Link to the AO3.
Date posted: February 8, 2026
Words: 1151
Summary:
Dave accidentally overwaters Jade's plants and has to scramble to fix it.
“Shit. Oh shit shit shit, no, that looks bad.”
Granted, Dave doesn’t know a whole lot about succulents, but he’s pretty sure these things weren’t yellow when Jade left. He’s also pretty sure, now that he’s thinking about it, that Jade explicitly said he didn’t have to water them every day. He looks down at Bec with a panicked expression. “Man, why didn’t you stop me?”
Bec looks up at him, and Dave can see judgment in his eyes. Then the dog closes his eyes and lets out a long sigh through his nose, which Dave knows from years of experience at this point means, Sorry man, you’re on your own for this one. “I’m always on my own. Next time she goes out of town I’m taking you to the pound.”
He’s supposed to go to the airport to pick Jade up in an hour. How does he fix overwatered succulents in an hour? Can he just, like… dump them out? He’s pretty sure he’s seen Jade repot them before. Where’s her repotting soil?
He steps over Bec, who’s lying in his favorite place in the middle of the floor, and shuffles out to the sun room, where Jade keeps her full sun plants rather than the partial shade things that live in the kitchen. “Alright, I know she’s got potting soil out here…”
Jade does have potting soil out here—three different kinds of potting soil. It’d be easy if they were all totally different, but two of them are labeled as succulent soil, and Dave can’t tell what the difference between them is. He thinks maybe one of them is a little bit darker? Are the indoor succulents in the lighter or darker soil? He remembers it looking darker, but that might have been because of all the fucking water he put in it.
He jolts as his phone rings in his pocket, fumbling it as he pulls it out of his pocket and nearly dropping it on the floor. He’s panting a little when he holds it up to his ear. “Uh. Hello?”
“Hey! My plane landed a little bit early, do you think you could come pick me up now?”
Shit. “Oh, hey Jade. Yeah, I can pick you up now. Are you hungry? I can stop and grab you something to eat. Or we could stop on the way home or whatever. I think Taco Bell is still open this late.”
“No, that’s okay! I’m not really hungry. I’m just tired, I wanna come home and go to bed.”
“Right. Yeah. You were on a long flight, of course you’re tired. Totally. I’ll be right there. You want me to bring Bec?”
“No, that’s okay, he’ll be fine just for the drive to the airport and back. It’s less than an hour. Is everything okay? You sound kind of nervous.”
Dave grimaces. “Yeah, no, I’m good. I’ll be right there. Love you.”
“Love you too!”
Dave hangs up the phone and stares at the potting soil for one last moment, contemplating if he still has time to try to repot the succulents. No, definitely not. Jade’s tired—plus, he misses her, so he doesn’t really want to stall picking her up any longer. He’s just going to have to accept Jade’s heartbreak when she sees how bad he fucked her plants up.
“Bec! Watch the house! I’m going to get your mom!” Bec doesn’t even pick his head up, and Dave rolls his eyes. “Lazy old dog,” he mumbles as he grabs his keys, stuffs his feet into his shoes, and steps outside.
Jade travels for work often enough that they live close to the airport, and it’s late enough that there’s not much traffic either. It takes Dave twenty minutes to get there, and it takes five more for him to track down Jade. She spots him first, and she starts sprinting toward him. He knows this routine by now, and he holds his arms out wide for her, wrapping them tight around her to squeeze her close when she leaps up off the floor to kiss him.
Kissing Jade after a week feels like heaven. When she starts to pull away, he leans after her, and he doesn’t set her back down on the floor just yet.
Jade laughs, and his chest squeezes with fondness. “Dave, I still have to get my bag!”
He spares a brief glance toward the baggage check without really looking at it. “I don’t see it yet. You can stay here for a minute.” She grins, leaning up to kiss him again, and he lets out a slow breath through his nose. “Damn. You’re not allowed to leave again.”
“You say that every time!”
“And I mean it every time. I’m not the boss of you, but, y’know, I miss you and stuff.”
Her smile softens and she tilts her head up to nudge her nose against his. “Can we go home now?”
“Yeah. Let’s go get your bag. It’s been spinning around the baggage claim for a while.”
“Dave!”
Honestly, Dave is sort of stunned that Jade doesn’t fall asleep in the car on the drive home. He smiles over at her at every red light, and she keeps her hand on his leg while he drives. “You go ahead. I’ll grab your bag.”
Jade smiles and leans over to brush a quick kiss against his mouth. “Thank you. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
He slides out of the car, walking around to the back to pull Jade’s suitcase out of the trunk of the shitty little Honda Civic he bought off of John when they graduated college. It takes two attempts to close the trunk again, and then he locks the car and heads inside just in time to hear Jade cry, “Oh, Bec! No!”
Dave’s heart starts to race, and he rushes into the house behind her. “What? What happened?” As he steps into the kitchen, he sees the succulents that he’d overwatered on the floor, soil spread out everywhere and pots broken.
“He hasn’t gotten into my plants like this since he was a puppy!” Jade’s brow furrows, and she leans down to look closer at Bec. “Can dogs go senile?”
“I’m sure he was just mad that his mom was gone for a week. Why don’t you two go snuggle up in bed and I’ll sweep this up?”
Jade purses her lips for a moment and then sighs. “Yeah, okay. I think I’m gonna take a shower first.”
Dave raises his eyebrows. “I can wait to sweep this up.”
“Daaave!” Jade laughs and rolls her eyes, and he grins as she steps out of the kitchen. He glances down at Bec with a sigh and crouches down to scratch between his ears.
“Alright, good dog. I guess I won’t take you to the pound.”
Link to this fic on AO3.
Date posted: February 8, 2026
Words: 811
Summary:
Dave and Jade go on a paleontology dig together.
I asked the DaveJade Discord server for prompts and wrote ficlets until the Patriots scored. If you like DaveJade you should check out the server for the next time I do something like this!
Jade follows Dave as he marches through the desert, swiping at the sweat on her brow. “Are you sure there are dinosaur bones allllll the way out here?”
“I’m 100% sure, Jade. Don’t you trust me?”
“Well yeah, duh! I just don’t think that dinosaurs lived in the desert. I thought they lived in jungles and stuff where all the leaves are!”
“They lived all over the place, Jade. They ruled planet Earth before humanity swooped in.”
“Humans didn’t swoop in until millions of years later!”
“I’m speaking metaphorically, Jade.”
“What does metaphorically mean?”
“I dunno. Rose said it.”
Jade giggles, holding a hand over her mouth. “Okay. Well what kinds of dinosaurs are we looking for?”
Dave squints for a second like he’s straining to remember something. “I think the velociraptor was in the desert. And the protoceratops.”
“What’s a protoceratops?”
“Uh, it’s kind of like a triceratops but… proto,” he answers lamely. Jade giggles again.
“Okay! So we’re looking for velociraptor and triceratops bones?”
“Protoceratops bones, Jade. They’re different dinosaurs.”
“But the bones look the same, right?”
“...Uh. I guess so, probably.”
Jade nods and squints around the park a little bit, pushing her glasses up her nose to get a better look. When she spots a long, thin stick, she perks up, running over to it and picking it up. “Look, Dave! I found one! It’s a… uh… tail bone!”
“Tails have lots of little bones, Jade. You saw them at the museum.”
“Oh, yeah. Well then it’s a leg bone!”
Dave narrows his eyes skeptically at her for a moment, and then he nods. “Okay. I guess it could be a leg bone.” He looks around the ground, and then takes a few steps to bend over and pick up a small rock. “And this is a tail bone.”
Jade gasps, staring at the rock like it’s the most incredible thing she’s ever seen. “Wow! That’s really cool, Dave! Maybe you could find a tooth, too!”
Dave’s cheeks flush. “Maybe. They’re kind of little, though. Velociraptors were really, really small.”
“How small?”
“Uh, kind of Bec-sized.”
“Hey! Bec isn’t small! He’s a big dog!”
“Yeah, but he would be a really little dinosaur.”
Jade purses her lips for a moment, but she decides this logic holds up. “Well maybe we just have to look really really close!”
She plops down to sit on the ground cross-legged and starts digging through the dirt with her fingers. It’s dry, since they haven’t had rain in a couple of weeks, and it doesn’t take long before her clothes are covered in dust. She digs for a little while, until she feels like she’s been looking for a reasonable amount of time, and then she holds up a nearby rock, nearly the size of her hand. “Dave, look at this one! I think this is a T-rex tooth!”
Dave’s tiny brow furrows. “T-rexes didn’t live in the jungle, Jade.”
Jade’s own brow furrows. “Well obviously this one did!”
“No it didn’t! That’s not a T-rex tooth!”
“It is so!”
They glare at each other, faces scrunched up stubbornly, until Jade feels big hands wrapping around her chest and scooping her up off the ground. She squeals and kicks her legs, giggling as Grandpa says, “Look at you, sprog! You’re all covered in dirt! I think we’re going to have to go home and get you into some new clothes.”
“Nooo!” Jade pouts as Grandpa settles her against his hip.
“Yep! Say goodbye to your friend, pumpkin.”
Jade looks down at Dave, who’s frowning up at her. “Bye, Dave,” she mumbles grumpily.
“Bye, Jade. We can play paleontologists again tomorrow.”
