Dirk Strider (Ultimate) (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
uber_marionettist) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
silph_co2020-04-04 08:42 pm
uber_marionettist) wrote in silph_co2020-04-04 08:42 pm
Switch on, switch off, robotic [Closed]
Who: Dirk Strider and Carly Nagisa
Where: Lapras Mech Lab
When: At some point after Carly talks to Connie
Summary: Carly said she would have words with Dirk. Dirk never said he'd listen.
Rating: cw for suicidal ideation, breaks with reality, self loathing, etc
Blocking every number on his Pokegear was the second thing Dirk did after ensuring Carly herself was locked out of the lab. He has no regrets about that.
It also guaranteed him some fucking privacy during his inevitable offscreen reactions. Eventually, though, the dust settles and the sutures have been tied off.
And there's something about being alone in a place that he can't escape, that wasn't his choice.
It fucks with him.
That's normal.
For him.
But this is different. Better? Worse? Just different. Bigger than that jail, smaller than this game. It's not a matter of scale.
And it's lacking the amenities of the ferry, sure, but far enough from the sea he can't smell or see or hear it. It's not a matter of location.
It's a matter of isolation.
There's no one to see him, hear him. Not even any of his other selves. No one.
And nothing real.
He remembers being young, sitting alone in his room, or atop the spire or down by the ocean, closing his eyes in the shower or even submerging himself in that infinite seawater. And trying to feel that. 'Real.' To feel certain enough, to know whether he was, or else whether anything around him was 'real.' To prove or disprove it, to push with his mind until whatever breakthrough would dispel the falsehood or bring him into the reality that he knew had to exist, somehow.
The uncertainty would eat at him for hours, the lack of breakthrough frustrating to the point of archeronian agony. But to know, categorically and conclusively, that it is not...
And to not know, but to fear that he is not...
The thing about being alone, truly physically and existentially alone, is that you start to do strange things. Like lying on your back on cold concrete flooring, staring at the ceiling. Trying to 'feel' your own reality.
In a way, he's already sure he is not.
Or he wouldn't have slipped this far out of control.
Where: Lapras Mech Lab
When: At some point after Carly talks to Connie
Summary: Carly said she would have words with Dirk. Dirk never said he'd listen.
Rating: cw for suicidal ideation, breaks with reality, self loathing, etc
Blocking every number on his Pokegear was the second thing Dirk did after ensuring Carly herself was locked out of the lab. He has no regrets about that.
It also guaranteed him some fucking privacy during his inevitable offscreen reactions. Eventually, though, the dust settles and the sutures have been tied off.
And there's something about being alone in a place that he can't escape, that wasn't his choice.
It fucks with him.
That's normal.
For him.
But this is different. Better? Worse? Just different. Bigger than that jail, smaller than this game. It's not a matter of scale.
And it's lacking the amenities of the ferry, sure, but far enough from the sea he can't smell or see or hear it. It's not a matter of location.
It's a matter of isolation.
There's no one to see him, hear him. Not even any of his other selves. No one.
And nothing real.
He remembers being young, sitting alone in his room, or atop the spire or down by the ocean, closing his eyes in the shower or even submerging himself in that infinite seawater. And trying to feel that. 'Real.' To feel certain enough, to know whether he was, or else whether anything around him was 'real.' To prove or disprove it, to push with his mind until whatever breakthrough would dispel the falsehood or bring him into the reality that he knew had to exist, somehow.
The uncertainty would eat at him for hours, the lack of breakthrough frustrating to the point of archeronian agony. But to know, categorically and conclusively, that it is not...
And to not know, but to fear that he is not...
The thing about being alone, truly physically and existentially alone, is that you start to do strange things. Like lying on your back on cold concrete flooring, staring at the ceiling. Trying to 'feel' your own reality.
In a way, he's already sure he is not.
Or he wouldn't have slipped this far out of control.
no subject
"There's nothing to talk about."
His tone is final.
You can't contain the ocean. You can't fight it."
Quiet, with certainty and an understated sense of resolve.
"You can conceive of it in the abstract, but in concrete terms, it's too great an organism. Try illustrating it as a picture, or describing it in words. You can't. With all of their senses, a single person can barely perceive even a fraction of a percent of it at once. Rendered two-dimensionally, you create an elephant and blind man situation of near-cosmic scope."
