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Tavros is smiling when he gets home, standing in the doorway to wave as Jade heads off again on some other crazy adventure, but Dave can see how tired he's gotten. The way he holds onto the doorframe, the way his shoulders are hunched just that little bit. Dave can see a lot from behind his shades, and as long as he doesn't grimace nobody realizes how close he's looking.
Even after he closes the door, Tavros is still trying to put up a brave front. "Hi," he says, with that goofy little smile of his. "I hope you, weren't too lonely, with me gone."
"Pining away every second," Dave says. "I'm like a princess in a goddamn tower over here."
"Except for, you're not in, a tower," Tavros says. Teasing back. Good for him. "And that's, for the best, probably."
"Yeah, pretty sure I'd never be able to get pizza delivered to the top of a tower," Dave says. Tavros frowns like he wants to ask what a pizza is. Dave waves the question away. "Anyway, why don't you go slip into something more comfortable while I finish this up?" He's not doing anything more engrossing than putting shitty Photoshop filters over a comic to see if he can make it look worse, but sometimes you have to give a man his privacy.
"Okay," Tavros says. "I'll, do that." He heads for the bedroom, arms held out just a little like he's worried about his balance. Dave keeps his poker face, but he's listening for any creaks or whirs that shouldn't be there. Can't be too careful.
Sounds like everything's in working order for now. Equius may be a first-rate social disaster zone, but he knows his way around robotics. Pretty good thing, too, because there aren't a lot of other options in a universe with only sixteen people currently living in it.
Dave blames the strangeness of the whole thing for the situation he's in now: shacking up with a freaky alien guy so earnest he still has to have irony pointed out to him half the time. It's weird for so many reasons. Mostly, Dave copes with the same approach he uses for time travel. You just don't think about it too hard, and stuff works out.
Lalonde couldn't be that reasonable, of course. She had to go on like somehow Dave was validating one of her crackpot theories about suppressed desire and childhood trauma and whatever the fuck. Eventually Dave pointed out that the words she was using didn't even make sense in his case. 'Homo' meant 'same,' and if there was one thing he and Tavros were not, it was 'the same.' Ah, the semantic defense, Lalonde said with a smug little smile. Certainly that has the advantage of making you feel clever about your denial.
Aren't you late to a dress-up date with your girlfriend? Dave said then, and that was pretty much all they had to say about that.
He cocks his head, listening for noise from the bedroom. Pretty quiet in there by now, so Dave hits control-S and goes to check it out.
Tavros is sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes closed. He's taken off his pants and detached his robo-legs, setting them on the mattress beside him. He looks so fucking relieved, so tired, sometimes Dave kind of wants to kick the collective knobby gray ass of the entire troll system for leaving him this messed up in the first place.
"How's it going, killer?" he says.
"Oh," Tavros says, opening his eyes in a hurry. "I didn't even, hear you, come in."
"Dave Strider is stealthy like a goddamn ninja," Dave says.
Tavros grins. "Tavros Nitram is, suitably impressed, probably."
"Goober," Dave says. He kneels in front of the bed so he can lean in and give Tavros a kiss. "Jade wore you right out, huh?"
"I can't tell, when you're implying, things you shouldn't," Tavros says.
"That would be never," Dave says. "I am the very model of perfect goddamn propriety at all times. I could school your sweaty meatball of a mechanic on the finer points of etiquette except that he would like it too much."
"I'm sure he, is crushed by, your rejection," Tavros says.
Dave nods. "Most of the inhabitants of this sorry rock," he confides, "cry themselves to sleep at night at the knowledge that you beat them to the incomparable prize of Dave Strider's undivided affections." There's not enough irony left in this poor depleted universe to sustain statements like that very often, so he kisses Tavros again before he can talk himself into actual sincere confession time.
It took some practice for them to get the hang of kissing when they first started this crazy alien homo romance, and that's counting the fact that Tavros is one of the least aggressive trolls ever to exist. It was probably loads worse for Lalonde and her vampire-wannabe girlfriend, but there are some questions you just don't ask your paradox sister, even ironically. Trolls, in any case, are about eighty-seven percent pointy edges on a good day, and they had to give it a few tries before they could liplock without bloodshed.
It was worth it, though. Tavros's mouth tastes sort of sharp and fresh at the same time, like licking a lawnmower blade—Dave's pretty sure Jade could give him some sound biological theories about the acid levels of troll bodily fluids, but he's not in any special hurry to ask—and he makes these little snorty purring noises that Dave would never actually admit to finding adorable. He holds onto Dave's arms really carefully, because even filed down his claws are still pretty sharp compared with squishy human parts.
Dave is prepared to defer to Tavros's obvious exhaustion and just have a quiet, low-key cuddles-and-makeout session, on the unspoken understanding that it's high-level fakeout irony, a double helix of nice guy stereotypes and bullshit gender roles and okay maybe he can see his resemblance to Lalonde every once in a while—but as he leans closer into the kiss he's starting to feel some reactions out of Tavros that suggest otherwise.
