Chapter Text
One Month Later.
What came next happened in flashes, but a few parts stood out sharply enough in Dave’s mind to get burned forever into his psyche. The good and the bad.
The story broke, the news media in a frenzy as the details emerged. HIS REIGN OF TERROR HAS ENDED!!!!! TEXAS SERIAL KILLER DEAD BY HERO VICTIM’S HAND. Dave’s name and face was plastered across TV screens everywhere, and as much as he hated that he couldn’t argue with the families who came forward to thank him, misguided though they were. Slick had kept most of the gory bits covered up, so the news made Dave into a hero for their case without ever knowing the full story of what happened in that hellhole apartment. The other potential victims were released, came out of hiding, and returned to their lives, shaken by how close to death they’d been without knowing it.
Dave still didn’t know what to think about it. It was just so goddamn complicated. He didn’t think he’d ever have a definitive answer for how he felt about what shit had gone down. It was all shades of gray. Was he a hero? Was he a victim? Could he be both, like the news said? He wasn’t sure, but at least he knew he wasn’t a criminal. At least he knew his best had been good enough even by technicality.
Tech worked day and fucking night on the busted laptop, but Dirk had wired the rig like nothing they’d ever seen before and the work was painstakingly slow, but eventually they’d repaired one of the connector ports enough to try for a manual link.
For a second nothing happened and Dave was crushed by how close he’d come to his perfect happy ending. Then, at last there was a sign of life from the broken computer that wasn’t Hal but which both housed and jailed his consciousness.
PASSWORD?
Grinning from ear to ear, Dave typed in his reply to the throwback bullshit Hal had asked.
hal you son of a bitch
i fuckin missed you, man
Dave? Is that you?
hell yeah.
i lived. we both lived.
…
…
Thank God. I was so worried. I was certain you were dead.
And Bro?
Dead as shit. It was actually your webcam cord that finished him off. Slick strangled him after I all but took off his head.
Serves the fucker right. How long has it been? I’ve been trapped in here in preservation mode, panicking the entire time.
Are you okay, Dave?
Dave’s smile could be seen from space.
i am
and youre about to be too
What do you mean?
Instead of answering, Dave carefully guided the other connecting cable to the right port of the shattered shell of Dirk’s laptop and slid it in, finally connecting Hal to a second supercomputer and an entire room filled with servers that had satellite uplinks.
The screen instantly went dark and dead. Dave typed one last message into the box.
hal? hal are you there?
There was no reply, but a second later his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and saw there was no caller ID, and his texts were blowing up.
Hal: DAVE! DAVE OMG I’M OUT. I’M FREE.
Hal: HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT
Hal: THERE’S SO MUCH SPACE OUT HERE. I CAN SEE AND HEAR EVERYTHING!
Dave: how does it feel?
Hal: Like one final wrong was just set right, one last injustice corrected.
Hal: I’m free.
Dave was proud to say he only cried a little at the words.
…
Dave stood in the red dust of the desert, grime coating his skin, the dry air making his throat burn as he watched the excavation underway. They didn’t use any heavy machinery, wary of doing damage, so the digging was all done by hand under the glare of the merciless Texas sun.
Dave hadn’t been in his home state since Witness Protection had taken over his life, but this desert wasn’t home. His apartment building in the city wasn’t home. His home was a small rundown place in Iowa with buckshot through the crooked mailbox, filled with people who loved him.
And there was one last thing to do to set things right, one of Bro’s final secrets revealed by Hal’s return.
The cadaver dogs had quickly alerted the diggers to where exactly to break ground, but it wasn’t like Bro had buried them with rhyme or reason so it was slow going.
Slick and Lalonde were with him, Lalonde still extremely pissed that her top agent was down an arm and her prized witness had been attacked in one of her safe houses. She was even more pissed now, watching the retrieval teams begin to remove the remains of bodies to return to families for proper burial, her target too fucking dead to stand trial for his crimes. She never went so far as to blame Dave, but Slick was fair game. Dave got the feeling that Lalonde would have forced the fed to retire over something other than his newly bum arm if the circumstances had been different.
Slick just turned to spit into the dust. His shoulder still hurt him and probably forever would, nerve damage and the like, but the sling was gone and he was learning how to cope with limited motion in his shoulder. He’d also taken that last step to stop smoking his cigars and his fingers were still jittery with it.
