Chapter Text
Now.
i'm just not sure if i'm really, REALLY ready for this kind of power! or the right person for it.
who the fuck is ever the right person
moot point
john the stormbringer
egbert of the winds
youre the one that has the power
youre the one that deals with it
Not the r8ght person???????? John you alr8dy flipped me red, stop 8eing so pitia8le. Do you think it was luck that we got this power? Well I HAVE ALL THE LUCK. ALL OF IT. Stop moping and kick ass alr8dy!!!!!!!!
you heard your crazy murder girlfriend we need a plan john
we need to figure out how to kill a god!!
Before.
Time is space here and you can unfold that even if it turns out to unfold into a tesseract. You're not the only expert here, after all.
For that matter, you're not really an expert compared to her. Aradia sees time in a way you don't think you ever will. Complexity simplifies for you, but it expands for her, revealing every layer below.
You don't really mind. You grew up in a gene-family and life-family of doctors and professors, biologists and astrophysicists and sociologists. You and your Bro were the practical ones. The hands and tools of the family body. It's relaxing, really. That's how you're so damn cool, really. You don't have to overthink things.
Especially when it comes to time. Because you don't have to analyze it in order to know it. Dirk taught you from a lot of traditions, but what they had in common - Zen Buddhism, Taoism, the Transcendent Order, Action-Response Mesoam Neo-Zapatist Combat - was shrinking the conscious to enable the subconscious. He taught you to always process without actively looking, to act with purpose and to know your reasoning by your actions. He made you Batman made you the best damn hands your family could have. You think your skin is proof enough of that. You took on eternal anti-gods and won their favor.
And Aradia? Ara is a mind without compare, a magician of time. You've seen her in action, and she's no mere channel for the dead. She gets their knowledge with patience and politeness and unending energy for questions. And then she uses it the way she wants to. She just applies the same principles to time itself.
You could watch her do this forever. In fact you probably have/will/will have been. You rarely interfere, but when you do it's like sliding in a missing puzzle piece - a simple and intuitive step, that jumps Aradia's work ahead. She gives you a warm grin each time you do that, and you feel absurdly useful. Your brother went to mad dedicated lengths to teach you skills you could apply to a lot of fields, and you finally found the one where you and your talents are really needed.
It just kind of fits that time is your inheritance.
Aradia makes one last adjustment, and the indecipherable mess of time and space snaps out into an n-dimensional fractal construct, one whose order is so complex as to approach its previous chaos from the other direction.
Aradia understands it, though, and grabs hold of one strand. "Are you ready, Dave?"
"Time is meaningless here until we shove it into being. We're here at the same point as the first time we came." You smirk and adjust your lenses. "Right now I'm out there being born ready."
(One of the few good things about not hanging out with John is that you can make ironically terrible one-liners without him insisting that you meant them sincerely.)
By the look of skeptical humor on Aradia's face, she doesn't quite buy your ironic appreciation either. At least she's not calling you out on it.
You wonder exactly what your gene-sister would have to say about your mental health if she knew you were going off to confront the immortal ruler of the Alternian Empire with nothing but a flight suit, your psychic girlfriend, and an intuitive but simple ability to manipulate time itself.
Probably something long-winded about the amount of power you could be applying to the battlefield or letting her study instead of using it on an insane crusade. Yeah, you're not going to bother imagining any more of that. The overactive imagination is more of John's bag anyway. Your strengths tend more towards pulchritude.
Later you'll regret not letting Rose run any kind of test she wanted on you for as long as she wanted. It would have beat the eternity and a half you spent fighting that cueball-headed motherfucker. And even if you didn't learn a damn thing from it, you really could've lived perfectly happily without the shit you know now.