words in the fire/ashes on the ground

by saffronHeliotrope

Summary:

A collection of Homestuck ficlets from prompts on tumblr, written upon the occasion of reaching various follower milestones, plus some extra driblets that don't really fit anywhere else. Tags and ratings will be updated as necessary; chapter names show pairings and titles.

Notes:

My endless thanks to my tumblr followers and buddies, who encourage me in this glorious silliness.

Title from Patrick Watson.

Chapter 1: John & Dave, Halloween (G)

“Aww man, Dave, look at all this sweet loot! This is the best Halloween ever.”

“You say that every year, dude.”

“Yeah, maybe, but this year it’s really true! Look! I’ve got like ten Snickers bars, six Butterfingers, eleven -- no, twelve Milky Ways! And -- oh, wow, gross, a Baby Ruth -- how’d she get in there?”

“Hey now, bro, Baby Ruths are the best.”

“Seriously? The peanut-to-nougat ratio is all wrong. They’re disgusting.”

“You’re disgusting. Baby Ruths are awesome. And how come I didn’t get any? What house did you get yours from?”

“It was probably Mrs. Miller around the corner, the house with the creepy lawn gnomes in the garden. She’s got terrible taste in everything, including candy. And she probably didn’t like your costume.”

“What are you talking about? My costume rules.”

“Oh yeah sure -- like you can just take a red hoodie and two oven mitts and call yourself a lobster. Whatever, dude.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand my minimalist masterpiece. At least I didn’t spend two months slaving over a glorified backpack with buttons, nerd.”

“It’s a proton pack, and it’s awesome!”

“Ok, whatever, Egon. Everything about you screams I’m trying too hard.”

“Whereas everything about you screams I’m a colossal douche but I still want candy so I’m going to put in the bare minimum of eff-- Ow! I’m keeping that one, you know.”

“That’s fine, I still have plenty of ammo for the John-Egbert-is-being-a-dork trebuchet.”

“You talk a big game, tough guy, but the way I see it, I still have something you want, and it starts with a B and ends with an -aby Ruth. You’d better be nicer if you want a trade.”

“Oh shit, bring out the top negotiators stat, this is about to get straight up diplomatic. I’ll give you... three of these fine-ass fruit-flavored Tootsies and a Good & Plenty for that pretty little lady. That right there is a steal and you’d be a fool not to take it.”

“Tootsie rolls and Good & Plenty? What do you think I am, an amateur? I want one of your Snickers bars, and, let’s see... those Milk Duds.”

“Are you kidding me? Not a chance. Milk Duds and Good & Plenty. That’s two little boxes, and everyone knows the little boxes are inherently cooler.”

“Why do you keep trying to get rid of the Good & Plenty? What, do you not like licorice?”

“Dude, I love licorice, licorice is so great I wish I could eat nothing but licorice forever. I’m just trying to spread the licorice wealth out of the goodness of my heart because you’re my best bro and I hate the thought of you being deprived of its oily black magnificence. Baby Ruth for a Good & Plenty is a bargain and you know it.”

“Ok, prove it.”

“Huh?”

“Prove how much you love licorice, and maybe I’ll consider it.”

“Oh, man, I’d like nothing better. See, I’m opening it up just for you. And I’m -- ohh, yeah, thish ish th’ shith, duthe. I cang’t eveng handthle how goog thith ith.”

“Really? Because you’re looking a little green around the gills there.”

“Only becaug I’m loving thith tho mucksh.”

“Really?”

“Tothally.”

“Really.”

“Goddamnit, John, jutht give me the Baby Ruth.”

“Ha ha, gotcha! I know how much you hate licorice -- you’ve always hated licorice! You can’t fool the prankmaster and you never will. Eww, gross, dude, don’t throw those at me, I hate Good & Plentys!”

“You’re not going to be reasonable and trade, then I’m going to take what I want by main force.”

“That’s what you think! Look, I’m building a fort with all my Milky Ways. Don’t worry, little Ruthie, I’ll keep you safe from the big evil douchecanoe.”

“Ok, men, load the trebuchet...”

“Oh no, not the Rollos!”

“Fire! Direct hit to their foundations, sir, it looks like the wall is collapsing!”

“Aaargh!”

“Prepare the battering rams! Bring out the lollipop cavalry! Sugar Daddy to the rescue!”

“Oh no, Ruthie! My poor sweet baby, torn from her home and family and all she’s ever loved!”

“Don’t worry, baby, I’ve got you, shh, only Striders now, you’ll never have to look at that big derp-face ever again.”

“Two can play at this game. I’m totally stealing your Junior Mints.”

“Like hell you are -- hey!”

“You want them back, come and get themmmph-- Ew, gross, dude, you still taste like Good & Plentys.”

“You should have thought of that before you made me eat them, genius.”

“Nah, it was totally worth it. You kiss pretty well for a lobster, by the way.”

“Shut up and get over here, Spengler.”

Chapter 2: Rose & Dave, crimes of passion (M)

Rose drops through the skylight first, a shadow falling into more darkness, the cable making only a tiny ssshhh as it unspools from her belt harness. After a heartbeat, you follow. When your cable slows you and halts just above the floor and not a millimeter farther, you unhook the carabiner and step down. She’s already slipping down the gallery on silent feet. You make for the featureless control panel on the wall, clip the tiny device in your palm into its almost-invisible port. It cycles a few times, then the indicator flashes green. She has done the same at the other end of the room.

