Chapter Text
Your name is Dirk Strider, and you made a promise when you were three years old to share everything with your brother Dave.
You will never forget. It was snack time at the home where the two of you grew up. The snack of choice that day was the last of the double-stuffed Oreos, and there wasn’t enough to go around. You got one. Your bro didn’t.
The hurt that flashed across his face went straight to your young heart. It was only there for a second, and thank fuck for that, ‘cause otherwise you might have died from a severe cardiac infarction. He hid it well after the initial shock, just like you’d taught him. He wasn’t as good at hiding his emotions as you were. In fact, he never really would be. But you were proud of him for putting on a good act, not letting them know they got to him. And they really did think he ‘wasn’t that into Oreos anyway.’ But you know everything there is to know about Dave Strider, including the fact that Dave fucking loves Oreos.
The look on his face when you handed him half of the Oreo you just crushed in two was something you could remember clear as day decades later. It hit your heart harder than a runaway freight train. Struck dumb, that’s what you were. You completely forgot about your own share of the Oreo.
Dave eventually got sick of you staring and shoved you aside to go get some milk. But he came back. Any other day, he might have wandered off to screw with the radio settings on the boombox or ironically play dolls and house in the play-kitchen corner. Went and got himself some breathing air, in other words. Even the best of bros need their elbow room.
But this time he came back. This time he played with you for the rest of the day, and this time you didn’t need brotherly breathing room either. It was more than simple gratitude and you both knew it. It was the knowledge that you’d always be there for him, even for the stupidly small stuff like snack time. You knew then nothing was ever going to be more important to you than him, and you felt so certain that he realized it just like you did. The bond between you was tangible that moment, clearer then in the simplicity of childhood than it would be again for years.
For the rest of your life, you will always come back to this memory as the definition of love.
-
Your name is Dave Strider, and when you were five years old you swore to protect your brother Dirk from the rest of the world.
Dirk isn’t like other people.
It’s more than just how cool he is, or all the weird things he likes. It’s more than the way he speaks or acts. There’s something about Dirk, something that goes right down to the core of him, that is just different.
The adults at the home used words like “stubborn,” “strong-willed,” and “independent.” They also used words like “strange,” “weird,” and “wrong” when they thought no little ears were around to listen. The other kids had their own words, some of which were meaner and most of which they were too afraid to voice after the first couple of times Dirk proved just how even he could get with his enemies.
The worst part was always that you knew they were right. Not about Dirk being “freaky” and “odd,” but about him being different. Dirk was different. Despite how much you looked alike and how much you tried to act like him, there was always that something about him that made you feel more like one of them than one of us.
It hurt. It hurt when you didn’t understand. Sometimes you felt like he was a thousand miles away, across an ocean you were too weak to swim, and you hated how much it hurt.
The other kids were always talking about getting adopted and having a “real” home and family. You never really got it. Probably because, you realize when you’re older, you always knew that Dirk was your home and your family, even before you realized that most kids had parents and didn’t live in homes like yours. He’s where you belong, and it’s more than just your shared white hair and reddish eyes.
But then he’d go off into that secret, different place inside him that you couldn’t understand any better than the others, and you’d know what the other kids felt. It hurt to feel so empty.
The other kids didn’t see Dirk like you did. Where you saw someone cooler than glacial ice with a mind twice as sharp, they saw a weirdo. Dirk didn’t fake it. For all that he was ironically insincere, he never bothered to play the social game. He didn’t act the way you were supposed to act. He didn’t say the things you were supposed to say. It was like he couldn’t be bothered to act like a normal human being.
Which was fine with Dave. As far as he was concerned, every minute Dirk wasted acting like someone other than himself was just one less minute he was spending being the coolest guy in the universe.
But sometimes it made things harder for you both. Mostly him, but sometimes you too.
They didn’t like him. Not the adults, not the other kids, and especially not the moms and dads who came to adopt. They didn’t get him. That was their loss, as far as you were concerned.
