White Noise

One (Static)

'I long to walk with some old lover's ghost

Who died before the god of Love was born'

-John Donne, Love's Dietie

SEPTEMBER

John emerged from the 17th street station platform with little concession to the rain; it poured from a slate-grey sky, boiling steadily on the Northeastern horizon. He had an umbrella, and his coat was waterproof, but staying out from under the touch of an approaching storm had never really felt right to him.

It was late afternoon; rain had been a threat since early morning but only now was it making good on all the bluster. Grey buildings and grey streets and brief stretches of green lawns were drenched by the time he made it from the station to campus, by then so was he, for the most part. He got a few looks from passing classmates, grinned at them from behind dripping hair and didn't fault them for huddling alone or in couples under flimsy umbrellas, but he also didn't stop a gust from blowing away the protection just briefly enough for the rain to get in. A little water never hurt anybody.

In a few weeks a downpour like this would be sleet instead, or snow if they were unlucky. But there was still the taste of summer in the air now so John loitered outside instead of ducking into the Climate Sciences building, watching the clouds roll like a wet bruise across the sky.

He could be up there, if he wanted. If he was careful he could make it to the roof and then it was just a matter of flying fast enough and high enough, and then -

His phone buzzed a little staccato in his pocket; he paused under the overhang barely sheltering the front doors, thumbing through the messages on his phone. A check-in from Mr. Crocker, the usual commentary from Rose or Jade, occasional taunts from Vriska. Chums pestering him left and right, but what caught him now was the two-message notification in red.

TG: stayed home please bring juice when youve got a chance

TG: and i swear to god one mention of howie and i will in fact fucking kill you we grew out of that shit ten years ago

John checked the clock in the upper corner of his phone against the message time; Dave had probably cut all his morning classes. He frowned; it wasn't uncommon for Dave to skip a class or three, but his absences had been more uncomfortably frequent, his bad days more noticeable. John tapped out a reply and pocketed his phone. He could wait, drip-dry in class and dream of flying up above the slipstreams they would study, or he could catch the next cross-town bus to Dave's apartment. He turned on his heel immediately and squelched through the downpour to the closest bus stop.

The midtown high rise apartments pushed a cement salute against the sky, near black by the time John's bus came to a watery halt just down the street. He ducked through the rain to the corner store just adjacent to the bus stop, snatched up juice and various packaged snacks, and then slipped out again to the alley that stretched alongside the apartment's main building.

The apartments had a perfectly serviceable front door, and the lobby if he remembered correctly even looked relatively clean and friendly. It was just that, considering it was a Strider abode, the conventional way of getting around never really turned out to be the easiest way to get anywhere. The one time John had tried to be lazy and use the elevator, he'd ended up stuck in the basement parking garage for two hours under the dim emergency light while tinny pop music filtered through the speaker system and a vague feeling that he'd brought it upon himself crept through his subconscious.

Instead he'd found a better way, a little bit of a guilty cheat. There was a fire escape on the building directly the neighbor to Dave's, and from the roof all it took was a well-placed leap (or, in John's case, a careless jump and the back of the wind at his call) and any intrepid visitor could get to the roof access stairwell and take the dark plunge down to the penthouse apartment. This, despite the name, wasn't on the top floor. Instead it was somewhere around the middle of the building, and while the roof access was technically the most direct route, new visitors needed a map and occasionally grappling hooks to get there. Not that it was a problem for John, it was rare he actually took the stairs instead of floating down the middle of the chaos to the right door - which, true to form, was almost impossible to find - that opened into the Strider apartment. It was never locked, though a key suspended by a string of paper clips hung from a hook next to the door. John had tried the key on the lock out of curiosity once, it hadn't even fit.

He shouldered open the door, mindful of the ever present threat of falling plush, and kicked off his shoes. They squeaked morosely against the linoleum foyer, and the sound drew an annoyed grunt from somewhere further inside. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it over the back of a chair that had never been sat on but held at least six months worth of junk mail, and slid into the living room.