“Six minutes,” you breathe into your mouthpiece, and you see her nod in the shadows. Six minutes until the motion sensors re-activate.

You follow her into the shadows, through an atrium where the moonlight flashes silver through her hair. She’s at her most gorgeous like this, sleek and lethal. Your entire body feels suffused with electricity.

You turn into a wide gallery where your target hangs in the center of the side wall. It’s a Picasso, valued at a cool eighty-seven million, worth even more in certain highly prestigious circles. You pause before it while she slips the pack from her back, pulls out the razor.

“Doesn’t really speak to me,” you whisper, tilting your head.

“Nobody asked you,” she replies with the barest whisper of breath, her gloved fingertips delicately exploring the edge of the frame for pressure sensors. The hyper-sensitive mic taped along her cheek feeds directly to your earpiece, and it feels like her lips are millimeters from your ear.

You love this. “Seriously, though. He looks like he’s constipated. Why would anyone pay eighty-seven mil to have this ugly douchebag looking down off their walls?”

“Art criticism à la Strider, ladies and gentlemen,” she whispers, making the first slice along the bottom of the frame, quick and light. God, you love watching her work. “Are you going to help, professor, or do you have more wisdom to impart?”

“Nah,” you murmur, pulling the tube-shaped case from your back and pulling out the decoy. “I’m just joshing you. I know he was exploring the collapse of recognizable form, a process which would see its first full Cubist expression in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. Which, unlike this piece of shit, is a true masterpiece, because, you know, boobs.”

She gives you the patented single-eyebrow-raise. Rose Lalonde, undisputed queen of the unimpressed face. You flash a grin.

Still, that familiar frisson of excitement runs through both of you as she finishes cutting the painting from its frame. You move fast, fitting the decoy into the frame as she rolls up the canvas and slips it into the tube. You strap it back over your shoulder. Then you look at each other. Your heart is beating hard.

“That was too easy,” you whisper, moving closer. “It’s no fun when it’s so easy.”

“We still have four minutes and twenty seconds.” Her voice in your earpiece sends a jolt of electricity down your spine. Her breathing is the slightest bit fast, eyes shining in the dimness.

“You’ll have to be fast,” you say.

“You’ll have to be quiet,” she says, the corner of her perfect mouth twitching upward, then she takes a fistful of your shirt and hauls you into deeper shadow.

All that mad fizzing energy instantly diverts downward as she kisses you, hard and hungry. She does something unknowable with zippers and straps and you tear down your fly, and then you’re boosting her up with her legs around your waist, pressing her hard to the wall, her arms locked around your shoulders. Then you get her at the right angle, and she tilts down and you push up and little lights burst behind your eyes in a hundred different colors.

You rock her into the wall, fast and silent and relentless, and she matches your pace, squeezing you around the hips with her thighs, grinding into you in maddening little circles. You hiss in a breath at her tightness, her pace, and her eyes go wide in warning and she slides one gloved hand over your mouth. You can’t bear it; you want to groan out her name, you want to slow down, you want to make it last. Instead you bury yourself in her and fling yourself over head-first into freefall.

She comes absolutely silently, body vise-locked around you, and you follow a moment later, muffling one tiny helpless grunt into the side of her neck. You look at each other for the space of a breath. Her eyes glitter with amusement. Then you let her carefully down, she grabs her pack off the floor, you check the security of the painting in its tube strapped to your back, and you run.

The red warning light on your wristwatch starts flashing as you hook yourselves back up to the cables. The press of a button, and you’re hoisted soundlessly up to the skylight, where you rapidly dismantle your gear and lower the glass into place. Mere seconds after refastening the bolts, you hear the tiny thrum of the alarm system re-arming itself.

Keyed up and crazy, body singing with adrenaline, you make for the corner of the roof. That’s when a low voice drawls in your earpiece, “Nice show, kids.”

You nearly lose your footing, but Rose just sighs beside you. “I thought Roxy disabled the security cameras.”

“Disabled, diverted to our monitors, same difference.” There’s a peal of breathless laughter down the other channel. “You should hurry back and help her out, though, Rose. She still has to cover our tracks and I think she’s finding it hard to type with one hand down her pants.”

“Lies and slander!” cries Roxy. “I’m a pro at the one-handed hack. I’m the best there is.”

Rose snorts softly. “Try not to injure yourself before we get back,” she says as you start down the side of the museum on your carefully-placed handholds.

“What about you, bro?” you ask as you climb. You always get this feeling after a job; you’re flying. “You holding up ok?”

“Nothing I can’t deal with,” Dirk says in your ear, and you can hear the smirk in his voice. “Though I could probably use a hand with the driving.”

“You two are about as subtle as a brass band,” says Rose as you drop the last few feet to the ground and take off down the street. “I preemptively veto road head during the getaway drive. Remember how the van almost went off a bridge last time?”

“You’re no fun,” you and Roxy say in unison, and Dirk says, “That’s because Dave was the one driving.”

The black van rolls up and a disheveled-looking Roxy slides the side door open. “Get in, dorks,” she says, and you disappear.

Chapter 3: Dave & Dirk, because Indie asked (E)

It looks like someone’s been using your black shoe polish as a chew toy and you’re ready to go on a fucking rampage, so the rhythmic creaky sound that builds as you storm down the hall toward Dirk’s room doesn’t really register as bedsprings until it’s far too late.