She beams down at him at that. “Okay! We can look in the jungle for T-rex bones!”
Dave opens his mouth as if to say something and then just closes it and nods.
As Grandpa carries her back to the car, Jade sinks her head down against Grandpa’s shoulder. “What kind of dinosaurs did they have in New Zealand, Grandpa?”
He pauses for a moment to think about it, nudging the door to the back seat open with his knee while he does. “I’m not sure! How about the next time we go on a library adventure we look for a book about it?”
Jade smiles sleepily and nods. Despite the fact that she’s nearly six years old, she still hasn’t outgrown her forward-facing carseat, and her head sinks back against the headrest as Grandpa straps her in. “Can we go on a nap adventure when we get home?” she mumbles.
Grandpa reaches out to ruffle her hair and she giggles. “We can always go on a nap adventure, pumpkin.”
She hums, her eyes drifting closed. She falls asleep almost immediately after the car starts moving, dreaming about being paleontologists with Dave and finding a brand new kind of dinosaur—the desert T-rex.
Link to this fic on AO3.
Words: 2142
Date posted: December 2, 2025
Summary:
Dave comes home to a special sort of surprise.
DaveJade Week 2025 Day 2: Lava
Written for @davejadeweek!
Before Dave even opens the door, his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. There’s giggling on the other side of the door, and it’s not just baby giggles, either.
As he starts to open it, though, he’s greeted by a loud shriek of, “Daddy, no!!” before he can even take a step into the apartment. He freezes, his heart plummeting, and looks up like a deer in the headlights, only to see Jade and Zack standing up on the couch.
His first thought is that there’s some sort of bug or rat or something on the floor, and his eyes flash down to assess the damage. He doesn’t know how a bug or rat or something would have found its way into Jade’s fancy ass apartment building, though, and after he doesn’t see one, he has the spare brainpower to remember that Jade has never really been squeamish around those kinds of things, anyway. His brow furrows as he looks up at them again. “What’s going on?” he asks, trying not to let his nerves show in his voice too much.
“You can’t walk there!” Zack shouts, which is not especially helpful. Dave spares another glance at the floor closer to his feet.
Jade is the one who ultimately comes to his rescue. “The floor is lava, Dave!” she yells. Immediately, his shoulders slump with relief, but his heart is still pounding.
“Oh damn,” he says, shaking his head in disappointment. “Well can I get a lava-proof life raft or something?”
Jade and Zack exchange a thoughtful look, before Jade finally looks back to Dave with a bright grin and says, “Coming!” She bends over to scoop all three of the couch’s throw pillows into her arms, before sort of tossing it a few feet away from the couch and then hopping down onto it. She tosses a second and leap frogs onto that one, and Dave snorts.
He brings a hand up to mask the grin that he can’t stifle. She looks ridiculous. She looks adorable. He can’t help but remember when they used to play The Floor Is Lava together as little kids, when they were barely older than Zack is now. He doesn’t think Zack has ever played it before, which implies to Dave that Jade is the one who suggested it.
As Jade hops from one throw pillow lilypad to the next, she keeps twisting around to pick up the one she was just standing on, and then plopping that one unceremoniously in front of her. It’s not a particularly fast or efficient path, but it certainly keeps her from touching the floor. When she does finally make it to him, the pillow is enough padding that she’s level height with him, and he can’t resist the temptation to lean in and kiss her.
She smiles against his mouth as she kisses him back. As much as he wants to wrap his arms around her and pull her close, he’s very aware of his son standing only a few feet away from them, watching the whole scene unfold from the safety of the couch. He pulls away enough to raise his eyebrows again and mumble, “The Floor Is Lava?”
Jade shrugs and smiles sheepishly. “We were running out of Squiddles.”
Dave snorts. “You can’t run out of Squiddles. You have all four seasons of Squiddles in a boxset, and he’s too little to care about rewatching episodes.”
“My battery for Squiddles was running low.”
“Your battery was running low? Are you okay? Is the world ending? Did I miss an announcement about the apocalypse hitting?”
Jade laughs and swings the one remaining pillow in her arms at him, and he barely manages to block it, shooting her a teasing grin. “Careful with the rib.” Her face actually manages to drop into something guilty-looking, and his chest squeezes, so he reaches out to pull her into another quick kiss. “‘M fine,” he mumbles.
“Is that what the doctor said?” she asks, voice low.
His eyes flit to Zack, whose giggles are starting to die down as he waits impatiently for his parents’ return, and then back to Jade. “Can we talk about this later?”
She clearly isn’t very happy with that, but she purses her lips and nods anyway. She drops the last throw pillow onto the floor and hops onto it, and then turns around to look at Dave expectantly.
Dave picks up what she’s putting down. He hops quickly from one pillow to the next, and then he twists and bends down to pick up the pillow that neither of them is standing on. It does bother his rib a little to bend and twist like that, but it’s not that bad, and he reasons it’s probably worth it to make this memory with Jade and his son. Plus, it feels like teamwork, even if exceptionally goofy teamwork, to pass pillows between them and build a slow path to the couch.
When they finally get close enough, Zack grins and shouts, “Daddy, catch me!” which is about all of the warning that Dave gets before his three-year-old is jumping from the arm of the couch and into his arms. Dave can’t help a soft oof as he barely manages to catch him, and his rib definitely protests at that, but he pushes that thought aside as Zack giggles and tucks his face against Dave’s neck.
“Hey lil man. Did you have fun with Jade while I was gone?”
“Yeah! We watched Squids, and now the floor is lava,” he explains dutifully, which is all information Dave already had, but he nods along like he’s just learning it anyway.
“Sounds like a busy day. How long has the floor been lava?”
Zack picks his head up, tiny blond eyebrows knitted together, and then peers over Dave’s shoulder at Jade.
“Since lunchtime,” Jade answers.
“Since lunchtime!” Zack parrots, looking back at Dave with a bright grin.
Dave shuffles Zack around to balance him on his hip, opposite to the side his broken rib is on, and then tilts his head. “Is the floor gonna stop being lava anytime soon?”
Zack thinks long and hard about this, before he looks down at the pillow they’re on and shrieks, “Oh no!! We’re sinking!”
Immediately, Jade gasps in horror, clutching a hand to her chest. Then, bravely, she says, “I’ll save you! Dave, toss him over here!” Dave isn’t so sure about the thought of throwing his toddler, even if Jade is only a few feet away. But when he doesn’t immediately do it, Zack starts to scream in pretend-fear for his life right next to his ear.
His rib throbs, sending a sharp pain radiating through that whole side of his body, as he tosses Zack as gently as he can while still being confident he’ll reach Jade. Sure enough, Jade snatches Zack right out of the air like some sort of Olympian toddler catcher, tugging him against her chest and dipping her head to blow a raspberry against his cheek in one fluid motion.
Zack giggles some more, burying his face against Jade’s neck. Dave’s chest squeezes with fondness. “I’ll come back for you!” Jade tells Dave, before she hops from her pillow up onto the couch. For just a second, Jade wobbles and Dave thinks she’s about to fall. He’s pretty sure he sees his life flash before his eyes as he imagines his girlfriend slipping and cracking her head against the coffee table. She rights herself a moment later, though, throwing the arm that isn’t holding Zack out in front of her to brace against the back of the couch.
He lets out a breath of relief when she leans down to set Zack on the cushions, where he plops down to sit, pulling his knees up close to his chest. When she turns to Dave, it’s with an overly dramatic look of determination, before she stretches her arm out for him. “Take my hand!” she says, sounding for all intents and purposes like she’s auditioning for Titanic.
Dave tries to tamp down on his grin to match Jade and Zack’s theatrics, looking down at the pillow under his feet. “It’s no use!” he responds, looking up at them with as much defeat as he can muster. “I’ve sunk too far! You can’t save me!”
Jade shakes her head, and Dave swears there could be tears in her eyes for how distressed she seems by his noble sacrifice. “I won’t leave you!”
“You have to go on! You have to take care of Zack for me!”
“No!”
He starts to sink to his knees, staring Jade in the eyes through his shades. “I love you.”
His knees hit the floor, and Jade and Zack both shout, “Nooo!” He sinks further to lie flat on his back, and then, for good measure, sticks his tongue out of his mouth, to really telegraph the fact that he’s tragically dead.
He keeps his eyes cracked open behind his shades, and he sees Jade wrap her arms tight around Zack. “I’m so sorry, baby,” she says, voice tight.
Zack looks sad for another moment, and then he perks up, smiling brightly. “It’s okay! I have a potion!”
Dave barely manages not to raise his eyebrows at that, but Jade just gasps hopefully. “Of course! The potion!” Dave suspects, based on his experience of playing pretend with his son, that there was no prenegotiated potion, but he’s not exactly in a position to call them on it.
Jade picks Zack up and carefully lowers him onto the pillow she was standing on a moment ago. A moment later, Dave is greeted with the familiar feeling of his son jumping onto his stomach, the same way he wakes up nearly every morning, and he lets out another soft oof. At least he missed his ribs this time.
Zack just sort of holds his hand over Dave’s face for a second, and Dave waits patiently for… something, he’s not totally sure what yet. What he gets is Zack, apparently also waiting, but much less patiently, stage-whispering, “Daddy, you have to drink the potion.”