There were no lights on, but from the door he could see the plasma glow of the big screen TV that dominated the living room. On the TV a game was paused and muted, the same terrible Mad Snacks Yo game Dave had failed to beat since before Sburb. All he could hear was the constant, claustrophobic buzz of whining electronics, the ticking of the clock on the wall, and the steady drumming of rain against the windows. Over a field of cords, discarded puppets, and the odd cheap replica sword there was the old and body-wrecked futon, folded half-broken to bed mode, supported by cinder blocks and the hilt of a dagger that looked like something out of a movie. On the futon, Dave was stretched out prone, head turned towards the TV. John padded over and knelt at the head of the futon, setting the wet bag of snacks on the floor next to him.

"You look totally shitwrecked," he stated, looking Dave over. It was tradition more than a viable observation; Dave usually looked just fine regardless of health. His image and his pride never allowed for him to look anything other than a ten, so as dictated by law and circumstance, John told him the exact opposite. This, like many sustainable lies, was what kept their friendship stable, or so John liked to tell himself. It was easier than admitting he'd get too painfully and obviously flustered if he said anything about how good Dave looked, all the time. "Sick?"

"No," Dave grumbled, turning his face so his mouth just cleared the pillow. He was doing a good impression of a guy who wanted to slowly smother himself out of his misery. John tilted his head and could see a dark smear along the pillowcase, and frowned. Nosebleeds were a bad sign on a good day; a worrisome one on bad days, and this was definitely a bad day.

"You sure?" he asked, nodding to the smear. Dave grimaced.

"Well, it ain't the fuckin' flu."

John reached into the grocery bag and pulled out the juice, popping open the cap and holding the bottle out for Dave to take. Dave pushed himself up with a belabored grunt to take a swig. John couldn't see his eyes for the shades, but he knew the look he was getting was still overly suspicious. He grimaced, guilty of a quick mental somersault that kept him from making the latest in years of awful, no-good Little Monsters jokes at Dave's expense. Some things are harder to grow out of than others.

"I didn't say anything," he protested. Dave handed the bottle back.

"You don't have to," Dave croaked, lying back down. "I know you're thinking it."

"Never crossed my mind," John lied, twisting the cap back on. "Ice pack?"

"Yeah." Dave's face was in the pillow again; at least if his nose started bleeding the mess would be sopped up immediately.

John went to the bathroom and fished an ice pack out of the mini fridge behind the shower. When he returned, Dave was fumbling blindly through the snack bag, mumbling at him from the pillow.

"What?"

"I said," Dave came up for air, lifting a bag of Doritos up to his face to check the flavor, "if your mind wasn't trained in the most religiously fawning way on Howie getting his horrible monster dick in my juice, what were you thinking about?"

John stepped over a river of cords into the kitchen to find paper towels to wrap the pack with. "Oh, I was..." he groped for a topic, settled on something relatively safe, "wondering why the hell you guys built your penthouse in the middle of the building instead of the top floor." He found an unopened economy pack of paper towels in a lower cupboard and proceeded to rip into it.

"Uh, because that's the most predictable thing of all the things." Dave waved a hand over his head in a fleeting, dismissive gesture.

"But you built an Escher-esque number of staircases leading to the top floor."

"Yeah."

"Why though."

"Why the fuck not is the real question."

"Why don't you live in the top three floors if you own them?" The double-wrapped plastic on the paper towels finally gave way, from which John freed a roll. He tried to shove the rest back into the cupboard, but something in there had shifted, so he hunted for another. "Half the floors in this place aren't even apartments, just stairs and doors leading nowhere."

"Egbert, can we do the 'explain the obvious to the monkey faced buffoon' when my head doesn't feel like it's about to. Y'know. Implode."

"Oh yeah. I'm the monkey faced buffoon," John muttered, searching fruitlessly for an empty shelf. He settled for the top of the fridge, clearing a handful of smuppets with distractingly creepy stitched-on smiles and depositing them on a pile with their cousins.

"Glad you're feeling ready to own up to that."

John snorted, grabbed the paper towels, juggling them and the now-damp ice pack as he navigated his way back to the futon. He kicked the end of the futon just under Dave's head."Yeah, you know, some people in this room still have full motor function."

Dave grunted at him. "Don't."

"And could hypothetically punch you."

"Yeah, don't."

"In the head."

"John."

"Repeatedly."

