Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

You’ve taken to being generally confused by Bro Strider. It required a full universe shift and hours upon hours of explanations from your respective siblings to get the two of you to socialize in the first place, and even that experience had been strange more than it has anything else. Bro—your Dirk, but not quite—lives with you now. With you, Dirk, and that brat who borrows your name.

You call that kid Dave the Second. He is more than a little annoyed with you at any given time, but you think he kind of likes the way you tease him.

You get the sense you’re a more affectionate brother than Bro is, which sort of floors you.

It had taken a lot of adjusting to get used to being with the three of them, but since neither you nor Bro were willing to give up the loft you’d grown so accustomed to in your respective lives, you have since settled on working together.

He’s a slob, but you’re not much better. To his credit, he keeps the sink empty in exchange for an immaculate dishwasher to house his shitty fireworks. The two of you have nightly battles over what food to get for dinner, since he keeps swords where actual fucking food would normally go. You’re never going to get the refrigerator to actually serve its purpose.

You regard his sword-hoarding with the same amused disdain you give to his dick puppets. “They’re Smuppets and we’re fucking keeping them. You have a problem with that? Find someone who gives a shit.”

Dirk seems to like Bro, which works for you. You don’t know Dirk that well yourself, having never met him before your death in your original universe, but you’re as impressed by the kid as it’s possible to be. He’s a genius, you can see that. He doesn’t have your experience, but he’s at least as intelligent as you are, if not vastly more so. It occasionally occurs to you that both Dirk and Bro are probably more capable than either you or Dave the Second could ever be.

It would be disconcerting if you didn’t love Dirk and look down on Bro in equally large quantities.

The knowledge that Bro is able to give him some sort of companionship that you can’t quite muster—for a kid who looks at you like you’ve failed to meet his expectations, no less—is a grudging comfort.

Dirk spends more time with Bro than he does with you. You wonder sometimes if he’s avoiding you, but when you chill alone with him, it’s always fun. He shows you his robots. You hum and hah appreciatively like the good little shit you have to be. You draw him god awful SBaHJ-style renditions of famous paintings.

It’s a beautiful sort of symbiosis.

You share the single bedroom with Dave the Second. Both Dirk and Bro sleep on the futon. One night you woke to get a glass of water. You stood against the wall as you watched Dirk cling to Bro, Dirk still blissfully unaware of your presence even as your own shielded gaze fell upon another pair of sunglasses pointed at you.

Dirk was crying—shaking, really. The seventeen-year-old boy genius that you never got to know but consider yourself responsible for suffers from nightmares that he doesn’t tell you about. You can’t even deny that it stings to know he depends on not-Dirk to help him through it.

He won’t tell you about Sburb.

You ask him every now and then. He brushes the questions off with his wry sort of humor, so unlike that shared by you and Dave the Second. For the two of you, there’s no sense, just a degradation into an endless idiot spiral, the end of which is a long list of business cards from shitty Chinese food restaurants with the words ‘this is stupid’ written on them in red. You can hear the pain in Dirk’s voice, though. You never had a chance to make him happy or let him feel like a kid.

You hate meteors. You hate meteors and their arbitrary, timeline-fuck bullshit.

Dave the Second makes a good roommate. You don’t really get along, but you have a grudging affection for him that grows by the day. He’s sixteen, a year younger than Dirk. He is effectively you, which makes conversation easier than it ever has any right to be. He’d be funnier if you didn’t already get the punchlines to his shitty jokes. He’s also in accordance with you that a bedroom should be a veritable fucking overgrowth of cords and electronic devices used to maintain the steady stream irony that the two of you need to survive. The two of you mix together sometimes on your turntables.

You’ve also been known to dress up in scarves and reenact short plays with the most inane dialogue you can manage during improvisation. On more than one occasion, you’ve found yourselves suddenly Parisian in the middle of an Italian one-act.

It’s an art form.

You ended up in a strange universe that both Dirk and Dave the Second refer to as C1 for reasons you don’t really fucking care enough to ask about. What matters is that the apartment isn’t yours and it isn’t Bro’s. You aren’t sure why, but it seems like it was set up to accommodate the four of you as a whole unit. There’s not nearly enough space, but it has all the shit you both collected without the useless bachelor paraphernalia that builds up when one lives alone with his younger brother who also doesn’t give a fuck.

Occasionally Dave the Second, Dirk, and Bro flee to the roof. They spend hours up there strifing while you work on intentionally low-budget SBaHJ films. The result is that Bro is ripped, Dirk is tending toward really fucking buff for a kid, and Dave the Second is getting the toned slenderness that your side of the Strider gene pool has managed to achieve. You’re starting to feel flabby in comparison.

The films you’re focused on making are the epitome of horrible and you’ve never been more proud. They’re not social commentary anymore; the Batterwitch doesn’t exist in this universe. You can’t actually shake the desire to make them, though. They’re just so gloriously goddamn terrible.

You’ve started to do Smuppet cameos. Bro noticed after the third release. He gives you strange looks whenever he knows you’re working on a project. You get the sense that he’s flattered. You’d like to say you don’t give a rat’s ass, so you will. That’s exactly what you’ll say.

Dave the Second echoes your thoughts sometimes, saying the things out loud that time has taught you to hold back. It’s almost refreshing, the way he goes at Bro. He’s like a little dog. You don’t like to admit that he’s sort of you when you start thinking like that about him.

Dave the Second and Bro effectively wreck the living room at least once a week. Dirk watches silently, better at hiding his emotions than other-you or other-him. You’re much better at affecting the movie star pompousness you’d gotten used to. The media ate that shit up once. It served you well then. It’s sort of a habit now. You’re not stalwart like the bastards you live with. You’re a prima-motherfucking-donna and these bitches will recognize.

Or some fucking thing.

Bro catches you alone in the kitchen one day and calls you princess. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t encourage him. Ironically, of course. You wonder when your life became this strange little circus.

[ + ]

“Are you gonna finish that, Blondie?” He gestures to your opened but untouched bottle of apple juice. Dickhead's hair is almost as light as yours, but fuck him. You're not gonna bring it up.

“Apocalypse is already over, man. No more deviant behavior from me. I wouldn’t want to rip a hole in space-time and send us plummeting into an abyss where Dave motherfucking Strider doesn’t drink his sweet ambrosia. Fuck, oceans would overflow, mountains would collapse, volcanoes all over the world erupt at once. What kind of irresponsible son of a bitch do you take me for? I’m looking out for you, man. I got your back.”

You’re not sure when you started gesticulating dramatically, but you don’t hate it. You down a liberal quantity of the juice before smacking your lips at him as loudly and wetly as you can manage.

He’s a little older than you—by seven years to be precise—having survived longer in his timeline than you did in yours. He manages to look all of his thirty-nine years as he watches you with his impervious, untouchable eyes. His face is blank as usual, prompting you to think up as many ways as you can to get him to break form. You haven’t succeeded yet, but you will. He stands very still before you, typical of that douche.

You wink. He lunges.

Yeah, you’re definitely regretting your lack of physical exercise. He’s fast as shit and has absconded with your juice before you can even react.

You’re not even sure he actually likes apple juice.

“God fucking damn it,” you say to an empty kitchen.