Except when it was your loss. Like when he couldn’t just do what they wanted for five minutes to get what he wanted, or when he just wouldn’t let things go. You tried explaining it to him, that if he’d just play by the rules it would all go so much easier. It’s not like it mattered. It was just acting, just playing a role to get what you wanted. It was just doing things the way other people did them. It wouldn’t mean anything if he just followed along to get what he wanted.
Dirk didn’t get it. He wouldn’t do it. Looking back, you think maybe it was because he couldn’t. But back then it was so infuriating. It came so easily to you, being a part of the crowd and playing the people around you like a DJ’s sweet, golden fingers play across his turntables. It was impossible to think that there was something you were better at than he was. He was better than you at everything. You learned from him, not the other way around. It was inconceivable that there was something Dirk couldn’t do or didn’t understand. Therefore, everybody else had to be right. He was just being stubborn. All those times that the different inside of him wasn’t obvious enough for you to see, that’s what you assumed. Sometimes it made you furious. You’d live to regret that.
Those regrets started when you were five years old. Almost six, in fact. Dirk was watching one of his favorite TV shows, My Little Pony. You were watching it with him, ironically. You had just begun considering that maybe Dirk’s enjoyment of the show wasn’t as ironic as yours. He collected the McDonald’s pony toys. He even brushed their fake, plastic tail hair as he watched. You had also considered that maybe Dirk had discovered a new level of irony that was reached by being so sincere that it somehow came full-circle onto itself and became ironic again. The concept was both mind-boggling and infuriating. You didn’t get it, but you couldn’t admit that you didn’t get it. So, all other options being impossibly uncool, you decided to fake it. This was the beginning of a long-standing habit.
Some kid you don’t even remember now said something you can’t recall to Dirk right in the last half of the show. Something about Dirk’s favorite pony, you remember that much. You rolled your eyes at the comment, forever ironically amused, just like Dirk taught you to be, at just how uncool some people are. You don’t even bother turning around. Dirk will take care of it, you knew, just like he always does. Besides, not like it was directed at you.
Dirk gets up, just like you expect. He drops his pony in your lap, which you know is an unspoken command to actually pay attention to the show so you can fill him in later.
You keep your eyes glued to the screen, knowing from experience how intensely he’s going to grill you on the details. You are oblivious to everything else around you right up to the point where you hear a scream.
You turn in time to see the offender drop to her knees. Blood spreads across her shirt faster than you see it drop in the dim light of the TV room, like it’s appearing by magic. The kid’s fingers are coated. It’s on the floor. She’s crying the kind of cry that’s mostly screams, uneven breaths, and whimpers.
Then Dirk kicks her. She falls backwards onto her back, and you swear you can hear her head hit the wood.
“Shut up or leave,” Dirk orders in the same voice he’d tell you to get him a soda or that he was going outside. In his only voice, because unlike everyone else, Dirk only has one.
The kid scrambles to her feet and runs away. You almost expect Dirk to follow her, but he doesn’t. He’s satisfied. He walks, perfectly relaxed in the strange way that he always is after a fight. Like none of it matters anymore.
He sits down beside you, even though that’s not where he was sitting before. He takes the pony out of your lap and readies the little brush for its hair.
“Tell me,” he says, and for a moment you honestly have no clue what he means.
Dirk shouldn’t have done that. You don’t just do that. You don’t just hit people for making fun of a TV show. And even if you do, you don’t make them bleed. You don’t hit them again when they’re already crying.
But Dirk did. And he’s smarter than you. Dirk knows everything about everything. So it has to be OK. Right?
You launch into a shoddy explanation of what you saw in the few seconds he was gone. There’s not much to tell, but you only remember half of what you should. The rest was knocked out of your brain by the shock. Fortunately, Dirk silences you before you even get to the first ‘um…’
You’re actually surprised when the adults come and drag Dirk out of the room. He resists. They’re showing the preview for next week’s episode. He has to see it, and he fights up to the exact point that it ends. After that, he comes willingly. Really, sometimes you wonder why they bother making things so difficult.
