Work Text:
Look at you, losing your mind
You can’t unwind
And you feel confined
Come on, where’d your head go?
Caught in headlights ‘cause of a doe
Over a violinist who can sew shit she doesnt sew she knits as poised as her bow
Your name is Dave Strider and you are currently a mess.
The thought is, yes, impossible, perhaps enjoyable to the cruder of peeps, but it’s happening. Holy shit, it’s happening.
You are a Strider. This means you are ironic. This means you are also always clad in a Raglan shirt and black Aviators. That’s just the way of the Strider. It goes without saying that you are what is known as a “cool kid.”
And here you are with hands shoved into your pockets like there’s a fucking rainbow down at the bottom of the Denim Valley, shoulders hunched in a pre-regurgitation pose and, dear god, are your knees facing each other? Someone put this boy out of your misery.
As always, however, there is a method to your madness.
You’re trying so hard (something a Strider doesn’t ever do, emphasizing the need for someone to pump your head full of lead and turn you into the amazing Metallic Cranium Boy) just to mentally cough up some rhymes to keep yourself calm. That’s three strikes against you already. Maybe now you can break out the maracas and go completely batshit. One can only hope.
Your eyebrows are knitted so tightly they’re a wannabe unibrow and you’re begging the goddamn world that these glasses cover all of this, your perspiration, your ragged breathing, your impromptu yet spot-on impression of Actually the Worst Troll™, but as often as others might think they aren’t actually made of magic. Magic probably wouldn’t slide down your nose the way it is now.
“Dave? Are you alright?”
Oh shit she’s talking Dave she’s talking to you how about you do something dumbass
“Yeah, I’m fine, Lalonde, yeah,” you finally spit out. Damn.
Rose seems concerned, standing in the doorway of his apartment. She’d stopped by to visit and saw only your older brother (your Bro, as you say, but she always refers to him as Mr. Strider), heard you were busy, and made to leave. Understandably.
Then you picked up a familiar voice from your bedroom and could only describe it as…maidenly. Womanly. Lovely.
Damn, when’d you get so bad with words? No; her voice was maidenly, and that phrase was ironic. Yes. You could almost feel Bro giving you a proud pat on the shoulder.
And yeah, you shot out of your room, hopping dexterously over the various shoes strewn around, to say hey, how are you, don’t leave how’s Egbert and junk.
Rose was there, in the doorway, as previously mentioned. Waiting. Her eyebrows were knitted together—get it, because she knits—and she was mildly uncomfortable, unlike you who was extremely uncomfortable. And nearly hyperventilating.
Yeah, that’s probably why she was mildly uncomfortable. But god she looked nice even when she was freaked out like shit look at her eyes the wider they got the more you could see the hues of amethyst and plum staring back at you and you didn’t just use “amethyst” and “plum” in the same sentence oh you did not someone get a scientist in here to name a new volcano because you are no longer a cool kid and are in fact filled with magma. Or to-be vomit. Good show.
And now you’re falling to goddamn pieces right in front of her. Don’t do this, man. You’re scaring her. She’s pressing her fingertips to her lips, probably smudging them with black lipstick and yeah that’s kind of hot but she’s doing that because she probably thinks you’re having a heart attack.
“Are you…sure?”
Obviously you’re not (alright or sure), but you nod your head so fast your shades almost fly off your face. It’s just getting better by the minute.
But dammit you are a Strider, aren’t you, so you swallow whatever is blocking your airway, throw your shoulders back and be a Strider.
“I’m great, Lalonde,” flows out of your throat with a natural air. Back in business. “And you?”
She fidgets with her creamy pixie cut in an unconvinced fashion. “I was curious as to how you were doing as of late,” she replies, caution dripping from each word. It makes that whatever it was crawl back up your throat, and you clear it smoothly by disguising it as a chuckle. “What’s the matter, you think I can’t take care of myself?”
Her lashes flutter for a half-second. Maybe she was imagining your slight aneurism, because you’re obviously in tip-top shape—you are Dave, after all, so why wouldn’t you be?
Because your head is way over your heels and you’ve tripped and done a Charlotte spiral, followed by a Mohawk turn and finished with a quadruple jump and fell right on your face for Rose Lalonde and you are going to go insane.
Why? Maybe it’s because she’s stunning, because how can eyes be so big and how are lips so plump and skin so white and forms so distracting, or maybe it’s because she teases and prods you and tries to pick at your brain and find out things you, yourself, didn’t know about and takes great joy in it.
Her girlish nature could be a plus, seeing how no matter how hard she may deny it she giggles and gussies herself up and makes all that so appealing you can’t stand it.
Maybe it’s all of those things. Damn. It’s all of those things.
And so you’re here now, with your Brave Face crumbling and a nice crimson coming in and taking its place in front of the one person that you wish would never see you like this.
Coincidentally, she’s the only person that could cause you to feel like this and, thusly, is the only one that can see you like this.
