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agerefandom · 4 years

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> Dirk: Regress

Fandom: Homestuck

Characters: Dirk Strider, mentions of Roxy and Jake

Words: 2,750

Summary: Dirk is an age regressor. (It’s a rough day but it’s easier as a four-year-old.)

Warnings: Isolation, body dysmorphia/dysphoria (unspecified), self-sacrificing ideals, one cuss word, mention of storms.

(Note: I’ve had a few people notice that I usually write from caregiver perspectives for agere fanfiction! I struggle with putting my experience of regression into words, in a way that I don’t with my caregiver experiences. I still enjoy writing reader-insert fanfiction that deviates from my personal experience of regression, but this is my best attempt at communicating the way that I regress.)

> Dirk: Regress

Your name is Dirk Strider, and some days it’s not worth claiming that you aren’t lonely.

Filling the hours of a day is routine by this point: there’s reprogramming to be done, and new scripts to be written, and fanfiction that you absolutely don’t post online under miscellaneous pseudonyms. There are fights to win and fights to lose and moments when you just throw yourself into the water and let yourself float there until the sun is too bright against your eyelids.

But some days just refuse to pass. Nothing feels like it’s really happening, and none of your friends answer your messages, and you refuse to message again because that would be desperate. Even with four centuries’ worth of internet videos, it feels like there’s nothing to watch, and the walls are closing in with the endless ocean stretching outside. You should be able to fill this day because it’s only as empty as every other day on this abandoned planet, but somehow time seems incapable of passing.

Today seems to be one of those days, and you’ve retreated to the roof to sit and watch the waves. The sun is too warm, and you’ll probably end up with a painful sunburn, but it’s worth it to be away from the wires and screens that remind you of the work you aren’t doing and the friends who aren’t responding.

For some reason this view always seems to feel new, despite the hundreds of days you’ve spent pacing on this roof, fighting on this roof, bleeding on this roof. Something about the sky’s ever-shifting shades and the way the ocean rolls far beneath you. Something about the seagulls that flutter down from the sky to rest their wings, or maybe the wind in your hair and the way it ruffles your clothes, the closest thing you have to human touch.

You close your eyes and lean your chin on your knees, breathing in ocean air that tastes like salt and smoke. You’ve always assumed that the bad smell is an effect of whatever technology the Batterwitch used to flood the planet, but maybe the air on Earth has always been horrible.

The heat is heavy in the air today, which means there might be a storm brewing. The apartment is always the worst during storms, listening to the rusted supports groaning in the wind and wild waves. Sometimes you wonder if you’ll even make it to the fabled game, or if the ocean will just swallow you one day with none of your friends the wiser.

You feel ready to settle in for an afternoon of grade-A moping, but part of you doesn’t agree. Part of you feels like enjoying the sunlight, or going for a swim. That sounds nice, if you’re being honest, but you doubt that you could enjoy anything today. Part of your mind will always be thinking about the messages you’re waiting for, the hours you have to fill, and the fact that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today, and how will you be able to deal with that when today seems so endless?

That excited part of you is insistent, though. It really wants to run around and play, which is an instinct that seems foreign. You mentally inspect the desire, trying to decide if it’s a sign that you’re finally giving up your tenacious grasp on sanity. The more you pay attention to it, the more tempting it feels. Just let go for a while.

There’s an energy in the desire that moves into your body, replacing the lethargy of moping. Your limbs feel ready for climbing, for swimming, for exploring a ruined world stretching around you that you usually prefer to ignore. Maybe it would be nice, to let whatever off part of you this is take the helm for a while. It feels like it might be already happening, and you’re too tired to fight it off. You let the part of yourself that’s moping curl in on itself, finding a little corner of your mind to continue its lethargic musings.

And then you open your eyes and push yourself to your feet.

---->

Your name is Dirk Strider, you are approximately four years old, and the ocean looks incredibly blue.

You feel silly for all the moping you were doing before, and for wasting such a beautiful day. You really want to take off your clothes and get into the water, but a loud part of your brain won’t stop telling you that jumping from this high up is a really bad idea.