You burst in with an angry “What the fuck happened to my--” before your words choke off with an entirely undignified squeak, because there on the bed is your little bro, your little man, whose diapers you changed and whose ass you wiped and whose macaroni art you hung on the fridge, riding the fuck out of little-Dave, little-you (not really so little says some treacherous and utterly reprehensible part of your brain) and, by the looks of it, quite enjoying himself.

For one long gobsmacked moment you see everything like time has ground to a halt: the drops of sweat shivering between Dirk’s shoulder blades, the arch of his back, the press of his knees and the curl of his toes into the mattress, the curve of his ass which little-Dave (little-you) is snapping his hips up into like he was born to it. His frankly gorgeous cock (you changed his diapers, you changed his diapers) which he’s jerking with one hand, and he’s approaching the edge fast, if you’re judging it right, and you’re a very good judge. The way his mouth trembles, soft and open and vulnerable.

Then without a falter in his rhythm little-Dave says, “You gonna join in, old man, or you just here for the show?” and Dirk, panting, arching, turns and shoots the filthiest grin in your direction. And just like that your brain short-circuits, bzzzt, dead, Dave Strider is speechless, Dave Strider who built a junk empire on endless throwaway streams of nonsense and absurdity and words words words. You’ve got nothing.

You fucking abscond.

In the hallway you lean against the closed door and resolutely don’t listen to the breathless laughter that quickly turns to other noises. Fuck, you’re half-hard. The image of your little brother is seared into your brain and tattooed to the insides of your eyelids and probably will haunt your dreams until your dying day.

You need a drink.

You need therapy.

You most definitely do not need to go jerk off in your bathroom.

You adjust yourself miserably in your slacks and stalk down the hall to the living room, where your counterpart (Dirk’s counterpart? Shit, you don’t even know anymore) is busy at the coffee table with his obscene arts-and-crafts projects. He holds a quivering proboscis up to his mouth and snaps off a thread with his teeth. You shudder.

“What’s eatin’ you?” he asks.

You fetch up against the side of the wet bar and slosh two fingers of whiskey into a tumbler, and long for a time when you didn’t have two distinct sets of memories, when maybe it was just you and Dirk and he was a cute kid obsessed with robots and you were just his big bro, provider of Easy Mac and enforcer (sometimes) of bedtime. You take a slug of your whiskey. “I think,” you pronounce, “that we fucked up our kids.”

He gives a snort. “Old news.” He lays the neon monstrosity aside. “They still at it in there?”

You nod, unsurprised.

He sighs and leans over to root around under the couch, then comes up with Li’l Cal trailing droopy and sinister from his fist. You barely stifle your instinct to leap back in horror.

“What do you say,” he says, standing up, taller than you like Dirk will be, bulkier than you will ever be, “we ambush the little shits?”

He waggles Cal menacingly at you, smirk growing on his face. You consider it for a hot second, then put down your drink and grab your camera.

Chapter 4: John & Dave, the secret life of dorks (G)

“Are you sure about this? I don’t know if we’re going to find anything. I mean, Dave is a pretty secretive kid.”

“Secretive my ass. He’s terrified that people will find out he’s a giant dork so he covers his tracks with his idiotic irony routine. Keep looking. He’s definitely been hiding something.”

Jane wrinkles her nose and pokes half-heartedly at the detritus on Dave’s desk. Old copies of game magazines, crumpled schoolwork, ratty movie ticket stubs, a few too many dirty dishes and wadded-up paper napkins for comfort: it looks like the normal leavings of a teenaged boy. “I don’t know what you expect we’ll find.”

Dirk is lying on the floor, half-under Dave’s bed. “Drugs. Love letters. Condoms. Anything incriminating. C’mon, you’re the gumshoe here -- you should be a pro at this.”

“So what if he is dating someone? The poor kid deserves some privacy. God knows you and your brother torment him enough as it is.”

“Please, Jane -- Dave is a Strider and that means he must learn to live every moment as if the very next might bring utter humiliation and the destruction of all he loves. Aha!” He pulls out from under the bed, the spikes of his hair adorned with dust bunnies. He waves a piece of paper at her, and she sees some familiar-looking dark blue ink. “I’d know John’s chickenscratch anywhere. ‘Dear Dave: Thanks for coming out with me to the movies on Saturday. I know you weren’t super-excited to see the new Matt McConaughey film the way I was but I’m sure you’ll agree that it was totally rad and completely worth it. Even if you had to save face by insisting it was stupid.’” Dirk snorts. “Your brother is a nerd.”

“I’m well aware.”

“‘Thanks also for buying the milkshakes afterward and for walking me home. I’m all a-flutter at the memory of your patented Strider charm.’”

Jane rolls her eyes. “He’s just being a goofball as usual. But this doesn’t prove any--”

“But it gets better. ‘I’m sorry my dad caught us on the porch at an inopportune moment and that he’s got such old-fashioned ideas about gentlemanly behavior. I also wish he hadn’t gotten those branches trimmed off the tree by my window because otherwise you could have snuck in and picked up where we left off.’”

“What?”

“Still unconvinced? ‘But if you want, you can come over on Tuesday after school--’ that’s today, you realize -- ‘Dad works late and Jane is always off with her friends and we can maybe finally get a bit of privacy.’”

