[Homestuck Fic] Einsamkeit [Dave/Karkat]
Aug. 18th, 2011 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blood_wingedTitle: Einsamkeit
Genre: Romance/Angst
Pairing: Dave/Karkat
Rating/Warnings: NC-17. Dave losing his cool, freaky alien biology, lots of cussing, sex.
Summary: Well lookie, it's a de-anon from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
homostuck . Dave didn't get a lot of love from anyone as a kid, because Bro didn't roll like that. As a result, he secretly craves tenderness and affection. But he's ashamed of his need for basic human closeness and pretends he's too cool to need it. Then Dave finally gets some love right in the fucking gaping psychic wounds. Catharsis ensues. Also porn.
Dave Strider didn’t need anyone.
This is what he told himself as he leaned over the sink and peered at himself in the bathroom mirror. A pale faced blonde boy with blood red eyes shadowed by nights of lost sleep looked back at him, and an expression something close to a crooked smile worked its way across his lips. The light was strange here, it made him seem gaunter than he was, and he glanced around the grey-walled bathroom wondering just why they’d all thought it was such a marvellous idea to stay on Alternia after all was said and done. It had been a while since he’d seen or even spoken to the others – John, Rose and Jade – since their argument over what ought to be done when they finished the game, though he sometimes heard news of them from the trolls. As for himself, Aradia had told him in no uncertain terms that jumping through time as he had been was causing damage to the universe itself, and he had to stop.
Since then, he’d been absolutely, and completely unironically bored out of his skull.
The bedsprings creaked as he sat down, pulling his computer into his lap and opening Pesterchum. The three humans he would now hesitate to call his friends were all offline, but several of the trolls were not.
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] at 03:13 --
CG: HI AGAIN, IDIOT.
TG: oh gog
CG: OH GOG IS RIGHT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING STRIDER ISN’T THIS THE TIME WHEN YOU MEATSACKS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SLEEPING OR WHATEVER.
TG: look vantas im not in the mood for your motherfucking self so just lay off alright
CG: WHOA WHAT.
CG: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FUCKING SMARTASS COMMENTS.
CG: IF YOU THINK GIVING YOURSELF A PITY PARTY IS GOING TO MAKE ME BE SYMPATHETIC.
CG: YOU HAVE ANOTHER THING COMING NOOKSNIFFER.
TG: im not asking for your sympathy
TG: i told you already im not in the mood for you asshat
-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 03:29 --
CG: OH WHAT THE FUCK.
CG: YOU DID NOT JUST.
CG: PERFORM THE MEATSACK EQUIVALENT OF HANGING UP ON ME.
CG: GOG DAMNIT STRIDER.
In the computer room, the rest of the trolls sat at their respective computers were treated to yet another show of Karkat Vantas smacking his keyboard repeatedly against his computer monitor, only stopped when Sollux dispatched several F5 keys towards his head with astonishing accuracy. Instead, he then turned his rage on the blind teenager, who simply took it as he always did. This display had become something almost expected of late. They all knew that whenever Karkat opened a window to bother Dave it would inevitably end with anger on the nubby-horned troll’s side when the human inevitably blew him off. Karkat hated him, and it was rather clear for all of them to see. Terezi snickered and giggled and span in her chair like some kind of half-batshit dervish and there was only so much of her hyena-laugh that Karkat could deal with before he got up and stormed out.
He didn’t get far. His feet led him towards the source of his irritation, his hand lifting to pound on the door in some hardwired gesture of good manners before he simply opened it and walked in, orange eyes flicking about the darkened room. Dave was there, lying on his side with his back to the door on that weird flat squashy table that all of the humans seemed to insist upon sleeping on. The covers were pulled up to his shoulder in a way that only left his pale blonde hair visible and Karkat narrowed his eyes, tilting his head a little, listening to the sound of the other boy breathing.
“What are you Edward fuckin’ Cullen or some shit.” The human’s voice was flat, near expressionless, and quiet but it still made Karkat jump. He rolled onto his back and though Karkat couldn’t see his eyes he could feel them on him from underneath the boy’s shades. Karkat didn’t know what an Edward Cullen was but he assumed it was supposed to be an insult, and he let out a little growl.
“I wasn’t done talking to you, fucker,” he spat. “That signing off bullshit only worked when I couldn’t just come and kick down your fucking door.”
“You knocked.”
“And you- what?”
“You knocked.” Dave slid his glasses down, just enough that he could make out Karkat’s silhouette next to the door. Karkat could see the boy’s eyes, as red as his blood, and he frowned.
“So fucking what?”
“I don’t know how it works in your world, Vantas, but where I come from knocking on a person’s door is the equivalent to realisin’ that they own the space before you walk in.” The human stood up, the bedsprings squeaking again as he moved, and he walked over to the other boy, leaning against the wall in front of him. Karkat tilted his head back, a scowl on his face. “It’s pretty motherfuckin’ polite and you’re kind of harshin’ on the courtesy by walkin’ in here with this attitude.”
Karkat, for once, seemed stumped. His little fangy mouth was hanging open, dark eyebrows drawn down in an expression half way between confusion and fury, then he made a little sputtering sound and uttered a word that didn’t sound as if it contained any vowels. “Fuck you,” he snarled, and Dave rolled his eyes, turning his back on the troll boy, heading back to his bed and pulling his computer into his lap in a way that would, to anyone else, have said ‘I’m done talking to you now, piss off’, but Karkat wasn’t just anyone, he was Karkat Vantas, and he wasn’t about to stand there and take being ignored like some newly hatched grub.
He walked over to Dave and snapped down the lid of his laptop.
Dave didn’t move. He let out a slow breath and grit his teeth. “You’re fixin’ for an ass-kickin’, dickwad.”
“I’m not going to stand here and be fucking ignored by you, what the fuck is your problem, Strider? You’ve been acting like some pathetic wriggler since John and the others left.”
“Go away.”
It stung. It stung more than he thought it would to just hear one of those names come out of that fucking grey-skinned creep’s mouth and if it hadn’t been for his complete need to keep up his as of yet unshattered coolkid persona he would have cracked right there and then and punched the overbearing troll across his pointy face. His bed rattled as Karkat kicked the side of it.
“If you’re trying to make me fucking hate you you’re doing a piss-poor job of it you insufferable prick.” Dave could almost feel the rage radiating off the troll, and it made him inclined to believe that he wasn’t doing quite as poor a job as Karkat was trying to have him believe. The fact that the other still hadn’t left, however, was a little puzzling. The once time traveller had never really been able to make sense out of the complexities of troll relationships, despite Terezi and Nepeta’s repeated attempts to explain it to him. The only thing he knew for sure was that Karkat was one of few trolls who didn’t follow the rules like he should.
When Dave didn’t answer, Karkat bit his lower lip hard enough to draw some of his bright red blood to the surface. This was a situation that he didn’t find himself in often. People didn’t just ignore him (or so he would have liked to tell himself). “Oi-” he began, and then the bed squeaked and Dave had sat up, and his glasses were in his hand and his candy-red eyes were staring at Karkat with something that might have been anger flickering far below the surface.
“What in the nine rings of motherfucking hell do you want, Karkat?!” he said, almost shouting, but not quite raising his voice enough. Two thoughts immediately went through the troll’s head. The first, was that Dave was now annoyed enough to give him full eye contact, and the second was that he had just called him by his first name. Both of these thoughts infuriated him.
“What the fuck,” he started. “Do you think you’re doing? And more to the fucking point who do you think you’re talking to you worthless waste? You’re stuck here, that’s your fucking fault. It’s your fucking fault that John and Rose and Harley don’t talk to you anymore because you never fucking tried. Fuck, even I manage to keep friends better than you do.” That strange troll-disease called ‘friendship’ had been one that had spread inevitably through their group and none of them were really that embarrassed about talking about it anymore. “Gog, you’re such a fucking waste of space you make me want to hang myself just to save the embarrassment of having to watch you do it without a rope. You think any of us are going to give a fuck if you just let yourself disappear? Because we won’t, fuckass. Everything you’ve done to yourself is your own fucking fault and you can’t even blame your man-lusus for it anymore. You- Oi. What the fuck are you doing.”
Dave was shaking. Somewhere in the middle of Karkat’s speech he had sat up, possibly with the intention of making him shut up somehow, but something that the troll had said had stopped him, and now he was simply sitting there, with one arm wrapped around his knees and the other hand clenched into the bed sheets, hard enough to turn his white skin whiter over his knuckles. His eyes were fixed ahead and his jaw set firmly in a way that seemed to be making it tremble. Karkat was struck with the sudden feeling that he had gone Much Too Far With This Asshat and he very much did not know what to do about it.
“Oh.”
“You should give fuckin’ classes in how to be a first class asshole,” Dave muttered, lips barely moving.
“Um.”
“I know it’s my fault, alright? I know. It’s my fault that they all left, it’s my fault we’re all stuck here, and by some epic fuckin’ reach-around of space-time it’s probably my fault that you’re such a fuckin’ prick that you would actually say all those things to me without even thinkin’ about it.”
Something shining and clear and wet-looking had appeared on Dave’s eyelashes, and there was an unnerving quaking in his voice that Karkat had never heard before. His eyebrows drew together in a kind of shuddering motion like he had some weird computer lag, and Karkat’s hands twitched at his sides. There was nothing quite so awkward as seeing another male upset, and at that moment, a parallel universe where Karkat walked away appeared and spiralled off on its own tangent. In this universe, Karkat sat down, and Dave pushed his sunglasses back on.
“Listen, uh…”
“Piss. Off.”
“No I won’t just piss off, I’m not such a bulge-sucking fuckhead that I can’t feel… uh.”
“’Guilty’. The word you’re lookin’ for is ‘guilty’.”
It was the word he was looking for but it wasn’t something he was particularly willing to admit to. Meeting these humans had done a lot of things to change the way that the trolls saw the world and even how they acted towards one another, and ‘guilt’ was one of the words that had been introduced into their vocabulary. It was one of those embarrassing things, like friendship, which existed but were best left ignored and Karkat was feeling it now, a strange, hot, Do Not Want sensation in his gut that was making him almost but not quite expel everything he’d eaten in the past few hours.
“Yeah, whatever.”
He quickly realised that he’d placed himself into rather an awkward position, but he was determined not to be the one who gave up first. Karkat sat there in silence, gazing at the opposite wall, listening to Dave breathing. He held his knees and dug his nails in, and finally, Dave made a sound as if he was going to speak, and Karkat snapped his head around so quickly he felt a muscle pull in the back of his neck.
“It’s not like I miss the oblivious idiot,” Dave said, resting his hands on his chest and tapping his fingers slowly. Karkat nodded silently. “Or Rose being fucking weird. Or even Jade.” The troll nodded again. Dave stuck an arm behind his head and sniffed. “And it wasn’t as if bro ever did anything but torment me with those damn…” He stopped before he could say the word that would have him shaking from inevitable nightmares later, and instead made a quiet ‘hmn’ sound.
“Yeah.” Karkat muttered.
“Karkat-”
“What?”
The human had sat up at the same moment that the troll had turned around, and in something straight out of one of Egbert’s terrible romcoms they had ended up far too close to one another. Karkat could see himself reflected on the dark surface of Dave’s glasses, orange eyes open and wide, and he could see the outline of the other’s behind them. Dave didn’t move. He couldn’t see as well in the dark as Karkat could but the lamp was too far away for him to turn it on without shifting from this position, and the troll didn’t seem to be volunteering any movement, either. They remained suspended in this position for what felt like hours, though it could only have been seconds before Karkat finally blinked and lifted one hand, touching one sharp-nailed finger to the side of the other boy’s sunglasses. He jerked his head away, and Karkat let his hand drop.
“Oh,” he said again.
“Hmph,” said Dave, but he didn’t snap, or say anything insulting. Karkat was, rather understandably, confused as fuck by this and when he brought his hand up again, Dave didn’t shy away from it. The troll touched two fingers to the side of his sunglasses, and then two to the other, and pulled them away from the boy’s face.
“… Oh.”
Dave’s eyelashes were still wet, his eyes ringed red and the pupils huge in the dark. They were flicking all over Karkat’s face as he looked at him, never lingering in one place too long.