Your brain is stupid. You head down from the roof, slamming the door behind you to show that you’re upset about not getting to jump into the waves. Your shoes are discarded carelessly, shirt and sunglasses and pants dropped along the way. Your body is funny, not quite right and not quite wrong. It stops you for a second, and you poke your stomach, hold up your hands. The fingers are unfamiliar. This is your body, isn’t it? Why doesn’t it feel right?

You shrink away from the thoughts, but the part of your brain that’s enjoying its rest pushes you back into awareness before you can get away. Apparently you’re not allowed to stop being here, so you guess that you might as well enjoy it. Away with the body thoughts! You’re getting distracted from the real goal, which is to be in the nice cool water as soon as possible.

Once you’re free of uncomfortable clothes, you patter down a set of stairs where the walls give way to the rusted internal structure of the apartments that used to be below your home. The stairs stop at a metal platform that you remember constructing, the heat of the blowtorch and the glow of the sparks. The memory fits and it doesn’t fit, so you shrug it away as you swing over the platform onto a ladder that leads down to the water.

Halfway down the ladder you know that you’re close enough to the water that it won’t hurt to jump, so you push yourself away from the ladder and let yourself free-fall.

You hit the water feet-first and it envelops you. You can feel the air bubbles combing through your hair, rippling on the bottoms of your feet, the last bit of the above-water world clinging to you. You let yourself drift until there’s only you and the faint ocean currents pushing around you, peaceful and quiet. You wish you could stay here forever, but you can feel your lungs starting to hurt. You have to kick for a few seconds before you break the surface, sucking in a deep breath as soon as the air touches your face. The sun is too warm, and you stick your tongue out in its direction. Stupid sun.

You swim in the direction of one of the nearest buildings that sticks above the water, enjoying the sound of your legs kicking through the waves. The ocean is mostly calm today, and you can hear the seagulls crying up above you. You navigate your way through the familiar landmarks of rubble and ruin, switching from front crawl to elementary backstroke as your energy rises and falls. Your apartment towers above you, casting a shadow on the water. You think about painting something on the side of it, trying to liven up the plain grey concrete, but that seems like a thought for another day.

It takes a few minutes of swimming to reach the nearest neighboring apartment building, and you pull yourself out of the water onto a shore of concrete. There isn’t much interesting here, mostly crumbling bricks beginning to reveal the girders underneath. The roof has collapsed in on itself in slabs of concrete that you can pick your way across, avoiding the freshest evidence of seagull passerby. A plant has somehow made its home in one of the sections of brick, some kind of weed with jagged leaves and long tendrils seeking more dirt. One of the birds probably brought it from some faraway patch of land, high enough to avoid the flooding.

You stare at the bright green of its leaves, aware that it must be one of the only living things in the surrounding area. In the end, though, it’s impossible to resist picking it out of the wall, the tendrils clinging desperately to the rough bricks as you separate it from its home.

It’s rubbery in your hands, and you dig your fingernails into the leaves to watch the darker green show up in half-crescents where you tore the skin. You wrap the stem around your fingers, admiring the colour. You think about eating it, moving it towards your mouth, but there’s a mental feeling of someone smacking your hand and you drop the plant with a frown. Your brain is too busy and dumb.

You pick up the plant and move it into a patch of sunlight, hoping that it’ll get eaten by another passing bird. Then its seeds can go somewhere else, maybe even on the roof of your house.

You dive back into the water, daydreaming about having a jungle grow on the roof of your house, the roots becoming part of the apartment walls and the leaves changing colour like you’ve seen in TV shows.

---->

The afternoon passes in a delirious blur of sun and splashing, laughing at your own voice and trying to climb one of the supports of your apartment building before finding the metal too hot from the sun.

Eventually, you pull yourself out of the water and climb up the ladder one rung at a time. You take a last look at the rippling water as you open the door and step into the concrete stairwell up to your apartment.

The inside is dark and cool in contrast to the sun-heated world outside, and you begin to shiver as you make your way into your room. An old towel is in the laundry pile, so you scoop it up and use it to dry yourself off. It smells a little musty, but it does the job fine. The feeling of not-right-not-wrong hits you again as you dry off, and you push it aside more easily this time. Not your problem, and you’re starting to have the feeling that you won’t be here for long. It seems silly to worry about it with the little time you have left.

