im usually so nervous to request things but your writing is so scrumptious and i’ve been Very Normal™️ about danhausen lately so….perhaps danhausen with a reader that is also very weird and unusual? i keep watching him and having “omg he just like me fr” moments lol and i think that could be a super cute dynamic!! i feel most fics make the reader a fairly “normal” person but this would be so cute :D ty if you do it!
eek ur so real for that 💞 very happy to provide weirdness for you!!
゛WEIRDO ⸝⸝.ᐟ⋆ danhausen x reader
: ̗̀➛ requested! for anon
“ You are deep weird. Bones weird. Soul lives in a crooked little house at the edge of a cursed forest weird. ”
⤿ Danhausen slowly realises that you are just as strange, soft, and wonderfully unusual as he is, leading to a sweet kindred-spirit romance built on beetles, teeth, and being weird together.
tags | fluff | uh weirdness? lol | kiss |
Danhausen noticed things.
It was, in his professional opinion, one of his many excellent and very evil talents, right alongside cursing enemies, collecting human teeth in a morally ambiguous fashion, and appearing in places where people were almost certain he had not been standing a moment before.
He noticed when someone changed their entrance wrist tape. He noticed when catering tried to hide the good biscuits behind the sad oat bars. He noticed when wrestlers laughed too loudly because they were trying to impress someone nearby, or when their anger was not really anger at all, but embarrassment wearing a jacket with spikes on it.
Danhausen noticed these things because people were often very bad at hiding themselves, even the ones who wore leather, face paint, sunglasses indoors, or all three at once.
But you were different. You were not bad at hiding yourself. You simply did not appear to be hiding at all, which, in Danhausen’s experience, was much stranger.
The first thing he noticed was the little black notebook.
It was not unusual for people backstage to carry notebooks. Wrestlers had promo notes, trainers had schedules, production had endless lists of things that looked boring and important in equal measure. But yours was different because it had a sticker of a possum wearing a tiny crown on the front, and because you wrote in it with the severity of someone recording evidence for a haunting.
You sat in the hallway outside the locker rooms with one knee crossed over the other, boots planted carefully apart, head bent, lips moving slightly as your pen scratched across the paper.
Danhausen had been passing with a paper cup of coffee he did not trust, because it had come from a machine that sounded like it was choking on coins, when he slowed without meaning to.
You did not look up as he approached. “The vending machine near production is lying,” you said.
He looked behind himself, because sometimes people spoke to someone else when Danhausen believed they were speaking to him, and sometimes invisible ghosts spoke to him, and one needed to be certain. There was no one there. Only him, you, and the terrible coffee breathing steam from its flimsy cup.
“The drink machine?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
You nodded, still writing. “It says strawberry flavour, but it’s not strawberry. It’s red flavour. Totally different spiritual category.”
Danhausen stared at you for a long moment. The hallway hummed with the ordinary backstage chaos of rolling equipment cases, faraway voices, someone laughing too hard around a mouthful of food. You continued writing as if you had said something completely normal. Danhausen slowly looked down at his coffee, which smelled like burnt dirt and regret, then back at you.
“Yes,” he said carefully, because the statement was correct. “Red flavour is usually a deception.”
That was when you finally looked up, and your face changed with a tiny bright flicker of recognition, like someone had struck a match in your eyes. “Exactly.”
Danhausen should have continued walking. He had things to do, probably. Very important things. Evil things. Teeth-adjacent things. Instead, he stood there clutching his coffee while you tapped the end of your pen against the possum sticker and studied him with open curiosity.
“You’re Danhausen,” you said.
“I like your whole thing.”
His shoulders lifted at once. Compliments were suspicious unless offered with proper tribute, but yours seemed genuine, dropped between you with no sharp hook attached. “Yes, many people enjoy Danhausen’s whole thing. Very famous. Very evil.”
“You’re not evil,” you said, and returned to your notebook.
Danhausen gasped with such theatre that someone at the end of the hallway glanced over. “This is slander.”
“You have gentle eyes. You can't be that evil,” you said, not looking at him, and then wrote something else down as if that settled it.
