Chapter Text
I think that you're killer/With your floppy hair
Take me out to dinner/You know you can take me anywhere
And all of my girlfriends roll their eyes/And tell me to take it slow this time
x
Karkat
You’d never say it to his face but Dave was absolutely correct. You have finally let yourself enjoy this without worrying about the uncertain future and, god fucking dammit, you are happy. The last few days have been nothing but watching movies, snuggling, and kissing. It’s like nothing you’ve ever known. Your shoulders don’t ache like they always have, and your teeth aren’t sensitive from being ground into dust each night while you sleep. Instead, you have developed a perpetual curly strand of hair at the top of your head, from where Dave has twisted it around his finger endlessly throughout films, and a slight crick in your neck from falling asleep on the sofa three nights in a row.
You’re fighting against the neck pain now, trying to keep comfortably lying against Dave’s shoulder without turning enough to poke your horn into his clavicle, while you near the end of Brokeback Mountain. It was on a human romance film list that you found online and Dave decided it was ironic enough, as “the gayest film ever”, to watch. You still have yet to mention that it’s a pale imitation of a troll flick. (Pale as in a shitty version. There is nothing that could be misconstrued as moirallegience between Ennis and Jack.)
“Dude, can you sit the fuck still?” Dave interjects suddenly. “It’s like I’m all cuddled up with a fish that just jumped out of the water and is now suffocating in the air and flopping about tryin’ to get back to the sea. Thrash about all you want, buddy, you ain’t getting nowhere without legs.” His voice sounds thick.
You shuffle out from his arm and turn to look at him. “Are you crying?”
“No, man, I don’t cry.”
There aren’t tear tracks on his face but he very well could be welling up under those shades. He spent the first hour of the film joking about seeing so much bare ass, but became suspiciously quiet after a while. You take his shades off. He isn’t crying per se, but his eyes are glistening.
You frown at him as you fold the shades up and hold them beside you. “Oh, you don’t cry? Why are your gander bulbs all wet?”
“If you think these bulbs are wet, you should see my dick,” he quips, taking the glasses from your fist. The sexual jokes have become so frequent that they’ve ceased having their presumably desired effect of making you uncomfortable. “You are getting way too comfortable taking my shades off. It’s supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime privilege to see Strider eyes up close and personal.”
He doesn’t slip them back on yet because you grip his wrist and hold it down. “You are so fucking insufferably conceited, Strider,” you growl, your face caught between a scowl and a grin.
Dave’s head tilts like a confused barkbeast. “I’ve got good reason to be.”
You feel the tension fall from his wrist as he stops trying to move it up to his face. In response, you loosen your grip and slide your hand up his arm slightly. If he’d had the shades on, it would’ve been impossible to tell the shiver that your touch sent through him, but his eyes give it away, blinking slowly.
“What reason could possibly explain that trunkbeast-sized tumor in your pan that you call your ego?”
He smiles and uses the hand that isn’t holding his shades to grab your face. “I dunno. Some cute troll boy keeps flirting with me and blowing compliments up my ass. A guy can only take so much brown-nosing before he becomes blissfully aware of his own extreme irresistability attribute.”
You roll your eyes. “Oh, fuck you, asshole.”
“You wish,” he mumbles, before kissing you.
When the transportalizer sounds, you break apart and notice that you were making out through the whole end of the movie and the credits are now rolling. Dave doesn’t leap away like he would’ve before, but he does slip his shades back on. It’s ridiculously endearing that his eyes are kept as a little secret, just for you.
John Egbert, as per no one’s request, sits himself beside you. “Woah, you guys are having movie time again? Man, you’ve gotta start inviting me!” It’s become almost customary that he interrupts your movie dates. You suppose that’s your fault for having them in his and Dave’s shared room. But, at the same time, John is equally at fault for failing to realise that what he is interrupting is, in fact, a date, and not just some classic bro-time hangouts.
“I didn’t think you’d wanna watch Brokeback Mountain, bro. There’s no Cage or McConaughey to keep you interested. Just two good cowboy bros having intense bro-times,” Dave says, throwing his arm back around your shoulder as the two of you readjust your lounged positions to accommodate the excess dork.
