Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dave doesn't like to talk about the first time Karkat touched his cape. He doesn't like to talk about it because he responded by shoving Karkat in the face – it was mostly an accident, really, he was just lashing out to protect his vitally important personal bubble – and then Karkat slapped him on the arm and then there was a flaily little altercation that couldn't even be described as a squabble, much less a proper fight. There might or might not have have been hair-pulling. But nobody has to know about that. (Except Rose, who was watching the whole thing with a look on her face that said a very similar scene was likely to show up in a wizard fic later on, and Kanaya, who looked as if she wished she could hang them both from the wall by their collars and leave them there.) Dave is just glad Terezi didn't witness it. He doesn't think he could have recovered from that.

The second time comes just moments after the tragic destruction of Can Town by a giant stomping troll in a snit. Dave speculates aloud, as he strolls over to survey the damage, that Karkat was taking out his feelings on Can Town because it was the only situation in which he'd ever qualify as a giant anything. Karkat grabs his trailing cape and yanks. Dave comes much too close to falling over backwards.

"Dude, I'm not even getting into this again with you," he says, regaining his balance and most of his dignity. "We're dealing with a natural disaster here. Show some respect for the dead. Also, let the fuck go of my fucking cape or I'm gonna deface every shitty movie poster you got."

Karkat doesn't take it any further, perhaps conscious, as Dave is, that Terezi is watching – smelling? – the whole thing with an expression of utmost disdain. The Mayor's beady little carapace eyes flick nervously between them, which makes Dave feel kinda bad about the whole thing. Even though it's indisputably Karkat's fault, who knows, maybe the city would still be standing if Dave hadn't found it so much fun to mess with him. Addiction is a powerful thing.

Later he and Terezi pour one out for the good citizens of Can Town, who gave their lives defending their homes against troll Godzilla. The Mayor leads the memorial service, rambling on in his incomprehensible carapacian language of clicks and squeaks and funny nibbly noises, and the firefly blinks solemnly throughout. They begin reconstruction the next day. Karkat walks past the door much more often than anyone should have reason to, scowling in at the three of them, by which Dave understands that this thing isn't over yet.

The third time, he's sitting backwards on a chair, playing Angry Birds on his phone, because that's one way to pass the time. Karkat comes in, crosses his arms and glares, but since they arrived on the meteor Dave has grown used to that, and right now he's way too occupied with important bird-flinging to pay it any mind. Besides, ignoring Karkat is the worst thing you can do to him. Nothing makes him madder faster.

Sure enough, Karkat doesn't put up with it very long. When his glare fails to burn a hole in the side of Dave's head, he stalks over, takes the tail of Dave's cape and starts a circuit of the chair, a purposeful glint in his eye.

"Uh," Dave says.

"Hold still," Karkat says.

Dave wasn't planning on moving anyway. Getting up now would look too much like concern. It would be, like, giving ground or something. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing, fuckmunch?"

He orbits the chair three times, by which point Dave's cape is wound tightly around him, pinning his arms to his sides and functionally tying him to the chair. His phone is trapped in folds of red cloth. He can't even see the damn pigs he's aiming for. Karkat finishes the performance with a pin fastened somewhere behind Dave's back, securing the whole arrangement. Then he leaves.

"Okay," Dave says to the empty room. "Good. Awesome. Now I'm tied to a chair. That's just. Awesome."

It takes a good twenty minutes of fumbling around blindly under the cape before he manages to get a text through to Rose and she comes to the rescue.

"How exactly am I to interpret 'gems i am tied to chick'?" she enquires. "I wasn't sure whether you were requesting assistance or some private time."

"Give me a break, I couldn't see the screen. Will you just please get me out of this goddamn chair?"

"Certainly."

"It's Karkat," he explains, as she takes her sweet fucking time unwrapping him. "He's got this vendetta against my cape ever since I told him to step off. It's like, he's yanking my chain, only instead of a chain I have this cloak and he's decided it's open season for yanking."

"You could always just stop wearing the cape for a few days," Rose suggests.

"Hell no. The cape is the best part of the outfit. Do you get to look like a superhero? Does John? Nope. I have inarguably the best costume simply by virtue of the fact that I don't look like a Hindu nun or a shitty Nintendo elf." He thinks about that as he gets up and pockets his phone. "I'm gonna go ahead and guess that Karkat is just jealous he never got a cape of his own."

