Chapter Text
You place an empty mug next to the others on the coffee table, the most recent sacrifice in your quest to appease sleeplessness. Not a wise move necessarily, but no one else is around to begrudge the choice. The distinct lack of other occupants makes the ever-present buzz of Skaian technology echo all the louder. It also means there’s nothing to distract you from the sensation of something slowly wresting control of your senses. Pins and needles propagate down your limbs, building in intensity until your hands completely dissolve into numb static. Your heart hammers in slow-motion, valiantly trying to push lead through your veins. It’s an endeavor made all the more taxing by the unequivocal fact that each one of your ribs is straining towards the others in an attempt to collapse your ribcage entirely. You try to swallow, and feel it campaign against the unseen hands that press your throat closed. It would be frightening, were it not so familiar.
It certainly used to be frightening, when you were younger. The sensation of having one’s body suddenly hijacked by mysterious, foreign forces should terrify even the most precocious of children. But with repetition the mystery wore thin, and distress gave way to annoyance. The flood of cortisol and adrenaline is now too routine to even do you the favor of being interesting, much less inspire the excitement of fear. Of course, you can’t actually put a stop to it, as like many other regrettable elements of the human psyche, logic and clarity of thought plays no part in the experience. Your panic attacks—while still merciless in their occurrence—are now divorced from any genuine panic, and as such you can’t even properly indulge in a jaunt of emotional turbulence while your corporeal form takes a vacation from being useful.
Your knowledge of the psychological leaves you aware that these symptoms can be held at bay with a variety of pharmaceuticals, but neither you nor your compatriots have attempted to alchemize any substances of a psychiatric nature. Even faced with the meteor’s unrelenting torrent of boredom, accidentally making meth doesn’t seem like a worthy pastime.
So, like usual, you sprawl on the couch and wait it out. The resolute tedium of the situation does not hasten its conclusion. Without permission, your breath leaves you as a stuttering sigh.
Memories come to your mind unbidden—which you don’t appreciate in the best of circumstances—of past episodes. Hands numb, heart racing, throat closed, always the same. But you also remember being cocooned in warm arms, and gin-laced, pitying banalities playing in your ears as your mother would cup your small, frozen hands in her own. You remember chipped nail polish on nails bitten down to the quick.
You try not to pity your younger self for letting such a transparent performance take you in. You try not to pity your present self for still treasuring the memory.
You think about Kanaya. You know that she knows this happens. You wish she didn’t. This is partially due to your awareness—courtesy of Karkat's many tirades on the subject—of the peculiar hangups trolls have about intermingling amorous attraction and sympathy. However the majority of your regret is sourced from the limited incidents where Kanaya did try to offer a hand in comfort anyway, and you seized up like an unruly prisoner on the electric chair. Something about that particular blend of hormones makes for one hell of a Molotov cocktail.
Your solitary imprisonment within your own leaden body is interrupted by the sound of someone padding into the room. The soft muttering that accompanies those footfalls gives away the interloper’s identity—your ecto-brother is rustling about in the kitchen. Prefacing the term “brother” with “ecto” is perhaps unnecessary, but it does help skirt around some of the enduring weirdness of that particular revelation. You hold onto hope that he’s oblivious enough to not notice your catatonic form on the couch. The rustling pauses, and the footfalls come closer.
He’s stopped muttering under his breath, now standing not-quite in front of the couch and looking at you in awkward silence. Well, probably looking at you. The perennial sunglasses do leave open the possibility that he is not in fact looking at you, but you dismiss the possibility as unlikely. There’s no universe in which you’d be so lucky.
Still stripped of words, you aim to school your features into something opaque enough that you can pretend you’ve maintained the upper hand in this surprise encounter, and abstain from considering how the tremor in your actual hands may impact the effect. You do take note that one of his hands is surreptitiously occupied with a plastic stress cube, which you had alchemized and left on his desk after Karkat systematically launched each and every clicky pen into the void during a particularly spectacular tantrum. Not your most subtle move. In defiance of experience, you open your mouth to say something snarky.
The invisible hands tighten down a little harder on your throat, and you smother a strangled cough instead. The trite pain of choking on your own spit capitulates to the thoroughly novel discomfort you feel at seeing Dave’s pale eyebrows twitch in response to the sound. In flagrant abrogation of the ordinances by which you interact with each other he quietly joins you on the couch, leaving a carefully apportioned stretch of vacant cushion. You notice the hand closest to you do a little ballet of hesitation, insinuating but not committing to action. And you remember that same motion being one of the last things you saw right before dying in a fiery explosion the size of two universes. A bark of what might have been laughter wrests itself from your throat, and with that, you give up. You cajole your frozen body to flop sideways, and land its dead weight on your brother.
“Oh shit!” he says. It seems you’ve surprised him, one point to Rose.
“Ok, yeah we, we’re doing this,” Dave begins—yes, there he goes, truly there's no telling where this new monologue will lead. “Yeah dog we’re making it happen—”
He wrestles his arm out from where you have it pinned, and places it around your shoulders. He kicks his feet up on the table on the coffee table—dodging the multitude of mugs—and revises his posture, presumably to settle your weight in a less uncomfortable fashion. In it for the long haul then, how gracious. His other arm joins the first, and you are being hugged. He continues talking, having been shaken out of whatever made him stop in the first place. The vibrations of it buzz in your chest.
You don’t know how much time passes, only that during it your breathing smooths and your limbs regain sensation. Also during that time, Dave seems to have remembered that he usually talks with his hands. While the gestures are muted by an armful of ecto-sibling, the logistics of the situation still dictate that every so often one of his elbows tries to occupy the same space that you do. You don’t point it out. The stars are aligned in a very particular fashion, and you are not yet interested in nudging them out of place. Instead, you observe quietly. With the oft-bemoaned clarity of hindsight, you realize Dave’s hands look similar to your own, though more calloused. You notice his nails are bitten down to the quick, and wonder if he would acquiesce to a manicure in the name of irony.
And then you think, "Oh shit," to quote a friend.
You feel the heat running down your face before you feel the moisture. Alright, well, you had a good run. Time to knock these stars out of alignment.