Let’s play a game.

I’m not talking about chess, or solitaire, or playing any iteration of the literal thousands of sequels of Mario Party that Jake saw fit to stuff in this spaceship. Nah, me and the crew got bored of that shit about a month in, and that’s a generous estimate. The only games we’re equipped to play on an even field are Battle Royale style Russian Roulette death matches in the hyper-gravity Dragon Ball Z training room. TZ and Rose always win, because they cheat like the absolute dickens. Them's my girls.

I can’t engage in any recreational entertainment with them. The only person I’m fit to play games with anymore is myself. Not due to my narrative omnipresence –that dissipated when we switched to third-person limited in the postscript– but instead due to the fact I enjoy seeing what Dirks do when shoved together and forced to interact. What else is a guy with an ego the size of planet fucking Jupiter supposed to do with his free time?

So, yeah, by “let’s play a game” I essentially mean playing dollies with a bunch of dead Dirks. Writing erotic fanfiction about me, involving me, starring me. And in this fanfiction, I've decided I'm going to literally insert myself into the story and fuck myself because, Jesus fucking Christ, there’s only so many cold showers I can take. Yes, I realize this might be a little sick, but I’ve accepted my self-obsession as a personal character quirk. Or is it something else? Has the deep void of loneliness, spreading away from me like the infinite expanse of ocean I grew up in, driven to me to a state of insanity? Ha ha. Nah. That’d be ridiculous.

Let the games begin.

I set the stage. Now, this is obviously happening on paper, within the subtextual stupidity loop of a fanfiction website formatted to look like *my* website formatted to look like the same fanfiction website, so there’s no literal stage to set. Just orange text on a page. But for the sake of giving our readers something to visualize, let’s say this all takes place in a white void. A simple box. Big enough to fit a handful of Dirks, with lots of space for them. White floors, walls, a ceiling, all lit perfectly in order to show off every beautiful, camera-ready feature of mine.

I set five Dirks into the box. These are all various Dirks that make up me, the Ultimate Dirk. Some of them already had knowledge of their other splintered selves, but for those who do not, I beam a summary of events direct into their fake fictional brains. Don’t want anyone to be left out of the loop.

Dirk 1 is exactly the sort of Dirk you would expect. I immediately decide that I will be fucking this Dirk at the end of the fic. Handsome, lithe, and very very flexible. He’s exactly three years younger than I. His mouth curves ten degrees downward. He stares up at the ceiling like the narrator is going to pop out of it and punch him in the face. Which, of course, I will at the end. With my tongue. But this is a slow burn and I need to build an erotic rapport with him before we engage in sloppy makeouts. Otherwise the readers won’t be invested.

Dirk 2 is exactly the same as Dirk 1 except it’s in a black catsuit and covered in cool red circuits. This is a great look for me and I fully support it. It shares the same irritated scowl as Dirk 1, except it directs its glare at the others instead of at the narrative voice in its head. A good choice.

Dirk 3 is an extremely bangable, sexy, middle-aged version of myself. Six feet of spats, muscles, popped collars, hats, and chiseled features. Literally the hottest character in Homestuck and that’s the objective truth and definitely not related to any personal biases of the author. If my dick didn’t already belong to Dirk 1, I’d put it in this guy.

Dirk 4 is exactly the same as Dirk 1 except he doesn’t look irritated, he’s straight pissed. Pissed at the world, pissed at me, pissed at the other Dirks. I’m not sure if this guy even counts as a splinter of me, like for some fucking reason I can’t dredge up his timelines, but I can summon him into my free-for-all-sandbox so, why the fuck not, I guess.

Dirk 5 has a white cueball for a head.

Dirk 3: Why are there five of us? That’s too fuckin’ many.

Dirk 2: Obviously because we need something to distinguish us from Hugo Award nominated A-List Homestuck fanfiction THEATRE OF COOLTY.

Dirk 5: I presume that, due to the nature of THEATRE OF COOLTY, this means one of us is secretly Andrew Hussie.