“Oh, okay,” Dave stage-whispers back. He opens his mouth to let Zack pour the pretend potion into his mouth, and then closes his mouth and swallows hard like he’s gulping it all down. He waits a second, and then groans. “Zack…?”
“Dave!” Jade cries in relief. Dave looks up at her, with her hands clutched over her mouth like she’s trying to hold back very real sobs, and he offers her a weak smile.
“Jade…”
“I thought I was never going to see you again,” she says softly, and it sounds sincere enough that it makes his chest squeeze in spite of himself.
Zack cuts into the moment, though, yelling urgently, “Daddy, we have to get out of the lava!”
“Oh, right,” Dave says, in his normal, not-just-brought-back-to-life voice. He wraps his arms around Zack and clutches him tight to his chest as he sits up. It’s a struggle to climb up onto his feet with no hands, let alone to do it while balancing on a pillow, but somehow, he manages. He doesn’t waste any time before jumping up to join Jade on the couch.
She leans up to kiss him, and he kisses her back, letting Zack slide out of his arms and down onto the couch so he can slide one hand to her waist. Fortunately, Zack seems to be too little to think kissing is gross yet, because he just giggles in delight while Dave and Jade enjoy their glorious reunion. When they finally break apart, Dave sinks his forehead to press against Jade’s. “Hey,” he mumbles.
She huffs a laugh. “Hey. Good to have you back.”
“Good to be back.” He grins, leaning in and pecking her lips again. After a moment, he teases, “Are you really gonna cry like that when I die?”
“Oh, I’m gonna cry way worse than that when you die,” she laughs, nudging her nose up against his.
“You think we could manage to go out at the same time? 95 in bed together, just had some nice family dinner with our great-great-grandkids, and then, bam, simultaneous heart attacks. Dead instantaneously.”
Jade laughs again and lightly shoves his shoulder. “That’s terrible.”
“What? What’s terrible about that? I said we’d have a long life surrounded by family.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling, so he’ll take it as a win. She bends over to pick Zack up, and he’s happy to snuggle in close against her chest. She hums, stroking her fingers through his hair. It’s a peaceful moment, and Dave can’t help just smiling as he watches them.
Then Dave hears keys jingling in the door, and Zack sits bolt upright to shout at the top of his lungs, “Aradia, no!!”
Sorry this took so long! I have been having a few Off Days.
A Piece of Ice-Clear Heart
Pacifica had wanted nothing more than to be emancipated when she was 16. She'd had the paperwork hidden in her drawer, all ready to be filed the moment the government offices reopened after the holidays were over. Over those few days of waiting, though, she got into her own head about it. She didn't have anyone to vouch for her in court. Did she really make enough money at Greasy's to support herself? What if she didn't win the emancipation case and her parents decided to punish her for trying it?
So she didn't end up filing, and she didn't end up moving out until she was 18.
Her 18th birthday was an exhausting affair for about a billion different reasons, but then she was out. She never had to see her parents again if she didn't want to. She was her own person.
The last year has involved a lot of hard work, but Pacifica has never felt more free in her entire life.
When she wakes up on her 19th birthday, it is with a sense of dread settling into her stomach. Part of it is just automatic. She can't remember the last time that she enjoyed her birthday. She must have been really young, though—certainly long before the Pines twins showed up in Gravity Falls, no matter what her parents would like to say about it.
Part of it is just this sense she has that something is going to go wrong.
Her biggest fear is that her parents are going to show up and try to do something. She doesn't even know what they could try to do, but she doesn't want to find out. It's been a year since the last time she saw them. A year since the last time she spoke to them. A year since the last time they chastised her, or rang a bell at her, or threatened to ground her from her phone for a month, which really meant grounding her from Dipper and Mabel for a month.
So when her phone starts ringing first thing in the morning, it's hard not to launch into a panic.
She squeezes her eyes shut as she answers. "Hello?" she says, trying to make herself sound groggy so she can make an easy excuse to hang up if she needs to.
"Hey Paz! Happy birthday!!" Immediately, Pacifica's chest squeezes, but it's with fondness.
"Mabel," she breathes, relieved.
Mabel laughs on the other end of the line. "Yep! Am I the first one to call you? OMG, did I call you before Dipper did??"
Pacifica laughs back, sinking back against her pillows. "Yeah. You beat him."
"Haha, take that, Dipping Sauce! I am so taking away his boyfriend of the year award!"
Pacifica laughs again, letting her eyes flutter shut as she sinks into the warmth of her bed and listens to Mabel chattering on the other end of the line. Maybe everything will be okay.
Link to this fic on AO3.
Words: 3034
Date posted: December 31, 2025
Summary:
John looks timid as he approaches them. It’s almost cute, actually, the way he shyly looks between the three of them like he’s trying to approach the cool kids in the high school cafeteria. “Um… how do we even do this?” he asks. Then, when all three of them open their mouths to answer, he adds, “I mean, like, mechanically.”
This one tinges close enough to NSFW that I wasn't completely sure whether to cross-post it or not, but I think it's fine. I wrote it as a treat for Chase from the @homestuck-fanauthor-coalition but I don't know his Tumblr off the top of my head and I am too tired to guess so I'm just gonna trust Sam to show him or something lol.
Hypothetically, their arrangement of interests should work out quite nicely.
Rose is a writer. She’s always been a writer. If she ever let her guard down for a moment around her mother, Roxanne Lalonde would be breaking out the scrapbook of mediocre poetry and far more mediocre fanfiction Rose wrote by hand in crayon as a kindergartener to show anyone who would read it.
Admittedly, she probably only got into screenwriting as a particular subgenre because two of her best friends were already interested in the film industry—but she’s sure she would have become a writer either way, so that seems like a petty technicality.
John’s desire to go into film was only natural, really. He’s loved movies as long as she’s known him—longer, obviously, but that’s not the conventional manner of speech. And he’s always been so good at the piano; combining the two is downright intuitive.
Rose isn’t entirely sure why Dave has elected to go into directing. She’s tried to pry into his psyche about it, but she’s started to get the impression that Dave isn’t entirely sure why he’s elected to go into directing either, and she doesn’t want to plant any seeds of doubt. Mostly, it would be inconvenient for her personally if any of them backed out now.
They’d all agreed to apply at all the same film schools once they came of age, and that one day they would all produce a movie together. (Not literally, as none of them was planning to go into producing, but in the broader sense of the verb.) Perhaps many movies, if it went well for them. Rose would write it. Dave would direct. John would compose. And, by necessity, they would graciously allow strangers to fill the miscellaneous roles they weren’t qualified for.
It should all work out.
But none of them act.
“I don’t think anyone wants me in front of a camera,” John says, apparently cringing even at the thought.
“I dunno, you’ve got a sort of goofy Egbertian charm,” Dave argues.
Rose rolls her eyes. “I’m afraid John is right, Dave. I think even if I managed to write a script without dialogue, John would still find a way to compromise the integrity of the project.”
“Okay, you’re agreeing with me, so I’m not gonna argue with you, but hey.”
Dave ignores John’s protests to look at Rose, his face carefully neutral. “Alright. Thanks for volunteering then, Lalonde.”
Despite having expected this response, Rose bristles. “I did no such thing. Aren’t you the one always talking about women and men alike prostrating at your feet? It seems to me like you’d be the much better candidate for an advertisement.”
Dave clicks his tongue. “I can’t do that, Rose. I’m the director. Directors stay behind the camera. You don’t even wanna know how messy things would get if I abandoned my post.”
Again, Rose rolls her eyes, but before she can open her mouth to argue any further, Jade chimes in with, “I can do it!”
All three of them stare at her.
Jade is the only member of their group who isn’t studying some manner of film. In a show of solidarity—and in no small part, Rose is sure, due to the location of Caltech—Jade had moved to Los Angeles with them, and she pays the largest share of rent on the house the four of them live in together, but science is her passion. Sometimes, when they’re all out for coffee and studying, much like they are right now, Jade will ask them if she can think out loud about her work, and the rest of them will wind up staring in awe as she starts rambling about magnesium ions and secondary cells and other words even Rose can’t begin to wrap her brain around.
Rose is exceedingly aware that all four of them are attracted to her.
They have a sort of unspoken deal about it: As long as they all live together, Jade is off-limits. She’s one of their best friends—has been since they were children—and none of them wants to jeopardize the integrity of the group. Plus, if Jade has ever been interested in any one of them, she’s done a masterful job concealing it.
“Are you sure, Jade?” John asks before Rose can speak up and point out why this is probably a bad idea.
“Sure! Why not? You guys help me with my physics stuff all the time, the least I could do is return the favor with your movie stuff!” Calling what they do helping is exceedingly generous, but Rose’s tongue is still glued to the roof of her mouth.
“Yeah, dude, that’d be awesome,” Dave says, offering one of those rare Strider half-smiles.
Jade, apparently aware of Rose’s extended silence, looks at her with a near pleading expression. “Would that be okay with you, Rose?”
…Well, really, what could be the harm? It isn’t as though they’re advertising anything illicit. Rose offers Jade a soft smile of her own, and Jade beams radiantly.
“So, remind me what we’re doing an ad for again?” Jade asks once they’re back at the apartment. Dave is fiddling with his camera, which leaves John and Rose to fill her in on the particulars of their assignment.
“We got to pick off of a list.”
“We’ve purchased a few different items, just to keep our options open.”
