Chapter Text
Dave is not the sort of guy who talks about his feelings, except sometimes by accident when he can’t control his mouth. (A more frequent occurrence than he’d like.) To be honest, he’s not even really the sort of guy who thinks about his feelings, most of the time. He just sort of does whatever seems like a good idea at the time, and hopes the lasting consequences don’t fuck him up too bad. It’s been working for him so far.
This is probably why he and Karkat have not really talked about how much cuddling has become a part of their daily routine. Karkat, it seems, is also not great with the talking when it comes to this sort of thing. Of course, he’s great at picking apart other people’s feelings, but when it comes to himself... well, let’s just say they’ve both been pretty good about never discussing any of this.
It’s not like they plan to cuddle or anything. They just got into the habit of watching movies together. Not like that’s a fucking crime. And so maybe Karkat loves the gooey rom-com stuff. Fine. He shares them with Dave, and Dave shares his ridiculous action movies and so-bad-they’re-good ironically hilarious flics with Karkat. It’s like, a trade or whatever. Cultural exchange. Anyway, it’s funny how much Karkat loves the rom-com stuff. He’s so into it -- it’s great. Dave’s even found a couple of human rom-coms to show him to compare, just to watch the way Karkat gets initially excited and then extremely analytical about it.
And so maybe Dave would nod off sometimes in the evening, and Karkat makes a convenient pillow. Maybe it’s easier for them both to see Karkat’s weird bug-top computer thing if they’re closer together. Maybe that gradually morphed into them leaning on each other a bit. So what? A little physical contact never hurt anybody.
So it’s not like the position they’re in now is the result of long planning or some kind of ulterior intent -- Dave stretched out sideways on the couch behind Karkat, one arm around the troll’s stomach to keep him from rolling off the edge of the cushions. It’s just sort of the end result of a natural progression. And they’ve definitely not talked about it. It is what it is, and what it is is comfortable. Not everything has to mean something, no matter what Rose says.
The problem, then, is that Dave forgot that there are certain scenes in “Titanic” that are somewhat on the steamier side (literally), and, well, it’s not exactly easy to find a lot of private time on an -- all things considered -- pretty small meteor, and okay, maybe Dave’s a little pent up, what with being nearly 15 and all and so, maybe, in a perfectly understandable and harmless moment of weakness, he sort of... twitches.
Karkat is up off the couch in the blink of an eye like someone stuck a red-hot brand on his ass, goggling wildly. “WHAT the FUCK was THAT?!” he screeches. It’s a real good shriek, too. Positively fish-wife quality.
“What was what?” asks Dave, because there is absolutely no way to explain a budding chubby to your platonic alien cuddle-buddy, and so he takes the only reasonable course of action and plays dumb.
“Something MOVED!” yells Karkat. “Didn’t you feel that? It must’ve been a nibble vermin or something! Do you have a fucking spinal injury? It must have run right up your leg!”
Dave does the best half-shrug he can while lying down, and is about to attempt to play it off further when his body betrays him like Judas fucking Iscariot and he twitches again, out of nowhere. Goddammit.
Karkat’s eyes are wide as saucers, staring at Dave’s crotch. Without breaking his gaze, Karkat reaches down and picks up the weird gandalf-looking magic staff thing that Rose had left on the floor earlier. Dave’s not sure what the thing does, but it’s certainly heavy enough for a makeshift club. “Don’t. Move,” Karkat says through gritted teeth. “It’s in. Your pants.”
Dave would laugh if he weren’t terrified for his future children as Karkat approaches with the staff brandished like a baseball bat. Both hands fly instinctively to cover his crotch as he curls in on himself. “Jesus, Dude, chill! It was just my dick! Calm the fuck down!”
Karkat blinks at him. He slowly lowers the staff from an imminent ball-bashing position, although he doesn’t actually set it down. “Your...” he trails off.
Dave knows he’s probably blushing, and he hates it so, so much. He’s supposed to be cool about shit. Jesus Strider, keep it together. It’s just a boner, not the end of the fucking world. You already lived through the latter.
But Karkat won’t stop staring. His expression is something like horrified curiosity. “Your... your genitals move?”
Dave is somewhat thrown off by this. “Yours... don’t?”
There is a long and world-record awkward silence. This is some gold fucking medal olympic-grade discomfort here for both of them. The look of horrified curiosity on Karkat’s face does not go away. Finally he meets Dave’s eyes and says slowly, solemnly, “Strider, you have to be dead fucking honest with me here... Do humans have tentacles for genitals?”
