Chapter Text
You realise you have a power when you resurrect a crow you accidentally killed. You were thirteen, and the crow didn’t seem too thankful for you lunging out of nowhere and grabbing it, yanking it out of the way. As it pecked at your hands in an attempt to get free, you told it that you had saved its life, that it was alive because of you.
It might just be a crow, but that’s a nice feeling. Knowing you can save people. Keep them alive.
(When you meet Dirk, when you see the dark circles under his eyes, puffy and sore and bruised into his skin, you take a step back, look at yourself and at the things you had planned to do, the ways you’d planned to save everyone, the way you’d prepared every contingency and every possible twist and turn and alternate event, and you think. Oh. Oh, I need to stop. So you did. You stopped, you learnt to go with it. To take each day as it comes. To never become – become what? What was Dirk? He wasn’t evil, not in so many words. But he was – he was – something was wrong with him. The day Jane – well, the day she – the day that – that was a dark day for everyone.)
It’s around the time you meet Dirk that you stumble across Harley. Literally, since she was asleep in the fucking hallway like a dog. As you righted yourself, face pressed against the wall and cheek red, you looked back at her, in a heap of gangly limbs and messy uniform and wayward hair, and oh.
Girls, you think, and rip a piece of paper out of your notebook to write a note to her.
lost girl reward for finder
You think you’re funny. You aren’t.
She manages to track you down. You aren’t sure how she managed that, because there was nothing to indicate it was you.
‘You don’t use grammar,’ she told you when your eyebrows arched over the rim of your shades. ‘You think you’re so clever.’ She growls, and stomps off.
Rose tells you that you are the most pathetic boy she has ever encountered, and that’s including that asinine crush John has on her.
(‘We all know that when the day comes that Karkat is able to nullify his Touch of Death,’ she said, in that preaching sort of tone she adopts, the lecturing, really fucking annoying tone that makes you squint at her in hopes that it shuts her up. ‘John will be all over him, assured heterosexuality aside.’)
You have a class called Theory of Relativity that is about as related to the theory of relativity as you yourself are. Maybe, you don’t know, you kind of stop paying attention after about five minutes, because Jade Harley is sat in front of you with her crazy devil-may-care island-girl messy hipster hair, and it is everywhere and you kind of want to touch it. It just looks really soft, for all the tangles, it looks like it might be silk between your fingers. Your bro would be ashamed if he caught you fawning all over a girl like this, caught you playing with the edge of your notebook, causing paper cut after paper cut after paper cut because you’re too busy staring at a wayward strand of hair that curls in a different direction to the rest, looped outside of the mass. You have no time to pay attention to the blood all over your notebook because you desperately want to push that hair back into place alongside the rest.
But you don’t, because that would be uncool. You sit there, and you watch it shift, watch her hair fall over one shoulder then the other as she tilts her head. If life were one of those weird furry animes that keep showing up in your browser history, she’d have big twitchy, over-exciteable puppy dog ears perched in the middle of her hair.
(You don’t tell her that the dog ear headband that shows up on her bed one day around the time of her birthday was a present from you, not even years later when most of the fur has worn off them and the headband has snapped so many times that it is a latticework of superglue. She’s never told, but you suspect she knows anyway. Apparently you light up or some other cliché bullshit when she’s happy.)
One day at lunch, she catches you watching her from your spot on the bleachers. You pretend that you aren’t looking, but she’s wrestling with Jake and she’s watching you watch her, and she gets pinned. It’s a total joke, you know, because Jake had been losing up until that point. She comes marching over, dust in her hair and grass-stains on her chin, and blames you for her defeat.
You don’t know why you say it, but you tell her that she could always wrestle you any day, especially if it was between the sheets.
The nurse tells you that you have a concussion, gives you an icepack for the swelling, and sends you on your way.
In the corridor outside, you meet that weird fish dude. The one that makes your skin tighten, makes your head ache, the one that feels so incredibly wrong, like there’s a line of perfectly straight, equal red lines, and suddenly there’s a horizontal blue line. Being around him feels like a skipping record, like there’s a bit of grit in the groove. There are a dozen metaphors for the way that Eridan Ampora makes you feel, but none of them fit.