You try to follow, but they won’t let you. You hate when they take him away from you, but you hide it. Just like he taught you to. You also find a way to listen on the other side of the wall, your ear pressed to the window, just like he taught you.
You can’t make out the words well, just the tone of voice. Dirk isn’t saying much. The adult talking to him goes from stern to questioning. You hear a question you can’t make out trail off into silence. Dirk’s not answering this one. The question is voiced again, and again it’s met with silence. The third time, the voice is yelling. He’s threatening Dirk, and the threats come through the window loud enough for you to hear. You’re not too worried. Not until you hear the final part.
“Is this funny to you, young man?”
Oh, shit. You suddenly understand everything that’s going on behind that door without needing to see. Dirk’s doing one of his things. One of those things that nobody gets because they’re just so fucking weird.
He’s laughing. In the face of what is most likely the most dangerous force in your young existence, Dirk Strider is laughing. Or at least smirking. Maybe giggling.
You want to scream through the window and tell him to stop, even though you know he can’t. He told you that once. It’s one of the few, precious secrets he’s trusted you with. Sometimes when shit gets too real for even him to handle, he just… breaks a little. His pokerface breaks, and what leaks out has nothing to do with what he’s feeling doing and everything to do with Dirk being completely out of control.
Dirk knows everything. He knows how everything should be. Only sometimes he doesn’t know everything and things aren’t how they should be. That’s what happens most of the time when he loses his cool. He gets as furious as a hurricane. Even the adults can’t stop him. You’ve pretty much accepted that as just another Dirk-ism, even if the adults haven’t.
The times like this, though, you just don’t get. But you know what it means. It means Dirk is scared. It means that after you hear the sound of the slap, the laughter just gets louder.
You turn and run when you hear someone shout at you. You don’t see him again until dinner, where of course he doesn’t talk. Back in your shared room, you get him to give you the details.
“What do you think happened? I’m in trouble.”
“How bad?” you ask. You can see the mark on his face. It’s all you can think about.
“Grounded for two weeks. Got to talk to some people,” he mumbles like he doesn’t care. Maybe he doesn’t. “Where’s Rainbow Dash? Did you get her?”
You inform him that you put his precious McDonald’s pony is right where he always keeps it, regardless of the fact that he’s already found it by the time you get the words out. And you figure that’s the end of it.
It’s not.
You figured the grounding was the actual punishment, but you learn quickly, quicker than Dirk does, that the “some people” he’s got to talk to are a much more serious concern.
At first he’s cagey about what’s going on in the meetings. All he’ll say is they ask him a lot of weird questions and try to make him talk about stuff. He doesn’t understand what’s going on any more than you do, which scares you.
You press him harder as the meetings continue. He opens up easier than you would have expected.
“You’re seeing a shrink,” you blurt out after you hear only a couple of the questions.
“Seems like it,” he says. You can tell he’s embarrassed even through his flat tone. “Not like I have much of a choice.”
Only the bad kids have to see shrinks specially like this. The ones that nobody wants, even the home. You don’t say it. You don’t have to.
You drill Dirk as hard as you dare, getting every last bit of information you can on him. Sometimes making the adults back off was as easy as saying the right thing at the right time. Reform, and all that bullshit.
The trouble is, Dirk isn’t saying the right things. The questions, which seem so obvious and simple to you, completely confound him. He’s not playing ball. He’s going to lose this war. And maybe there’s nothing you can do about it. Not this time.
It is in that moment that you realize that Dirk Strider needs your protection. There are things Dirk can’t do. People just don’t get him, and he’s incapable of making himself understood. He’s you’re brother. He’s the coolest guy you know. But he’s also different in a way that nobody seems to understand. You don’t even understand it, but you’re the closest he’s got. You can’t fuck up like this again.
You swear then and there that no matter what the future brings, you are going to stand stalwart between your brother and the world.