“What are you doing?” he asked, glancing down to where his sunglasses were held in Karkat’s hand, then back up to his face. He caught his lip between his teeth and furrowed his pale arched brows together, and reached out to take his glasses back. Karkat flipped his hand over, and Dave’s closed over it. The both of them stopped breathing for a moment, and Karkat let out a nervous sound as something unexpected and alien clenched around his chest.
“I don’t hate you,” Karkat told him, grumbling out the words.
“I’m disappointed,” Dave replied. “I’d been tryin’ really fuckin’ hard.”
“Jegus, don’t fuck with me, Strider.”
“I don’t hate you, either.”
The silence descended again, not quite as tense and uncomfortable as the first time but Dave still hadn’t moved his hand and Karkat was beginning to feel a tingling up his arm. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let this fuckass think that he was succeeding in making him nervous. Dave wasn’t sure what he was doing, all he knew was it had been a long gogdamn time since he’d had any form of contact, from anyone, and his palm felt like it was on fire.
“Kark-”
“I swear to gog if you say my name like that one more fucking time Strider I’m going to cut you a new waste chute. Shut up. Shut up just shut up.”
Karkat huffed loudly, and set the sunglasses aside out of Dave’s reach. Something in Dave seemed to have given up, and the troll was quite sure that the human’s night vision, as adjusted as it might have been by this point, wasn’t good enough to notice how intently Karkat was looking at him. He’d always thought there was something funny about these meatsacks, yet the similarities that they shared numbered more than their differences and perhaps-
“I actually don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, you fucking said that already, what’s your fucking point. You don’t know me well enough to hate me.”
Letting out a short sound that was possibly something close to a laugh Dave finally took his hand away from the other boy’s and Karkat pulled his back into his lap, clenching and unclenching his fingers as that tingling feeling refused to go away. He didn’t like it, less for the fact that the sensation was an unpleasant one, because it wasn’t, but more for the fact that he had the intense suspicion that he was supposed to be enjoying it, and he didn’t want to.
“You ain’t that bad of a guy,” Dave drawled out, shifting back to sit against the head of his bed. He didn’t make an attempt to get his glasses back, he just looked at Karkat with that infuriating flat expression and rubbed one finger up the side of his nose.
“If you’re lying in some attempt to spare me some kind of emotional trauma don’t fucking bother,” the troll snapped. “I know what kind of a ‘guy’ I am, and that is the kind of guy who is leaving. Right now.” He got up, and heard the bed squeak behind him as Dave moved, the quiet sound of his bare feet hitting the floor.
“You don’t need me to hate you.” He could feel Dave’s eyes on his back as he reached the door. “You already hate yourself enough. Is it even possible to be your own… what’s that word again… kismesis?”
“Oh fuck off, what the fuck do you know?” Karkat’s fingers hovered just short of touching the door handle, his head down as he all but grated the words out in response to the blonde human. “You don’t know anything. You’re the one wallowing in his own tremendous lack of cool and sitting there expecting me to feel sorry for you or some shit but I don’t, alright?”
Dave laughed. He laughed and the sound chilled Karkat right to the bone. He glanced over his shoulder and Dave was stood next to the bed, looking at him with those blood-red eyes with no expression on his face to betray that he’d just made that sound, but Karkat was sure he hadn’t imagined it. The human tipped his chin up in a cocky manner and folded his arms over his chest. Karkat couldn’t help himself. Anger flushed his face red and he marched back over to where Dave stood, stopping barely two inches from his chest, prodding his ribs. He didn’t get the chance to unleash his next barrage of verbal weaponry upon the human teenager, pulled up short when Dave grabbed hold of that offending hand in a grip that wasn’t tight but tight enough, and Karkat began to feel that tingling sensation again.
“What are you doing. Stop that.”
He pulled once, then again, but Dave wasn’t letting go. Something like panic flashed in the troll’s eyes and he pulled a third time, harder, only for the human’s bony fingers to close tighter around his wrist.
“Don’t.” Dave hadn’t put his shades back on and his eyes seemed huge now, far too close to Karkat’s face but the troll wasn’t leaning back. He swallowed and almost said ‘what’ but he knew what Dave meant and speaking would mean he was acknowledging what was going on here. His eyes darted between Dave’s face and the hand closed around his and back, and he let out a slow breath. “I don’t think that we’re that different,” Dave went on. “And don’t take that as a fucking compliment because there’s no way you could match up to my suave demeanour and-”
Karkat kissed him.
It wasn’t like in the movies, where each participant tilts their head the right way and their mouths meet at just the right angle and then it magically starts snowing or raining cherry blossom petals. Karkat’s nose bumped against Dave’s and their teeth clicked against each other in a way that made him think he must have chipped one and he could taste blood again as their lips crushed together but Dave’s grip on his hand had grown all the tighter and he wasn’t pulling away. It was stiff and uncomfortable and Karkat kept his eyes shut tight until he finally drew back with a quiet sound.
“What the fuck,” he said, his voice more of a whisper, a little hoarse as his shoulders hunched. His face felt like it was on fire and one of his front teeth was aching, but all he could think about was how he wanted to do that again.
“I told you I don’t hate you, asshat,” Dave said. Karkat bristled.
“I already said I don’t hate you either, nooksniffer, so what the fuck was that?”
Somewhere along the line Dave had collected himself and the dampness that had been sticking to his eyelashes was gone, but he was looking at Karkat with a kind of intensity that made the troll’s skin crawl. The human made a small headjerking motion back towards the bed, and Karkat nodded, allowing himself to be led over and sat down. Dave sat beside him, leaning forwards, resting his forearms over his thighs. Clasping his hands together, Karkat ran his tongue over his teeth and wondered just what the hell he’d gotten himself into this time.
“… Dave.”
The teenager looked over at him, slanting his eyes towards the other boy and knocking the knuckles of his clenched fists together.
“I’m not into this… fuckin’ emotional vulnerability shit.” Red eyes closed and Karkat knew from the sound of his voice that they were entering Very Serious Territory here, and now was the time to be quiet. Dave rubbed his hand over his mouth and exhaled sharply through his nose. “But… I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m… okay with this.” He gritted his teeth, every word seeming like an effort and Karkat watching him like he was about to slit his own throat wasn’t helping him in the slightest in how he was feeling like that was exactly the case.
“Look, Dave, I didn’t… you know… that fucking stuff I said…” The words were sticking, like tar in his throat and his voice sounded thick.
“You were right.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t take too much from it, right.” He had his eyes turned away but hearing somebody admit that he had actually been right about something had stunned Karkat into a kind of silence in which he couldn’t speak even if he’d wanted to. “You were right. About Egbert, and the others. I didn’t try. It’s not because I didn’t fucking want to. I actually like the buck-toothed morons and my… what… sister, or whatever. Don’t tell them I said that, for gog’s sake.”
“Mm.”
Dave pushed a hand into his hair, resting his forehead against his palm. The troll teen watched him, scratching his jaw with one sharp fingernail, the other hand resting on his knee and gripping lightly on the fabric of his pants. It was rather evident just to look at him that he felt just as awkward about all of this as Dave did, but even so, Karkat knew the difference between a situation that he could exploit for his amusement and one that he had to be serious about, and this was a clear case of the latter. The human had wet eyelashes again and it disturbed the troll more than he would ever want to admit to see someone like Dave Strider so easily shaken. He pressed his lips together and drew in a steadying breath, then lifted his hand from his knee and placed it on Dave’s shoulder. The muscles under his palm twitched and half-stiffened, then Dave let his shoulders drop and an expression of mild disbelief crept onto his face. Karkat’s fingers squeezed lightly, and he closed his eyes.
“Fuck…” he muttered.
“Hey, I know it’s not fucking easy, this whole human friendship thing,” Karkat said. “How you idiots manage without quadrants… But uh, Strider, this isn’t…”
“You’re really fuckin’ bad at this,” Dave told him. Karkat glared, but he didn’t move his hand, and after a moment Dave glanced at him from behind his hair. He smiled, actually smiled and Karkat felt the tips of his ears heat up. “Thanks, man.”
“Uh.” Grey skin flushed red again, Karkat’s eyes darted away and he cleared his throat. “So, I should um-”
“Well, yeah, if you want-”
“I mean it’s not that I-”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“… It’s not… just you.”
“… What?”
Karkat’s turn to look away now, and he frowned at the floor as he sat there, fidgeting with a plucked thread over his knee. “You heard what I said, fuckass. I’m not going to say it again just to satisfy some fucking abnormal meatsack urge that you have to- O-oi.” Dave’s hand was on his arm, the touch barely there but it might have weighed a tonne for how heavily Karkat felt it. He twitched.
“Let it out, man,” Dave said.
“Fuck you,” Karkat spat back at him, but there was very little venom in it.
“Just let it out, it’ll do you good.”
“Don’t you start trying to get the fucking upper hand on me Strider I’ve seen you nearly start blubbering three times already.”
“Hah. No one’s going to believe that if you tell them so don’t even fuckin’ bother.”
“Yeah, right.” Karkat snorted, and scooted forwards slightly. He knew what the human was doing – he’d seen it several times before in movies. That didn’t, of course, mean that he knew how to deal with it. Or that he wanted to.
“Hey, before you go, I have a question.” Dave seemed to have calmed down entirely from whatever funk he’d managed to get himself in, and he leaned back now, watching the other teen with an almost calculating expression. There was something else behind it, almost as if he’d drawn shutters over a more internal part of himself and it was noticing this that made Karkat pause before he stood up to leave, looking over at the boy. “What the fuck did you kiss me for?”
That was the one thing that Karkat had been hoping he wouldn’t ask, and he cringed slightly, his teeth digging into his lower lip again. The troll scuffed a hand through his hair then closed his eyes for a moment, letting out a huffing breath through his nose. Stupid humans. It wasn’t as if they could be expected to understand the complexities of human emotions and how trolls might kiss a person they hate as much as a person they like. It was a perfectly reasonable way to express that kind of thing. Dave was watching him. He could see the cogs turning in the grey-skinned boy’s head and he found himself almost amused by it. He didn’t expect the troll to understand the complexities of human relationships.
“I-”
“Shut up, Vantas.”
Dave was smirking at him. He was smirking and Karkat didn’t understand why, but the next thing he knew one of his fingertips was touching the corner of the faint uptilt of the pale teen’s mouth and he was tracing over his lower lip with an odd kind of wonder. The human was doing nothing to stop him, not even leaning away from his hand, eyelids dipping to half mast. Karkat wondered just what he was doing, and more than that, he wondered why he hadn’t just stood up and walked out yet. The answer came and smacked him in the face rather spectacularly when Dave brushed his fingers over the skin of his wrist, an expression on his face of something like curiosity as he turned Karkat’s hand over and pushed the sleeve of his shirt up a little way, finding the lines of his veins barely visible against the skin. Tingles were running up and down Karkat’s arm again, and Dave seemed fixated on him in a way that didn’t make his skin want to crawl off his body and hide in a corner. No, the human was looking at him like he found him… completely fascinating.
“I mean it, fuckass,” he said then, breaking the silence. “No one’s going to believe you if you tell them you saw me cry.”
“Gog, Strider, will you just shut up?” Karkat snapped. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing but you’re… touching me and it’s…”
“I’ll stop.”
“No!” Dave moved his hand away, but Karkat brought both of his up and cupped the other boy’s face, his skin looking all the darker against the cocky human’s. He froze like that, and Dave’s eyes were wide, then he poked his tongue past his sharp teeth and wetted his lips. “Dave Strider.”
“… Yeah.”
“… I’m going to fucking kiss you, and you’re not going to fucking complain.”
“… Cool.”
Kissing was something that was much easier said than done, and the anticipation of it didn’t make it any simpler. Karkat leaned in, his hands still on either side of the human’s face, and as their lips came within an inch of touching, Dave’s eyelids fluttered closed and he murmured quietly.
“If you bite my tongue, I’m going to destroy you.”
