Work Text:
Your name is Dave Strider.
Currently, you are lying face up on the burning concrete of your apartment complex’s roof. The sun makes you squint despite your shades, and the fine, fresh cuts that line your face open with the movement.
Your sword is somewhere on the other side of the roof. You don’t really have the energy to go and look for it. It might be broken. You don’t care.
You’ve decided that you hate this.
Between the mixture of sweat and blood soaked into your shirt that you’ll have a hell of a hard time cleaning out later and the new wounds you’re dreading patching up, there’s really not much to like. You remember being almost excited for the strifes, when you were little. It was the only time he would talk to you, even if it was just critiques of your form. But the older you got, the less he would talk, the more indifference evident on his face, the harder he would go on you.
You miss when he’d teach you how to clean your wounds, fresh out of a strife. There was one particular evening where he sliced your shoulder deeper than he meant to, and he’d had an almost guilty look on his face when he gently propped your crying form up against the toilet. Now that you’re older, the memory perplexes you, because it’s obvious that you should have dodged, then, and he should have been angry with you. Not angry, downright pissed. But he wasn’t. You still have the scar to show for it.
Scars are something you have a lot of. None on the face(every scratch made there is too superficial to even bleed, let alone scar), but so, so many on your hands. Your forearms look like you’ve been taking a razor to them for years, though you’re sure your Bro would kill you if you ever even attempted that shit.
Sometimes, when you’re really desperate, you’ll tell yourself he does it because he cares. Because you’re sure he does care about something(otherwise he’d let you rot) but you’re not entirely sure it’s you. In fact, you’re certain it’s not you, though it could’ve been at some point. The thought sort of makes you sick.
He doesn’t strike you as the type to care about things, so it really makes you wonder. You like to guess around on nights where you’d rather do anything but think of the rumbling in your stomach and the feather-light footsteps that occasionally pass by your bedroom door like goosebumps. Maybe you’re some kind of fucked up science experiment. Maybe he’s training you to battle the Big Bad Evil Guy that’ll End The World™ because you’re the Chosen One™. Maybe he’s just fucked up.
You once asked yourself on a sleepless, moonlit night if it would be better if he liked you. You couldn’t give yourself an answer, and came to the realization that you don’t know anything about your own brother. That and the fact that you can’t even ask him about himself without fearing for your life almost broke you, that night.
It’s been a while since you’ve eaten anything of sustenance(no the Doritos you had this morning don’t fucking count), so it’s not a surprise when your emotions go straight to your face. It’s been harder to keep them in line nowadays.
The sunlight reflects ten times brighter through bitter, unshed tears. You clamp your jaw down against the inside of your mouth, though it’s not enough to stop your lower lip from wobbling.
With white-hot tears dripping down your temples and into your hair, you hate him. You hate him because he’s your brother, and though you try with every shred of self preservation you have left to loathe him, you can’t. Because you’re still clinging onto the good memories of him like someone desperately trying to hold the broken shards of a vase together.
You hate him with every fiber in your being, but there’s always a part of you that’ll adore him, that’ll look up to him, and god knows you’ve tried to rip it out and pulverize it until there’s nothing left. You can’t get rid of it, even if you want to, and it drives you mad.
If it was possible to dissolve into dried concrete and disappear, you’d already be a part of the floor. It practically feels like you’re melting into it, all life energy wasted on the sweat that keeps pumping out of your pores and the anguish ripping out of your face.
You’re the same temperature as the surface beneath you. You mold into it, slipping through the cracks, dripping over the sides and over the brick walls.
With much contempt, you’re stuck here, lain bare with your insides on display.