Chapter Text
You step out onto the tiny balcony and take what feels like your first breath in hours. Inside is crowded and hot, and you’re choking on perfume and tasteful floral arrangements and eau de fucking idiot.
You can’t believe you let Kanaya talk you into this. She’d punked you with the promise of free food, but failed to mention it would be cut fruit on sticks and smelly cheese on crackers so fucking delicate they splinter when you pick them up, leaving you covered in crumbs and weathering the disdain of waiters whose suits are ten times nicer than yours.
You suck in a breath of cold air and try to filter the irritation out of your veins, but that never works. You’re human so your body is two-thirds water, and you’re you, so that last third is pure A-grade spite. You do, however, feel considerably less dizzy outside, even if there isn’t much of a view. Just the alley behind the hotel. Oh, and the dude sitting on the ground next to the railing, knees drawn up tight to his chest, phone in one hand, champagne bottle in the other.
“’Sup.”
Fuck. You can’t even be free outside the party. This guy looks like a douche. Platinum blond hair sprayed up to anime-level proportions, black nail polish, three earrings in each ear and none of them matching. Plus he’s wearing fucking sunglasses at a gala, at night.
That pings something in your memory–something you should know but don’t.
“I just came out for some air,” you say, which is true but also sounds dumb. But the dude nods like you’ve imparted wisdom.
“Yeah, man. On a level of one to clusterfuck I would give it a solid 7.5. Maybe an eight when they bring out the good snacks. Everybody’s too worried about fucking up their clothes to get mad rowdy. Although–.” He gives the bottle a shake. “I don’t know who could get drunk on this, shit’s gotta be like .3% alcohol.”
You’re staring. Partly because you weren’t expecting to be babbled at by a tipsy blond, and partly because he’s taken off his sunglasses and fuck he’s almost too pretty to be real.
“Grab some pavement,” he says, fist-bumping the ground next to him. “Or grab whateverthefuck this balcony is made of.”
You hesitate for a second because this is the only suit you own and you don’t want to have to scrub stains out of the ass, but fuck it. It’s not like you use it more than once a year anyway.
You sit down and the guy traps the champagne bottle between his legs to offer you his hand. “Dave.”
“Uh.” He’s the first person who's bothered with a handshake since you showed up; everyone else’s eyes glazed over as soon as they realized you were just some fashion designer’s date. “Karkat.”
“Karkat.” You brace for questions about where you’re from or comments about how cool and exotic your name is, but he just says it a couple times, memorizing it, testing how it feels in his mouth.
Oh, thanks brain. Great choice of words. And now you’re staring at his mouth, which is twitching up at the corners.
He holds out the bottle. “No herpes, I swear.”
You snort and grab it before your good sense and social anxiety can come back online. This guy seems better than trying to choke down finger sandwiches, at least.
Dave is right. If drunkenness is the goal, this champagne is not goal-oriented. That’s fine–you don’t like being drunk around strangers–but Dave takes a few more swallows and declares it “a goddamn crime against nature and public decency” and propels himself up and back inside. He’s gone long enough that you figure it was just an excuse to bail. Irritation froths back up inside you. If he’d wanted to be alone why ask you to sit down in the first place?
Maybe you smell. You showered, but you’re not actually sure when you last washed this suit. You take a surreptitious sniff at your armpit.
“Dude.” Dave is back and so is a whole bottle of Bacardi. “That’s physically impossible.”
“What?”
“Licking your elbow.”
You stare at him.
“That’s what it looked like you were doing–trying to lick your elbow.”
“Why would I be trying to lick my elbow?”
“Animalism? The gravitational pull of the moon? Does anyone need a reason to lick their own elbow?” He holds out the bottle to you.
“Where the heck did you get that?”
“From the back.”
“Do you know the bartender or something?”
Another flickering half-smile. “Or something.”
Is that a covert way of saying he stole it? You don’t really speak mumbly balcony weirdo. Which, you probably should, since you basically come from the same genus. Did he crash this party? Just some rando from off the street? He isn’t really dressed for a black tie event, but he’s also not dressed like any normal human being. Tight red pants and a sleeveless, double-breasted vest bedazzled on the back with a round symbol. A record? A donut? Whatever. He looks like a stage magician who got lost in a Final Fantasy game.
He sits back down next to you, close enough that your thighs brush. Gooseflesh ripples over your arms. Dave turns to you and says, “Did you know there’s a whole instagram that’s just like, aesthetic pictures of moose heads mounted on walls? All these dead deer posing all moody for the camera.” His rings click against his phone screen as he taps in his password. “Some dude in assfuck Idaho runs it. I should write a song about him and his passions.”
You laugh. Then you look at moose heads on instagram. Then a tumblr that is entirely pictures of people in boat shoes. You pass the bottle back and forth and show him that video of the dude reading out all the misspellings of ‘ouija board’ on yahoo answers. He laughs so hard he spits rum onto his jeans.