Danhausen did not know what to do with that, which was rare and deeply inconvenient. He stared at you until you glanced up again, and when you smiled at him, it was not the smile people usually gave Danhausen. It was not indulgent, not confused, not entertained in that way that made him feel like a very strange painting someone had decided to hang in the lobby. It was warm, but also a little conspiratorial, like you had both seen the same ghost in the corner and agreed not to embarrass it by pointing.
He pointed at your notebook instead. “What are you writing?”
Danhausen leaned forward slightly. “About the cursed vending machine?”
“Sometimes. Today it’s mostly about people’s walk cycles.”
You clicked your pen. “Everyone walks like they’re keeping a secret in a different part of their body.”
You shrugged, casual as anything. “Some people keep secrets in their knees. Some keep them in their shoulders. Some people walk like they swallowed a church bell and they’re trying not to let it ring.”
For the first time all day, Danhausen forgot to sip his terrible coffee. He looked down the hallway, watching a stagehand stride past with a headset and a clipboard, then squinted at him thoughtfully. “That one has a secret in the elbows.”
“Yes,” you said immediately, delighted. “Thank you! Finally someone gets it.”
Something very small shifted inside him. Not loudly. Not dramatically. It was more like a coin sliding under a door.
He did not know what it meant yet.
Over the next few weeks, Danhausen kept noticing you, which was not the same as watching you. Watching sounded too obvious, too human, too easy to make fun of. Noticing was different. Noticing was what he did when he found you sitting cross-legged on a production crate, eating crisps with chopsticks because, as you explained to a baffled assistant, “the dust is too powerful and I need my hands for dramatic pointing later.” Noticing was when he saw you whisper “good luck, don’t embarrass me” to your boots before a match, then knock twice on the left heel and once on the right. Noticing was when you politely moved a chair out of the way and murmured, “Sorry, sir,” to it, like the chair was an elderly man you had inconvenienced.
At first, he assumed these were isolated incidents. Everyone had a few strange habits. Hook ate chips like he was punishing them. Orange Cassidy could communicate a full paragraph with one eyelid. Wrestlers were not exactly a normal species. But with you, the strangeness was not a costume you put on for a laugh.
It was in the way you tilted your head when you listened, as if tuning your ears to a private frequency. It was in the way you collected shiny bottle caps, loose rhinestones, broken bits of ring gear, and once, very proudly, a tiny plastic sword from a cupcake. You called them “useful objects” and kept them in a mint tin in your bag.
Danhausen discovered this by accident on a rainy afternoon when half the roster had been trapped backstage by delayed transport, leaving everyone tired, damp, and faintly annoyed. He found you on the floor beside a radiator that did not appear to be working, sorting through the tin with great seriousness. He had been walking by, again with suspicious coffee, again telling himself he had no reason to stop, when something silver caught the light.
“What is that?” he asked, already crouching before he decided to.
You glanced up, then tipped the tin toward him. “Treasure.”
Danhausen’s eyebrows rose. “This is mostly trash.”
“Rude. This is a museum.”
He peered inside. There was a bent paperclip, two safety pins, a purple sequin, a fake pearl, a smooth black button, the cupcake sword, a tiny bell, and what appeared to be a googly eye with no adhesive left on the back. “What does the museum honor?”
“Evidence that the day happened.”
Danhausen, who had been reaching for the bell, froze slightly. “What does this mean?”
You shifted against the wall, your shoulder brushing the radiator. “I don’t know. Sometimes days feel slippery. Like they’ll vanish if I don’t keep proof. So I keep little bits of them.”
He looked at you then, properly. Your tone had not changed much.
You had not made it sad or dramatic.
You simply said it, honest and odd and soft around the edges.
The hallway lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere, someone shouted about missing wrist tape. Rain tapped against a high window in nervous fingers. Danhausen looked back into the tin and saw not rubbish, but a tiny archive of survival. A bell. A sequin. A pearl. Proof that a day had existed and had left something behind.
Very carefully, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small white object.
Your eyes widened. “Is that a tooth?”
“It is a spare tooth,” he said proudly.
“A spare tooth,” you repeated, reverent.
“What kind of emergency requires a spare tooth?”
Danhausen looked offended. “Many kinds.”
You held out your hand, palm up. “May I?”
He hesitated. Danhausen did not hand teeth to just anyone. That was how one ended up with lawsuits, curses, or awkward conversations with management. But your hand remained open, patient and still, and your face was bright with the kind of interest people reserved for rare jewels or baby animals. He placed the tooth carefully in your palm. You looked at it for a long moment, then smiled.
