Chapter Text
You are Dirk Strider and you are pitching a fit. The workshop is not your individual space, but you have your own station to work at, all your projects cluttering every available surface. They get thrown to the floor, against the wall, smashing back into their cogs and screws and tiny plates that took three weeks of filing to be the exact shape you needed. Your toolkit is upended, screwdrivers and wrenches and rat-tails getting scattered across the floor and forming a death trap for anyone not thinking as they come in. You even try upending the desk, but though you have the honed strength of a swordsman, so much upper-body strength you could probably arm-wrestle Equius and put up a fight, it’s too heavy for you and all it does is strain your shoulders.
So you kick at it instead until you’ve knocked one of the legs out and sent it crashing to the floor.
Standing in the middle of the carnage, panting and snarling like an animal, you clench your fists and screw your eyes shut. Your face is cut, blood welling in the cage formed by the hair of your eyebrow, and your hands are shredded, blood dripping to the floor with the way your nails dig into the cuts on your palms.
The door to the workshop swings open, but you refuse to look.
‘Strider.’
You breathe through your nose, bite back curses and fuck off, Eq, and the door swings shut again. For a few moments, you stand there, and then you kick the other leg of your station out and the whole thing collapses.
When the last of the anger is gone, drained from you in your blood and sweat, you collapse to the floor, sitting on the tiles and shoving the balls of your hands into your eyes.
Seb beeps and boops from across the room, whining as your abuse of the machine forces it to power down, but you ignore the rabbit, snarl at yourself and crawl across the floor to forcibly shut it up by smashing it into the floor until it stops.
It will take a solid week to repair, but right now you can’t bring yourself to care.
The door opens again, and you don’t realise that you are in a heap on the floor, and must have been for a while; the blood in your eyebrow is dry, and your knuckles are black for the blood and grease there.
‘Come with me.’
‘Fuck you.’
Silence, and then Equius is picking his way across the obstacle course to lift you to your feet by his shirt. You ignore him, limp in Equius’ grip and don’t respond to anything he says.
In the end, Equius is hefting you over his shoulders, carrying you fireman style through the corridors and making sure, you know, still limp and bloody and not responding, through the most busy ones. You thinks you hear Karkat mouthing off, but you ignore it.
Equius says nothing to any inquiries, and takes you through to the infirmary, dumping you rather unceremoniously on the floor. Literally, too, since you land in a heap on the vinyl.
‘Equius,’ Jane rasps, ‘be nice.’
But she doesn’t sound like she wants to be nice herself, so you don’t bother getting up.
The other mechanic disappears then, clomping off back to wherever he’d come from, leaving Jane in her hospital bed, and you in a sweaty, greasy, bloodied heap on the floor next to her.
There are several minutes of silence, and you stay where you are, face pressed to the floor. It’s where it belongs.
‘Equius said you tore the workshop apart,’ she says eventually, and you grunt.
‘Just my side,’ you mumble.
‘Just your side.’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’
You manage to shove yourself up, and sit at the side of her bed without looking at her.
‘Would you care to explain?’ she asks, and you pick at the dried blood on your hands.
‘Not really.’
‘You know I’m going to make you, so I don’t know why you’re fighting it.’
‘I could just leave.’
‘You’ve avoided me for three weeks, Dee, you won’t leave now you’re here. I know you, better than you think I do.’
You say nothing, lip curling, and you can almost imagine the smile on her face. Roxy said there would be scars. You’ll miss that smile.
‘Promise me one thing,’ she asks then, and hisses as she reaches out to take one of your grimy hands.
‘Anything,’ you whisper, and push her hand back to the bed, laces your fingers together.
‘Promise me you don’t blame yourself for what happened.’
‘I can’t do that.’
Her nails dig into your palm, into the scratches. ‘Dee.’
‘Anything else,’ you beg, and look at her finally. ‘Anything else, and it’s yours. But not that. I’m sorry, but not that.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she tells you, and her eyes are so bruised, butterfly tape holding her face together.
‘Yes, it was,’ you whisper. ‘It didn’t work, I didn’t make it in time.’
She smiles, crooked and with wire in her jaw.
‘Dee,’ she says, and you frown at her. ‘Dee, that wasn’t your fault. These things take time, you can’t just – it’s not – Dee, you were already stretched too far, you can’t expect it to work like that!’
‘It should have,’ you snap, and wrench yourself away to pace. Your hands smear grease and blood through your hair as you tug and yank at it, and she stays in the bed watching you. ‘However thin I’m stretched, it shouldn’t matter! I should have been able to get to you through Seb, I should have – I could – I’m supposed to keep you safe!’
‘You kept me alive,’ she says, and she looks so sad, and it breaks your heart. ‘That’s more than anyone else could have done in your position.’
‘It wasn’t enough.’
‘Dirk,’ she says, and you stop pacing to look back at her. ‘Dirk, listen to me. This was not your fault, and it will never be your fault. Just because you want to be – to be – some kind of hero – it doesn’t mean that you can kill yourself permanently trying to save us all the time! We’re kids, not Gods!’
‘Well, we should be!’ you snarl, and she flinches. ‘I will make it work,’ you promise, and she leans back as you move to stand beside her, to lean in and press your foreheads together. ‘We’re war vets, Janey. We’re the frontline in this war, and I’m going to make sure no enemy gets to you ever again. No one’s going to hurt you.’
She tries to draw back, but you’re holding her close, breathing in the sterile, antiseptic smell of her skin and dressings, the warm throb of her bruises and the sticky fat of the adhesive on the tape, the expensive shampoo in her hair.
‘Dee,’ she whispers, and you know what’s coming, dig your fingers in to hold her. ‘Dee, you’re hurting me.’
And just like that, you recoil, backing away to the end of the bed and staring at her like a wild animal.
‘Dee.’
But you’re gone, sweeping out of the room and returning to your lab. She will be out of the infirmary by the time you are done fixing Seb, and she will be off crutches by the time there is a crisis that you can slit your throat for. You still don’t make it to Seb, the rabbit rejecting your consciousness, and you come back to yourself in the bed she’d lain unconscious in for a month, throat raw from screaming, and you ignore orders to rest and try again. And again. And again.
You’re going to keep trying until you get it right.