#dave tag.

[elichatterarchive]

this is like PEAK eridan im crying

[elichatter]

"I used to wear these?" You ask, pressing the pads of your pointer fingers into the sharp edges of the shades he's given you. He's wearing a similar pair, though they look too big for his face - like they once fit, but he's worried himself ragged enough that they hang over the bridge of his bony nose.

"All the time," he says, without insisting. He talks like that a lot; like he doesn't need to convince you because you already know. You don't know if this works for or against him. If he's pranking you, he's either not all that into it or a fucking genius.

You hum. "Alright."

He looks at you, and you know he's expectant without really understanding how.

"What?"

"Dude, I didn't bring them so you could eye them like a cut of beef. Put them on."

"This feels a little weird, man."

"This is weird? Wait until you put them on. This is, like, the pearly gates of weird. Bust them open and don the shades."

You blink at the black glass in your hands, eyes reflected in them as orange beads, bright and blank. Fuck. You're really going to do this, aren't you?

"How did they survive the transfer?" You ask, raising a thick brow. You want to make it clear to this guy that you're still a cynic at heart, but you're curious all the same. This kid might be selling you the biggest crock of shit since Avatar, but you're determined to know every detail he can give you. Maybe you're only asking to catch him when he slips up.

"A missile hit the meteor we were standing on and the impact blew them the fuck off of your face. See that crack, there? I thought their shit was totally wrecked before I got them to - anyways. I picked them up and passed out with them in my hand. I've just had them ever since. Just put them on. Seriously."

You snort. "Okay."

Alright. These feel pretty cool. You pull apart the arms of the shades and slot them behind your ears. There's no discomfort, despite the sleek nature of the frames and the diabolical edge of the glass. They rest just above the odd little bump in your nose. You're surprised to find your vision barely impaired - they'd looked opaque before you'd donned them, but they're much more transparent than a regular pair.

Damn. You just spent a long ass time analysing these shades. Is that weird?

"Alright. Shades are on," you say, putting away the minute or so you just wasted and deciding to pull it apart later. "I'm not feeling anything."

"'Kay,'" says Dave, and you hear resignation in his voice. "Sorry about this."

"What?" You ask, but you're cut off by your vision filling with bright red light.

Great, you think, in the same instant you screw your eyes shut. This fucking kid is gonna blind me, or brainwash me, and I walked right into it, all for a pair of dumbass shades. Nice going, Dirk.

You open your eyes tentatively, one at a time, and find yourself staring straight through something that looks like the future.

A small line of code runs up the left of the shades, missing in part thanks to the crack along the rim. Everything is bathed in subtle red. In the corner, a small text log blinks, faster and faster the longer you stare at it, a little dumbfounded.

"What is this?" You ask Dave, who you can still see, bespectacled and crimson and so much smaller, now.

He doesn't respond. He just looks at you, a long and loaded look, and it becomes a little too much. It feels like he's seeing you, or seeing someone he wishes you were, and it makes you feel just a little inadequate.

The chat log opens of its own accord.

TT: Nice going, Dirk.

"What?" You're starting to feel stupid.

TT: Figures.

TT: All that talk of knowing yourself and here you are.

TT: Here we are, I guess.

TT: Back in Shitty Rumpustown, population of one: me and you, buddy.

"Who are you?" You ask, because that feels appropriate. This isn't Dave, who has taken to picking at the beds of his nails - an old habit that you're going to have to pull him up on later - wait -

TT: Dirk, you wound me.

TT: I guess this isn't a splinter situation at all.

TT: That's sad. We'd gotten good at handling those.

TT: Really, bromie, it's quite simple.

TT: I'm you.

TT: Maybe more you than you are, right now, because, well,

TT: I remember everything.

[elichatterarchive]

Dave stumbles into the lab one night, crimson eyes half closed against the lamplight Dirk works by. ‘Saw the door was open. What’re you doing?’