Egbert shrugs. “I’ve never seen it. Was it good?”
You bark out a laugh. “It was a shitty version of the far superior troll film: In Which Two Lowblood Baabeast Herders Enter Into A Vacillating Red/Black Relationship; Both Have Matesprits–”
“Hold up,” Dave interrupts, “there’s a troll version?”
“No.” You scowl at him for not letting you finish the title. He does this every time you begin telling him the Alternian name of a film. “This is a human iteration of the original and much finer troll movie. Do I have to remind you that our universe came first?”
Dave rolls his eyes, you assume from the way that his eyebrows bob above his shades. “We gotta watch the troll version at some point. I bet it’s just as shitty as that troll Adam Sandler film we watched.”
You jab his side with your elbow. “That movie was fucking fantastic and you know it!”
John laughs. “Jeez, you guys are so funny when you argue!” You don’t blame him for not recognizing the black flirtation going on. You’re not sure even Dave realizes that he’s doing it. Perhaps it’s all a part of human romance and its weird quadrant-mixing ways. “Do you wanna watch troll Brokeback Mountain now? Or, I guess you’ve just watched the human one so it’d be kind of repetitive. Hmm.” He, honest to fucking god, places a hand to his chin as he thinks, like a cartoon character. “Oh! What about Jurassic Park, Karkat? I’ve been meaning to show you it ever since you got here!”
Before you can give John a scathing review of his past movie choices, Dave answers for you. “Sure. I haven’t seen it before.”
“Oh my god, Dave, how? It is, like, one of the greatest films of all time! Jeff Goldblum is so funny and, oh my god, the “life finds a way” moment! We have got to watch it!”
The two of them turn to you, waiting for the one who can actually understand the letters on the keyboard to find the film. “Okay, fine!” You search for it on the milf-covered website that you and Dave have been using to pirate all the human movies.
The film begins and John is immediately leaned so far forward towards the screen, you’d be unsurprised if he fell on your husktop. You watch a human man get mauled by some sort of mysterious animal when you feel Dave’s arm snake off your shoulder and down your back. It wraps around your lower back and he lays it at your side, touching your thigh. You turn to him. His face is staring straight forward at the screen; the only acknowledgement of his touch is the slight smirk on his lip. Oh. He’s testing the waters of how oblivious Egbert truly is.
You look back at the screen and slowly lift your hand to Dave’s face and pull at his lower lip a little with your claw.
He chuckles a little and moves towards you. “I think we could makeout right now and Egbert wouldn’t have the slightest clue,” he breathes against the shell of your ear. He squeezes your leg a little.
“Dave…” you growl. It’s partially a warning, partially an agreement to his little game.
Unfortunately, your volume control issues betray you. “Shhh, Karkat! Jeff Goldblum’s about to come on,” John says, turning toward the two of you and seeing Dave’s hand gripping near to your ass and your fingers on his face. His face which is almost buried into the side of yours. John eyes the scene with suspicion. “Are you two fighting, again? Should I sit in the middle?”
Dave starts laughing and your palm connects with your face. “Fuck me, Egbert. You are a complete buffoon.”
“What?” John pauses the movie. He looks again at Dave’s hand on your thigh. “Am I not getting something? I don’t understand how you can spend all this time watching movies together when all you do is fight. I mean, every time I come in, it’s like you have Karkat in a headlock or something, and he just lets you. Are you friends or not?”
“Not exactly,” Dave hints.
John’s eyebrows furrow like that was a riddle. “So you don’t like each other?”
You are fucking amazed by this kid’s lack of understanding. “How you have gotten through six sweeps without walking into a well sign-posted sinkhole astounds me.”
“What?!” John asks exasperated.
“Dude, just, okay, look,” Dave says. He uses his free hand to turn your face towards his and plants a kiss right on your mouth. He looks back towards John. “Get it?”