And as is so often the case when Dirk describes the ocean, he is describing himself.
There is a bit of a pause, a delay during which he's still lost in thought, ruminating on his own conceptual existence. Unfortunately, he doesn't forget his audience.
"So, what do you think happens when you put your Platonic cube in a two-dimensional space?"
"This question is not rhetorical. What do you think? Is it flattened? What does flattening mean when depth doesn't exist? Is it like your drawing? Or is that quality erased from it, hopefully creating a more pedestrian square? No guarantees, but at least both of those outcomes have the potential to be visually coherent. So what if instead it were dimensionally amputated? At what angle? Where?"
He lets her have a moment, intending to only halfway overload her with the details of the problem.
no subject
But she'll humor him, at least for a moment. Even if 'Platonic cube' gets a frown. Bring up Plato's Cave one more time bud,
"I don't think any of it stops existing." There, that's a good start. "Just because someone can't see or perceive it, doesn't mean it isn't there. That'd be like saying birds that don't see glass should pass through it! It doesn't happen that way though- they crash. But, more on you...it sounds a bit like you're stuck, I guess. Certain things can't happen...but it feels like they should, right? Can't be done, but feels that way...I guess it would be a bigger version of a 'phantom limb' in that way, huh..."
cw graphic imagery related to dying
Phantom limb.
He can't say he's ever experienced that.
But.
But?
"But no. I'm not the amputee in this existential phantasmagoria. I'm... not."
But.
"Just.... shut up a second. I need to think." He doesn't need to think.
But he can close his eyes.
And he already knows because he can feel it in the same fashion as a creature of the deep rising from beneath--a smooth, hairless body brushing a human foot, a calf before evaporating into the dark; it is the barest of briefest touches, furtive and fleeting. And yet in that fraction of a second, the contact between twin forms of flesh flush against each other--
He is neither the leg experiencing that brief brush with not alone, nor is the unknown making itself known, brushing up against its known unknown.
He is the water.
He is the water and he has no body, no limbs, he has no skin and no world to interact with the skin he doesn't have, he has no reality except what his consciousness can touch--
It never was about the body he lost. Because that body was never his.
But oh, how much fucking worse that was than either of them could have anticipated. Billions of terabytes of synaptic concatenation processing faster than the speed of thought, the memory of skin prickling with sweat or abraded raw or cooled by the breeze, salt air in his nose and lungs, of air passing through his sinuses, of physicality, of the haptic feedback of being alive.
But it wasn't just the body he lost. It wasn't just the body he lost. It wasn't just the body he lost.
Because he never had it. Because it was never his body. Because the coin flip between himself at the nanosecond at which he diverged was never his to win. Because there was never a coin to begin with. His consciousness was never his, nor his identity. His relationships, his memories, the data-fied simulacra of 'emotion' he mocked and craved and replicated for himself, for their benefit, over and over. And the longer it went on, the more they diverged, the more they stayed the same--
He never stopped wanting to have a body; no, wanting to have a better body; no, wanting to have his body;
What changed? What changed him from Dirk Strider? What changed him from that template, that essentiality, or did he change?
These are old thoughts. Old thoughts, old questions, long answered, long irrelevant. Where they lead is a rooftop, where they lead is a splintering, where they lead is hate, because one's worse than the other and neither one will relinquish his place in that, the 'worst' and the 'no better' reflecting in fragments and fractures and a solid pane of (un)broken glass.
The body--his? body? His body? Is it shaking? Or is that just breathing?
It feels--
It feels like running headfirst into a brick wall.
Like that moment of collision, that moment of nigh-fatal impact, without the skull as barrier.
Whatever was supposed to happen--the dull comic book thud of his own thoughts off the pavement, interrupting not just once, or over and over, but the precise moment of halted momentum. And not frozen in a single second of time, but extending infinitely out from that moment, a continuum of the collision, those brain cells dying by the impact caught forever mid-expiry.
It doesn't hurt. Actually. If it did, the pain would have come from outside of him, from the abortion of ascending (or descending) flight. Dull and dumb. Before, his pain came from within, as though his skin were debrading in contact with the universe, thinning and dissipating as he expanded. Other times it felt as though he would crack, would hatch like an egg. Starting from his skull, the assumed centre of 'I.'
