Work Text:
You run out of money in New York, in a town called New Hope, which Dave finds unspeakably hilarious.
"I don't get it," you say.
"Don't worry about it."
He's stroking your hair, which is nice. You've curled up next to him on the one park bench in town, his jacket wrapped around your shoulders, your legs dangling over his lap.
"This is it, I guess," he says. "This is how I die. Starved to death next to an Alternian pocket knife, waiting for her to give into her primal bloodlust and eat my flesh for sustenance."
The cannibalism thing is such a stereotype. "Hey, we only do that sometimes," you say.
"But you would."
"Of course I would," you say, flashing all your teeth at once.
"So what're we going to do?"
You sniff his jacket. It still smells like Texas, like the boiling hot sun and his tiny apartment and cheap flimsy metal. "You'll sell your body on the streets. I'm going to be your pimp."
"You don't have the jacket to be a pimp."
"I'll make one," you say. "Don't worry so much."
You breathe him in. He's all cold sweat and the beef jerky that was your last meal and cherry red everything. He's the best thing you've ever smelled.
The sky is parched, sheet white, all finely pressed linens and starch and cotton. It's clean. It smells like newness.
"I think I know someone who can help us," he says. "But it's going to be a pain in the ass. We are going to have to put up with so much snarky bullshit."
"We are going to swim in the snarky bullshit," you add. "We are going to get intimate with it."
"Gross."
You snatch his shades and trade them with your own. He groans.
"You are the worst thing that has ever happened to me."
"Give it a few sweeps," you say. "I'm sure something else will come along."
(Something does.)
---
The most important discovery of week one is that Dave has nightmares.
You're laying next to him in the back of your truck (TH1S 1S SC4ND4LOUS, MR. STR1DER. well it's either this or you sleep in the front seat pick your poison). No matter how long it's been since you left Alternia, you've never quite shaken your nocturnal habits, so he falls asleep first, which is nice because you get to observe the rarest of all sights: the Strider at rest.
You slide up his shades so you can take a good whiff at his eyes. He has perfectly fine, almost white eyelashes, freckles across the bridge of his nose, and he smells younger without the glasses. Sadder, maybe. He mutters and shifts in his sleep so you carefully slide the glasses back down. Dave keeps moving, keeps muttering. Something about heat and clockwork, something about a scratch. A series of unfamiliar names and not all of them are human.
"John," he whispers. "John, no, don't," and then, "Terezi."
(This is the first thing he's done in two sweeps that shocked you.)
(The last thing was befrending an Alternian exile in the first place.)
"Dave." You shake his shoulder. "Dave, wake up."
"What?"
"You were having a nightmare."
"Oh," he says. He sighs, rubs his eyes, looks up at the sky.
"Do you ever feel like you don't quite fit in, somehow?"
"Yes Dave, I am six sweeps old again and no one understands me."
He scowls. "No, not in a dramatic bullshit way. But like you're one of those puzzle pieces that someone spills soda on so it gets all wrinkled and bloated and when you try and shove it in the right spot it just won't fit, no matter what."
You laugh. You laugh and laugh and the sky tastes the same way it did your first night on Earth, all crispness and alien smog and the stench of humans.
"Oh yeah," he says. "You probably do."
---
When you thought about Earth, America in particular, you never thought of it being quite so huge.
And when you read about roadtrips in human literature, they always seemed more exciting, more adventurous.
No one told you about Oklahoma. How it lies like a flat hard desert, how the sky eats you alive and spits you back out, a loose boundless sack of flesh. No one told you about how after a while there's a film of unrealness over everything, as if you and the car and the boy in the driver's seat are all that have ever existed.
No one told you about car sickness.
When you get to Kansas your stomach throws up its hands and admits defeat. Dave ends up stopping every five miles so you can get out of the car and empty the contents of your stomach on the roadside weeds.
He holds your hair back and you choke up bile. "Are all road trips like this?" you ask.
"Yeah pretty much," says Dave. The way he's looking at you smells all funny. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear and you think he's about to tell you something but you feel your stomach turn again and he sighs.
"You'll get used to it eventually."
---
No matter what you do, Dave doesn't listen.
"You're human," you whisper. "You can't just walk into an Alternian ex-pat bar. That's sort of not okay. Is there any way to get this into your thinkpan? You are going to get hurt."
