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Dave is watching you across a roof that’s been through two universes and as many apocalypses. You can’t see his eyes, but you can see his shoulders braced for violence, and the sword he holds like he’s used to its weight. He looks younger than you, even though he’s not, and you remind yourself that he’s here because he wants to be. This is his gig. You’re just here to not fuck it up.
Still, lightly as you can, you say, “I thought you hated fighting.”
“Sure,” he says, and kicks a chip of concrete. “But it wouldn’t be a fight, though, would it? Just. You know. Two dudes brandishing our weapons at each other from six feet away because we’re not gay, except for the part where you can’t spar from six feet away and we are.”
And yeah, it’s a bad idea. You know it. You think he knows it too — but maybe it’s the kind of bad idea he needs. If he can face you here, kick your ass, maybe that means he’s won the shitty game he’s been playing since childhood, and he can live without a larger shadow looming over him. If there’s any way to give him that, you have no right to refuse it. So you nod tersely, beckon like one of those trenchcoated Matrix guys, and tell him, “Bring it on.”
His footing shifts. You raise your katana in an ironic-but-not-really salute, and he nods once. Sun reflects on his shades and the edge of his blade as he lifts it, and for one instant you can’t stop staring, dry-mouthed, at the way he moves. Then he charges, and you have no more time to indulge your bullshit. Steel flashes, ringing with jarring impact against steel as you deflect. He gets in close enough for you to feel his heat even in the heat of day, then falls back again before you can retaliate, rolling on his heel away from the flat of your blade. You follow, press the attack and hit nothing but air. Again. He’s there and gone, too good at knowing where not to be — but when he takes the offensive, all that brilliance wavers. His next blow is uneven, like he doesn’t want to commit. You could train that hesitation out of him, but a different Dirk already tried, in a different universe, and you’re not doing that to him again.
Anyway, ain’t like this is an easy fight. You don’t know what an easy fight is like, but it sure ain’t your bro’s fancy footwork or unpredictable strikes, his swordplay syncopated to whatever beat he’s got spinning in that Time-god mind. He’s in your space again, slipping too easily past your defenses, and this time, you only just catch the edge of his blade on yours. And there’s a problem here, one you’re beginning to realize you should have included in your calculations. Specifically: neither one of you can be normal about this. You’ve got this way of looking at yourself from the outside, and you’re doing it now, seeing yourself split down the middle. Half of you is thinking this is the guy you want to enact upon your ass the world’s most epic heroic beatdown, like some latter-day Achilles dragging you through the dirt behind his chariot, and the other half is convinced that anyone coming at you with a blade wants you dead. And him — what’s in his head, you can’t guess, but his face is blank with concentration as he spins and parries, his mouth thin and tight. He’s balanced, perfectly high-wire poised, using his momentum to keep from falling.
Then you attack, and it’s a mistake, because your bro doesn’t hold his ground. He slides to one side, flashsteps out of sight and comes in fast from an unexpected direction. The motion grabs you by the hindbrain — footsteps, light glinting in the corner of your vision, danger where danger shouldn’t be — and all the rest is automatic. You don’t think. What you do is what you did when a huge fuckoff drone tried to ambush you, the first time you almost died in battle: duck and twist, slice fast and vicious, aiming to take the enemy down and keep him down. But Dave’s no enemy — this ain’t a fight — and fuck it, you’re not doing this. You slam the brakes on your sick moves in time to avert the worst of the damage, but only the worst. Your katana meets resistance, and you hear the clench-toothed stoic hiss that your bro makes when he’s in pain. When you turn, he’s rising from a defensive crouch, his aviators missing, and the record emblem of his favorite shirt is slashed through and bright with blood. His eyes are far away, like he’s looking out at some other time, some other place that you figure probably looks just like this one, and you’re thinking bad idea, yeah, time to call this whole idiot shindig off. Then he moves, and there’s no hesitation left. He drives forward, aiming to end the threat in front of him, and the threat is you.
Everything after that is simple. You see what has to happen, feel it in the coil of your muscles as your brain calculates angle and speed, because you’ve got a choice — take the hit or take him down — and your heart says it’s no choice at all. You’re the goddamn Prince of Heart, and if that means anything, it means mind and muscle are fucking overruled. You course-correct, wrenching your katana to the side, leaving yourself open. You don’t think you’re supposed to make your shoulder move like that. Even before he hits you, it hurts. You see him falter, try to redirect, and you lift your chin to let him know — it’s fine. You can take it. You deserve to bleed a little too.
Then the world goes slow. Your thoughts stretch with the seconds, thickening to molasses even as you realize what’s happening. This isn’t a thing Dave ever does, like you don’t go yanking souls out of bodies. It isn’t what he wants to do or to be. But time still skips like a janky record, and when it falls back into the groove, the world is different. He hits like a linebacker, slamming into you with the full force of his shoulder and not even a glancing scrape of steel. Next thing you know, you’re on your ass with fireworks exploding behind your eyes, and he’s looking down, backlit by sun, his shirt wet with blood. Shallow, you think. He’ll be OK. Your own pain makes itself known in torn muscles, abraded palms, the hot throb of a feeling lodged low in your gut that you wish you could cut out and dispose of. Dave’s sword clatters to the concrete. He stretches an open hand towards you, offering to help you up, and all you can think to say is, “That’s not six feet away, bro.”
Then he’s hugging you, and all you can smell is his sweat and his blood, and the dry dust that gets into everything this time of year, blown in from empty desert. You feel his skinny arms around you, his chin on your shoulder, his breath tickling your ear. This isn’t something you’ve earned. You shouldn’t just let it happen. There’s nothing giving you the right to dig your fingers into his shirt and hold on too tightly, but you do it anyway, keeping him close — and he goes still, silent except for one sharp indrawn breath. You jerk back, giving him space.
