Work Text:
It’s easy to fall into your old habits regardless of what anyone tells you to. There’s always more work to be done, more coding to be written, and projects to tinker with. However, despite this, there’s a knocking on your door that you can hear even over the psychedelic music playing distantly in your workshop.
You suppose it’s been long enough since you stretched, which you should be doing anyway since you insist on wearing your binder regardless of what physical work you’re up to, so you practically jump at the chance to do so. Stepping back from your current robot project, you take the time to gently scrub away any oil on your hands with a microfiber cloth and a bit of Dawn dish soap. After your hands are nice and clean, you walk over to the radio and turn it down just enough that you could have a conversation, if that’s what they’re indeed here for. Somehow they decided to wait for you since you see their feet still there, waiting close to the door if the shadow under the door is any indication.
“Oh, hey man. How- uh... are you good?” It’s your brother Dave, standing there with a box in his hands, shades tastefully pressed close to his eyes. He’s sweating a little despite the cool air rushing in from outside of the door. You wonder for a moment if he ran here but quickly brush it off, he’s known for flying everywhere and is possibly nervous.
“Weird way to say hi,” you give him a small slight smirk, nothing big or special about it. Just enough of a smile to let him know you don’t hate his guts or anything since you know he has issues reading you.
Dave seems relieved since he takes a deep breath, “Sorry haha. I brought you somethin’ cuz you seemed kinda busy and missed our movie night yesterday, dude.”
“Fuck,” you brush your hands through your hair, a nervous habit that you haven’t quite worked out of your system yet. “Shit, I fucked up. I knew I was forgetting something.”
He puts his hand up, juggling the box over into his right hand, “It’s cool, I don’t mind. Karkat just worries and-- well, I worry too. Can’t be havin’ my bro havin’ a freak out or nothin’. That shit ain’t tight, dog. Uh... yeah.”
You must give him a look since he stops his rant dead in his tracks, unusual for him. “Sure, what is it?” You reach out to take the box, realizing you’re still clogging up the doorway, cutting off any chance of actually inviting your brother inside. “Wait-- we should take this inside.”
He gives you playful fingerguns with his now empty hands and a smile on his face. A worried look brushes across his face for a moment but goes away as quick as it came, replaced easily with the smile from before. “Damn right we should. I’m supposed to assess the situation anyway, whatever that means.”
You raise an eyebrow at him, but still walk over to your couch, sitting gingerly on the edge of it while setting the box on the coffee table in front of you. Keeping your knife on you comes in handy for situations like this, so you unclip it from your pocket and flick it open. Dave swallows hard and you give him a lazy shrug, you’re not going to hurt him and he knows it but he can’t help but get tense. You know that, but you do need to open the package somehow since it’s covered in at least six layers of tape.
“Karkat,” Dave starts, coughing into his hand. He continues, “Karkat insisted on using so much tape, like I was gonna fuckin’ drop it on my flight over. Dork ass shit, right?”
“It’s from Karkat?” You ask him, keeping him busy while you make quick work of slicing through the layers of tape. Going faster is preferable because you can’t stand the fucking look on his face whenever you so much as hold a butterknife around him. “That’s nice of him. Should I be careful while I do this?”
“Uhh, well I don’t know, I guess don’t cut near the bottom since he put a-- whoops, I almost gave it away,” he leans back on the chair across from you, trying and failing spectacularly to look casual and unfazed by your actions. “Anyway, yeah.” Dave finishes, folding his hands into his lap while tapping his foot anxiously on the wooden floor of your apartment. He’s not great at acting casual, his true feelings more akin to an open book, which he must get from Roxy’s genepool.
Guilt fills your chest like the warm feeling of a glass Jake’s scotch melting over you in your belly. It threatens to consume you, but you don’t let it. You know deep down that you’re partially responsible for what happened to Dave. You know you are, no matter how much convincing he and Rose try to do and you’re sure that somehow Dave blames you as well. He’d never say it to your face, of course, but you know he thinks it.
Shaking the feeling off to the best of your ability, you open the box after putting your knife down. You make sure you close it as quietly as possible and your eyes never miss the relief that washes over Dave’s features whenever you put a knife down. You did this, you did this. You did this to him. Your mind screams at you. “Karkat made this?” you say more to yourself than as a question for Dave, despite this you know he’ll answer.
He nods, spine stiff and straight like someone shoved a steel pole into his spinal cords. Something about his posture reminds you of a puppet and you hate to see it on him. “Yeah, he spent forever readin’ this book Rose gave him and wouldn’t quit workin’ on it. Since you missed our last movie night, he didn’t have the chance to give it to ya,” he wrings his hands together before relaxing them again, tapping his fingers to an unknown beat on the curve of his knees. You wish you could observe him less, but you must know every facet of any situation you are in regardless of whether you’d like to or not.
