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“So I guess you’ve died, like, multiple times now?” the Strider instance says. Dave. Sollux isn’t sure whether this Dave is dreaming, dead, or another metaphysical anomaly stuck halfway between them. He’s definitely not the original, but everything gets weird with Time players. There’s cross-timeline bleedover, AA says, which means most of them know as much about being doomed as Sollux himself.
Dave is sitting atop a hivestem, though they don’t call them that here. Sollux sits beside him, the base of a water tower hard and angular at his back. He can’t see the alien sky – he kind of wishes he could, because it turns out he’s a lot more jazzed about visiting strange new worlds when he can actually walk on them and touch things and shit, and it would be cool to get the full sensory experience – but the heat is intense and the air smells like baking asphalt, and the place reminds him weirdly of his own hive on his own dead world. Plus, Dave’s a good guy to share a roof with if you don’t want to talk, because he’ll do it for you.
“Twice,” Sollux says. “Not an experience I plan on repeating.”
“Smart,” Dave says. “Showing all hells of self restraint. Me, I’ll have to rent a shitty high school gymnasium for the corpse party. Charge for tickets. Put up some streamers, spike the punch, sneak off for spooky ectoplasmic makeouts behind the bleachers.” A pause, as the sun beats down and sweat gathers between Sollux’s shoulderblades. “You’re invited.”
“Thanks. Just what I’ve always wanted: an afterlifetime supply of smug douchebags in spikefruit shades.”
“Apple,” Dave says. “I know you know what an apple is. Your murderlawyer pityfriend didn’t go around calling you spikefruitberry blast. But you called it, the top secret prize is that. Unless you’d rather we get off our asses and draft ourselves into the Ghost Army.”
“Is that what you’d rather be doing?” Sollux asks, mostly because it’s the quickest way to avoid finding out more about what he and TZ were to each other in this Dave’s timeline, which isn’t and can’t be his own. Last he saw her, she was alive, with Karkat, on a meteor that’s headed for once in the direction they need to be going. He hopes she stays that way.
“Sure. Why not?” Dave says, and then, anomalously, nothing else. There’s the sound of him shifting in place, the soft thump of his back hitting the water tower and the huh of his exhalation. Sollux imagines him leaning lazily back, his thin legs stretched out, his face tilted up towards the sunlight – Yellow? Maybe red. Earth’s sky is supposed to be blue. And Dave was almost too skinny, last time Sollux saw a version of him, but they’re both older now, and he might have filled out. He was scarred, too. That doesn’t change.
“No,” Dave says, so quietly it’s barely more than another breath. “Fuck it. No. I think I’ve earned the right to a little boredom.”
And yeah, Sollux thinks, that sounds about right. Time flows slowly, out on the edges of whosever universe this is. If the ghost army direly needs a couple of doomed nerds, the ghost army can wait, but he doesn’t think it does. The narrative’s moved on, and it’s left him floating in this little bubble of heat and almost-solitude, in the memory of someone else’s city. He’s not complaining. It’s peaceful here.
“Hey Strider?” he says.
“What?”
“What the fuck are bleachers?”
“Stadium seating for sportsball fanatics ready to get their bread and circuses on watching buff guys in tight pants collide with each other at top speed, and there is definitely a large hadron joke I could be making there,” Dave says. “You guys probably call them horizontal ass platforms. Why? You thinking of taking me up on that invitation?”
There’s enough too-casual half-joking-not-joking lightness in his voice that Sollux’s answer cycles rapidly from an automatic hell fucking no to maybe to sure. He’s curious. Bored. He’s got a thinkpan full of quiet, interspersed with the sound of Dave not shutting up, and he’s kind of wondering what it would be like to lose his hate virginity to some asshole with Apple shades beneath an alien sky, just the two of them with no drones watching. He always kind of hoped it would be Karkat, but he sent that possibility on its way at light speed, and if anyone knows what it’s like to outlast your universe, it’s this and every other Time player iteration in existence. So he says, “Yeah. OK. Not the whole bleachers and spiked punch hoofbeastshit, though. Just – ”
The rooftop. Groping for Dave’s warm, solid ghost-human hand, so weirdly staticky it almost feels psionic. Slipping his other hand up beneath Dave’s shirt, finding blade scars but no grubscars, hearing Dave’s little deadpan ow when he digs in with his claws. Shit. Humans don’t do that. They bleed too easily, probably.
“Fuck, sorry, fuck, I’m an idiot,” Sollux says, and Dave kisses him, too quickly to be anything but clumsy. There’s another, muffled ow, and the taste of iron and what might be ectoplasm, before they both pull back at once.
“You got some chompers, dude,” Dave says. “The better for devouring hapless Time guys with, I guess. Or Dave guys. We’re still doing this, right? Because when I play gay alien chicken, I play for keeps.”
“I have no clue what half the shit that comes out of your shout cavern even means,” Sollux says, and kisses him again. Carefully, this time, against the corner of those untrollishly soft lips, until Dave turns his head and Sollux’s tongue slips half by accident into his mouth. He’s more than rustblood-warm, and he makes a startled, breathless noise that leaves Sollux thinking maybe it isn’t hate he feels, even if it’s not exactly pity either. Dave’s arms wrap around him and cling. The air seems hotter now, closer, and Dave’s breath is humid against his jaw when he breaks the kiss. There’s a fumbling gravity that pulls them closer until he’s straddling Dave’s narrow hips, and he can feel something stiff and heavy through Dave’s jeans, pressing against his lower abdomen. When he leans into it with a little more of his weight, Dave’s hands clench in his shirt.
“Can I, um, adjust?” he says. “This is having a predictable but uncomfortable effect.”
“You could. Or I could. That’s kind of the point of this.”