“Shit,” you say. “Didn’t mean to come off all unsettling.”
Doesn’t matter what you meant, though, does it? It matters what you do. You keep not learning that, and for one moment, everything feels like it did when you’d hoped, because you’re an asshole, that this could be easy — that what he saw when he looked at you could ever be the same as what you saw when you looked at him. Then you’d touched him too casually, and he’d sidestepped, leaping between moments and away from your hand on his shoulder with fight-or-flight grace. You promised yourself you wouldn’t do that again, and now you have. But all he does is look at you — his hands on your shoulders, his eyes unhidden, something soft now playing at the corners of his mouth.
“You thought…” he says, and stops, lifts a hand like he means to touch you and then lets it drop. “Six feet away is fine, dude, if that’s the way you want this thing to go. But we don’t have to be.”
This thing, you think, but you don’t ask him to clarify. Words won’t work for what you need to say. You tip your chin back again, in something like an offering: your throat to his blade, or your mouth for whatever he wants to do with it, or just a chance to step away, clean up his injuries in peace. You’re expecting him to go for option three. He doesn’t. He scans your face, uncertain. His eyes dart towards your throat, away, and he just sits there with you beneath him, everything in you aching for something that isn’t yours to want. Your heart thunders like a spooked stallion. You’re half-hard against his leg.
You think: there’s no way he doesn’t know.
Then he reaches down and removes your shades, leaving you blinking in the late-day light. There’s nothing to them but mirrored polycarbonate. Hal’s in his own body now, plotting world domination or whatever he does on his own time, but you still feel defenseless. You still let it happen.
“We cool?” Dave asks, like what he really means is something else.
“Yeah,” you say. “We’re cool.”
“Then — instead of sparring, because yeah, that was dumb and lets not do it again, but maybe if you want another dumbass idea, a thing we could try is…”
He leans down. His lips brush yours, softer and dryer than you’d expected, more careful. You let your mouth open, and his tongue slips in, clumsy and unfamiliar, almost too much. You don’t think he really knows what he’s doing, and you sure as hell do not, except for the general concept of your lips parted for him and his hands getting all into your perfectly-spiked hair, but he’s all up close now, his hips pressed against yours, and neither one of you is half-anything. But when you get your hands beneath his shirt, sliding up over the musculature of his back, you hear a choked-off hiss of pain, the predictable consequence of fabric tugging against the goddamn sword wound on his chest. Being a god means you heal fast and easy, but that doesn’t mean anything stops hurting.
“It’s no big deal,” he says, like he believes it. “I’ve had worse.” You know he has. Both of you have stitched up your own injuries before. You remember sitting at your tower’s edge, staring down at the expanse of salt water with surgical thread and sterilized needle and no room left in your body for tears, and something clicks into place in a way it hadn’t before. What he needs, it’s not to administer any kind of beatdown, heroic or just. Never was.
“Sure,” you say, “but I do know my way around a first aid kit, so let’s just put Terrible Fucking Ideas: The Sequel: The Prequel on hold for now and I can patch you up.”
He blinks at you slow, like he wasn’t expecting that and doesn’t know how to read it, then rises with a wince you suspect you weren’t supposed to see. His eyes are a deep, sunset red, and he won’t look at you straight on, until you see where his shades have fallen and hand them back. Not even cracked. That’s some god tier shit. As he slides them back over his face, he could almost be the brother you never knew, the one you always meant to make proud — but once his eyes are concealed again, he reaches for your hand, and you let him hold on tight.
Inside the apartment, it’s cool and dim, but you can’t shake the feeling of the sun on your neck as you sit him down in the cluttered kitchen and go to get clean water and gloves, soap and bandages. He doesn’t flinch when you peel his bloody shirt away, or clean the slash you left across his chest as carefully as you can, dabbing away dried blood, making sure no fabric is caught there. But his stomach trembles beneath your touch, and you hear his measured breath, in and out through gritted teeth, the quietest whimper sometimes on the exhale. He’s still hard, somehow, which you guess means he’s more like you than you thought, and maybe when he’s bandaged up, he’ll let you go down on your knees for him. It won’t be about fixing things, just his scent, his proximity, the heavy velvet heat of his dick in your mouth. But you’ve got bandages in your hands now, and you’re winding them around his chest, clean and soft, over antibiotic ointment that you know from experience stings like a bitch.
Then it’s done — the wound dressed, the bleeding staunched, Dave’s hands unclenching from his knees. The easy part is over, and the important part isn’t something you know how to do.
You have to try, though. The other Dirk never did, so it’s up to you. You crouch down in front of him, so he’s not looking up at you, and you tell him, “Hey, it’s alright. You won’t be less of a badass if you cry.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, his voice gone quiet and rough, but he doesn’t cry. He just laughs a little, and touches your throat, the scar there, so gently. His hand curls around the back of your neck, and the weight of it there feels right, because that’s where he wants it. Your thumb finds the button on his jeans, unfastens it, and he pulls you tentatively down. The sound he makes when you take you take his dick in hand — the long shaky breath as you wrap your lips around it, tasting bitterness and salt — isn’t stoic at all, isn’t pain, just need and relief wound up tight together. His fingers are in your hair now. Your head is in his lap, cradled there as his thighs tense beneath your hands, and you’re thinking maybe your shadow was only ever yours. This isn’t a game for him to win.
You’re done with games. You don’t think you’ll be back to the roof again.