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“I have a theory,” John says, head rolled back to stare at the ceiling, and Dave cringes. It’s never good when John starts philosophizing while higher than the stratosphere. John sees Dave’s grimace and laughs. His eyes are bluer than any photoshopped ocean Dave has ever seen, made brighter by the swollen veins in his scleras.
“Seriously, Dave! It’s not going to be stupid or go on forever, I’m not that high. Listen, you stupid stupid dumb.”
“That insult was fucking incredible, dude. I never knew you had such a way with words. Carry on, Keats, I’m sorry I got in the way of your flow.” John laughs so hard that he falls over and muffles his guffaws into Dave’s armpit.
“Stop it, you’re making me lose track of my thinks. My thoughts. My thinky thoughts.” Yeah, John’s definitely high, hanging around somewhere near Alpha Centauri and suffocating in the atmosphere.
“Okay, okay. Just listen, Dave. It’s a good set of thoughts, I’ve thought them before this.” Dave wonders what it would be like to open his skull and sift thought his weird fucking thought system, to play his neurons like a harp and watch them fire, see what makes him tick. He looks into blue eyes and sees himself reflected back, drowning in sky blue star bursts and the inky tenebrosity of his pupils.
“So I have these dreams, right?” And Dave can only think of red hot cogs spinning through rivers of lava, of swords in stones, sweat beading on his brow and the cool, forgiving kiss of wind on his skin.
“I dream that I can fly, and the wind buoys me like a gentle caretaker.” Dave’s felt it too, but not with the effortless ease and contentedness as John. He dreams of hands at his hips and the wind carrying him high high high, the bone deep trust that the dream won’t break and setting him plummeting downward.
“You’re caught between clock hands made of titanium but somehow you can change it, you push and bend as if your hands can dig tunnels through timelines.” Dave’s heart is pounding like a honey badger on speed in his chest. Everything feels familiar but washed out, memories that have been written into the steam of his bathroom mirror and the water has dripped through it, making it unintelligible.
“What are you getting at here, Egbutt? Do you need to start a dream journal?” Dave blames his scratchy voice on the weed and ignores how dry his mouth has gone since John started talking about this.
“I guess I just think that maybe dreams are the window to another universe.” Dave opens his mouth to comment on the amount of times he’s left his house naked in other universes if that was the case, but the breath catches in his lungs.
John lays his head on Dave’s shoulder and dreams of a universe outside the set of their own, a universe where they are Gods and his father is the wind and they love each other.
-----
Dave flips through one of his photo albums and traces the curve of John’s grin over the protective plastic covering. He never really noticed how often John was the subject of his photographic lens, blue eyes and white enamel reflected in telephoto zoom. There were a handful of photos featuring Jade in rain boots and wide-brimmed sun hats; Rose hiding her face from the camera with German literature; Terezi grinning like a demon and trying to feed a squirming Karkat her cherry lollipop.
John sprawls over the pages like an intimate tableau. Dave thinks about the cool wind coming in through his open window and wonders what the corners of John’s mouth taste like.
Dave thinks about the older brother he used to have, the defiant line of his jaw as he held hands with another boy. He remembers the screaming, remembers his dad giving him ten minutes to get his shit and get out. He remembers the majority of that time being spent with Dave clinging to him and begging him not to leave, the boy with dark hair shoving clothing and puppets into duffle bags, organizing tool boxes to take with them. He remembers his brother rubbing his back, telling him to be strong, that it was only for a little while.
Dave wonders where his brother is.
He shuts the photo album and files John Egbert’s mouth into a locked cabinet, where he keeps everything he remembers about a gay sibling he hasn’t seen since he was eight years old.
-----
“Jesus fucking Christ, Jade, this song is going to imprint itself into my brain tissue. I’m going to suffer from cerebral hemorrhage because you can’t fucking turn this piece of shit off.” Dave is leaning against a huge pile of knitted pillows and afghans while Jade commandeers the sound system. Rose is in her desk chair sipping red wine out of a proper glass, all straight posture and poise despite the fact she’s drinking bootlegged wine in her bedroom with a bunch of goobers.
“How is it going to be imprinted in your brain when there are, like, no words?” John asks, spread eagle on the knit pile beside Dave and taking pulls out of the bottle of whiskey in his hand.