"Naw I'm not," he says, parking the car in front of Mobius Double Reach Around. "I got my dragon girl."
(You are secretly pleased.)
"If you're bleeding out, I'm not going to save you," you say.
"'Kay."
He swings out of the car and swaggers into the bar.
Hell, you shouldn't even be in here. It's all mustard and brown bloods, the occasional lime-green troll. This is not the sort of place a teal blood just wanders into, especially with a human on her arm.
Dave slides onto a bar stool and you clamber up next to him, hunch your shoulders, try to ignore the looks everyone's giving you. The bartenders a brown blood, huge horns, not that old. Surprisingly friendly.
"Hey," he says. "Can I uh, get you anything?" He lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper "Maybe directions to an uh, more human friendly place?"
"Naw I'm good, thanks bro," says Dave. He turns to you. "What do trolls drink that's alcoholic?"
After two Cherry Apeshit Apocalypses, your laugh goes back to normal and his does too. When you stumble out to the car he flips off one of the yellow bloods who'd been staring you down and this makes you almost keel over with laughter.
"I shouldn't drive," he says. "I really shouldn't drive."
You're toppled together in the back, leaning against each other for support. "I can drive," you say. "I've watched lots of human movies with driving. I can drive, and it will be amazing."
"No," he says. "No no, that's not happening."
"What, you afraid of dying?" you ask and that makes the mood turn sour. He dips his head down, and you can see (smell) every freckle on his face so very sharply. His breath huffs against your face and the worn denim on his pants is soft against your knees. You want to lick the freckles off his nose, you want to breathe in the lemon smell of his hair and never leave because he is so small, so perfectly alone and tiny and you want to squeeze him in your hands until he breaks and never let go.
"I like going to troll places," he says. "Bars and restaurants and everything. It reminds me of some people I -"
He pauses. The air is heavy between you and you find your hand locking with his and this is so maudlin, but under the haze of those two drinks you can't find the energy to care.
"I die in my dreams," he says. "A lot. All different versions of me." His breath is shaky. "I've been stabbed more times than I can count and it all feels so real and sometimes instead I find another dead Dave in my dreams and his blood is on my hands and I just can't stop staring at it, it's so bright."
You rest your hand against his throat, feel his pulse jump under your fingers, bright and hot. "Don't die on me, Strider," you say. "Dead Daves are the enemy."
Dave makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob as you press your lips against his. His lips are chapped and it's awkward and short. (You've never done this before. You wonder if he has) When he pulls away you can't resist the urge to kiss the sprinkle of freckles on his left cheek.
"Want to go key someone's car?" you ask.
"Fuck yes."
(You almost get caught five times, and you have to go hide in a ditch a mile away till morning, but carving "T34M PYROP3 STR1D3R W4S H3R3" into someone's car is worth the risk.)
---
Sometimes you get the lyrics to songs wrong because you like the way the corner of Dave's eyes crinkle up but his mouth stays the same, and you know he's trying to hide a smile, and you know it's because of you.
"I see my marionette walking awaaaay.” you belt.
"Stop it, for the love of God stop it. You are murdering the song."
"It's a mole that is feeeeeding."
"Too late, now it's dead. Laying there on the ground, blood everywhere. Widow's crying over the corpse as the police ask her to identify it. "
You like Human Bruce Springsteen the best, but Dave refuses to play that Nebraska tape anymore after you pass through Illinois. "Too cool for this trip," he says, throwing it into the glove box.
---
The most important discovery of Week Three is that when Dave Strider is alone with you in the middle of the night, when you're rubbing a thumb across his knuckles because he just woke up screaming, he'll answer your questions without deceit.
The stars are pretty tonight, even if the Condesce's fleet blocks huge swaths of them out.
"I never could see the stars this well on Alternia," you say.
"Terezi, I don't want to be the first person to tell you this, but you're sort of blind."
You put a hand against your chest. "What?"
"I'm sorry, it's true. Can't see a thing."
"I wasn't always blind."
He wants to ask you about that, you think, but you're not telling. It was, frankly, really stupid.
"What do you dream about?" you ask.
"Lots of things," he says. "Dead Daves, puppets, fruity rumpus asshole factories."