The cogs turn in John’s brain and his face cycles through a range of expressions, before he lands back on confusion. “Dave… are you gay?”
x
But I got a feeling wounds are healing, talking on the phone
I know everybody changes, but I hope that we don't
Carve our names into the car seat leather
You plus me equals a heart forever
A heart forever, oh
x
Dave
“Man, there is no fucking chance you’ll be able to fight off a sword with that thing. You can give in. I won’t judge.”
Karkat swings his little sickle around pretty impressively. He challenged you to a strife after you mocked his choice of sicklekind and, true to form, he’s stubbornly intent on going through with it. “Ha! You fucking wish, asswipe. I was going to be a threshsecutioner back on Alternia.”
You take out your sword. “You know that means nothing to me.” This is happening, you guess. “That sickle’s too small. You won’t be able to deflect my hits,” you repeat the same argument that you’ve used a few times in a feeble attempt to make him drop the idea.
“I told you, size doesn’t matter.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
You shrug and swing the sword experimentally. You’re still not completely used to the weight of the sword you found in the ruins. It’s ever so slightly different to your old one, in a way that almost throws you off. Almost.
“Come on. Fight me. When I win, I promise I will only brag for a day.” Karkat keeps standing in a ready position and dropping it to slash at the air, like a video game character in idle animation.
You ready yourself, setting your legs apart. You crack your neck to either side. “Alright, let’s go. First one to disarm the other wins a kiss.”
Karkat narrows his eyes at you. “We’d both be getting a kiss either way, imbecile.”
“Well darn, looks like we both win. Maybe we should stop this bullshit and get to kissin’”
“Fat chance. I’m going to knock you on your ass.”
You sigh and take a stance as Karkat runs across the garden at you. He has one arm at his side and his feet parted in a pretty nice fighting stance as he goes to hook your sword with his sickle. The metal clangs together as you pull your sword back and flashstep to behind him. He whirls around, confused and frowning, his thick eyebrows lowering when he realises what you did. You evade a wide swipe of his weapon, and you smack back at it with the flat of your blade. Karkat pulls his arm back and takes a few steps backwards, with some footwork that tells you how unused to actual fights he is.
His technique reeks of learning the patterns without ever having really put them to practice. Sure, he’s had a little battle experience, in Sgrub, but he’s always had a team behind him and mostly fought things that weren’t fighting back. You, on the other hand, are battle-hardened to a fault. You’ve never had it easy, and you’ve never sparred for fun. You don’t run on patterns and technique; it’s all expertise and instinct. If you fight Karkat the way that you used to strife with Bro, he’ll get hurt, and you’re not really into the wounded soldier fantasy of nursing him back to health.
Karkat is persistent, you’ll give him that. He runs at you again, trying hard to loop his sickle around your sword. In response, you use a leg to sweep his feet out from under him and he falls onto his ass with an “oof,” as you knock all the wind out of him. You stand above him and point your sword down, under his neck.
“Finished?” you ask, knowing full well what the answer will be.
He laughs spitefully. “I thought it was first to disarm the other.”
You bend one knee on his chest, keeping your other foot on the floor. “True. But you’re down, man. Not gettin’ out of this.”
“Oh, really?”
With his free hand, he grabs the leg that you have placed on the ground and pushes, causing you to lose your balance and crash down on top of him. Then he rolls over and, as he does, gets a quick, unanticipated swipe with his sickle at your sword, knocking it out of your hand. You lay stunned on the floor with Karkat straddling you.
He throws his hands up in victory. “Ha! Yes! I told you. A sickle is a perfectly acceptable, if not superior, weapon of choice!”
You smirk and sit up on your hands, so that Karkat slides to sit in your lap. “You cheated.”
“How the fuck did I cheat, nookwhiff?”
“You seduced me. Dirty play, using your adorable wiles to lull me into placidity.”
“Oh, please. First of all, I didn’t do anything of the sort, and second, as if you weren’t trying to do the exact same thing by standing over me, all brooding and smirking.”