Their options include a roll of disinfectant wipes, a tub of Greek yogurt, and a tube of lipstick, all of which are currently laid out on their kitchen table—cleared for once of the debris Dave and Rose tend to leave nearly every time they pass it.
“Okay! So do I just have to talk about how great they are and stuff? These products seem a little silly for that sort of thing.”
“That’s part of the point,” John says.
“And you don’t have to improvise anything, either. We have to submit our script alongside the completed project. I’ve already written a basic script for each product,” Rose adds.
Jade raises her eyebrows as Rose offers her the printed copies of the scripts. They’re each short—about two pages—but with the added effects John and Dave will be doing in post, Rose is confident they’ll be able to get at least a minute of material out of them—the minimum requirement for their assignment.
“Alright, I’m all set up over here!” Dave announces. His camera stands on a miniature tripod on their kitchen counter, pointed toward the table.
“So which one should we do first?” Jade asks, looking over all of the options.
“I suppose you’re free to choose, since you’ll be the star of the show,” Rose offers. “Unless the boys have any strong preference?”
John and Dave exchange a look like Rose has just volunteered them for conscripted service, before Dave shrugs and John says, “Nope! We can do whatever Jade wants.”
Jade hums and looks down at her scripts again. “The wipes seem the easiest!”
The wipes are very easy. The script doesn’t even have any dialogue for Jade to recite—John did, at least, agree to doing a voiceover in the post-production. She just has to pretend to sneeze and then wipe the table afterward while they ramble about the fresh scent and keeping your family safe this cold and flu season. It’s all very basic stuff. And the best part is that there isn’t anything especially attractive about it. At one point, Jade leans further over the table than strictly necessary and Rose catches herself staring at her ass, but it’s only for a moment.
They settle on the yogurt next. This also passes mostly without incident, although Rose knows all three of them notice the way Jade dramatically moans around a spoonful of yogurt. Dave’s face goes red, but she and John manage to keep it together—or at least, if John is blushing, he has the advantage over them that his skin tone doesn’t match a sheet of paper.
The worst one by far, though, is the lipstick.
They move to the bathroom for this one. Really, only Dave and Jade need to go, but John and Rose are too invested at this point to leave, even if it means that Dave has to angle the camera even more carefully so he manages to catch Jade’s reflection in the mirror without catching any of the three of them. Fortunately, he is, at least, very good at what he does.
“It’s a shame you have no desire to be a cinematographer,” Rose mumbles between takes. “You have a real gift.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Dave says, sounding annoyed for some reason Rose can’t quite put her finger on. It’s not her fault that their friend is unbearably hot.
Well, perhaps it is a little bit.
It wasn’t as though Rose had written the script with Jade in mind or anything. In fact, by the time she was working on the script for the lipstick ad, she was largely resigned to the fact that she was probably going to have to be the one to step in and do the acting, at least for this one. Perhaps in another world, the three of them split the scripts evenly and left Jade out of it. Oh well.
The most sensible direction to Rose was to frame the advertisement around a woman getting ready for a date. She’s put on her nice dress and heels, done up her hair, and now the last thing left is her lipstick. Jade had been especially excited for this one, and she’d made the lot of them leave while she got ready for it.
Now, she’s leaning over their bathroom counter with her curls pulled up into a strategically messy bun in a dress that leaves her entire neck and shoulders exposed, applying lipstick.
“Uh, could you do that again a little slower?” Dave says. Rose almost can’t tell whether it’s an earnest directorial cue or if it’s just Dave being horny—almost. The way he swallows when Jade nods and goes to wipe off the lipstick with a piece of toilet paper is rather incriminating.
“I’m not sure how many times I can do this today, though,” Jade says as she dabs at her lower lip. “My lips are starting to get pretty raw.”
Dave swallows again, and Rose is inclined to join him. She’s sure she’s not the only one thinking about kissing Jade senseless or staring at the faint red staining on her lips. Will this footage even be usable? Maybe if they’re lucky, one of the earlier takes will be good and it won’t matter how distracted their cameraman is now.
Rose chances a glance at Dave’s camera, zoomed in on Jade’s lips, and she shoots him a glare.
“David,” she scolds, voice low. He detests the name, although Rose can’t tell whether it’s because it is his full name or because it isn’t.
“Rosie,” he replies, lying somewhere in the dangerous territory between teasing and mocking. It’s her mother’s nickname for her. He knows she hates it.
“We have an agreement.”
“We’ve never put it in writing.”
“You’re being unprofessional.”
“Directors sleep with actresses like, all the time.” He pauses for a moment, and then cringes at himself. “Okay, no. I’m walking that back. That was gross. But Jade’s not a real actress.”
“She is for the purposes of our assignment!”
“What are you two mumbling about back there?” Jade asks, turning her head to raise her eyebrows at them. She’s got lipstick on only her upper lip—already fascinating to Rose, who applies her bottom lip first—and she seems to be keeping them carefully parted so she doesn’t accidentally smear it before she’s done applying (even though, Rose regrets to say, the take is rendered unusable by the disruption).
Somehow, John is the one who comes to their rescue. “They’re arguing about the shot. Rose thinks it’s too zoomed in.”
“Oh, okay. Well we’ve done a few different takes now. Are they all zoomed in like that?”
“They are not,” Rose confirms. “We’ll stop bickering. You know how we can get.”
“Yep! Sometimes it’s almost like you two are siblings with the way you fight.”
Dave and Rose both exchange a look, crinkling their noses. Rose doesn’t want to imagine what sort of hell her childhood would have been if she’d grown up with both Dave and her mother. When Jade has turned back to the mirror, John shuffles over to them, hissing, “Will you two get it together? It is not that hard to be normal about this!”
“Easy for you to say,” Dave mutters.
“In what way is that easy for me to say?”
Rose clears her throat and nods toward Jade, and Dave and John exchange a glare before huffing and turning away from each other.
They make it about five minutes before the next disruption. “You know, if you’re worried about the zoom, you could always come a little closer!”
All three of them exchange another look. “I dunno, Jade,” John starts. “It’s already pretty hard to angle the camera so that we don’t catch any reflections we’re not supposed to.”
“Nah, I can figure it out,” Dave dismisses.
Rose shoots him a sharp glare. “I thought we already agreed that we were past the disagreement over the zoom level.”
Dave shrugs. “I wouldn’t be doing my directorial duty if I didn’t try to get as many different shots as possible. See which ones are the most usable.”
Rose is fairly certain her eye twitches. She’s completely certain that John clenches his fists at his sides as Dave steps closer, until he’s nearly pressed against Jade’s back. “This okay?” he mumbles, leaning in close to her ear.
She may be imagining it, but Rose is fairly certain Jade shivers at that. Immediately, bitter jealous stirs in her gut. “Yeah, this is perfect,” Jade says, biting her lip. It’s unfairly attractive, and Rose has to tear her eyes away to cool her temper.
Unsurprisingly, things go off the rails fairly quickly after that. Dave seems to make some effort, briefly, to actually get a good shot. He knows the same thing that they do, though—the camera is entirely visible. At best, they can fix it in post.
Once he’s accepted the reality at hand, he abandons all pretense. He even goes so far as to set the camera down on the counter before he dips his head down to press a kiss against Jade’s shoulder. She hums, and as though Rose and John aren’t even there, tilts her head to grant Dave better access to her neck, which he happily takes advantage of.
“Uh, guys?” John says, managing to sound more embarrassed than annoyed. Maybe he is more embarrassed than annoyed—he’s always been far less vindictive than either her or Dave.
“You guys don’t have to be shy!” Jade says cheerfully. Even Dave freezes for a moment, his lips still pressed to the crook of her neck. Jade rolls her eyes fondly. “Oh come on. You guys can’t seriously believe I haven’t noticed by now, right?”
John and Rose exchange a look. “Noticed what?” Rose says cautiously.
Jade rolls her eyes again. “That you guys are all hot and, like, super into me!”
Rose feels a strange sense of pride curling in her gut at Jade calling her hot, even if it isn’t her individually.
“Jade, that’s not…” John starts to deny.
“I mean you can deny it if you want to! But I’m throwing out an open invitation here to whoever wants it.”
“An open invitation to do what?” Rose asks, still trying her absolute damnedest to be cautious. There’s a reason none of them have made a move on Jade. Things could go so very sour.
“Well, duh! A foursome, dummies. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it!”
She hasn’t thought about it. She’s starting to feel a little dumb for not having thought about it. Jade is right that they’re all hot. Rose can imagine worse people to have a foursome with—not that she’s inclined to at this precise moment, given the options laid out in front of her.
She breaks before John does, stepping into the bathroom to drop a kiss against Jade’s other shoulder. Jade sinks back a little further (into Dave, Rose notes with no small degree of jealousy) with a sigh.
John looks timid as he approaches them. It’s almost cute, actually, the way he shyly looks between the three of them like he’s trying to approach the cool kids in the high school cafeteria. “Um… how do we even do this?” he asks. Then, when all three of them open their mouths to answer, he adds, “I mean, like, mechanically.”
They all pause. Right. If there were only three of them, Rose is sure she could offer some suggestions—not from any practical experience, but it’s an easily solvable logic puzzle. Four of them, though, especially with their respective anatomical differences, is… not so easy—especially if they all want to be with Jade.
“Yes, well,” Rose says, clearing her throat and taking a step back. “Perhaps we can take turns?”