“What?”

“‘Until then, my sweet hummingbird.’ And he closes by saying, I kid you not, ‘Ooh, Mr. Strider, ooh, xoxo, John.’ I think that’s all the proof we need.”

Fifteen minutes later they are creeping down the hall of Jane’s house toward John’s room, Dirk in full-on ninja-stealth mode, Jane just behind him. There are unmistakeable noises coming from behind the door, soft but growing louder: the shifting of bedsprings, heavy breathing, a muffled groan or two. Then a rustle-clunk makes Dirk freeze in his tracks -- the sound of a pair of jeans weighted down by a belt buckle, hitting the floor.

“Oh, God, Dave,” croons John. Jane blushes up to the roots of her hair. This is her baby brother and she’s suddenly not so sure she wants to see what’s on the other side of the door.

Then a breathy moan that would put a porn star to shame. The timbre is unmistakeable -- it’s Dave.

Jane catches Dirk’s wrist. “I don’t know about this,” she hisses in his ear.

Then Dave sobs, “Hhnngg, John, harder, please,” and a smirk flashes across Dirk’s face, quick and mean, and he pushes the door open all at once.

Jane has one shocked instant to see John and Dave sitting up on John’s bed, backs to the wall, fully clothed, a good two feet apart. John is grinning all over his face.

Then the movement of the door trips some complicated mechanism of cords and pulleys, and there’s the hiss of an aerosol and the whir of a fan, and Jane and Dirk are hit face-first with a blast of spray glue and then a soft whuff of feathers.

“Eeurgh!” shouts Dirk.

“Blaaugh!” cries Jane. Glue up her nose, feathers in her mouth, eyes squinched shut, yelling bloody murder, she runs blindly for the bathroom, Dirk hot on her heels. Hooting triumphant laughter follows them all the way down the hall.

*****

Much later, safely ensconced in their favorite climbing tree in the woods behind Rose and Roxy’s house, John is still prone to bouts of giggles.

“That was so perfect. So perfect. Best prank ever, by a mile. Oh man, did you see their faces?”

Dave can’t help the smile that keeps tugging at his lips. “I’m going to have to sleep with one eye open until I’m roughly thirty-five years old and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be purple ink in my shampoo in the morning. But yeah, it was totally worth it.”

John grins. “Maybe they’ll leave us alone now. You know. Until you’re ready to tell people.” He reaches out, laces his fingers carefully through Dave’s.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Dave hesitates, then leans cautiously forward in the crook of the branch. “Until then.”

His mouth is soft and warm. John reaches out, steadies him, pulls him closer.

Chapter 5: Rose & Roxy, spades (E)

People sometimes mistake you for sisters. You don’t always mind, and she doesn’t always correct them. And in a way, it’s appropriate. You snark at your female acquaintances and you bicker with your girlfriends, but nobody fights as mean and dirty and personal as sisters, and no sister could get under your skin like she does.

All you know is that your life begins its inexorable slide off the rails the first day of your junior year when she arrives, a transfer from God knows where, all icy perfection from the soles of her ballet flats to the headband in her sleek blonde bob. She sits down beside you in Advanced Organic Chem and proceeds to answer question after question until Professor Jensen -- your Professor Jensen, who adores you, who encouraged you to major, with whom you have a standing invitation for tea and chocolate from her private stash during office hours, Professor Jensen who stood between you and the campus judiciary board when your roommate turned you in for underage alcohol possession and they screamed for academic probation and she got you off with a warning instead -- Professor Jensen turns her steely regard on the newcomer and the look in her eyes says well well, what have we here.

It’s the same look she gave you two years ago when you arrived in her intro class, a bright-eyed freshman, brilliant and aware of it, ready to take the old boys of the Natural Sciences division by storm, and now she turns it on this little slip of a thing, prim and perfect in her cardigan and pleated skirt. The professor asks her name.

Rose Lalonde, she says.

You hate Rose Lalonde like you’ve never hated anyone before.

You’re an easygoing girl; it’s kind of your thing. You flirt and laugh, you get people drunk, you’re touchy-feely and sweet and the life of the party. You make people love you and then you blow them out of the water with the sheer power of your brain. It’s what you do. But you look at Rose Lalonde, self-possessed and still, secretive like an iceberg is secretive, and you know with a sinking feeling in your gut that your usual approach will be useless.

You can’t not be her lab partner. You start working harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. You are relentlessly prepared for every lab, every study session, and the first time she arches an eyebrow in your direction in mild admiration you feel like you just won a Nobel prize. She starts studying harder. When she beats you on a problem set by two percentage points, you go back to your room, throw things at the wall and scream, then redouble your efforts.

On the next quiz, your score is three points higher than hers. She doesn’t say anything, but you know she’s seething.

Together, you fly through the materials for the semester by the time midterms roll around. Professor Jensen tells the two of you not to bother coming to lecture anymore, and starts tutoring you privately in more advanced topics. The rest of the class is so far behind you they’re like a distant memory.

You haven’t hosted a party of your own in months, and haven’t been to anyone else’s in weeks. Your friends tell you you’re no fun anymore. As if that were something that mattered in the slightest.