It’s a washed out orange sweater, plain and tightly knit by hand. The sleeves are just a little too long, like you prefer them to be, and even the neck rides high into a sort of turtleneck shape just like you like. As you brush your fingers down the front, you can tell great care was taken into getting every stitch perfect and even the wool it was made with was perfectly chosen with you in mind. “Karkat made this,” you repeat, unable to mask the awe in your voice. You didn’t know that little shit cared about you so much, you should give him more credit since he makes your brother happy, after all.
Dave doesn’t hide his smile well, you feel a flush of embarrassment on your cheeks at just how much emotion you’re showing but you let the feeling pass. You need to learn to be more open with Dave since that’s how he prefers it. As well, you could afford to be a little more giving with how much you want to show to your friends and family. “Thank you,” you whisper the words so quietly you’re unsure if Dave hears it, but he must since his face breaks out into a full ass grin from ear to goddamn ear.
“It’s no problem. All I did for the thing was pick out the colour and buy the shit,” he relaxes and you can tell he means business with it this time. His legs come up to kick over the arm of the lounge chair as he sits in a way you can’t describe as anything but painfully Dave and horribly bisexual. You love your brother, you love every quirk of his personality and how much it mirrors and differs from your long dead guardian, Alpha Dave Strider. That guy and you never did meet, but you can gleam enough from the surviving recordings of his interviews, his movie cameos, and the letters in that dusty box by your bedside that he hand-wrote for you in thousand-year old faded ink.
“Hey,” you say before your brain can clamp down on it. What the hell are you doing?
Dave looks up at you from his amazement of whatever meme or text he’s looking at on his phone. You assume he’s talking to Karkat with how relaxed he seems. “Hmm?” He glances over at you in a pseudo-casual way.
You didn’t think this far ahead, highly odd for you. “I’m…,” you take a moment to look down at your hands, the movement not as laid back as you were hoping it’d make you look. “I’m sorry if I make you nervous sometimes. I know it’s my fault you’re messed up,” you tell him. Your eyes want to look up and gauge his reaction so badly, so you squeeze them shut behind your shades to bite down on the temptation. His eyes sear holes into your skin and you grit your teeth hard, hard enough to snap a metal pipe in half.
The sound of cloth shifting fills your ears and you feel his thumbs brush against your cheekbones suddenly, lifting your shades until they rest on the top of your work-mussed hair. You have to look at him now, he’s right there and you’re being childish by closing your fucking eyes. Ball the fuck up, Strider, what the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you goddamn owe Dave for everything your shard did to him? You owe him this much. You’re being a petulant little toddler right now so grow up and look at him like a man.
“You don’t do that,” his heavily calloused sword-wielding hands finally come away from your face and you’re able to stop having a fucking breakdown long enough to actually look at him. From here, you can see every little scar on his face, you remember every story he told you before Rose or Karkat or someone else eventually asks him to stop talking. The one closest to his eye is from when Bro slammed his head into the oven door and shattered it, slicing open what of his face he didn’t have the time to protect with his hands. The screamingly bright pink one on the bridge of his nose is from when Dave was young and your ectobiological equivalent thought it would toughen Dave up if he dropped it on his face while he slept. He didn’t dodge before it had nearly sliced half of his nose off in one quick swoop. Sloppily stitched skin folds at the Cupid’s bow on his lips are caused by--
A hot, sharp white-hot painful sensation takes over your cheek and you realize you’ve been staring at Dave in abject horror for too long. When you blink, Dave is holding his hand in pain out of the corner of your eyesight and your head is suddenly facing the door of your workshop and no longer staring at Dave. Your face burns with pain, a familiar feeling from the first time you sparred with your Brobot on a level a little too high even for you. Did… did Dave slap you?
He winces, still holding his hand and shaking it as if to shake off the pain. You know it doesn’t work like that, so you sigh audibly and walk over to him. His eyes quickly dart at you and he puts his hands up in surrender and starts scooting back toward the wall until his back is pressed against it as if to defend himself from attacks in his blind spot. Holy fuck, you didn’t think he was still this bad. “For what it’s worth,” he says so quickly that you’re sure he thinks you’re going to fight back, “I didn’t think I was gonna slap you that hard, it was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please just-- don’t.”
“Dave, I’m not going to hurt you,” you spread your arms out wide with your palms up so he knows you don’t have a weapon. You won’t hurt him, you know that. You’re at least one hundred percent sure of that, if not more. Just the thought of your hands on Dave in any way except for secret handshakes and to tap him on the shoulder feels disgusting. You’re not sure what the fuck you’re thinking, but you go with it since it doesn’t feel wrong. It just feels very not you, if you’re doing what you think you’re doing. Before you know it, your arms are wrapped around him and it feels… stilted.
It seems to take him a second to realize what you’re doing but despite this you feel his heart hammering faster than should be physically possible in his chest. Whether this is because of the binder he always wears despite not needing to (for what you assume is some kind of comfort thing) or because of his nervousness is up for debate. Dave eventually eases his muscles, not really hugging you back but not pushing you away. Y’know, you’ll take that ‘cuz you’re sure that’s all you’re going to get out of him since you’re the one being weird here. Now that you’re thinking about it, you’ve never observed him so much as sling an arm around his siblings and Karkat, sometimes rubbing the top of John’s head. He must not be one for public or semi-public displays of affection so you’re most likely making him feel watched.
