Work Text:
“Let me see your math homework,” Dave says to John ten minutes before first period.
“Dude, I was gonna copy yours!” John yelps.
They stare at each other for a moment before scrambling for pens and paper in a desperate attempt to get something down before the bell.
“We’re so screwed,” moans John, before another piece of paper is placed on top of his barely-started one, the work neatly delineated in bright green ink, and the answers boxed in.
“When are you two stupidheads going to learn to do your homework at home?” Jade asks over Dave’s fervent ‘You’re a lifesaver Harley’, trying to sound stern but utterly failing. John just laughs sheepishly and promises her his dessert at lunch.
This happens every week.
Rose sits in the back of her Creative Writing class. The topic is one she is interested in, but she prides herself on being an excellent multitasker and half-listens to the teacher while devoting the other half of her attention to scribbling furiously. Her teacher is probably not nearly egotistical enough to believe that his lecture is worth the sheer number of words that she’s producing, but after reading her last submitted assignment, whose strangely detailed depictions of the eldritch had left him unable to sleep for days, he prefers to leave her to her own devices. This suits Rose just fine. She has a schedule to maintain, hordes of readers practically slavering at the thought of her next update. Her AO3 account has 1500 subscribers and none of her works have earned less than 500 kudos.
As the teacher proceeds to drone on in the background she finishes a scene in which one of Zazzerpan the Learned’s faithful disciples is cursed to fall down every single flight of stairs he encounters. It serves as a fitting allegory for the futility of the quest of Zazzerpan and his allies against the androgynous antihero Calmasis. She’s sure that Dave, who frequently parodies her tendencies towards wizarding melodrama and homoerotic subtext in his own ironically terrible and inexplicably popular webcomic, will get a kick out of it. He’ll deny it, of course, but his mouth will edge up just slightly in the official Dave Strider method of showing emotion, and she’ll know.
Jade, possessing a palette even more indiscriminate than John’s taste in movies, sticks it out with the school lunch. Rose’s mother, in what Rose claims to be the next passive-aggressive gesture in their possibly-entirely-made-up feud, always packs her a beautiful lunch complete with handwritten note. Rose will always eat it nevertheless and carefully rinse out the Tupperware when she returns home. John tends to throw his own lunch together last minute, although some of his dad’s confections will inevitably make their way in—even when he double-checks his lunchbag before leaving every day. He’s alright with it in the end, as the sweets are always quickly snapped up by Dave who is content to mooch off of his friend’s lunches rather than getting his own—except in the cases where Jade beats him to it.
“Sorry Dave, them’s the breaks,” Jade says through a mouthful of chocolate cupcake. “You two owe me for that homework anyway.”
“Oh come on Harley why must you be so cruel as to separate me from the Dadbert’s culinary prowess," Dave moans, although his voice doesn't change from his customary monotone. "That stuff is all that’s keeping me from wasting away in a wilderness so barren that it’s only populated by one guy and his dying camel but then he manages to stumble upon an oasis where some half-naked chick rises from the waters holding out this fare of the gods and he takes it and it tastes downright fucking orgasmic.”
“You’ve truly outdone yourself in nonsensical metaphors,” deadpans Rose, who hasn’t paused her nonchalant knitting of some monstrosity in purple yarn.
“Gross, Dave, gross,” John adds, valiantly struggling to get past the mention of his father and ‘orgasmic’ in the same sentence.
“Yeah I’m not convinced, Dave!” Jade declares. “You’re going to have to try harder than half-naked chicks and dying camels.” Dave plies her with promises of shitty swords and dog-walking until she finally takes pity on him and gives him a bite.
The week before prom, John and Jade tag-team in order to completely cover Dave and Rose’s lockers with toilet paper, clown squirt-flowers, and photographs of Nicolas Cage. The other two respond by hijacking the school’s speaker system in order to sing a version of “How Do I Live”, edited with mildly obscene references to squiddles and smuppets, in beautiful harmony. John woos Dave with apple juice; Jade nearly breaks her neck hanging a gigantic banner in the gymnasium reading Rose come to prom with me!! :D
Rose coerces freshmen into dressing up as characters from action movies and delivering sappy messages to John; Dave pulls out all the stops while rapping to Jade in their biology class and the teacher is so floored by the display that he lets the class go ten minutes early. The principal calls them all into his office to warn them about disruptive behavior; the foursome all high-five and then go to prom together. Dave insists that they all wear matching corsages and they perform one of the strangest group slow dances of all time. They end up in a Denny’s at 3 in the morning, slightly drunk off of the night air and love for each other.
John looks at his friends and wants to say something appropriately sentimental like “we’ll always be best friends forever, right?”, but Dave’s arm is resting against his and across from them, Jade has entirely appropriated Rose’s personal space and all of their legs are tangled together under the table, and the words are entirely superfluous really. He takes an extra-large bite of Dave’s pancakes instead and thinks that even if a meteor were to vaporize the Earth right at this instant, he wouldn’t have it any other way.