"C'mon, Egbert, don't be a tool, admitting you're dumb as a brick and uglier than a zookeeper is the first step."

"To what?"

"Accepting your life's true purpose as my buttslave. Obviously."

"...I'm just going to go ahead and punch you," John said, making no move to do so. Dave made a noise like a high-pitched whine into his pillow; John kicked the futon again. The dagger-hilt at the other end wobbled dangerously. Dave's whining continued in a long, irritating warble. "God, you're such a child. I won't punch you, but tell me why the fugue."

The whine stopped. John squeezed the pack so it was a little more malleable and a little less damp, and began to wrap it.

"Broke up with TZ again," Dave muttered, after a long silence. John finished wrapping the ice pack and leaned over to set it on the back of Dave's neck, then knelt at the head of the futon. The confession didn't surprise him; Dave and Terezi had been going back and forth since endgame. They broke up for all kinds of reasons: because Dave had forgotten more about their time in the game than he remembered, because his understanding of quadrants was still unsatisfactory, because she didn't understand why every date didn't have to end in sex, violence, or both, because of time, because of life, because it was just too weird to try to slog through a three-year amnesia. John didn't ask why, he just stayed close by and picked up the pieces when Karkat wasn't on Best Bro duty, which was rare.

Hell, it was rare for Dave to go to him first at all. After everything was said and done, Karkat had smoothly taken up the mantle of Best Friend that John had so reluctantly abandoned, along with his chance to jump from ship to meteor. John hadn't even been given the chance to protest; Karkat simply stepped in and took over without a word. Dave had gone with the stronger of his memories, and for his absence, John had faded from Best Friend to just a friend, and after endgame things had never... quite gone back to the way they had been.

Sometimes, thinking about it, the cool epiphany of what it meant to really hate someone would slink along the back of his thoughts, even though he knew logically it was just jealousy. Other times, it merely hurt. He was at no want for friends; hell, he technically had a pantheon of friends. But there was falling out and simply being forgotten, and the latter put little cracks and fissures in the shellac of Everything Is All Right Now so messily poured over his and every other heart that woke up the cool April morning four years ago and remembered skies full of fire.

John couldn't deny Karkat his role, or say that he felt any real jealousy over Dave relying on him so much. Saying anything about it was out of the question, and petty. They were still friends, John still had Bro Rights and could pop over whenever he felt, and more often than not Dave's good days found them together, though rarely alone. In the weirdly rational, integrated universe they'd built for themselves, they'd made sure to stay close, building a city out of the fractured memories of lost universes on continents that resembled nothing like what Earth or Alternia had held, but it didn't matter, so long as they were all close. But even that closeness didn't ease the lingering awareness that, even though they'd won the game, the victory hadn't exactly been stellar. All they could do was try and pick up the pieces and pretend that they knew what they were doing with their lives.

John turned so his back was against the futon, leaning against it until it creaked, then settled with his weight. He'd never be able to sit on the thing, not without the kind of balancing act that would make a career acrobat cry tears of shame. It was another incongruous weirdness about the Strider household: they owned the entire building, but only occupied about three storey's worth. They had more money than probably literal God, but instead of buying real furniture they went dumpster-diving and made do with milk crates and cement blocks. Nothing was cast out of the Strider home until it was well past broken, and even then a pervasive sense remained of 'we can fix it.' Which was probably why Dave kept going back to the same relationship over and over, trying to patch over the cracks and fix what had broken. It never worked for long; in the end, the broken things broke worse, and the fallout was harder, the bad days more frequent, and what qualified as bad had turned from a few symptoms of endgame trauma to a soup of nearly unidentifiable badness that got harder to navigate the longer time went by.

It was hard to deal. Harder for Dave than probably anyone else, barring the Megido sisters, but they dealt with their issues their way. John didn't push; Dave came to him on the bad days at his discretion. All he could do was be ready, and at least marginally helpful.

John put his hand up over the futon, adjusting the ice pack, then letting his hand rest in Dave's hair. The rain drumming up against the windows intensified in a gust, and then settled back into a monotone. The TV flickered in response, the screen dimming and then brightening, reflecting the anemic blue glow against scattered game cases and the curve of a glass eye winking at him from the hollow of a cinderblock supporting one of the legs of the kitchen table.