“Point conceded,” Dave says. “Point’s all yours.”
When Sollux reaches down between them, Dave’s fingers brush his as he works open the button and zipper, and their hands meet again around the shaft, before Dave pulls back to let Sollux work with what he’s holding. Alien junk. Awesome. But pretty fucking weird too: almost motionless, warm and dry except at the blunt tip. It doesn’t feel ghostly. It feels alive, and fragile. When Sollux brushes the lubricated slit at the top, Dave gasps “Fuck” with a thready desperation that sends a pulse of heat down through every nerve. He feels the sudden shift and slide as his bulges push out to tangle with each other and the front of his boxers, but it’s fine. They’re dream clothes. He can reboot them any time he likes.
The bigger question is what he wants to do about the human bulge in his palm, because he doesn’t think he wants to get the thick, inflexible thing inside him. He suspects it could hurt if he tries, in a way that might be amazing but might just be pain, and he doesn’t want to deal with pain right now. He wants to push Dave back against the water tower and reduce him to mumbled incoherency, or just, fuck, to get some friction from anything that isn’t loose cloth. He lifts his hips long enough to let Dave tug down his pants and boxers, and to hear him say, in what sounds like awe, “Holy shit, dude. Please tell me that’s not the origin of your thing with the twos. Not that I can blame you, because seriously. Respect.”
“It’s not. Asshole,” Sollux says, and straddles him again, hands on his shoulders, wondering what the fuck to do with the alien shaft pressed up against his abdomen until his bulges take the initiative and twist right around it. He wonders where this Strider learned about his whole binary thing. Did they ever troll each other, before everything went to shit? It shouldn’t matter. He’s literally having sex right now, and he can’t drag his stupid thinkpan away from all the ways the multiverse has found to screw them over. But then Dave wraps both hands around the whole coiling mess and starts to stroke, and that’s… good, actually. Different than Sollux’s own hand. Softer, even with the swordsman’s callouses, and less expected. There’s a rhythm to it, and Sollux tries to let himself relax into it, biting his lip as Dave’s hips twitch and Dave’s pulse throbs against him. His mind goes blank, a little bit. He lets it.
“So what is?” Dave says, and what passes for reality out here snaps back into focus.
“What?”
“The origin of the two fixation.”
“I’m a bifurcated Doom prophet mutant. It’s twos all the way down.”
“Horns,” Dave says, and lifts a hand away to touch one of them tentatively, like he’s not sure that’s alright. “Dicks.”
Sollux isn’t sure what a dick is, and right now, he doesn’t care enough to ask.
“Or Prospit and Derse,” he says. “Mind. Body. Life and death. What – ” His voice catches in his throat. The denim of Dave’s jeans is rough against the inside of his thighs, and Dave’s grip is hot and tight, steady around him, but his mind and his body are still running in parallel. Everything he’s feeling is cleanly delineated, suspended narrowly between too intense and abstractly distant. “What the fuck is the opposite of Doom, anyway? It isn’t Life. It isn’t Hope. Maybe it’s not twos all the way.”
The possibility bothers him. There’s something wrong about a universe unbalanced. He shouldn’t care, but he does, even now. Karkat would call him a fucking wreck, in the palest possible way, and FF would laugh, without any approximation of meanness, and tell him to stop glubbing about it and do something. Dave just says, “Hey,” like that might mean anything at all, and stops what he’s doing to grip Sollux’s shirt and drag him close. There’s another kiss, and the distance collapses. He rocks forward, and everything is heat and sweat, cloth and slurry-slick human skin. He hears Dave whimper into his mouth as his hips jerk up, feels the clench of clawless hands against his back and the brief, bright sting of his own sparks crackling in the stifling air.
Somewhere in all of that, Dave comes. Sollux doesn’t even notice until after it happens, and even then, only from the way Dave falls back against the tower, loose-limbed and breathing hard. He’s only halfway there himself – moving instinctively, seeking contact, his bulges writhing in the close, tight space between Dave’s abdomen and his own until halfway becomes enough. His mind goes blank again in a flood of psionic charge and release. The world narrows down to physical need and unfiltered sensation: the drawn-out, pulsing rush, the weary comedown afterward.
Second by second, awareness sets in again. He feels heavy and calm, and everything is quiet, inside his thinkpan and out. His pants are a gross disaster. For some fucking reason, Dave is still holding him in scarred, wiry arms. When he tries to disentangle himself, Dave touches the back of his head – a stay still gesture. An I want you here gesture. He’s the one with the ruined shirt, so it seems fair let him call the shots. The way they’re sitting won’t be comfortable for long, but he doesn’t mind ignoring that for a minute or two to rest his head in the undefended, subtly alien hollow where Dave’s shoulder meets his neck. The dream’s going to shift, eventually. The simulation will reset. But it hasn’t happened yet, and he can wait.
“Hey, Captor,” Dave says quietly.
“What?”
“I think it might be this.”
“I still don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Sollux says, without urgency. He’s tired. He’s earned the right to be.
“The opposite of Doom.”
“Pailing a stranger on top of a derelict hivestem?” he says, even though he knows that isn’t it.
“Escape,” Dave says. Sollux guesses that means he means it, and fuck, he might not be wrong. It fits – the last stupid jigsaw piece, the snippet of code that makes the whole thing work.
He says so – says thanks, like an idiot. Dave curls idle fingers in his hair, and a breeze from outside the bubble breaks the stillness, cooling the back of his neck. It smells like a building rainstorm, alien and harmless; it feels like something changing in the dream, and Sollux wonders when their surroundings slipped offscript and became something other than memory.
He doesn’t know the answer, but it’s not a question that needs one. Neither is what happens next? All he knows is that something will – that it will be new – and the waiting doesn’t scare him any longer.