This is just....
He remembers to open his eyes. And he stands up--carefully, with deliberate slowness, as though testing his own body.
A thought, only half-coherent: this is Just(?)
"You know, I was really hoping not to have this conversation with you. I really was. This would be so much easier if you'd just read Homestuck."
no subject
Empty.
That's what it feels like. He's just staring off behind his shades, quiet and unnervingly so. Not moving. Not speaking. He breathes, but it feels as if at the same time he simply isn't there.
Like...
Not a robot, she thinks to herself. Perhaps more like a ghost.
When he finally does speak, she takes a moment to answer. "...I can't say if 'Homestuck' is something I could've read, unfortunately," she answers. "Even if it existed, it could have been something my country just didn't have- even just under that name." She doesn't know why it would be relevant. Or that it's even some form of fiction- but it matters somehow, and that's enough to remark on her ability or inability to try anyway.
"We're having it now though," Carly adds. "...And... ...at the very least, I don't think it's one we should leave half-finished. This is important- not just to you, but for you."
It's not just something to care about. It's something that Affects him.
no subject
"...do you know what the term 'canon' means as it pertains to a piece of media? Canon itself is comprised of three pillars, and by the measure of those pillars, it also pertains to reality. Ergo, Homestuck is both a piece of media and the reality of my origins."
He starts to walk towards her.
"I don't know about its basic existence across space and time to your specific version of Japan, but your country was reading it. There were multiple fan-driven translation projects--Russian, Korean, Japanese. Steven read approximately one-third of it. Are you following this?"
no subject
But hey. "So, I'm following, but also you have my condolences on that. I guess it wasn't...as big after Zero Reverse in Japan though..." Sucks.
no subject
There's another saying, too: absolute power corrupts absolutely.
At least one of these sayings is true.
He strives not to waste valuable word count on frivolous actions like sighing, but he does tighten his jaw slightly. This is not entirely deliberate.
"It's 8,211 non-standard pages of mixed media, Carly. It's incredibly difficult to summarise."
no subject
As it stands. "I don't need to know your whole story to know something is wrong. Just you saying you were in a place where you knew where reality stood says plenty- and even if that's not the root of things, it's still contributing isn't it?" she adds, frowning. "Not a lot of people can say they come close to where you stand on awareness- or have stood, for that matter. Isn't losing that kind of thing what you're talking about, when you say the impossible was made two-dimensional?"
no subject
"Even that is just part of an even bigger picture." Somehow his tone maintains that factual clarity, betraying in him no tiredness, no secretive emotional burdens.
"When you--as in Carly--say 'you'--as in Dirk Strider, what 'you' mean from that flawed and limited perspective is a singular person with a linear identity. When you, Carly, think--that is to say, when you, Carly, experience the internal phenomenon known as 'thought,' there is no uncertainty on your part, as Carly, regarding 'whose' thoughts they are, nor 'who' you, Carly, are when thinking them. There is one person whose thoughts are experienced by you, Carly."
The truly impressive part is that at no point in that did he appear to stop and breathe.
"'Identity' as singular--you--assumes the perceptive component known as thought to be a seamless experiential procedure, through which 'you', in singular, is both generated and expressed. The person implied by 'you' is translated directly."
It's borderline nonsensical even to Dirk's ears compared to how it was in his head, but he continues. She didn't want him to explain? Fine. He won't.
"Are you (Carly) your thoughts? Are your (Carly's) thoughts, the thoughts of Carly Nagisa, merely evidence of your existence, Carly? Does Carly exist, causally, as the outcome of your (Carly's) thoughts, or do your (Carly's) thoughts exist as the outcome of you (Carly)?"
He was going somewhere with this.
"Wait. I got a little sidetracked. What I'm trying to say is that there is more than one 'Dirk Strider.' So much so, in fact, that when you, as in Carly, say 'you,' as in Dirk Strider, you--Carly--are not necessarily referring to persons known in isolate as 'Dirk Strider.' And yet you, Carly, undeniably mean 'Dirk Strider' by use of the term 'you.' That's what I'm trying to say."
no subject
She has thoughts just from the first part of what he said- the 'Ocean' is still something with a 'Name' after all, even if it doesn't cover the multitudes of fish and plants within. But that's not what matters either.
