Chapter Text
The cruiser is all but unpilotable. Sollux pushes it as far as he can, but it’s more of a dragging, painstakingly-controlled fall than true flight. Dave is curled up around his arm in the backseat through the entire descent; he’s so quiet that even Karkat can’t help but be concerned.
Sollux gets them landed outside a shitty two-caegar-a-night pod hostel, not far from another cruiser kiosk. Somewhere above them—above the artificial cyan-blue sky of traffic—the sun has started to rise. Not much true sunlight reaches the lower streets of Alternia, but something in the air feels different: the dry warmth of the night starts to sharpen, and the neon reds and bronzes and golds of the streets sharpen with it. That same sharp heat fights weakly against the post-harness-induced headache that nearly has Sollux laid out flat, but he doesn’t need the help. There’s too much left to be done.
He can rest when they rip his back out again.
Ha, ha.
Sollux sends a couple of encrypted messages to their rebellion contacts to request an extraction. Roxy assures him that she and Calliope will be there within half an hour; it stems the admonitions he’d been getting for missing their meeting.
Now, on the topic of his boyfriends.
“I am, for sure, gutting that shitty coolant system of yours when we get back,” he tells Karkat, who’s propped up on the right side of the front seat next to the still-shattered window. Karkat’s palm is still pressed against the place where his torso caught the knife, air leaking out past his hand in fits and spurts. Something in his chest rattles so hard Sollux can hardly hear himself.
“Your shitty coolant system,” Karkat reminds him.
“Right,” Sollux agrees, as if he’d forgotten, “my shitty coolant system.” There’s a guilt and a fondness that are hard to extract from one another, but he reaches over and squeezes Karkat’s arm.
Karkat loses his grip on his expression long enough to let slip a rare smile, then he waves Sollux off. “Go check on Dave, he looks like dogshit warmed over and served with a garnish of additional lukewarm dogshit.”
“God, you’re such a poet.”
Sollux slips into the backseat and settles next to Dave’s legs, which are curled up against his torso. It’s been hard to get a real sense for the damage with the goddamn helmet, but he was fully lucid immediately after, and Sollux decided to take that as a good sign. (Even if he apparently used his available consciousness to hit on Sollux’s boyfriend, which Sollux admittedly wasn’t as upset about as he would have expected to be).
“Dave?” Sollux asks, softly. There’s no answer. He tries again: “DV?”
Dave stirs. For a moment, Sollux wonders if he’s asleep, until he finally clears his throat and replies, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, haven’t heard that one in a while.”
“Hah.” The fondness and guilt make a reappearance in this second act of the conversation. The latter is a comfortable routine regarding just about anything involving Dave Strider. The former sort of sneaks up on him. “I’m going to check out your head and arm, and this time you’re not going to be a baby about it.”
Yet Sollux still surprised when Dave silently holds his arm out towards him. There are thick, black burn marks roped around the red velvet. His palm is loose and open, facing upwards, though still trembling. Sollux shifts closer and gingerly removes the glove. Familiar fingers curl and twitch in the open air; the unsteadiness has Sollux frowning.
“You can calm down, I’m not going to bite.”
Dave apparently finds something about that funnier than he’d expected, and he snorts, tipping his head back against the window. “M’not worried,” he says.
The fact he hasn’t snapped at him yet is a good sign, at least. Sollux rolls his sleeve up as far as he dares, then sucks a breath through his teeth when he sees what’s underneath. Wordlessly, he places his hands on either side of Dave’s helmet and slides it off. Cyan blue irises meet him there, the pupils narrowed and angular at the edges like camera shutters. It’s the same cyan blue as the lights glowing softly beneath the melted skin on his arm. His fingers twitch again, erratically. Not nervous. Threatening to short-circuit.
“What did he do to you, Dave?”