You get dressed in the nicest clothes you can find: there’s a shirt that seems way too big, and you pull it on before looking at what’s on the front. It’s a silly design with wobbly lines that you can’t put together from upside down, and the shirt hangs almost to your knees. It feels cozy, and you add a pair of boxers to the outfit before deciding it’s good enough for lazing around.

The bed is soft and springy and you settle onto it with a sigh, shoving a pillow into the corner to lean on. The day has been fun, but your shoulders are tired from the swimming and your head hurts from all the sunlight. You snag a pair of sunglasses from the table beside your bed, careful with the points as you fit them onto your face. The world gets darker and you relax, grabbing the nearest soft thing to hold. It’s Hella Jeff in his silly coloured onesie and you laugh at his big eyes, widening your own in an attempt to mimic his expression.

Your tablet is difficult to fish out from under the mattress while you’re sitting on it, and once you turn it on it makes a lot of loud noises at you until you exit the window that was open. My Little Pony is easy to find, and you pull up one of the early episodes before propping the tablet against your feet so that you can watch it while hugging your Hella Jeff plushie and maybe resting your eyes a bit.

You can feel the rest of your brain perking up as soon as the theme song comes on, but it’s your episode to enjoy, so you push everything to the back and sing along with Pinkie Pie, and if you fall asleep before the second episode is over, then there’s no one to tell you it’s too early to sleep and who cares about time anyways.

> Dirk: Wake Up.

You wake up in a tangle of blankets, with your shades half-off and poking into the pillow, and Hella Jeff’s ass in your face. You push him off grumpily and sit up in bed. It’s late, and you fell asleep with the light off, so your room is dark aside from the flashing lights from the various panels scattered on the desks.

You’re hungry, and still groggy from the unexpected nap, and the afternoon feels like a distant dream that could have happened to someone else. You try to prompt that same sense of excitement, the eager curiosity that had taken over for the day, but it feels utterly foreign to your mind. You physically poke yourself, as if that will make the mood re-emerge and take over, but it only makes you very aware that you’re wearing one of your old sleep shirts that you stopped wearing when you were about twelve. You pull it off with an irritated sound, and roll out of bed. Your pounding head demands food and water, and you haven’t checked your messages in seven hours.

The glasses you’re wearing don’t have build-in screens, so you swap them out for another pair once you’ve pulled on a t-shirt that actually fits and shoved some jeans over your boxers. Sure enough, Roxy has finally gotten back to you, and fairly recently.

You start responding to her message as you poke around the cupboards for something that you won’t have to cook. She’s messaged something benign, but you know that she knows that you know that she hasn’t been doing well or she would have messaged back sooner. Hopefully she’s feeling better, but you know from experience that she’s more likely messaging you to start an ill-conceived fight that she can use to rationalize her bad mood and self-isolation.

Having friends is exhausting. You find some packaged ramen and head back to your room, planning to just crush it up and eat it while you finish the episode that you fell asleep half-way through. Roxy is talking again, her words a blur of badly-spelled pink across your vision, and you already feel tired from the conversation. You miss Jake, and how easy he is to please. He won’t be back for another two days, out on some sort of island quest that takes him out of network range. You hope that he’s doing okay out there.

You settle into bed again, sparing a frown at your Hella Jeff plushie as if he was to blame for the entire situation. You hook up your tablet remotely to the TV so that you can properly hear it, and settle in to multitask for the night. This is what you wanted, something outside of yourself to focus on, someone else’s problems to solve, something to fill the hours for you.

But even as you start dissecting the things that Roxy isn’t saying, you find yourself craving that effortless enjoyment you’d felt that afternoon, the way your head had tilted up to the sunlight as if it was a second nature. You have a job to do, to keep everyone on track for a future that only you and Roxy know is waiting. But maybe one day, after everything was over and the game was won, you could take a longer break. Maybe there would be a new world for you to explore, and it would be better than the endless ocean of ruins.

For now, you wrap your arms around yourself and do your best to help Roxy communicate how she’s feeling. Your friends come first, and the future comes later.

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