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The Green Sun is enormous, pushing right at the limits of comprehension. It pulses like a vast heart, with whorls and flares of neon fire lashing at the void of space, and on their meteor dotted against its immense face they are all, gods and mortals alike, a little awed.
Terezi swallows around the light coating her tongue. Sour vapors burn through her nose, fill the space behind her eyes with lime and drip green apple down her throat. From behind his shades Dave watches her, looks at the light shining on her teal and red outfit, her color and his. Gives her a tiny chin-jerk of a nod when her own gleaming red glasses turn his way, while behind them the Green Sun grinds through the mass of two universes, churning through its paces as Alternia's blinding sun and Earth's yellow star once did.
The solar wind streams past them, and their skin prickles as if its ready for something different, something new.
-----
Two days into their journey the effects of the Green Sun show up.
"It looks like sunburn," Rose diagnoses. She touches her fingertips to the damaged skin above the collar of Karkat’s shirt. It earns her a loud “Fuck!” and Karkat spitting like an affronted alleycat as he ducks away, so she turns to Terezi instead, who makes a face at Karkat and offers her arm for inspection. The color of burned flesh, it seems, is a universal constant: Terezi's red down to her fingertips, blistered and faintly yellow at the crook of her elbow where the damage is worst.
“How do you treat it?” Kanaya asks, crowding in for a better view while Terezi grits her teeth at Rose's prodding. Kanaya was spared, either as a rainbow drinker or a jadeblood, not that the other trolls care in their scorched misery. She seems to glow a little brighter though, as if instead of burning she stored the sun's rays inside herself and is slowly releasing them through her skin. Terezi takes petty pleasure in elbowing her away.
No one knows why the humans were unaffected. They must be the superior species when it comes to deflecting sick burns, Dave had deadpanned when Karkat brought it up, but they already knew that, didn’t they.
Rose shakes her head. “There’s not much you can do. The damaged skin will peel off in a few days, and until then try not to irritate the burns too much. If it behaves like regular sunburn, that is. Considering the source, that's probably the best we can hope for.”
“I told you that sun was bad news,” Karkat snarls, burned arms crossed delicately across his chest. “This is what we get for not fucking listening to me.”
"Duly noted," Dave says, then delivers a hearty clap to Karkat's shoulder - and even Terezi can't suppress an unsympathetic grin at Karkat's indignant yowl of pain.
-----
That night, as much as night can be defined by the passing of a few hours and the decision that it's time for bed, Dave comes back from a shower in boxers and bare feet, toweling off his hair, and Terezi is in his bed.
She's on her side facing away from him, and Dave is certain she's not asleep. The sun got through their clothes, the trolls had reported, and Dave can see it now, how her skin is darkened like it was rubbed down with coal dust, an alien suntan spotted with patches of red that runs down her back, over her ribs and the curve of her hips and disappearing under a pair of teal underwear, the only piece of clothing she's wearing.
Dave slows to a stop and thinks, not for the first time, that this is going to be a weird three years.
"Put on something other than your God Tier pajamas," she instructs while he's still composing an opening line. “I don’t want to deal with any more red.
“Hey, no talking smack about the God Tier outfit," Dave recovers after half a beat. "They're the coolest threads on this rock and you know it. But whatever, not like they’re the only thing I’ve got.”
As he fishes a t-shirt from his sylladex he lets his gaze dwell on her. Red and black is a grim palette for any living creature, and against the pale sheets Terezi stands out like paint on canvas. When she’s awake, with glinting teeth and face highlighted in crimson, she has the air of something malevolent, a creature that survived immolation and emerged crackling and vengeful from the fire. Here, the effect is lost. She looks charred, the blackened debris left when the fire's gone out. It's unnerving. He has a sudden image of her crumbling apart, as if she were made of ash held together by just a web of nerves and the air pushing her into a Terezi shape. Dave sits down on the edge of bed in his shirt and boxers, taking care not to touch her.
“So," Dave starts, "should I warn Rose to expect trolls to be bustin' into her room too? Unless you're here about the sunburn. Look, I told you I was fucking with you when I said rapping cures it, and I'm not about to disrespect Dr. Dre by letting you mangle his rhymes any more than you did earlier.”
"I'm not here to rap with you, dumbass, though it is about the sunburn." Her voice is rough with fatigue on top of her usual rasp, giving the impression that it too has been burned. "I couldn't sleep because of it and decided a change of scenery would be nice."
"I thought your slime bed would be good for sunburn. Like, troll aloe, or something."