“Not on purpose,” you shrug. “Maybe you just think I’m hot.” Karkat flushes furiously. “Anyway, you think we need a rematch to decide this, or do you want your prize?”
x
I like your big sister/Shе has your same face
And I tried to win hеr/Over with my cynical humor and yacht rock music taste
And all my ex-boyfriends have heard these lines/(Let's get married when we're twenty-five)
But I like you better by a million times
x
Karkat
When you wake up on the sofa, you almost mistake the face sipping on a coffee and smiling cheekily at you as Dave’s. That is, until you realise that Dave’s head is on your lap and the smiling face has lilac eyes, rather than scarlet.
“Good morning, Karkat. I would shut down that husktop if I were you, just in case any more incriminating pictures are taken,” Rose lilts sweetly.
You look to your husktop, and, as is customary by now, the screen is flooded with pornography. You reach to slam it closed, careful not to disturb the snoozing boy on your knee.
Rose watches you, patiently waiting to deliver more snark, no doubt. As soon as you settle back and rub the sleep from your eyes, she starts, “I think we’re due a conversation. But first, can I offer you a coffee?”
Your head flops back on the top of the sofa. “Please,” you say through gritted teeth. “I’m going to need one if I have to talk to you.”
She titters a little as she goes to brew you a cup.
Dave is peacefully laid out across the length of the loungeplank. He fell asleep pretty quickly into Forgetting Sarah Marshall, with his head on your shoulder and shades poking into you. You shook him awake after a few minutes and made him lay down instead, and you spent the entire rest of the film tentatively trying to find a comfortable place for your hand to rest.
Rose hands you a mug that says “world’s best granddaughter” — you acknowledge it with a thankful grunt — and takes her seat again. “I suppose the traditional opening line here would be “what are your intentions with Dave”, though that is a little trite. Not to mention, vague. I mean, seriously, what are your intentions? Nobody is answering that with “oh, thank you for asking. I intend to cheat and break his heart”. Perhaps I should begin with, have the two of you finally settled into some sort of relationship?”
You blink at her a few times. Sometimes she waffles on so much like Dave does, that you’ve wondered if they’re ectobiologically related. It’d make sense. They look so similar and human movies have taught you enough about the concept of siblings that it would be a fair assumption to make about that. Without playing the game, you’ll never know, but they also would never exist… You don’t like to go down this train of thought too far, though. It only leads to the assumption that this is a doomed timeline and… Yeah, fuck that. You’ll just put it down to being some paradox space bullshit.
“It is too fucking early in the morning for this Lalonde horseshit. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Karkat. Surely, you’ve consumed enough human romantic comedies, by now, that you have seen the vaguely threatening and played-out conversation between the love interest and the best friend or relative. I’m doing my due diligence, as Dave’s friend, by determining if you’re good enough for him.”
Fuck her for playing into your love of romance films. She’s good. But two can play at this game. “Don’t I need to do the same for Kanaya, then?”
She grins at the matching of wits going on here. “That’s an interesting subversion of the trope. I like it. We’ll interrogate one another, like a sort of lightning round. If you’ll allow me to begin: have you and Dave finally settled into a defined relationship?”
“We’re “dating”,” you curl your claws around the word. “We haven’t defined it into a quadrant because Dave refuses to further his cultural understanding.” That sounds more accusatory than it should; you wouldn’t know what quadrant this falls into, either. It’s matespritship but he flirts pitch with you and there are moments so pale. You realise, though, that Rose and Kanaya are in a similar situation. You’ve asked Kanaya about their relationship but you have no idea what Rose would quantify it as. “What quadrant are you and Kanaya in?”
She places her coffee mug down and crosses her legs, leaning against the arm of the chair that she sits in. “Maybe I’m refusing to further my cultural understanding, as well. We decided that our dynamic doesn’t fit neatly into one quadrant, so Kanaya is trying her hand at a more human definition of a relationship. We’re “girlfriends”.” She copies your air quotes. “Hmm. Have you had a relationship before this?”
“What?” You’re taken aback by that question. “How is that in any way relevant information? Or any of your business, for that matter?”
“I am just trying to ascertain your compatibility with Dave. Let’s call it, determining a character profile.”