You’re tipsy enough to start getting indiscreet with where you’re letting your eyes linger. He has bony wrists, a light tracing of freckles on his bare arms and bridge of his nose, a skin tone that might be a warm gold in natural light, high cheekbones and long eyes. You’re curious, but you don’t ask him where he’s from, because you hate that question when you get it yourself. The answer is Bumblefuck Pennsylvania, but you’re too brown for most people to be satisfied with that.
The two of you are on a site for ranking celebrities by which one is more likely to vape, when he pauses and says, “Dude, you have nice hands.”
“Um.” You hold one of them up, looking at the bumpy knuckles, the bitten-down nails, the shiny burn on your palm from when you’d been making tater tots in the dark a couple weeks ago. What the fuck.
“Uh. Thanks. You have nice–.” You experience a moment of pilot confusion, because every part of him is nice. He literally looks like a cover model. Well, a skinny one with stained jeans and smeared eyeliner.
You’re saved from having to pick a random body part by a guy stepping out onto the balcony in a cloud of woody cologne. He’s wearing a charcoal suit with a designer label you don’t recognize but would probably give Kanaya an orgasm. He has purple in his hair and those square-frame glasses that make him look like a hipster from 2009.
“Hey, Stri. Been lookin for you.”
“Been here.” Dave takes a messy swig from the bottle. His posture shifts, goes sprawling and lazy, his smile thinning into a smirk. He looks…well, dangerous isn’t really the right word, but you’ll go with it.
The guy doesn’t even acknowledge your existence. “Let me get your number, chief,” he says to Dave. He has a slick, fussy accent that sound put on.
Dave flicks his fingers over his lock screen. “Sorry dude, I don’t have a phone.” You ruin it by giggling. Dave’s own little smile is unbearably cute and you’re tipsy enough that you want to touch it with your fingers.
“Huh?” The guy’s eyebrows are puzzled parentheses above his glasses. “Oh, har har. Come on, Strider, if we’re gonna collaborate it makes a lot a sense to have each other’s info.”
Dave sips rum with his pinky out. “Have your agent call my agent, Ampora. I know you’re new to the scene, but come on.”
Ampora makes a gulpy noise of affront, like a goldfish choking on its own spit. And suddenly you’re right there with him, ‘cause several facts have finally come together in your foggy brain to announce that surprise! You are a fucking idiot.
“Dave,” you say. “Dave Strider. This is your fucking party.”
“Wow, harsh.” He winces. “This is my label’s party. Gotta get swanked out for the cameras because apparently that makes the music sound better.”
You can see it now, of course. The five second google search you’d done of this dude when Kanaya had invited you. You’ve been trading memes with an international pop sensation, and your drunk ass had no idea.
Classic.
Ampora laughs at you. Straight up points a finger and chortles. Dave–-Strider, whatever–-doesn’t. If anything he looks chagrined.
Yeah, well, maybe he should be, you think savagely. Maybe if his music was better I would have heard it. As if you don’t relentlessly avoid anything considered ‘popular’. Popular shit is for the masses, and the masses are idiots. It’s been scientifically proven.
You’re too busy hating yourself and the rest of the human race to catch what Dave says to get Ampora to leave, but he does. Dave slumps back against the railing, palming at his eyes and smearing his makeup further. “Dude, chill. It’s not a big deal.”
You will not chill, you will slop the hysteria inside you all over this goddamn balcony.
“Right. No big deal. I’ve just been shoving my phone in the face of a guy who’s gone out with Beyonce. No worries. Completely normal.” That’s one of the few pieces of trivia you held onto when Kanaya had been telling you about him on the ride here. Nowhere near as useful as, oh, maybe what he looks like?
Dave groans. “Yeah, no, that got blown way the fuck up online. Her necklace fell off at the VMA’s and I picked it up for. Paparazzi dickheads took pics of me handing it back so it looked like we were holding hands. The closest I’ve ever come to dating Beyonce is listening to Lemonade on repeat in my boxer shorts.”
You snort a laugh that comes out half a sob. You are such a piece of shit. Dave has every right to be antisocial at his own crappy party, it’s not like he tricked you into thinking he was another skulking loner who couldn’t handle the mental fatigue of a crowd. That was just your own pathetic projection.
Fuck you in every simpering orifice, you thought you’d made a friend.
But you live in reality, okay. Dave has just released his third studio album and you are a 20-something office drone with a useless BA and a pile of student debt. On the weekend you play Overwatch and read trashy novels. There is absolutely nothing special about you.