Dave raises both hands to his face. He’s not sure whether to laugh, or cry, or maybe just stop fucking existing because Christ on a pogo stick, what kind of question is that? He takes a deep breath. “No, Karkat. Humans do not have tentacles for genitals.”
Karkat relaxes fractionally. The makeshift dick-crushing weapon lowers all the way until it touches the floor, although even now Karkat still doesn’t actually drop the thing. “But it... moves?”
Dave rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure, sorta. Sometimes. It’s not a big deal, Dude. Why, how do your bits work?”
Karkat frowns. “No fair. I asked first.”
They stare at each other again a moment in silence.
Which is how, a few minutes later, the two of them come to be gathered around the coffee table with paper and crayons and Dave drawing what might be the first ever non-ironic dick he’s ever drawn in his life.
Karkat scowls at the picture. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You draw those all the time. That’s the lame shit you forced me to draw in Rose’s book that time I was trying to explain to you about Terezi and Vriska’s relationship. You drew one out of chalk and tried to make us play Number Square Jump on it that one time, remember? But no one said anything about them moving!”
“They don’t- move , exactly,” Dave tries to explain. “It’s more like it sort of... grows? Like, swells? Like, it starts out like...” he tries to draw a non-erect penis, but it comes out looking more like a sad, lumpy upside-down U shape. “And then when a guy is, you know, interested or whatever, it fills with blood and sort of... stiffens up? And when it does it can, like, twitch and stuff.” Suddenly Dave is very self-conscious about how weird human dicks are. He’d never really thought about it before.
“So they are tentacles,” says Karkat.
“No!” Dave sets down his crayon. “It’s not like, prehensile or whatever. We’re not going around with, like, fucking squid crotches.”
Karkat still looks skeptical. “And all humans have these?”
“Well, all the dudes, yeah. It’s different for girls.”
Karkat throws up his hands, tantrum-style. Dave can sense one of the troll’s famous rants coming on. After more than a year on the meteor with the guy, he’s developed a sort of sixth sense for them.
“Do you mean to fucking imply to me, with all fucking seriousness, that female humans have different genitals than male humans? What kind of fucking bullshit are you trying to feed me here Strider? Do I look like I crawled out of a fucking cocoon yesterday? Am I covered with metamorphosis-slime? Do I look like I’m fucking glistening to you?! How would that even work! I thought your species was usually all about the gender-mixing for sex? How would you even deal with a set of foreign genitals? What, do you like, need to read a fucking manual before you can have sex? So what do women even have then, hm? Like, a curly version or something?”
Dave holds up a hand, not because he thinks it will actually calm Karkat, but more in a sort of gesture of self-preservation. “Dude, it’s just a vagina. It’s not a big deal.”
“What in the massive glub-beast’s fucking fronds is a vagina?”
“It’s like...” Dave puts the crayon back to paper before realizing that he actually doesn’t really know that much about vaginas. He draws a vague, upright oval and then, after a moment’s consideration, draws two smaller ovals inside of it. “It’s sort of like that. It’s like, this part sticks out a little, I think, and that’s the part that you stimulate or whatever. And then there’s a hole part here that the penis goes in.”
“Goes IN ?!” Karkat shrieks.
“Keep your fucking voice down,” Dave hisses. The last thing they need is fucking Rose Lalonde finding them and seeing Dave’s piss-poor attempt at drawing a vag. “Yeah, it goes in. That’s how human reproduction works. The male uses his penis to put the... uh, seed inside the female, and then the baby grows in the female’s uterus or whatever, and then nine months later it comes out. What, do you guys not do that?”
Karkat ignores the question. He looks pale. “Comes... out?” His voice is dazed. Dave hopes he’s not about to throw up; he looks like he might. “Like... a whole human?”
“Not, like, a full-grown human. But yeah. A baby. It’s usually like-” he holds his hands out in what he assumes is roughly baby size. Not that he’d fucking know, but whatever. Not like Karkat’s going to call him on it.
“And it bursts out of her... uterus? Where is that?”
“It doesn’t burst out. You’re making it seem like some kind of face-hugger shit. No. The uterus is connected to the vagina, so the baby sort of... comes back out the hole?”
Karkat still looks overwhelmed. “That’s utterly ridiculous. You realize that, right? Your reproduction is practically nonsensical. It takes place inside the human? What’s wrong with your species?”
“Alright wise guy.” Dave hands him the crayon. “What do your bits look like then?”
Dave’s not expecting much from this drawing; if anything, Karkat’s an even worse artist than he is, and that’s saying something. And, as usual, Karkat does not fail to disappoint.