You sigh. Might as well be agreeable. You have no idea what Rose could be capable of if she decides you aren’t compatible, and you don’t want to find out. “Fuck, okay. I guess, no? There was a time when I thought that maybe Terezi and I… Well, we were vacillating red and black for a while but we weren’t ever in the same place.” You look down at Dave. “But it wasn’t…”
“It wasn’t what?” Rose pries with a dubiousness in her voice.
You keep looking at Dave. He sleeps so still, with the same practised stoicism on his face. “It wasn’t like this, okay?”
Rose’s voice softens, “You really like him, don’t you?”
“Hey, bulgebreath, it’s my question!”
She chuckles. “My apologies. Please, ask away.”
“Hm…” Truthfully, you aren’t that enthused about the lightning round. You don’t really have anything to ask. Rose and Kanaya fit well together and you haven’t seen Kanaya this happy. Maybe, ever?
“No more questions?” Fuck. You hesitated too long. She sniffed out your satisfaction like some sort of sea-dwelling carnivore smelling blood in the water.
Before you can answer her, you are punched in the jaw and Dave’s yawn becomes a garbled apology. “Aw shit, sorry, Karkat! I was stretching,” he trails off, looking around. “Oh, hey Rose. What were you two talking about?”
x
And I got a feeling wounds are healing, talking on the phone
I know everybody changes, but I hope that we don't
Carve our names into the car seat leather
You plus me equals a heart forever
A heart forever, oh
A heart forever
x
Dave
You and Karkat have fallen into a routine of watching movies and working on your respective hobbies in tandem. After a few days of begging, he downloaded some DJing software on to his husktop and some troll version of M S Paint, where all of the colors are concerningly named for the blood castes — you were particularly thrown for a loop when Karkat explained that the rainbow airbrush pen, Rainbow Drinker, was named after troll vampires. He reads his bodice rippers, undoubtedly better befitting a middle-aged troll lady than a teenage boy, as you flit between mixing beats and playing them while you draft up some new SBaHJ panels. Fans of your webcomic have been waiting on you, like you’re a dude and they’re all butlers, since you left Texas, and you’ve broken new ground with your thrilling plotline of the blossoming relationship between Sweet Bro and Geromy. Embracing your inner gay-ness really does open up some doors to story beats you’d never previously considered.
As you work on a mix of Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em’s Crank That (Soulja Boy), writing a verse of your own about what exactly Soulja Boy is cranking, Karkat slams his head into his book and groans loudly.
“Is there any way that you could possibly make that noise even more aggravating? Please? I am finding it far too easy to read my novel and your embarrassing rhymes are only making it marginally more difficult to concentrate,” he complains.
You pause the recording of your voice and turn to look at Karkat. His cheeks are flaming red, possibly from the book but more likely from hearing you workshop a verse about cranking your hog. “No, dude, look. This is going to be my masterpiece. And by that I obviously mean a piece about masturbating. Fuck, that’s good, wait.” You take a moment to jot down mastur-piece in your note book. “I’ve just gotta keep refining this shit. I’m just running low on material, on account of having no smutty books written in plain ol’ earth English lying about.” You flick at the dog-eared corner of his book. “I mean, how’s a guy to write about cranking his lil’ soulja when he’s not got the sweet pornographic words to work with?”
He swats your hand away with the book like he’s trying to get a fly. “Fuck off. I’ve told you, it isn’t a porn book.”
“Seriously? Why is that jacked dude completely nude on the cover, then?”
“He’s a warrior, Dave. Not that you humans would know anything about that. You are all pathetic in comparison to our warrior race; we dominated galaxies. I was considered defective back on Alternia and I still thrashed you in our battle the other day.” He hasn’t missed an opportunity since your strife to remind you that he won. You’ve been considering challenging him again, just to see the tantrum he throws when you win this time.
You close the fleshy laptop down (gross, you’ll never be used to troll tech) and swivel yourself round to him. “Prove it.”
“What?” He eyes you warily.
“Prove it’s not a porn book. Read it to me. And, hey, it’ll teach me more about those quadrants that you’re always on me to learn about.”
