[fanfiction] [homestuck] homeward bound
Title: Homeward Bound
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: G
Characters: Mrs. Lalonde, Mr. Egbert, Bro Strider
Other: post-game, alternate universe, futurefic
Notes: First We Take Manhattan awfulproject procrastination prologue. I like writing self-indulgent pap when I should be writing other stuff. If you want notes on this alternate universe they're all under the Manhattan tag, where all the funny stuff is written by my breathtakingly talented colleague cephiedvariable and I make all the jokes about John being a ho.
The three of them sat on the porch, beer bottles freezerburning their fingers, and they pondered their predicament.
In Rainbow Falls the dusk fell like smoke, and the security lights bearing down on the lawns attracted moths by the dizzy swarm. Usually a group of preteens given any stretch of flat open space would have run around on it, purely for the mindless achievement of running around on the grass, but these nine sat like sentries: facing outwards in a ragged semicircle, watching the forest’s edge and picking the chicken out their sandwiches. One of them was collecting a silent tithe of cherry tomatoes. Each and every one had the gaunt, watchful bent to their countenance found on gun-toting survivalists or refugees without asylum; when one shifted the others shuffled to fill in the gaps in a sort of fortified Musical Chairs, unconscious of it, shoulders relaxing minutely only when the circle reformed. That they’d arranged themselves to be the first line of defense for the watchers on the porch had not escaped notice.
“Beer before liquor, Lalonde,” said Strider.
She’d been twiddling the hipflask in irritated fingers, and slung it sideways where he caught it with careless ease. “Never fear, I have no communicable diseases,” she said, and he took a double-barrelled gulp of her whiskey. “In any case we’re a little past the worries of sharing spit, considering our genetic material’s sitting out there on the terrace.”
The sunglasses never twitched. “You owe me fucking years of child support, baby mommy.”
“You owe me for emotional damages. If I’d known Rose’s father was a puppet pornographer from Texas with sixteen popped-collar polo shirts, I could have traumatised her that much more effectively. -- James, a shot? Or will you remain abstemious?”
Mr. Egbert had drank about two mouthfuls of beer. Instead he sat, quietly smoking his briar pipe, dark-headed and curiously untidy without his hat. It wasn’t hard to see the Harley-Egbert connection. His hair was a peak of cowlicks, smoothed down ineffectively with Brylcreem, and his gaze had settled on the gathering of children out in the half-dark. “I’ll pass, Violet,” he said. “Tobacco’s enough, after today. I feel thoroughly put through the governmental wringer.”
“Harley’s involvement didn’t help, the feckless varlot,” said Mrs. Lalonde, and took a generous slug of beer. “I just checked. They’ve frozen most of Skaianet now, hardly a wonder if they were keeping tabs on him since ‘92 and me since ‘95 when the first wave hit. No point in any of his games keeping us apart. The wild goose chases he lead us on were all for, alas, jack shit.”
“And your paycheck,” said Bro. “What was your salary, like a squillion dollars?”
“Hardly. Working with Harley never provided a dental plan. If you must know, it was in information.”
“Sure. Russian missile coordinates. Latitude and longitude of the Roanoke colony.”
“The whereabouts of my unknown son,” she said.
All three pairs of eyes fell on the group of children ahead: the back of a second dusty-blond head, skinny knees tucked up into a skinny chest. His hair badly wanted a trim, and it made him the twin of the pale girl sitting cross-legged to the side. Equally alike was the slump of their shoulders. The silence devoured everything with sharp teeth, only broken by Mr. Egbert’s quiet, deep voice when he said, “It seems a great pity to have to split them all up again. Will you stay down south, Jesse?”
“Yep,” he said, which invited no other discussion on the matter. Bro sprawled in his chair, loose-limbed and fluid, wearing his sunglasses at night in the manner of Corey Hart. Mr. Egbert said merely, “Well, my doors are always open for David and yourself. I am not keeping them locked away from each other, not as we were, no matter what any man in the Pentagon may say.”
“Speaking of which,” said Mrs. Lalonde, back at the whiskey, “you’re taking Harley’s little girl, am I correct?”
“Correct as ever. She is my little sister; I will raise her as my own. It will be my privilege after the life she’s been forced to live.”
“And of our other Dickensian extraterrestrial urchins, are we in agreement?”
Egbert inclined his head a little, tapping away pipe-ash as he did so. “Yes, if they’re happy with the arrangement,” he said. “I will take young Mr. Sollux back to Washington. You will take Miss Terezi and Mr. Karkat.”