-
Your name is Dirk Strider, and you are considering the various merits and potential hazards of building a robotic duplicate of yourself.
There are the obvious rewards, like having a fucking roboclone of yourself. The only thing cooler than Dirk Strider would be two Dirk Striders. Not to mention the more practical benefits. You are a very busy guy. It’d be nice to have a helping hand (or twelve) around to take some of the load off. And, if you’re in one of your particularly sentimental moods, you guess it would also be nice to have someone like you around.
But then there are the obvious downsides, like having a fucking roboclone of yourself. The only person who would be better at getting under your skin than Dave would be you. Not to mention the more practical drawbacks. You know a metric fuckton about robots. It would be the biggest pain in the ass just to locate the parts, not to mention a reliable power source. And, if you’re in one of your particularly realistic moods, it is pretty much impossible to create a program that perfectly imitates human behavior, much less a specific human’s behavior.
You try not to think too hard about that last part. You plan and theorize the impossible because… because it’s nice, OK? It’s hard being one-of-a-kind. It’s hard, and no one understands. Not even Dave. He gives you these looks every time you do something even remotely outside the bounds of the mundane. You can see it clear through his shades, even the painfully cliché aviators that he’s started wearing instead of your matching pair.
You’ve always known that in some sense you were different from all the other kids around, but it’s only recently that it’s started to seem like a bad thing. You have even unironically collected several songs which make mention of the phrase “alone in a crowd.” Alright, fine. You have actually delved through every dark corner of the internet to comprise a full compendium of every song produced in the last century that even vaguely referenced the feeling of loneliness. (Loneliness as did NOT relate to romantic love in any way, shape, form, or fashion. You had to draw the line somewhere.) It has been a veritable challenge convincing Dave that you weren’t succumbing to teenage melodrama bullshit, because you are in fact succumbing to teenage melodrama bullshit.
The game’s changed. Somehow, as if on divine or cosmic cue, the whole world has shifted right under your feet. You don’t know when it started, but you know you were painfully slow on the uptake. And now you’re left behind in some way you can’t even name, much less fix. Even Dave is different. You think that maybe you’re different now too. You think maybe you hate that more than anything.
Dave’s been in the room at least five minutes already, trying to get your attention in that particularly obtuse way of his. You keep meaning to tell him that acting like he has absolutely no interest in you at all or how much of his precious time you’re wasting when really he’s on goddamn pins and needles waiting for your attention really isn’t ironic, just passive as fuck. You’ve never had the heart to go through with it though. He’s your little bro, and you can’t bring yourself to take him down a notch unnecessarily. He’d take it harder than you’d mean it. You know he would. It’s kind of cute, actually, how seriously he takes the little things.
But if you’re resolved not to say anything, you’re left in with the conversational ball dropped dead in your court. There is not even the threat of bounce left in that ball, by which you mean that getting the conversation (that’s going to happen regardless of whether you want it or not, thanks to Dave be a persistent little bastard) started up again is going to be a real pain in the ass. It always is.
You take a moment to get a solid handle on the frustration that rises up the moment you give in and shove your robo-plans to the back of your mind. When you’re certain you can safely maintain the patented Strider cool, you push back your desk chair. By the time Dave turns his head away from the window he was so pointedly observing, you’re already falling across his lap.
“Pay attention to me,” you demand, savoring the irony you’re sure he doesn’t catch as you settle your arms around his neck. If he even thinks about touching your face or your shades you are going to pull every hair on the nape of his neck. You are not even kidding.
“Jegus, bro. Needy much?” he says, rolling his eyes even as his hand instinctively goes to balance you.
“Like your whole reason for coming up here wasn’t to shower me with attention.”
“Like the whole world revolves around you.”
“Like your whole world doesn’t.”
“Like you’re actually that cool.”
“Like you even know what cool is.”
“Like you aren’t spewing bullshit every time you call something ironic.”
“Like I’m incapable of redefining ironic.”
