Archive of Our Own ^omega

One day, when you were alone in your apartment, you felt the familiar sensation of being watched. You tensed on instinct, and then panicked silently, because you lived alone. You turned the small space upside down, and closed all the curtains just in case. The feeling subsided.

Your mistake was in reacting.

Your name is Dave Strider, you've been living peacefully for years now, and when you go to sleep that night, you have no belief that that will end.

Over the next few weeks, you start feeling watched again. Off, and on, constantly. You feel the prickle of hairs on your neck, the harsh rhythm of your heart, the sweat beading down your face as you fail to breathe steadily. When you’re working when you’re partying when you’re buying groceries when you’re hiding under the covers like you’re a teenager again you’re always feeling EYES.

It starts to feel nostalgic. There’s phantom heat on your neck like you’re back down south again. Phantom cuts from long healed scars open on your skin.

Then one day it stops, and you’re so fucking relieved about it. You were thinking you might have to book a session with your therapist about it, which is expensive, or worse tell your friends, which is embarrassing. But it’s fine, because you’re not being watched anymore. You were just paranoid. That’s probably it.

Life is good, or fine at least. You wake up, stay in bed for too long, get out of bed, pick your clothes up off the floor, drink some water, go to the kitchen, put ON your clothes, pop some poptarts in the toast, put some coffee on to boil, head to the bathroom, wash your face, put on deodorant, paste your toothbrush, brush your teeth, keep brushing your teeth, spit out the gross shit, look in the punch the mirror.

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That wasn't you.

You're staring down at the sink watching suds swirl down the drain, your arm quivering in pain as you feel blood drip down your fist. You can see the drops hit the edge of the sink and slide down the side to mix with the water swirling down the drain. It looks nice actually, there's a fun mix of colors there. Nice to focus on, much nicer to focus on than what you saw in the mirror.

It wasn't you.

It was you-shaped, but it wasn't you. You didn't- you couldn't catch any details before you punched the mirror. But your hair was darker, your skin was… wrong. You had to have just been seeing things. It was a trick of the light and you panicked like an fuck up. That's all.

…But what if it wasn't?

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You can't just hyperventilate into your sink forever. You have to check the mirror again, if you don't, you're going to be worrying about it for half of forever. So you need to do it. You need to hurry up and do it. Do it. Do it DO IT DO IT DO IT JUST LOOK UP AT THE MIRROR AND SEE- nothing.

The cracks in the mirror don't show you, but that's for the normal reasons, like the fact that it’s broken into nearly a thousand fucking pieces and getting a clear view of anything reflected in there is impossible. Good, it was nothing. Totally nothing.

You pick each and every shard of glass out from between your knuckles. Calm and expressionless as you wash your hand clean of blood, and carefully wrap it with gauze. It's been a time for reminiscing, you guess.

You stumble on your way back to the kitchen. You're being watched again. Whatever it is is back. That’s stupid, it's stupid to give a form to your paranoia. But after what just happened…

It's nothing. It has to be nothing.

You eat your pop tarts in unfamiliar silence, and try not to think of what exactly is watching you, and what might have happened if you hadn't broken that mirror.

The watching doesn’t stop.

A month later and you haven’t had a private moment no matter where you’ve been. Everyday everywhere it’s been staring staring STARING at you. You finally broke and talked to your therapist about it two weeks in, and she told you it must be your hypervigilance acting up. She assured you that healing isn’t linear and sometimes you’ll regress and blah blah blah nothing you haven’t heard before and nothing you can correct her on without getting sent to the looney bin.

She gives you some advice to try spending some time with close friends, or to reorganize your living space to try and take back some control over what’s supposed to be private. You can’t really do anything else about your apartment, you already tried shoving all your couches to the table to make a hidey hole, and that didn’t help at all- if anything it made the feeling worse. And you’d love to chill with your friends but John is out of the state and wouldn’t take you seriously, and Rose fucked off to France for an extended research trip AND decided she was doing a tech detox apparently so you’re shit out of luck there too.