He said it with such dismissive bluntness that the troll almost sniggered, but he held back the urge in favour of closing the remaining distance and pressing his lips to the other boy’s. Karkat’s lips were surprisingly soft, Dave thought, if a little chapped from constant biting, and cracking one eye open revealed that the troll boy’s eyes were tightly shut. He hadn’t moved his hands from Dave’s face and he was beginning to feel a little uncool about it, so he lifted his own and wrapped his fingers around Karkat’s, pulling his hands down and holding them both in his lap. He tilted his head and felt the other’s tongue, rougher than a human’s, almost cat-like, flick out against his lower lip and before he could give himself time to think that kissing someone with razor-sharp teeth could be incredibly dangerous, he’d slid one hand up Karkat’s back and into his hair and gripped, and Karkat let out a sound something close to a purr. Dave pushed his tongue past the other teen’s lips and tested the sharp tip of one of his teeth, understandably wary but he found that Karkat, at least, seemed very aware that he had to be careful and the red-eyed human only tasted blood for a moment before Karkat was sucking on his tongue like he was born to it and sliding his own, the texture a little like sandpaper but softer, into Dave’s mouth.
Matching red blushes were on both their cheeks when they parted, and Karkat smirked to see that he’d managed to do something to fluster the coolkid Dave Strider. Dave dropped his hand from the troll’s thick hair to his shoulder, circling his thumb over the neckline of his shirt. For a long moment, they didn’t look at each other, then their eyes met and Karkat made an awkward sound.
“What the fuck are we doing,” he muttered.
“I’m pretty sure that you don’t need me to answer that,” Dave replied wryly. He ran his fingers down Karkat’s arm and the troll glanced down, touching the back of one of Dave’s hands and then taking hold of his wrist. He could feel the pulse of his blood through the veins close to the surface, and his eyelids flickered. It had been… too long a time since someone had touched him because they wanted to. Since someone had looked at him the way that this human was looking at him now. He shifted, moving himself an inch or two closer to the other boy. Their knees bumped. It made him flinch and he looked up at Dave quickly. Dave appeared to be just as startled as he was, and for a moment the shutters behind his gaze lifted, letting Karkat see the explanation for every damn thing that was happening.
“Fuck, Strider,” he said. You’re lonely, he wanted to add, but the words wouldn’t come. Dave knew, though. He shook his head but the answer was clear on his face. Karkat moved his hand from Dave’s wrist and brushed the backs of his fingers over the human’s cheek, feeling the faint evidence of a fine stubble there, not coarse like John’s (something which he had spent much time making fun of), but almost downy. He shifted forwards, Dave moved back, and Karkat followed him, landing half-heavily on the human’s chest and hearing the sharp exhale of breath that the impact caused. Pale fingers closed around his upper arms and he froze for a moment, then shifted, unwittingly making it easier for Dave to flip him onto his back. He growled, but there was very little he could do, and the moment one of the human’s fingertips brushed curiously up the side of one of his horns, it was as if every scrap of breath had been robbed from his body.
He clung on to Dave’s shoulders as if the bed was rocking and Dave was rather quick on the uptake. Adolescence had pulled the both of them into awkward, pointy kinds of shapes but Dave somehow managed to carry it off gracefully while Karkat was all sharp edges and elbows, and it didn’t take much effort for the human boy to put himself into a position where Karkat couldn’t have escaped even if he’d wanted to.
“Hah, this is weird,” Dave said, stroking his fingernail up and down the bony nub sticking out of the troll’s hair. Karkat was trying to speak, but all he could manage were hisses and words that had too many clicking consonants and Dave couldn’t understand a thing. The troll’s slim fingers gripped almost fretfully at Dave’s shirt, nails digging into the fabric and pulling hard enough to rip a seam at the shoulder, and Dave muttered something that was only half a complaint in a flat voice moments before he was dragged down into a kiss. His fingers pinched around that little horn and Karkat whined, his chest and hips pushing up, and Dave was finding that as much as he didn’t want to be aroused by this he couldn’t ignore those noises. Karkat’s teeth dug gently into his lower lip and he tasted blood again, moving his hand from the horn into the troll’s hair, jerking his head away.
“No biting, motherfucker,” Dave told him, and Karkat snapped at him, teeth clicking together barely an inch from the human’s swollen lip. He looked down in the dim light at the troll and then rolled off him, leaving him spitting out curses on the bed as he crossed the room.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
“I’m turnin’ on the light.”
“What-No, damnit, Strider don’t you even-”
Click.
Light flooded the room and Dave was treated to the sight of a very aroused troll boy lying on his bed, pressed back against the wall, his cheeks flushed with the reddest blush that the human had ever seen and his lips parted as his breath left him in soft pants. As for Karkat – Dave was blushing too though not quite so heavily, his shirt torn and lower lip beaded with blood. The blonde smirked and moved away from the wall, back to the bed. He ran a hand up the front of Karkat’s shirt and orange eyes followed his fingers, a faint rip-pop sound of fingernails digging into the mattress as he tried to move away at the same time as shifting towards the taller teen. One pale fingertip traced the symbol on the fabric, and one slim eyebrow lifted.
“Cancer,” he said. Karkat grunted and turned his head away while Dave tried to remember if he knew anything about astrology. As it turned out, he did, and he traced the shape again. “Makes some fuckin’ sense I suppose. Resistant to change, reticent…” He paused. “… Sensitive.”
“Fuck you,” Karkat spat, and then squeaked as a bony-fingered hand slid up under his shirt. He immediately looked furious with himself and Dave promptly hid a smile against the warm, dry skin of the other boy’s neck. Both hands pushed the black fabric up and over grey skin, the muscles fluttering as Dave explored with his fingertips. No navel, he noticed straight away, and… He pushed Karkat’s shirt higher. No nipples, either. Trolls were weird. Karkat parted his lips, drawing in a breath to speak but one look from Dave caused the words to stick in his throat. There wasn’t a mark on him but for the odd tiny pale line and one single, inch-long scar a little off-centre on his chest. Dave touched it and Karkat huffed, batting the boy’s hand away.
“Alright, alright, no touching that,” Dave muttered, avoiding it, as well as the steadily growing feeling that what was happening right now was very strange. Karkat’s hands were kneading his shoulders and he liked it. He liked the small sounds that the troll was making and most of all, he liked the way that he was enjoying this.
“Why are you doing this,” Karkat whispered, an almost-shake in his voice. It was all moving so fast, he could swear it had only been seconds since had intended to leave the room and leave Dave alone to whatever misery he’d decided to mire himself in. “I don’t-”
“Don’t fuckin’ question it,” the boy replied, letting out a sigh and allowing his forehead to touch Karkat’s chest, feeling the troll’s heart knocking against his ribs. There was a kind of grim satisfaction in that. He felt the other’s sharp nails run down his back and hook the hem of his shirt, the fabric drawn up over near-white skin and over his head, leaving his hair sticking up. Karkat was looking at him strangely, as if somehow the anger that always seemed to pour from every inch of him had completely disappeared, and he didn’t resist as his own shirt was pulled off and tossed aside. The troll blinked, moving his eyes over Dave’s chest, lifting a hand to press one fingertip against one of the pink nipples standing out against his skin. The soft flesh dented under his touch and the centre stiffened as he rubbed over it.
“Weird…” he said. He shifted and Dave let him sit up, dropping back into a kneeling position. Karkat continued his quiet exploration of the human’s chest and stomach, both soft nubs unwittingly teased to hardness and a fluttering beginning in Dave’s stomach before he cupped the back of the troll’s neck and pulled him up to kiss him again. His free hand moved over Karkat’s skin and he felt the other’s roughened palms against his shoulderblades, the troll’s fingernails drawing faint red lines in their wake.
Dave rolled his shoulders and grunted quietly, shaking his head in a small effort to move his hair back into place. It didn’t work. He eased Karkat back onto the bed, meeting very little resistance as he did so, the troll seeming compliant under his hands now. There was an expression of uncertainty on his face, his eyes everywhere at once, then he half closed them and slanted his gaze away.
“I don’t know why I-” Karkat began, and Dave pressed a finger to his lips. He was trying not to think but it wasn’t working, all he could think about was how strange this was, and he was asking himself why as he moved to kiss the other teen again and Karkat’s arms were around him and he brought one leg up to slide around his hips. Karkat’s breathing shook, and his fingernails dug in hard enough to make Dave hiss, and the human bit down on where he could see the other’s pulse fluttering at his throat. The reaction he got to that was one he didn’t expect, as Karkat let loose a shuddering moan and swore under his breath, tightening his grip around the blonde and arching up towards him. Dave almost flinched, something in him balking at being half restrained, and he looked down at Karkat to find him grinning.
“Freaking you out, Strider?” he asked, shifting his hips slightly. “Flustering that coolkid persona you’ve got-mm.”
He was interrupted, Dave’s mouth fitting over his again and one arm sliding beneath him, lifting him up. Orange eyes fluttered closed, another soft, muffled sound of pleasure escaping as Dave’s fingers found one of his horns again. He didn’t know how to stimulate it properly, but just touching it was enough, and when the human rocked his hips down and Karkat pushed his own up and they both groaned against each other’s lips, they looked at each other for a long moment. Something passed between them and Karkat swallowed, trailing one fingernail up Dave’s spine.
“… Alright.”
There was a definite awkwardness in the way he said it, but his expression was sincere, something that Dave was so unused to seeing on Karkat’s face that he had to pause for a moment to work out just what that look in his eyes was. Oddly, he didn’t feel any kind of rising smugness at the consent, only a faintly warm tingling in the centre of his chest that he didn’t feel particularly comfortable in experiencing. He looked down at Karkat, the other’s eyes fixed on his face, and he brushed one hand over his chest and stomach, drawing faint circles where his nipples should have been and running a finger over where his stomach was slightly indented, where a navel would be if he had one. He traced the contours of unfamiliar muscles under the grey skin and he didn’t speak, he just nodded. Karkat reached up and touched his face, one finger of his free hand hooking into one of Dave’s belt loops, while Dave’s hand skimmed between his hips, over his stomach to the button of his pants and flicked it open. The troll twitched and gasped softly, his eyes darting up and then away just as quickly, but he made no move to stop him and Dave slid the zipper down, only to jerk his hand away when he felt something he hadn’t anticipated.
“… Vantas?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh. What the fuck is that?”
Karkat bumped his head back against the pillow and put a hand over his face. “I’m not human, shitstain,” he ground out. “I don’t fucking look like you.”
Making an irritated sound somewhere between a grunt and a curse, Dave narrowed his eyes and took a firmer grip on Karkat’s pants, tugging them down over his hips. The bulge in his underwear was quite evident, but what was making Dave both curious and incredibly weirded out was the way it was moving. He hadn’t signed up for any kind of freaky tentacle shit, but he had the feeling that Karkat might just kill him if he stopped now, and while the prospect of seeing whatever was under that thin layer of cloth might have been daunting, it was not quite so unappealing as being chased by a half naked, pissed off alien brandishing a scythe. Karkat still had his hand over his face and Dave could see the red staining his cheeks between his fingers, and the moment his fingers touched the waistband of his underwear the troll jerked away and sat up, leaning forwards and glaring at the human.
“You first.”
“What?”
“You first, fuckass, are you fucking deaf?”
“Oh, cute, you’re shy,” Dave drawled, catching hold of Karkat’s wrists as the troll batted at him, snarling in that hissing language of his. “Well, if you need me to set an example…”
“Just get the fuck on with it.”
Dave moved up onto his knees, and Karkat’s eyes didn’t leave his hands as he watched the blonde unfasten his jeans and slide the zipper down, denim moving over slim hips and pale-skinned, almost hairless thighs. His underwear was simple, black, but that didn’t keep the troll from staring at it and Dave didn’t miss the way he momentarily averted his eyes when the last of his clothing was stripped without ceremony and dropped off the edge of the bed. Karkat looked at him, up at his face then down, drawing his own knees up to his chest as his eyes roved over the lightly muscled chest and stomach in front of him, the taut skin between faintly prominent hips, and then… that.
“I ain’t sure if I should be concerned about that lack of comment,” the red-eyed teen stated, accent seeping into his words as he struggled between his innate confidence and the sheer anxiety welling up in his gut. “You just gonna sit there lookin’ at my junk or what?”
He was already half hard from their activities so far, and the way that Karkat was staring at him was only making things worse. Karkat caught his lower lip between his teeth and tried not to look like some naïve grub who didn’t know what he was seeing.
“Can I touch it?”