Karkat’s eyes flick about awkwardly. He rifles through the pages.
You raise your eyebrows above your shades. “What’s up? Can’t find a chapter that isn’t just trolls mercilessly going at it with unbridled, hate-filled lust?”
“No! I’m trying to find something that will be simple enough for your primitive human understanding of troll romance to grasp. As fascinating as a lesson on all of it would be, I’d hate to drag you away from your oh-so-important masturbatory raps for as long as it would take for you to understand.”
You snatch the book from his hands and Karkat makes a noise somewhere between a growl and the squeal of a kettle that’s just finished boiling. He makes grabs for it as you deftly dodge his hands and open the book to the first page, bending it and adding another line to the already striped spine. “How about starting at the beginning, doofus? Here, I’ll get us going.” You clear your throat noisily and look intently at the nonsense lettering on the page. “Once upon a time, there was,” you check the characters on the front cover, “a big, naked dude with phallus-shaped horns attending a massive troll hate-orgy, with a chick, with orange blood and huge tits, and another dude.”
“Fucking stop it, asshole! You are making a mockery of my culture!” Karkat keeps swinging his grabby little claws towards you and the book.
You hold a hand out and catch one of his, holding it back. “You’re telling me that stories about naked dudes is troll culture? Never mind! Maybe I should be trying my hand at this cultural enrichment shit.”
Karkat lets out a frustrated growl and continues making a play for the book with his free hand. Neither of you even look up when someone transportalizes into the kitchen.
“Um. I can go if I’m interrupting… something…” Kanaya’s weirdly posh voice says stiltedly. (She’s sort of British? How can an alien be British?)
Karkat reels back from you, red as a freshly smacked ass. He looks mortified. Lord knows why; he reads this shit in front of people all the fucking time. “Er, no, we weren’t– it’s not–” he blusters.
Kanaya is flushed too. It’s like motherfucking Christmas up in here, with all the red and green going on. “No, no, I can make tea later. I’ll just…” She clears her throat. “Sorry,” she apologizes before dematerializing.
You look at Karkat who has sunk into a chair, covering his face with his hands. His quest to retrieve the book has been forgotten. “Dude, what was that?”
Karkat lets out one of his, by this point, patented groans and sinks further into the chair. “Nothing you’d understand.”
“Try me.”
He glances at you through the slats of his fingers. “Fine.” He moves his hands and slides himself back into a sitting position. “You are a shameless pitchflirt,” he says accusatorily.
You hop up onto the table in front of him. “What, like kismetis? I thought our primitive human intellects couldn’t do your fucked up troll hate thing?”
“No, and I was right about that. I don’t believe that you are capable of the nuances of full blown antipathy that defines our caliginous relationships. But,” he sucks a whistling breath in through his teeth, “it seems that the teasing aspect of human flirtation is a pretty fucking close approximation of budding black feelings. And what’s really fucked up is that I have been reciprocating your pitch advances, while you’ve had no idea what is even going on right under your sniffnubs!” He covers his face again.
“Karkat.”
“No.”
“Karkat, listen. Fuck me, you are such a dramatic motherfucker. Listen.” You try to pry his hands from his face and he complies, instead replacing them over his ears. “Oh my god.” You pull his right hand from his ear. “Dude, I already know you’ve been flirting with me. We’ve been falling asleep spooning on the sofa every night for the last goddamn week. Black, red, diamonds, spades, whatever. It’s not a big deal–”
He interrupts to correct you, “spades is black, jackass. You’re forgetting about auspisticism, which–”
“Whatever. To me, you’re just hitting on me like any ol’ human. I mean, I still don’t get the quadrant thing–”
“You would if you fucking listened to me ever.”