He didn't jump. For the most part he'd grown out of jumping or twitching back whenever he caught sight of Lil' Cal's dead, empty stare, but he wasn't sure he'd ever grow out of being mildly unsettled by it. The open malevolence was gone now, sapped away after endgame to just a little shadow of childhood fear, but he never really understood why the hell Dirk had decided to keep the thing around. He didn't know the specifics, just a few brief and unhappy words about it from Jane or the slightly hysterical I'm-trying-too-hard-to-make-this-sound-funny anecdotes from Roxy, but it was clear things like Cal were bad news.

Which was dumb; it was just a puppet. Just a creepy, stupid puppet.

Dave nudged him with a finger and that time he did jump, just a little.

"Juice," Dave croaked at him. John took his hand away to uncap the bottle and offer it up. Dave pushed himself up on his elbow to drink, and as he did a slow drip of blood slid from his nose over the curve of his lip. John watched it descend, black in the dim light, and reached up to wipe it away once Dave had finished drinking. Jesus, he was pitiful, strong as a lava flow on his good days and reduced to shit-tier pain and discomfort on the bad days, caught between the constantly readjusting time stream of an only moderately stable new universe and the physical memory that he shouldn't even be alive.

He knew Dave was watching him, from behind the shades. If he looked very closely and carefully he'd be able to see Dave's eyes grow narrow and thoughtful like they got the very few times he'd slipped and been more affectionate than strictly necessary. His hand stopped, fingers curled down around Dave's jaw, thumb smearing the blood away from his lip in a wet, dark curve. John dropped his hand and flushed with guilt, starting to rise, maybe abscond to the kitchen for more paper towels or just let himself out now instead of acting like more of an ass than usual.

"Here," he muttered instead, turning to kneel again, taking the bottle back, lifting the ice pack from Dave's neck to tear a corner of damp paper off. He wiped the blood away mechanically, wadded up the paper and tossed it away like it offended him, then turned to resume his sit, back against the wobbling futon and eyes trained on nothing. Dave was still watching him, propped up on his elbows, head tilted just slightly askance. Lightning cracked outside - the TV flared, scattering light across the mirror-finish of Dave's shades and the scratched curve of John's glasses. A low purr of thunder followed the light, rattling the windows, drowning the apartment's constant electric hum so that there was a brief sensation of false silence.

When the thunder died and the hum returned, Dave settled back down on his pillow, arms crossed underneath it, this time with his head facing John. A few seconds of awkward uncertainty stretched into long minutes of mutual silence. John's eyes started to ache from the dim glow of the TV, and in his head phantom ideas of what Dave was thinking, what expression he might actually see if ever Dave took off his shades, swam up against the blue glow. He fidgeted, fumbling with the damp cuffs of his jeans and not looking anywhere he might catch Dave's reflection.

He caught sight of Lil' Cal again. The puppet's blank eyes stared out at him from its hidey-hole under the table. How did it even get there? God he couldn't fucking stand the damn thing, it was just another stupid artifact, a reminder that they'd lost so much for the sake of playing a simple game, that things were never really going to be 'all right.' It just lay there, staring with its dead stupid eyes reflecting the glow off the TV, its battered, badly patched body folded up in its little cement hole like an eel in a cave.

"I should go," he said finally, breaking off from the puppet's stare. Dave grunted something that sounded like an affirmative, but when he moved to stand, a tug at the neck of his shirt held him up.

"Thanks for coming over," Dave mumbled, and just beyond the rim of his shades John could - just barely - see his eyes, and the indescribable scrutiny Dave pinned him with turned his knees to jelly.

He balked. He almost sat back down. But the uneasy buzz from that stupid doll and the knowledge that even if he did stay any longer it would be more unbearable silence, waiting for someone to come home and take over, for Dave to call over Karkat and then John would have an even worse time of dealing than before. He could stay, sit under to spooky gaze of a bunch of lifeless puppets and feel smaller and smaller as the minutes went by, more and more stupid and unnecessary.

John realized suddenly that it wasn't Lil' Cal that had spooked him; just his own stupid, anxious certainty that he was going to end up making a complete ass out of himself. But instead of swallowing his nerves and settling back, he ducked out of Dave's meager grip, patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, and shuffled to his wet shoes and coat with a muttered "you're welcome."