Then again you’re not sure how helpful that would actually be… John’s always tiptoed around your shit and Rose gets too in the weeds. You aren’t in the mood for either of those right now. What you do want is the one thing your therapist is able to help you with: sleep. A quick prescription for some sleep aids is granted without you even having to beg too much. You’re pretty sure the dark circles helped with that, you haven’t gotten more than a few hours of fitful sleep each night since this started.

Whatever the hell is watching you, it can do that while you’re awake. And it does, oh boy has it been. But you’re going to get to sleep now. It isn’t real, it can’t wake you up.

You wake up in the woods. You can’t process the trees, you just know they’re there. Fuck. You can feel the prickle of eyes on every part of your bare body as you stand up from where you lay among the… grass? You think it might be grass. You hope it's grass. Grass makes the most sense if this is a forest, after all.

You try to walk around and… can. Not that kind of nightmare yet then.

You wander the ‘forest’ aimlessly for what feels like hours as seconds stretch into infinity, taking the opportunity for a conscious dream which isn't throwing psychological triggers in your face.

And thinking that is apparently the cue for the forest to shift into a small town, except all the buildings are made up of the same familiar apartment building, stuck into the ground at various heights and angles. Coooool.

It is… significantly less peaceful than the ‘forest’, because you can't help but jump at every window you pass, the shifting of curtains and blinds jumping your heart rate without fail. Your… dream heart rate. You're ignoring that for the sake of your already fraying mental stability.

Not that still being watched in a DREAM isn't already causing problems. Oh, and being naked. That's concerning. In a logical way, but not emotionally. Yet.

More concerning is that eventually over the infinite rows of buried apartments (why do you think this counts as a town?) you see one standing straight up, exactly as tall as it should be. You have free will in this dream, and you know it is one, but it isn't lucid. No amount of wishing turns that building into an ice cream shop.

You trudge steadily onward, stomach churning (dream stomach) as you eventually reach the apartments and start trudging up the stairs. You try every doorknob on the way up. They're all locked. Even the top floor.

Only one left to try.

You're not even scared anymore, you're just annoyed. Yeah of fucking course it'd be the roof. Of course the door to the staircase opens, of course it feels like the stairs go on for way longer than they should, of COURSE you can open the door to the roof. And of course when you open it, you see a guy-

And. Not… the roof. Dream. Right. It's… a lake? Or a big mirror. Or a lake that works like a mirror. The whole thing reflects a galaxy's worth of stars and nebulas like nothing you've ever seen, and it's mesmerizing to look at, even before you step out of the door.

The surface is cold and smooth against your bare feet, and you… your reflection is wrong again. It's different from the mirror, but it's wrong. Your form splits and morphs between a scared, sliced up kid, a tired, sliced up teen, and your own confused, scarred up adult self.

Your body hasn't changed. You look back up and- well the stars aren't there either. Not the only reflection freakiness huh. It's just… white. Pure white light that somehow doesn't burn up your eyes.

Then there's the guy. You recognize him even at the edge of the horizon. From the mirror.

That's who you saw. Ashy skin, pitch black hair, your eyes. You can tell they're your eyes, because he's in front of you all of a sudden.

He throws his arms around your shoulders and you don't flinch away, you… can't? And his limbs sit on your shoulders like a mountain. You don't get a chance to look at any of his features other than your eyes, because his face smashes against yours, lip to lip. Okay, that kind of dream is not unwelcome right now.

You let yourself melt into the dream kiss. It's nice, it's been a while, and you didn't realize you've been missing this until getting to swap fake spit right now.

Your dream kisser is pretty good too. His heavy-ass hands move up to tug at your hair, and down to cup your ass, and forward to squeeze your hips, and back up to your neck-

You realize that your smooch partner has far too many hands at the exact moment that his- its? Tongue slides into your mouth, and it's too long! It's pressing back into your throat, and your eyes fly open to see your own staring back at you.

