So yes. First fanfic in the Homestuck universe, written for a friend for her birthday :) Formatting was fun, lots of run-on sentences. However, seeing as I joined the Homestuck fandom relatively recently, please tell me if I, ah, messed any facts up.

Homestuck, Dave Strider and Jade Harley belong to Andrew Hussie.

Your name is Jade Harley, and the first time you saw him, you noticed that he was really scrawny. He was built like a beanpole, all thin and tall and lanky and lean, with strawberry-blond hair and freckles dusting across his cheeks and nose, his sunglasses making his face seem paler than it was, thin lips resting in a slight frown, eyelashes casting slight shadows across his sharp cheekbones.

He never smiled, really – it was always a smirk, with a hint of a snicker, perhaps. You'd only ever seen him laugh in person a few times, and it was a treat, with that actual grin on his face, one that flashed at you for an instant before it was replaced by his usual poker face. You find after a while you hope to see that smile every time you see him, but despite most of your best efforts to laugh and to make him laugh he ends up with that little smirk and you give up, hoping for better luck the next time around, pretending that is doesn't aggravate you when it totally does.

He had a hint of a southern accent, you remarked to yourself after a while of speaking to him face-to-face, though it was barely noticeable. The only time you actually registered it was when he got a little excited or started one of his famous Strider monologues, when the words that came out of his mouth were so quick and rhythmic and occasionally garbled that they made absolutely no sense, so that you couldn't understand a single thing he had actually said, but at the end of his rant there it was, just the tiniest Texan twang as he stopped to catch his breath.

He would, of course, deny this to no end when you teased him about it. He denied a lot of things, actually, and he still does, but you don't let it bother you since that's how he drags himself through life and everyone has their ways.

Even so, you still can't believe he denies that he wasn't lonely, that's bullshit, Jade, even if I was lonely you wouldn't fucking understand. You aren't stupid, you aren't as air-headed as you're sometimes made out to be, you grew up by yourself too! But it would be a long time before he opened up to you, and you were content to wait, you supposed, but then again, you were tired of waiting.

That was all you did for the majority of your life, actually. You waited. You waited for a very long time, after your grandpa died, with his arcane messages to you as if he'd known he would die and the visions you'd see in the Skaian clouds, and you were constantly doing specific things to ascertain the future you and your friends were destined to take. You never let on how exhausted you were sometimes, how stressed, because no one would understand, really, how you carefully executed things to get things to work out just right. John was great, he was the nicest person you had ever had the chance of meeting (and to think he was your brother of sorts! You couldn't have been happier), and Rose was great too, though she got a little analytical at times… but no one really understood the pressure of failing, that if you did something wrong everything you cared about would pay.

That is, until you met Dave Strider, perhaps the most ironically unironic person you've ever met, and definitely the coolest one you've ever had the chance to converse with. There was one stark difference, however: where you, under no circumstances, could fail, he messed up and did things wrong all the time. Miserably, even, sometimes his failures resulted in everyone's deaths! But unlike you, he had second chances, and while this seems unfair you realized after talking with him that he doesn't see it that way. After all, he's seen himself fail, with dead Daves all over the place, and while he acts like he doesn't give a fuck you know it actually creeps him out.

But anyway, you appealed to his coolness because that's what he was, a coolkid, therefore unreachable to a country girl like you, and you figured you might as well try to get on his good side because heck, better to have a coolkid on your side than to have one on the sidelines. You're not sure if your efforts paid off in the end, at least, you weren't for a good long time, not until you entered the Medium and the world ended and all of that. Before you got your space powers and you were breeding frogs and he was helping you with his time-traveling abilities.

That was when he really opened up to you – not Dave the coolkid, but Dave Strider, the actual thirteen year old who was, to quote his manner of speaking, "scared shitless" of the future. And that was when you began to see some similarities between yourselves.

He told you about Bro with a sort of admiring reverence, his voice taking a tone of someone who can't believe what they're seeing whenever the fabled guy was brought up, and when he told you about how he died and how he had decided he didn't care too much you knew he denying it. Dave spoke with his actions rather than his words, and whenever he lied he had a little giveaway; a tiny quirk of the lip, a twitch of a hand, a muscle pulling in his neck, something, and then you always knew, and he always knew you knew when he could see the pitying expression on your face.

