Chapter Text
You used to think you had a lot of things in common with Dave. Even before you knew he was your brother, you knew something about him matched something in you. Otherwise, you wouldn't have spent so much time tumbling over each other in waterfalls of absurdist language. You wouldn't have been able to share- and shame- each other's creative pursuits. You wouldn't have had such ridiculously involved rap battles.
Lately, though, you're beginning to realize that it's not a common foundation that provides your similarities. Rather, it's convergence. Totally different forces coming together to produce the same end result.
Take language, for instance. Your words are selected with precision. They are fine tipped needles, intended to puncture, serge or seam. Your metaphors are constructed with delicate care, honed over a lifetime of trashy novels and wholly satisfying, if nutritionally void, fanfiction. But, more than that, you speak for other people. You react, and redesign, and move your words to match them.
His way of speaking is misleadingly abrupt, underneath the Texan drawl. He speaks in fragments, but so many of them that they make an illusion of a desperate, unstoppable flow. If you had your books, you would probably find abridged psychological studies confirming your suspicions that he was silenced often as a child. He has a deep seated need to hear himself speak to whatever his labyrinthine treatise is calling fruition that day, as if once he stops he'll never be given another chance to finish. If other people have things they wish to say in the mean time, he finds them so irrelevant that, you think, he probably doesn't find them at all.
You've met him for the first time twice. You don't let yourself think about that overlap too much, because the way the memories match and differ is nauseating, and you'd like to keep the 'inability to deal with personal problems leading to mass homicide' thing a wholly trollish construct. Even with the benefit of dueling first impressions, though, you never actually thought of him as alien. You were accustomed to being the odd one out, back home, and you thought you sensed the same thing in him. After all, he had created a persona for the consumption of the masses, not too different from your spooky goth one. His posture was an artfully constructed rendering of a slouch. A mathematically precise rendition of every after-school TV special Cool Guy. His sunglasses and expressionless face only added to that impression. Even his voice was a parody of coolness, with his flat tones. The only audible markers of emotion he ever seems to give up, unless he's gone into a complete fit of hysterics again, come from speed rather than tone. When he's calm, he actually finishes his sentences instead of biting off loosely connected phrases.
The conclusion? He was obviously trying too hard to seek approval from his classmates, maybe his family. A wholly human desire that you knew entirely too well.
That's what you thought. And, in a way, you still think it. But, watching him flirt or befriend or whatever these jam sessions are with an actual alien, you realize you probably didn't go far enough.
At first, of course, you never noticed. It was a bizarre situation for everyone involved. If anything, Dave handled it the best.
He never missed a beat. He behaved with them exactly the way he behaved with you, John and Jade. And then, quicker than you ever could have done it yourself, he started behaving like they did around each other. He imitated their gestures, used their phrases. He even changed the way he spoke, adopting the cadence of not-quite-human that affected their language even with whatever paradox space was doing to ensure you all spoke something comprehensible to each other.
He had always spoken like he was one step short of choking, or possibly exploding from the pressure, and becoming some kind of pointillist impression of language. But suddenly, that had become eminently useful. Coming from such different worlds, just speaking the same artificially smoothed over language wasn't nearly enough. There were lost nuances, words that obviously didn't translate at all, becoming incomprehensible mashes of nonsense syllables. But, Dave still had that need to explain every sentence with six others. And that sketched out concepts of the untranslatable, and solved at least as many idiomatic problems as it created.
For the first time in your two lives, you had believed his artificially cool persona. He had seemed, if not natural, then at least comfortable in that bizarre circumstance. And it made you wonder- you still wonder even now- just how far that facade actually runs.
No one should be that capable of assuming the normalcy of alien social and cultural cues. Not without practice. But there he was, practically a utopian sci fi expy. And where had he picked up the ability to parse the wildly unusual as utterly mundane?
You don't let yourself think about that question too hard. You don't have the text books necessary to figure it out, and in truth it makes your teeth ache in a way you have come to associate with Improperly Defying Your Aspect. But it's better than actually listening to the pair of them. They've claimed half of a dining table, with one of Dave's smaller turntables spread out over it, and you're the only other person who's still even pretending to consider the combination dining room and nutrition block a public space instead of yet another victim to the roving field of second hand privacy that seems to follow them around like a cloud these days.
“Just fucking let me do it you insipid, twitchy excuse for an 'artiste'.”
“Ah-ah-ah. These records are a limited commodity. We don't want your angry little kitty claws fucking 'em up for keeps.”
“I'll fuck you up for keeps, who the fuck still thinks 'Karkat is a meowbeast' jokes are even funny? What sweep do you think this is?”
Dave swats Karkat's horns with a loosely curled fist and makes the flattest, least impressive attempt at a 'meow' you have ever heard in your life. And given your childhood, you are a veritable connoisseur of terrible cat impressions. Karkat shoves back hard enough that he actually grunts with the effort, and Dave slides almost a foot down the bench, laughing in two sharp bursts of air. That just winds Karkat up further, to the point that he starts growling.
Your needles slip at that, a loop of yarn hanging morose and unloved from the rest of the misshapen gloves you're working on. It's hard to make them without a pattern, but you have plenty of time left for practice.
You don't actually collect the loop up again. The hair on the back of your neck is prickling uncomfortably. You aren't afraid of Karkat: you are literally a God and he's about the size of a fourth grader with pretensions. But, if a human were making that sort of noise, it would be a warning. And if it were any other troll, it would be more of a notification that it was already far too late, and you were now destined to die horribly.
Dave just scoots back towards him and laughs again, three perfectly enunciated 'hah's. And, quick enough that you would almost call temporal shenanigans on it, he hauls a still guttering Karkat onto his lap. As you are literally a God, you know that if Karkat tore out your intestines with his bare claws for assaulting his personage in that manner, you wouldn't have so much as a scar. Dave, however, doesn't even get a wound for the trouble. He just wraps himself around Karkat until the growls fade into grumbles. When the total absence of concern has become a total absence of danger, he drapes his arms over Karkat's shoulders, and picks up Karkat's wrists, guiding his hands with surreal delicacy onto the turntable.
You eye the dropped loop of yarn for a moment, and you can feel yourself frowning as if it's cotton-wool blend has somehow gravely insulted you. But it's hardly the gloves' fault that your brother has no sense of shame, and that his 'not my boyfriend' is hardly any better. You slide your needles through the unfinished work to lock it against unraveling, and then the entire mess disappears into your sylladex.
It's most assuredly time for you to excuse yourself.
The screechy racket of Karkat's fumbling claws and general failure to pick up a beat follows you down the corridor.