“Sure, man,” Dave said nonchalantly, drawing in a hissing breath when the tip of Karkat’s finger circled around the head of his length. He watched, holding his tongue against anything potentially snarky that might have spilled past his lips as that same finger moved down over the blood-flushed skin to the base. The attention was sparking a tingling low in his stomach and he quickly rose to full attention, much to Karkat’s apparent mixed amusement and curiosity. By then, Dave was digging his fingernails into his thighs, creating red half-moon shapes in the pale flesh, and Karkat was so intently focused on the alien cock in front of him that he seemed to have entirely forgotten what they were doing. The human teen reminded him by taking hold of one of his horns, provoking a moan of surprise that welled up from so deep within Karkat’s chest that he felt the troll tremble. Karkat could do little but follow Dave’s guiding hand as he had his attention brought back to the blonde boy’s face, and Dave’s other had slid up between his legs, cupping over that warm, moving thing inside his underwear.
The troll gasped softly, his hips twitching forwards, eyes rolling closed at the combined sensations of his bulge being touched and that hand still working at one of the small candy-corn horns poking out of his hair. “Your turn,” Dave told him, and he nodded jerkily, grunting as the movement made the human reflexively tighten his grip on the horn he was paying such close attention to. Karkat was quite reluctant to move away from that touch, from any of it, but he needed to in order to comply and so he did, not for a moment taking his eyes away from the other boy’s. Beginning to find that staring a little unnerving, Dave responded to it with a cocky smirk and Karkat scowled, but he didn’t stop, and a moment later he’d dropped his own underwear to the floor and Dave was looking at something that he had no idea what to think about.
“Fuck,” he said, and Karkat huffed, his cheeks cherry red. Dave didn’t ask, he just went right ahead and touched, his fingers twitching as the organ that had no doubt slid from that bony-looking sheath between the troll’s legs moved towards his hand. It was like something straight out of the Japanese porn he’d once had the misfortune of coming across on his brother’s computer and he ran his fingers down it, finding it faintly slicked. “Whoa…”
“This isn’t show and fucking tell, nooksniffer,” Karkat snapped, but Dave ignored him, his fingers finding two small globes, one on either side of that sheath, seeming set into the bone but soft as he ran his fingertips over them. He heard Karkat whine, and then the troll had wrapped one arm around him and grabbed his wrist with the other hand, shoving Dave’s fingers lower. Underneath that bulge at his groin and set back slightly, Dave felt something he had certainly not expected. Something warm, soft, and-
“What the fuck?”
He jerked his hand away, and Karkat hissed, keeping hold of his wrist but not forcing him back to that spot. They glared at each other for a moment, Karkat because of the boy’s sudden reluctance after all of his posturing, and Dave for the fact that the coolkid front that he’d been so carefully rebuilding since his eyes had stopped leaking had been well and truly shattered. Dave Strider was Freaked. Out.
“Why the fuck do you have teeth down there?!” he choked out, still able to feel the slight edges of what had undeniably been teeth on his fingertips despite no longer touching them. “That’s messed up. This whole fucking thing is messed up. Fuck.”
“How else are we supposed to defend ourselves if we don’t fucking want it? Use your gogdamn think pan, Strider.”
“Have you heard of mace?” The expression on Karkat’s face told Dave that the troll had most definitely not heard of mace and he swore again. “Fucking hell, Vantas.”
“I told you we didn’t look like you.”
“But teeth? Really?” Dave held up his hands, drawing in a calming breath. “Yeah, you have some weird alien shit going on down there and I’m cool with that, man, but… teeth.”
“It is not ‘teeth’.” The troll was bristling, if possible redder than he had been before. “It’s a fucking defence.”
“Why the hell are you doin’ it? You-oh… I get it. You ain’t shy, you’re nervous.” He couldn’t help the faint sense of achievement that he felt upon realising that, and although Karkat spluttered out a protest and called him several interesting names he knew he was right. Dave sat back, looking the other up and down while he sorted his head out or did whatever he needed to do so he could stop fuming, and finally Karkat closed his eyes a moment.
“Fuck you, Strider. You’d be fucking nervous too.”
Dave didn’t say anything to that, he didn’t even smirk. Karkat looked, just for a moment, so delightfully embarrassed that he couldn’t find the words. Instead, he let out a short laugh and leaned forwards, not expecting but pleasantly surprised when Karkat mimicked the movement and kissed him again. He rested his hands on the troll’s sides, feeling the odd arrangement of muscles under the skin, circling his thumbs lightly and enjoying the way that the other squirmed a little under the attention. Karkat’s own hands were busy, sliding up Dave’s back, his nails lightly tracing the curve of each rib and Dave was thankful then that he wasn’t ticklish in the least. There was something quiet, calm yet careful between them as Dave avoided Karkat’s teeth and Karkat did his best not to dig his nails too hard into the soft flesh of the human’s back. In Dave’s mind, there was an odd mental block between when he had spoken to the other online and now. He couldn’t for the life of him work out how he’d ended up sitting naked on his bed with someone he barely liked. Someone who had been a metaphorical thorn in his side from the moment they’d met.
He flickered his eyes open then closed them again just as quickly, the image in front of him burned into the backs of his eyelids. Karkat’s eyes were closed, thick dark lashes spread across reddened cheeks and a tiny frown creasing between his eyebrows. His hair was everywhere, prickling against Dave’s forehead, and Dave was quite sure he’d never seen anything quite so fucking beautiful. Dave wrapped one arm around him in a way that made the troll pitch forwards slightly, his teeth nipping at Dave’s lower lip, and he pushed his hand back down between his legs and found that soft warmth again, Karkat whining softly against his lips as he felt for those tiny sharp points that had startled him. He didn’t find them, and Karkat wrenched away to bury his face against the blonde’s neck as he continued exploring. His breathing turned shaky, hips twitching as he placed his teeth against Dave’s neck but didn’t bite down, and his voice was almost a growl as he spoke.
“Are you going to fucking do it or not?” he asked, and then Dave slid one finger inside, and he let out a high, choked sound as his thighs tried to clamp closed over the blonde teen’s hand. He cursed, hissing, breaking the skin of Dave’s shoulder with his teeth and sending a thin line of blood running down his back. Dave didn’t notice, his mind focused entirely on the sensation of Karkat’s insides spasming around his finger, the arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, teeth and nails sparking tiny points of pain on his body that he couldn’t have found more intoxicating. Karkat rode up against his finger, his movements shuddering as if he was resisting but couldn’t help himself, and when Dave nosed up into his hair, and ran his tongue up one of the troll’s horns, he let out a strangled cry that went straight to the blonde’s erection.
“I might just hate you after all,” Karkat spat out. Dave smirked, and drew his hand away, his hand slicked a pale red colour. He pushed the other boy back and moved over him, leaning down.
“I’m touched.”
“Fuck you.”
“Nah, man.” Karkat had really set things up for him there. The troll was slightly squirming and gripping at his upper arms, eyes squinted in a way that suggested he was having difficulty in keeping them open. His grey skin was flushed cherry red and he looked as if he was trying very, very hard to hate the human boy who had him pinned and he wasn’t quite managing it. Dave was enjoying the contact more than anything, but he hadn’t gone this far to back out now. “Fuck you.”
He took Karkat’s hips in both hands, and the other teen barely had a moment to widen his eyes and begin the first syllable of what might have been an encouragement or a denial before Dave was pushing inside him and he was letting out a high, whining sound and gritting his pointy teeth together, digging his nails into the blonde’s arms and sending five drops of blood rolling down to each elbow. Dave hissed, jerking his hips forwards, and Karkat yowled in a way that the other wasn’t sure was in pain or pleasure, but he kept his grip on Dave and growled something harsh and demanding in that foreign tongue of his and his insides were clenching around Dave’s cock in a way he’d never felt before. He almost lost his mind in that moment but he didn’t, he grasped the swearing, squirming troll’s hips and thrusted, and if Dave hadn’t lost his mind then Karkat certainly had.
His nails detached from Dave’s shoulders and he wrapped his arms around the blonde, burying his face against his hair and scraping those sharp teeth against his ear. Dave could feel blood trickling from several faintly painful spots on his body but the discomfort was steadily lessening in favour of a growing euphoria. Karkat was tight, tighter than anything he’d ever felt and infinitely more satisfying than his hand, as awesome as that could be. He lowered his head and bit down on the troll’s throat, the skin slightly thicker than a human’s, and it took a little extra bite before it welled up in a rosy bruise. His attention was returned in kind, bites on his neck between heavily panted breaths as Karkat writhed underneath him.
“I need-” he groaned through gritted teeth, scratching his nails over Dave’s back though not digging them in – it seemed he’d retained enough of his mind to know that he could shred the delicate human skin if he pressed too hard. A low ‘hmm’ sound rose in Dave’s throat and he licked at the darkened mark he’d left on the other’s neck, and Karkat twitched, digging his nail in gently then releasing just as quickly. “I need a f-fucking bucket let me go.”
“That ain’t how I roll,” Dave told him. Though, a lot of this wasn’t really how he rolled. Fucking grey-skinned hermaphroditic teenage boys with sharp teeth and sharper tempers wasn’t generally on his to-do list. At his denial, Karkat tried to struggle, but he was much too far gone to put up much of a fight and Dave held him down easily, pushing up into him in a way that made his shoulders roll back, head tilted up, a loud cry passing his lips. He hissed and bucked and squirmed and Dave had never seen anything so fucking sexy.
When he came, it was as if a tidal wave of pleasure had crashed over the troll. His knees drew up and his hips bucked, chest rising and shoulders curling in as he yowled and promptly bit down on Dave’s shoulder. The sudden shock of the pain and the near-unbearable tightening around his cock had the blonde shuddering to a stop, pushing in deep and hard and the next thing he knew his own orgasm had crept up and punched him square in the gut. It was only when he began to come down from his high that he realised that the troll’s need for a bucket hadn’t been understated. Karkat was cherry red, covering his face in what Dave assumed to be embarrassment and that weird-ass tentacle-cock had withdrawn, leaving a trail of pink-tinged fluid behind. Both of their chests and stomachs were covered and for a moment all Dave could do was stare.
“… Fuckin’ weird,” he muttered between two heavy breaths.
“I… fucking told you… fuckass,” Karkat half-snarled, though he didn’t manage to inject much venom into it. “I can’t believe you fucking came in me without even fucking asking, do you even-”
“Oh, shut up.” Dave drew away and rolled off the other boy, lying on his back for a moment to level his breathing before he sat up. The troll was still immobile, gazing glassy-eyed at the ceiling with his chest heaving and covered in his own genetic material. It was dripping down Dave’s chest and stomach and he wrinkled his nose a little picking up Karkat’s shirt before it occurred to him that such a small amount of fabric wouldn’t be enough to clean up this mess. He retreated to the bathroom, wiping the stuff off him and hearing Karkat beginning to swear in the other room, in both English and his own language and possibly several others. He grabbed another towel and headed back, and the troll didn’t even seem to register his presence as he proceeded to no doubt ruin that towel as well as the other one, and he was still hissing obscenities to himself when Dave had pulled his jeans back on and sat back down beside him.
“Oi.”
Interrupted, Karkat slowly slid his eyes over to the human and looked him up and down, then looked away again. He grunted and shifted as if he was going to sit up, and then changed his mind.
“So,” he said. “In your fucked up quadtrantless human romance, what does this make us?”
Dave shrugged. “Doesn’t have to make us anything, man. We just fucked. I’m not gonna get all cathartic on you just because you got a piece of the Strider.”
Karkat was quiet at that. He looked between Dave and the door, and seemed to come to a decision. Slowly, almost as if it pained him to do so he turned his shoulders and leaned up against Dave’s side, dropping his head to the boy’s shoulder with a quiet thud. Neither of them spoke, but Dave cast a half-startled, half-curious glance down and let out a quiet breath through his nose. He moved one arm up, working his fingers into Karkat’s coarse hair and scratching one fingernail idly behind one of his horns. Karkat made a shuddering, stuttering sound like a broken purr, but he didn’t voice an objection, and Dave smiled faintly.
“I still don’t fuckin’ hate you, Strider,” Karkat muttered.
“Yeah. I know.”
Dave Strider didn’t need anyone.
But wanting… wanting was fine.
