Chapter Text
You are diligently taping the four corners of your newsprint to a thin sheet of fiberboard when Dave Strider drags a horse beside you and straddles it.
“So, Maryam, what’s on the agenda for today? More shitty still lives? ‘Cause if I have to draw one more bowl of goddamn fruit, I’m gonna paint this place in all the colors of my rainbow puke.”
You spare him a single glance before returning to your task.
“If you ever bothered to read the syllabus or listen to our instructor at the end of class, Mr. Strider, you would know that we have a model today.”
“Really? Oh hell yes, model days are the best. You just get to kick back, draw some naked chicks, watch everyone freak out and get nosebleeds ‘cause they’re drawing some naked chicks.”
“How do you know that this naked person will indeed be a ‘chick’? We could just as easily have a male model.”
Dave gazes at you over his shades, “Call it ESPN. Or, better yet, call it an obvious fucking fact. In your billion art classes here, when have you ever had a dude as a model?”
You wordlessly retrieve a sketchbook from your backpack and begin shuffling through it. Dave opens his mouth to speak, but you interrupt him with an index finger in the air. He waits with his arms crossed until you present him with a drawing from your beginning anatomy class the previous semester. His eyes widen behind his shades at the wrinkled visage of a very old, very naked man stretched out in the warrior pose.
“Does he—“
“Yes. He spent the entire session with varying levels of erection. Then he went around peering at all of the girls’ sketches during his breaks and admonishing them if they did not accurately portray his genitals. It was an awful week.”
Dave hands your sketchbook back, upper lip curled in disgust. You return it to your backpack.
“There goes my art, Kanaya, I hope you’re happy. There’s gonna be some blonde bimbo coed up on that rickety-ass podium begging me to draw her like one of my French girls and I gotta be all ‘sorry, girl, I just can’t get the thought of withered, half-mast dong outta my head, all I see when I look at your face is a big ol’ wrinkle chub’ and then she’s gonna cry. And I’m just gonna point to you ‘cause you’re the one who gets their sick kicks from ruining days and making ladies cry—“
You cut him off with a light smack to the head with a few sheets of loosely-rolled newsprint that you had torn from your pad.
“What the hell’s this for?”
“For the gestures that we will be drawing of your purported blonde coed. You used all of your newsprint the first week of the semester on that ridiculous pet project of yours—“
“My Sunday comics parodies were inspired and it is hella obvious that you—“
“And I would prefer to avoid the inevitable confrontation with our instructor over your lack of preparedness that would absorb upwards of twenty minutes of class time. It is model day, after all.”
You roll your eyes and begin prepping your newsprint with charcoal when Dave opens his mouth to deliver what is sure to a be a rousing diatribe of nonsense concerning the “inspired comic parodies” he had hung over every inch of bulletin board in the art building this January. After a few moments of silence, you look up to see Dave staring at the door, lips parted and brows furrowed. You follow his gaze to a young woman with light, shoulder-length blonde hair dressed in floral-print Bermuda shorts and a white peasant blouse. She places her messenger bag on a chair in the corner and scans the room.
“That must be our model. It appears that your premonition was correct.”
Dave appears close to vomiting. You offer him your water bottle, but he waves it away and forces his face back into an expression of indifference just in time to greet the mysterious girl approaching them.
“Rose, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Hello, Dave, what a pleasant surprise to run into you. I am doing quite well this afternoon, thank you for asking. Is your instructor around?”
“Why?”
“I would like to know if I should be changed promptly when class begins or if he has some sort of short lecture planned.”
You quickly interject, “I do not believe he has arrived yet. He has a tendency to be late on Thursdays.”
The young woman – Rose – turns and flashes you a thankful smile.
“There is no way in hell that you are the model.”
“Is this Advanced Drawing, room 307, 12:20-3:10?”
“God dammit. Since when do you take your clothes off for strangers? Does your mother know that you came to college to be a stripper?”
“I admit that I had hoped that it would shock her at least a little, but alas, Mother is practicing her over-supportiveness to a tee. I’d hazard to say that she’s even a little jealous. She also asked that I pass along a stirring rebuke about your dilatory filial attitude concerning the timely return of phone calls.”
“Dude, no, she’s either calling me at the asscrack of dawn to tell me to eat a bowl of Lucky Charms ‘cause she doesn’t want me to end up on the cast of Rent with malnourishment-induced AIDS, or she’s rambling about the empty house at 2 am ‘cause Bro’s gone on one of his mysterious trips and left the wine cellar unlocked.” Dave pauses. “Like Lucky Charms isn’t the shittiest cereal. Like soaking those little pencil top erasers and some wood shavings in milk and calling it food was the best thing since sliced bread. Now, Trix, that’s a legit meal; that rabbit knew what was five-star and what was basic shit.”