You can't see any extra arms from how close up you are, but you can still feel them, and you can feel more start to grip your body, pressure on your legs, and chest, and back, as that weirdly un-fleshy tongue tries to slide all the way down your throat.

You can't struggle, you can't even speak, you can barely move your head. The most you can do as you frantically struggle against the mass of limbs and unblinking stare is to look down.

You don't even see your strange morphing form anymore. You're too wrapped up in your ‘partner’. Your body is barely visible, almost completely covered in what looks like a cross between leafless tree branches, tentacles, infinitely twisting knots, chains, galaxy arms-

You're trying to comprehend what you see in the reflection. That's a mistake. Your throat is so full you can't even vocalize your pain.

IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS NO NO NONONONONONO-

You wake up still screaming, your body covered in a layer of cold sweat. It's still watching you.

You stop being able to sleep pretty soon after that. Everytime you lie down in bed you think of that dream and decide Red Bull and Netflix are more your speed. Everyone around you notices, and no one except your agent is willing to tell you they’re getting worried. You blow ‘em off and keep on keeping on, because every time you do manage to sleep, you’re sent into another twelve hours or so of active nightmares, being chased by your extradimensional stalker through hallways and wooded paths and city streets and more.

You can't hide, you know that intuitively. So running through a senseless dreamscape is your only option. If you go full charge you can outrun it, but not forever. It always catches you. And holds you, constraining your body in those… tendrils you saw beneath the mirrored lake.

It almost feels like it's cradling you, those appendages smoothly coiling against every inch of your skin as you weakly struggle until you give up. You always give up.

The lines between the absurd dreams and reality aren't blurred so much as dissolved like cotton candy in water. You think you see that humanoid form in every reflection you cast, you barely look at the new bathroom mirror, you avoid windows, you can barely take baths anymore without looking down and seeing that face over your dick.

And that's another thing! You keep waking up sweaty, if rested, with a boner after getting held and stroked all over by a freaky eldritch stalker. Because there is something wrong with you, apparently. You can’t even take care of it, because you’re still being watched. Getting touched in a dream by a freaky entity? Turn on! Getting watched by that freaky entity? Turn off! Not the biggest problem with all of this, but it’s a bother that’s for sure.

You grow accustomed to this uncomfortable status quo in a few weeks, only skipping every other day of sleep instead of two. Which means more time dreaming, and more time getting chased and grabbed. You’re giving up sooner, slumping into the tendrils when they take you just to get it over with. The watcher is taking this with gusto, apparently, because its tendrils are dipping into you.

Waking up after getting dream-fucked would be one thing, and you are, fairly often, and it’s a problem for your perpetually surveilled case of blue balls, but the tendrils aren’t very discerning about how they enter you. They slip into your mouth, your nostrils, your ears. You feel them slip between your scarred skin and twining with your blood vessels and muscle fibers, and you barely react from the confusing lack of pain. You aren’t even tired afterwards.

You’re still generally tired though, which means you’re dozing off all the time, and sometimes you can’t keep yourself from falling asleep. And at some point, you sleep without dreaming. You barely register it until you’re groggily jolting awake, unusually unmolested by flesh-roots, and you don’t even get to hope for more before you realize where you fell asleep.

You were at your desk trying to catch up on script writing. Your document is even still open on your computer. It’s longer than when you passed out. You feel dread sink into your bones as you read.

Your fingers are bleeding. Your keyboard is stained with blood. You didn’t write this. You couldn’t have written this- you don’t know SHIT about this kind of thing, maybe you could’ve picked up a bit from Rose but you don’t recognize any of this.

You bother checking your history to see if you somehow forgot researching weird tree shit, and no. You did not. This information didn’t come from you.

It’s communicating.

But what the fuck are you supposed to get from this? Your incomprehensible stalker has a tree fetish, WOOP DEE DOO! You got that from the constant forests and the freaky tendrils! Not helping!

It keeps trying anyways.

