Your Very Own Voice of Reason

by beeskneesDeductions

As a con on the street, Dirk had to raise Dave to steal and cheat in order to survive. But when the secrets inside Dave's hallucinogenic mind begin to rise up as he's trapped in an ever present evil medical testing corporation, our youngest Strider will find out that the voices in his mind aren't the only ones lying to him. Sole focus on the StriLal family.

2. Chapter 2

A/N: This is a really, really short chapter. And I don't really think I can make it any longer because I have a schedule of what plot points are in what chapters. This one is kind of mostly filler.

I will tell you this, next chapter is going to be a bit of a doozy. Thought I'd drop an A/N here to apologize for the length of the story so far ):

Dave was miserable. Given his current living situation, it was not at all shocking that he had contracted food poisoning. Dirk had left at dawn, with promises he'd scrounge up some nausea medication and fever reducers.

Only took you to throw up all over him.

CL34RLY, H3 R34LLY C4R3S 4BOUT YOU, D4V3. GOGD4MM3D 1NSUFF3R4BL3 PR1CK.

Dave simply groaned and rolled over, wrapped in his jacket under some park tree. The summer heat was only making his fever worse, but Dirk had been considerate enough to get Dave into some shade. This is the most sick I've ever fucking been, ever.

A voice he supposed could be his conscious, his voice of reason, something he'd never though he had due to all the other sounds clouding his mind, told him that was wrong. On the rare occaisions it spoke up, Dave always figured it sounded kind of like Dirk. He struggled to remember any time he had been sick. A life of unsanitary conditions led to his immune system becoming as tough as crow's meat. Back in his childhood days, however, it had taken all of Dirk's efforts to keep weak little Dave alive.

Yet, Dave couldn't recall feeling like he was in an oven, one that was violently spinning his entire world around.

Or at least, up until age five. Before then, Dave couldn't dig up a scrap of past. It wasn't uncommon for memories to fade as people aged, but they still had bits and pieces. A favorite toy, a trip to the park, a bad injury remedied by Mommy's kiss. Even with the lack of parental units or a life of plush luxury, Dave literally had no memory. No recollection of why he was alone, no distant memory of previous alleyways he had inhabited. It had literally been like he hadn't existed until then.

Time was fuzzy in those days, but Dave remembered when Dirk had found him. Dave had supposedly only been wearing some seriously torn up clothes, a white and pink t-shirt and some black shorts, the entire ensamble torn and frayed and dirty. According to Dirk and clouded memories, he hadn't known how to speak and barely knew how to walk. Dirk had to literally teach him everything Dave now knows.

Speech was taught by monologinh to Dave, waiting for the kid to pick up on the words. If Dave said the words in the right context or in correlation with the right object, he was rewarded with jelly beans that Dirk snagged from mothers' purses or out of kids' hands. If Dave was wrong, he recieved a slap on the wrist and a very careful explanaition of what he did wrong.

As words became cemented into his life, the voices slowly constructed themselves. As soon as Dirk caught onto the fact that Dave was babbling to himself for reasons beside practicing speech, he began to be reprimanded for speaking to himself. Quickly, Dave caught on and began to build up a barrier between him and the world. On the few occaisions Dave thought about it, he figured that the reason Terezi and John trusted nothing but themselves and each other, was because of his early onset habit of bottling everything up.

Soon, at seven, Dirk asked Dave to provide a distraction while he slipped some money from a mother's purse. Ready to please the only person in his life to give him any attention, Dave lured the mother away by pretending to trip and beginning to scream and cry.

As he progressed through life, he graduated from The Distraction to The Thief. Later on, Dirk began leaving Dave alone for long periods of time, a week or so each occaision, chooshing instead to pursue his own desires while leaving Dave to his own devices. Slowly, Dave formed a connection with the voices in his head. He began to act for himself, following Terezi and John's suggestions and stealing things of pleasure, a pair of Aviators here, a candy bar there.

Terezi and John jad their own means of bending Dave to their will. Terezi could get Dave to do what she wanted by calling him her hero, or Cool Kid, or by stroking his ego. John would attack Dave with half-hearted insults about how lame he was, or how much of an asshole Dirk was. Dave knew he shouldn't have let it happen, but somehow the two had barreled through his brick-wall barrier, and then reinfored the entire thing with steel and a moat, leaving them safely on his side.

He groaned as yet another wave of nausea rolled through.

Y3S, D1RK 1S SHOW1NG HOW TRUSTWORTHY H1S PROM1S3S 4R3.

Dude, why would you expect any more of a con man than for him to abandon you in your time of need?

"Goddammit, just shut the fuck up," he moaned, rolling onto his stomach, eyes squeezed shut behind his shades, hands clamped over his ears.

As if that would quiet them.

That proved to be his mistake, however, because moments later he found a hand clamped over his mouth, the suffocatingly sharp scent of chloroform filling his nostrils.

[+]

Pay no mind to the rabble,
Pay no mind to the rabble
Head down, go to sleep
To the rhythm of the war drums
Pay no mind what other voices say
They don't care about you
Like I do