"It only works for a little bit before it starts hurting again. Plus the sopor smells way too much like the Green Sun."
The squeak of the bedsprings as Dave shifts his weight sounds mildly obscene. Travel deep enough into this laboratory, with its walls thick as a siege fort's and stairs that can carry you far and away from everyone else, and things can get dead silent. The space he's chosen as a bedroom is a well of quiet, where even small noises become big. Dave rubs his knuckles over his knee, and asks, "Alright, so, what's with the birthday suit? Just cause you're sunburned doesn't mean you're in Cancun, you're not gonna run across any Troll Girls Gone Wild video crews around here."
"As if I'd want to be in one of your strange Earth pornographies, Dave," Terezi retorts with a dismissive sniff. She can smell deceit, Dave knows, and false bravado is nothing more than a lie with a bold face. Can probably smell uncertainty too, and hearts beating in throats, and years of posturing about romantic conquests cracking under the fact that, in reality, he has never done anything even close to this before. He's aware of how incredibly uncool he must smell to her right now. "And I don't know what a birthday suit is but I'm obviously not wearing any kind of suit. It's more comfortable without clothes rubbing against the burns."
"Does this means Karkat and the juggalo are running around naked too, cause that's a sight I'd rather avoid."
Terezi snorts, but doesn't say anything. Dave wishes she would turn to face him if only so he could see her expression, then remembers her current state of dress, and feels the back of his neck get hot. Not liking the quiet, he goes on, "So how are you handling baby's first sunburn? I always threw little bitchfits when my bro tried to put sunscreen on me so I get burned to hell pretty much every summer. Or I used to. I guess things like summer and sunscreen don’t exist anymore. But yeah, I’ve been there, with the sunburn and all. Stings like a bitch, doesn't it?"
"Like the bitchiest. It's not my first sunburn though. I got burned pretty badly the day I was blinded."
"Oh." He looks over his shoulder at her, thinking of sunlight that blinds, thinking of her bare and burned skin. "You know you never really told me the full story with that. You gotta fill me in someday."
"You have weird taste in bedtime stories. Didn't you come in here to sleep anyway, or are you going to keep me awake talking all day?"
He did, of course, and so lies down behind her with a muttered "Yeah cool, I'm down for some shut-eye", leaving a gulf of space between them. Heat is radiating from her body like she's a small sun herself, and Dave wonders if it's because of the sunburn or because she's a troll or if this is just what lying in bed with another person is like. He takes off his sunglasses, folds them and slips them safely under his pillow, then, after a moment of quiet breathing, curls forward until his forehead rests against Terezi's back, just below where her hair falls across her neck. His wet hair sticks to her skin, beads of water dripping and rolling along the curve of her shoulder blade.
“That feels good," Terezi rasps, somehow making it sound like a rough purr. She squirms and wiggles her shoulders. "Okay coolkid, you can stay as long as you keep actually cooling me down.”
“Like hell I’m not staying, it’s my bed.”
"But keep your grubby hands off the sunburn. Which is pretty much all of me, so don’t get smartassy about it.”
“Yes ma'am. Consider me the most proper gentleman you ever saw, keeping his hands all to himself like they're made of candy and he’s not sharing. Hell no you can’t have any this, what, you think I'm just giving this stuff out like its Halloween? These things are so locked down even your overprotective shotgun-wielding mama would give me the nod of approval."
“My mom was a dragon.”
That startles a laugh out of Dave. “Shit, you always know what to say to put a guy at ease, Terezi.”
“Go to sleep already. I promised the Mayor guy we’d hang out with him tomorrow so I’m waking you up for that whether you like it or not.”
And, with his earlier exhaustion tugging at him, Dave has no argument with that. He stretches to switch off the bedside lamp then flops back into place, the mattress - the best they could get from the alchemizer, full of jutting springs that feel unnervingly like bones and kept him awake their first night here, though it doesn't feel so bad now - producing another round of squeaking as he curls up behind her. "Sleep tight, Dave Strider," Terezi trills, as the heat seeps from her skin into him, through his head to his chest all the way to his toes, "don't let the ripperwasps bite."
-----
(A week later Cantown’s official ribbon cutting will be celebrated, and afterward Terezi will take off her shirt to gleefully show Dave the skin peeling off her back. Dave, against every coolkid instinct in his thirteen-year-old body, will blush red enough that he might have sunburn too. Terezi will turn to face him, press her nose against his cheek, and grin.)