Dave seemingly has little to say to that. Or maybe he’s just sick of you crushing him. He tries to stand up and dump you, but you throw your arms and legs around him, giving him the option of getting dragged down with you or acquiescing. He smartly chooses to plop his ass back in place. You let go a moment before impact, so you crash down more on the couch than on him.
“So, bro,” you push deliberately onward, “what’s up?”
“What, a guy’s got to have some kind of hidden agenda to get some face-time with his big bro?”
You snort and settle back on the couch, making a show of getting comfortable. As far as you’re concerned, you did your part. You put the ball back into play. It’s in his court now, and you’re not going to drag it back over the net just because that’s how he wants you to play. If he wants to talk, then he’d damn well better get started. You intentionally pin one of his arms down as you stretch your legs across his lap, just to irritate him.
The silence drags on for what’s a nice, couchy moment for you (spent lapsing back into your robo-musings), but it’s obviously too much for him to handle.
“Alright, you caught me. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“That took less time than I was expecting.”
“Jegus, give a guy a break, would you? It’s not every day you get life-altering news, Dirk,” he says, rolling his eyes. You hate it when he calls you by name, and he knows it.
“The whole point, Dave,” you say, putting a matching emphasis on his name, “is to keep people from knowing every little thought going on behind that thick skull of yours. Anybody can walk around slack-jawed and dull-eyed when they’ve got nothing going on.”
“Yeah, well maybe I don’t want to keep the whole goddamn world behind a steel wall all the time,” he snaps, suddenly irritable. He jerks his arm out from under your leg and shoves you off him. “Now will you shove your bullshit life mantra up your ass for a second and listen to me?”
You pull your legs back into your own personal area, far over on the other side of the couch. You can still feel the almost-electric burn where his hands touched your bare skin. You resist the urge to rub at it.
“Alright, bro, you’ve got my full attention. What’s this life-altering news?”
You catch his eyes flicker over to the doorway. Not that you can actually see his eyes through his shades. What you catch is subtler, the way his eyebrows twitch slightly and the minute muscles around his eyes move under his skin.
“Nobody’s around, bro,” you assure him. You always know when someone’s around. You always catch the little noises and movements they make. You have never been able to understand how Dave can miss such obvious stuff. You are convinced it is because he’s constantly wrapped up in his own little dramas. The kid’s constantly worried about other people: what they’re thinking, what they’re doing. And not just that, but what they’re thinking about what he’s doing. That’s Dave’s problem, you think. He’s insecure.
“Bro,” he says, leaning in and looking about half a second away from exploding, “we’re leaving this shithole once and for all.”
~
Your name is Dave Strider, and you are moving into your first adoptive home.
Ever since some bullshit incident when you were just a little tyke, your bro has been classified as “hard to place.” You’ve heard a couple of pop-psychology labels thrown at him over the years (oppositional-defiant, OCD, bipolar, sociopath, ADD, ADHD, gifted-but-underachieving, psychotic, schitzo), but none of them have stuck. Mainly because the guy personally pushing for a psycho disorder labels got mysteriously transferred after you convinced Dirk to tell the shrink about the time that son of a bitch hit him.
That was the first time you managed to protect your big bro, and it hasn’t been the last. Dirk’s otherness hasn’t faded with time. If anything, it’s intensified. Or maybe your understanding of it has just intensified. You can make patterns of it now. There are all these different situations that always come back to the same basic weakness. Weaknesses, you guess, because it’s not all the same thing. You don’t really have a clue what you’re talking about, seeing as you’re not a goddamn psychologist or brain surgeon or whatever the fuck he needs, but at least you’re trying. Trying being much more than you can say anyone else in this fat trashy world has done for him.