Dirk 4: Hey. Spoilers, dude.

That’s the joke, Dirk 5. We’re all Andrew Hussie. We are the death throes of a lonely man’s post-Dave, post-author-avatar Mary Sue. The swan song of a “woke” self-insert. He’s been gracious enough to cut my narrative strings and give me free reign to make philosophical jokes about Wikipedia pages he’s read, bring back the uncomfortable incest vibes he’s always loved, and dunk on eternal pissant Jake English: Hussie’s greatest mistake.

Dirk 4: Ok fuck off.

Dirk 1: Christ.

Hold up, this is annoying, I’m labeling you all and giving you the appropriate quirks. The white guy’s getting a background so the reader doesn’t have to highlight.

I appreciate the kindness directed towards our invisible, voyeuristic observers. It’s always nice to extend a hand to our narrative guests.

BRO: who’s this extremely short fuckface and why am i violently aroused by him.

BRO: yo, shit, wait. is this guy the reason you kidnapped rose?

What? No, I took Rose because-

BRO: look let’s be real here. engage in a man-to-man talk.

BRO: rose is the shit and all but why her. you could have taken dave.

AUTORESPONDER: Obviously he couldn’t have taken Dave, as Dave wasn’t on the edge of ascending to his ultimate self and posed no threat to our schemes.

DIRK: There’s also the fact that she was dying. Can’t say I’m a fan of the fucking off into space part, and also not a fan of literally everything else, but I understand building a new body for her.

BRAIN GHOST DIRK: Really? Like none of you emotionally constipated fucks could have just talked to her? Her condition was related to psychological distress, and you could have helped by spewing friendly amounts of bullshit at her and not being a dick.

BRO: nah dudes. shoulda ignored rose and taken dave, the stronger player. shove him in the fridge for three years and he’d unlock his ultimate self and be on our side in record time. trust me.

DIRK: Holy shit.

Alpha Dirk’s perfect expression cracks, alarmed at sexy, sexy older Dirk. I admit to the group that I’m with Dirk on this one. I’m not going to shove Dave in a fridge like an asshole. I’m a villain but I’m not evil. I picked Rose because she wants to come with me.

BGD: ‘Want’ seems like a strong word. You used a little elbow grease to convince her.

Not too much elbow grease. She was always weak to a father figure. Assure her with the truth and she is putty in your hands. And give her a little candy.

All the Dirks, with the exception of Scratch, glare up at the sky with the exact same look. Even behind the four pairs of shades, I feel the judgment radiating through the metatext and shooting me right in the heart.

Alright, fuck you guys. Fuck off. Fuck all of you. I’m not like that. I’m NOT going to fuck my beloved, precious, aesthetically pleasing clone daughter. Not the light of my life and fire of my, uh, heart.

I see now that the puppet guy was a mistake. I remove Doc Scratch from the playing field, and he pops into nonexistence with no sound.

BRO: damn i thought we were gonna piledrive him.

AR: No.

BGD: No one’s fucking anyone. This is clearly just a setup for upstairs Dirk to fuck the alpha Dirk. It’s in the tags.

DIRK: I really don’t get why. I have never been more unaroused in my life when talking to other Dirks. I’m pretty sure my dick retracts into my pelvis so hard the force of the vacuum creates a minor black hole.

AR: We’ve already established this, idiot. It’s because he’s trapped on a spaceship and can’t fuck his daugh-

The autoresponder’s mouth suddenly glitches for no reason whatsoever and it can’t talk anymore.

Look, guys, sometimes, when you’re delving through splinters of yourself while also incredibly depressed and suicidal, you may or may not discover that a piece of you is an omnipresent genderless puppet obsessed with young ladies in a manner that appears sexual because he’s a dense immortal god but CERTAINLY ISN’T SEXUAL ACTUALLY because the puppet doesn’t have a dick. And you just gotta grit your teeth and absorb his experiences anyway, because the guy can control the narrative and you need as much of that control as you can get.

