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Dab found Evan to be one of the most fascinating people he knew.
More so than his dad, who was anything between dark nerdy shirts and bright pink flamboyant crop tops. More so than his mother, with her bright smiles and wise words and the way she was keeping two children in line in the house.
Evan Pancakes drew Dab in like nothing else the boy knew.
He thinks it might be the way the boy's eyes glitter as he stands from afar and watches- since they were children, Evan was more of a watcher.
It was Dab who threw himself into the people around him, who gave out glowing smiles like nobody's business, who was all charm and wit and colors.
Somehow, he was drawn to Evan's quiet greys and blacks, to his soft words and his wise eyes and his clever hands. Evan emanated an intelligent sort of peace that Dab often found lacking in his home.
It wasn't that Dab was unhappy, because he wasn't. His parents were amazing, his house was bright, colorful, always so warm.
But it was also a ceaseless movement, every day no less than a whirlwind of color and activity. Dan embraced the way his household worked, the way everyone fell together and apart as easily as sliding machine parts (that were also wildly graffitied with bright colors).
In growing up in this sort of environment, his eyes and his brain adjust accordingly- his bright eyes register every moment around him in shapes and colors and pictures. There isn't a moment when his mind doesn't register that from the corner of his eye there's a blue car that's more cube than car, or that he can pick out every color in the bushes across the street.
It's in Evan Pancakes that he finds moments of solace; when his eyes and mind are able to slow down, when the whirlwind of image information that beats across his brain crawls to a stop and all he has to think about is Evan and his hair and his eyes.
Evan Pancakes is subdued tones, earthy and grounding and peaceful stillness.
If Dab is the mayhem of asteroids, exploding stars, and bottomless black holes, Evan is the gentle thrum of stardust like breaths on cheeks, the peaceful spin of orbiting planets and the sight of stars passing from the surface of deathly silent planets.
Dab adores him.
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Though Dab and Evan get along, both children soon realize that there's something different in the most fundamental level that the two register the world around them.
Dab sees it all in colors, in collages of chaos and overflowing canvases. Evan sees numbers, things to be calculated and discovered and learned.
It doesn't get in the way of their rapidly budding relationship; they balance each other out in the most phenomenal of ways, chaos and the calm.
The curly-haired boy is an ever-shifting soul, about as constant as the moving winds and the flowing sea. The quiet boy who stands beside him is grounded, the solid core of the earth and the deepest roots of ancient trees.
And Dab adores him.
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When Dab enters grade school, his parents get him an activity table- it's stocked full of paints and pencils, colors and textures and anything he may need.
For a while, it's welcome respite from the ceaseless torrent of information. He creates, and he creates, and he creates.
It's fun at first, gluing macaroni to his butterflies and pasting glitter across the flowers. It's like healing an ache in the corner of his brain that had been overflowing from the ideas, letting it come out in the form of finger paintings and crayon doodles.
But the ache only grows with him.
By the time he's a teenager, the overflowing corner of his brain is a constant throb, a horrible ache that spreads down his spine and makes him hurt unless he lets it out; so he does.
He makes paintings, drawings, portraits, sculptures, anything his mind can dream up. He pours all of the colorful pandemonium of his mind into it, lets himself grow near obsessed with his projects.
It never seems to help completely, but it's the only solution that Dab can see in front of his eyes- so he carries on.
It's just a torrent of create, make, paint, draw, get it out get it out getitoutgetitoutgetit--
"Dab." The quiet voice is so sudden, so soft in the midst of the need to make art beating down on the boy that it has him going still, shaking under the weight of what he still has not made.
"Dab, hey?"
Dab turns, sees Evan standing a little awkwardly with his fingers twisting together, lips pressed tight and eyes trained on the ground. When had he gotten here?
"Evan." He finally manages, when his brain finally remembers how to do anything that isn't solely for art. "Hi."
"It's… I haven't seen you, um. In a while." The younger boy stutters a little, because in front of a vessel for tumultuous creation like Dab, he finds his science, and his calculations, and his informations to falter. "And I just… thought you might want to… hang out."
What did Evan's science and knowledge stand against Dab's maelstrom of pure emotion?
The walls are covered with Dab's work from over the years- from the very first macaroni finger painting to the last completed project, a massive canvas leaned against the wall depicting layers upon layers of colors that seem to scream in agony.
It makes Evan sad, seeing the art in the lounge go from carefree to portraits of sorrow and misery and grief.
He thinks the reason why Dab is able to remain so bright and cheery and happy in front of everyone else is because the anguish and the suffering manifests in his creations, in a different but beautiful form of catharsis.
Dab stares at Evan for a moment, and in this moment he sees his hands, stained and splattered with colors, and he notices the twinge in his wrist and the ache behind his eyes and the way his back protests from how long he was hunched over that table. In the next moment, he sees Evan, painfully small in his grey hoodie and black trackies, and he lets out a shaking breath as the aching in his head eases.
"Yeah…" He says softly, and he pushes away from his desk, unfinished work forgotten, for now. "Yeah, let's go out."
Evan smiles, and it's timid but it's sweet, a kind salve on the desperate cramps in his mind.
Dab thinks, suddenly, that there will likely never be anything he ever makes that he will be prouder of than when he makes Evan smile.
"Come on, you look like you haven't seen the sun in years." Evan says, and he takes his hand, dabbled with all sorts of paints and inks, and pulls him away.
God, Dab adores him.
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"It doesn't stop," He croaks out, and it's some ass o'clock in the morning, and his hands are trembling and he's sitting curled up as he speaks harshly into his phone, trying not to let the tears fall from his eyes. "It never stops, Evan, and I can never make it stop and the only thing that can ever make it stop is you, please, please help me, I want it to stop, make it stop, make it stop--"
And Evan shows up at his window, panting, the hood of his jacket pulled up around his face and eyes wide and worried.
Dab lets him in, and when Tabitha sees an extra child curled up in the narrow bed of her son's bed, she smiles, gently shuts the door, and shushes her curious husband.
In incidents much like these, Evan ends ups saving Dab from being consumed by his own creations time and time again- he finds mugs of warm tea and plates of clumsily made sandwiches, and he wakes up to blankets draped over his shoulders and his lamp light turned off.
It's little things like that- Evan never tries to force Dab away from his art, because he knows that he needs it like Evan needs his test tubes and his science and his papers.
It's just that Evan is the eye of the storm, the calm before and after it; the oasis in the desert and the silver linings to the clouds.
They're very much each other's counterparts, in that they round each other out and fill the other in. It's their coexistence of chaotic emotion and precise science.
When they were children that ran around town causing all sorts of trouble Dab remembers that his mother had called them 'organized chaos', and he'd smile, bring it up to Evan who grins brightly and reaches out to touch Dab's curls.
"Yeah, well. Someone's gotta make sure you don't break yourself."
They're simple words, easy words. Almost flippant in delivery.
Dab grins widely behind his pastel stained fingers, his paint covered nails, his ink splattered palms.
And he adores Evan.