“This tooth is clearly a he.”
Danhausen nodded slowly. “Yes. His name is Mr. Chewy.”
You gave the tooth back without laughing.
Danhausen did not realise how important until later, when he was standing alone near the curtain, touching the pocket where Mr. Chewy had been returned safely, and replaying the moment in his mind like a very strange little film. You had not laughed. You had not wrinkled your nose. You had not said, “That’s disgusting,” or “Why do you have that?” or “You’re so weird,” in the tone that meant weird was a cage with a velvet bow on it. You had accepted Mr. Chewy as a person of significance. You had asked about his aura. You had understood, without needing the world to translate.
Still, Danhausen decided not think too much of it.
He thought of it constantly.
It became a problem. A very evil problem, but a problem nonetheless. He found himself looking for you at call times. He noticed when your bag was thrown beneath a bench, recognised by the keychain shaped like a haunted cat. He learned that you preferred sitting on floors to chairs when you were anxious, that you hummed old television theme tunes when you taped your wrists, that you had a habit of staring directly at people when they were being rude until they grew uncomfortable and wandered away. He learned that you did not like people touching the back of your neck, but you would let Nyla Rose pick glitter out of your hair without flinching. He learned that you laughed silently first, shoulders shaking, then made a small sound afterwards like a kettle remembering its purpose.
And, troublingly, he learned that you listened to him.
Not in the way people usually listened to Danhausen, waiting for the punchline, waiting for the bit, waiting for the performance to reveal where reality ended and the joke began. You listened as if every word he said was a pebble dropped into water, and you wanted to watch the ripples.
When he complained that one of the lighting rigs had “bad intentions,” you asked which one and then avoided walking beneath it. When he declared that a rival had the personality of wet cardboard in a haunted basement, you considered this and said, “No, wetter.”
When he told you, with great importance, that curses required intention, presentation, and good wrist posture, you nodded and adjusted your own wrist like he had taught you something sacred.
One evening, after a taping that ran too long and left everyone with hollow eyes and sore feet, Danhausen found you sitting alone near the loading bay doors. The air was cold there, carrying the damp smell of outside and the metallic breath of trucks. You had your knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, chin resting on your sleeve. At first, he thought you were upset, and something in his chest tightened with immediate and inconvenient alarm. Then he saw that you were watching a beetle make its slow, determined way across the concrete.
Danhausen approached carefully. “Is this beetle bothering you?”
You did not look away from it. “No. I’m supervising.”
“Ah.” He lowered himself beside you, his knees cracking slightly beneath the dramatic strain of existence. “Does the beetle require supervision?”
“All creatures require witnesses.”
Danhausen considered this. “Yes. Otherwise how will anyone know they were very brave?”
The beetle paused near a small crack in the floor, antennae moving like it was receiving bad news from the universe. You leaned forward slightly, your expression solemn. “Come on, Kevin. You’ve crossed worse lands than this.”
Danhausen nodded. “Very determined. Slightly cursed, but in a charming way.”
You smiled without taking your eyes off the beetle, and he felt the smile like it had happened against his own ribs. The two of you sat in silence for several minutes, watching Kevin navigate dust, a stray thread, and what looked like a dried drop of coffee. People passed behind you, some glancing over, some ignoring you entirely. Danhausen found that he did not care. Usually, he cared a little, even when pretending he did not. Usually, he felt the shape of people’s attention, their amusement, their confusion, their expectation. Beside you, he felt only the cool floor beneath him and the steady presence of someone who did not require him to become easier.
After Kevin disappeared beneath a stack of pallets, you sighed. “Safe travels, tiny king.”
Danhausen lifted one hand in a small wave. “May your enemies lose their brains.”
You looked at him then, your eyes soft and amused. “That’s a good blessing.”
“It is a curse also, depending on the floor.”
“That’s most things, though, isn’t it?”
He turned his head. “What is?”
You shrugged, picking at a loose thread on your sleeve. “Blessings and curses. Depends where you’re standing.”
Danhausen stared at you for a beat too long.
You seemed to notice, because your smile shifted into something smaller. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly, which was suspicious because Danhausen never said nothing unless the something was large and wearing a hat.