Genre: Romance/Angst
Pairing: Dave/Karkat
Rating/Warnings: NC-17. Dave losing his cool, freaky alien biology, lots of cussing, sex.
Summary: Well lookie, it's a de-anon from
homostuck . Dave didn't get a lot of love from anyone as a kid, because Bro didn't roll like that. As a result, he secretly craves tenderness and affection. But he's ashamed of his need for basic human closeness and pretends he's too cool to need it. Then Dave finally gets some love right in the fucking gaping psychic wounds. Catharsis ensues. Also porn.*****
Dave Strider didn’t need anyone.
This is what he told himself as he leaned over the sink and peered at himself in the bathroom mirror. A pale faced blonde boy with blood red eyes shadowed by nights of lost sleep looked back at him, and an expression something close to a crooked smile worked its way across his lips. The light was strange here, it made him seem gaunter than he was, and he glanced around the grey-walled bathroom wondering just why they’d all thought it was such a marvellous idea to stay on Alternia after all was said and done. It had been a while since he’d seen or even spoken to the others – John, Rose and Jade – since their argument over what ought to be done when they finished the game, though he sometimes heard news of them from the trolls. As for himself, Aradia had told him in no uncertain terms that jumping through time as he had been was causing damage to the universe itself, and he had to stop.
Since then, he’d been absolutely, and completely unironically bored out of his skull.
The bedsprings creaked as he sat down, pulling his computer into his lap and opening Pesterchum. The three humans he would now hesitate to call his friends were all offline, but several of the trolls were not.
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] at 03:13 --
CG: HI AGAIN, IDIOT.
TG: oh gog
CG: OH GOG IS RIGHT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING STRIDER ISN’T THIS THE TIME WHEN YOU MEATSACKS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SLEEPING OR WHATEVER.
TG: look vantas im not in the mood for your motherfucking self so just lay off alright
CG: WHOA WHAT.
CG: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FUCKING SMARTASS COMMENTS.
CG: IF YOU THINK GIVING YOURSELF A PITY PARTY IS GOING TO MAKE ME BE SYMPATHETIC.
CG: YOU HAVE ANOTHER THING COMING NOOKSNIFFER.
TG: im not asking for your sympathy
TG: i told you already im not in the mood for you asshat
-- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering carcinoGeneticist [CG] at 03:29 --
CG: OH WHAT THE FUCK.
CG: YOU DID NOT JUST.
CG: PERFORM THE MEATSACK EQUIVALENT OF HANGING UP ON ME.
CG: GOG DAMNIT STRIDER.
In the computer room, the rest of the trolls sat at their respective computers were treated to yet another show of Karkat Vantas smacking his keyboard repeatedly against his computer monitor, only stopped when Sollux dispatched several F5 keys towards his head with astonishing accuracy. Instead, he then turned his rage on the blind teenager, who simply took it as he always did. This display had become something almost expected of late. They all knew that whenever Karkat opened a window to bother Dave it would inevitably end with anger on the nubby-horned troll’s side when the human inevitably blew him off. Karkat hated him, and it was rather clear for all of them to see. Terezi snickered and giggled and span in her chair like some kind of half-batshit dervish and there was only so much of her hyena-laugh that Karkat could deal with before he got up and stormed out.
He didn’t get far. His feet led him towards the source of his irritation, his hand lifting to pound on the door in some hardwired gesture of good manners before he simply opened it and walked in, orange eyes flicking about the darkened room. Dave was there, lying on his side with his back to the door on that weird flat squashy table that all of the humans seemed to insist upon sleeping on. The covers were pulled up to his shoulder in a way that only left his pale blonde hair visible and Karkat narrowed his eyes, tilting his head a little, listening to the sound of the other boy breathing.
“What are you Edward fuckin’ Cullen or some shit.” The human’s voice was flat, near expressionless, and quiet but it still made Karkat jump. He rolled onto his back and though Karkat couldn’t see his eyes he could feel them on him from underneath the boy’s shades. Karkat didn’t know what an Edward Cullen was but he assumed it was supposed to be an insult, and he let out a little growl.
“I wasn’t done talking to you, fucker,” he spat. “That signing off bullshit only worked when I couldn’t just come and kick down your fucking door.”
“You knocked.”
“And you- what?”
“You knocked.” Dave slid his glasses down, just enough that he could make out Karkat’s silhouette next to the door. Karkat could see the boy’s eyes, as red as his blood, and he frowned.
“So fucking what?”
“I don’t know how it works in your world, Vantas, but where I come from knocking on a person’s door is the equivalent to realisin’ that they own the space before you walk in.” The human stood up, the bedsprings squeaking again as he moved, and he walked over to the other boy, leaning against the wall in front of him. Karkat tilted his head back, a scowl on his face. “It’s pretty motherfuckin’ polite and you’re kind of harshin’ on the courtesy by walkin’ in here with this attitude.”
Karkat, for once, seemed stumped. His little fangy mouth was hanging open, dark eyebrows drawn down in an expression half way between confusion and fury, then he made a little sputtering sound and uttered a word that didn’t sound as if it contained any vowels. “Fuck you,” he snarled, and Dave rolled his eyes, turning his back on the troll boy, heading back to his bed and pulling his computer into his lap in a way that would, to anyone else, have said ‘I’m done talking to you now, piss off’, but Karkat wasn’t just anyone, he was Karkat Vantas, and he wasn’t about to stand there and take being ignored like some newly hatched grub.
He walked over to Dave and snapped down the lid of his laptop.
Dave didn’t move. He let out a slow breath and grit his teeth. “You’re fixin’ for an ass-kickin’, dickwad.”
“I’m not going to stand here and be fucking ignored by you, what the fuck is your problem, Strider? You’ve been acting like some pathetic wriggler since John and the others left.”
“Go away.”
It stung. It stung more than he thought it would to just hear one of those names come out of that fucking grey-skinned creep’s mouth and if it hadn’t been for his complete need to keep up his as of yet unshattered coolkid persona he would have cracked right there and then and punched the overbearing troll across his pointy face. His bed rattled as Karkat kicked the side of it.
“If you’re trying to make me fucking hate you you’re doing a piss-poor job of it you insufferable prick.” Dave could almost feel the rage radiating off the troll, and it made him inclined to believe that he wasn’t doing quite as poor a job as Karkat was trying to have him believe. The fact that the other still hadn’t left, however, was a little puzzling. The once time traveller had never really been able to make sense out of the complexities of troll relationships, despite Terezi and Nepeta’s repeated attempts to explain it to him. The only thing he knew for sure was that Karkat was one of few trolls who didn’t follow the rules like he should.
When Dave didn’t answer, Karkat bit his lower lip hard enough to draw some of his bright red blood to the surface. This was a situation that he didn’t find himself in often. People didn’t just ignore him (or so he would have liked to tell himself). “Oi-” he began, and then the bed squeaked and Dave had sat up, and his glasses were in his hand and his candy-red eyes were staring at Karkat with something that might have been anger flickering far below the surface.
“What in the nine rings of motherfucking hell do you want, Karkat?!” he said, almost shouting, but not quite raising his voice enough. Two thoughts immediately went through the troll’s head. The first, was that Dave was now annoyed enough to give him full eye contact, and the second was that he had just called him by his first name. Both of these thoughts infuriated him.
“What the fuck,” he started. “Do you think you’re doing? And more to the fucking point who do you think you’re talking to you worthless waste? You’re stuck here, that’s your fucking fault. It’s your fucking fault that John and Rose and Harley don’t talk to you anymore because you never fucking tried. Fuck, even I manage to keep friends better than you do.” That strange troll-disease called ‘friendship’ had been one that had spread inevitably through their group and none of them were really that embarrassed about talking about it anymore. “Gog, you’re such a fucking waste of space you make me want to hang myself just to save the embarrassment of having to watch you do it without a rope. You think any of us are going to give a fuck if you just let yourself disappear? Because we won’t, fuckass. Everything you’ve done to yourself is your own fucking fault and you can’t even blame your man-lusus for it anymore. You- Oi. What the fuck are you doing.”
Dave was shaking. Somewhere in the middle of Karkat’s speech he had sat up, possibly with the intention of making him shut up somehow, but something that the troll had said had stopped him, and now he was simply sitting there, with one arm wrapped around his knees and the other hand clenched into the bed sheets, hard enough to turn his white skin whiter over his knuckles. His eyes were fixed ahead and his jaw set firmly in a way that seemed to be making it tremble. Karkat was struck with the sudden feeling that he had gone Much Too Far With This Asshat and he very much did not know what to do about it.
“Oh.”
“You should give fuckin’ classes in how to be a first class asshole,” Dave muttered, lips barely moving.
“Um.”
“I know it’s my fault, alright? I know. It’s my fault that they all left, it’s my fault we’re all stuck here, and by some epic fuckin’ reach-around of space-time it’s probably my fault that you’re such a fuckin’ prick that you would actually say all those things to me without even thinkin’ about it.”
Something shining and clear and wet-looking had appeared on Dave’s eyelashes, and there was an unnerving quaking in his voice that Karkat had never heard before. His eyebrows drew together in a kind of shuddering motion like he had some weird computer lag, and Karkat’s hands twitched at his sides. There was nothing quite so awkward as seeing another male upset, and at that moment, a parallel universe where Karkat walked away appeared and spiralled off on its own tangent. In this universe, Karkat sat down, and Dave pushed his sunglasses back on.
“Listen, uh…”
“Piss. Off.”
“No I won’t just piss off, I’m not such a bulge-sucking fuckhead that I can’t feel… uh.”
“’Guilty’. The word you’re lookin’ for is ‘guilty’.”
It was the word he was looking for but it wasn’t something he was particularly willing to admit to. Meeting these humans had done a lot of things to change the way that the trolls saw the world and even how they acted towards one another, and ‘guilt’ was one of the words that had been introduced into their vocabulary. It was one of those embarrassing things, like friendship, which existed but were best left ignored and Karkat was feeling it now, a strange, hot, Do Not Want sensation in his gut that was making him almost but not quite expel everything he’d eaten in the past few hours.
“Yeah, whatever.”
He quickly realised that he’d placed himself into rather an awkward position, but he was determined not to be the one who gave up first. Karkat sat there in silence, gazing at the opposite wall, listening to Dave breathing. He held his knees and dug his nails in, and finally, Dave made a sound as if he was going to speak, and Karkat snapped his head around so quickly he felt a muscle pull in the back of his neck.
“It’s not like I miss the oblivious idiot,” Dave said, resting his hands on his chest and tapping his fingers slowly. Karkat nodded silently. “Or Rose being fucking weird. Or even Jade.” The troll nodded again. Dave stuck an arm behind his head and sniffed. “And it wasn’t as if bro ever did anything but torment me with those damn…” He stopped before he could say the word that would have him shaking from inevitable nightmares later, and instead made a quiet ‘hmn’ sound.
“Yeah.” Karkat muttered.
“Karkat-”
“What?”
The human had sat up at the same moment that the troll had turned around, and in something straight out of one of Egbert’s terrible romcoms they had ended up far too close to one another. Karkat could see himself reflected on the dark surface of Dave’s glasses, orange eyes open and wide, and he could see the outline of the other’s behind them. Dave didn’t move. He couldn’t see as well in the dark as Karkat could but the lamp was too far away for him to turn it on without shifting from this position, and the troll didn’t seem to be volunteering any movement, either. They remained suspended in this position for what felt like hours, though it could only have been seconds before Karkat finally blinked and lifted one hand, touching one sharp-nailed finger to the side of the other boy’s sunglasses. He jerked his head away, and Karkat let his hand drop.
“Oh,” he said again.
“Hmph,” said Dave, but he didn’t snap, or say anything insulting. Karkat was, rather understandably, confused as fuck by this and when he brought his hand up again, Dave didn’t shy away from it. The troll touched two fingers to the side of his sunglasses, and then two to the other, and pulled them away from the boy’s face.
“… Oh.”
Dave’s eyelashes were still wet, his eyes ringed red and the pupils huge in the dark. They were flicking all over Karkat’s face as he looked at him, never lingering in one place too long.