That’s the last time you sleep without dreams. And every time you're caught, you wake up with bleeding fingers and red decorations. On your walls, your floors, your ceiling once. The ‘forest’ from your dreams, your watcher's ‘human’ form set in the center of a massive, sprawling tree, a complex diagram of rings and spheres you don't understand, and the singular word ‘Qliphoth’ in large letters.

You can't handle this anymore. You're at your absolute limit. You wake up to a word you don't understand and didn't mean to write in your own blood with your bandages in shreds on the floor.

You collapse to your knees and start to sob. You don't have anyone to talk to, you don't have anything to say. What can you DO?

Bro never took you to church, but it was Texas, you know how to pray. You clasp your hands in front of you, smearing them red with blood.

“Our father…” You mumble quietly through clenched teeth. “Who art in heaven… Hallowed be thy name.”

It hurts. In a lot of ways. Your bleeding fingers hiss at you, and you don’t know if that’s in a ‘Oh no he’s talking about Jeezy Boy fuck that noise’ sort of way, or if it’s a ‘You fucking dumbass that’s not going to work. Idiot.’ kind of way. Your nerves scream at you with a thousand repressed memories of a place and time you swore you’d never go back to, but here you are. And your head? Your head tells you those are the wrong words. It's the wrong prayer, it's the only one you know and it's not the right one.

“And forgive us our trespasses…” You need no forgiveness.

“As we forgive those who trespass against us…” You don’t. You know you don’t.

“And lead us not into temptation… But deliver us from evil.” Is it even evil? You don’t fucking know! It just makes you bleed sometimes, and watches you all the time, and holds you tight in your dreams and frankly that reversal of frequency is better than what you were used to! It's just fucking you up on… accident?!

You want to crawl under your bed. Or your closet. Anywhere you can to get away from here, on your knees, a kid who’s out of options but to pray for a miracle. But God still isn’t real, while your guardian was, and now something new is. You never even bothered praying to Bro.

So why does your head tell you to pray to… this? Do you even know the words? Because you shouldn't. Then again there's a lot you shouldn't know that you've used anyways.

Maybe… maybe if you just… gave up on hiding?

It's a horrifying thought, you've given less and less of a shit about all of this, but you're still being watched, and that's- that's always been malicious. You're not gonna trust an ‘entity’ when you couldn't trust your dad.

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Like you've got more options now than then.

You… open your mind. That's the only way to put it. You slump even harder on your knees and try to listen to the voice telling you to pray, to focus on the ghastly reflection, on the gaze that's been piercing your soul.

You let it speak through you.

“Ygnaiih... ygnaiih…” Your tongue curls unnaturally around the words pouring from your throat, words you've never seen nor heard before. But you know their meaning all the same.

My father… My father…

“You who keep existence's gates.” You continue, focusing on the meaning instead of the sounds, as your ears begin to ring.

“You who tie creation's knots.” Your hands shake as you keep them clasped in front of you. You don't know if you're crushing them together, or if it's what you're saying.

“The All in One and One in All.” Blood hits your tongue. You can't stop.

“I call for you: Y̷̨̛͍͂o̴̳̾̅g̸͍̒-̵̦͐̀S̴̖̺͝o̶̡͊t̶̟̃h̷̨̡͑ȯ̸͖t̷̼̅h̷̠́̈́.”

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It seems like nothing happens, but you feel the shift. You’re still being watched, but you can tell something about the watcher, about their motives. There's no malice, but curiosity, wonder even. About… you? It reminds you of how you felt when you first realized just how smart the crows outside your window were, and you were kind of freaked the hell out but you got so excited thinking about what they could do.

Now you're the crow. Caw caw mother fuckers.

You try calling Rose at least thirty times, fuck her detox, and get no response. Which sucks because you'd rather do nothing than try googling anything you just said, and asking her to tell you the scary story without the scary bits was the only thing you were more willing to do here. Ignorance it is.

Besides, now it feels like. It’s okay? Everything is fine, you don't know what you were even worry- no you know what you were worried about, but now it feels silly. And you aren't sure how to feel about it. But there’s… an understanding, a mutual one, somehow. Which feels like an improvement.