“The radioactive Draculet and the little big-horned one say they’ll recreate Lord of the Flies right here in the Adirondacks,” said Mrs. Lalonde. “We can’t hide them in plain sight, so why not let them hit that metaphorical Oregon trail. In any case I’ll keep an eye on them. Hamfistedly parent a single child, and one is adequately prepared to hamfistedly parent five.”
“I’m taking Pyrope,” said Bro.
This caused no little consternation. “For Christ’s sake, Strider, you’re like a professional vagrant -- ”
“Got the alien-orphan spook stipend.”
“Jesse, with all the respect due to you, it’s not enough to raise one child upon, let alone two -- ”
“Striders stretch their twenties, Egbert.”
“Your place is a hovel,” said Mrs. Lalonde, golden-haired and grim. “You are living the American dream of modern white poverty, mixed with the American dream of being a hipster. You make freecyclers uncomfortable. You count only as the working poor due to bored fetishists writing Paypal cheques for your indie puppet smut, which is a sentence I never envisioned myself having to say -- ”
“Dave needs it,” said Bro.
And Violet Lalonde was quiet. As the other two watched she folded in on herself like a paper bird, gaze fixed on those two paper-blonde heads on the grass. Night had fallen. One of the girl trolls had lit up gorgeously, a softly glowing ornament, and she was being worshipped by multiple moths as their queen. The children had finished picking at their dinner and were talking in murmurous white-noise hushes, though James’s son had fallen into a deep and silent sleep bracketed by two sets of troll shoulders; a plane groaned by overhead, and they were all stock-still as teenage meerkats until the noise was gone.
“It would be difficult,” said Mr. Egbert after a while, “being alone.”
So that was that. When two out of three beers and a pipe had been finished, Mrs. Lalonde reached across the table to take his hand: she raised it to her lips and kissed it, a little mocking, but his expression was steady and sad. Bro ignored them both. “So what now, my dear?” she said. “We all simply pick up and try to live the rest of our lives and theirs? What are pubescent heroes meant to do after the fact?”
“Well, for one thing,” said John’s dad thoughtfully, “I am banning them from video games.”
Fandom: Homestuck
Rating: G
Characters: Mrs. Lalonde, Mr. Egbert, Bro Strider
Other: post-game, alternate universe, futurefic
Notes: First We Take Manhattan awfulproject procrastination prologue. I like writing self-indulgent pap when I should be writing other stuff. If you want notes on this alternate universe they're all under the Manhattan tag, where all the funny stuff is written by my breathtakingly talented colleague cephiedvariable and I make all the jokes about John being a ho.
The three of them sat on the porch, beer bottles freezerburning their fingers, and they pondered their predicament.
In Rainbow Falls the dusk fell like smoke, and the security lights bearing down on the lawns attracted moths by the dizzy swarm. Usually a group of preteens given any stretch of flat open space would have run around on it, purely for the mindless achievement of running around on the grass, but these nine sat like sentries: facing outwards in a ragged semicircle, watching the forest’s edge and picking the chicken out their sandwiches. One of them was collecting a silent tithe of cherry tomatoes. Each and every one had the gaunt, watchful bent to their countenance found on gun-toting survivalists or refugees without asylum; when one shifted the others shuffled to fill in the gaps in a sort of fortified Musical Chairs, unconscious of it, shoulders relaxing minutely only when the circle reformed. That they’d arranged themselves to be the first line of defense for the watchers on the porch had not escaped notice.
“Beer before liquor, Lalonde,” said Strider.
She’d been twiddling the hipflask in irritated fingers, and slung it sideways where he caught it with careless ease. “Never fear, I have no communicable diseases,” she said, and he took a double-barrelled gulp of her whiskey. “In any case we’re a little past the worries of sharing spit, considering our genetic material’s sitting out there on the terrace.”
The sunglasses never twitched. “You owe me fucking years of child support, baby mommy.”
“You owe me for emotional damages. If I’d known Rose’s father was a puppet pornographer from Texas with sixteen popped-collar polo shirts, I could have traumatised her that much more effectively. -- James, a shot? Or will you remain abstemious?”