He caught the door before it slammed behind him, eased it shut and leaned against the frame. His head still felt muzzy, like the murky plasma-colored darkness of the apartment had followed him into the stairwell. Even though it was much darker in here; the stairs were lit only intermittently, with hanging bulbs or lights on brief timers, he felt like he could see better. The oppressive silence of being a room with Dave when he wasn't being talkative was far worse than the open silence of an empty, labyrinthine stairwell.

He started down into the dark. There was no point in trying the roof exit; only Dirk and Dave knew how to get the door open from the inside. Besides, he hardly needed to worry about falling.

The dark here was a comfort; no electric glow, no distant humming, just the hollow sound of his sneakers on the stairs and the intermittent buzz of the overhead bulbs as he passed into their range. He liked the dark, really, liked how it reminded him of the Land of Wind and Shade. There was a kind of comfort in slipping into a shadow and letting the world forget he was there, which he'd been getting better and better at doing the more time went by.

He couldn't turn into wind any longer; there simply wasn't enough power left in him to do it, not in the rational, fragmented world they'd built. But sometimes, if he lingered in the dark long enough, his skin didn't resolve back quite as quickly as it should once he walked into the light. It wasn't anything substantial, nothing that anyone else would really be able to notice if he didn't point it out, but he didn't point it out. He supposed it was a holdover power, something to do with his Land or his Denizen, maybe a little bit of God-Tier specialness he hadn't bothered with because being a hurricane had been so much cooler, while it lasted.

He was getting good at it, though. At vanishing, at fading out. He was better at stepping back than anyone he knew. He could go silent for days and hear nothing about it, at least not where it counted. Jade expected it; she was used to him flitting away to fuckoff nowhere. Rose had long since given up commenting on his more frequent disappearances, though he remembered her being worried, back at the start, when their world was still new and they were all more than a little afraid of being in it. He'd told her it was nothing; he just missed the dark. Meenah gave him shit about it, when he'd bothered to mention it, but she gave him shit about the sun rising in the morning so there really wasn't much to be said beyond that. In reality it was just easier to fade back from everyone and let the rest of the world sort itself out.

He leaped from the end of the first stairwell to the curved top of another that twisted down in a widening arc until it ended at a wall. It felt fitting, walking a downward spiral right into a dead end after leaving Dave to suffer quietly in his buzzing gloomy room. His Dave, the living Dave, the one who had survived over all other timelines. He'd dreamed of seeing 'his' Dave again after the three years on Jade's ship. More than anything he'd wanted to jump into that imaginary bliss of just being able to be friends again, to talk and play and make up for all the time they'd lost on their final trek to the battlefield. Then the game ended. The survivors wished their new world to life, and then...

Then they'd all pretended to be people again, like replaying a game on easy mode with all the cheats. There were glitches, losses, empty pockets where memories should have been, and never quite enough time to try and pick up where things had left off. Little by little, John had faded back to watch Dave learn what 'moirail' meant with Karkat all too happy to teach him.

He'd missed out on so much time he wasn't sure he even knew how to be friends with Dave any more, all his attempts to fall back into step with him had fallen into a series of ever more hopeless awkward silences, that his time had been wasted and used up, and that his value even as an acquaintance was dwindling to nothing, that the quiet between them whenever they were together would eventually stretch so far that Dave wouldn't even bother calling him any longer.

He walked into a wall.

The spiral staircase ended; his shoes hit cement and he stumbled forward, just barely catching himself before crushing his face against the blank wall that should have been a door, if the building had been made by anyone other than a Strider. The timed light bulb above the landing flickered to anemic yellow life, buzzed for five seconds, and then faded, and died. John looked at his hands, pressed against the wall, watching them dissolve as the light left, and wondered if the rest of him was vanishing as well, or if the whole idea of fading was just an avoidant metaphor.

He stepped back, sat on the stairs. The indents of his sneakers were still damp on the stair treads; he took the cold to be another metaphor - this time for the kick in the ass he should have given himself before skittering out of Dave's apartment like a wimp instead of staying like he wanted to.

