Work Text:
Evan finds Dab to be the most riveting sensation in existence.
More than the sea, more than the sky, more than satellites, stars, or suns- Dab Howlter was surely the most fascinating, unfathomable thing that Evan Pancakes knew.
Evan knew that the world was a complicated place filled with complicated things. He knew that he could explain without much trouble the exact function and parts of an electric telegraph, or the principles of flight and space travel. He could put into words the Quantum Theory and how it had ripped the entire fabric of classical physics to shreds, demolished ordinary notions of the nature of reality, screwed up entire philosophies of cause and effect and revealed peculiarities about nature that nobody, no matter how imaginative, could ever have imagined.
But Dab was somehow more complicated than any of that.
Evan knew his way around the things in his world. Through a marriage that was falling apart and between parents that didn't even try to care about their son, the boy held his head up high. He took a step back from the world and he absorbed everything around him.
He read the thick, heavy books his father kept in the study but never opened. He locked himself away and escaped from the hard, unforgiving walls of his home, found solace in his theories and statistics and numbers.
Evan knew nothing in his own home but empty rooms and spacious beds, his parents sleeping in separate rooms and eating dinner alone in the suffocating silence of loveless home.
It's in Dab Howlter that he knows something different; when the sun actually feels warm against his cinnamon skin and the numbers that rattle through his thoughts cease to have meaning, when the only thing he has to think about is Dab and his curls and his smile.
Dab Howlter is warmth, sugary smiles and a soft light that fills the entire room. He is fullness and indulgence and gentle affection.
It fills Evan with a burning sort of curiosity, but the boy would rather burn than feel the cold for another day.
--
Facts, percentages, data, it was all easy. These were things that Evan could fathom.
For as long as Evan had known Dab, which was as long as he could remember, he had made absolutely no sense.
Dab was beyond algorithms or calculations or analyses, some sort of natural, incomprehensible phenomenon, unmeasurable in his depth and intricacy. He was a beautiful marvel while simultaneously an unceasing torrent of undecipherable emotions, as though he were one massive contradiction to be unraveled.
Dab was a torrent of unpredictable chaos. He was like coloring outside the lines and rain on sunny days.
In the cold hard world that Evan has grown so used to, under the uncaring gazes of his parents, the only warmth that he has ever known comes from his bright eyed friend.
He is a beacon of light in the darkness, the moon in the sky on a starless night, the shine of the surface of the depthless ocean.
It doesn't take very long for Evan to realize that there is something fundamentally different in the way he and Dab view the world.
It scares him, as the things one doesn't understand tend to do.
But he was curious, and it burned in his soul still.
--
Evan would be lying if he said that the Howlter House didn't fill him with envy.
It was an ugly feeling that he did his best to tamp down, but it was there, persistent and leering.
The house was peculiar, strange and colorful but so, so warm, and bursting with more life and love and laughter than Evan had ever seen. He smiled more spending one afternoon with the Howlters than he had his entire life in the Pancakes house, and it nettled him, just a little.
Mr. Howlter was silly and fun, if a bit absentminded, and still filled with a childish sort of joy that Evan himself lacked. Mrs. Howlter was much the same, kind and genuinely full of affection for Dab and, strangely, for Evan as well.
When he returned home, entered the dark halls of his house and made his way to his room, he stopped in shock when he glanced into the mirror and found that he was crying. He hadn't noticed it before but now it consumed him- he was crying and he couldn't stop, like a dam had been broken.
He wanted it, the house of joy and love. He wanted it so bad it ached in his bones, tugged at his heart and the edges of his mind.
When he woke up the next morning, eyes sore from the tears, he numbly washed his face in cold water and made himself cereal, ignoring the broken wine bottles and the opened flasks of whiskey in the corner of the kitchen, lingering pieces of a broken family hidden in the shadows of its walls.
This is fine, he would think, a tiny, tiny child alone at a dinner table for a dozen. I'm okay.
And he would carry this ache inside him for many years to come.
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As childish as Evan knew it sounded (though he did not seem to understand that he was a child), the boy did his best to avoid feeling.