“What are you doing?” he asked, glancing down to where his sunglasses were held in Karkat’s hand, then back up to his face. He caught his lip between his teeth and furrowed his pale arched brows together, and reached out to take his glasses back. Karkat flipped his hand over, and Dave’s closed over it. The both of them stopped breathing for a moment, and Karkat let out a nervous sound as something unexpected and alien clenched around his chest.
“I don’t hate you,” Karkat told him, grumbling out the words.
“I’m disappointed,” Dave replied. “I’d been tryin’ really fuckin’ hard.”
“Jegus, don’t fuck with me, Strider.”
“I don’t hate you, either.”
The silence descended again, not quite as tense and uncomfortable as the first time but Dave still hadn’t moved his hand and Karkat was beginning to feel a tingling up his arm. He wasn’t sure if he liked it or not but he sure as hell wasn’t going to let this fuckass think that he was succeeding in making him nervous. Dave wasn’t sure what he was doing, all he knew was it had been a long gogdamn time since he’d had any form of contact, from anyone, and his palm felt like it was on fire.
“Kark-”
“I swear to gog if you say my name like that one more fucking time Strider I’m going to cut you a new waste chute. Shut up. Shut up just shut up.”
Karkat huffed loudly, and set the sunglasses aside out of Dave’s reach. Something in Dave seemed to have given up, and the troll was quite sure that the human’s night vision, as adjusted as it might have been by this point, wasn’t good enough to notice how intently Karkat was looking at him. He’d always thought there was something funny about these meatsacks, yet the similarities that they shared numbered more than their differences and perhaps-
“I actually don’t hate you.”
“Yeah, you fucking said that already, what’s your fucking point. You don’t know me well enough to hate me.”
Letting out a short sound that was possibly something close to a laugh Dave finally took his hand away from the other boy’s and Karkat pulled his back into his lap, clenching and unclenching his fingers as that tingling feeling refused to go away. He didn’t like it, less for the fact that the sensation was an unpleasant one, because it wasn’t, but more for the fact that he had the intense suspicion that he was supposed to be enjoying it, and he didn’t want to.
“You ain’t that bad of a guy,” Dave drawled out, shifting back to sit against the head of his bed. He didn’t make an attempt to get his glasses back, he just looked at Karkat with that infuriating flat expression and rubbed one finger up the side of his nose.
“If you’re lying in some attempt to spare me some kind of emotional trauma don’t fucking bother,” the troll snapped. “I know what kind of a ‘guy’ I am, and that is the kind of guy who is leaving. Right now.” He got up, and heard the bed squeak behind him as Dave moved, the quiet sound of his bare feet hitting the floor.
“You don’t need me to hate you.” He could feel Dave’s eyes on his back as he reached the door. “You already hate yourself enough. Is it even possible to be your own… what’s that word again… kismesis?”
“Oh fuck off, what the fuck do you know?” Karkat’s fingers hovered just short of touching the door handle, his head down as he all but grated the words out in response to the blonde human. “You don’t know anything. You’re the one wallowing in his own tremendous lack of cool and sitting there expecting me to feel sorry for you or some shit but I don’t, alright?”
Dave laughed. He laughed and the sound chilled Karkat right to the bone. He glanced over his shoulder and Dave was stood next to the bed, looking at him with those blood-red eyes with no expression on his face to betray that he’d just made that sound, but Karkat was sure he hadn’t imagined it. The human tipped his chin up in a cocky manner and folded his arms over his chest. Karkat couldn’t help himself. Anger flushed his face red and he marched back over to where Dave stood, stopping barely two inches from his chest, prodding his ribs. He didn’t get the chance to unleash his next barrage of verbal weaponry upon the human teenager, pulled up short when Dave grabbed hold of that offending hand in a grip that wasn’t tight but tight enough, and Karkat began to feel that tingling sensation again.
“What are you doing. Stop that.”
He pulled once, then again, but Dave wasn’t letting go. Something like panic flashed in the troll’s eyes and he pulled a third time, harder, only for the human’s bony fingers to close tighter around his wrist.
“Don’t.” Dave hadn’t put his shades back on and his eyes seemed huge now, far too close to Karkat’s face but the troll wasn’t leaning back. He swallowed and almost said ‘what’ but he knew what Dave meant and speaking would mean he was acknowledging what was going on here. His eyes darted between Dave’s face and the hand closed around his and back, and he let out a slow breath. “I don’t think that we’re that different,” Dave went on. “And don’t take that as a fucking compliment because there’s no way you could match up to my suave demeanour and-”
Karkat kissed him.
It wasn’t like in the movies, where each participant tilts their head the right way and their mouths meet at just the right angle and then it magically starts snowing or raining cherry blossom petals. Karkat’s nose bumped against Dave’s and their teeth clicked against each other in a way that made him think he must have chipped one and he could taste blood again as their lips crushed together but Dave’s grip on his hand had grown all the tighter and he wasn’t pulling away. It was stiff and uncomfortable and Karkat kept his eyes shut tight until he finally drew back with a quiet sound.
“What the fuck,” he said, his voice more of a whisper, a little hoarse as his shoulders hunched. His face felt like it was on fire and one of his front teeth was aching, but all he could think about was how he wanted to do that again.
“I told you I don’t hate you, asshat,” Dave said. Karkat bristled.
“I already said I don’t hate you either, nooksniffer, so what the fuck was that?”
Somewhere along the line Dave had collected himself and the dampness that had been sticking to his eyelashes was gone, but he was looking at Karkat with a kind of intensity that made the troll’s skin crawl. The human made a small headjerking motion back towards the bed, and Karkat nodded, allowing himself to be led over and sat down. Dave sat beside him, leaning forwards, resting his forearms over his thighs. Clasping his hands together, Karkat ran his tongue over his teeth and wondered just what the hell he’d gotten himself into this time.
“… Dave.”
The teenager looked over at him, slanting his eyes towards the other boy and knocking the knuckles of his clenched fists together.
“I’m not into this… fuckin’ emotional vulnerability shit.” Red eyes closed and Karkat knew from the sound of his voice that they were entering Very Serious Territory here, and now was the time to be quiet. Dave rubbed his hand over his mouth and exhaled sharply through his nose. “But… I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m… okay with this.” He gritted his teeth, every word seeming like an effort and Karkat watching him like he was about to slit his own throat wasn’t helping him in the slightest in how he was feeling like that was exactly the case.
“Look, Dave, I didn’t… you know… that fucking stuff I said…” The words were sticking, like tar in his throat and his voice sounded thick.
“You were right.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t take too much from it, right.” He had his eyes turned away but hearing somebody admit that he had actually been right about something had stunned Karkat into a kind of silence in which he couldn’t speak even if he’d wanted to. “You were right. About Egbert, and the others. I didn’t try. It’s not because I didn’t fucking want to. I actually like the buck-toothed morons and my… what… sister, or whatever. Don’t tell them I said that, for gog’s sake.”
“Mm.”
Dave pushed a hand into his hair, resting his forehead against his palm. The troll teen watched him, scratching his jaw with one sharp fingernail, the other hand resting on his knee and gripping lightly on the fabric of his pants. It was rather evident just to look at him that he felt just as awkward about all of this as Dave did, but even so, Karkat knew the difference between a situation that he could exploit for his amusement and one that he had to be serious about, and this was a clear case of the latter. The human had wet eyelashes again and it disturbed the troll more than he would ever want to admit to see someone like Dave Strider so easily shaken. He pressed his lips together and drew in a steadying breath, then lifted his hand from his knee and placed it on Dave’s shoulder. The muscles under his palm twitched and half-stiffened, then Dave let his shoulders drop and an expression of mild disbelief crept onto his face. Karkat’s fingers squeezed lightly, and he closed his eyes.
“Fuck…” he muttered.
“Hey, I know it’s not fucking easy, this whole human friendship thing,” Karkat said. “How you idiots manage without quadrants… But uh, Strider, this isn’t…”
“You’re really fuckin’ bad at this,” Dave told him. Karkat glared, but he didn’t move his hand, and after a moment Dave glanced at him from behind his hair. He smiled, actually smiled and Karkat felt the tips of his ears heat up. “Thanks, man.”
“Uh.” Grey skin flushed red again, Karkat’s eyes darted away and he cleared his throat. “So, I should um-”
“Well, yeah, if you want-”
“I mean it’s not that I-”
“For fuck’s sake.”
“… It’s not… just you.”
“… What?”
Karkat’s turn to look away now, and he frowned at the floor as he sat there, fidgeting with a plucked thread over his knee. “You heard what I said, fuckass. I’m not going to say it again just to satisfy some fucking abnormal meatsack urge that you have to- O-oi.” Dave’s hand was on his arm, the touch barely there but it might have weighed a tonne for how heavily Karkat felt it. He twitched.
“Let it out, man,” Dave said.
“Fuck you,” Karkat spat back at him, but there was very little venom in it.
“Just let it out, it’ll do you good.”
“Don’t you start trying to get the fucking upper hand on me Strider I’ve seen you nearly start blubbering three times already.”
“Hah. No one’s going to believe that if you tell them so don’t even fuckin’ bother.”
“Yeah, right.” Karkat snorted, and scooted forwards slightly. He knew what the human was doing – he’d seen it several times before in movies. That didn’t, of course, mean that he knew how to deal with it. Or that he wanted to.
“Hey, before you go, I have a question.” Dave seemed to have calmed down entirely from whatever funk he’d managed to get himself in, and he leaned back now, watching the other teen with an almost calculating expression. There was something else behind it, almost as if he’d drawn shutters over a more internal part of himself and it was noticing this that made Karkat pause before he stood up to leave, looking over at the boy. “What the fuck did you kiss me for?”
That was the one thing that Karkat had been hoping he wouldn’t ask, and he cringed slightly, his teeth digging into his lower lip again. The troll scuffed a hand through his hair then closed his eyes for a moment, letting out a huffing breath through his nose. Stupid humans. It wasn’t as if they could be expected to understand the complexities of human emotions and how trolls might kiss a person they hate as much as a person they like. It was a perfectly reasonable way to express that kind of thing. Dave was watching him. He could see the cogs turning in the grey-skinned boy’s head and he found himself almost amused by it. He didn’t expect the troll to understand the complexities of human relationships.
“I-”
“Shut up, Vantas.”
Dave was smirking at him. He was smirking and Karkat didn’t understand why, but the next thing he knew one of his fingertips was touching the corner of the faint uptilt of the pale teen’s mouth and he was tracing over his lower lip with an odd kind of wonder. The human was doing nothing to stop him, not even leaning away from his hand, eyelids dipping to half mast. Karkat wondered just what he was doing, and more than that, he wondered why he hadn’t just stood up and walked out yet. The answer came and smacked him in the face rather spectacularly when Dave brushed his fingers over the skin of his wrist, an expression on his face of something like curiosity as he turned Karkat’s hand over and pushed the sleeve of his shirt up a little way, finding the lines of his veins barely visible against the skin. Tingles were running up and down Karkat’s arm again, and Dave seemed fixated on him in a way that didn’t make his skin want to crawl off his body and hide in a corner. No, the human was looking at him like he found him… completely fascinating.
“I mean it, fuckass,” he said then, breaking the silence. “No one’s going to believe you if you tell them you saw me cry.”
“Gog, Strider, will you just shut up?” Karkat snapped. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing but you’re… touching me and it’s…”
“I’ll stop.”
“No!” Dave moved his hand away, but Karkat brought both of his up and cupped the other boy’s face, his skin looking all the darker against the cocky human’s. He froze like that, and Dave’s eyes were wide, then he poked his tongue past his sharp teeth and wetted his lips. “Dave Strider.”
“… Yeah.”
“… I’m going to fucking kiss you, and you’re not going to fucking complain.”
“… Cool.”
Kissing was something that was much easier said than done, and the anticipation of it didn’t make it any simpler. Karkat leaned in, his hands still on either side of the human’s face, and as their lips came within an inch of touching, Dave’s eyelids fluttered closed and he murmured quietly.
“If you bite my tongue, I’m going to destroy you.”