Dirk doesn’t look up, face inches from the wiring that he’s tinkering with. ‘Working.’ 

‘Is that what we’re calling it? Looks to me like you’re obsessing,’ Dave tells him. 

Dirk is almost knocked out by the realisation that he is, in fact, obsessing, and that his younger-older brother is most definitely about to save his ass.

‘Fuck,’ he breathes, quiet in the murky dark. When Dave flicks the lightswitch, Dirk has to glare behind his shades, teeth clenched for the duration of his adjustment. ‘What time is it?’ He grimaces a little harder. ‘What a dumb fucking question. We’re -’

‘-On a meteor, drifting through space,’ Dave finishes, pulling up a chair and sweeping a few pieces of metal out of the way, like they mean nothing (like Dirk hasn’t spent the better part of two days trying to make them mean something). ‘It’s half past go-the-fuck-to-sleep o’clock, dude. It’s a quarter to ‘you look like shit’. It’s-’

‘Bro,’ Dirk says, in a tone that isn’t quite as stoic as usual, and Dave clams up. They have a sweet little groove going at the moment -- ever since they talked things out, they’ve been twisting in tandem, a machine so fuckin’ sick it doesn’t even need oiling. They’re the rhyming words of the sickest bar this side of the apocalypse. They’re either end of a metronome. They’re Striders, for fuck’s sake. 

Dave leans his head on the crook of his elbow, flat on the workbench. He (poorly) stifles a yawn. ‘Seriously, man. How long have you been holed up in here? You’re, like, drenched in shit. It’s nasty as hell. Not in a good way, either, like some mechanic working tirelessly to save his spaceship from the endless caverns of a dead planet. Like, you just look bad.’ 

Dirk takes a look at his grease-stained hands, curses the callouses on them to the old husk of Dave’s Earth and back. ‘A day or two.’

Dave whistles, low. ‘Shit.’

‘It’s not that bad. When I made him the stupid scrumbot, I was up working for almost a week. It was-’

The expression on Dave’s face cuts him off long before his own brain has the sense to. Shit, indeed. He says as much.

‘You’re making Jake something?’

He hadn’t specified, but Dirk supposes he doesn’t need to. The bent and singed scraps in front of him look very ugly in the light. ‘I’m trying to, I think. I keep running out of steam, which is very fucking stupid. You’d think I would know what to do when faced with a room full of robotic parts and pretty much all the fucking time in the world, but, you know something, Dave? I’m stumped. Completely and utterly goddamn stumped. Stumped out of my fucking brains.’ 

There’s a quiet that feels very heavy. Dirk doesn’t look up, and Dave doesn’t move for a long while.

‘You want me to appearify you a coffee?’ Dave asks eventually, and he blinks his huge red eyes like he’s actually bothered about the answer, and Dirk feels very much like he can’t breathe on this meteor anymore, like space is compressing him into a tiny little ball, like all his worst traits are surviving the squash. Fuck. Fuck, this sucks. He’s suddenly very thankful for his shades. 

‘Yeah. Yeah, thanks.’

Dave gets up, pats Dirk’s shoulder a little awkwardly (like he’s worried that Dirk’s going to bite him, or something) (but that’s fair, honestly), and vanishes to acquire two cups of extremely shitty coffee. Good. Every appendage Dirk happens to be able to feel at the moment is shaking at a different frequency. He’s a radio turned to a station of static, buzzing away in his own brain. Almost against his own will, Dirk rests his head against the worktable and closes his eyes. 

When he dozes, he dreams that, somewhere on Derse, a fire is engulfing a forest. He panics until he realises that he is holding a match. 

--

The next morning, Dirk’s coffee is undrinkable. Literally. The film atop the drink has solidified into a kind of gelatinous mass, and Dirk has to kind of fight it out of the cup in order to rinse it out. It’s annoying, and not how he wants to be spending his time, but it makes for an easy life, and he’s found himself craving a little bit of simplicity recently. 