You still forgo sleeping until tomorrow night. Just in case.

When you do, you wake up in your room. Your old room. It takes a moment for you to calm your shit down before you push through the door, back into that familiar apartment. It’s blissfully empty, and you’re able to rush back out to the hallway and up to the roof without obstruction.

You push the door back open, and step out onto the lake of stars again. It’s your first time back since you first encountered… him. And you see him again, standing, facing you, his reflection taking up almost the entire surface of the lake. It doesn’t hurt to look at anymore. Yours has changed though. It’s just you now. Your eyes are barely visible though, under their new unearthly red glow. You have to walk to him this time. It takes forever and no time at all.

You stand in front of him. He ‘stands’ in front of you.

“...Ygnaiih?” You try, your tongue curling more naturally around the word.

He smiles, you think he smiles, and throws his arms around your shoulders again, almost forcing you to the ground from their heft. You're ready for the kiss, the tongue- the root sliding down your throat, and you welcome it. You aren't ready to be pulled. For the world to shift. To be dragged beneath the ‘lake’.

It's the same and like nothing you've experienced all at once. You are surrounded, constricted by an infinite mass of shifting, coiling, many eyed roots. They press against your skin and all around you, no tips or beginnings to dig beneath your skin. No beginnings and no ends. He's everywhere. He's everything.

You feel… delight, almost childish happiness at your presence within him. Like all those kids on TV when their parents finally give them whatever stupid shit the commercial is selling. And you're happy to be here, to see. To know.

He’s not a ‘Tree of Evil’ and not because he’s not a tree, even if he isn’t, because he’s more ‘just a tree’ than the alternative. He’s the roots, and the branches, and he connects everything from the most distant stars to the closest atomic bonds. He holds apart the realms between reality, he ties the past to the future and back to the present, he is everything within himself, and his self is everything.

Everything, and whatever these senses he's directing at you are.

The roots undulate from within at your thought, and you get a wave of sensation as the shifting of the roots forces you to straddle a bundle of them.

THE WATCHER WAS WATCHED BACK. NEVER SEEN BEFORE. NEVER SEEN SINCE.

You noticed him. It's because you could tell he was watching. But then why was he watching you?

A WHIM. LIKE MANY BEFORE AND SINCE.

Oh. Like an accident. The Abyss happened to stare at you for a moment, and it saw you staring back. Is that… good?

He doesn't seem to have an answer for that. You don't know if ‘good’ means anything to him. But you'd probably guess that's accurate. You're like, an expert on this one eldritch guy probably. You're pretty sure he likes you? That's preferable to the alternative.

YES.

Well… then what now?

The roots start squirming, shifting wildly around you with intent. Strong intent.

WITHIN. PROPERLY.

You don't have to wait long to find out what that means. The tips of the tendrils are back. You realize you're about to be fucked at both ends by branches that touch the stars. Is this sexual for him? Is this as good for him as you're pretty sure it's going to be for you?

You don't get a response as the roots start squeezing you tighter, one shoving down your throat and the other into your ass, and a thousand more slipping into your skin as you moan around the one in your mouth. They all feel like they go impossibly deep, undulating and writhing and shifting like they'll entirely fill your body.

They slip against your skin as you thrust back against them, trying to get whatever stimulation you can because if you're blown apart by an eldritch god entering your body you're at least going to come from it.

You get the feeling, if not the sound, of a chuckle as your sight is filled with your own eyes crinkling in amusement back at you from the surface of the roots. He thinks you're silly for imagining that he'd kill you at this point. Aww…

The roots don't stop wriggling into your skin as you're humping, and you can see, in your mind's eye, his human effigy smiling at you. And you try to smile back as your arms wrap around the roots you've been straddling. And then they pierce your chest. And then you come.

You wake up back in your bed, and you feel heavier. Different. You can still feel his gaze, but you can tell where he's watching from. He's in you. Your body… your body feels the same on the outside, but in there… you're definitely not human anymore.