“The beat will get stuck in my head and I won’t be able to spin anything that doesn’t sound like this for a solid month.”
“Thank god for that!” Jade says, grinning wide around the lip of a Smirnoff Ice. “Maybe you’ll produce something worth listening to, cool kid!” John’s bark of a laugh mixes with Jade’s giggling and Dave reaches over to punch John in the ribs. The bottle of whiskey is thankfully capped when the slap fight turns into a full on headlock wrestling match, John’s arm wrapped around Dave’s neck and Dave punching John in the stomach, both of them laughing like a couple of idiots.
Vodka Mutini tries to sit on John’s face and suddenly the fight is over in favor of John cooing over a mutant cat. Dave makes a quiet pussy joke and rests his head on John’s thigh and wonders when he got so drunk that his fingers went numb. Rose raises an eyebrow when they make eye contact and Dave sneers at her, grabs for the bottle that hit the floor and takes a long swig that burns all the way down.
The party is over a few hours later, when Jade falls asleep face first in Rose’s bed and Rose turns the music off. John and Dave are kicked out to sleep in the guest bedroom next door. It’s freezing compared to the oven of Lalonde’s bedroom, and John is shivering in bed and downing mouthfuls of Jack Daniels.
Dave kicks his jeans off and crawls under the covers, trying to leech John’s warmth. His head is pleasantly light and he can feel himself grinning. John smells like whiskey and the destructive force of a hurricane.
“We were Gods once,” Dave says, and John sets his bottle aside.
“Do you remember?” John’s eyes are hopeful. Dave can tell he’s trying not to look as disappointed as he feels when Dave shakes his head.
“Not completely.” Dave remembers the wind. He remembers stifling heat and scorching metal structures. He remembers John’s mouth and the smell of ozone and Gushers on his skin and a calescent weight in his stomach, coiling up in his viscera, tries to lock it away but it won’t stay still long enough for him to round it up.
John smiles, and it’s the saddest thing he’s seen. Not even the fuzzy dream-memories of hauling his own dead body across his room and tossing it out the window are as sad as John’s smile.
John holds him together while Dave does his best to shake apart in the warm circle of his arms. When he falls asleep, he dreams of flying.
-----
Dave wakes up sprawled over John’s chest. He doesn’t smell like the air anymore; instead, he smells like body-warmed cotton and stale whiskey. John’s hand is against his skin, pressed to the small of his back, it has crept beneath his t-shirt like a curious animal. John’s touch is warm. Dave feels the marrow of his bones sing for more while something sharp in his chest shifts, reading itself to spear his heart straight through.
He lays his head on John’s shoulder and closes his eyes. He tries to think through his hungover haze. All he can see is his brother’s back as his father slams the door, his mother crying on the couch.
Dave pretends that the brush of his lips against John’s collarbone is an accident as he extricates himself and flees half-dressed into the hallway.
-----
Dave can’t see anything but spectrums of blue and milk white skin. The cabinet in the shadowy back corner of his brain is bursting at the seams.
Dave dreams of John’s eyes and a warm body against him, surrounded by the whistling wind. He wakes up with sticky boxers, reaching out to the warmth of the body beside him that is not there. Implicit muscle memory makes him itch with the want of John’s body in his arms, to soak up his heat and smell the wind in his hair.
Dave tosses his boxers in the laundry and cleans himself up.
He spends the rest of the night flipping through John’s Facebook photos on his phone, biting the heel of his hand and resisting the urge to call him.
-----
“Do you remember Rose’s party?” Dave asks, keeping his eyes resolutely away from John’s.
“Kind of, I guess! I was pretty out of it. I remember getting into a bitch fight with you!” Dave rolls his eyes and smirks in spite of the Molotov cocktail roiling in his lower abdomen.
“Do you remember when we went to sleep?” John pauses in his vigorous cookie dough stirring. He sets the bowl down and pads across the cold tile floor, standing in Dave’s space because apparently what Dave has to say is more important than the construction of weed cookies.
“Do you remember?” John’s hands are braced on the counter, caging Dave in. His hands shake when he lays them on John’s forearms.
“No. I don’t think I need to, though.” John’s mouth is close and Dave keeps thinking of his brother, where is my brother, but he thinks he can taste the ozone on John’s breath.
-----
When they kiss, Dave lets John breathe for him.