Work Text:
Dave came to dread visits to the Lalondes once puberty hit. Things had always been kind of awkward with Rose and Roxy, as they tried to act like a family without actually knowing each other very well, but at least he'd never paid attention to their curves before. Anymore he caught himself staring after them as they walked away and he had to fight the desire to stab his brain out with an icepick.
His wandering gaze hit the worst during a trip to New York when he was thirteen. Jade had monopolized the attention of the adults with some robotics problem one evening, so Dave and Rose watched a movie alone in her room. They sat on her bed, the laptop between them, in an unusual silence. He was having trouble paying attention to the plot, let alone quipping at it, because he kept glancing at her. Wasn't that skirt kind of... short? It was fucking cold in the north and that was... that was a lot of exposed skin. (Why did his eyes keep traveling there? Fuck.)
"It's perfectly natural, you know."
His gaze snapped up but she was still staring at the monitor. "What is?" he said.
"Attraction to a sibling who you haven't had the opportunity to build familial bonds with."
He stiffened. "Where the fuck did that come from?"
She smirked. "Your gaze, mostly."
His face burned red. "I-I wasn't-"
"As I said, it's not unexpected." She waved him off. "There are numerous reported cases of separated siblings developing romantic attraction for each other before realizing they're genetically related." She slid a hand over his. "It's just an aspect of human nature backfiring. We can be quite narcissistic when it comes to searching out a mate; we trust our own genetics to produce strong offspring." She leaned in close. "Our genetics helped us survive this far, after all."
He kissed her.
He shouldn't have, a million alarm bells screeched in his mind the moment he did it, but too late for that. The most he could do was brace himself for the inevitable slap. The slap never came and it wasn't replaced with a scream either. She kissed back.
She smirked when they pulled apart. "You're a terrible kisser."
Admitting he'd never kissed anyone before would probably not have saved his reputation, so instead he said, "What would you know about it?"
She raised her eyebrows, plucked off his shades, and slid them onto her head. "Try something," she slipped her hand behind his neck, "more like," she pulled him to meet her halfway, "this."
They kissed again, this time with Rose in the lead. It was the perfect combination of warm and wet, static and shifting, and he strove desperately to match her. Alarms still rang but the volume was falling and they went mute as she caught his wrist with her free hand and set his fingers over her chest.
(Oh god, oh god, this was so fucking wrong, why did it feel so good?)
She rubbed the back of his neck and he wrapped an arm around her waist. Just as she pried his mouth open to deepen the kiss -- not that he needed much coaxing -- the door opened.
"Hey, we're about to-" Dirk's voice cut off as he caught sight of them. He froze, his hand still on the doorknob.
Dave was too mortified to move as his internal alarms rang out louder than ever in a chorus of "Told you so." Rose at least had the sense to extract herself from the kiss and scoot away from Dave, though she otherwise seemed unbothered. He'd seen her look more embarrassed after someone walked in on her watching Squiddles.
There was a long silence. Dirk was so still it was almost as if time had stopped. It was too much to hope that he'd fainted in shock and just hadn't fallen yet, but Dave hoped anyway.
Rose cleared her throat and shot him a pleasant smile. "Did you need something, Mr. Strider?"
Dirk shifted, hesitated another moment, and said with an odd tone, "Dave. I think we need to talk."
Dave would have preferred to hear "Dave, I'm going to slice you in two and you don't even get a weapon to defend yourself with" just then. His entire body felt like ice as he slid off the bed.
"Don't forget these," Rose said without even the slightest shame in her voice as she held his shades to him.
He didn't deserve to even pretend he was cool, but Dave snatched them and jammed them back on his face all the same.
Dirk led him to the guest bedroom in silence and shut the door after them, presumably so the whole house wouldn't hear the shouting he was no doubt about to lay on Dave. Dave braced himself, but Dirk had gone still again. His expression was impossible to read, perfectly blank with his shades blocking his eyes, and his face was turned towards Dave as if summing him up.
Dave's insides writhed. Getting shouted at would have been less stressful.
Finally Dirk spoke. He didn't yell, but his voice was filled with disbelief. "You know she's your sister, right?"
Dave wanted to crawl in a hole and die. "Yes."
Again Dirk just stared. He was still for so long that birds would have flocked around him if he was outside. "She's your twin sister."
"I know."
"Don't you like men?"
"Liking men isn't mutually exclusive to liking women," Dave mumbled.