Did he want to?

What a stupid question. Of course he wanted to go back. He wanted to fly up the stairwell and back into Dave's apartment and balance on the futon next to him and talk him through whatever shit was weighing him down until it was gone or at least more manageable. He wanted to talk to Dave about Terezi, maybe convince him to try someone else for a while, step back and stop trying to desperately fix something that was just going to stay broken or break worse, maybe try to fix something that still had a chance, to try anything else.

So, question two: why didn't he?

Because he was afraid of going back to that buzzing silence. He was afraid of it filling up the space between them until it pushed him out the door again. Which was all the better reason to go back, right? Muscle through the nervousness and four years worth of being absurdly sub-par on the friend front and making up for all of it in one fell swoop by just being there when Dave needed him.

He does need you, clearly.

He wouldn't have sent that message, otherwise, right?

Hope was Jake's thing, but it was difficult to not get infected by it from time to time. John fiddled with his shoelaces and looked up through the gloom to the single fluorescent light glowing over the door to the Striders' apartment. Maybe that's all he wanted, to be needed by someone. Better Dave than anyone, because he really, trulythought he might need Dave, too.

He should have stayed when Dave stopped him. He'd feel like a fool going back up there now.

"What are you doing?" He asked aloud.

"I was just about to ask you the same question."

John jumped, turning on the ascent, sneaker squeaking under him as he spun a full 180, back slapping hard against the wall. Dirk stood at the top of the arced staircase, a soldering iron in one hand and what looked like a mechanical leg in the other. Backlit by the single light over the apartment door, all John could really see of his face was the eerie red pinpoint glow from his shades; Lil Hal was watching him as well.

"Nuh- nothing?" He stuttered out, pushing away from the wall, sheepish and clumsy. Dirk's head tilted to one side, the robotic foot came up and nudged at the edge of his shades.

"Did you and Dave have a fight?"

"What? No, I'm just-"

"Because the only reason I can think of for you sitting out here all by your lonesome is that you two had some kind of falling out."

John blinked at him. It's difficult to read Dirk on a good day; he got the poker face down better than Dave ever did, but down in the dark, getting any kind of clue from his expression was impossible. He frowned, shook his head, damp hair falling into his eyes, streaking against his glasses.

"No, nothing like that. I'm just... uh." He spread his hands, grasping for an answer he couldn't define.

"'Just uh?'" Dirk prompted.

John lowered his head, hunched his shoulders into a shrug. "Just... being kind of dumb, I guess," he muttered. "I should-"

"Go back up and talk to him."

He glanced back up at Dirk, whose shadow had moved along the stairwell to a gangplank perched unsteadily between two landings. The red, watchful flash from Lil Hal was no longer visible; he could almost see Dirk staring at him from behind the sharp frame of his shades. Dirk's head turned towards the apartment door; in the light John could just barely see him frown. "Talk to him," he says again. "It's in your best interest."

"I-"

"Trust me on this, man. Don't just let this shit go."

Dirk turned from him then, taking the gangplank to a stairway leading down almost vertically, his footfalls silent. John stared after him until his eyes strained in the dark, until he heard the brief open and shut of a door, somewhere down in the pit of the stairwell.

Trust me on this.

He supposed...

Dirk would know about the troubles of silence, wouldn't he.

John looked up to the apartment door again.

It took barely a breath to rise up to the landing, less time to slip back in, closing the door behind him.

Predictably, Dave hadn't moved from his spot on the futon. The snack bag had been lifted up to place of honor just within arm's reach next to his hip. The game had finally been unpaused and he was attempting to play one-handed, the other still tucked under his pillow for support. John glanced at the TV just as the dudebro on the skateboard ran into some kind of pixel glitch, doing a mad conga while stuck through the torso by a rail. Dave muttered a curse under his breath and pushed the controller to the floor with a clatter.

"Sore loser, Dave?" John asked. Dave jumped, jerking his head so fast his shades went askew, and then scowled. John had to fight a grin; he loved getting the drop on Dave, if only for the way he grumbled about it.