“Okay then. Get reading,” you toss him the book, “I got a lot to learn.”
x
So buy me silver jewelry and all my favorite Cadbury
And tell me yet again about when we met and what you thought of me
Sometimes, I get overwhelmed and way too far ahead of myself
I often get the feeling that I'll never want somebody else and
They say modern love's a cruel endeavor (They say it's cruel)
And to that I say, "Fuck it, whatever" (Whatever)
x
Karkat
The closing credits of Mamma Mia blare out a song that Dave is clearly trying to pretend he doesn’t enjoy, as he has been with every song throughout the film. It seemed to be a movie much more aimed for humans (which, you guess, applies to literally every single human film) with its focus on familial relations. Although, you guess some trolls, those who are more interested — or even believe — in the ancestors, could have an easier time relating to the issue of not knowing who your “dad” is. You preferred the older human woman’s story: her struggle between determining which of these men were her matesprit and how they have changed since she met them.
A question plagues you. “What did you think of me when we first spoke?”
Dave snorts a laugh. “That’s a hella dumb and neurotic question, dude. Seriously?”
“Serious as a cull order.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. I thought you were an asshole for harassing Jade and the others. And then I thought you were funny to mess with, which I guess hasn’t changed.” To really drive the point home, he flicks you lightly.
You flap his hand away. “What about when we met?”
He gulps. “Pretty much the same. It took me a bit to realise that I thought you were hot, I guess.” His expression remains unshaken but his voice has lowered, revealing a hint of embarrassment.
“When did you…?”
His head turns. His eyes are deadlocked ahead. “Movie night. When we all watched John’s shitty McConnaughey flick together. You, er, you got cream on your lip from the hot cocoa and I,” he coughs, “I wanted to wipe it off.”
You think back to that. Dave told you that there was something on your face and brushed his thumb along his upper lip to show you were. It distracted you from the film for a while because that image bounced around your mind like a guy falling down the stairs.
Dave resets to unbothered. “Your turn. When did you whip up this titanic hankering for my bod?”
“Oh.” You hadn’t quite considered that the question would do an impressive somersault and land facing right back at you. You don’t know how to answer because it’s unfathomably humiliating to admit that you had a pitch-crush on him from the first moment he ever spoke to you. Instead, you deflect expertly. “How many times do I need to explain the vast differences between the simplicities of human romance and the intricacies of troll romance?”
He smirks smugly. “Oh yes, just what I wanted, another lecture on how little I understand troll relationships. Come on, bro, you can’t leave me as the only one exposed. My metaphorical pants are round my ankles, here. I showed you mine; you gotta show me yours.”
You huff. “Okay. The dislike that you expressed toward me in our first conversation was lost in interspecies translation and came off as some black advances. Which I… reciprocated.”
“Hopy shit, you were into me from the first time we ever spoke? I know I’m unconscionably sexy but, damn dude, that’s all hells of embarrassing for you.”
“Shut up.”
Dave reclines back on the arm of the loungeplank, looking incredibly pleased with himself. “So what about the other quadrants? When’d you realise you wanted to feelings jam with me and take long romantic walks through the jungle?”
You grumble a little in protest but answer anyway. “When you went missing, I was worried about you. And then you appeared at Jade’s hive and you looked so weak, and I realised I was waxing pale for you. I don’t really know when I started to feel flushed for you. It was likely just a result of the fucked-up-ness of black/pale vacillation.”
“Or maybe troll quadrants are dumb and you just fancied me flat out from the moment you voyeuristically spied on me from a meteor?”
“Maybe.” Holy shit, did you just say that?
Even Dave noticed that you may have just admitted the stupidity of reducing your feelings into separate boxes. He sits up straighter and raises his eyebrows. “Woah. Did mr. quadrant really just say that?”
“I… I guess I did. Maybe you’re right. Maybe my feelings are more human. Maybe we should just be human boyfriends and forget about Alternian bullshit. I mean, that universe was decimated, and it fucking sucked; why give it any more air time? Fuck Alternia. Fuck the quadrants. And fuck troll society’s casteist rhetoric that made me hate myself! ”
“Dude, did you just ask me to be your boyfriend in a rant about rejecting your alien dictatorship planet?” Dave grins.
x
'Cause I got a feeling wounds are healing, talking on the phone
I know everybody changes, but I hope that we don't
Carve our names into the car seat leather
You plus me equals a heart forever
And ever and ever and ever, oh
Forever and ever and ever, oh