He knew, someplace within his expansive young mind, that if he did, he would surely be crushed under the weight of it, under the despair and the crippling loneliness in his heart. He knew that as long as he avoided it, as long as he could pretend it wasn't there, he could survive it.
So he pushed it away, tucked it back in the corner of his brain where he would never see it past all the information he absorbed, so it could be buried deep and left to gather dust where it couldn't hurt him.
But as habits did, he become consumed with absorbing information- his mind reeled day and night with ideas and thoughts. He couldn't lay in bed long enough to fall asleep before a new hypothesis ticked at his brain, and then he was crawling out of bed because he had to test this, he had to know, he had to figure it out right now or the curiosity would torture him in his sleep.
Evan had done his damnedest to make sure he was always thinking about something or other, anything as long as it wasn't the way coldness settled in his limbs, seeping into his skin and clinging to him from where it grew on the walls of the inside of his home like a suffocating fungus.
While Dab threw himself into the present, took in everything around him in the there and then until he was bursting with it, Evan did everything within his power to be anywhere but the now. It didn't matter where he stood, in fact, as long as it wasn't here.
"You know, sometimes I wonder what you're always thinking about." Dab says to him one day, as they sit pressed together at the top of the jungle gym. When it was just the two of them up there and staring up into the sky, it almost felt like they didn't really exist- an intense feeling, like they were the only things in the universe, but also the smallest.
Dab's fingers are still tightly intertwined with Evan's.
"You're always thinking. It's loud."
"You can hear me thinking?" Evan responds softly, feeling Dab's curls blowing in the breeze and brushing against his ear. It makes goosebumps rise on his arms.
"No," Dab says, almost petulantly. "If I could, I wouldn't have to wonder. But that doesn't mean I don't know you're thinking."
The boys are quiet for a moment, before Evan speaks up again.
"I don't think so much when I'm with you. I don't have to."
"You calling me dumb?" Dab prods the younger boy's cheek gently, the teasing in his tone clear as day. Evan thinks about how he can understand the curly haired boy, when he can't really understand anyone else.
He thinks it may have to do with just how candid Dab was- his words were not sugarcoated, his actions genuine. There was no ulterior motive, no hidden social cue. Dab did as he felt and Evan could take everything to mean exactly what it was- he was not expected to give sufficient reciprocation, not expected to react in any way but with complete honesty. It was refreshing.
"Maybe I am." He lobs back, grinning a little helplessly at the sky, feeling his cheeks grow as warm as the fingers in his.
"So you've read all those books and know all those things about the stars and the galaxies. There are more important things, you know." Dab proclaims, just dramatically enough that Evan knows he's only kidding.
"Like friendship, and bravery?" He says, unable to hide the smile in his voice.
They'd read those books together when they were younger- or rather, Evan had read them out loud and Dab had listened with eyes aglow. He'd picked up reading long before his peers had, and he was glad he did whenever he thought about how peaceful those hours had been, painting the world of magic with his voice and watching Dab listen, riveted, like nothing else in the world could have mattered in that moment.
"Oh, shut it, you." Dab turns his head, sticking his tongue out at the dark-skinned boy.
"You're not dumb, Dab." Evan says simply, smiling peacefully. There are no numbers here, no statistics or data or calculations. There is only him, and Dab; only the warmth in his hand holding Evan's and the ache in his cheeks from grinning. There is nothing else that he need think about because the boy beside him filled his mind. "You're more interesting than any of those books."
The curly haired boy is quiet for a moment, then turns his bright eyes to stare at Evan.
"Is that right?" He says softly, and the gentleness in his voice makes Evan blush.
"I mean, I guess what I'm really trying to say is that although stars and galaxies fascinate me," He chooses his words carefully, saying them slow as he keeps his gaze to the sky. "I would much rather sit and marvel at you instead."
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For a long time, as Dab spent more and more time with his art, locked away in his room, nothing mattered but his experiments and his data and his research. If Dab didn't need him, then Evan didn't need him either.
