Ten years have gone by.

Two minutes before midnight, a teenage boy crosses beneath the neon lights of the Trollish slums, stepping quick and sure-footed atop the cracked pavement as if this is a path he’s walked many times. He’s got on a coat two sizes too big and a brimmed hat pulled down to hide his distinctive buck-toothed grin. Above him, Jane Crocker’s face beams out from a holographic propaganda display, reminding the populace that curfew is in fifteen minutes.

This boy would like to say that he’s too cool and daring to care about curfew, but the sound of Jane’s cloying, prerecorded voice rising above the noisy streets sends an involuntary shiver down his spine. Luckily, the girl he’s come to meet does not suffer from the same instinctive Jane-based anxiety. She doesn’t have many fears or inhibitions at all. About a block from where they usually meet, she swings out of an alleyway and yanks him in by his elbow. He lets loose a shrill, unmasculine noise right into her mouth before she shuts him up with a kiss.

After a few minutes of extremely novice make-out action, Harry Anderson and Vriska part, both wet-mouthed and short of breath. Harry Anderson wipes a bit of blood off of his bottom lip. Vriska pokes him in the chest and hisses.

Harry Anderson rolls his eyes. He has beautiful eyes. He’s a pretty successful combination of his parents’ genes, all things considered. He’s got his father’s infectious grin, his mother’s long eyelashes, and his “auntie’s” unusually blue eyes.

Vriska doubles over laughing at Harry Anderson’s impressively spot-on imitation of Gamzee’s mulish lilt and vaguely lewd posture. Harry Anderson starts giggling too. He can’t help it. She’s so pretty and her laugh is both cruel and infectious.

Vriska hooks two fingers under the hem of Harry Anderson’s shirt and reels him in close.

Vriska shoves Harry Anderson. Not playfully. He hits the bricks behind him with a soft ‘oof,’ then keeps laughing.

Vriska snorts at him condescendingly.

She pushes him up against the wall again and kisses him hard.

Aradia lies with her chin in her palms and looks over the edge of the meteor station. Under the shade of night, the cities of the Troll Kingdom form a twinkling filigree over the rocky landscape below, a hundred rivers of gossamer lights in all the colors of the hemospectrum. Jane’s fleet is so massive that it blots out the lights of the capital. Is this what Alternia looked like from the sky as well? Aradia lived far from the city, and that all seems so long ago anyway. Sollux comes to stand by her, popping open a can of fizzy drink.

Sollux tosses Aradia a can of fizzy drink. She catches it without looking, cracks it open and takes a long, refreshing sip of the hissing liquid.

On Earth C, months go by at a breakneck pace. Teens fall in and out of love and hate. Alliances change, revolutions fully germinate, wars commence. And somewhere within that mess, John Egbert is the best man at Jade and Dave’s wedding. He lasts nearly two hours before he gets a ruinous case of the sniffles.

The event is being held semi-clandestinely in the mansion of one of Jake’s wealthy television exec friends, staged as a “reunion party” for whichever one of his old, stupid television shows people get nostalgic about these days. It’s a smokescreen meant to throw the human government off the scent of political radicals like Rose and Kanaya partying just twenty miles from the seat of power. Jake claims there’s no way they’ll find them, but John sometimes gets the feeling that the whole planet’s bugged. After nearly ten years of unfettered monetary interference in the upper echelons of the global hegemony, could something like this possibly fly under Jane’s radar? It can’t, right? John likes to think she’s not so far gone that she’d tip off the government to send troops to arrest her friends and family on the occasion of her ecto-daughter’s wedding.

So he smiles his way through his best man duties, then smiles his way again through the gallows-humor speech Rose gives at dinner, backlit by the flames of the Imperial Drone factories churning away on the horizon. He wears a possibly genuine expression for a few moments as he dips down to give Jade a kiss on the forehead. She looks beautiful in her dress, and Dave doesn’t look especially uncomfortable beside her. There is still joy to be found on the eve of a war, Rose says in her speech, but John found precious little to be happy about in this world even before everything went off the fucking chain. He is conspicuously unaccompanied. Not alone, of course: he’s been put in a honored seat at the head of the wedding party with Jade to his left and Rose to his right. But Jade is with Dave, and Rose has Kanaya and their daughter, and everyone knows that John has lost his family to Jane Crocker.

Well, not literally to Jane Crocker. What drove Roxy away was him being depressed and just an all-around huge wet blanket who was impossible to live with. John is totally ready to own the fact that he was a bad husband, but maybe not the fact that he was a bad enough husband to drive his wife to passively support a brewing genocidal dictatorship. She looks happier, though, whenever he’s caught sight of her behind Jane—Calliope faithfully at her side—in any of the propaganda broadcasts that Jane passes off as business press conferences. By the time Roxy finally cut things off between them, he hadn’t personally seen her smile in years.