The thing that bothers you most right now is the two scratches covering the length of his face from temple to pronounced Greek nose to sharp, regal chin, the thing that bothers you about them is that they are obviously fresh, the skin parting a little where the scratches are, but there is no blood. You know wounds like that, you know skin-splitters. He should be dribbling that royal blood of his, but there’s nothing. Nothing at all. There’s a little ooze, maybe, a little purple-tinted pus, but there’s not any blood.
‘Women,’ Eridan says when he sees the icepack you’re holding. ‘Everyone’s heard.’
You snort, and wince at how it makes your nose ache. Damn her.
‘Women,’ you agree, and you go your separate ways, he to the nurse’s office, and you to the dormitories.
John comes to find you after you don’t go down to dinner and tells you that the whole of your class has heard, and he finds the whole thing hilarious.
‘She got you,’ he chortles, rolling around on his bed. ‘She got you good.’
You glare at his stupid ruffled hair and his lopsided glasses and his stupid, stupid buckteeth and swing your legs over the side of your bed so you face away from him.
In the morning, when you’ve healed over the worst of the clout upside the head, you go and grit out an apology to Harley for the “unwarranted solicitation” that you gave her.
She admits, over a lunch that you weren’t aware you’d agreed to, that she only hit you because everyone was gasping and to be honest, she didn’t immediately understand what you’d meant until Rose explained it to her that night once everyone had gone to bed.
‘Oh,’ you say. ‘Um. I’m sorry.’
She laughs, and it’s not really a very pretty laugh, it’s actually quite annoying, but you kind of fall a little bit in love with it anyway.
You sit there, watching her chop up her sandwich into tiny little bite-sized portions, watching the way she very pointedly sticks her little finger out. You wonder who taught her manners, and you cover your mouth and cough, try to pretend that you aren’t smiling at how sweetly ridiculous she looks.
Over the next few months, you find yourself sticking closer and closer and closer to Harley until one day you find yourself waking from a nap. Her fingers are in your hair, massaging behind your ears the way she probably rubs her dog’s head. That wouldn’t be a problem, really, because it feels quite nice, especially in the red-raw spots where the arms of your shades have dug in, and the tug at your hair actually feels pretty therapeutic. No, the problem is that your head is in her lap, your nose pushed up against the belt of her skirt.
You bolt upright, and she blinks at you, calling your name as you practically throw yourself out of the room, skidding on the carpet and landing in a heap in the corridor outside. When you can bring yourself to stop macking on the floor, you find the spider bitch grinning down at you.
She doesn’t say anything, and neither do you, hurrying off down the corridor and rubbing at your carpet-burnt nose in shame.
The next day, you shove a frog-shaped post-it down the back of Harley’s shirt, a note scrawled on it.
(You won’t tell her that you cut it out especially for her.)
sorry for being gay
That’s okay!!!! comes the reply back all curlicues and swirls beneath your chicken scratch, it’s okay to be gay - John is very handsome, after all!!! Xoxoxo
(Harley is a grade-B asshole, Karkat tells you years later as you sit on the bleachers and watch the boys play their sports. She’s all sugar and spice and all things nice, and then she pulls the rug out from under you and shoves your head down the toilet. An explicit sort of metaphor, but those are the best.)
After Dirk tells you to get over yourself – you’d taken to hiding out in the workshop with him, watching as he builds a little robot rabbit, and you get your hands slapped with everything from his hand, to a screwdriver, to a spatula he just showed up with one day and never returned – you return to your place napping in Harley’s lap as though you’d never been away.
One day, you call her Jade, and she gives you this little smile, this cute little thing that’s all Cupid’s Bow and a flash of teeth, the sort of pouty-mouthed smile you saw in your Bro’s magazines when you used to sneak into his room whilst he was at work. That’s it you think, you’re gone, she’s got you, you’re hers, and you lunge up from space by her feet to kiss that smile.
She laughs against your lips, tilts her head with her stupid, silken hair falling over her shoulder, and that smile curls your lips in turn, makes you smile that smile you have only ever, ever given her.
‘You’re still gay,’ she whispers, and you, David Elizabeth Strider, you laugh.