He said it with such dismissive bluntness that the troll almost sniggered, but he held back the urge in favour of closing the remaining distance and pressing his lips to the other boy’s. Karkat’s lips were surprisingly soft, Dave thought, if a little chapped from constant biting, and cracking one eye open revealed that the troll boy’s eyes were tightly shut. He hadn’t moved his hands from Dave’s face and he was beginning to feel a little uncool about it, so he lifted his own and wrapped his fingers around Karkat’s, pulling his hands down and holding them both in his lap. He tilted his head and felt the other’s tongue, rougher than a human’s, almost cat-like, flick out against his lower lip and before he could give himself time to think that kissing someone with razor-sharp teeth could be incredibly dangerous, he’d slid one hand up Karkat’s back and into his hair and gripped, and Karkat let out a sound something close to a purr. Dave pushed his tongue past the other teen’s lips and tested the sharp tip of one of his teeth, understandably wary but he found that Karkat, at least, seemed very aware that he had to be careful and the red-eyed human only tasted blood for a moment before Karkat was sucking on his tongue like he was born to it and sliding his own, the texture a little like sandpaper but softer, into Dave’s mouth.
Matching red blushes were on both their cheeks when they parted, and Karkat smirked to see that he’d managed to do something to fluster the coolkid Dave Strider. Dave dropped his hand from the troll’s thick hair to his shoulder, circling his thumb over the neckline of his shirt. For a long moment, they didn’t look at each other, then their eyes met and Karkat made an awkward sound.
“What the fuck are we doing,” he muttered.
“I’m pretty sure that you don’t need me to answer that,” Dave replied wryly. He ran his fingers down Karkat’s arm and the troll glanced down, touching the back of one of Dave’s hands and then taking hold of his wrist. He could feel the pulse of his blood through the veins close to the surface, and his eyelids flickered. It had been… too long a time since someone had touched him because they wanted to. Since someone had looked at him the way that this human was looking at him now. He shifted, moving himself an inch or two closer to the other boy. Their knees bumped. It made him flinch and he looked up at Dave quickly. Dave appeared to be just as startled as he was, and for a moment the shutters behind his gaze lifted, letting Karkat see the explanation for every damn thing that was happening.
“Fuck, Strider,” he said. You’re lonely, he wanted to add, but the words wouldn’t come. Dave knew, though. He shook his head but the answer was clear on his face. Karkat moved his hand from Dave’s wrist and brushed the backs of his fingers over the human’s cheek, feeling the faint evidence of a fine stubble there, not coarse like John’s (something which he had spent much time making fun of), but almost downy. He shifted forwards, Dave moved back, and Karkat followed him, landing half-heavily on the human’s chest and hearing the sharp exhale of breath that the impact caused. Pale fingers closed around his upper arms and he froze for a moment, then shifted, unwittingly making it easier for Dave to flip him onto his back. He growled, but there was very little he could do, and the moment one of the human’s fingertips brushed curiously up the side of one of his horns, it was as if every scrap of breath had been robbed from his body.
He clung on to Dave’s shoulders as if the bed was rocking and Dave was rather quick on the uptake. Adolescence had pulled the both of them into awkward, pointy kinds of shapes but Dave somehow managed to carry it off gracefully while Karkat was all sharp edges and elbows, and it didn’t take much effort for the human boy to put himself into a position where Karkat couldn’t have escaped even if he’d wanted to.
“Hah, this is weird,” Dave said, stroking his fingernail up and down the bony nub sticking out of the troll’s hair. Karkat was trying to speak, but all he could manage were hisses and words that had too many clicking consonants and Dave couldn’t understand a thing. The troll’s slim fingers gripped almost fretfully at Dave’s shirt, nails digging into the fabric and pulling hard enough to rip a seam at the shoulder, and Dave muttered something that was only half a complaint in a flat voice moments before he was dragged down into a kiss. His fingers pinched around that little horn and Karkat whined, his chest and hips pushing up, and Dave was finding that as much as he didn’t want to be aroused by this he couldn’t ignore those noises. Karkat’s teeth dug gently into his lower lip and he tasted blood again, moving his hand from the horn into the troll’s hair, jerking his head away.
“No biting, motherfucker,” Dave told him, and Karkat snapped at him, teeth clicking together barely an inch from the human’s swollen lip. He looked down in the dim light at the troll and then rolled off him, leaving him spitting out curses on the bed as he crossed the room.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
“I’m turnin’ on the light.”
“What-No, damnit, Strider don’t you even-”
Click.
Light flooded the room and Dave was treated to the sight of a very aroused troll boy lying on his bed, pressed back against the wall, his cheeks flushed with the reddest blush that the human had ever seen and his lips parted as his breath left him in soft pants. As for Karkat – Dave was blushing too though not quite so heavily, his shirt torn and lower lip beaded with blood. The blonde smirked and moved away from the wall, back to the bed. He ran a hand up the front of Karkat’s shirt and orange eyes followed his fingers, a faint rip-pop sound of fingernails digging into the mattress as he tried to move away at the same time as shifting towards the taller teen. One pale fingertip traced the symbol on the fabric, and one slim eyebrow lifted.
“Cancer,” he said. Karkat grunted and turned his head away while Dave tried to remember if he knew anything about astrology. As it turned out, he did, and he traced the shape again. “Makes some fuckin’ sense I suppose. Resistant to change, reticent…” He paused. “… Sensitive.”
“Fuck you,” Karkat spat, and then squeaked as a bony-fingered hand slid up under his shirt. He immediately looked furious with himself and Dave promptly hid a smile against the warm, dry skin of the other boy’s neck. Both hands pushed the black fabric up and over grey skin, the muscles fluttering as Dave explored with his fingertips. No navel, he noticed straight away, and… He pushed Karkat’s shirt higher. No nipples, either. Trolls were weird. Karkat parted his lips, drawing in a breath to speak but one look from Dave caused the words to stick in his throat. There wasn’t a mark on him but for the odd tiny pale line and one single, inch-long scar a little off-centre on his chest. Dave touched it and Karkat huffed, batting the boy’s hand away.
“Alright, alright, no touching that,” Dave muttered, avoiding it, as well as the steadily growing feeling that what was happening right now was very strange. Karkat’s hands were kneading his shoulders and he liked it. He liked the small sounds that the troll was making and most of all, he liked the way that he was enjoying this.
“Why are you doing this,” Karkat whispered, an almost-shake in his voice. It was all moving so fast, he could swear it had only been seconds since had intended to leave the room and leave Dave alone to whatever misery he’d decided to mire himself in. “I don’t-”
“Don’t fuckin’ question it,” the boy replied, letting out a sigh and allowing his forehead to touch Karkat’s chest, feeling the troll’s heart knocking against his ribs. There was a kind of grim satisfaction in that. He felt the other’s sharp nails run down his back and hook the hem of his shirt, the fabric drawn up over near-white skin and over his head, leaving his hair sticking up. Karkat was looking at him strangely, as if somehow the anger that always seemed to pour from every inch of him had completely disappeared, and he didn’t resist as his own shirt was pulled off and tossed aside. The troll blinked, moving his eyes over Dave’s chest, lifting a hand to press one fingertip against one of the pink nipples standing out against his skin. The soft flesh dented under his touch and the centre stiffened as he rubbed over it.
“Weird…” he said. He shifted and Dave let him sit up, dropping back into a kneeling position. Karkat continued his quiet exploration of the human’s chest and stomach, both soft nubs unwittingly teased to hardness and a fluttering beginning in Dave’s stomach before he cupped the back of the troll’s neck and pulled him up to kiss him again. His free hand moved over Karkat’s skin and he felt the other’s roughened palms against his shoulderblades, the troll’s fingernails drawing faint red lines in their wake.
Dave rolled his shoulders and grunted quietly, shaking his head in a small effort to move his hair back into place. It didn’t work. He eased Karkat back onto the bed, meeting very little resistance as he did so, the troll seeming compliant under his hands now. There was an expression of uncertainty on his face, his eyes everywhere at once, then he half closed them and slanted his gaze away.
“I don’t know why I-” Karkat began, and Dave pressed a finger to his lips. He was trying not to think but it wasn’t working, all he could think about was how strange this was, and he was asking himself why as he moved to kiss the other teen again and Karkat’s arms were around him and he brought one leg up to slide around his hips. Karkat’s breathing shook, and his fingernails dug in hard enough to make Dave hiss, and the human bit down on where he could see the other’s pulse fluttering at his throat. The reaction he got to that was one he didn’t expect, as Karkat let loose a shuddering moan and swore under his breath, tightening his grip around the blonde and arching up towards him. Dave almost flinched, something in him balking at being half restrained, and he looked down at Karkat to find him grinning.
“Freaking you out, Strider?” he asked, shifting his hips slightly. “Flustering that coolkid persona you’ve got-mm.”
He was interrupted, Dave’s mouth fitting over his again and one arm sliding beneath him, lifting him up. Orange eyes fluttered closed, another soft, muffled sound of pleasure escaping as Dave’s fingers found one of his horns again. He didn’t know how to stimulate it properly, but just touching it was enough, and when the human rocked his hips down and Karkat pushed his own up and they both groaned against each other’s lips, they looked at each other for a long moment. Something passed between them and Karkat swallowed, trailing one fingernail up Dave’s spine.
“… Alright.”
There was a definite awkwardness in the way he said it, but his expression was sincere, something that Dave was so unused to seeing on Karkat’s face that he had to pause for a moment to work out just what that look in his eyes was. Oddly, he didn’t feel any kind of rising smugness at the consent, only a faintly warm tingling in the centre of his chest that he didn’t feel particularly comfortable in experiencing. He looked down at Karkat, the other’s eyes fixed on his face, and he brushed one hand over his chest and stomach, drawing faint circles where his nipples should have been and running a finger over where his stomach was slightly indented, where a navel would be if he had one. He traced the contours of unfamiliar muscles under the grey skin and he didn’t speak, he just nodded. Karkat reached up and touched his face, one finger of his free hand hooking into one of Dave’s belt loops, while Dave’s hand skimmed between his hips, over his stomach to the button of his pants and flicked it open. The troll twitched and gasped softly, his eyes darting up and then away just as quickly, but he made no move to stop him and Dave slid the zipper down, only to jerk his hand away when he felt something he hadn’t anticipated.
“… Vantas?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh. What the fuck is that?”
Karkat bumped his head back against the pillow and put a hand over his face. “I’m not human, shitstain,” he ground out. “I don’t fucking look like you.”
Making an irritated sound somewhere between a grunt and a curse, Dave narrowed his eyes and took a firmer grip on Karkat’s pants, tugging them down over his hips. The bulge in his underwear was quite evident, but what was making Dave both curious and incredibly weirded out was the way it was moving. He hadn’t signed up for any kind of freaky tentacle shit, but he had the feeling that Karkat might just kill him if he stopped now, and while the prospect of seeing whatever was under that thin layer of cloth might have been daunting, it was not quite so unappealing as being chased by a half naked, pissed off alien brandishing a scythe. Karkat still had his hand over his face and Dave could see the red staining his cheeks between his fingers, and the moment his fingers touched the waistband of his underwear the troll jerked away and sat up, leaning forwards and glaring at the human.
“You first.”
“What?”
“You first, fuckass, are you fucking deaf?”
“Oh, cute, you’re shy,” Dave drawled, catching hold of Karkat’s wrists as the troll batted at him, snarling in that hissing language of his. “Well, if you need me to set an example…”
“Just get the fuck on with it.”
Dave moved up onto his knees, and Karkat’s eyes didn’t leave his hands as he watched the blonde unfasten his jeans and slide the zipper down, denim moving over slim hips and pale-skinned, almost hairless thighs. His underwear was simple, black, but that didn’t keep the troll from staring at it and Dave didn’t miss the way he momentarily averted his eyes when the last of his clothing was stripped without ceremony and dropped off the edge of the bed. Karkat looked at him, up at his face then down, drawing his own knees up to his chest as his eyes roved over the lightly muscled chest and stomach in front of him, the taut skin between faintly prominent hips, and then… that.
“I ain’t sure if I should be concerned about that lack of comment,” the red-eyed teen stated, accent seeping into his words as he struggled between his innate confidence and the sheer anxiety welling up in his gut. “You just gonna sit there lookin’ at my junk or what?”
He was already half hard from their activities so far, and the way that Karkat was staring at him was only making things worse. Karkat caught his lower lip between his teeth and tried not to look like some naïve grub who didn’t know what he was seeing.
“Can I touch it?”
