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Strider-Lalonde get togethers are… Decidedly awkward. Dove tends to stay apart from it. He’d have stayed home if the others let him (newsflash, they didn’t.) Instead, he’s here at the park, ass parked on a bench with paint crumbling off it and his hand in his pocket and the hope that he won’t lose his shade because wow, this is definitely sunburn weather. It’s hot, it’s sunny, it’s Texas. He should be inside, in his room, doing his thing.
This is the second get together they’ve done since the Lalondes and crew moved here but it’s about the same as the first. Bro, old man Dave, and the Momlondes are standing around looking like assholes and probably gossiping like fuck about all their kids. Dove wants to hate them. He don’t bother wasting the energy. Even though sometimes older Rose gives him a glance, like she knows something or thinks something, and he does his best to ignore it. Weird enough that closer to the grave Dave gives him the same look on a daily basis. Bro cut that shit out when Dove gave him a name to call him.
Turning from the guardians, Dove spots Dave chatting up the younger Rose and the trolls. They’re all sitting in a patch of clover and Rose is teaching Tavros how to make a clover crown while Terezi cracks some kind of joking remark that has Kanaya looking embarrassed. They all look so close and comfortable in a way that makes Dove feel…
He’s not lonely. He could walk over there and join them if he wanted. He just doesn’t. They already have a Dave and it isn’t him and he doesn’t feel like having that rubbed in.
Sollux had the right idea, dragging his laptop here, and the adults seem happy enough to let him fiddle around on it to his heart’s content. Weirdly, Damara’s sitting with him but they don’t seem to be talking. She’s nursing a cigarette and gazing out at the others like Dove is. He wonders for a few seconds whether or not they have anything in common other than their aspect. He doubts it. He’s screwed up but Damara is just… intense as fuck.
Dirk snagged Roxy the moment everyone got here and he hasn’t left her side since. They have another bench that they’ve taken up for their own. Hal’s leaning against a tree beside it and seemed amused enough with whatever Roxy’s babbling about. Sitting on the ground between Roxy’s knees is Calliope and she looks positively radiant with joy. There is a finished clover crown sitting in the hollow between her horns and blending into her white curls.
Something about her annoys Dove. He’s pretty sure he knows what it is and he’s an asshole. But that isn’t news to him.
He draws his gaze from them and instead watches the other group of teens as Terezi goads Tavros into a playful fight that ends up dragging Dave in when they don’t bother to watch where the tumble takes them. Kanaya looks exasperated and then she’s in the thick of it and there are going to be clovers in every nook and cranny after this. (Haha.)
Dove’s fingers twitch in his pocket as his body shifts like he’s gonna get up, and then what? Join them? Right. Like that’s a thing he can just do. Fuck them, he doesn’t need anyone. And no one deserves Bird Dave anyway- less bird, more lame these days (haha, he did a another funny. He is on a roll today.) He gets up but only to step onto the bench and jump to catch the bottom limb of the tree hanging over him. He doesn’t manage to scramble up on the first try but on the second swing of his body, he gets his legs wrapped around the limb and manhandles his body up over it. He steadies himself and edges up another level and another after, the highest he can get before the limbs are too thin to hold his weight.
He is hiding in a goddamn tree like a moron. Wow. Can he get any lamer. Stubbornly, Dove rests against the tree and vows to enjoy his own company until he’s allowed to get back to his room so he can lose himself on his computer as usual.
Fresh air. What a crock.
He’s only been up there five minutes before the tree shifts and it turns out Rose, little Dave’s Rose, is climbing up. He can’t think of why she’d leave her nice group of friends to park her ass up on his tree limb, but there she is anyway. Rose gives him a quiet, enigmatic smile. Before he can ask what the fuck, she’s caught him up in a hug. Dove goes still and stiff. He can’t make himself return it and it seems she didn’t need him to. Rose draws back and gives him a glance over. She doesn’t stare at his stump and she doesn’t shy from it, either. He’s not sure how to feel about that.
“It gets better,” she tells him, like that means anything, but his throat closes up and he thinks he forgets to breath for a few seconds. Rose just smiles. She kisses his forehead. “Just wait. It’s coming. You’ll see.”
With that, she shimmies back down the tree gracefully like she’d been born in one. Dove doesn’t know what to think of it, any of it. He watches through the leaves as Rose returns to her group of rabble rousers and picks a leaf out of Kanaya’s hair with a light laugh that reaches him.
Strangely enough, her words do make him feel better. At least for right now. He doubts they’re true, but… Well. There had once been a time he trusted her strange knowledge implicitly. A different Rose, maybe, but this one was similar enough to her.
Dove spends the rest of the outing in his tree trying to figure this Rose out.