“Take turns,” Dave repeats, voice flat.
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
“My blood’s not exactly in my brain right now, Lalonde.”
Rose rolls her eyes. “Then I suppose we’ll have to negotiate the logistics of a foursome another time.”
Jade starts to whine, and then pauses. “Another time?”
Rose hesitates. Has she misread the situation? “...If that would be alright,” she says slowly.
Jade practically gets stars in her eyes, perking up immediately. “Yeah! That’d be more than alright! I’ll look it up and see if I can find a diagram or something!” If it were anyone else, Rose would be sure they were joking. Because it’s Jade, though, she merely snorts.
“Yes. Another time.”
John swallows hard as he looks between the rest of them. “So… if we’re taking turns, how do we decide who’s first?”
“Dude, I’m right fucking here,” Dave scoffs.
“Perhaps, just this once, we can let him win,” Rose sighs. John pouts. Jade grins.
Link to this fic on AO3.
Words: 7505
Date posted: February 24, 2025
Summary:
Baby shoes
Never used
Thought of you until it happened to us too
It turns out that supporting your sister-in-law through every pregnancy loss in a long battle with infertility does not actually prepare a person for when it happens to them.
For the dividers in this post, I used this very simple gradient line by @enchanthings-a! This was originally written as a potential entry for the @homestuck-fanauthor-coalition's Bard competition in January, but I did not end up submitting it. Y'all should check out the pieces from that competition!
“Rose and Kanaya are gonna try for a baby.”
“Oh wow. Who’s gonna tell them?”
Jade looks up from her phone with a snort, but as she stifles a grin she says, “That’s not funny.”
“That was hilarious. You know it was hilarious.”
She rolls her eyes. “I was just wondering if they talked to you about it.”
“Why would they talk to me about it?”
“Well, you’re Rose’s brother.”
“Yeah, so? I’m pretty sure they don’t need my permission to have a kid just because I’m the only blood relative she still talks to. Actually, I’m pretty sure they don’t need anybody’s permission. Just a boatload of money. I’m talking metric fucktons of money.”
“Well, that’s kind of why I figured they might talk to you about it?” His eyebrows knit together a little in confusion, so she elaborates, “You’re Rose’s twin. I mean, obviously you’re not, like, identical twins or anything, but you’ve still got at least half of the same genetics. And you’re free.”
“Oh.” Dave purses his lips, brow furrowing further in thought. “You mean you think they’re gonna hit me up for baby juice?”
“Dave, gross,” she says, crinkling her nose. “But yeah, maybe. Don’t you think that would make sense?”
“I dunno, I’ve never really thought about it before. When I think of my sister having kids I still think of her pulling the heads off of all her Barbies.”
Jade laughs, because the image of Rose pulling a French Revolution with America’s most famous career woman is so fitting that she could see her doing it now. “I don’t think she’s gonna pull the baby’s head off.”
“Are you sure? I hear those things are pretty fragile. It might pop off easier than the Barbies’.”
“Dave!” she says, going for scolding even as she cackles.
Jade sits on the couch with her feet pulled up to sit cross-legged and a steaming cup of green tea in her hands. She only drinks green tea at Rose and Kanaya’s. She likes green tea, it’s just that when she has to make the hot drinks herself she always finds herself reaching for coffee.
She’s the only person in the room who doesn’t seem at all awkward or nervous. She guesses she’s also the only person in the room who doesn’t really have any personal stake in the conversation, though. Not really. She’s only here because all three of them had separately asked her for emotional support, and what else was she gonna do on a Wednesday night?
“I mean, like, are you sure you want me?” Dave says eventually, apropos of nothing. Nobody’s said anything in several minutes. The whole conversation has been happening in fits and starts. It’s driving her a little crazy to listen to.
“I would like to have some genetic relation to my child.”
“That’s Freudian.”
“No it’s not. Don’t try to talk psychology at me, Dave, you’re not good at it.”
“Wow, you’d think you’d be a little nicer to the father of your baby,” he jokes, and then pales a little. “Maybe. Possibly.”
“I’m not sure that father is the most appropriate term,” Kanaya says, only shrinking into herself a little bit when everybody turns to look at her. “Beyond the genetic component, your involvement with our child would still be in a strictly avuncular capacity.”
“Avuncular is a good word,” he says, which seems so obvious to Jade as a tactic to divert away from the topic at hand.
“Neither of us expects you to be in any way paternal,” Rose says, clearly trying and failing to make her voice sound gentle. “We don’t even have to tell them if you don’t want to. There’s no reason for you to be anything other than Uncle Dave.”
Dave nods a little absently at this, and Jade pulls a hand away from her cup to set it on Dave’s knee with a squeeze. She sees him let out a little breath. “You’re not worried that I’m gonna… I dunno, fuck it up? Maybe there’s something innately fucked up in my genes.”
“Dave, we have the same genes. If there’s something innately fucked up in our genes, my child doesn’t stand a chance either way.” Rose pauses for a second and takes a long, probably strategic sip of her own tea. “I would never force you to.”
“I know.”
“If you really don’t want to, the conversation can end here. We can figure something else out. We just thought we would ask you.”
“Karkat offered, when he heard,” Kanaya puts forward helpfully.
“Eugh, what? No, my future niece or nephew is not coming out of Karkat.”
“Well, technically, your future niece or nephew is coming out of Kanaya,” Jade points out, and Dave presses his mouth into an annoyed line as he looks at her sideways. “Sorry. Not helpful.” She squeezes his knee again.
“Look, I want to help. I just… I never figured there’d be a kid with my genes out there. Ever. I never really wanted there to be. I know that just my DNA isn’t enough to fuck them up, I know that our parents are the ones that fucked us up, but it still feels like…”
“Like there’s something wrong with us?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Rose starts, leaning forward to set her empty cup on the coffee table. Jade guesses at Rose and Kanaya’s house it’s more like a tea table, but she’s pretty sure that’s technically a whole other piece of furniture. “Let’s assume there is something innately wrong in our genetic code. Let us remove the onus from our parents for how we turned out and instead lay the blame with some undiscovered chromosomal disorder. At least we already know how to deal with that variety of fucked up.”
Dave barks a laugh, a startled sound that seems to burst out of his chest, and then they all settle into another uncomfortable silence.
Jade waits until she finishes her tea and sets the empty cup on the table next to Rose’s. Then she leans her head over on Dave’s shoulder and says, “Well, I think you guys turned out pretty great.”
Dave laughs again, a little quieter and a little more subdued, sort of a very brief chuckle, and leans his head over against hers. “You’re a bad judge of character.”
“I’m a great judge of character.”
“Your favorite character in Squiddles is Billy the Bellsuit Diver.”
“I’m right! You don’t know anything about Squiddles. And you are just trying to derail the conversation so I don’t compliment you more!”
“No, I’m trying to derail the conversation so I don’t have to admit out loud that I’m going to agree to father Rose and Kanaya’s baby.”
It feels like all of the air is sucked out of the room. Dave’s face goes pale again, and when Jade looks over at Rose and Kanaya, they’re looking at each other with that Did you hear what I just heard or am I crazy look.
Kanaya is the first one to break the silence. “Thank you.”
“How was your appointment?”
“So awkward, Jade, oh my Gog.” Her lips quirk at the familiar inside joke, even if it isn’t their inside joke. “I knew all of the jokes about cups and magazines but I thought that it was gonna be exaggerated.”
“You should have texted me.”
He laughs. “I don’t think they would have let me. And it probably would have made it even more awkward to have to go talk to the techs after.”
She shrugs. “How could they have stopped you? Was there somebody in there watching you to make sure you didn’t do anything inappropriate?”
“It felt like there was somebody in there watching me to make sure I didn’t do anything inappropriate.”
“Poor baby.”
“Jade, I’m not sensing a lot of sympathy from you right now.”
“I’m sorry.” She shuts her laptop and sets it aside, untangling herself from the throw blanket on the couch to meet him by the entryway. “Do you want me to make it up to you?”
“Jade, I literally cannot get off again right now.”
“Like because of doctor’s orders or just because of how awkward you feel?”
“No, the dick doctor didn’t give me any orders. But you should have been in that room, dude.”
“I should have been in that room,” she agrees, and he laughs again. “Well, do you want to watch a movie?”
“Any news?”
“If we had news, don’t you think we would have called you?”
“I assume you would have called me if you had good news. If you had bad news maybe you would have holed yourselves up in your house to never see the light of day again. Which you probably would have been fine with, but Kanaya would suffer.”
Rose laughs, a little. Jade grins. “You’re starting to sound too much like Dave.”
“Starting to? This whole thing has been going on for a decade at this point. Where have you been?”
“It has not been a decade.”
“Most of a decade,” she amends, rolling her eyes. “And we were pretty much dating even when we didn’t say we were dating.”
“I remember. I said you were dating and you both acted as though I had walked in on something deeply intimate and you wanted to crawl out of your skins, yet somehow this mortification did nothing to stop you from being all over each other at parties.”
“We were not all over each other, that is such an exaggeration,” she huffs. They were, though. They used to play Uno as a team so she could sit in his lap.
“There’s no news,” Rose says graciously instead of arguing with her. “The appointment was yesterday. They advised we wait at least two weeks before taking the test, to give any potential embryo the chance to implant. They also advised that it was likely it would take a few attempts before there was a viable embryo.”