"Yes, that makes perfect sense," says Rose. "Next time, why not use your god-tier powers to prevent Karkat from trussing you up like a prize ham?"

"No, see, because then it'd look like I give a shit what he does."

Why is it, he wonders as he makes his way back to the relative safety of his room, that so many girls are giving him withering stares lately?

"Don't," he warns Karkat the fourth time. "The little dude's asleep. Cape is off-limits until further notice. I mean, it was off-limits anyway, but this time it really is."

Karkat stares down at the Mayor curled up in the little nest he's made of Dave's cloak, and rolls his eyes so hard it looks like it hurts. "Why do you let him do that? He has a pile to sleep in like everyone else."

Dave shrugs, carefully, so that the movement of his shoulders won't disturb the Mayor. "Because my cape is snuggly and awesome and obviously the best thing on the meteor. Bitches love my cape. In fact, I'd say he likes it almost as much as Terezi does."

He half-expects that to cause a blowup, and Karkat does audibly grind his teeth, but he must decide it's not worth it or something, because he leaves without another word. Dave wonders if that means he's won this round. He's glad not to have woken the Mayor up, but he's been waiting for Karkat to escalate things since the incident with the chair about which he will not speak, and this is a little anticlimactic.

"It's just, every time he does something, the things he does get dumber and weirder," he explains to Rose later. "I don't even know what he's trying to achieve any more. It was easier when he just yelled at me a lot."

It's pretty rude, the way Rose sighs and taps her pen against the tabletop and tries to keep reading while Dave is telling her this, like she's more interested in her book than what he has to say, but it's okay. He's a forgiving guy. He doesn't hold Rose's lack of manners against her.

"The meteor is big enough for all of us to have our own space," she says, without looking up. See? Rude. "I can't understand why you don't just try to avoid him."

Dave stares at her blankly. "Why would I want to do that?"

By the fifth time, Dave has magnanimously decided he just feels sorry for Karkat. The dude is obviously lovesick and inadequate, and he needs to do whatever makes him feel better.

He sits cross-legged on the floor at the edge of Can Town, idly scribbling the next issue of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. (No, it's not a waste of time to update a terrible webcomic from a doomed universe, why do you ask?) Terezi and the Mayor are alchemizing more chalk, which is always a lengthy production, because the Mayor always wants to make more green and Terezi always wants to make more red, and then there's bickering and violation of the new packages and they both go a little crazy licking their respective colours and, basically, Dave hasn't felt the need to accompany them on that errand since the first time, when he ended up having to alchemize a new shirt. He doesn't like to talk about that, either.

Karkat walks past the room. He doesn't do that so much these days. It's like he's resigned himself to spending all his time with a reclusive clown; he doesn't come to peer in through the doorways of the more fortunate any more. But presumably, the sight of Dave alone, with his cape to the door, presents an irresistible target, because he comes in. He doesn't even say anything. He just stands there, silent and looking forlorn. Dave would be forlorn too if his best friend was a juggalo.

"You know," Dave says, putting aside the tablet he borrowed from Nepeta's room, "if you want to come and draw shit with us nobody is actually stopping you. No one else decided you had to be on the outside looking in. You kind of did that to yourself."

"Shut up." Karkat bends down, picks up the corners of the cloak, and shuffles around to Dave's front, pulling the cape up and over them both like a canopy. He sits down, and the folds of the cape hang down like curtains on either side of them, forming a private two-person world of velvety red. Dave thinks he has an idea what's going on, but playing dumb is his speciality.

"Dude, if you wanted to make a fort, you just had to say so. I am so down for fort-building, you don't even know. You should have seen the one I made back in my apartment to get up to the crawlspace in the roof, it was – "

"Shut up," Karkat says again, and kisses him.

"Wait, hold on, before we do this I need to know which of your ridiculous quadrants this is supposed to be and what I'm expected to – "

"Strider, shut the fuck up."

The next kiss is fiercer and involves Karkat holding the front of Dave's shirt, and when they pull back they're both breathing hard. Karkat's eyes are reflective, shining like copper coins in the half-darkness. They look at each other.

"You know what? Okay," Dave says, and kisses him again.