You cannot help yourself but blurt out to Dave, “Your family has a wine cellar?” That was, of course, not the foremost question on your mind concerning the conversation unfolding before you, but it was a concern nonetheless. You know that your knowledge about Dave is mostly limited to his present, and you find yourself once again disgustingly curious about this sphere to which you are not privy.
Before either could answer, the door slams open and in bustles a short man with Einstein-esque wiry black hair, too much stuff in his arms, and a scowl glued to his face. As soon as he manages to dump his burden in the prop closet/ office, he bellows, “Why the hell isn’t everyone set up already? You get to draw something alive for once because the art department, in all their infinite wisdom, managed to get off their Matisse-print-grubbing asses and hire me a model. Speaking of where’s the model because I swear to all the fucking gods in the sky if she doesn’t show up today…” He scans the room until his eyes fix on Rose. She offers him a small wave and stands up to meet him.
“I see you’re in good spirits today, Karkat.”
“Shut up and go get changed, Lalonde. You can go ahead and take your sweet fucking time, though, ‘cause it looks like these undergrad assholes are too busy flirting and fondling themselves to value their education.” Karkat looks around the room, scowl deepening with each student scrambling to ready their newsprint or sharpening their pencils. He alights on you and your spine straightens involuntarily.
“Congratulations, Kanaya, you are once again the only human being in the vicinity expressing even the faintest modicum of competence.” He spares a glance at Dave, and his eyebrows raise in surprise at his relative preparedness. “And it looks like you managed to rub off a little on Strider. So ‘A’ fucking plus to you.”
You smile at the praise and are about to verbally express your thanks when Dave capitalizes on the silence, “Hey now, I’m an artist, and I sure as shit can’t be bothered with all this type A organizational bullshit. You think da Vinci would’a been assed to color code all his inventions and file ‘em all away in the right cabinet? Also, I need to be excused from class this week, I think I’m dying of sickness.” He coughs lightly into his hand. “Consumption. You know how it is.”
“You look fine to me. And take off your sunglasses so you can see contrast like a normal person.”
“My religion keeps me from drawing living things?” Dave, of course, makes no move to remove his shades.
“What about all those crow drawings you turned in last week?”
“Those were taxidermied, and don’t you insult the memories of Huggy, Muggy, and Odie by implying that I would steal their presh living souls in a blasphemous drawing.”
“Please tell me you don’t still keep those disgusting crow carcasses in your room,” Rose says, reappearing clothed in a long-sleeved, heather grey robe that covers only a few inches of thigh. You manage not to stare. There will be plenty of that soon enough.
Karkat looks near screaming, but nearly an entire semester dealing with Strider’s provocations has given him the mettle to keep it together. “Unless you can come up with a valid excuse, you will turn in your best three gestures and best long drawing at the end of class on Tuesday just like everyone else, you freaking thorn in my ass.” With that, Karkat walks off to see to the rest of the class.
Rose perks up like she has just been given a gift. “Dear brother, are you uncomfortable with the prospect of drawing me in the buff? You know that modeling—“
“If you say one word about Freud or Westerfuck or whatever psycho-bullshit is running through your head right now, I will link Mom to every shitty forum and archive that you’ve posted your weirdo fanfics on.”
“Mother loves my ‘weirdo fanfics.’ She is always the first to kudos and comment.”
Dave simply glares at his sister, and you are surprised at the range of facial expressions on display today. Dave’s face is usually as deadpan as his voice, but it seems that not even he is immune to the universal torment of a sibling. In your budding friendship, you had found that he was fairly tightlipped on the subject of his family, and over a year later, you are still unsure of the particulars. You were aware that Rose existed, though you were unaware that she attended this university. There was also another brother that may or may not function as a guardian. You had an inkling of a second sister? You table these musings for a later date; perhaps you could get Dave drunk this weekend and pry. It’s not as if it would be much different than your average weekend.
Karkat yells something about gestures and getting one’s shit the fuck together, and suddenly Rose is robeless and climbing onto the sheet-covered platform in the center of the room. She slides into a textbook contrapposto position, and you set to work. You frown at your awkward proportions, and Karkat calls time.
Rose twists and bends her torso into what you recognize as the pose of the Discus Thrower. You mark the lines of her shoulders and pelvis and think you do a fairly good job making the whole thing not one giant blob of charcoal. Karkat calls time. As you wonder if Rose typically appropriates all of her poses from the Classical sculpture section of Art History 101, she fully extends her right leg and stretches to grab the toes while keeping her weight and balance on the ball of her crouched left foot. You’re impressed with her flexibility in a purely aesthetic capacity.