You tilted your head. “You’re looking at me like I just turned into a pigeon.”
“Danhausen would never accuse you of this without evidence.”
“You would be a very interesting pigeon.”
“Thank you. I’d haunt statues.”
He made a strangled little sound that was almost a laugh and almost a cough. It startled him. It startled you too, because your smile grew, and then you laughed properly, that silent shoulder-shaking laugh he had started to recognise. He watched you with an expression he hoped was normal and suspected was not. There was warmth moving through him, slow and unfamiliar, like candle wax down the side of a black taper. It pooled somewhere dangerous.
He did not understand it yet.
Or maybe he did, and was simply pretending not to, because pretending was safer and had better lighting.
The penny did not drop all at once. It rattled first.
It rattled when you appeared beside him before a match with two paper cups in your hands and said, “I brought you a beverage of questionable origin.”
Danhausen accepted it with grave suspicion. “What is inside?”
“You of all people should know brown is absolutely a flavor.”
He looked into the cup, sniffed, and recoiled. “This smells like a shoe.”
“I know. I thought of you.”
He placed one hand over his chest, moved despite himself. “This is very romantic.”
The air between you changed so quickly it was almost audible. Danhausen had meant it in the easy dramatic way he said many things, tossing words like glitter and curses, but the moment they landed, he saw them reflected in your face. Not discomfort. Not mockery. Something else. A quick flash of startled pleasure, buried almost immediately beneath humor.
“Careful,” you said, looking away as you took a sip from your own terrible drink. “I’ll start expecting dowry teeth.”
Danhausen’s thoughts fell down a staircase.
“Dowry teeth?” he repeated faintly.
You nodded, still not looking at him. “At least three. I have standards.”
“I’m trying not to seem needy.”
Danhausen opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and discovered that for once, words had abandoned him in his moment of need. You glanced sideways, saw his expression, and laughed quietly into your cup.
The penny rattled again when you watched his match from the side monitor with your hands clasped beneath your chin, muttering encouragements that no one else seemed to hear. “Bite him spiritually. Yes. Good. Menace him with your elbows. Excellent posture. Oh, beautiful curse work.”
Danhausen only learned of this because Wheeler Yuta told him later with a baffled expression, asking, “Is your little friend always like that?” and Danhausen, who had been unwrapping his wrist tape, went very still at the phrase your little friend.
“Your little friend,” Yuta repeated, instantly looking like he regretted it. “The one with the notebook. She was commentating your match like a witch watching her favourite frog compete in a tournament.”
Yuta raised both hands. “Not an insult.”
“Honestly, I think she was into it.”
Danhausen’s tape tangled around his fingers. “Into what?”
Yuta looked at him for a moment, then snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”
Danhausen was not kidding. Danhausen was alarmed. Danhausen was many things, including very evil, but in that moment he was mostly confused, because the idea that you might be into anything involving him made his brain behave like a possum in a chandelier.
He avoided you for approximately twenty-three minutes after that, which was a lifetime by backstage standards and a pathetic blink by emotional standards.
He told himself he was being strategic. Mysterious. Unavailable. Very hard to catch, like a goblin with tax debt.
In reality, he spent most of those twenty-three minutes standing behind a stack of folded tables, staring at nothing and replaying every conversation you had ever had. The red flavour. The museum tin. Mr. Chewy. Kevin the beetle. Dowry teeth. Gentle eyes.
He touched two fingers to the black paint beneath one of them and frowned.
When he finally emerged, it was because he heard your voice.
“You can tell him I’m not mad,” you were saying somewhere around the corner, your tone light but edged with something uncertain. “I just don’t know if I accidentally did something strange in the wrong direction.”
A second voice, belonging to Willow, answered gently, “I don’t think you did anything wrong. He’s probably just being Danhausen.”
“Yes, but there are different categories of being Danhausen. There’s theatrical hallway Danhausen, ominous snack Danhausen, tooth economy Danhausen, and then there’s avoidant cryptid Danhausen.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Willow said, “Avoidant cryptid?”
“That’s when someone vanishes because feelings looked directly at them.”
Danhausen felt personally attacked by the accuracy.
Willow laughed softly. “Maybe talk to him?”
“I don’t want to corner him. Cryptids need habitat.”