"Jesus fuck, John, warn a brother if you're going to pull your zap bullshit again, would you? Goddamn fickle son of a bitch..." Dave set his shades straight again, then put his leg out to catch the futon before it could topple to the floor. Once he'd pushed it back to something like a sustainable balance, he slid back to his former position, pushing himself up on his elbows. His mouth twisted into a confused frown, the glare off his shades reflected at John like a question.

"What brought you back, bro?"

John shrugged loosely at him, then sat cross-legged at the head of the futon, facing Dave at eye level. "I felt bad about leaving you alone."

Dave's frown deepened, wavered, twitched up almost to a smile. "The hell you did."

"The hell, I did." John swallowed back any admission that Dirk had convinced him, that if it hadn't been for that little intrusion he probably would have sat in the shadows for the next two hours before slinking dejectedly back home through the rain.

He fidgeted with his pants cuffs again. It was warm in the apartment but his hands felt clammy, on the back of his neck he felt phantom chill. He tried not to let his brain panic back into silence, to admit that he knew, desperately, that there was a particular, exact, frightful reason he wanted to come back. That he knew his place as 'best friend' had been revoked and it wasn't something he could ever really recall or beg back. More than that 'best friend' wasn't quite what he'd wanted to be for a long time.

You know maybe-

"You know maybe this thing you have with Terezi-"

Dave grunted into the pillow. "Don't want to talk about it, man."

John paused, caught his breath in the back of his throat. Bad timing. It was bad timing and this was a bad idea. He shouldn't have come back.

Trust me on this. What exactly had Dirk wanted him to be trusting about?

You know.

"No, I mean, maybe you should try out someone else for a while."

Dave snorted at him. "Don't tell me you're taking that buttslave jive seriously."

"Shut up, I don't want to be your buttslave," John grumbled back. He was flustered, pulling, tearing at the cuffs of his jeans, twisting the loosed threads around his fingers so hard the circulation started to cut off, turning his fingertips icy blue. "It's just that you keep doing this off again on again thing with Terezi and every time she dumps you it kind of freaks me out because you end up doing this-" he gestured to the room at large; the denim thread around his fingers ripped with the motion, falling between them like cut puppet strings. His hand fell after, down to his face, taking off his glasses to clean off the wet smears with the edge of his shirt.

"Hey John, I mean, don't worry about me," Dave reached out, taking the glasses from him, wiping them clean with the leftover paper towel from his ice pack. Once they were clean he put them back on John's face, tapping the bridge in place. "I can take care of myself."

"Why, though? Why can't I take care of you a little, Dave?"

He didn't mean to sound quite so desperate. But his voice cracked, and when it did he gulped back his breath and looked down. The pit of his stomach felt cold. So did his skin, everything. He went dumb with regret and shame. Silence once again made itself comfortable between them.

"You're taking care of me now," Dave began, but John shook his head, cutting him off.

"That's not the point. That' not what I'm... um, not what I'm asking."

Dave propped himself up a little higher, leaning forward. The futon creaked ominously underneath him. "John, are you asking me to be your boyfriend?"

"Um-"

"John, are you going to kiss me?" Dave grinned like a fox as he said it, wiggling his shoulders for emphasis.

"No! Dude, your girlfriend just dumped you, I'm not going to kiss you after that!"

Dave leaned in; the futon started to lean with him, then pitched forward. John's hands shot up to catch the edge of it to keep it from crushing him. Dave leaned forward a little further; it was all John could do to keep from dropping the futon and running out the door.

"I bet you wanna," Dave smirked. His face was drawing close. He wasn't serious, clearly, he was just fucking around but John was stuck and if he did go for it John wasn't going to stop him.

"I'm... I'm going to drop you," he threatened.

"No, you aren't."

No, he wasn't. He couldn't, and though he knew it was just a joke, entirely at his expense, he didn't pull away when Dave kissed him, almost patronizingly, on the nose.

All he had to do was lift his chin a little. That was it, just a few centimeters distance and Dave's prank would be his triumph (briefly, until Dave punched him for being too forward, for being a dick, for taking advantage of him, for all of the above) but he couldn't just-

His arms flagged under the pressure the weight of Dave and the futon put on them. They dropped, just an inch. Dave's mouth crashed into his, shades clacking against glasses and John felt his own lips cut against his teeth. He tasted blood but only really felt Dave, and Dave's mouth, and shock.