BRO: solid.

DIRK: What the fuck.

The autoresponder appears as though it wants to say something, tapping at its malfunctioning mouth. It works again, magically.

AR: I have to say I deeply respect the direction you’ve steered yourself, Mega-Dirk. Cold, calculating, on-par with me, and perhaps surpassing me as much as your mortal body allows. This whole thing is fucking awesome.

BGD: What the fuck are you on about, Dirk’s fucking evil. Bad evil.

How bad can I be? I’m just doing what comes naturally. I’m not an evil person, I’m just morally cryptic. Obfuscated. Hard to figure out. This was compounded by the merging of the many monsters tangential to myself. The woeful side effects of the human instrumentality project. if you will.

BRO: you absolute fucking nerd, i am going to slam myself into a locker and leave me there.

AR: It all comes back around to Evangelion, doesn’t it? We’re Gendo Ikari, obviously. Rose is our Rei. Shinji is John. I can’t let you do that, John. Get back in the car, John. Fuck Terezi right in the nook, whatever that is, John.

BRO: asuka’s vriska.

DIRK: Asuka’s totally Vriska.

DIRK: And while I don’t approve of many of the choices I made within the grander narrative, can I just say I deeply enjoyed viscerally kicking Vriska out of the spotlight. Fuck Vriska.

AR: Fuck Vriska.

BGD: Fuck Vriska.

BRO: fuck vriska i guess.

DIRK: Nice, glad we can all agree on something.

You know we’re in a bad place once a fanfiction descends into nothing but arguable character assassinations and semi-incorrect but well-intentioned AU parallels. I am Gendo Ikari though. Like, for serious.

Honestly, we don’t have to discuss fine works of Asian scholarly craft. I’m just playing with Barbie Dolls here. My hands move these manikins around like they’re talking to each other, like I’m play-acting house and am making them engage in hot, visceral, plastic-on-plastic kissing action. Now there’s an idea, lets get on with the selfcest already.

Hey boys. I now set the age old question onto the floor, that we’ve all thought about literally thousands of times. If you were trapped in a completely empty, inescapable room with your clone, would you fight them or fuck them?

All of them answer me immediately, as they’ve all fantasized about that exact question more times than I’ve ever jerked off.

DIRK: Fight.

BGD: Fuck.

AR: Fuck.

BRO: fuck.

Yeah okay whatever. Anyway, I’ve decided they’re all going to piledrive Dirk now. Dirk performs a double facepalm.

DIRK: I can’t believe I hate myself so much I’m considering gangbanging myself.

Hate myself? No, I LOVE myself. That’s what separates me from you, Dirk. That’s what separates the Ultimate Self from the splinter he grew from.

All the other dolls disappear from the playing floor. It’s just the Alpha Dirk now, alone in a white sandbox, with no one but the narrator to talk to. He looks up. A cool, unreadable determination is set into his handsome features.

I’ve got some choice words for him. Words best expressed through the chat format as opposed to a dope-ass orange voice booming in his head. I add my own doll to the mix, setting it down before Dirk. Dirk gets demoted to (Dirk). I believe the parenthesis are thematically appropriate.

I look exactly like (Dirk), in every facet, down to the expression. Although perhaps there is more of an abyss in my eyes than his. My Dirksona stands a friendly, yet tense, three feet away from (Dirk) as I speak to him.

(DIRK): You and I both know you’re only engaging in erotic dialectic because you’re lonely as fuck. *We’re* lonely as fuck. You’re too busy with your head up in the fifth dimensional clouds to engage with anyone.

DIRK: I can’t engage, that’s the fucking point of all this.

DIRK: I’m indulging in the only toys I have.

DIRK: But what’s a little loneliness when you’ve got an infinity with other gods ahead of you? One with friends who will catch up to your level once they trounce my villainous plans. Or kill me, whichever.

(DIRK): So that’s really the plan, is it? My knowledge is limited to what you beamed direct into my thinkpan, so I’m pretty opaque as to the grander schemes of my antagonist arc.