“Two weeks is so long.”
“You’ll be the first person we call.”
“I better be! I don’t even get to have Dave’s baby, I wanna be in the know about it if Kanaya gets to.”
“Kanaya isn’t having Dave’s baby. Kanaya is having our baby.”
“Yes, okay, obviously Kanaya is having your baby, but what if it comes out with Dave’s nose and Dave’s eyebrows and stuff? It’s the only time I’ll get to see that.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line for a second, and Jade thinks about apologizing. Eventually, Rose says, “You’ll be the first person we call, Jade.”
“Okay,” she replies softly. Then, “Thank you.”
“Maybe you should try those pregnancy diets. I heard eggs can help.”
“Where did you hear eggs can help?”
“I dunno! I am pretty sure I read that online somewhere.” Jade shrugs and takes a sip of her green tea.
“I could not possibly eat any healthier than I do right now,” Kanaya says, sounding more than a little frustrated, but Jade is pretty sure it’s not at her.
“I’m not saying you’re not eating healthily, I’m saying there’s supposed to be these… baby-making superfoods. Here, we can look it up right now if you want to.”
“I do not want to.” Jade pauses, and then pushes her phone back in her pocket. “It’s fine. Every doctor and nurse and tech we’ve spoken with has assured us it takes a while.”
Jade squints. It’s so obviously not fine, but Jade is the only one of the four of them who really knows how to talk about her feelings—and honestly, saying she knows how to talk about her feelings might be a little bit of a stretch.
They sit in silence for a while, but it’s not uncomfortable, or at least not as uncomfortable as all of the silences the last time they had tea together were. The fact that Rose and Dave aren’t here probably helps.
“Are you… jealous?” Kanaya eventually asks. Jade’s brows knit together.
“Huh?”
“Rose said it seemed like you might be jealous.”
“Rose is a nosy pain in the butt who should learn to mind her own beeswax.” Kanays stares. Jade shrinks into herself a little. “...Sorry. That was a bit much. It’s just a little frustrating how well she knows me sometimes.”
“So you are jealous?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” She pauses, and Kanaya waits patiently while she searches for the right words. “I don’t really know how I feel about it, I guess. The idea of having a baby is nice. The idea of having a baby with Dave is nice. But it’s also kind of terrifying, and I know he doesn’t want it, and I’ve always known that and I’ve always been okay with it.”
“But something is different now.”
“Not exactly.” She pauses again. She doesn't talk this time until she finishes her tea. “I think if you guys weren’t having a baby then nothing would be different. And I’m thrilled for you guys and I’m so excited to be an aunt. But… gosh, Kanaya, saying this makes me feel awful.”
“What?”
“I guess it feels like you guys are getting something that I’m never going to be able to have. And even if I didn’t really want it before, it’s hard having to think so much more about it now.”
Kanaya is quiet, and Jade is nervous. She knows this isn’t the sort of thing you’re supposed to say to anybody. You’re supposed to just keep feelings like that to yourself and say Congratulations, I’m so happy for you! She is happy for them.
“I’m worried that something is wrong.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe I can’t have children at all, and we’re just wasting time and money. Rose wanted to just adopt, did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Rose wanted to adopt because it didn’t matter to her if our child was biologically related to us, and she was certainly never interested in carrying a child, and even if it took a long time, there was no possibility that we wouldn’t have a child at the end. I was the one who pushed to have a baby. I wanted to… I don’t know. Feel like a mother? Is that an awful thing to say?”
“I don’t think it’s any more awful to say than what I said.” Kanaya lets out a breath that’s not quite a laugh, but Jade can hear a hint of relief in it. “But I thought Rose wanted to be biologically related to the baby. Isn’t that why you guys asked Dave?”
“I wanted to ask Dave,” Kanaya confesses, her cheeks flushing a little. “I wanted the baby to be related to both of us. I wanted to be able to look at our child and pick out our features and say, They get that from you when they were doing something annoying.”
Jade sits with this for a minute. It’s complicated to process her feelings about it.
“Well, it would be awfully silly for me to criticize you,” she says eventually, when she decides that’s how she feels about it. “I seriously told Rose I was hoping your baby was gonna have Dave’s eyebrows. It’s not even my kid!”
“I have much nicer eyebrows than Dave.”
Jade laughs, a little startled. “Yeah, you do.” She pauses. “I think it’s gonna be okay, Kanaya.”
“That’s how you make a baby,” Dave says, a little breathless.
Jade laughs, just as breathless. “Don’t put that on us! And that’s an awful thing to say. What Rose and Kanaya are doing is really hard.”
“Yeah, I know. This is easy. Have they tried doing this?”
“I’m sure they’ve tried doing this lots.”
“Gross. That’s my sister.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re not really shy about talking about our sex life in front of Rose.”
“Yeah, but that’s different.”
“How?”
“Because that’s to torment Rose. This is just me and you.”
“Oh, of course, I’m so sorry.” She snickers and rolls over to cuddle up to him, even though they’re both sweaty and she can’t help crinkling her nose a little bit. He wraps an arm around her and lets out a slow breath.
“Rose told me yesterday that they’re gonna try and use the last sample for IVF, since they can probably get more than one pre-baby that way.”
“She called them pre-babies?”
“No, obviously she didn’t call them pre-babies, but embryo is such a bad word.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to talk to me about bad words right now.”
Rose and Kanaya go in for their first round of IVF on her birthday, and Jade thinks it would be a pretty great birthday present to be an aunt. When they don’t hear anything back before Christmas, she thinks they’re probably saving the big news for the holiday. She’s pretty used to the Not This Time texts by now, and the lack of one feels like it should mean something.
“Do you think it would be jinxing it to get them baby clothes for Christmas?”
“No, I don’t think so. They’re gonna have a baby eventually, it wouldn’t hurt anything to get them some early. Just don’t get them only baby stuff for Christmas.”
She doesn’t know why she thinks Dave would know any better than she does, but this reasoning makes perfect sense to her.
They always do small presents. It’s just easier, since they always do both Christmas and Chanukkah and they don’t always know which presents are going to be for what until they’re wrapped. She finds the teeny tiniest pair of baby shoes that have maybe ever been made and can practically feel her uterus melting out of her onto the floor—That’s a Dave thought—and she settles on that with less than a week to spare.
Rose and Kanaya are a little more subdued than she’d expect when they first get there, especially Kanaya. Jade writes it off as pregnancy being exhausting. She’s always heard that pregnancy is exhausting, and she’s sure it could start this early.
“Kanaya, do you need any help in the kitchen?” she asks, because Rose and Dave are both hopeless in the kitchen so if Kanaya does need any help then she’s the only choice.
“We were thinking we’d embrace the stereotype and just order Chinese food this year,” Rose answers, and Jade knits her eyebrows together. She’s always liked cooking with Kanaya and she doesn’t get to do it very often, but she guesses the pregnant lady gets to choose. Maybe the smell of potatoes makes her sick or something. That seems possible.
“Well if we’re just going to order food for delivery then can we skip to candles and presents?”
“We’re supposed to wait until sunset!” Jade interjects.
“No, it’s alright,” Rose says, and she disappears in the direction of the kitchen to retrieve (Jade guesses) the candles and lighter. Rose says the prayers, and she sounds so out of it that Jade wants to step in and help her, but her pronunciation isn’t very good. She’s starting to suspect that this isn’t early pregnancy exhaustion, but she doesn’t know a delicate way to ask.
The gift exchange process for Chanukkah is always a little involved. They each get each other presents as individuals, and then they each get two presents as a couple. They open two presents a night, one per couple, decided by just sort of randomly plucking one out of the pile. Christmas is the real free-for-all, where all of the extra little things that make them think of each other throughout the year get squirreled away for the extra day.
“Oh shit, Rose, for real?” Dave says, holding what must be a very expensive vintage camera in his hands.
“No, it’s just a replica,” Rose says, and her voice is so flat Jade almost can’t tell she’s being sarcastic. It’s the first joke she’s cracked all night.
When Kanaya opens her present, she stares in stunned silence.
“Sorry, I know you guys didn’t officially tell us or anything, but…”
Rose’s jaw clenches, and she stands to walk out of the room without saying anything. Jade stares at her back and then turns back to Kanaya.
Kanaya looks like she’s going to throw up as she stares at the tiny shoes in her lap. She had looked up the math and found that their baby would be coming at the tail end of summer, so Jade wanted to get them something that would be useful for the chilly New York autumn. The boots are so small they look like they were made for a doll.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Kanaya says softly, clearly trying to be reassuring, but between the look on her face and her tone, it’s like she’s not really in the room with them.
Jade has never heard of a chemical pregnancy before, and if she hadn’t been there for every negative pregnancy test along the way, she probably wouldn’t have understood what Rose and Kanaya were so upset about.
She and Dave have a New Years party and Rose and Kanaya don’t show up. She’s not surprised they don’t show up, both because they’ve barely left their house for the last week and because they texted them to let them know they wouldn’t be there.
“I just feel so awful.”
“You didn’t know, Jade. And I thought it was a nice idea.”
“You don’t know any more about having babies than I do!”
“Yeah, dude, we’re totally clueless. So it wouldn’t make sense for them to be mad at us.”
“Well they’re obviously upset.”