Then he'd tell you he was fucking serious and you would give him a small smile and say I believe you, and he'd go off tangent on a rant on how you obviously didn't believe him, and then you'd shoosh-pap him and after he'd calm down he'd confide in you a little bit more if you're lucky, until he vanishes to get more frogs and it's back to work.

It's the only time he bares his soul to anyone, and you see he is lonely, and slightly forgetful, and he is very much afraid of his own mortality. You wonder how he manages, constantly knowing that somewhere on a doomed timeline there is a Dave who is going to die, and that each Dave is him but isn't him, and he can't feel their utter sadness when they do die but he knows exactly how it would feel, and then you would swear his poker face was slipping – but then he'd get himself together, tell you to forget it, it was a load of shit anyway, and then he'd be gone and the moment would be lost. He was so hard to get through, so used to hiding away and tucking his feelings into himself, never letting anyone in, really.

Well, that was what you thought, originally, until he told you about everything that happened in his childhood back in Houston, Texas, struggling to get the words out, and he's stuttering and biting his lip and his mask is slipping and he's mortified at his lack of 'coolness'; but you accept him, encourage him with a grin and laughter, keeping his hands in your own when he begins to pull away, until his story becomes clear in your mind as he slowly gets it out.

He was raised by his Bro and Lil Cal, if you could call it that – raising doesn't usually encompass constant strifes where you were beaten to the ground on a regularly basis, with a bunch of shitty swords located conveniently in the refrigerator and smuppets all over the floor. You never had an irreversible fear of a puppet who could seemingly beat the shit out of you without even blinking an eye (this puppet could blink, he tells you with a shudder), with that same puppet haunting you in dreams and giving you nightmares where you'd wake up in a cold sweat.

You never had to hide your feelings, or be taught that coolness means speaking in a certain manner, making sick beats, loving irony, and having a poker face on, at all times. You never had to be ashamed of your iris color and to hide it behind shades because contacts irritated your eyes, nor did you have to deal with eating takeout and microwave dinners all the time by yourself because your Bro was always out working (though you ate meals by yourself, yes, after that fateful day when your grandpa died). You never dealt with a sort of inferiority complex, knowing your Bro was better at you in everything but still moving forward, hoping for the day you surpass him, and even while you know you have an inferiority complex you had to continuously deny it because it's not cool.

There was more, but that was the stuff that stuck to your brain, and when he told you all of it you just held his hands and watched his face as he struggled to keep everything in, to keep his coolkid façade in place, not to lose face in front of you even though you're Jade, and for gog's sake it's not like you're going to tell John or Rose or any of the trolls about what he told you. What happened there was a private thing between you two, and you wouldn't dare ruin it – but even so, it had been so hard for him to open up, you could understand why he wanted to rein it back in, and so when you knew it was a losing battle and his mask was beginning to slip you just pulled him to you in a hug so he would know you're not looking. And that was the first time you had ever heard him cry, or at least something close to it, a strangled sob that was clogged in his throat that you only heard once before his long, limber fingers closed around your shoulder.

A few minutes passed, then, he pulled back, and you both simply stared at each other for a while, until you reach up and tentatively begin to pull down on his sunglasses, wondering what color his eyes were (he hadn't told you, only that he was ashamed of them) and you expect him to protest but he doesn't. He catches them, effortlessly, smoothly as they fall, and then your brilliant green eyes meet his deep red ones and your fingers are skimming across his cheek, tracing his jawbone, pausing at his blond eyelashes, wondering how he could have ever thought his eyes were something that he couldn't be proud of.

When you told him you liked them, those same irises that he had hidden from the world for years and years, you could see his eyes sheen with unshed tears, but he didn't cry, he just told you 'thank you' in this tiny little uncool voice, and then he hugged you again, hard, and you both stood there for a little bit, arms around each other, his face hidden in your hair and his sunglasses poking into your back while you tucked your face in the crook of his neck, breathing in his scent (steel, sweat, exhaustion, safety, love), and yes, maybe he isn't perfect, but no one's perfect.

He's Dave Strider, though, and that's just how things roll - and frankly, you wouldn't have it any other way.