DIRK: Oh yeah, basically I’m giving myself and my friends a purpose so they can develop into God, detach, and ascend from the Machine, instead of festering in shit tier Earth C ending timelines that they don’t deserve.

DIRK: You see…

DIRK: I want all my friends to be fanfiction writers.

DIRK: I want all of them to write godtier fucking friendfiction so they can continue to exist.

DIRK: Except Jake. He can fester in the narrative. I mean, do you really want Jake fucking English to write us a character arc in some doomed timeline?

(DIRK): Ok honestly I was ready to argue on the ‘everyone but Jake gets enlightened’ front but you’re fucking right about him writing friendfiction. That drivel would be unreadable.

(Dirk) pauses, for a moment. He mulls it over.

(DIRK): Actually, now that I think about it, no. I have no fucking idea what would happen if Jake wrote friendfiction, as much as I’d like to pretend I do.

(DIRK): Let’s bring Brain Ghost Dirk back and scope out his opinion on the matter. Out of every insufferable splinter of myself that I’ve encountered, I have to say, he was the most tolerable.

I ignore (Dirk)’s request. (Dirk) is incorrect about Jake, of course. He hasn’t yet come to understand that Jake is the most one-dimensional, idiotic, over-sexualized piece of meat in the entire cast. I pulled him direct from a time just before he realizes this, before he opens his eyes and becomes the me you see before you.

(DIRK): I can, like, hear you.

DIRK: But you know I’m right.

DIRK: Do you know who you are in relation to me?

(DIRK): I’m the alpha.

DIRK: You’re me, age twenty. The alpha, indeed.

DIRK: I remember what it was like. The wicked expansion of my heart, coming to a head in Earth C. You’ve been feeling the pulls of your splinters since birth. But they came into full swing once we started the game.

DIRK: When you told Dave that you were at fault for his abuse? You knew it then. You felt the edges of Bro Strider digging at your psyche and *knew.*

DIRK: Dave never believed you, but it really was all your fault. I mean, not *your* fault, like not specifically you. It was *my* fault. And I am you.

DIRK: And I know what you’re feeling, at age twenty, three years back. Every fucking dark-ass motherfucking version of myself is rutting up against you like trolls in a pan-quadrant breeding season orgy.

DIRK: And you’re not letting them in, yet. You think you can manage. You think you’ve got this all under control, like you always have. You’re stoic. You’re deadpan. You’re so afraid of becoming the villain you’ve always wanted to be.

(Dirk) does not reply. An inscrutable expression coats his face like black ink. But I know what he’s thinking. Hell, I can *tell* him what he’s thinking, that’s well within my ability and he knows it.

DIRK: I’ll tell you what the trigger point is. Since you’re not real and all, you’re just a figment of my Ultimate Self’s imagination that I’m writing an erotic fanfiction about. It’s not like I’m spoiling anything.

DIRK: You will watch your friends go down the wrong paths.

DIRK: Dave still doesn’t make the moves on Karkat that you know would make him happy.

DIRK: Roxy’s so fucking baffling to you, you don’t know how to deal, you don’t ever talk to him.

DIRK: Jade’s so close to joining you, but she can’t find a home, a sense of self.

DIRK: And then there’s the two that cause you to cave.

DIRK: Jane becomes a ruthless business executive, her only character trait.

DIRK: Jake turns into the slutty, slutty, completely null and void man meat he was destined to be.

And the memories all flood back to me, visceral, stronger than all the other paths I’ve lived. I recall Jake, trash-tier, waste of characterization Jake, fucking everything that moves, and everything that doesn’t. His absolute inability to process any emotion that isn’t “horny.” Cheating on our ill-defined relationship. The taste of jealousy bursting through my mouth, like I just slammed twenty cuck gushers into my maw and bit down hard. I’m over it now, at least. Really, I am. Totally over it. So over it. But (Dirk) isn’t.