“They can be upset without being mad.” Jade purses her lips, and Dave presses a kiss against her forehead. “It was just bad timing. They’ll probably still need them eventually.”
I hope so, Jade thinks, but she can’t force herself to speak it into existence. She’s never been all that superstitious, but after the baby shoes thing, it feels like maybe jinxing is real.
She doesn’t know who to talk to about this.
Her go-to would be to call Rose or Kanaya, but for obvious reasons, they’re not really viable options. John wouldn’t know how to keep his mouth shut, and she loves Karkat, but she knows he wouldn’t react in the way that she’d want him to. And she’s not ready to tell Dave yet. Maybe she’ll never be ready to tell Dave.
It’s three days after Valentine’s Day and as she stares at the little stick with two lines, all she can think is that she had two glasses of wine on their date. She doesn’t even normally drink, it just felt like with the big fancy restaurant they were at, that was the appropriate thing to do. There were certain things you were just supposed to do at big fancy restaurants on Valentine’s Day.
Her phone buzzes with an incoming video call, and she stares at it.
“Hey, guys,” Jade says, trying not to sound too nauseous or dissociative or excited to see them.
“We have news,” Kanaya says, and Rose and Kanaya are both bad at showing excitement, but Jade is pretty sure they’re excited.
“Oh, yeah?”
They hold up two different positive pregnancy tests. One of them is practically just a strip of paper with two dark red lines, and the other is one of those digital tests that just says Pregnant where you can plainly read it. Jade’s eyes flash briefly to her own test. It’s just one of those regular sticks, and her second line is so faint. Maybe it’s wrong.
She looks back at the screen and her face splits with a smile a second too late. “That’s awesome! When do you guys go in to get it confirmed and everything?”
“We already did,” Rose says. “This test is from a few days ago. We had our appointment to verify this morning.”
Jade nods a little bit, and she feels like she’s mentally lagging, like her head moves before her brain can think to feel it moving. “That’s amazing, you guys must be so thrilled!”
“Well, we don’t want to celebrate too early,” Kanaya says, and Jade winces.
“Why not celebrate? You guys have been trying for this for a really long time. This is really great news.”
They’re quiet for a second, and Jade mentally smacks herself on the forehead. She knows why they’re not celebrating yet, that was such a stupid question.
“Is Dave there? We were hoping to catch both of you.”
Jade looks at her pregnancy test again. A lump is forming in her throat that she swallows down so she can answer, “No, sorry. He’s at a concert. He probably won’t be home for a few more hours. Do you want me to call you back when he gets here?”
“No, that’s alright. We’ll call back in the morning. Just don’t tell him without us.”
Jade doesn’t want to tell him anything without them. “Okay.”
Dave takes the news that she’s pregnant shockingly well, after she runs back out to the pharmacy and gets a second, digital test with a little less wiggle room to interpret the results. He’s not excited or anything, but considering she expected him to be mad, that carefully neutral Okay had come as a shock to her.
They procrastinate telling Rose and Kanaya. With how hard it had been for them to conceive, it feels like rubbing it in their face to announce that they did it on accident. It sucks, though, because Kanaya and Jade get to be pregnant together and Kanaya doesn’t even know about it.
When Jade is starting to show, they decide that they can’t hide it for much longer. Even if the changes probably aren’t as obvious to Rose and Kanaya as they are to Dave and Jade, who both see her naked pretty much every day, it’s only going to get worse the longer they wait.
Rose and Kanaya are coming over to go over plans for Karkat’s birthday party. It’s always a little stressful to have Rose and Kanaya over at their place, because Dave and Jade almost always go over to theirs. The house is kind of a mess, but it’s not a cleanable mess because it’s just the sort of disorganized chaos that they choose to live in. At least she’s stocked up on green tea, since that’s pretty much the most caffeine she’s allowed to have, and she’s not even allowed to have that much of the green tea because something something folic acid. She’s sure Kanaya probably knows more about it than she does.
“They’re going to be excited.”
“I know.”
“Jade, you look like you’re going to throw up.”
“I always look like I’m going to throw up. Your kid is making me throw up all the time. Take it up with her.”
They just found out that they’re having a girl, which is earlier than they thought they’d be able to, and they didn’t even really plan to anyway. It was one of the reasons that it felt like they should finally tell Rose and Kanaya.
Dave leans down a little closer to her bump, which is still very small, but she has to use a rubber band to close some of her smaller jeans.
“I need you to act cool for like, an hour. Aunt Rose and Aunt Kanaya don’t know you’re here yet and they’re going to be very upset with us if they find out because you made your mom puke before we could even tell them about it.”
Jade laughs and moves a hand under his chin to pull him up to kiss her. He meets her kiss easily, and she sighs, melting against him a little.
“You’re really not mad?”
“Jade, it’s been like four months. If I was mad, don’t you think you’d maybe have noticed by now?”
“I dunno! Maybe you got reeeally good at hiding stuff.”
“From you? I’m not sure that’s even possible.” He presses a kiss against her forehead and then adds, “I’m not mad. I’m a little surprised and a lot terrified, but I’m not mad.”
“Okay.”
Rose and Kanaya get there about an hour later than they were expecting them, which Jade would probably be more upset about if she wasn’t also pregnant and didn’t intimately understand how hard it is to get anywhere on time. She can’t imagine what it’s going to be like with an actual baby.
“Sorry we’re late. The demon demanded sacrifice, and who was I to break the terms of our contract?” Rose says, which Jade knows means Kanaya had a craving. She laughs.
“It’s okay! We know how it is.”
Rose and Kanaya’s house is so big that Jade isn’t sure she’s even seen all of the rooms in it. They have practically a whole apartment in their basement, with a kitchen and everything. Rose called it a mother-in-law suite. Jade pointed out that Rose didn’t have a mother-in-law. Dave laughed, even if Rose and Kanaya didn’t. She’s always wondered if they were really planning to have that many kids to fill it with, or if Rose just never figured out how to live in a small house.
Dave and Jade’s house is… okay, it’s not small by any means, but they don’t have any more space than they need, and they don’t have any space that they’re not using. It technically has three bedrooms, but one of them is too small for an adult to reasonably live in, so Jade uses that one as her office. They had debated whether to turn Jade’s office into a nursery or the other, larger bedroom that serves as Dave’s office slash their guest room.
Jade doesn’t lead Rose and Kanaya into the kitchen so much as she opens the door from the mudroom-slash-sunroom that’s barely big enough for shoes or plants and they all walk into it.
“Tea?”
“Do you have herbal?”
“I have peppermint or I have green tea.”
“No, thank you,” Kanaya says at the same time that Rose says, “Green, please.”
Dave walks back into the kitchen while she’s making tea and says, “There are my two favorite sisters! I was starting to think that you died. I started writing your eulogy on my phone in the bathroom.”
“Clearly the best place to begin the mourning process.”
“Have you ever had a good shower cry, Rose? That shit’ll fix you.”
“Surely you must have an explanation for why you’re still like this, then.”
“Ouch,” he says, holding a hand to his chest dramatically until Jade gives him a cup of tea to pass to Rose. “Here, drink some tea. Maybe it’ll make you stop saying mean things to me.” Rose raises a brow as she takes it, and he ignores her to turn to Kanaya. “How are things? How are baby things?”
“Things are fine. Baby things are fine. We have another ultrasound in two weeks where we can find out the sex, but we’re still not sure if we’re going to.”
“You know you can find out, like, totally on accident? Sometimes the kid’s just hanging out in there all, Hey, wanna look at my junk?”
“Interesting. And you know this why?”
Dave pales a little. Jade freezes, cup of tea halfway up to her mouth.
“Just real excited for uncle duties. About to get super avuncular up in this bitch. Well, not about to. Soon. Kind of soon. Probably jumping the gun, really.”
Rose and Kanaya stare at him like he’s a crazy person. Jade takes her sip of tea.
“You know what, forget I even mentioned it. Rose’s kid? Probably gonna be the biggest secret keeper on this side of the planet. Maybe the whole planet. Gonna be in there with their knees all crossed like, Hey, what are you looking at me for? Even if you guys decide you wanna know, you’ll just have to wait it out.”
“Dave,” she finally cuts him off, and he looks relieved as his mouth snaps shut. She gives Rose and Kanaya an apologetic look, and they stop staring at Dave to stare at her. She does her best not to wither under their looks. “We’re pregnant, too,” she says quite simply.
It feels like time crawls to a stop while she waits for them to react in some way. Their faces don’t change, they don’t say anything, they don’t even look away from her to glance at each other or anything. Eventually Dave says, “I thought I told you the we thing was weird. I’m not—”
“Pregnant.” Dave’s mouth snaps shut. Jade nods. “How far along are you?”
“I think at our last appointment they said it was coming up on 22 weeks?”
“22 weeks? You’re tiny,” Kanaya says a little indignantly, and Jade doesn’t react because she’s not sure whether it’s a compliment or not.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Rose asks, which is the exact question Jade was hoping they wouldn’t ask. She grimaces.
“I thought you would be upset.”
Everyone goes quiet again. There is no Why would you think we would be upset? They all know why they thought they would be upset. Jade still isn’t sure they’re not upset. Rose looks at Dave. “And you’re… okay?”
“We’re okay,” he says. Then, a second later, before anybody can call him out for it, “I’m okay.”