And yeah, sure, sometimes it’s a pretty shitty job. Like when he gives you shit for it, in particular. But somebody’s got to do it, and you’re all he’s got. And, well, he’s all you’ve got too. There’s an element of selfishness to your pseudo-chivalry. If he gets taken away because he does something you don’t stop…
You don’t have to worry about the what-if’s anymore, because as you clearly have already established, you and your bro are getting the fuck out of Dodge, by which you mean you are getting adopted. Sort of, anyway. Blah, blah, adoptive process. Whatever. So not important. In fact, it is the least important thing you could be thinking of at a time like this because you are honest to god going to live with John Egbert and his dad. This is seriously a thing that is happening. You could not possibly be more serious about this if you tried. Well, maybe you could stop completely spazzing out about the fact that you are going to be living in an actual fucking family house in less than a week, but you’re not sure you’re capable. Not that you care, because you’re going to live with John! Just… so cool. Life is so cool.
What’s not cool is how utterly unpsyched your bro Dirk seems about this massive life change. You swear to Christ he’s been dragging his feet all morning.
“Look, just put the goddamn pony in the goddamn box,” you finally snap. You’re sitting on the corner of his bed, jiggling your foot at ninety miles per hour. You’ve been hovering. Of course you’ve been hovering. You are incapable of doing anything but hovering. You had all your shit packed and parceled three days ago. You wish (and not for the first time), that you could just skip this part and go straight to the moment where you walk through the front door of your new home for the first time.
Dirk shoots you a dirty look over the top of the box he’s meticulously packing. He doesn’t bother explaining (again) the importance of carefully wrapping anything that could possibly be demolished by a nuclear strike in several layers of newspaper. You suppose you should count yourself lucky.
“Look, just carry the stupid box yourself. That way you don’t have to worry about your shit getting wrecked.”
It’s not the first polite suggestion you’ve made. It’s not even the first time you’ve made that suggestion.
The corner of his mouth twitches in what you’re certain is a thinly-veiled expression of his frustration. But that doesn’t stop you any more than the other hundred subtle suggestions that you’re getting under his skin. Hell, frustrating him is half of the reason you’re here. (The other half being you’ve got absolutely nothing better to be doing except waiting.)
“I am not risking my girls,” he says, slow and even and practiced thanks to the hundred thousand times he’s said it before.
“It’s not like you’re protecting them from everything anyway. What if we get into a wreck and the car catches on fire? Your newspaper won’t protect them then. In fact, it will probably only make things worse, seeing as newspaper’s flammable.”
You feel the air rush past your face long, long before you hear the crash against the wall.
“Get out.”
The dictionary bounces off the wall behind you and across the bed. You turn, wide eyed, and survey the damage. The wall’s got a nice, new dent to match the dozen others, and the old dictionary practically exploded. You didn’t even see him move.
“Jesus!”
You jump a foot into the air when you realize Dirk’s now standing right in front of you.
“Get out,” he repeats.
When you don’t move fast enough, he grabs you by the arm and pulls. You’re thrown out on your ass just as quickly and easily as the unfortunate dictionary. He’s got the door slammed and locked behind you before you can even regain your footing.
You’re nanoseconds away from giving the door a nice kick and round of swears when you hear more bumping and thumping from inside. From the sounds of it, Dirk’s adding yet another dozen wounds to his already very scarred wall. You almost feel bad for setting him off. But not really. The bastard deserves to be rushed. You swear to Christ, sometimes his whole purpose in life is to be as difficult as humanly possible.
But you decide it’s in your best interest not to press the issue any further. You’d really rather not have a black eye or busted lip when you’re trying to make your first son-ly impression on Mr. Egbert. You have a father figure to impress now.
Fuck, that is so weird to think about.
Your own empty room is already being taken over by its new resident. You slink off to the TV room, hoping to waste… however long it is before the Egbert’s arrive. The clock on the wall says you’ve still got four hours to go. Four fucking hours.
And, as luck would have it, it’s Brony time.
~
Your name is Dirk Strider, and you are forcing yourself to eat a family dinner. This is one of the hardest things you have ever done.