Dave doesn’t mention the previous night, even though it must have been real fucking annoying to force that moronic machine to make two cups of sludge and carry them back before they grew skin only to find the second party snoring like a particularly old walrus, anime glasses askew. Dirk feels a surge of something strong for his fellow Strider, though he doesn’t label it just yet. Neither of them are ready for something like that.

Roxy greets him with a smile he feels somewhere in his hippocampus, sharp and hot. He nods back, has to keep himself from scanning the rest of the faces in the room. Instead, he sits by his friend, steals the first edible thing he sees on her plate and stuffs it into his mouth before she can snatch it back from him. With Roxy, things are certainly more painless than they could be (that is to say, he’s still trying to teach himself to look Jane in the eye. That is to say, Jake is not one of the faces in the room). He can sit shoulder to shoulder with her and across from Rose and know that he’s going to do better today. 

From the doorway, Dave, who’s ushering the Mayor forward by their tiny shoulders, offers an expression that edges on unreadable. Dirk reads it, considers, gives it a five star review on Troll Goodreads and places an order for the sequel. Instead of a totally kickass and not-money-grabbing version two of a brotherly half-smile, the Mayor skitters over and delivers a dusty bottle of orange soda. 

As Dirk twists off the cap, Jake and John join the group. His hands are too occupied to go white knuckled. He’s too busy thinking about building public transport for Can Town to choke on his first mouthful of Fanta. That’s progress.

It’s when he’s ready to go that the paranoia kicks in -- Jake has robbed him of his indifferent exit. If he gets up and leaves now, it’ll seem like he can’t wait to get out of any room Jake has entered. If he hangs around, it’ll look like he’s desperate to linger, like some sort of English-specific creep that gets his rocks off by lurking in the shadows and watching Jake do things. Dirk’s throat starts to close up, the way it does when he doesn’t know what to do. 

He has to stress that this isn’t about Jake, or the fact that he still loves Jake (and probably always will), it’s about the feeling he’s getting in his head -- his entire head, behind his nose and between his teeth and curling through his eye sockets -- the feeling of being pulled apart, losing his grip on something. It’s the feeling he gets when he stops paying attention to his dreamself, but tenfold, twentyfold, fuckzillionfold; he’s somewhere between two places, stuck fast, anchorless. 

He is, in fact, totally fucked. 

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. He’s just unsure. It’s a new feeling, and one he’s not fond of at that. 

He stands up. No eyes follow him. His shoulders don’t relax. 

Dirk finds himself en route to the lab. 

--

‘You still in here, Bro?’

‘Yeah. Hey.’ 

Dave pushes open the lab door with a little more uncertainty this time. Dirk doesn’t blame him. It must look to Dave like he’d regressed straight back to making mindfuck-bots after the heart-to-heart that never was.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Finishing something up. Check this out.’

Dave sits obediently (that rubs Dirk the wrong way, but there’s time for that later), blank expression the perfect canvas on which Dirk gets to throw his latest creation. 

‘It only took me a few hours,’ he hears himself saying, as if he needs to justify doing something he enjoys, ‘so it’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty cool.’ 

‘Just show me,’ Dave says, and Dirk nods. Right. Showing. 

The small tin train blows a harmless puff of warm air before it starts to worm its way around the track, weaving, silver and snakelike, along the bends Dirk had carved from the shards and scraps of his last effort. 

Dave can’t help but grin as he watches the carriages roll by. ‘Dude, sick.’

Dirk shakes his head. ‘Look in the windows, bro.’ 

‘You’re kidding me,’ Dave breathes, pushing himself out of his seat and kneeling hurriedly by the still-moving train. ‘Shit. Awesome. You even got John’s vacant fuckin’ expression. Wow, who’s that kid sat next to John? He’s hot as Hell, dude. Smokin’ as all the irons after a blacksmith pulls them from the fire with his fuckin’ catcher’s mitt bare ass hands. Hey, who’s that? Must be the cool kid’s ecto-brother. They got similar badass shades on. They’re taking this train to Biznasty City, population three, Mayor one.’ 