Dirk actually showed an emotion as he cringed in disgust. "She's not a woman; she's your thirteen-year-old sister."
"Oh my god, I got the memo already." Dave hunched his shoulders and stared at the floor. "You can stop saying that."
"Do I need to be worried about you and Jade next?"
Dave pulled a face. "Don't be fucking gross! Jade's my sister."
"So is Rose!" Dirk said. He'd raised his voice but there was still more horror than anger behind it.
Dave slapped both hands over his face. "I know."
"How long has this been going on?"
"This is the first time, this is the only time, this has never fucking happened before." Dave knew he was almost whining, but his image was already thoroughly dragged through shit, so what did it matter?
"Just fucking tell me you're not seriously attracted to your sister."
Dave froze. "Uh." Oh Jesus, why did he have to word it like that?
Dirk didn't let the silence sit long. He turned for the door. "I'm getting Jake."
Panic overrode any self-preservation, any dignity left in him, and Dave tore after Dirk, grabbing his arm as if he had a chance of dragging him back. "Bro, no, no, no, please, for the love of god, for the love of anything, don't tell Grandpa- don't tell anyone else, please."
Dirk stopped to face him. "You were making out with your sister."
"I know." Dave's shoulders slumped. "It was a stupid fucking mistake and it'll never happen again, I swear to every plush smuppet rump in our apartment. Just please don't fucking tell anybody."
Dirk scowled. "This never happens again?"
"I'll win the lottery five times before I even think about touching her. Lightning will strike me twice. Valve will release Half Life 3."
Dirk considered him a moment, then sighed. Dave couldn't remember the last time he'd seen him look so openly exasperated. "I catch you two at this again, even your dead second cousins thrice removed will hear about it. You got that?"
Dave hadn't even noticed how badly he'd been constricting his lungs until he let out a long breath of relief. "I got that. I fucking got that."
"And, for fuck's sake, no sharing a room without supervision anymore."
"Deal."
Dirk smacked him upside the head. "And that's for not fucking knowing better to begin with. Jesus Christ, Dave."
Dave swallowed and wondered if apologizing would be uncool, but at that point he didn't have much further he could fall. "Sorry, Bro."
Dirk shook his head and opened the door. "I just stopped by to let you know that Rox wants you downstairs for coffee. Tell your si-" He frowned. "I'll tell your sister and you can fucking head down on your own."
Dave nodded and kept his head bowed as he hurried down the hall and to the ground level. By some small mercy, everyone in the living room was already well-engaged in conversation and in no hurry to drag him into it. He curled up in an armchair and pulled out his phone for a game of Bust-A-Move: Mobile Rip-Off in a desperate attempt to take his mind off recent events.
It wasn't long before Dirk and Rose joined them, Dirk's expression back to its normal, unreadable blank slate as if nothing had happened. Worse, Rose seemed downright perky. Fuck, go figure Dirk let her off scot-free and, if he kept his word, Roxy wouldn't even know she needed some good old fashioned parental guilting either.
"You're in a good mood." Roxy grinned at her. "Did something happen?"
"Oh, I suppose." Rose took the armchair next to Dave's. "I did some soul searching with Dave's help and I think I've made a breakthrough."
Dave's breath caught or else he might have let out a shout. She was telling on them?
She shrugged. "It turns out I'm exclusively attracted to women."
Dave was still for so long that his previously half-empty iPhone screen filled with colorful bubbles and was overtaken by the taunt of Game Over: Retry or Quit. What.
Everyone else was too busy giving Rose congratulations on coming out to notice how awkward Dave had gotten. Considering how many queers were already in the room, it was a pretty casual affair, but there was something about Dirk's posture that Dave read as sheer relief.
Dave waited for the subject to change away from Rose, then leaned over as far as he dared to whisper, "I hate you."
Rose smirked, also keeping her voice quiet. "I made sure you enjoyed it."
"You used me."
She rolled her eyes. "As I explained, humans are attracted to their own traits. If I can't even find myself attracted to my twin brother, I really must be a lesbian."
Dirk glanced their direction and Dave dropped back into his seat in a hurry, holding his phone close to his face -- Game Over still covered the screen -- and sinking into the corner of the chair as if it could ever substitute for the deep, dark hole he wanted to hide in.
He should have been disgruntled that Rose practically took advantage of him to test the waters of her orientation, but he wasn't. He hated himself for it when, instead, he just felt the bitter sting of rejection.