You step back and so does he, giving you a crooked but thoroughly fake smile. “Not to judge you,” he says, breaking the tense silence, “but man, your hugs are ass. Huggin’ you feels like huggin’ a skeleton decoration at Halloween times for a goddamn stupid ass picture. You’re like huggin’ a box of sharp objects and skin all dressed up into a dude.” His eyes meet yours and he starts to laugh. “Oh my god, you emotionally constipated dumbass, you look like you’re going to shit your fuckin’ pants.”
Your cheeks pull up into a grin despite how much you want to throw yourself off of the roof of your shoddily-recovered house, patched up with the help of Dave and John’s efforts. You don’t deserve to smile and laugh with him, your brain insists but just this one, you shove it aside and fucking ignore it. Of course you deserve this, you worked hard for this and you didn’t do anything wrong this time. You might in the future, who the fuck knows, but at least for now you can ease the fuck up on your own goddamn bullshit. Slowly, you allow yourself to join with Dave, your brother, in the fun. It feels good, it feels weird, it feels wrong but… it feels nice. You let yourself have this because you earned the right to feel good about yourself for fucking once in your miserable life.
“So,” Dave puts his hand on your shoulder, still looking a little stiff, like he’s holding something back. You want to question it, but you want him to come to you first. “You better try the sweater on so I can tell Karkat if it fits or not. He’ll throw a shitfit if I left without makin’ you put it on.”
Right. The sweater, that’s what he came here for after all, so you should at least do that. You grab up the box and take it with you to try it on in the bathroom. Dave promises to wait on the couch and sits down, crossing his arms behind his head in an all-too theatrical way while he waits. After closing the door behind you, you easily pull it up and over your head, it fluffs your hair up so you smooth it back into place the best you can with just your bare hands and look in the mirror. It fits like a goddamn glove, you’d swear Karkat measured you when you weren’t looking and you do think of asking but remember that his other troll friend and Rose’s wife, Kanaya, took your measurements so that’s probably where he got that information.
As you lift the box to throw it away, however, you see a piece of paper flutter out of it where it falls onto the floor by the trash can. You toss the box and lean over to pick it up, noting how the fabric doesn’t pull up high enough to ride over your hips and silently shoot a thanks to Dave’s troll boyfriend for considering this. The paper is small and hastily written in Karkat’s sloppy handwriting, as if he included it at the last second. You unfold it, leaning your hip against the counter while you read it. Huh. So that’s why he actually came here today. No wonder he’s acting like such a nervous freak around you. He doesn’t know how to tell someone because he’s testing it out on you. You open the door and shove the paper into the pocket of your jeans, burning the words into the back of your eyelids in case he tries to avoid it more.
Dave is pacing around but stops when he sees you, not that it helps his image in any way. The shape of your hallway and a well-placed mirror lets you see him long before he does. “Hey, it fits. Nice, dude.” He pauses and you wait patiently to hear what he has to say. “Uh, before I go I have somethin’ to say,” he chews on his lip so hard that you can see it’s bleeding.
“What is it?” You ask him, training your face into an inquisitive state. You’re good at playing it cool, at least.
“I… I- I was… I got… I’m hoping you’d show me your robots?” He swallows, clenching his fist until his knuckles are white. Poor Dave.
“Congratulations,” you tell him before he has the chance to talk himself into even more of a pit than the one he’s currently making for himself.
His eyes go wide and his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline, “How the fuck did you know?”
You shrug easily, as if you didn’t need to be told what the fuck was going on second hand from Karkat himself. “Karkat ain’t known for making me shit so I already had an idea when you walked in the door. You’re getting married, aren’t you?”
He blushes so hard his whole face is alight with colour, “Yeah, he asked me and--”
Putting your hand up, you pat him on the shoulder, “Tell me the details at the party, man.” He squints at you, uh oh. You’ve given off more than you should, haven’t you? “Whoops. I shouldn’t have mentioned that part.”
“He told you!” Dave points an accusing finger at you, “That fuckin’ sneak, he put a note in there and told you first. Imma pinch him, I swear, dog.” Quickly, he waves his hand as if to wave off his thoughts, “Anyway, I gotta get goin’, we need to make reservations and shit. Plus I gotta tell Roxy that you ain’t dead in here since you ain’t answerin’ Mom’s calls.”
Well, at least he’s eased up since he got here. “I understand,” you nod your head. “I’ll get some sleep, since you pulled me away from my work anyway and I’ll give Roxy a call, I promise.” You put your fist up and he breaks into a grin, quickly bumping his fist against yours. He leaves in a flash, flying off into the sky toward his house near the Troll Kingdom.
Today, you think, you’ll let yourself have this moment. You’re not going to die anytime soon, since you’re immortal so it’d do you some good to ease off, if only today.