‘No, dude, they’re coming from Biznasty City. This is the train to-’

Dave’s mouth drops open, a soft little ‘o’ of surprise. ‘Can Town,’ he breathes, and Dirk nods.

‘You know it.’

‘This is awesome, Bro.’ Dave hovers for a second, and Dirk knows (almost instinctively) that this is where good brothers would hug, but they both seem to baulk at the last second, like wary horses sensing a storm. It’s alright. There’ll be plenty of time for that later.

Dave grins, effectively waving away the awkward air. ‘You should show everyone else. We’ll move it to Can Town to show the Mayor. The little dude’s gonna straignt up fucking flip.’ 

Dirk nods, lets his brain bounce against his skill a few times. He feels like a car ornament. ‘Yeah. That was the plan.’

‘You should show him.’

‘I know. I will.’

‘In the morning?’

‘Yeah. I think so.’

Dave nods. Now they look like matching car ornaments. ‘Cool. You should get some sleep, Bro. You still kinda look like shit.’

They smile, quiet, tentative. 

‘See ya,’ Dirk says to the back of Dave’s head, and stops the train with a flick of a switch. Once the wheels stop turning, he takes up Dave’s position, squints through the tiny windows at the figurines sat inside the carriage. It’s the best replica he could manage, pieced together from fragments of pictures and logical guesses. The mechanics of the room itself don’t matter all that much. 

What matters is the miniature figurine of himself, sat serenely next to the figurine of a grinning Jake E.nglish. 

For some reason, Jake’s smile had been easy to recall, but almost impossible to recreate. 

The figurines don’t have history. The figurines aren’t even looking at each other. The figurines are vague, yet unconfusing, and, even if they are confusing, Dirk is going to be right here to clarify. Dirk is going to be the one to spread his hands in surrender, ask truce? and act like he could handle a refusal.

His finger lingers on the light switch. 

It’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start. 

Dirk turns off the light, takes himself to bed, and wakes up on Derse to the sound of rain.

[elichatter]

saw they had the seadweller ears and nearly passed out

[elichatter]

nothing abt this isnt perfect 

[elichatter]

enneagram types:

dirk: type one

dave: type five

eridan: type four YES that's the same as me shut up

mituna: type eight...

sol: also a type one with a five wing (: cool!

[elichatter]

[TT] Let me hit you with this. In the event of a draw, both players are killed.

[TG] love this

[TT] So, bro, again, that's the only rule. If there's a draw, we're both going to be killed.

[TG] now hold on

[TG] what happens if i lose

[TT] Oh, I put an X in the centre.

[TT] You'll be killed,

[TT] And I'll live.

[TG] i see

[TG] uh

[TG] bottom left corner

[TT] Ok. I put an X at the middle left.

[TT] Now, really think hard about what you want to do next here, Dave.

[TG] hmm im gonna

[TT] One of us can walk away from this.

[TG] middle right

[TT] Dave, why would you?

[TG] if i go down youre coming down with me dirk

[TT] X, bottom right.

[TG] circle top left

[TT] See, why are you DOING this? You don't want one of us to live? Jake, are you hearing this shit?

[GT] You know old chap folks usually ask me what the best thing about being chummy with the striders is and im usually fresh out of what to say but now i am jolly well sure im going to say "NOT that they play pesterchum noughts and crosses"

[TT] This is what I'm saying, Jake. You're watching this,

[TG] games not over dirk

[TG] games not over

[TT] Jake, you're watching this KILLING GAME, and you're going to walk away from it with NO Strider brothers. Do you want one brother, or no brothers?

[TT] Now I like this element of a third party,

[TT] Trying to make sure,

[TG] your move coward

[elichatter]

what’s wrong, dirk?