Dave Strider has been quiet. He wakes, breathless, to twisted sheets recreating the heft of her weight on his hips – he’s been wondering when the other shoe will drop, be it a knock-off Converse or a dancing slipper. Ironic, how the detritus of the old world symbolizes godhood in the aftermath. That sounds sort of like Rose’s pseudointellectual bullshit. She’s in his head in more ways than one.
Dave wanted a sister before he was old enough to see why that was a terrible idea. Bro didn’t think that the apartment was any place for a girl – instead of bringing his girls over when he needed a break, he always went to their places. As far as he knows, it was always the same three decreasingly-tolerant hook-ups from his days as a fulltime DJ. Now that he’s older, Dave’s pretty sure that his Bro was spending a not-insignificant amount of his time out in their beds. He always came back with a tension in his neck and shoulders, fingers twitching towards the nearest piece of heavy weaponry.
He sort of understands now.
It’s a tangent. He wanted a sister, didn’t care about the specifics, all he knew was that girls were gentler and nicer, he learned that from TV and his secondhand PC with the whirring fan. He was pretty sure that a girl wouldn’t leave him all torn up and nursing roadrash, burns, scrapes, sunburn, and a pretty fucking persistent concussion by himself. He told himself that a girl would at least make sure they healed properly. A girl might even let him stay inside when he was keeling over from the sickness and the heat under his skin.
He remembers waking up with a stomach bug when he was eight or nine – he ain’t sure who he caught it from, maybe one of the birds – and the world spun like the fucking Tilt-a-Whirl ride at Six Flags when he tried to stand on uneven knees. He retched on the floor of his bedroom, and nothing came up except the memory of hoarded Doritos and a shitty little string of what tasted like sour apple juice. It clung to his tongue no matter how much he spat and gagged.
Bro had placed a sword in his sweat-tacky hands and dragged him by the collar to the roof when he couldn’t make it up on his own two legs. He was too light for his age, but also too tall, and his ankles bounced against the staircase that he was more used to seeing on the journey back down when he was overbalanced and rocketing to Earth, limb over limb. That was just how things were.
Now that he’s older, he’s pretty sure it was wrong – all of it – but that doesn’t stop him from missing what he had. When things were good, they were syrupy-sweet in the rearview mirror – a heavy hand ruffling his hair, the stench of Houston summer and Axe body spray and leather and the way the controller stuck to his hands. They’d strip down to their boxers in the worst of the heat and play whatever shitty bootleg Bro was halfassing when they were too lazy to fight like men. Bro always won. That was just how things were too.
If he’s being honest with himself, he misses the bad parts just as much. He misses the tang of blood and the stinging impact of knuckles on skin. He lost his first tooth in a fist fight – spat it out to the side like they do in the movies and came up swinging through a hit that never landed. He misses all the shit that he’s pretty sure normal kids never got to do – he tried cocaine when he was twelve and pumped out eighteen episodes of SBaHJ in under an hour with a raging erection. That was cool, at least ironically. He misses feeling alive, and if that means being beaten within an inch of his life, so fucking be it.
What’s important – relevant, pressing – is that Dave has a sister now. Technically, he’s always had a sister, but even after they both knew, it never felt like having a sister. Fuck, he’s not even sure what having a sister is supposed to feel like, but whatever’s going on between them now doesn’t really seen to fit the platonic ideal, emphasis on platonic, meaning that what’s going on sure as hell ain’t platonic, and that it would have been pretty fucking illegal back on the planet they grew up on, and that it’s sort of fucking awful in a completely new way.
Having a sister isn’t what he thought it would be when he was a kid. It’s not exactly the same as Houston, as Bro – there are a lot of things different about Rose, actually. She speaks faster. She doesn’t smell like Texas summer or leather or Axe. She doesn’t carry a sword. She’s sexy, to put it fucking lightly, and he would never admit it out loud, but there are also a lot of things about Rose that are the same. In appearance if nothing else, she is eerily similar to the man who raised him: white-blonde hair kept short, long limbs and strange eyes. She’s thinner and shorter, but she’s also still a kid, and she’s more rounded – softer, he guesses, no muscles, but it’s still uncanny.
