Work Text:
The nakodile shows up on a Tuesday.
Or what passes for a Tuesday on LOHAC, which is to say the gears ticked over into a new cycle and Dave decided it was a Tuesday because someone had to and also because Tuesdays are the most nothing day of the week and that felt right for a planet made of clockwork and existential overheating.
It's just sitting there when he opens the door. Three feet of stubby-legged crocodilian consort, jaw slightly ajar in the way that means it's either thermoregulating or smiling. Hard to tell with nakodiles. The answer is usually both.
"nak," it says.
"yeah man same," Dave says, and steps over it.
It follows him.
---
Consorts do this sometimes. That's the thing. They just pick a player and decide that's their guy now, like a pigeon who lives on your fire escape and has decided that your specific windowsill is an ancestral homeland worth defending with its life. There's no application process. No interview. One day you don't have a nakodile and the next day you do and that's just how it works.
This one is — different isn't the right word. Insistent, maybe. Most consorts wander off after a while, distracted by lava currents or shiny gears or whatever consorts think about when they're not saying nak at you. This one stays.
Dave names it Lil Snapper on day three, which is objectively hilarious and which exactly zero people are around to appreciate.
"that's your name now," he tells it. "lil snapper. its ironic dont worry about it."
"Nak."
"exactly."
---
The thing about being a god on a dead planet is that it's boring in a way that wraps all the way back around to being sort of unbearable. Dave has time. He has so much time. He has enough time to count every gear on every tower in the land of heat and clockwork and then count them again to check his work and then a third time because the second count came out different and now he has to figure out which number is right.
He talks to Lil Snapper because Lil Snapper is there.
"okay so the thing about the economy in can town," Dave says, sitting on a gear housing that's warm but not actively scalding, "is that the mayor keeps trying to implement a barter system but the carapacians already have a fiat currency based on tab pulling and nobody in this game thought to include an economics primer."
"Nak."
"thats a good point."
"Nak nak."
"okay well now youre just being contrarian."
---
He starts doing it without thinking about it. Just narrating. Running the tape out loud because the alternative is running it inside his head where it echoes worse.
"rose says i have a thing. avoidant something. attachment style. which is cool and normal and not at all a bummer to hear from your sister who learned psychology from a malevolent web browser."
Lil Snapper blinks. Slowly. One eye, then the other. Nakodile eyelids work independently, which is a fact Dave did not need to know but now cannot unknow.
"like i think i get what she means. youre supposed to want people around but youve been. trained or whatever to expect that people being around comes with a catch so you just dont. you opt out. you build a whole thing around not needing anybody and then you wake up one day as a literal god on an empty planet talking to a crocodile about your. whatever. your deal."
"Nak," says Lil Snapper, very quietly.
"yeah."
---
Sometimes the nakodile does things that don't make sense.
Dave's spinning a sick beat on the wheels of steel — okay it's a salvaged gear mechanism and some copper wire and a piece of sheet metal but the PRINCIPLE is the same — and Lil Snapper just sits and watches. Not the fidgety way consorts usually watch things, where their attention slides around like a greased marble. Lil Snapper watches like he's listening. Actually listening. Head tilted five degrees to the left and absolutely still.
"oh youre a music critic now?"
"Nak."
"harsh."
But he keeps going. And the nakodile keeps listening. And after a while the music gets less ironic and more just— music. Because nobody's listening except a three-foot consort who couldn't judge him if he wanted to.
---
The puppet thing is weird.
Dave finds a stray smuppet in the back of his sylladex — god knows how long it's been in there, probably since before the game, probably since the apartment, possibly since the beginning of time given how those things seemed to propagate through space and time like a particularly cursed infestation.
He holds it up and goes "look snapper its your distant cousin" and the nakodile flinches.
Actually flinches. Full body. Jaw shuts, legs tense, tail curls in. The works.
"whoa hey buddy its just a puppet." Dave puts it down. "its cool. puppets are creepy i get it. no puppets. puppet free zone. ill put it away."
He captchalogues it and doesn't think about it again.
He doesn't think about why a consort would flinch at a smuppet. He doesn't think about it because the answer, if he thought about it, would be that consorts shouldn't flinch at smuppets. Consorts don't know what smuppets are. Consorts don't have context for the specific revulsion that puppet produces.
He doesn't think about it because Dave Strider has made not thinking about things into an art form and the gallery is extensive.
---
It rains on LOHAC sometimes. Not water — condensation from the lava vents hitting the upper gear strata and coming back down as something between mist and warm drizzle. It's not pleasant. It's not unpleasant. It's just wet.
Dave sits under an overhang and Lil Snapper sits next to him and they watch it come down.
"you know what i miss," Dave says. "and this is stupid so dont judge me."
"Nak."
"i miss having someone taller than me in the room. thats so dumb right. im a god. ive killed shit that would make lovecraft go actually thats a bit much. and what i miss is having to look up at somebody."
Lil Snapper presses closer to his leg. Three feet of warm consort against his ankle.
"bro was—" Dave stops. Starts over. "my bro was. you know." He stops again. "complicated doesnt even. like. okay he was a puppet-obsessed ninja who trained me by fighting me on the roof with actual swords and the puppet thing was probably. i mean the swordfighting was definitely. it was all."
He makes a gesture that means nothing.
"it was a lot of years of something and i dont have the word for it yet. rose probably has the word for it. rose has words for everything. i just have the."
Another gesture. Smaller.
"the part where i lived there."
"Nak."
"but he was also the guy who was just. there. in the morning. making orange juice that was mostly just sunny d because he never remembered to buy actual groceries. and hed be at the counter and id come in and hed go 'sup lil man' and id go 'sup' and that was it. that was the whole interaction. and that was fine."
Dave pulls his knees up. God tier pajamas are shit for warmth but great for curling into a ball in.
"i think the fucked up part is that i miss both of them. the roof version and the sunny d version. and i keep trying to figure out which one was the."
He makes the gesture again. The nothing one.
"whatever. its not a thing i can. yeah."
Lil Snapper says nothing.
Not "nak." Nothing.
Just sits there, warm against his ankle, perfectly still, in the rain that isn't really rain, on a planet made of gears.
---
Dave falls asleep like that. Under the overhang, curled up, one hand resting on the nakodile's back like it's the most natural thing in the world.
He doesn't dream about swords. He doesn't dream about puppets. He doesn't dream about anything at all. He just sleeps and the gears tick and the maybe-rain falls and Lil Snapper doesn't move.
Doesn't move for hours.
Just stays.
---
In the morning — the arbitrary, gear-defined morning — Dave wakes up with a crick in his neck and a nakodile sleeping on his feet and the specific kind of peace that comes from not knowing a thing you'd break if you knew it.
"sup lil man," he says, without thinking.
"Nak," says Lil Snapper.
And that's it. That's the whole interaction.
And it's fine.