John has no idea how Harry Anderson is doing, but he definitely caught Vriska texting him under the table when he got up to get another flute of champagne. She’s texting Tavros in another window, which is weird, but probably not as weird as John craning his neck to read messages over a teenage girl’s shoulder. The idea that Rose’s shitty daughter has more contact with his son than he does makes his eyes start to itch. He wanders out onto the ballroom balcony so that no one else has to see him cry for a second time tonight. It’s a balmy evening, and John can smell the oil burning at the forge across the harbor.

There’s someone else occupying the balcony already, and it’s not one of the party guests. A shadow, standing with its back to the ocean, arms crossed, gaze fixed firmly on the ballroom windows. John takes a step closer and immediately recognizes Karkat’s nubby horns and distinctive shoulder-hunch. Of course.

John snorts back his tears and jaunts forward with a jolly wave.

Karkat blinks and looks up, startled out of his thoughts. He’s grown gaunt since John last saw him in real life. In his Alternian military fatigues, and his admittedly bitchin’ eyepatch, he looks almost imposing. Kind of dashing, actually. When he opens his mouth, however, he’s just the same old Karkat.

Karkat’s frown gets deeper, and he picks at the red cording that runs down the breastplate of his uniform.

John chews his lip and thinks about it for ten seconds.

John joins him at railing and bumps his shoulder. Karkat groans and runs a hand down his face, obviously still a little “all heartbroken” about it.

John turns around so that he can rest his elbows on the bannister. The angle of the moon is cutting a sharp stroke of light over the water, like a blade descending from the night sky to shear the harbor in half. He takes a despondent sip of his champagne and sighs.

Karkat’s expression turns hard, regretful. It’s a frown made of granite, or some other manly kind of rock that chips easily when dropped. His one eye is glinting bright gold, reflecting the light from the party. He opens his mouth to say something, but is distracted by movement from inside the ballroom.

He fumbles with something at his wrist, and out pops a grappling line. With unexpected smoothness, he hitches it over the edge of the balcony and leaps the railing in a single, elegant bound. John watches him rappel down the cliffside until he disappears beneath the precipice shadows. Wow. Karkat grew up to be kind of cool. Who would have guessed?

John spins on his heel to see Dave in the doorway, holding a bottle of champagne. He looks smart in his three-piece tux, but he’s still sporting the same old Stiller shades, which always serve to remind John how hard it is to believe this guy’s almost forty. Jesus Christ, are they seriously almost forty? Yes, they’re technically immortal—that doesn’t mean the encroaching milestone isn’t making him feel dizzy nonetheless.

John decides it’s probably better not to mention what he was actually doing. And definitely not to mention who just rappelled off the balcony with alarming stealth and grace.

Dave comes to join John at the bannister, gazing out over the water with a look at least as existential as John’s. John isn’t sure what to say about that, so he wiggles his empty glass, looking for another shot of sparkling social lubricant. Dave tops him off before taking a long swig off the bottle himself.

Dave shrugs.

John looks down and twirls the stem of his glass between two fingers.

John swallows a lump down his throat. Terezi’s picture is still in his wallet: faded, dog-eared, marred by ragged white lines down the center from being folded and unfolded so many times, deep enough to be called valleys at this point.

They fall silent for a moment, soaking up the atmosphere, sipping their booze, contemplating the suckiness of being an adult. Dave lets out a soft laugh and slaps John on the back. John swallows his champagne wrong and starts coughing.

They toast, lip of the glass to rim of the bottle. The sound rings out above the noise of the party inside. It rises up above the ocean, to where the stars are turning and dawn is already breaking on some other part of the planet. That’s how the years pass. Faster and faster the longer it goes. For those living on this iteration of Earth C, like John and Dave, it appears to be an illusion of age, an old adage about perception changing the older you get. The days get shorter the more the regrets pile up.

But that’s only part of it. Above this Earth, the dead cherub is still meditating, waiting for the day when she can have her own heroic apotheosis. Waiting for the day when she can confront the one she calls the Prince. And on this Earth, John is just waiting for the day that feeling finally stops. That feeling that he’s still waiting for something, and the even worse feeling that years ago, he missed his only chance to put an end to it. If you stand on a very high hill at dawn, you can watch your shadow move in an arc around you.

Ten years to the day he last spoke with Terezi, John finally gets rid of her photograph. He stands at the top of a very high hill, rips it into six pieces and lets the wind carry it away. Whatever else happens now... it doesn’t matter.