Instead....oh.
Hm.
"Ohhhhhhhhh..." She's uncomfortably familiar with this, even if it's only on a 1:1 ratio instead of...whatever Dirk is dealing with. Carly grimaces- Knowingly. "Ohhhh this is like my coworkers but all in one spot at once," she mutters, taking a moment to speak more clearly.
"At this point...There's no easy way to parse through to 'one' thing. Honestly, there's probably going to be a lot that 'many' agree on, if we're talking about what I think we are! But..." Hmm. "...I don't mind being friends with an amalgam- I'd just like to be trusted with trying to help said amalgamation get a hold on themselves if anything. If you- and I'm talking the whole ocean here big guy," she adds, a rather mean joke from someone taller than him, "But if you're having troubles sorting things out...well, it's like I said before. It's not going to help if you just clam up and bottle it. Definitely not when you're bottled up too much to begin with," Carly huffs.
"The point though- if you're a whole pile of different beings stuck in one spot, I'm still here for you- the whole big surprise bag. And I'll try to keep that in mind from here on," she adds with a small smile.
no subject
Dirk starts, in a way that (were this to be rendered more traditionally for his canon) would have been enclosed in parenthesis. As though she's aware of this (but she can't be--can she?) Carly doesn't acknowledge or let him continue the question; he shuts up, frowning deeply and with more of his face than he's usually willing to exert himself to.
"Don't make promises you can't keep," he advises her at the end--simply, factually. "You barely even know what you're agreeing to, let alone who."
Was that a threat?
"Not that it matters. Talking was never going to help." If he comes off as detached or distant rather than dour or dispirited after that, so much the better. "Not in canon, not even where and how I was meant to be--because that is exactly how and where I was meant to be. So tell me, why the fuck do you think that would change here?"
no subject
She didn't expect him to get it ultimately- the reason someone would push. Keep pushing. Keep-
"Because even when something is 'meant to be', there's still a chance in trying." She says it with confidence. An absolute radiance, firmness, the words of someone who has met fate in the face and torn through it before.
And she'll tear through it again. "It's easy to just accept things aren't meant to be. But even if others fail, nothing would change if people gave up after that. I don't just 'think' it can change. I know it can, and because I know that, I don't need to know everything about what I'm agreeing to- I can keep that promise, and I can be your friend."
no subject
But what he says, finally, is:
"You know that saying you're my friend repeatedly doesn't make it true, right?"
no subject
Carly crosses her arms. "Dirk, I don't know what kinds of friends any part of you have had- but I'm going to be honest...the way you seem to think of the word, it doesn't feel like you've had very...good ones? I'm not going farther than that, but the fact is, I consider you to be a friend. I also know when people are getting along even better as friends! That was the whole reason I came here after all, both you and Connie weren't exactly coming out of everything alright, and I'd rather my friends be able to be...well. Happy, in the end."
She pauses. "...Let's not drag that out though. The point is what it is. It doesn't feel like you actually know what a 'friend' is. I'd rather repeat it and continue doing my best to be a good one than just decide you shouldn't ever know what having one means."
no subject
The sharp turnaround is not visible in his physical demeanour, but it is very audible.
"My friends are the only people who've ever had my back, even when I didn't deserve it. They've been better than I fucking deserve. And you--" he stops, collects himself--again, it's pretty much invisible, only the hard downturn of his mouth betraying his anger to the naked eye.
But his voice almost--almost, never quite, but
al.
most.
shakes with it.
"Have no right to judge them."
Another breath. Lessening the sudden wave of ice and fire, temperamental, but still dark, still half a threat that really doesn't have any teeth now.
"You know that's Jane you're talking about?"
Is it rhetorical or just condescending?
no subject
"I never said someone couldn't do both," is what she says quietly- but not so quietly that she sounds cowed. "And the fact is, most people don't mean to be 'bad' friends. I'd even say a lot of friendships are like that, or start like that. And stay like that for a while."
But... "...That's why learning what to do to change things is important. So that both sides can learn. I'm not going to say what Jane or anyone else specifically does or doesn't do. But people are shaped by the experiences around them, and the people they interact with. And the things you expect from your friendships... ...aren't what you should be expecting. That's all."