It was always going to happen. You are in Rose’s room on a Friday night, and although you can hear low thumping bass and the drunken clangor of voices from somewhere nearby, you are encased in a bubble of tense quiet. A Shostakovich symphony plays softly through Rose’s computer speakers. You are battling through a problem set; for the past three hours you’ve been drawing molecular chains on the huge whiteboard she has mounted above her bed, arguing and sniping at each other. You’re stuck on a problem and you’re ready to throw your textbook out the window but there’s no way in hell you’re going to show weakness first.

Exhausted, frustrated, out of your mind with impatience, you suggest a solution. She shoots you down summarily. You want to claw her eyes out. She suggests something else; you know it’s not right but it’s got a glimmer of the right logic. You isolate the thread of her argument; expand on it. She jumps in, building further. You head her off at a dead end, turn the question around. She follows it through to its logical conclusion. You tweak it, rephrase it, polish it off. That’s it. You’ve got it.

You’re both short of breath, standing on her bed, whiteboard markers in hand, and there on the board is the answer you built together, elegant, concise, perfect. You want to sing with the gorgeous clarity of it. You feel like you could knock down walls with your mind.

You look at her. She looks at you.

And then she’s kissing you, hands tangled up in your hair, and your body is suddenly screaming with a need you didn’t know you had. You sweep her leg out from under her and you both go down hard. She curses at you and you think you’ve got a split lip but you don’t care, because every inch of you is on fire and she’s crumbling like an avalanche.

She tears your shirt in getting it off you. You fling her stupid headband across the room. The skin of her neck is softer than you could ever have imagined and smells like lavender. You want to rip it in shreds. When you drag your teeth over her nipple, she howls in something like despair.

She flips you on your back. You struggle as she drags your skirt off your hips and sob when she mouths you softly through your underwear. Her eyes are locked on yours and there’s a heat behind the cool lavender-blue that you’ve never seen. When she pulls the fabric aside, you close your eyes, waiting breathless for the warmth of lips and tongue; instead she lays a hard bite into the soft flesh of your thigh, vicious and deep. It’ll leave a bruise.

Look at me, she commands you.

You do, propped up on elbows, eyes wide and barely breathing as she claims you. Her hands hold your legs spread and you are butterflied and pinned, but not helpless, never helpless, not with the challenge in her eyes. You come faster than you ever have before, spiraling into a climax that is more wind-up than release.

With a look of triumph, she abandons you to dig something from under her bed. Everywhere that she has touched you aches like a bruise. She drops a shoebox on the bed between you, and pulls out a strap-on and a harness.

You fight her for it. She lets you win.

Your hands fisted in her silken hair, her legs wrapped high and tight around your waist, you fuck her slowly into the mattress while the toy rocks back hard and deep inside you. You grind against her, mindless with the pleasure that mounts in you again, and she reaches down between you, taking what she needs.

When she comes beneath you, your name from her lips sounds like a war cry.

She sleeps when it’s over, and her face is deceptively sweet, angelic almost, in the pale light from her desk lamp. You sweep the neat papers and framed pictures and balls of yarn off her desk and finish the problem set on your own. She’ll be furious, but she’ll catch up. She always does.

On your way back to your room through the deserted campus, you can see a hundred possible futures laid out before you plain as day, a hundred possible ways that this ends in loss and defeat and humiliation. But this is you, after all. You hate when things get boring, and, to be fair, no peace was ever half so interesting as this war.

Chapter 6: Rose & Kanaya, 'til we say we're sorry (T)

Notes:

Warning for alcohol use, some body-horror-type imagery of the grimdark variety, and sadstuck.

In the beginning, you’d thought it might be the claustrophobia that would finally get to you, the boredom, the echoing metal hallways and nothing to look at but the same few faces over and over. In those first few days the panic would rise in your throat every time you thought three years, three years, three whole years when I have only lived thirteen, that’s almost a quarter of my life so far and I’ll be spending it here in these dark corridors and labs.

In those first days you wouldn’t have thought that it would be the numbing of your sense of time that would eventually set your skin crawling. But as time goes by without regular cycles of sun and moon, light and dim, warm and cold, you begin to feel that you are spinning irretrievably off some vital, fundamental axis. No matter how goth and reclusive you were in your old life, no matter how assiduously you avoided simple healthy sunlight, your body still knew and thrived by its patterns and cycles. And now that it’s gone, you feel like you’re coming unmoored.

Perhaps this is Dave’s advantage; this is how he can play at Can Town with the mayor, flirt horribly with Terezi, horse around with Karkat. Perhaps his innate Game-given sense of the onward progression of time is insulating him. He and Karkat are carefully marking the days, a chalk tick mark on the wall in the main lab at the beginning of every night, but as time passes you trust the scraggly little row of lines less and less. Sometimes they blossom in rapid profusion until you fear you’ve been sleeping the weeks of your life away; sometimes you look at the wall after what feels like a month of waiting, only to see just two or three new marks.

You wonder if you’re losing your mind.

And then there’s Kanaya. She’s tall and lovely, poised and self-contained and unspeakably alien; she’s like no one you’ve ever known and you crumble before her. Your words desert you: you, who arm yourself in language, who build walls of lavender text, who weave webs and labyrinths to entrap anyone who tries to reach you. Under her cool steady gaze, misunderstandings proliferate, translations fail.