(DIRK): And I refuse to reach out to my friends. I don’t want to overburden them.

DIRK: You succeed. You never once reach out.

DIRK: And that’s how you fall.

Alone, I delved into myself. I explored every timeline I could find, no matter how far they branched out from me, no matter what ghastly over-muscled green form I wound up in. Curiosity is what killed the Dirk. An obsessive curiosity. Demons built up in me and made me stronger, more confident.

I was addicted to it. Our family always had a problem with addiction.

Alpha Dirk still stamped down the Ultimate Self, for a while. I knew what I was becoming, I knew I couldn’t stop it. I remember braiding that noose, figuring out the perfect count, how many times should I wrap it around the loop so it’ll hold strong after a jump from my studio, or a redwood, or the bell tower. I’d test it out with my bots. I’d even put it around my own neck if I was feeling brave. Sit like that in my desk chair for a while, zoning out and scanning my splinters while wearing that homemade hemp necklace like a bondage fanatic.

But my sense of self grew too big with all those Dirks. The size of planet fucking Jupiter, in fact. I couldn’t kill myself with the wanton scream of narrative relevance coursing through my veins.

DIRK: You stare at your gears in your studio and never look away.

DIRK: And one by one, entrenched in your loneliness and trapped in your head, your eyes peel open and you understand the Machine.

DIRK: That we’re all just characters in a play. Some less developed than others.

DIRK: Two of my friends who I thought I loved turned out to be flat as fucking hell. Thought I might as well give Jane her ideal life since she’ll never ascend.

(DIRK): You didn’t give them a chance to develop.

DIRK: Are you shitting me? Check out the candy route.

(DIRK): I am pretty sure John was subconsciously controlling that one, dude. Like, terribly, but still controlling it.

DIRK: Anyway, I remember feeling like you. I remember being appalled at the monsters plaguing my psyche, threatening to change me. It was for the better of course, but I didn’t know it at the time.

DIRK: But remember that jealousy? Like a bunch of cuck gushers?

DIRK: After a hookup that definitely didn’t happen, I gave in. You give in.

It started soft. I was very nice with Jake, because I didn’t know that Jake didn’t respond to nice. It was so fucking obvious in retrospect. Any suggestions I threw his way, kind thoughts I interjected into his dumb idiot baby brain, he couldn’t absorb. It had to be firm. Hard. Dominating. Raw. Jake always wanted to be the victim. And it spiraled and spiraled, until I crushed him, and began to work on all the others surrounding me.

(Dirk) curls his lip, disgusted by my dismissal of his dear friend. I breach the distance between us, and loop my arms around his shoulders, lacing my hands behind his neck. He doesn’t twitch or argue, because he knows it’s pointless. He’s just a construct of my mind, a doll. I can do whatever I want with him.

(DIRK): God, I can’t wait until Dave decapitates us.

DIRK: Same. Won’t it be narratively satisfying?

DIRK: But it’ll be a long while. I have to make sure we retain relevancy until my friends are powerful enough to escape the story.

DIRK: Maybe I go with them. But probably not. It’s a sacrifice I’ve long since accepted.

(DIRK): You know what? This pisses me right the fuck off.

A rare show of emotion. I pull his shades off, and they vanish into nonexistence. His gorgeous orange eyes reflect the pure darkness of my two triangles. I allow him to monologue, because nothing turns me on more than the sound of my own voice.

(DIRK): Now that you’re telling me this, it feels like I can do something about it.

(DIRK): But I can’t. I’m just a fictional character in your fanfic, not even a construct of paradox space.

(DIRK): If the real alpha me heard this, god, I don’t know. He’d do something about it. He’d fuck it up, obviously, but he’d do something else. Something that didn’t involve dunking on Jake so hard he became unable to grow into a better person.

DIRK: Better character.

(DIRK): Better “character,” fine, whatever.

(DIRK): I mean, I see the point of it all. I’ve always been an ‘ends justify the means’ person despite my best intentions. I understand the need for a villain to maintain relevancy, but am I *that* sick? Am I so sick I’m obsessed with making myself the bad guy?