He draws a series of wavy vertical lines -- two smaller inner ones, and two larger outer ones -- and then draws an oval at the top and a couple of circles at the bottom and leans back. His expression is smug, like obviously these are the superior genitals, but Dave’s not even sure what he’s looking at.
Dave nods. “Oh yeah, I can totally see how you’ve got us humans beat. Man, I didn’t even know I really wanted wavy-line genitals until this very moment. How have I even lived my life up to now?”
Karkat scowls at him and gestures to the lines with the crayon. “Those are the seed flaps around the nook.” He draws a smaller oval in the middle of the lines. “You don’t normally see the nook much; the flaps protect it. It’s sort of... recessed? That’s where the... you know, the stuff comes from. The seed.”
“Okay,” says Dave, absolutely 0% clearer on anything. “So what’s with all the lumpy bits?” He points to the round shapes at the top and bottom of the lines.
“Well, in the front you have the bone bulge,” he points to the larger oval at the top, “and in the back you have the shame globes.” He gestures to the two circles. “They’re the... umm... the erogenous parts. The bulge is for flushed arousal, and the globes are for caliginous arousal. Depending on which part is aroused and, uh, stimulated, you get the corresponding seed. So, see? Totally sensible.”
Dave is unconvinced. “So your globe-y things and bulges and whatever -- they don’t, like, get bigger when you get turned on or anything?”
Karkat shakes his head. “Not really. I mean, they get softer. The chitinous bone-shields retreat, and they become like...” he glances around for inspiration, and finally picks up a stress ball that Rose had left on the floor from an earlier session of playing therapist. (The crayons had been on the floor too. God, this place is such a fucking mess. You’d think a bunch of teenagers lived here or something.) He hands the stress ball to Dave. “Sort of like that.”
Dave squeezes the stress ball. “Your chitinous... what?”
“Bone-shields,” Karkat replies. “You know. The plates under the skin that protect the genitals. Why, what do you have?”
Dave shrugs. “Nothing, I guess. Our genitals are just squishy and unprotected.”
Karkat levels him a look like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.
Dave raises his hands, palms out. “What? I didn’t design the damn things, okay?” He feels unaccountably defensive on behalf of the entire human race. They’ve been getting along pretty damn well so far with the genitals they have, thank you very much! Dave certainly has, anyway.
Dave has so many more questions. Like, if both male trolls and female trolls have the same bits, what’s the actual difference between them? And is Karkat implying that trolls have two different types of arousal? What is that even like? And where on earth (or, specifically, Alternia) do buckets fit into all of this? But right now he has one more immediate, more pressing question.
He stares at the stress ball as he squeezes it, thinking about Karkat’s diagram. The combination -- the texture of the stress ball, the drawings of dicks and things -- has sparked a specific sense-memory in his mind from fairly recent history. He tries to think carefully about how to word his question, even though he knows it’s going to come out sounding terrible no matter what he says. “So... how... how far back are the shame globes, exactly?”
Karkat looks immediately suspicious, like he can hear in Dave’s tone that he’s up to something. “Far enough, I guess. Like, still mostly between the legs, but if a troll was naked you could see them from the back. Why?”
“So... if... say...” Dave feels like a heel, but he’s also grinning because he’s pretty sure this is secretly utterly hilarious. “Say someone was standing behind a troll, up against them, forcing them to draw dicks in some kind of ancient tome through, let’s say a physical altercation. If said troll was really annoyed, would the person behind them be rubbing up against...?”
Karkat immediately turns bright scarlet. It’s as amazing as Dave thought it would be. It’s barely even comparable to a human blush: more like someone threw red paint all over his face. “THERE’S NO NEED TO BRING THAT UP!” Karkat squawks. His vocal range is currently that of a puppy that’s just had its tail stepped on.
Dave can’t help himself; he dissolves into laughter. He laughs so hard he falls backwards onto the floor and just lies on his back, giggling like a maniac. Poor Karkat. Dave suddenly feels much less weird about popping a boner behind him on the couch.
Karkat swats his knee. “It’s not FUNNY, asshole,” he says, but there’s the tiniest thread of amusement in his voice.
A few moments later, when Dave is finally done laughing, Karkat says, “So, you wanna finish the movie?”
“Yeah,” says Dave, and sits up. And that’s the end of it.
They sit on the couch next to each other this time, a self-conscious distance apart. But half an hour later Dave is comfortably slumped against Karkat’s shoulder once again, breathing against his neck close enough to smell him.
He doesn’t think too hard about it.