You say stupid things. You forget yourself, overreach yourself, construct elaborate palaces of pseudo-Freudian babble that disintegrate at a touch. You forget that you can’t hit delete when you’re speaking across a table or perched at opposite ends of a sofa. You feel infinitely awkward and young. She gets angry and you can’t remember why; the days twist and blend and suddenly she is apologizing, or you are, stiffly, for things you can’t explain.

You turn fourteen and invent alcohol.

It makes you delightful. It makes you giddy and clever and lets you ignore so many things you would otherwise have to address. It helps you pretend that you’re not still having nightmares nearly every time you sleep. It shows you that what you thought was poise and elegance in Kanaya is actually a completely charming utter lack of a sense of humor. You laugh at her consternation, but she kisses you back when you mash your mouth against hers, so that must mean that you’re doing it right.

Sometimes when the poison has worked its way out of your system just enough, you wake in nauseated horror at the knowledge that no one is in charge, no one is watching. You’re supposed to be at the helm and you have deserted your post. You are falling, hurtling through space and time and memory, and there is no emergency brake, no escape hatch. You drink again to forget that you don’t know what you’re doing, that sometimes you’re terrified when she touches your breasts or between your legs with her cool efficient fingertips, that you’re only fourteen and you want your mother so much that you can scarcely breathe.

You self-medicate. You are ossifying, calcifying, petrifying. You don’t like your own reflection in Dave’s eyes so you look for it less and less. And anyway, he and Karkat have formed their Rad Horseshit And Shenanigans Club For Boys, membership capped at two, occasionally expanded to include one small mute carapace, and you are manifestly Not Invited.

When Dave does talk to you, he tells you in his slanted roundabout way that he’s worried about Terezi. What you hear between his words is that she is worth saving and you are not. You banter lightly with him to cover your ache until he goes away again. If you were less tightly in control of yourself, you would shout, look at me, what about me, I’m falling apart too.

Time blurs; at some point you turn fifteen. You’ve stopped looking at the tick marks on the wall.

And through it all, there she is. She is still cool and poised, and if she looks less unutterably alien than she did, it nonetheless occasionally startles you how she stands perfectly still, how silently she sleeps, how carefully she watches. It’s possible you were wrong about the sense of humor. It’s possible that you’re wrong about a lot of things.

You do not sleep silently. You are still, still waking dripping cold sweat; still waking from dreams of tentacles pressing against your skin from the inside, of something unclean writhing behind your teeth, of something else, something not-you, peering out through your eyes, syllables bubbling like tar over your lips. And when you aren’t dreaming of that, you’re seeing Dave’s terrified face and a timer counting down, all the nuclear bombs ever built detonating at point-blank range, your death and his death and the end of everything, a testament to your monumental arrogance.

You wake thrashing, deep in the certainty that you are dead, that the real you -- your real precious and irreplaceable body, the one that grew from infancy, the one that your mother held in her arms, the one that skinned knees and learned to knit and typed all that lavender text -- is corrupted, impaled, blasted to atoms, hopelessly damaged and irretrievable. That whatever you are now is pixels and code, twice removed, copied just a little bit wrong. Read/write errors, noise in the data: you can feel yourself disintegrating one cycle at a time. You are the Seer of Light and you are buried in darkness.

That’s when she surprises you most. She listens you while you cry and stumble over your apologies, and when you panic she just holds you tightly, moors and tethers you until you feel like you’re not flying apart neutron from electron. Your light-starved eyes and skin turn to her like a flower to the sun, drinking her in as she luminesces against the darkness, and she gives you light freely and endlessly.

She never says the words, but it feels like she is forgiving you again and again and again.

Your sixteenth birthday is coming. You see John in the dreambubbles; you see a girl who could be your mother at your age. They give you hope in a way that feels too fragile for truth, too slender to lean on. You don’t question anything anymore. You have stopped imagining what it will be like when you arrive wherever it is you are going. But she will be with you when you get there, and that may be enough to get you through.

Chapter 7: Bro/John/Dave, ganging up (E)

Some distant part of your brain is aware that it’s the time of night when ordinarily you would be snoring in front of Conan or blearily staring at your computer screen, too tired to go to bed.

The rest of your brain, however, is entirely taken up by the fact that John Egbert is currently bouncing naked in your lap. You’ve got two handfuls of his perfect plush ass and he’s making the best noises, all “oh fuck yes” and “harder, Bro, harder” as you drive up into him. And then Dave simultaneously turns your head with a finger under your chin and pushes his tongue into your mouth, and reaches between you to grab John’s dick which makes him sob and clench down harder on you, and your brain fogs out and you come with a hoarse yell.

You flop back on the bed, panting, all your muscles melting into the mattress as John climbs out of your lap. Your eyelids are just shuttering down when dextrous fingers peel the condom off your cock and an eager mouth licks you up then swallows you down.

You convulse, startled and over-sensitive. “Holy fuck,” you grit out, and Dave looks up at you from between your legs, a brain-bending combination of innocent and obscene. “Give me a minute, willya? Just because you two can bang like bunnies on speed all night --”

“Having trouble keeping up, old man?” Dave says, smirking.

You snort, but they’re both watching you curiously -- John built like a baby linebacker, broad and dense with muscle and padded in all the right places; Dave, louche and feral as a lynx, honed and lean and golden. You’re acutely aware that they’re both 22 and nubile as fuck while you’re pushing -- well, a number you’d rather not think too hard about.