It was that rankling thought that had brought the discontent to their relationship. Or, at least, to Evan's end of it.
Dab became obsessed with art, with painting and creating, and at some point he'd even stopped walking Evan to and from school, too busy with pouring out every thought and feeling that raged within him.
The curly haired boy threw himself into it- he came to school with his fingers mottled with watercolors, chalk dust in his hair and charcoal in his nails, jeans and shirt streaked with paint and a glowing grin on his face.
When once at school they would spend their time sitting in the grass, talking about absolutely nothing while Dab weaved daisies into his hair, they now spent apart- Dab sitting quietly in the corner of the art room, a sort of exhausted mania in his eyes, and Evan sitting quietly in the corner of the library, trying his damnedest to drown himself in his theorems and his hypotheses.
Evan was used to losing, really, but losing Dab had hurt more than anything else. The world he had once lived in seemed even colder with the warmth gone from it.
It was cold, in the library.
The dusty hollowness of it reminded him of his own bedroom, the way it was big and empty and unfriendly. The floors were hard, the shelves unyielding, and even the sunlight that shined through the windows were pale and weakened by the lifelessness of it's vast corridors.
But, in an aching and familiar sort of way, it brought him peace. He was used to this.
He was used to the mechanical and the detached, to being surrounded by silence and being uninterrupted for hours and hours on end.
He was used to drowning in indifference, to stifled quiet, hushed but spiteful arguments and frigid looks of resentment.
He did what he did best- he did his reading, his calculations, his experiments. He built himself blueprints and theories and ideas like they could somehow shield him from the world, tried and tested his way through them, very nearly tried to burn himself into the ground with his work.
Evan locked himself away into the stillness of his room, surrounded by his humming machines and his textbooks, because this, this was comfortable.
This was easy.
What wasn't so easy was that at any moment that he was distracted, the only thing he could think of was curly hair and smiling eyes, his skin going cold as it sorely missed the warmth of Dab's skin against his own and how it felt to be wrapped in those long arms.
His limbs are cold but his soul burns, it burns, it crumbles.
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And in all of that time that Evan spent filled with bitterness, he didn't notice that Dab was collapsing into himself.
He was quieter, paler, the circles under his eyes dark. Every waking moment he seemed to be moving, his fingers twitching and eyes roaming like idleness would kill him.
Dab was always sketching something, drawing something, putting paints and inks and papers together, and all this while Evan didn't notice because he was alone.
He wishes he'd paid more attention, tried harder to fight the darkness because Dab had needed him and he had been too busy wallowing in his own shadows to realize it.
It makes him feel heavy with guilt sometimes when he thinks about how alone Dab must have been in that time, his heart aching when he imagines the glowing boy feeling anything like the loneliness that Evan spent his life struggling against.
When Dab calls him at odd hours of the night with tears in his voice, he climbs out of bed and is making his way towards his best friend's house before the boy can even finish speaking. Because he knows what suffocating loneliness is. He understands what it feels like not being able to let go of the only thing anchoring you in the storm.
He pulls Dab against himself, arms going tight around him- the terrible, terrible look in the boy's eyes as he reaches out to Evan feels like it rakes through his lungs, and the dark skinned boy would do anything to make sure Dab never wears a face like that ever again.
They sit in heavy but comforting silence, holding each other tight on Dab's bed. Evan's eyes wander as he runs his fingers over dark curls, across the paintings and portraits and projects on the walls.
He sees the pain in them, sees the misery, and he also sees how Dab has captured that somehow in all the colors and the lines. He sees himself in some of those streaks- and in the thought that someone who had a family like Dab and lived in a house like Dab had felt that very same deep-seated anguish brought him some twisted comfort.
In this moment, holding each other, they find tranquility; the moon shines down through Dab's window and consoles them both.
And, unbeknownst to the older boy, the coolness of the night and the chill in Dab's skin eases that ever-present burn in the pit of Evan's stomach.
In this moment he finds a place inside where there's joy, and in the next he knows this joy will burn out the pain.