Dave lingered.

John's arms ached under the weight but Dave lingered, stayed. John could feel their breath mingling between each other's teeth and yet still he didn't pull away. It was not his first kiss but it was probably the most unsure, definitely the most awkward.

His shoulders started to burn, Dave's mouth moved. John could feel his breath, and every syllable, he felt them right down to his bones.

"You gonna kiss me for real, John?"

"I-" John's arms gave again, and the futon dropped further, far enough that he could just set it on the floor now and be done with it. He let go; it hit the floor with a thud. Dave had pressed all the way up onto his hands, angled awkwardly with his knees angled against the still-braced edge of the futon.

"I'm sorry," John started. Dave's face was still level with his own, his arms hurt, his fingers had pinched, and his mouth ached.

Dave's face was grave now; the TV's glow caught behind his shades and just briefly John could see his eyes, their color dimmed to murk but no less sharp for the shadows.

"Why didn't you say anything, man?" Dave asked, not bothering to move, holding the weird pushup with utter stillness, even when the snack back clattered to the ground next to them, completely motionless until John began to move away. One hand snaked out, twisted in the collar of John's shirt, held him in place. "John, why didn't you say anything?"

John shivered, colder than he was before, though his mouth still ached heat at him. "I didn't want to be wrong."

The corner of Dave's mouth curled up, long-suffering and sardonic; behind his shades his eyes rolled. "You're not wrong, you fucking old lady. Jesus."

"Oh," came John's dumb reply. He blinked again, owlish, surprised, a little scared and so relieved he wasn't even sure what to do with himself. "Not wrong. So this... this isn't like a rebound thing?"

"You say that again and I'm gonna fucking hit you," Dave threatened, the fist in John's shirt shaking him a little.

"Okay! Okay fine, not a rebound thing. I just, you know, this is bad timing."

"It's fucking awful timing is what it is, which I of all people would know exactly the details about. Shit, I'm half tempted to literally go back and time and just mack on you for the last hour instead of watching you shit yourself over whether or not to crank this up from best bros to makeout buddies."

"Please don't, I don't think I'd be able to live in a timeline with no company but my own desperate failure." John tried on a grin for size, and received its twin from Dave.

"You're still kind of freaking out, though." Dave loosened his grip on John's shirt, but his hand didn't quite drop, yet. "You're probably gonna for a little bit, aren't you?"

"Yeah that's gonna be a thing."

"Thought so." Dave nodded, then pulled back, drawing his legs under him so he could sit, butt on the floor and back against the tilted futon. "But the kissing, that's gonna be a thing, too."

John nodded mutely at him, and then screwed up his courage to something functional. "I don't, you know, I said I wasn't going to say it, but I don't want to be a rebound. I don't want to take anyone's place; I just want to do this kissing thing because I like you."

"Jesus Egbert please try and lay it on a little thicker, I can still breathe through the stink of nervous nerd funk," Dave sniped, but even as he did he leaned forward, and his mouth was on John's again, quick but unshy. He leaned back to speak, then grimaced. His nose bled again, and this time he wiped the offensive leak on the back of his sleeve. "Fuck, that's nasty. I don't think I got any on you."

John laughed at him, light and easy. One kiss had been enough to knock him reeling but two made him giddy, simple-minded with anticipatory happiness. It bubbled up inside him so bright and sudden that he almost didn't catch the one wrong note, the difference, the something that almost killed his laugh.

It was a voice.

He was sure it was his own voice, but it came from an infinite distance, and at the same time was so close he could almost feel it being whispered into his ear. It didn't sound out in the air but murmured into his head, right into the part of his brain that thought in words, making his skin prickle.

He's so pretty when he bleeds.

The thought was wrong, out of place, a drop of poison in clear water. He shook it away as soon as it made itself present in his brain, but as they set right the futon, finding something sturdier to brace it on so they could lie together, it bubbled up again, simmering quietly in the back of his mind.

So pretty, when he bleeds.

Notes:

7/8/13
Credit for this prompt goes to Shevathegun. Mad Props Yo to Thebes who keeps thing flowing smoothly.

There is no way in hell I'm going to try formatting pesterchum logs here.