“Come on, man. Let’s just pretend Ampora never opened his big floppy mouth.” Dave nudges you with his elbow. You wonder if he’s ever tried to lick it. “Welcome to imagination station, population two guys who can’t take the state of a nation so bent on–.” His voice gets deeper when he raps. It sets off something warm and tingly in your belly. “Shit, I’m too buzzed to think of any more ‘ation’ words. All I’m saying is, you’re cool. Please don’t get starstruck.”
You laugh. “Starstruck? Please. I’ve never even listened to your music.”
Dave blinks. “Then what’s the fuckin issue?”
Fuck, he looks so earnest. The issue is that everyone fantasizes about hitting it off with a celebrity, but that doesn’t mean it ever actually happens. Or, well. Maybe it only happens when you don’t give a shit about their music. The unfairness of the universe is literally astounding.
Not as if you didn’t already know that.
You wrestle your phone out of your pocket. “You record under ‘Strider’?”
“Fuck, dude. For real? Watching a guy’s videos in front of him, that’s like rearranging his desktop icons or, like, going through his lingerie.”
You glance at him.
“Hypothetical lingerie. You gotta be at least level four friendship before we get to the existential questions of sexy underwear I may or may not possess.” He puts up a hand to block the balcony light’s glare on your screen. “Naw, not that one, the audio’s fucked. Use the official page, it’s got ads but the quality is better.” He sure has a lot of tips for someone who doesn’t want you watching in the first place.
You tap play, then sit through a thirty second video of two CGI giraffes shopping for furniture that somehow turns out to be an ad for instant coffee. “This had better be good.”
Dave says, “Nothing is worth heteronormative giraffes.”
The music itself is poppy and synthed out, though rhythmically it’s more complex than you were expecting. Still not something you would listen to voluntarily. The song’s got your standard music video sets–scuzzy back alleys, crowded clubs, house parties full of pretty people, an artistically distressed vintage couch in a banged-up studio apartment. There’s a moment of obnoxious, stuttering jump-cuts, and then a guy appears on the couch, glittery hair in his eyes, flowery pink bathrobe cut up to his thighs.
He starts to sing, or like, do that annoying Kesha talk-singing, but you don’t catch any of the words. You’re too busy watching him. He’s a lot to look at when he’s sweated off half his makeup and hunched in the corner around a bottle of liquor. Done up and color-edited he is incendiary.
And his clothes, holy shit. You know dick about fashion (which is especially pathetic considering who your best friend is) but even you can tell quality when you see it. Dave goes from the the robe to a motorcycle jacket, to a red power suit and heels, from ripped up jeans and a tank, to “didn’t I see someone wearing that in the last Star Trek movie?”
“Yeah, uh, this one is kind of a clusterfuck.” Dave is commentating in your ear but you aren’t hearing much of it, watching him kiss a girl in a sparkly minidress, and then a boy in the exact same outfit.
He grunts. “Man, she had Taco Bell breath and he burped into my mouth, like, twice. Smdh.”
You very, very carefully do not focus on the little flashes of Dave’s tongue that the camera lovingly pans in on. “Is, uh. All of that your real hair?” There’s lots of colors happening and none of them are natural.
“Heh. Yeah. Started out with wigs but I can’t do shit in them. You try grinding up on a bunch of strangers when it feels like there’s an ungroomed rabbit on your head.” He taps his fingernails against the rum bottle in time with the music. “Totally fried the shit out of my follicles. I basically had to shave it off when we were done shooting.”
“Oh, it.” You steal a look back at him, hair beginning to flop in his eyes as his hairspray gives up the ghost. “It grew back.” Wow. Brilliant, Vantas.
“Yea.” Dave flicks at his bangs. “Hair does that.”
Fuck, he’s close enough that you can see the lipstick clinging to the corners of his mouth. You wish you’d gotten a look at him earlier in the evening, but you were too busy aggressively not giving a shit about anything going on around you.
Dave tilts your phone toward him. He basically has to hold your hand to do it. “Fuck, I remember some of these. Maryam really went for it. They had sew me into a couple of them.”
“Kanaya made them all?” See, you are capable of a fucking conversation. Heart, calm the fuck down stop beating so fast.
“Most of them. Some I got from the free table in my brother’s apartment lobby. Old habits. See something shiny, grab shiny thing.”
God. Superstar with a dumpster-diving past. It’s beyond Hollywood. It’s Lifetime Channel. It’s vomit-worthy. You love it.
“Kanaya mentioned she was bringing a date.” One of his eyebrows twitches up. “Guess that’s you.”
You flush and curl forward. The balcony railing is leaving grooves in your back. “Yeah but we’re not, like–.” Kanaya is very gay and you are It’s Complicated.
“Oh. Right.” Dave is suddenly very interested in his phone.
“What are you doing?” Social niceties have become much less crucial as your intoxication grows.
“Asking my assistant if there’s a chance of getting anything to eat here that isn’t crustless and organic non-GMO free range. I got a hunger that carrot sticks will not satisfy.”