"What the hell is a fruity rumpus asshole factory?"
"Pretty much exactly what it sounds like."
You poke him in the side and shift so your head is on his stomach.
"Mostly about this game," he says. "I think I played it in another life -"
You snort. "Is this a human religion thing?"
"No, shut up for a second, okay? Earth gets destroyed, and I'm playing with these three other kids, and then everything goes wrong."
"Am I in your dream, Dave?" you ask, tilting your chin up so he can fully appreciate your smirk, your finely tuned eyebrow wiggling.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, you and eleven other trolls."
(This is the first thing he's done in two weeks that's shocked you.)
"Didn't you think, when you first met me, that you recognized me or something? That I was sort of familiar but you didn't know why?"
(When you first met Dave the first thing you thought was that you'd have to deal with this human on your roof when you just wanted to be alone; freshly exiled, lusus-less, your head spinning with so many new smells. The second thing you thought was is he going to jump?)
"I don't know," you say. "Maybe."
(The first thing he said to you was "Do you like shitty comics?" and the first thing you said to him was "How shitty are we talking here?"
He proposed a cross-cultural art exchange. You spent your first afternoon in your new city drawing chalk figures on the roof, fucking with each other's art, snorting chalk dust and laughing when he tried it and almost choked.)
"Did we win?" you ask.
He laughs.
---
Ohio passes by in a blur.
"What was I like?" you ask.
"Hmm?"
"In the game. What was I like?"
His hands grip the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turn white. You didn't know human hands could do that.
"You were brilliant," he says. "You were brilliant and crazy and we were the perfect team."
Your heart (no, blood-pusher, you've been on Earth too long) catches in your throat. "Did you pity me?"
"Fuck yes I did," he says, and his voice is raw.
You pull over at the next motel you can find.
---
The most important discovery of week four is that Dave wants to own you and you want to own him right back.
He stumbles onto the bed and you pin him down with your knees.
When he kisses your collarbone he mutters, "You are the only thing that makes sense in this whole goddamn universe."
You bite his ear hard enough to draw blood. "I want to open your chest and crawl inside," you whisper, hand on his thigh. "I want to write my name on your arms so everyone knows you belong to me."
"I'd let you," he says. "Oh God, I'd let you."
He's tracing your sign into your stomach over and over again. "Always, forever, Tz," he says. His hands are shaking and so are yours. "Always, forever."
Looking back on it in the light of day, it's all rather embarrassing.
---
When Dave's car gets stolen he doesn't even look surprised. "Figures," he says. "I have the worst luck. You up for walking?"
"What if you carry me?" you ask, arm around his shoulder, one leg in the air and he grabs you up in his arms once before tossing you down and you pull his ankle until he falls over too and you should be scared. You're stranded in Pennsylvania a thousand miles from home (or a thousand thousand thousand miles, you think with a pang. Your hive, has it been demolished by now?) but you can't be. You are Team Pyrope-Strider, you don't do fear.
"I don't have any luck," he says. "In the game, there was this girl - a friend of yours, she was always saying she had all of it. Maybe she still does, maybe that's the problem here."
Your throat tightens. "You did?"
You nod. "Yeah. Her name was Vriska."
"Oh sweet troll Jesus," you say.
He's still laughing as he picks you up off the ground, brushes dirt off the back of your pants. "I guess some things are a universal constant."
(That's when you start to believe him.)
---
Something about the way he looks when he walks in front of you, hands in pockets, hood of his bright red hoodie thrown up, is indefinably familiar. It niggles in the back of your brain like a loose tooth, and you fall silent, watching his red shoes beat down dead leaves.
"What's up? You all right back there Pyrope or do I need to get some smelling salts?"
"Just thinking," you say. "Or remembering or hallucinating or your human disease called repressed memories has caught. Just a snippet of something. Red sweatpants, and the sun, but it's all green and - and that's it."
He falls in step with you, links arms. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm really sorry."
You don't understand why he's apologizing until your first nightmare.
---
It's a dumb idea, like most of Dave's ideas. For one, you don't have anywhere to go.
"Hey Pyrope, you ever thought about driving my shitty car into the horizon?"
"You asking me to run away with you, Strider?" you ask.
"Fuck yes."
"I thought you'd never ask," you say.
It takes you two minutes to pack.