Danhausen stepped back, hand pressed to his chest again, but this time not theatrically. Something was happening under his ribs, something with teeth and wings. You had noticed him too. Not the paint, not the catchphrases, not the curse hands everyone copied for photos. Him. His categories. His vanishing. His strange little weather patterns. You had seen him not as a joke or a puzzle, but as a creature with a habitat.
The penny rolled closer to the edge.
It finally dropped two nights later.
The show had been loud, frantic, and full of the kind of energy that made the walls feel too close. Danhausen had won, sort of. Winning was a flexible concept when curses were involved. You had lost, technically, though you had done so with enough spite and style that several people backstage agreed it barely counted.
By the time everyone began clearing out, the arena had emptied into that peculiar after-show quiet, when the crowd was gone but their noise still seemed to haunt the seats. Danhausen found you in the bowl of the arena, sitting halfway up the lower section with your boots on the seat in front of you, staring down at the ring.
He stood at the end of the row for a while before you noticed him. You had changed into a hoodie too big for your frame, hair a little messy, eyeliner smudged beneath one eye. In the dim arena light, you looked tired and beautiful in a way that made his thoughts trip over each other. Not beautiful like glossy posters or slow-motion entrances. Beautiful like a candle kept burning in a room no one else remembered to check. Beautiful like an odd little saint of lost objects and red flavour warnings.
“You may sit,” you said, eyes still on the ring. “The council permits it.”
Danhausen shuffled into the row and sat beside you, leaving one seat between you because he had not yet decided what his hands were allowed to want. “What council?”
“Me and the empty crisp packet under that chair.”
He leaned forward, spotted the packet, and nodded. “A wise council.”
They sat in silence for a while. Below them, crew members moved around the ring, dismantling pieces of the night with practiced efficiency. The ropes trembled as someone leaned against them. The canvas was scuffed and marked, evidence of bodies thrown, dragged, pinned, lifted, survived. Danhausen watched the ring. Then he watched you watching the ring.
“You were very good tonight,” he said.
Your mouth twitched. “I lost.”
“That sounds like something someone says when they’ve been banned from Monopoly.”
“Danhausen has never been banned from Monopoly. Danhausen simply improved it.”
You hummed. “Honestly, it probably needed them.”
He smiled despite himself, small and hidden, then folded his hands in his lap. The silence that returned was not uncomfortable, but it was heavy with all the things he had been avoiding. He could feel them gathering like birds on a telephone wire. You glanced at him, then away. For once, you looked almost nervous.
“Did I scare you off?” you asked softly.
Danhausen turned to you at once. “No.”
“You did do a bit of cryptid vanishing.”
He winced. “Danhausen heard this.”
“Danhausen hears many things. Very powerful ears.”
“Oh no.” You covered your face with your sleeve, laughing under your breath. “That’s embarrassing.”
“No,” he said quickly, then softer, “no. It was accurate.”
You lowered your sleeve. Your expression gentled. “I didn’t mean it badly.”
He looked back toward the ring because looking at you made honesty feel too close. His fingers flexed against his knees. He could cut a promo in front of thousands. He could curse men twice his size. He could be strange on purpose, loud on purpose, impossible to ignore on purpose. But sitting beside you in the quiet, he felt all the fragile little bones beneath the performance.
“You are not scared of Danhausen,” he said eventually.
You seemed surprised by the statement. “No.”
“Many people are not scared exactly,” he continued, searching for the words as though they were hidden in the dark between the seats. “But they are unsure. Or they think Danhausen is funny, which is acceptable because Danhausen is very entertaining. Or they think Danhausen is strange, which is correct because Danhausen is very strange. But sometimes they look like they are waiting for Danhausen to stop being Danhausen.”
Your face changed. The humor slipped away, leaving something open and aching in its place.
He swallowed, still not looking at you. “You do not look like this.”
You were quiet for a long time. When you answered, your voice was low. “People wait for me to stop too.”
You picked at the cuff of your hoodie, eyes lowered. “Not always in a cruel way. Sometimes they think they’re being kind. Like if they’re patient enough, I’ll become easier. Less intense. Less odd. Less likely to talk to beetles or assign emotional motives to vending machines. They like it when it’s funny, but not when it’s inconvenient. They like the sparkle, not the static.” You breathed out a small laugh that had no real humour in it. “So, no. I’m not scared of you. I think I recognized the shape.”