Mr. Egbert had drank about two mouthfuls of beer. Instead he sat, quietly smoking his briar pipe, dark-headed and curiously untidy without his hat. It wasn’t hard to see the Harley-Egbert connection. His hair was a peak of cowlicks, smoothed down ineffectively with Brylcreem, and his gaze had settled on the gathering of children out in the half-dark. “I’ll pass, Violet,” he said. “Tobacco’s enough, after today. I feel thoroughly put through the governmental wringer.”
“Harley’s involvement didn’t help, the feckless varlot,” said Mrs. Lalonde, and took a generous slug of beer. “I just checked. They’ve frozen most of Skaianet now, hardly a wonder if they were keeping tabs on him since ‘92 and me since ‘95 when the first wave hit. No point in any of his games keeping us apart. The wild goose chases he lead us on were all for, alas, jack shit.”
“And your paycheck,” said Bro. “What was your salary, like a squillion dollars?”
“Hardly. Working with Harley never provided a dental plan. If you must know, it was in information.”
“Sure. Russian missile coordinates. Latitude and longitude of the Roanoke colony.”
“The whereabouts of my unknown son,” she said.
All three pairs of eyes fell on the group of children ahead: the back of a second dusty-blond head, skinny knees tucked up into a skinny chest. His hair badly wanted a trim, and it made him the twin of the pale girl sitting cross-legged to the side. Equally alike was the slump of their shoulders. The silence devoured everything with sharp teeth, only broken by Mr. Egbert’s quiet, deep voice when he said, “It seems a great pity to have to split them all up again. Will you stay down south, Jesse?”
“Yep,” he said, which invited no other discussion on the matter. Bro sprawled in his chair, loose-limbed and fluid, wearing his sunglasses at night in the manner of Corey Hart. Mr. Egbert said merely, “Well, my doors are always open for David and yourself. I am not keeping them locked away from each other, not as we were, no matter what any man in the Pentagon may say.”
“Speaking of which,” said Mrs. Lalonde, back at the whiskey, “you’re taking Harley’s little girl, am I correct?”
“Correct as ever. She is my little sister; I will raise her as my own. It will be my privilege after the life she’s been forced to live.”
“And of our other Dickensian extraterrestrial urchins, are we in agreement?”
Egbert inclined his head a little, tapping away pipe-ash as he did so. “Yes, if they’re happy with the arrangement,” he said. “I will take young Mr. Sollux back to Washington. You will take Miss Terezi and Mr. Karkat.”
“The radioactive Draculet and the little big-horned one say they’ll recreate Lord of the Flies right here in the Adirondacks,” said Mrs. Lalonde. “We can’t hide them in plain sight, so why not let them hit that metaphorical Oregon trail. In any case I’ll keep an eye on them. Hamfistedly parent a single child, and one is adequately prepared to hamfistedly parent five.”
“I’m taking Pyrope,” said Bro.
This caused no little consternation. “For Christ’s sake, Strider, you’re like a professional vagrant -- ”
“Got the alien-orphan spook stipend.”
“Jesse, with all the respect due to you, it’s not enough to raise one child upon, let alone two -- ”
“Striders stretch their twenties, Egbert.”
“Your place is a hovel,” said Mrs. Lalonde, golden-haired and grim. “You are living the American dream of modern white poverty, mixed with the American dream of being a hipster. You make freecyclers uncomfortable. You count only as the working poor due to bored fetishists writing Paypal cheques for your indie puppet smut, which is a sentence I never envisioned myself having to say -- ”
“Dave needs it,” said Bro.
And Violet Lalonde was quiet. As the other two watched she folded in on herself like a paper bird, gaze fixed on those two paper-blonde heads on the grass. Night had fallen. One of the girl trolls had lit up gorgeously, a softly glowing ornament, and she was being worshipped by multiple moths as their queen. The children had finished picking at their dinner and were talking in murmurous white-noise hushes, though James’s son had fallen into a deep and silent sleep bracketed by two sets of troll shoulders; a plane groaned by overhead, and they were all stock-still as teenage meerkats until the noise was gone.
“It would be difficult,” said Mr. Egbert after a while, “being alone.”
So that was that. When two out of three beers and a pipe had been finished, Mrs. Lalonde reached across the table to take his hand: she raised it to her lips and kissed it, a little mocking, but his expression was steady and sad. Bro ignored them both. “So what now, my dear?” she said. “We all simply pick up and try to live the rest of our lives and theirs? What are pubescent heroes meant to do after the fact?”
“Well, for one thing,” said John’s dad thoughtfully, “I am banning them from video games.”