You’re watching his lips while he talks now. Hearing him say the word ‘hunger’ hits you right in your guts, and what the hell? It’s not even an overtly sexual word, he’s talking about hor'dourves for christ’s sake.
Your hand is on his thigh. Fuck. You both blink down at it. You have absolutely no idea how it got there.
You snatch it back. “I’m sorry, fuck, Jesus–I’m drunk, I didn’t–.”
“Chill out.” He smoothes a fingertip over your palm. “Said I liked your hands.”
What was it that past you thought about it being cold out here? Past you is an idiot. You are literally on fire. Dave is close enough that you can pick out individual freckles. “What are you–.” he starts, but you don’t get to hear the end of it.
Because one second your mouths are an inch from a slow-motion movie collide, and the next the balcony doors are busting open and some old dude with a terrible mustache is shouting at Dave and he’s shouting back, and someone is breaking a champagne glass inside and everyone is making too much goddamn noise for your rum-soaked brain to handle right now. Especially since your body seems to have remembered it has an anxiety disorder. You shut down.
Half an hour later you’re watching the rain chase itself down a car window, regretting all your life decisions. You’ve coughed up for an uber, because Kanaya isn’t sober either and neither of you feel like getting on the train.
“Are you alright?” she asks, for probably the eightieth time. “I’m sorry I dragged you through all that.”
“You fucking didn’t, okay? I’m fine.” As much as you’d bitched and stomped and been an altogether asshole, you had agreed to come. Kanaya isn’t your mom. She definitely isn’t responsible for the fact that someone had tipped off security that Dave Strider was being accosted by a stalker out on the balcony. You’re willing to bet that “someone” had a scarf and a shitty pompadour.
All Kanaya had to do was identify you as her date and prove you had an invite, but by that time the guest of honor had been safely hustled off to wherever celebrities are kept when they aren’t on camera. And so ended your brief encounter with a popstar you don’t care about and will never see again. It’ll make a funny story at parties.
Why do you feel so goddamn awful? More awful than usual.
Kanaya sighs. She is in a grasshopper green sheath dress, and she still looks as fresh as she had hours ago when she’d offered you her arm. She slides her phone across the bench seat.
“I wasn’t going to show you this, because I believe correspondence made in confidence should be treated as such, but…I think you need to see it.”
It’s a messenger window.
TG: maryam
TG: maryam
TG: kanaya for fucks sake i have got a conundururm
GA: Dave
GA: I Am Sort Of In The Middle Of Something
GA: That Something Is Your Party. That Was Organized For You. From Which You Are Mysteriously Absent.
TG: im here you just cant see me im stealth
TG: but fuck all that shit i got a fery important question from which i require you an answer
TG: your guy
GA: My What
TG: your date
TG: your bro
TG: adorable latino guy with the eyelashes and shitty attitude
GA: Ah. This Is All Beginning To Make Sense
GA: I Should Have Known Karkat Would Sniff Out The Only Person Here With An Equally Abysmal Capacity For Social Engagement
GA: What About Him
TG: on a scale of ten to naw
TG: naw being like call the police get this creeper away from me
TG: and ten being dtf
TG: how likery is he to go home with a dude he just met
GA: I Assume I Can Safely Infer The Dude In This Scenario Is You
TG: would be a pretty safe assume yea
GA: I’m Honestly Not Sure.
GA: But I Don’t Think You Should Ask.
GA: You Are Far Too Drunk For Informed Consent
TG: okaaay mom fuck off
TG: how tf do you know im drunk
GA: You Are Starting To Type Like Your Sister
TG: so thats a no on friend boning
GA: That Is A I Don’t Think It Would Be Wise
GA: However Karkat Is An Adult
GA: At Least Legally
GA: He Doesn’t Need My Blessing To Get Laid
The conversation cuts off there, probably because you put your hand on Dave’s thigh. You blink down at the screen. You read it over again. And again. The rain pounds on the roof of the car. Up front the driver is cussing out a minivan in front of you.
“This…is this real?”
Kanaya laughs. “Karkat.”
“Are–I–he–what do you mean “at least legally?”
That just makes her laugh harder.
The next morning you roll out of bed at the crack of 11 a.m. to a festering fucker of a headache and a message from an unknown user.
TG: hey so i thought about sending you a pizza with ‘will u go out with me’ written in pepperoni but then i was like
TG: oh shit
TG: what if hes a vegetarian
TG: heres a dead animal great first impression
TG: well second impression i guess first impression was dealing with my drunk ass and getting manhandled by my security team
TG: btw sorry about that those guys have no chill
TG: i think it partly has to do with the time someone tried to stab me in public
TG: anyway enough about me lets talk about you for a minute
TG: what are you doing tomorrow night