Not with a clatter. Not with a grand burst of music or lightning splitting the arena roof. It dropped quietly inside him, landing in a place that had been waiting for it all along. Danhausen looked at you and saw every strange little thing at once, no longer as separate curiosities but as constellations forming a picture. The notebook. The treasure tin. The chair apologies. The beetle blessing. The way you looked at him like he was not too much, because you had spent your life being told you were too much in a slightly different language. You were not merely amused by him. You were not merely kind to him. You were, in some impossible, glittering, haunted way, like him.
You glanced over. “What?”
“Oh,” he said again, more softly, as if the word had become a small creature in his hands. “You are weird.”
Then, slowly, your brows lifted. “Yes?”
“No,” he said, turning more fully toward you, his coat shifting against the seat. “You are very weird.”
Your mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Danhausen leaned closer, eyes widening with the force of revelation. “Not fake weird. Not ‘wears a silly hat once at a party’ weird. You are deep weird. Bones weird. Soul lives in a crooked little house at the edge of a cursed forest weird.”
Your face flushed in the dim light. “That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“It is true.” His voice was almost urgent now, as though he needed you to understand before the feeling overflowed and drowned him. “Danhausen thought you were nice. Then interesting. Then possibly dangerous because you understood too many things. But no. You are like Danhausen.”
You stared at him, eyes bright and uncertain. “Is that good?”
Danhausen looked offended by the question. “It is wonderful. Terrible for everyone else, perhaps, but wonderful.”
That made you laugh, and the sound loosened something in him. He moved into the empty seat between you without asking, pulled by instinct more than decision, and suddenly you were close enough that he could see the tiny fleck of glitter near your cheekbone, the smudge of makeup beneath your eye, the nervous movement of your throat when you swallowed. His hands hovered uselessly for a moment. He was not often gentle by accident. He was theatrical, careful, strange, loud, but gentleness required a different kind of courage.
“You collect proof that days happened,” he said.
“Danhausen collects proof that people leave pieces behind.”
Your eyes flicked down to his pocket, where the emergency tooth tin usually lived. “That makes sense.”
“Most people do not think so.”
“Most people are cowards.”
A grin tugged at his mouth, small and helpless. “Yes. Very cowardly. Very normal.”
You smiled back, and the air between you warmed.
For a moment, neither of you spoke. The crew below continued their work, distant and clattering, but the two of you seemed enclosed in your own strange little chapel of empty seats and arena ghosts. Danhausen’s gaze dropped to your hands. Your fingers were curled into your sleeves, only the tips showing. He thought about the way you had held Mr. Chewy with reverence. He thought about the way you had said “cryptids need habitat.” He thought about the word romantic sitting between you from days before, still alive, still waiting.
“May Danhausen ask you something?” he said.
“Is this why you watch Danhausen?”
Your eyes widened slightly. “I don’t watch you.”
You sighed. “Fine. I watch you a normal amount.”
“I watch you a weird amount,” you corrected.
You looked down at your sleeves, twisting the fabric between your fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe. At first, I just thought you were fun. Then I saw you being odd in ways that didn’t feel like a joke. You talk like the world is full of secret rules only you can see. I liked that. I liked that you didn’t seem embarrassed by it.” Your voice softened. “Sometimes I’d see you do something and think, oh. He's just like me for real.”
“For real?” he repeated, testing the modern words in his mouth.
“Yeah, like as in, genuinely. I think.”
“Ah.” He absorbed this seriously. “He's just like me for real.”
You laughed into your sleeve. “Exactly.”
Danhausen sat very still. His heart was doing something deeply unprofessional. “And this is good?”
“Because you like Danhausen?”
The question escaped smaller than he intended. It was not dressed in theatre. It had no cape, no curse, no dramatic echo. It simply stood there between you, vulnerable and blinking.
You looked at him for a long moment, and your expression went so soft that he almost looked away.
“Yes,” you said. “Because I like Danhausen.”
You smiled, nervous now. “Is that allowed in the tooth economy?”
“Encouraged,” he said immediately, voice a little too high. “Very profitable.”