“Sure, man,” Dave said nonchalantly, drawing in a hissing breath when the tip of Karkat’s finger circled around the head of his length. He watched, holding his tongue against anything potentially snarky that might have spilled past his lips as that same finger moved down over the blood-flushed skin to the base. The attention was sparking a tingling low in his stomach and he quickly rose to full attention, much to Karkat’s apparent mixed amusement and curiosity. By then, Dave was digging his fingernails into his thighs, creating red half-moon shapes in the pale flesh, and Karkat was so intently focused on the alien cock in front of him that he seemed to have entirely forgotten what they were doing. The human teen reminded him by taking hold of one of his horns, provoking a moan of surprise that welled up from so deep within Karkat’s chest that he felt the troll tremble. Karkat could do little but follow Dave’s guiding hand as he had his attention brought back to the blonde boy’s face, and Dave’s other had slid up between his legs, cupping over that warm, moving thing inside his underwear.
The troll gasped softly, his hips twitching forwards, eyes rolling closed at the combined sensations of his bulge being touched and that hand still working at one of the small candy-corn horns poking out of his hair. “Your turn,” Dave told him, and he nodded jerkily, grunting as the movement made the human reflexively tighten his grip on the horn he was paying such close attention to. Karkat was quite reluctant to move away from that touch, from any of it, but he needed to in order to comply and so he did, not for a moment taking his eyes away from the other boy’s. Beginning to find that staring a little unnerving, Dave responded to it with a cocky smirk and Karkat scowled, but he didn’t stop, and a moment later he’d dropped his own underwear to the floor and Dave was looking at something that he had no idea what to think about.
“Fuck,” he said, and Karkat huffed, his cheeks cherry red. Dave didn’t ask, he just went right ahead and touched, his fingers twitching as the organ that had no doubt slid from that bony-looking sheath between the troll’s legs moved towards his hand. It was like something straight out of the Japanese porn he’d once had the misfortune of coming across on his brother’s computer and he ran his fingers down it, finding it faintly slicked. “Whoa…”
“This isn’t show and fucking tell, nooksniffer,” Karkat snapped, but Dave ignored him, his fingers finding two small globes, one on either side of that sheath, seeming set into the bone but soft as he ran his fingertips over them. He heard Karkat whine, and then the troll had wrapped one arm around him and grabbed his wrist with the other hand, shoving Dave’s fingers lower. Underneath that bulge at his groin and set back slightly, Dave felt something he had certainly not expected. Something warm, soft, and-
“What the fuck?”
He jerked his hand away, and Karkat hissed, keeping hold of his wrist but not forcing him back to that spot. They glared at each other for a moment, Karkat because of the boy’s sudden reluctance after all of his posturing, and Dave for the fact that the coolkid front that he’d been so carefully rebuilding since his eyes had stopped leaking had been well and truly shattered. Dave Strider was Freaked. Out.
“Why the fuck do you have teeth down there?!” he choked out, still able to feel the slight edges of what had undeniably been teeth on his fingertips despite no longer touching them. “That’s messed up. This whole fucking thing is messed up. Fuck.”
“How else are we supposed to defend ourselves if we don’t fucking want it? Use your gogdamn think pan, Strider.”
“Have you heard of mace?” The expression on Karkat’s face told Dave that the troll had most definitely not heard of mace and he swore again. “Fucking hell, Vantas.”
“I told you we didn’t look like you.”
“But teeth? Really?” Dave held up his hands, drawing in a calming breath. “Yeah, you have some weird alien shit going on down there and I’m cool with that, man, but… teeth.”
“It is not ‘teeth’.” The troll was bristling, if possible redder than he had been before. “It’s a fucking defence.”
“Why the hell are you doin’ it? You-oh… I get it. You ain’t shy, you’re nervous.” He couldn’t help the faint sense of achievement that he felt upon realising that, and although Karkat spluttered out a protest and called him several interesting names he knew he was right. Dave sat back, looking the other up and down while he sorted his head out or did whatever he needed to do so he could stop fuming, and finally Karkat closed his eyes a moment.
“Fuck you, Strider. You’d be fucking nervous too.”
Dave didn’t say anything to that, he didn’t even smirk. Karkat looked, just for a moment, so delightfully embarrassed that he couldn’t find the words. Instead, he let out a short laugh and leaned forwards, not expecting but pleasantly surprised when Karkat mimicked the movement and kissed him again. He rested his hands on the troll’s sides, feeling the odd arrangement of muscles under the skin, circling his thumbs lightly and enjoying the way that the other squirmed a little under the attention. Karkat’s own hands were busy, sliding up Dave’s back, his nails lightly tracing the curve of each rib and Dave was thankful then that he wasn’t ticklish in the least. There was something quiet, calm yet careful between them as Dave avoided Karkat’s teeth and Karkat did his best not to dig his nails too hard into the soft flesh of the human’s back. In Dave’s mind, there was an odd mental block between when he had spoken to the other online and now. He couldn’t for the life of him work out how he’d ended up sitting naked on his bed with someone he barely liked. Someone who had been a metaphorical thorn in his side from the moment they’d met.
He flickered his eyes open then closed them again just as quickly, the image in front of him burned into the backs of his eyelids. Karkat’s eyes were closed, thick dark lashes spread across reddened cheeks and a tiny frown creasing between his eyebrows. His hair was everywhere, prickling against Dave’s forehead, and Dave was quite sure he’d never seen anything quite so fucking beautiful. Dave wrapped one arm around him in a way that made the troll pitch forwards slightly, his teeth nipping at Dave’s lower lip, and he pushed his hand back down between his legs and found that soft warmth again, Karkat whining softly against his lips as he felt for those tiny sharp points that had startled him. He didn’t find them, and Karkat wrenched away to bury his face against the blonde’s neck as he continued exploring. His breathing turned shaky, hips twitching as he placed his teeth against Dave’s neck but didn’t bite down, and his voice was almost a growl as he spoke.
“Are you going to fucking do it or not?” he asked, and then Dave slid one finger inside, and he let out a high, choked sound as his thighs tried to clamp closed over the blonde teen’s hand. He cursed, hissing, breaking the skin of Dave’s shoulder with his teeth and sending a thin line of blood running down his back. Dave didn’t notice, his mind focused entirely on the sensation of Karkat’s insides spasming around his finger, the arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, teeth and nails sparking tiny points of pain on his body that he couldn’t have found more intoxicating. Karkat rode up against his finger, his movements shuddering as if he was resisting but couldn’t help himself, and when Dave nosed up into his hair, and ran his tongue up one of the troll’s horns, he let out a strangled cry that went straight to the blonde’s erection.
“I might just hate you after all,” Karkat spat out. Dave smirked, and drew his hand away, his hand slicked a pale red colour. He pushed the other boy back and moved over him, leaning down.
“I’m touched.”
“Fuck you.”
“Nah, man.” Karkat had really set things up for him there. The troll was slightly squirming and gripping at his upper arms, eyes squinted in a way that suggested he was having difficulty in keeping them open. His grey skin was flushed cherry red and he looked as if he was trying very, very hard to hate the human boy who had him pinned and he wasn’t quite managing it. Dave was enjoying the contact more than anything, but he hadn’t gone this far to back out now. “Fuck you.”
He took Karkat’s hips in both hands, and the other teen barely had a moment to widen his eyes and begin the first syllable of what might have been an encouragement or a denial before Dave was pushing inside him and he was letting out a high, whining sound and gritting his pointy teeth together, digging his nails into the blonde’s arms and sending five drops of blood rolling down to each elbow. Dave hissed, jerking his hips forwards, and Karkat yowled in a way that the other wasn’t sure was in pain or pleasure, but he kept his grip on Dave and growled something harsh and demanding in that foreign tongue of his and his insides were clenching around Dave’s cock in a way he’d never felt before. He almost lost his mind in that moment but he didn’t, he grasped the swearing, squirming troll’s hips and thrusted, and if Dave hadn’t lost his mind then Karkat certainly had.
His nails detached from Dave’s shoulders and he wrapped his arms around the blonde, burying his face against his hair and scraping those sharp teeth against his ear. Dave could feel blood trickling from several faintly painful spots on his body but the discomfort was steadily lessening in favour of a growing euphoria. Karkat was tight, tighter than anything he’d ever felt and infinitely more satisfying than his hand, as awesome as that could be. He lowered his head and bit down on the troll’s throat, the skin slightly thicker than a human’s, and it took a little extra bite before it welled up in a rosy bruise. His attention was returned in kind, bites on his neck between heavily panted breaths as Karkat writhed underneath him.
“I need-” he groaned through gritted teeth, scratching his nails over Dave’s back though not digging them in – it seemed he’d retained enough of his mind to know that he could shred the delicate human skin if he pressed too hard. A low ‘hmm’ sound rose in Dave’s throat and he licked at the darkened mark he’d left on the other’s neck, and Karkat twitched, digging his nail in gently then releasing just as quickly. “I need a f-fucking bucket let me go.”
“That ain’t how I roll,” Dave told him. Though, a lot of this wasn’t really how he rolled. Fucking grey-skinned hermaphroditic teenage boys with sharp teeth and sharper tempers wasn’t generally on his to-do list. At his denial, Karkat tried to struggle, but he was much too far gone to put up much of a fight and Dave held him down easily, pushing up into him in a way that made his shoulders roll back, head tilted up, a loud cry passing his lips. He hissed and bucked and squirmed and Dave had never seen anything so fucking sexy.
When he came, it was as if a tidal wave of pleasure had crashed over the troll. His knees drew up and his hips bucked, chest rising and shoulders curling in as he yowled and promptly bit down on Dave’s shoulder. The sudden shock of the pain and the near-unbearable tightening around his cock had the blonde shuddering to a stop, pushing in deep and hard and the next thing he knew his own orgasm had crept up and punched him square in the gut. It was only when he began to come down from his high that he realised that the troll’s need for a bucket hadn’t been understated. Karkat was cherry red, covering his face in what Dave assumed to be embarrassment and that weird-ass tentacle-cock had withdrawn, leaving a trail of pink-tinged fluid behind. Both of their chests and stomachs were covered and for a moment all Dave could do was stare.
“… Fuckin’ weird,” he muttered between two heavy breaths.
“I… fucking told you… fuckass,” Karkat half-snarled, though he didn’t manage to inject much venom into it. “I can’t believe you fucking came in me without even fucking asking, do you even-”
“Oh, shut up.” Dave drew away and rolled off the other boy, lying on his back for a moment to level his breathing before he sat up. The troll was still immobile, gazing glassy-eyed at the ceiling with his chest heaving and covered in his own genetic material. It was dripping down Dave’s chest and stomach and he wrinkled his nose a little picking up Karkat’s shirt before it occurred to him that such a small amount of fabric wouldn’t be enough to clean up this mess. He retreated to the bathroom, wiping the stuff off him and hearing Karkat beginning to swear in the other room, in both English and his own language and possibly several others. He grabbed another towel and headed back, and the troll didn’t even seem to register his presence as he proceeded to no doubt ruin that towel as well as the other one, and he was still hissing obscenities to himself when Dave had pulled his jeans back on and sat back down beside him.
“Oi.”
Interrupted, Karkat slowly slid his eyes over to the human and looked him up and down, then looked away again. He grunted and shifted as if he was going to sit up, and then changed his mind.
“So,” he said. “In your fucked up quadtrantless human romance, what does this make us?”
Dave shrugged. “Doesn’t have to make us anything, man. We just fucked. I’m not gonna get all cathartic on you just because you got a piece of the Strider.”
Karkat was quiet at that. He looked between Dave and the door, and seemed to come to a decision. Slowly, almost as if it pained him to do so he turned his shoulders and leaned up against Dave’s side, dropping his head to the boy’s shoulder with a quiet thud. Neither of them spoke, but Dave cast a half-startled, half-curious glance down and let out a quiet breath through his nose. He moved one arm up, working his fingers into Karkat’s coarse hair and scratching one fingernail idly behind one of his horns. Karkat made a shuddering, stuttering sound like a broken purr, but he didn’t voice an objection, and Dave smiled faintly.
“I still don’t fuckin’ hate you, Strider,” Karkat muttered.
“Yeah. I know.”
Dave Strider didn’t need anyone.
But wanting… wanting was fine.