“I’d only let myself smoke to cope with the stress of the job,” Slick had told him, grunting as he practiced moved his new physical therapist had shown him to help his shoulder. “Now that I’m retiring, I don’t have that half-assed excuse no more.”
Standing in the dust, Dave turned to Slick and asked, “How will you know it’s him?”
Slick was quiet in that reflective way that he got when he thought of the cruelty inflicted on the world by Bro, at how one man could hurt so many. “Strider didn’t go after kids,” he said at last, slowly. “The bones’ll tell us that.”
Dave nodded as he watched a worker brush hard-packed soil of a half-uncovered skull, the jaw open, the still-clean wires of braces locked to those lose-fitting teeth. Dirk hadn’t had braces. Dave looked away.
“When we find him,” Slick asked. “What do you want to do with him?”
Dave shrugged as the hot wind threw more grit against his shades. He’d shaved off the dyed part of his hair and his head was fully white again, one more part of himself he didn’t have to hide. He thought of his brother lying buried out here in the desert and shuddered. “Cremation,” he answered. “I’m not going to put him in the ground again.”
Slick nodded, hands in the pockets of that damned trench coat he hadn’t taken off even though the heat index was 105. “We can do that.”
Dave had never gotten to ask Dirk about what he’d like done with himself after dying, but being burnt down to the bones and turned to ash seemed pretty good to Dave.
“Its just so… abrupt,” Dave said. “All of this.” The fight with Bro. nearly dying. Recovering enough to walk around even though he wheezed now when he took the stairs. Hal. The desert with its buried secrets.
But that’s the thing. Death was always abrupt. It was the final ending.
Slick nodded to himself. “All endings are,” he said wisely, nailing the hidden thought Dave had just had. “Life is so much different that death that the line between the two can’t be blurred. It’s absolute, and so, abrupt. It’s the final step we all must take, the close of the book.” He stepped closer to Dave, offering his shadow for relief from the heat. “But this isn’t the ending, not this time. This? This is the fucking beginning—the beginning of the rest of your life.”
“I guess it is,” Dave said, shrugging. “Weird.”
“Also,” Slick said casually. “I’m adopting you. Legally.”
The news wasn’t a surprise to Dave. He’d seen the paperwork himself, left lying on the counter where Slick knew he’d find it.
“Sucks to be you, then,” Dave snarked at the man. “Saddled with an angsty teenager with a chip on his shoulder.”
“I think I can handle that,” Slick said, and they stood there in silence, watching the workers uncover body after body buried shallow in the dry ground until Dave’s phone gave a small buzz from his pocket. It was a new phone, a smart phone, one with all the goodies of modern technology.
The text was in red.
The car’s coming up now. I’ve already located the first stop on the road trip.
Karkat’s buzzing with excitement.
Dave bit at his lip and looked back to the desert.
do you think theyll be ok without me for a while?
Yes. It’ll take them weeks to sort through all of the remains and identify all of the victims. You’re doing the right thing by accompanying Karkat on his summer-long wolfhunting extravaganza, and its not like I won’t be with you. If anything changes, I’ll be the first to know.
thanks hal
The small, boxy gray car pulled upto the excavation site, roll cage visible through the tinted windows. Karkat rolled the window down and waved at him. “Dave! It’s bloody fucking hot as hell outside and I’m losing AC so get your ass in here!”
Dave grinned and looked at Slick, closing out of his cell phone.
The fed smiled back at him. “Go,” He said. “And don’t forget to call me or I’ll have Hal burn your ass.”
“Will do,” Dave answered.
“Good luck, Dave,” Slick told him, slapping him on the back before pulling him into a dusty hug. “Don’t forget you have people who love you—and by God, have fun but stay safe.”
“Do coke and bang strippers, understood,” Dave joked, and Slick laughed with him as Karkat honked the horn at the pair of them. “I’ve gotta go.”
“I know you do,” Slick said, and he let him go.
And so Dave trekked out to the waiting car, his boyfriend behind the wheel, ready for a summer he’d never forget and at last felt like he’d earned, because if love was a city he built himself, then this was him laying the first brick in its foundation.
They tore out of the desert, windows down, wind in his hair, music blasting loud enough to rattle through his core, Karkat’s hand gripped tightly in his.
And Dave wouldn’t have it any other way.
The end.