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Dave sits down down on one side of the big couch, budging you over towards Rose with a scandalously bare foot on your hip, and then just leaves it there. This is an unfortunately typical provocation from your alien friend. He’s aggressive with physical contact: he pushes, he grabs. He carries the Mayor around on his back with simian, unselfconscious affection. He ruffles Karkat’s hair, pinches his cheeks, drapes himself suggestively across any part of Terezi that will hold still.
He says, “God, I need some girl time,” and puts his naked feet in your lap. Humans don’t have the same cultural taboos about public vulnerability as trolls. It doesn’t mean anything to them to go unshod, to say ‘I can’t run’. Normally it doesn’t bother you so much. Normally you can behave appropriately, as Karkat and Terezi generally manage, not to fixate on the smooth stretch of Rose's unguarded back, when she wears lighter dresses, or the way Dave once walked into the eating area entirely topless, and didn’t notice everyone staring breathlessly at bare stomach until he was halfway through pouring his cereal.
Human males have a significantly looser sense of propriety than the females—you have it on good authority that Dave once spent an entire episode of Can Town: Special Victims Unit in his underpants. Rose has, unfortunately, shown no such inclination.
Rose has shifted around, on her third of the couch, so her shoulder is against yours. Her soft hair brushes the side of your face. You finish your cup of tea in a graceless, noisy slurp, too focused on keeping your hands from shaking. You— you want. You want.
Dave has one of Nepeta’s drawing tablets, and is humming as he scribbles, tuneless. Soothing. Rose hooks the teapot up and pours herself a second, offers you the pot with a smile, her mouth so close to yours, and you’d do anything for her, you realize, giddy, warm all over. Your hands shiver as they take the pot.
Your second cup is more so— more of the same, you realize, abruptly, halfway through. This heat in you, this shivery sensitivity— the way your free hand has laid itself across the top arch of Dave’s foot, thumb tracing the long bones, the way your cheek’s rested atop Rose’s hornless head and your windchute is on the trembling edge of a purr— this isn’t right. This isn’t you, or at least, not the you you’d permit yourself to be.
“Is there,” you say, throaty, nearly buzzing, and have to cough. Swallow hard. “Does human tea have. Caffeine. Is that a compound you ingest recreationally.”
Rose shifts, goes mm? Looks up at you in breathtaking concern, and you’re caught by how lovely she is, the flower-pinkness of her mouth, how close and warm. You’d strip bare for her. You’d let her thread her fingers between the slots of your ribs. Oh, she’s beautiful.
Dave says, bouncing his heel on your thigh for attention, “Are you drunk? Holy shit, are you— like, are you tripping out? Did Rose just roofie you with her pretentious fuckin’ leaf water? Oh my god.”
“Oh my god,” Rose repeats, and colors brilliantly across her cheeks, blood coursing bright and close under her skin. Your hands cup around her face. You’re shivery all over. Breathless, panting. Warm, warm, so warm, and she could just— if she’d just take you. Your legs, your chest, your throat and mouth and horns and anything.
“I feel. I’m. I’m a little warm,” you say, “I shouldn’t... uh. Shouldn’t. Be...” still fascinated by Rose’s face, the petal texture of her skin beneath your thumbs. The pounding pulse at her cheekbones, her temples. Where her jaw turns the corner into tender throat. What shouldn’t you be doing? Certainly it couldn’t be this, certainly this is alright, holding her so close, so ardently.
Dave pulls you off her by the collar of your shirt, though being pressed close to him is hardly punishment. He's kind. He cares for you. You realize distantly that you must be quite a sight, right now, skirt rucked carelessly, head back against this shamelessly comforting alien’s shoulder, throat stretched, inviting, just exactly as flung-open welcoming as he. You want his hands on your belly. His knees on either side of your hips— you shift, yes, there, his fluttering heart against one of your shoulders. His long bones and soft flesh fold all around you like a cocoon. You’re purring for him, the noise pouring out of you like clear water, like light. Breathless, begging wordlessly. Touch me, please, like this— thank you, oh. Have me, take me apart.
“—not alcohol, more of a narcotic reaction? Certainly an intoxicant.”
“Well at least she’s like, all hyped for cuddles, and not, like, you know.”
“This dick?”
“This exact dick, yes.”
“I think your precious maidenhead’s safe from the lesbian vampire, Dave.”