Isn’t that the true meaning of irony? Congratulations, buddy, you are the King of Irony; how does that make you feel?
“I feel fine, I’m fine,” you fucking li(ar)e. You’re pretty tall but if it rains you are going to drown in this hole you’re digging yourself into. And no, clearing your throat won’t help.
You guess she’s had enough of your nonsense (as she would say) when her expression turns exasperated, borderline disgusted, and she marches over to you and yanks on your sleeve hard enough to make you stumble. She sits on your frayed couch and drags you down with her, although she lands with a huff and you with a grunt.
You try your best to not think about how she usually doesn’t let others see her being “testy” because she is a civil lady and try not to feel special because you’re seeing her being testy and nobody else does or like she considers you to be a great friend or anything and it’s not working because you’re about to spontaneously combust and are visibly trembling shit goddamn fuck it all.
Manicured nail tips brush some stray blond hairs from sticking to your forehead fast enough to make you inhale sharply (that wasn’t a gasp, it was completely different, shut up), and are then replaced with a cool hand. You feel an urge to lean into that hand, and a second urge to pull away from that hand, and you can’t decide which to do so you settle for breathing through your mouth hoarsely and attractively. Your blush—yeah, just admit it, lover boy, you’re blushing as red as flames and twice as hot and you can’t stop it—has her in a tizzy and thinks it’s actually a fever.
Could you play it off that way? Yeah, that’s why you’ve been acting weird, you caught a bug at school and it’s been making your mind all fuzzy.
Rose touches her own forehead briefly before both hands return to her lap, and sighs. She turns her head to the side, as if she can’t figure out your angle, and a tiny chunk of flaxen hair pops out from behind her headband. Mentally you scold yourself for using the word “flaxen” as you involuntarily tuck her locks back to where they belong.
And then you nearly keel over right there.
You fingers hover right over her cheek and your eyes are almost wider than the lenses that are doing zilch for your coolness right now.
And Rose, bless her heart, doesn’t freak out. In fact, she doesn’t even blink, really. Her eyes just slowly slide to properly see your fingers trembling in mid-air, and then back to your face. “Dave,” she starts as though she were talking to a human time bomb, a considerably plausible possibility, “is there anything you might not be telling me?”
And then you just completely crack, inhaling a shaky breath you are going to use to tell her.
“Holy shit, Lalonde, I’ve fallen so hard for you and I can’t take it anymore, you need to know how mind numbing you are and how I can’t think straight when I’m with you and I think I love that and I’ve never felt like this in my life and I don’t know if there’s a word for the feelings I have right now and I’m done.”
And you’re done. Your shoulders drop down a few inches from the position they were held in for an agonizing fifteen minutes by your ears, and you can now clearly hear a long and slow breath of relief heave its way out of your mouth. Apparently you weren’t receiving oxygen properly for a good while, which could definitely explain some of your redness. Not really. Your face alone right now could make
Your breath hitches and gets caught in your chest again when a new soft and sweet something closes your mouth by kissing it. You’re almost positive suffocating so often like this can’t be beneficial to your health but you’d eat your lungs sautéed on a bed of chives and parsley if you could be frozen in this moment forever.
Rose pulls away too soon with a smile on those very same precious lips that you love.
Your body feels a little detached from the rest of you and somehow hypersensitive at the same time, and your eyes are flitting all over the place because you cannot figure out what just happened or what to do, or what to think. You use that last one as an excuse as to why you used the phrase “those very same precious lips that you love.”
If you were old enough you’d get yourself a drink. Something with a lot of alcohol and a really gaudy name, like Supreme Carnal Psycho or whatever. “Garcon, can I get a refill of my Enthused Mastodon? Make it straight this time, with a lime wedge.” Yeah, that sounds pretty ace.
Alas, you are still very under the legal drinking age so you have to settle with wringing your hands fixing your hair into its normal coiffed image. Relaxing your lips from the perfect line you’ve held them in for quite a while, you have enough courage to look at Rose without flinching.
“You like me too, right?”
You’re not back to your old self just yet, but it’s a start.
You do flinch when Rose lets out a laugh, high in pitch, and while it’s different you welcome it with open arms. You afford yourself a smile in response.
“Honestly, Dave, you really can’t see a thing with those glasses, can you?” She moves to swipe them off your face and you instinctively dodge her and push the frame up the bridge of your nose. Her laugh is identical to the one before. “Then I suppose you can only see a few feet ahead of you. You really thought I didn’t have feelings for you?”
“Well golly gosh gee-zus, Lalonde, you know me so well, I totally just asked you to boost my ego, you got me, you read me like an open book.”
It’s good to be back.
One error you need to correct, though. “Rose.”
Her smile returns. “Thank you.”
You are a hundred and twenty percent Strider now because you loop your arm around her delicate shoulders and pull her close, leaning your cheek on her hair.
Look at you, with a girl so fine
Gone in the mind but got a new spine
You’d call this time pretty divine
Now you be polite
And you hold her tight
‘Cause you feel you’ve done something right