"Mmm," Dave says into the sharp-edged warmth of Tavros's mouth. He wraps his arms around Tavros's waist and pulls, and it is still weird how little Tavros weighs with his legs off, but he slides into Dave's arms pretty easily, snuggles up right against him. Tavros's skinny arms drape over Dave's shoulders and they're pressed chest-to-chest, which means Dave can feel it just fine when Tavros's genetic material expulsion glands—trolls can't be simple and just call them breasts—start to swell.
That was another thing that took some getting used to. Dave, like your average red-blooded human male, has nipples, but they're vestigial as Terezi's sense of shame. But trolls do everything backward, so it's Tavros's cock—okay, bone bulge—that doesn't do anything except feel tingly, and his temporary but perky and appealing breasts that give up the grubsauce.
Dave reaches down to palm the front of Tavros's briefs, rubbing slowly as Tavros's bulge stiffens. By now he's mostly gotten over the feeling like he's skipping the foreplay when he does this—skipping foreplay being one of those things you just don't do when you're ironically proving yourself the best gay boyfriend in two universes.
"You should," Tavros says, his voice going a little husky, "get in bed, too."
"Yes, sir," Dave says. It's kind of hot when Tavros gets into it enough to forget to apologize for everything. He shrugs off his t-shirt and skins out of his jeans—and then helps when Tavros's shirt is getting stuck on his ludicrous horns.
Shirts vanquished, Tavros rolls to the side enough that Dave can slip into bed beside him. Tavros's skin is a smooth, almost metallic gray, and his nipples blush sepia. Using words like 'sepia' is one of the ways Dave knows he's pretty fucking far gone. He wraps an arm around Tavros's waist and pulls him on top so they can kiss some more. The part where he can't get enough of the kissing is another of the ways.
But fuck it, who's here to call him on it, anyway? It's not like Tavros is going to mind, and if any of the other misfits on this rock are watching—Terezi still won't give him a straight answer on whether they can use Trollian for voyeuristic purposes now that everybody's sharing a universe—then they deserve the sudden onset diabetes they get. Justification: secured. Sloppy makeouts: go.
Tavros rocks on top of him, purring, his bulge grinding against Dave's dick, almost—but not quite, never quite—too intense to handle. When he shifts his weight to prop himself up on one elbow, slipping the other hand down between them and into Dave's boxers, Dave growls. Tavros laughs into his mouth. "That was, pretty good," he says. Trolls apparently growl instead of moaning. "Lots of, feeling."
"I'll give you lots of feeling," Dave says, running his hands up the ladder of Tavros's rib cage, cupping the heavy swell of Tavros's breasts. The skin is stretched smooth to the touch, full to bursting like an overripe metaphor, and the noise Tavros makes is more whine than growl as Dave squeezes gently. The weirdness of this setup gets cooler every time, and Dave thinks he's probably well on the way to having a textbook fetish here, but it is so hard to be worried about that when Tavros is tossing his head and making needy incoherent sounds at every little stroke and squeeze.
Dave rolls Tavros's nipples between his fingers, feeling the first traces of slickness in response. Tavros's cheeks are blushing almost the same color as his nipples, deep golden brown, and he's getting a little less careful with Dave's cock, his hand moving faster, harder. Dave can take a hint. He stops teasing and starts kneading, one hand palming each swollen breast, squeezing and pulling. Tavros's breathing gets shaky, stuttery, losing rhythm altogether as his body tenses up. Any second now, and the thought makes Dave's cock pulse, hard and ready himself—and then he gets it, the first shot of Tavros's genetic material shooting between his fingers and splashing warm across his chest.
"Yeah," Dave says, "yeah, come on, let me have that alien love honey," but Tavros is too far gone for even the incomparable sweet-nothing styles of Dave Strider to slow him down. He lets go again at the next squeeze of Dave's other hand, liberally basting Dave's chest and stomach with frothy, well-churned grubjuice. It's a hot mess of the literally literal kind, and that's apparently what does it for Dave these days, because he's making his own whipped-cream contribution to Tavros's bucketload of caramel sauce—and Tavros still isn't done, emptying his jugs under Dave's two-fisted assault until the metaphor just can't handle the load.
When Tavros finally collapses on top of him, wheezy-purring like some kind of asthmatic demon kitten, they're both covered in goo. There's another set of sheets ruined—no wonder trolls generally just sleep in jars of slime. Well. It's nothing they can't fix with an alchemiter. And maybe a bath.
"Hey, don't fall asleep on me just yet," he says, because otherwise Tavros just might. Dave nudges him in the ribs. "Not until we go wash some of this off, okay?"
"Uhm," Tavros says, which means yes. Dave's hit the point where he can translate Tavros's stutter. Jesus. He ducks out of the way so he won't get brained with a stray horn when Tavros pushes himself up enough to look over at his legs, then across the room at his chair. He grimaces. "Will you, carry me?"
Dave knows how to read Tavros's habits. Tavros knows he can trust Dave with the serious shit. They're both pretty far gone.
"Across the threshold like the luckiest goddamn bride in history," Dave says.
"That's a, human romance thing, isn't it?" Tavros says as Dave slides out of bed and gets his balance. "Okay." He holds out his arms for Dave to pick him up.
"Way better than just okay," Dave says. Tavros feels warm and comfortable in his arms. ...And sticky, but who's counting? "This is the best goddamn human romance thing in paradox space, and don't you forget it."