“Oh, thank god, you know how fuckin’ desperate I am for marriage to a gentleman of standing—”
There is distant discussion, above you—beyond your concern— and it isn’t until Rose snaps her fingers a few times in front of your face that you can bring yourself to care. The warmth of Dave’s body is sunlight. You’ve got your hands around his arm, holding it curled to your chest. You spare a hand to card through Rose’s hair. It’s soft as satin, as silk. You want her hands in your hair.
Rose snaps her fingers again. “Can we help? What do you need?” she asks. Repeats. You purr: you have it already. This attention. This warmth and contact. You rub your cheek in perfect satisfaction against Dave’s shoulder. He jumps, twitches, pats you. His heart races.
More conversation. Rose has stayed close, her voice gentle, soft, concerned. A sweet wind. Dave has both arms around you, his chin resting between your horns, and is— joy!— petting your stomach in slow, smooth circles.
Daringly, you stretch your legs out, and put them in Rose’s lap. She cups your ankle in her palm immediately. She looks like she cares about you: she looks at you so intently, so concerned. You shamelessly toe off your slippers.
She rubs your feet. Nothing in your life has ever felt so good, except for Dave’s touch also, soothing over your softest parts, hotly protective. You purr until your throat is prickly-sensitive with it, until your mouth aches from smiling. Everything is light, sweet. Hands all over you, delirious pleasure, warmth. Peace. You lose yourself in it.
You wake with a pounding headache, and a thirst so acute it borders on nausea. You remain on the couch, but you’ve been tucked under a blanket, a large crab-shaped plush laid beneath your head. A tall glass of water stands on the floor, just where you can reach it. Gulping it down clears your head, slightly, enough to gain your feet, pull the blanket around your shoulders like a cloak, and shuffle off with the glass in hopes of locating additional hydration.
Dave and Rose are sitting in the mealblock, playing some game with marbles and string and a scrabble board, and when they look up at you the enormity of your trespass hammers itself into your breast like a stake.
You drop the glass. Then, peak humiliation attained, you put your face in your palms and moan. You might as well rock back and forth and beat your head against the wall, for all the dignified resolution to this hideous scenario it might bring.
Instead of laughing at you, or offering recrimination for your ghastly transgressions, Rose goes and fetches a pole-mounted hygienic cluster, to sweep up the glass shards, and Dave puts his warm hand on your shoulder and steers you into a chair.
“It’s cool,” he says. “It’s all good, Vampirella, Karkat let us know what was up and it’s fine. We’re cool, everything was like, as consensual as it could have been considering the situation, or whatever. Best incestuous xenofuck alien threesome I ever did get to take part of. It’s important as shit that we get our cultural exchange on during this magical voyage of discovery and self-actualization, and like, learn and grow as people.”
“You told Karkat,” you say flatly. Of course. Of course! Your humiliation is complete.
“What am I, suicidal? I made Rose tell Karkat.”
You laugh a little, wetly, and then startle when Dave reaches over and wipes your eyes with his sleeve. Why did he do that? Karkat would surely have given them both a thorough education on every aspect of propriety their native society failed to equip them with, especially after— after they— after you—
“Look, if you wanted a hug you could have just said,” Dave says, demonstrating that whatever education transpired, he’d manage to ignore the bulk of it. He wipes your eyes again.
Rose comes and sits down with a glass of water, ice chiming against the sides, and gives it to you. When you look at her, she colors again, that brilliant flowery pink, but she smiles.
“We’re cool?” she asks.
You lean forward, summoning all your courage to be as daring and wild and vulnerable as these brazen creatures, and you kiss her cheek. She turns her head and kisses your mouth.
“Oh snap,” Dave says. “There goes your dowry.”
“Fuck off,” Rose says. “By which I mean stay right the fuck there and hold our girlfriend’s hand.”
You shiver all over at that— our! girlfriend! — and see in Rose’s wide eyes and the flat front teeth she digs into her dark lips, she does have a sense of propriety. Of transgression. She’s being brave, too.
When Dave laces your fingers together, you squeeze his hand, perceiving now the edge of anxiety in his smile, the nervey dampness of his palm. Cultural exchange. They’re so different, this alien pair, these bookends to a set of volumes in a foreign language, but some things are just as meaningful to them, and as important, even if they can’t express it properly.
Some of what they reveal, they mean for you to take.