You don't know what's different. You’ve still got blood, you’re pretty sure about that at least. It's the only thing you're sure is in there, except for him. You can feel him in there, peaceful right now in your new…

Well is it yours? The body? How much is yours and how much is his, cause you're pretty sure there's a lot of him in there. Is it a 50/50 kind of deal? Or is he timesharing your mortal form- why the fuck are you thinking of timeshares now?

Whatever the case your body is sticky because you came in your pajama pants, and eldritch fusion or not you don't like the feel of that.

You slip out of bed and to your bathroom, and it's a whole ordeal to get used to walking again. You can feel his awareness, his knowledge, brushing up against yours. You're pretty sure everything you saw and figured out in dreamland was already enough to pop a normal human head like a cranberry. But you're (probably) not a human anymore. So… you're fine? Not fine enough for everything, he's not letting you access everything. But you don't know if you want to know everything about all layers of reality in every permutation past, present, and future. You think you're good with whatever you get.

Whatever, you can figure out your weird new body and powers and shit after you clean up. You get to the bathroom and finally look into the new mirror, and it's just you, strangely enough- oh. Until you strip. Then it's not just you, it's…

It’s a large keyhole, right in the center of your chest, above your sternum. It's not like a tattoo, it's a void, right there in your skin. You could- can, even check. Your hand moves up your chest, fingers dancing above the edge of the hollow, and then you reach slowly inside…

A familiar root reaches out from the cavity and quickly entwines with your fingers, pulling them further in where more shoot out and curl around your hand.

“Oh…” You mumble. “Well good morning to you too.”

You see an eye open at the top circle of the keyhole in your chest, and blink back at you from the mirror. You give a small wave with your free hand, and the tendrils extend further from the keyhole, and you can feel them even deeper, running all throughout your body like a vegan circulatory system (is it vegan if the plant is a guy? Is he a guy if he's a horrific god?).

“Whats up with the shape?” You ask. “Weren't interested in just a normal gash in my flesh?”

IT IS WHAT YOU ARE.

His ‘voice’ radiates through your entire being in a way that you aren't prepared for. But it isn't unpleasant. You're just glad proper communication isn't over. It's nice. Not sure you understand anyways though.

MY SILVER KEY.

The tone there… is… affectionate. Affectionate is the only way you can describe it. There's some other feelings in there, but you can't parse them properly, and you're not sure if he can either, if he's any more used to this than you are. It kind of feels like a pet name though. You can be his little silver key if he wants, you can be Mr. … aw fuck.

You want to call him again, not by his name, but the word you used earlier, that means ‘My father’. It feels better. More personal. Intimate.

…Oh. You're calling him daddy. You're definitely calling him daddy when you do that.

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You're gonna keep doing it. If he didn't want to deal with your daddy issues he shouldn't have shoved himself into your body. But… hm. Not the main thing you want to think of him as. And his proper name feels too formal, and maybe he wants formal but he's, again, inside your body. Nonsexually. Right now.

“You got a name?” You ask, staring back at the eye in the mirror, and noticing that, just like the reflection in the dream, there's a glow behind your eyes. It isn't quite as strong, but it's there. Guess you've still got a reason to wear the shades everywhere.

You feel a wriggling in your chest as he ‘thinks’, you're pretty sure, as the roots shoot further out of the keyhole, curling around your shoulders and dropping to your hips. When the feeling stops you see the mirror start to fog up, before slowly clearing back to the lake of stars. He's there staring back at you, and he mouths the words, and you feel your mouth move in kind.

“Kar…kat?” You say with him, and see him smile at you in the mirror in response, and you smile back all on your own. “Okay. Karkat it is.”

Your hand slips out of the keyhole, and moves down to finally slide your pants off so you can clean up, and the roots move with you. You see them, you see them reach out towards your dick, and you feel your breath catch in your throat as you bite your lip.

Karkat is still watching you, he's always watching you, and thank him he always will be.