He’s decently sure that he’s not supposed to feel this way about his family, or his childhood, or whatever the fuck else is getting him hot under the collar, but almost everyone who cares is dead and nobody knows but him, and, well, Rose knows too, and he’s really, really tired of going into the horny variety of fight-or-flight when he sees his sister, and he’s not afraid to admit that he was wrong about girls, or at least Rose who left bruises on his wrists and a bloody mess of the skin on his neck. Sometimes he wonders if he should be taken out behind the shed and shot like a feral dog. His brain is fucked – it might be the brain damage, or the mutant paradox slime clone bullshit, or the game messing with his head, but there’s also a pretty fucking big possibility that this is just how he is. Dave Strider: a masochist who gets off on taking advantage of a drunk girl he is directly related to, who also happens to be cheating on her gorgeous, doting alien girlfriend for some incomprehensible reason. This is, of course, the girlfriend who she’s back with like nothing ever happened, and he said he’d cover for her, and he has. Sometimes covering for Rose means sleeping for too long and hiding in the furthest reaches of the maze that he lives in now and vomiting like a sick kid when he thinks too hard about what he wants.
It doesn’t taste like sour apple juice anymore.
He wants her to hurt him. The second time he only plays around with resisting, wriggling on the bare mattress so that she has an excuse to tie him up with her cape and pinch his nose shut and make him behave. Her breath is sharp – nothing like the cheap, yeasty beers Bro brought in bulk, but also not like the whiskey – and her teeth sting going in. He imagines the alcohol cleaning out the punctures so that he doesn’t have to focus on how it’s getting him so hard he might actually shoot off in his pants this time.
He hates it – her soft hands that are calloused the same way Bro’s were, her lithe frame, her glassy-eyed cruelty – but he also drinks it in. If she kissed him the way he sees her kiss Kanaya – like she’s something fragile, like she’s something special – he thinks that he’d actually put a stop to it. That sort of love always made him sick.
"I took care of it," she says, her words hanging on to each other, clumsy and nothing like how she should be. "You’re not gonna be a daddy." She drops a sloppy kiss on one cheek, and the other, and then his nose. He’s pretty sure it’s meant to be a mind game – condescension, yet another weapon in her flawless arsenal.
"Yeah?" His voice is husky and thick. She brackets him in with her arms and legs. "Good riddance, little dude." He’s not sure if he wants to know how she did it, not least of all because he doesn’t want to risk being turned on by it. Everything about this turns him on a little.
"It was a cluster of cells at most," she corrects, sliding her hands up his shirt. "A zygote. Not a little dude."
She pinches his nipples, grumbles in frustration and pushes his shirt up so it bunches around his neck, nuzzles his bare chest and leaves little bites across his pectorals. He takes it. He’ll always take it – whatever he can get. He’s a dog, nosing around for scraps, and as long as someone is looking at him, talking to him, touching him, even if it’s to hurt him, he’ll be okay.
He’ll be okay.
When she stamps her knee down – it has to be on purpose, holy shit – all the air leaves his lungs at once and he curls on instinct to protect what’s left of his descendants. There are actual tears in his eyes and he wheezes when she grounds down, sending throbbing, ice-cold nausea up into every fiber of his being. When he can see again, she’s looking down at him, analytical, watching him choke and sputter on his breath and roll around impeded around where it feels like he’s been impaled.
"I’ve always wanted to try that," Rose says. He can’t quite place her expression through his blurry eyes, but before he can even try, she kisses him so gently it aches, and in a shivering delirium he wonders if she’s evil, but also if she’s his god, and she whispers, "I don’t want you to get me pregnant." as she licks the shell of his ear.
It’s rational. Violence usually comes from someplace rational – Bro was making him stronger, Rose can’t get birth control in space. It makes sense. He’s still pretty sure that he’s some sort of sex freak for wanting this to begin with – by that logic, he’s surprised she doesn’t castrate him instead of resorting to the arcane wheel of fortune that is blunt force trauma. He’s struck with the pathetic urge to thank her.
He doesn’t. He can’t find his words.