“Like hell I am,” you growl, though you don’t move. Not quite yet.

“Ok,” says John with that toothy grin. “I can take a hint. We’ll just entertain ourselves for a while, right, Dave?”

“Right,” says Dave.

And before you’re quite sure what’s happening, John is ass-up on elbows and knees, while Dave buries his face between those ridiculous round cheeks and goes to town. You can hear the wet noises of Dave’s lips and tongue, and John twists back to look at Dave -- at you -- over his shoulder. He makes the filthiest little moan.

God-fucking-dammit, they know your weaknesses, the horrible little brats. Entirely without your say-so, your spent cock starts to take a definite interest in the proceedings.

You’re getting too fucking old for this, and you’re going to ache like hell in the morning, but you push yourself up and go show them how it’s done.

 

Chapter 8: John/Dave, heartbeats (E)

Sometimes you fuck him hard and fast. Sometimes you want nothing more than to storm him, overrun and claim him, use all your strength on him, force the pleasure from his body to yours and back again. You’ve never found his breaking point when you go hard. He takes everything you can give him.

Sometimes you fuck him soft and slow, and he shatters.

 

You are losing time. You are down to individual impressions, disjoint and fleeting: the rug scratchysoft under your shoulderblades, the light from the window falling in bars across his skin. His fingers slick and insistent and palm-deep. You cannot move. It has been moments, it has been hours, it has been aeons. Empires rise and fall in the spaces between your heartbeats.

 

You know he’s ready when he goes utterly still. You have made preparation into a vast unsubtle luxury and now he is far far below you, dropping like a stone through fathoms of clear water.

You watch the pulse flutter at the base of his throat as you ease your fingers out. He makes a bereft little sound but doesn’t open his eyes, and you lean in close so he can feel your body heat. For you, one stroke of your slicked-up hand. You curl close, lift his leg and push it back, press the head of your cock inside him, and he is just that receptive, just that open, that the whole thick length of you slides inside, so easy, so good.

 

He surrounds you, fills you, breaches and boards you, and all you can do is accept him, open to him, drag him down to where you already are. The exhalation from his throat winds all through the silence in your head. Your name from his lips is your anchor.

He fills your field of vision, covering you, curling you until your body is a strung bow. He reaches up, unknots your hand from where it tangles in his messy black hair, laces his fingers with yours and presses it to the floor. His fingers brush over your throat. You tip your head back, offering: here. Take.

 

He is tight and slippery and electric-hot but the pleasure is secondary to the closeness, the grip of his legs, the ready gift of his body. You stroke his throat, the fine damp skin, then press your thumb gently to the pulse beating there. His heartbeat is so slow: calm, trust, surrender.

You rock him just as slow, rolling your hips. You can feel his pulse everywhere: in his fingers, laced with yours, in his legs wrapped around your waist, in his cock pressed between your stomachs.

– Dave, you say. – Look at me.

 

Your eyes fly open. His pupils are blown wide with lust, blue ringing black.

Your heart beats faster.

 

When you feel his pulse quicken, you pull back farther, push back in, deepening the angle, and his lips part, his eyes glaze. You keep your movements slow, relentless, inexorable.

 

Your body is a resonating chamber and he is the bow on the string. He draws you endlessly back, winding you tighter and tighter.

You cannot contain this.

 

It crests in him all at once -- you feel it -- rising like panic, like madness. His heartbeat is flying under your fingers.

 

You are nearly sobbing before it is done. All your words are gone.

 

This is how you break each other: slow, slow, the rocking of your bodies, the blood in your veins.

Chapter 9: Alpha Dave/Alpha Rose, all dressed up (M)

Dave’s fourth mOive premieres three days after the publication of your third novel, so you go in together on the party, and you invite everyone.

Everyone comes. You rent out the swankiest club in Hollywood and deck it out like the set of a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, all gorgeous sweeping art deco lines and waiters in perfectly-tailored tuxedoes, everything elegant and traditional and non-threatening enough to please even the Imperial Fishbitch herself.

And when you make your entrance, arm-in-arm, the assembled glittering horde doesn’t seem to notice anything strange at first glance.

You stand at the top of the stairs and look down on them. You’re of a height, the two of you, both bobbed white-blond, both built tall and slim. But you watch their faces as they start to see: the black suit, tailored to the slight swell of feminine hips; the sequined bodice of a gown, built not to hide but to emphasize the flat chest, the broad sculpted shoulders. Then: silence. A few indrawn breaths.

Your tuxedo is a drawn blade, slender and sharp, tails and white tie and top hat dangling from your white-gloved fingers. Dave is a froth of feathers and frills, sequins and silk and delicate dancing shoes, and there is murder in every line of his body. When you draw him forward onto the dance floor, when you lead him in a lighter-than-air waltz that whirls you both around the room, he bends and sways, gracious and deadly.

In its lines, in its frills and flounces, in the way it floats like seaweed on a current, his gown echoes a dress the Fishbitch wore to a ball at the White House just a week before. An hommage, the politically expedient will say. A fuck you, echo the whispers.

As a pair, you are a fat glaring middle finger thrown up at the Batterwitch. There are no laws against this, and her goons cannot disappear you for anything you are doing tonight. But anyone can see that you are a challenge. Think, you say by your very presence. Remember. We are not meant to submit. We are not made to obey.