Sollux isn’t sure if he flinches or if the electricity just has all of his hardware that twitchy, but it clearly sends Dave back on the defensive either way. The identity of the ‘he’ isn’t in question. “You mean save my fuckin’ life? Will you just—can you just not jump to conclusions about my brother for once, maybe?” Sollux doesn’t respond. His silence prompts Dave further: “He and Jane Crocker were convinced that Midnight City needed to be brought under reign, and they started hiring local guys out from there, but it was about as effective as funneling more money into turf wars so they had to send extra firepower, and, um—there was, an incident, okay, it wasn’t like—he isn’t some kind of evil mastermind, alright? He isn’t out to ruin my god damn life. He’s just a guy, and he tries to do his best by me, or whatever, and, he saved what he could and built back the rest and, ta da, I am now the cyborg sex god you see before you today.”
Sollux isn’t sure if Dave breathes a single time during the entire monologue, horribly blue eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the windshield of the cruiser. Sollux isn’t breathing either.
It takes another twenty seconds before Sollux collects himself enough to speak. In that time, he draws blood at a hangnail again, scraping his picked-down nails against each other.
“Kind of a shitty robot if you got concussed,” he says, eventually.
“Part robot. I still have my brain, don’t make me explain the science to you ‘cause it’ll somehow be embarrassing for us both.”
“...Is that why you left? The accident, and—”
“No,” Dave says, quick and sincere.
“Fuck me running, Dave, if that wasn’t the last straw, then what was?”
Dave’s eyes dance from the windshield down to Sollux’s hands, working themselves raw. “When they told me to kill you.” He pauses for a beat, then raises his voice again: “I told y’all I didn’t feel like it, didn’t I? Ain’t no aforementioned dystopian overlords are goin’ to shell out money for me to kill my ex-boyfriend.” He pauses. “Not until they enter union negotiations, at least.” He’s still staring down at Sollux’s hands.
“I never thought Dave Strider would develop a martyr complex,” Sollux manages, at a loss for anything else to say.
“Naw, nothing that complicated,” Dave responds, and finally pries one of Sollux’s hands away from the other. “Stop fuckin’ with your hangnails, though, I told you they’ll never heal like that.”
The heat crawls down from Sollux’s ears and canvases his entire face. “Hold that thought.”
Sollux twists, leaning back over the divide of the front seat in an attempt to find his bag again. It’s been kicked under the console, and he shimmies far enough over to snag it with his fingertips. Karkat doesn’t even pretend he wasn’t listening to every word, and leans in to inform Sollux in that charming half-yell he uses when he thinks he’s being quiet: “If you don’t kiss him all three of us are going to pop a fuse.”
“Learn to whisper, you polyamorous disaster,” Sollux fires back before papping his boyfriend’s cheek placatingly.
He then slides back in place alongside Dave, clearing his throat once. “If you’re going to join Feferi Peixes’ and Karkat Vantas’ charming band of merry rebels, we’re disconnecting you from the Crocker network, first.”
Dave’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. “Wait, wait, wait, it’s him and Peixes’ bio kid?”
“Surprise, surprise, you passed your first interview. It looks like Dirk gave you pain sensors in whichever limbs he replaced, so this isn’t going to feel great.” He gets a screwdriver and does some quick figuring underneath the burned-out skin until he finds what he’s looking for. When the chip yields—like it had in Karkat—Dave’s eyes go blank for a moment, then kick back online in that same treasonous red as Karkat’s. He blinks rapidly, twice, then laughs, flexing his fingers.
“I’ll be damned.”
Sollux would be lying if he said it wasn’t a good look on him.
He’s distantly aware of Karkat’s head poking over the edge of the seat. Further out, more distant still, he can hear the landing of another cruiser and the approach of two sets of feet. Further—even further—the sun is still rising, warm as his boys’ eyes, on a day that promises to maybe suck a little bit less than the days that had preceded it.
Sollux kisses Dave just as Karkat’s coolant system calms to a quiet, content hum. His own post-harness headache dulls to background noise along with it.
Everything is going to be okay. And for now, the three of them can rest.