The man at the head of the table you are supposed to call “Dad.” He has a name, but you keep forgetting it. Dave elbows you every time you call him Mr. Egbert and John quietly reassures you that it’s OK to think of him as your Dad too. You don’t know how to explain to them that you don’t know how to think of anyone as your Dad, much less this picture-perfect 50’s father who looks down on you over the edge of his pipe.
You’ve got a new room upstairs you share with Dave. It’s Jane’s old room. The walls are all a pastel blue. That you don’t mind so much. You’ve spent the past two weeks trying to arrange your things, but you still find yourself sifting though boxes and rooting around in the bottom of the closet to find what you’re looking for. You are constantly rearranging, which you admit is probably part of the problem, but you can’t stop. Nothing looks right. This is probably due to the fact that you keep trying to turn your new room into your old room. Even the light looks wrong, refracted off the Jane blue walls. You know this, but you can’t stop, no matter how stupid you keep telling yourself this all is.
Dave sits beside John every time you eat together. Dave sits beside John even when you are not eating. The Egbert’s ever so subtly implied that your place was between Jane and “Dad,” who sat at the head of the table. Dave’s spot is directly across from yours. You think they’re trying to promote family bonding through osmosis. The high school kids on one side, middle school on the other. Old sandwiched between new. Adopted siblings sandwiched in between the natural born Egbert’s. You feel the walls closing in on you every time you sit down.
“Dad” asks for his children to please hold hands, like he does before every meal. Yesterday, you even had to go to church. That was an Egbert family ritual you were happy to be left out of the first week you were here, but now it looks like that was just a temporary, polite reprieve. You dressed up nice and sat for a full hour (and them some) in a hard-backed pew. You fought the urge to clamp your hands over your ears at each clinking ping of the ancient piano’s upper register. You spend so much time clenching your jaw shut these days that you have a permanent headache. You can’t sleep. You’re tired.
Dave eagerly grabs a hold of the Egbert’s hands, “Dad” on his left and John on his right. Dave is their new puppy, excited and eager to please. You are not a puppy.
Holding Jane’s hand was almost OK. You knew Jane from school. You had even given her a few choice high-fives over the years when she pulled off a particularly cool prank on a particularly deserving tool or (more frequently) when she put her choice deduction skills to the test and unraveled a radical mystery. She even bakes you a cake for your birthday every year. Or any day worth celebrating. Or any day at all, really. The girl does enjoy her baking.
But putting your hand into the warm, calloused grip of this stranger you’re supposed to call Dad? It makes every muscle in your body tense.
You grit your teeth and put your hand in his. You don’t flinch as his fingers close around yours like a vice. Instead, you obediently slip your fingers into Jane’s to complete the circle.
While the Egbert’s are rattling off the holy nursery rhyme Dave’s still struggling to memorize, you’re thinking about séances, spirit circles, and other savage fairy tales. You’re wondering how delusional people have to be to buy into the minor differences. You don’t chant along.
Dave kicks you under the table. The little bastard bulls-eyes on your shin. You grit your teeth harder. Beyond that, you don’t even budge.
But Dave does. You can feel it from across the table. And his new daddy notices too.
Cue another lecture from daddy Egbert. You literally have not gone a single day in the Egbert household without suffering at least one exorbitantly long-winded lecture, always revolving around how to make “Dad” proud. Even when you make him proud, you get a lecture on how proud he is of you. You’d find it ironic if it wasn’t so sad.
Dave looks appropriately chastised as “Dad” explains the importance of allowing others to burn in hell, or something. You’re not exactly paying attention. You’re too busy holding your tongue. You’re too busy not retaliating. You are trying very, very hard not to call Dave out on his bullshit, because new “Dad” wouldn’t approve. Not of your language. Not of the substance of your own little lecture either, you think. You could tell him about how Dave used to mock Serket’s psycho little sister when she crushed on Kankri and went religious for a semester. You could tell him about all the times you tore a thousand holes in Kankri’s circular logic while Dave laughed from the sidelines. You want to sell him out for the turncoat he is.
But you won’t. Because that’s not what brothers do.