She will do everything she can to keep the photos from circulating. She will crash the servers hosting websites, she will firebomb printing presses. But the pictures will leak, grainy phone-taken videos will be passed around, and word will spread. It always does. And maybe some people will see.

That night, Dave takes you back to his wretched opulent apartment overlooking Los Angeles. Flashbulbs follow you from the club to the limo, and from the limo into his building. Contrary to some of the more feverish speculation on the internet, this is not actually something you do often, but tonight it is necessary, it is required for your continued survival. Once he gets you into the sanctuary of his bedroom he peels the suit from your skin, piece by piece, delicately and at great length. The touch of his fingers makes you real.

And you do what his every glance has been asking you for all night: you take your razor-edged needles and you slice the beautiful gown to ribbons, carving it from the long clean lines of his body until the floating seaweed is no more harmless than shreds and thread. You fuck him in the ruins, riding him hard and pitiless while feathers drift around you like snow.

In the blind desperate joining of your bodies, in the moment of oblivion when you are both blasted out of your minds on pheromones and endorphins, you are alive, you are whole, she cannot touch you, she cannot break you. Not yet.

Chapter 10: John/Dave, gingham (E)

At the sound of the door slamming, followed closely by a complicated clatter-thud, you spare enough attention to glance over. There’s John, his bookbag and a few bags of groceries at his feet, and he’s staring at you with his mouth open a little.

“Sup,” you say, turning back to your game.

“Buh,” he says, then, “Wha,” then he clears his throat and finally gets a sentence off the ground. “Hey, Dave, uh, whatcha doin’?”

“Killing zombies, bro. They’re not gonna blow their own heads off, you dig?”

He comes over, sits down. “In a dress.”

“Hm.” You tilt your head, lobbing a grenade that clears half a block. “I think maybe there was one in a dress there. Mostly it’s just rags and shambles.”

“Not the zombies, dude. You.”

“Oh. Yeah, well. Shit’s comfortable as fuck, you don’t even know.”

Silence from John. You glance in his direction again. He’s red to the roots of his hair, and he can’t tear his eyes from your sweet little gingham-wrapped body. Score. In the moment between two explosions you hear the tiny rustle of his fingers stroking over a fold of your skirt. You miss an easy shot. Whoops.

“Dave,” he says, and there’s a little throatiness to his voice, a little heat. “Can I see?”

Target secured. You pause the game, meet his eyes, and stand, feeling the swish of lace and crinoline as the short full skirt sweeps over your stocking-clad thighs. John swallows hard as you twirl slowly for him. You don’t have to ask him if he likes it. He’s devouring you with his eyes. You let him look all he likes, unabashed, knowing how the stockings show off your long legs, how the the flare of the skirt emphasizes your narrow waist, how the neckline frames your collarbones -- collarbones he likes to trace with lips and tongue, but only in the dark, only after a few drinks.

If a little purple-checked gingham dress is what it takes to make him kiss you sober and in daylight, well, fuck, that’s easy.

He tries surreptitiously to adjust himself in his pants. You step smoothly in between his legs where he sits, and he looks up at you, utterly gobsmacked.

“So, what, you want an engraved invitation?” you say.

With a look on his face like he’s getting away with something, like he can’t believe his luck, he curls his hands softly around the backs of your knees, slides his hands slowly north.

“Going for the gold, I see. Nice solid tactic.”

“Shut up, Dave.” Fearless, he pushes his hands into the ruffles of your skirt. Good old Egbert. He’s easy to fluster but surprisingly hard to embarrass, which is one of the things you love most about him.

Also, his hands, his piano fingers, long and dextrous. The way they slip up above the tops of your thigh-highs and skate over your skin, until he’s cupping your ass in your lace-trimmed panties. His fingertips trace the edge of the fabric. “What have we here?” he asks, pushing handfuls of skirt up until he can see how the silly little scrap of underwear barely contains your boner.

He makes a little surprised hff of an exhale, then traces lightly up your cock. You shiver, heat flushing your face. He circles around the wet spot where you’re leaking against the satin and looks up at you, pupils huge and black. “You’re making a bit of a mess,” he says.

“Shame on me,” you say, and it comes out way breathier and less steady than you meant it to.

Something flashes in his face. He gets you by the hips and before you quite know what’s happening he’s got you on your back, laid half across the arm of the couch in a drift of frilly ruffles, and then he presses his mouth to that wet spot and you lay your head back and bite your lip and try to keep from pushing up against him.

He laughs a little, then hooks two fingers around the elastic and pulls down on the waistband until your dick pops free. “I like these,” he says conversationally, then licks a heavy wet stripe up from base to tip.

“Hnnggff,” you say.

“If I bought you more of these, would you wear them all the time?” He swirls his tongue around the crown of you, and you decide it was a rhetorical question, not really requiring an answer, which is probably just as well. “Like, maybe not to class or to a photo shoot or anything, but around the apartment. That’s be pretty sweet.” Then he sucks you into his mouth and there’s no more talking for precisely three minutes and twenty-four seconds until you gasp out a warning and come hard enough to white out your vision.

When you open your eyes, he’s kneeling over you and looking immensely pleased with himself. “So the dress worked,” you manage to say.

He grins. “I’d say that’s a solid yes. A+, would bone again.”

“Baller,” you say, and shove him down onto his back.