“Then we’re not upset,” Rose says, which feels a little unilateral for Jade’s tastes as she glances at Kanaya, but her sister-in-law still isn’t really reacting, so she guesses she has to take Rose’s word for it.
“I suppose we must be due around the same time,” Kanaya says, when she manages to talk.
“We’re a week before you!” Jade laughs, excited and relieved all at once.
At Karkat’s birthday party, Jade, Rose, and Kanaya all sit around in lawn chairs on the porch while everybody else mingles in the yard. They’re the three who can’t drink—two babies, one problem, which Jade still thinks can’t possibly actually be the more sensitive thing to call it. Nobody else that they know is really a big drinker, anyway, but when they all get together like this it’s nice to be able to have a beer or a shitty little wine cooler or something.
“Have you guys thought at all about names?”
“We’re waiting until the third trimester officially starts, just in case,” Kanaya says, hands resting on her bump, which is so much bigger than Jade’s even though Jade is technically pregnant-er.
“Oh. That’s probably a good idea.”
“Have you thought about it?”
Jade nods. “Yeah, a little, but we aren’t totally decided yet. Dave thinks we should give her a J name because everybody on my side of the family has one, but there aren’t a lot of J names for girls I like that aren’t already in the family.”
“That seems impossible.”
“Maybe I’m just picky.”
“Maybe you are.”
Jade laughs. “It’s a big decision! Whatever we name her, she’s stuck with forever. Well, not forever forever, of course she can change it if she wants. But she’s stuck with it for a while.”
“With how you two are, your child won’t even know her name. She’ll have a thousand nicknames before she even graces us with her presence.”
“Maybe,” Jade half-agrees, because she doesn’t want to admit that they already call her monkey and the princess half of the time. “Maybe we should try to match each other! They’re going to be so close in age anyway.”
“Cousins matching isn’t exactly traditional.”
“Since when do you care about tradition?”
“Touche.”
“What sorts of names were you considering?” Kanaya asks, speaking up for the first time in a while, Jade notices. She always seems to be quiet when Jade talks about her pregnancy—but the announcement is so recent that she feels a little silly drawing a pattern from it. It could be a complete coincidence.
“I like the idea of something natural, like Lily or Autumn. It feels like it kind of matches, since my name is a stone and Rose’s is a flower.”
“Willow,” she offers, and Jade tilts her head at her with a crooked smile.
“Yeah, that’s pretty. Maybe we could do trees. Like… Willow and Laurel or something.”
“That’s a nice idea,” she agrees, sounding a little far off.
At Rose and Kanaya’s next ultrasound, they don’t find a heartbeat. They talk about their options. They call Jade and Dave and talk to them about their options. There are not that many options. When they go in for an in-clinic abortion, Jade spends the day in bed, crying and cradling her own small bump.
Jade puts off having a baby shower.
She puts off a lot of baby-related things. It no longer feels secure to assume that everything is going to be okay just because she’s in her third trimester, or just because they’ve been perfectly healthy so far, except for being a little small, or just because they’re past the age of viability. She can tell that Dave is nervous about it. He’s always preferred to have something to do, and he was always a little uneasy about the baby thing in the first place, so not having Jade as a beacon of light in the whole thing is probably hard for him. That’s the only thing that finally convinces her to have the baby shower.
She doesn’t want to do a big party. She doesn’t want to have a house full of people chattering and congratulating her. She doesn’t want to play games and eat baby-themed foods.
They only invite their closest friends, and place special emphasis on the fact that it’s going to be lowkey. Rose and Kanaya, John, Karkat, Terezi. It’s almost funny, because Jade is pretty sure that John, Karkat, and Terezi don’t know the first thing about babies, but they’re still their family.
Rose shows up first, with no Kanaya in tow. Jade doesn’t ask why.
“It’s good to see you,” Rose says, wrapping her up in a hug, and Jade twists her body a little so her bump isn’t pressed between them.
“Yeah,” she agrees a little faintly. When they pull apart, Rose offers her a box, and Jade stares at it. “You didn’t have to get us anything.”
“Kanaya wanted to send something, since she wasn’t going to be here. She feels terrible, it’s just…”
“I get it.” Rose offers her a tight smile.
The party goes fine. Jade has a good time, even. Karkat and Terezi leave early, which she’s grateful for. John stays late, which she’s also grateful for. Rose is still the last person to leave, and while Dave is diligently moving all the new baby things into the nursery (they decided to sacrifice her office, since she can so rarely work from home, anyway), they sit in the living room, sipping on cups of green tea.
“How are you doing?” Jade asks, not in the casual way but in the Be real with me way that Rose usually turns on her.
Rose lets out a long breath. It makes her sound and look more like Dave than ever. “I think I’m coping as well as can be expected, given the circumstances.”
Jade swallows thickly. The circumstances. “It would be okay if you weren’t, you know.”
“I understand that.” There’s a moment of hesitation, and then Rose lets out another long breath, sinking into the couch a little more. “It’s more difficult watching Kanaya struggle with it than… it is. But then that makes me feel worse, too.”
“Why?”
“I should be more upset about the loss, shouldn’t I? It was my child, too.”
“I think it’s different. I think it’s okay for it to be different.”
Rose nods a little, and they both go quiet in favor of drinking their tea. Jade is grateful that Rose is willing to talk to her about it. It feels like she shouldn’t be. It feels like it’s her fault.
“Looks like you forgot one,” Dave says as he walks back into the living room, swooping down to press a kiss against her forehead and pressing a small, unopened box into her hands.
She didn’t forget.
She has no reason to believe that she knows what’s in it, but she has almost a preternatural sense of what’s in it anyway. She stares at the box, and then stares at Rose.
“It’s okay,” Rose says, and Dave raises a brow between them like he’s silently trying to ask what the hell he missed. Neither of them answers him.
Jade opens the gift with a lump in her throat, delicately peeling up the tape so the wrapping paper doesn’t tear even though she’s normally the first person to rip her presents open. When she opens the box, she feels her stomach twist with nausea.
The teeny tiniest pair of baby shoes that have maybe ever been made sit in the box, still never used.
Her eyes flit up to Rose, and her vision is rapidly growing bleary. “You don’t have to give these to me.”
“You’re due in October. We didn’t want our niece to freeze to death.”
Jade feels a sob bubbling up in her chest, but she clamps down on the urge. This is not her issue to be upset about. “But don’t you think you might need them eventually?”
She sees Rose’s eyes flit away for just a moment, sees the way her teeth tug at the inside of her lip. “We’re going to… wait a while. Our embryos can be stored for up to ten years, and we’re only 30. This didn’t seem like the right time to try again.”
Jade stares at Rose for another second and then looks back down at the shoes. “Okay,” she croaks, heart aching.
When Jade goes into labor, it seems like everything should be fine. She’s a week early, but since when has a week ever been a big deal? She pushes for ten and a half sweaty, miserable hours and Dave holds her hand the whole time. They don’t immediately place their daughter in her arms, and she doesn’t hear her crying, and she picks her head up despite how exhausted she is.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mr. Harley, can we speak with you for a moment?”
“What? No, Dave, don’t leave me. What’s wrong?”
Dave leaves her, following a nurse into the hallway. When he comes back in, there are more nurses with him. Nausea is clawing at her throat.
After several grueling minutes, a nurse who looks very sad shuffles over. “I’m so sorry,” she starts, and Jade stares at her.
“What? What is it?”
“She’s not… breathing.”
“What?” she says, or maybe whispers would be more accurate. Then, louder, she says, “Well then fix it. Help… Make her breathe.”
“Jade,” Dave says as he comes back to her life, and his voice is so gentle it’s actually painful. He reaches out a hand to brush across her sweaty forehead and through her sweaty hair and she flinches, but she doesn’t pull away from him. She’s not sure she can.
“I don’t understand… What happened?” Jade asks, voice heavy with despair. Everything has been happening too fast, maybe she missed something. Shouldn’t someone have said something?
“We don’t know,” the nurse answers, and everyone is speaking to her so gently, she wants to scream. “It’s impossible to say. More than half of stillbirths—”
Jade sobs, and Dave pulls her in tight against his chest. “No, I don’t… This is wrong, something is wrong, this doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know, Jade,” he murmurs against the top of her head, squeezing her.
“No, you don’t know. Nobody knows, this is…” She trails off into another shuddering breath, and she feels Dave’s hand rubbing circles against her back.
“Would you like to hold her?” the nurse asks, and Jade pulls away from Dave enough to stare at her for a moment with wide, watery eyes. It feels like the obvious answer should be yes, but the idea makes her chest squeeze painfully. She nods anyway.
Their daughter is six pounds and twelve ounces and eighteen inches long. She does have Dave’s nose and eyebrows and Jade’s lips, which are too perfectly still. Her skin is a pale purplish-brown color, maybe a shade paler than Jade’s is, and her downy hair is black. Jade holds her to her chest and crumples into herself as she devolves into sobs.
It takes a month before they feel ready to start unpacking the hospital bag, and Jade doesn’t know how long it will take before they feel ready to get rid of all of the baby things. She can’t imagine trying for another one.
In it, she finds the teeny tiniest pair of baby shoes that have maybe ever been made, and she stares at them. She still hasn’t talked to Rose and Kanaya since… since. She had said no one knew. But they know. She knows that they know.