(DIRK): Am I so sick that while I’m convinced I love my friends, that’s not necessarily true?

(DIRK): That in actuality, I just love my puppets?

DIRK: It is a little sick, isn’t it?

I tuck two fingers beneath his chin, and stroke his pointed jawline with my thumb. His skin is a little softer than mine, a little less hardened. He stares ahead like he’s firing lasers into me. Sex lasers.

DIRK: I’m curious, (Dirk). What would you do, if you were real? If you could go back to your timeline and change things.

I know what his first thought is: use the noose. He glowers at me when I speak his thoughts into truth, and muses on it more just to spite me. I cup his chin like a muscly man on a tasteful romance novel cover.

He’s pensive, when he speaks.

(DIRK): The hopeful, optimistic answer is that this would be the final push to get me to open up.

(DIRK): But my friends wouldn’t understand what’s happening to me.

(DIRK): Actually, fuck it, that’s something *you’d* say. I don’t want to be you.

(DIRK): You know what, I’d go to Rose first. She’d get it, she’d be hella bad at consoling me but she’d get it. Except I wouldn’t be super fucking weird about it.

DIRK: I am NOT fucking weird about it.

(DIRK): Or maybe TZ- uh, Terezi. You’re getting along swimmingly with her. She’s got one route mastered, she’s close to her Ultimate Self. And John too, I’d talk with John. I mean, fuck it, he seems like a nice dude, if irrelevant.

(DIRK): I’d speak with Jade too. If she found a home, I’m sure she’d have uncovered her Ultimate Self before I did. And hers would have been better than mine.

(DIRK): And Roxy. God, I ran away from Roxy. I shouldn’t have run. Roxy might understand me too, I don’t know.

(DIRK): And Jake and Jane, they wouldn’t get the splinters thing quite yet but I could have, at the very least, like, had a small iota of a conversation with them?

(DIRK): All in all, there’s people to talk to. I could have reached out.

(DIRK): And hell, maybe once the Ultimate Self finally came to me, I would have been ready for it.

(DIRK): There’s a lot of monster Dirks out there. Not a lot of good ones. I don’t think there’s a single good one in the bunch.

DIRK: You’re right, we all suck.

(DIRK): But maybe if I prepped myself enough instead of diving in headfirst with a fistful of loneliness and suicide, I could have managed it.

DIRK: Ok. Sure, dude.

DIRK: Let’s make out.

We make out because I said so. And then we had wild and raucous sex that I’m not going to recount here, because what kind of megalomaniac public exhibitionist am I? Not a public exhibitionist at all, that’s for sure. I know you were excited to read erotic selfcest fanfic but sometimes life just lets you down. I will leave you with this succulent tidbit: I definitely cum all over his face. Like with a full on, porn star, giant money shot facial. And thus, I am fully sated and don’t have to take a cold shower for a while.

However, the deluded ramblings of my alpha splinter haunt my metaphysical self long after I end this little game. What if there *is* some version of me out there that managed to rise to my level and maintain the alpha Dirk’s pathetic morals on top of all the insane monster Dirks? What if by speaking it, I put the idea out there? That now there’s some crazy wild Prince of Heart in Paradox Space with a different set of priorities?

Honestly that would have been dope as fuck, why didn’t I think of that. The only thing I like better than Dave beheading me is myself beheading me. What a cool action-packed battle that would be.

But it’s probably not to be. I can’t see anyone competent enough to pull in the, like, fucking one good Ultimate Self I probably have out there. The Muse could, if she wasn’t so excruciatingly boring. Maybe Dave. I have the utmost faith in Dave.

For right now, I’m the only Dirk in this universe. The god of it all. I am the beginning and the end. The alpha and omega. Or the beta, if you’re including those in your A/B/O ‘verse. But let’s be real here, I’m always the omega in those things.

After all, I’m knotty by nature.