She shows him her tits this time – actually shows him, guiding his overheated face by the chin to look. They’re on the small side with thumb-print nipples in a shade similar to his. She doesn’t rub and knead them like the girls in the pornos – she doesn’t really touch them at all. She seems more focused on his nipples, biting and sucking at them until he’s arching off the mattress in a futile attempt at escape. They must be bruised – he’s so overstimulated he’s pretty sure he’s started to cry, and the worst, most embarrassing part is that he’s still hard – or at least throbbing in that blood-rush way – despite being about fifty percent sure that his genitals are a squashed mess.
Someone is whimpering hoarsely. Someone’s voice is cracking. Rose is silent and smug as she lays him bare and sizes him up like her next meal.
"Look at you," she says, sighing happily. He can’t see exactly what she’s looking at over his wadded up shirt, can’t deduce the damage, but if she’s faced with the gory remains of what used to be a penis, at least she seems happy about it.
The important part is that she’s happy. He could go either way because it doesn’t fucking matter what a broken husk of an honest-to-god-tier sex offender feels, but if she’s happy, at least he’ll probably get an orgasm out of it, which is the saddest fucking thing that anyone has ever said even to themselves in their head, and he thinks he’s going into shock because it hurts more than it has any right to. She’s saying something in that sticky-sweet voice of hers that she only uses when she’s drunk, and there’s that, too – she’s drunk right now on that perfumey rubbing alcohol shit that took forever to wash off of his skin last time in the too-small shower stalls, and it makes him think about how long he’d go between showers back in Houston because Bro loved to catch him off his guard if he spent too long with the door locked and how they usually didn’t have water anyway. He’d stand next to the shitty plastic swords they kept in there and let the water soak through his clothes so that if Bro needed to have a go at him he wouldn’t be naked.
He’s naked now, and prickled with goosebumps from the cold and what has to be fear, and he’s scrunching up his face real funny to keep from crying harder than he is.
Rose is going to be so fucked up over what she’s doing to him when she finishes, it’s all he can think about on a loop along with Houston and Rose’s girlfriend and the last time it happened and how he still feels dirty down below his skin where he can’t scrub raw.
He never beat Bro – not in their games, not in their spars, not even in training. He’s starting to think that his family’s just like that – people to cast a shadow for him to stand under, pinned against the burning-hot concrete or a mattress or whatever the fuck they’ll pin him to do whatever they want to him, and he likes it, but it might be because it’s all he’s had, and it’s so pathetic that he wants to crawl into his sister’s cape and disappear in her smell. Vaguely floral and sweet like soap, vaguely animal like him.
She straddles him like before, legs astride, panties pulled to the side, eyes fluttered shut and mouth pursed like she’s concentrating really hard on something that isn’t him. The pleasure aches – she’s too hot and too heavy on his hips and it’s all wrong and awkward and he’s still throbbing and crying like a little kid, but she holds her hand over his mouth and so he tries to be quiet and let her enjoy this.
She doesn’t let him finish inside her this time, she does her grinding-clenching thing and then when she’s still shaking in the aftershocks, she slides off and skips right to the part where she regrets it, sobbing into his shoulder and apologizing until "sorry" stops sounding like a word.
Nobody can hear them in here – it’s soundproofed to hell and back because nobody else on the meteor seems to appreciate his sick beats, but he’s not sure if that’s something Rose thought through or not before doing this, because it didn’t really seem too thought out either time.
He’s never heard her cry before.
Dave is dizzy. He swallows over and over again like it’ll keep him from puking over the side of the mattress onto the floor and he rubs her back in jerky motions. She has acne there – it’s sort of weird to remember that his sister is still just a teenager. A god, but also a teenager, and he’s still hard even though it hurts – maybe because it hurts, Jesus Christ – and she smells overpoweringly of too many different things.
It’s not what he thought having a sister would be like. It’s worse, but it’s also better, especially after it’s all over and he’s not inside her and she’s not macking on him and making his head swim with the alcohol on her breath, because now, he can at least pretend it’s okay even though their shirts are off and he can still smell sex and everything is absolute ass. Bro never held him unless being caught in a headlock counts, so really, this is pretty cool.