“Danhausen also likes you,” he added, then straightened as if trying to recover some grandeur. “Obviously. Because you are very weird and you respect beetles and you understand beverage crimes. Also, you have never insulted Mr. Chewy.”
“He speaks highly of you.”
“He says you have kind hands.”
Your smile trembled. “Does he?”
“Yes.” Danhausen glanced at your hands again, then slowly, carefully, held one of his own out, palm up. “May Danhausen confirm?”
You looked at his hand. The offer was strange, but then, so were both of you. After a moment, you slid your hand from your sleeve and placed it in his. His fingers curled around yours with surprising tenderness, cool at first, then warming quickly. He looked down at the contact like it was another piece of evidence, another relic from a day that needed keeping. Your thumb brushed the side of his hand once, tentative. He inhaled.
“Very kind,” he said quietly.
You leaned a little closer. “You have gentle hands too.”
“Impossible. Danhausen’s hands are instruments of evil.”
He looked at you then, remembering your words from the loading bay. Blessings and curses. Depends where you’re standing.
For once, he knew exactly where he was standing.
The thought made him brave enough to lift your joined hands and press a careful kiss to your knuckles. It was theatrical in shape, but not in feeling. The feeling was too honest for theatre. Your breath hitched, and when he glanced up, your eyes were shining in a way that made his chest ache.
“Was that part of the curse?” you asked softly.
“Yes,” he whispered. “You are doomed now.”
He swallowed. “To be liked by Danhausen. Very much. Perhaps forever, depending on contract negotiations.”
Your laugh came out small and watery. “That sounds serious.”
“It is extremely serious.”
“I should probably consult my council.”
“And Kevin, if available.”
“Kevin will approve. Danhausen saved him from no danger whatsoever.”
You were both smiling now, leaning closer without making any official decision to do so. Danhausen could feel the warmth of your shoulder near his, the soft brush of your sleeve against his coat. The empty arena seemed to hold its breath around you. For all his strangeness, for all his noise, he had never felt quite like this before. Seen, perhaps. Not understood completely, because what creature ever was, but recognised. As if some odd little lantern inside him had flickered, and instead of asking him to dim it, you had lifted your own.
He noticed that your gaze dropped to his mouth.
He noticed, because Danhausen noticed things.
“May Danhausen kiss you?” he asked, very softly.
Your fingers tightened around his. “Yes.”
He leaned in slowly, giving you time to vanish if you needed to, because cryptids needed habitat and strange people needed exits and affection was better when it did not behave like a trap. But you did not vanish. You met him halfway, and when his lips touched yours, the kiss was gentle, a little tentative, sweet in a way that made him feel briefly weightless. There was no audience, no performance, no punchline. Just your hand in his, your mouth warm against his, your quiet breath catching when he tilted his head and kissed you again with a little more certainty.
When you parted, you stayed close, foreheads nearly touching.
“I think,” you whispered, “this is going in the museum.”
Danhausen smiled. “The kiss?”
He nodded solemnly. “It requires a very good object.”
You reached into your hoodie pocket and pulled out a tiny loose rhinestone, probably fallen from someone’s gear, glinting faintly in the arena light. You placed it in his palm. “Proof.”
Danhausen looked at it, then closed his fingers around it with great care.
“Danhausen will keep this forever,” he said.
“I thought it was for my museum.”
You laughed, nudging his shoulder with yours. “Fine. But I get visitation.”
The two of you sat there until the crew finished tearing down the ring, your hand still tucked in his, your shoulder pressed lightly to his arm. Danhausen kept the rhinestone in his palm the whole time. He would put it with Mr. Chewy later, perhaps in a separate compartment, perhaps wrapped in tissue like a sacred relic. Evidence that the day had happened. Evidence that someone had looked at him and not waited for him to become easier. Evidence that somewhere in the strange, loud, ordinary world, there was another crooked little house at the edge of the cursed forest, and its windows were lit.
Danhausen noticed things.
Not as a curiosity. Not as a mystery to solve. Not as a normal person being kind to something strange.
He noticed you as a fellow creature. A kindred oddity. A blessing. A curse. A person standing in the same impossible place.
And for once, he did not feel strange alone.
ˏˋ°•*⁀➷ ouchhausen notes!
winner winner chicken dinner
i love weird danhausen sm ty for requesting!!! 💞💞
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