Karkat wanders around the room giving suggestions of various levels of applicability. Most consist of admonishments that this was an advanced drawing class, and as such everyone’s gestures should look like a person and not like a kindergartener’s bullshit house. Karkat stops behind you and Dave and stands in silence except to call time for the last few gestures. You are disquieted by his breathing, and you glance behind you to find Karkat staring at Dave’s newsprint in what is either open-mouthed disbelief or fury. You would hedge on a combination when you actually look at the drawings in question.
“All right, that’s ten. Rose, take a break. Everyone else, go walk around for a minute and try to remember that human beings have standardized proportions and are not the graphite abominations that you’re trying to pass off as figures.”
Everyone stands and proceeds to mill about. Rose, once again robed, pads over while stretching her shoulders. Dave scrawls a few lines of dialogue onto his newsprint.
“Strider.” Karkat’s voice is surprisingly calm. You feel yourself hunch instinctively. “What the fuck am I looking at?”
Rose peers at the drawings. “Is that Sweet Bro?”
“What the fuck’s a ‘Sweet Bro’?”
“It’s from a comic,” you supply helpfully.
Karkat turns to Rose, turns to Dave’s drawings, and finally pans to you. You watch his Herculean effort to choke down what would surely be an explosive and decidedly unprofessional tirade, and you wonder how one would spot the early signs of an aneurism. Karkat expels a deep breath and says in a disturbingly even voice, “Dave, it’s the end of the semester. My boss is coming by next week to evaluate everyone’s work with the model. Do me a solid. Just draw the damn figure like I know you can.”
Dave frowns, clearly disturbed by the reasonability of the request and the dejectedness of its delivery. He looks at his newsprint which contains several figures all sporting Sweet Bro or Hella Jeff heads atop Rose’s torso. He looks back to Karkat and shrugs minutely. “Yeah, okay.”
Karkat nods stiffly and stalks off to his office. You hope to scream into something soft and muffling. It cannot be healthy to withhold that much rage.
The rest of the period is divided into two longer poses and goes fairly smoothly. The first is a dramatically-lit seating pose that features Rose cross-legged and torqued so that her elbows rest on the back of a wicker chair and her head rests on them. You think that you manage to bang out something acceptable, and you must admit that you are highly motivated by Rose’s occasional peeks at your work during her breaks.
Dave manages to take Karkat’s request to heart, going so far as to push his glasses onto his head during each timed session. His drawings are lovely, as usual, and you envy the liquid ease with which he wields his charcoal. At the end of the pose, Karkat wanders tentatively over to check your progress. When he sees Dave’s drawing, he visibly sighs in relief and mumbles a “Thank Christ” before offering a demand to squint at the shadows more.
Karkat gives you some quick corrections on your proportions, and then heads off to set up the podium for the final pose. The class watches bemusedly as Karkat huffs and puffs while hauling up several wooden boxes, covering them with pillows and drapery, and painstakingly arranging every detail. You would offer to help, but you know better than to come between your instructor and his perfectionism.
Dave returns from a walk with two cups of coffee and hands you one. You sip at the bitter swill that the art school passes off as gourmet.
Dave voices his concern, “One of these days, I’m gonna storm that shop and expose them for the cheap bastards they are. This is Folgers. This is what my tuition is bankrolling. Dixie cups of nuclear-hot Folgers. What about my refined palette? What about my delicate little artist taste buds all screaming as they die a lava death like some Greeks dumb enough to live under a volcano?” This was Dave and your little ritual every class period: banter, one of you grabs coffee for both of you, complain about trivialities. You are glad to see that he is not too out of sorts to participate.
“I’ll ready the trebuchet and flaming rocks.”
“Damn straight you will.”
“Perhaps the ROTC would be gracious enough to lend us a tank and munitions.”
“That’s the kind of thinking I like to hear, sailor. I have half a mind to promote you to whatever’s a rank higher than cabin dyke.”
“Pray think on it, sir, I daren’t imagine what such preferential treatment will do to my already unmitigated ego. Besides, what will the other officers do at the ghastly sight of a woman in their ranks?” You pause and break into a grin and giggles. “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t keep up with this one. Cabin dyke? Seriously?”
Dave wears his own smirk and raises his hand in a salute. “I will have you know that I come from a long line of famous cabin dykes. It’s a super-well-respected military rank, very important.”
You snicker into your hand and glance over to see that Rose has been watching the two of you with ill-concealed interest. Aside from quick glances, she had not come over to the two of you since the end of her gestures, and you think it is either because she finds you boring or because she has chosen to take pity on Dave.
Karkat crawls off of the makeshift bed constructed on the podium and surveys it from each side. “All right, Rose. Get up there and do something interesting. It’s not the most stable thing in the world, so don’t move around too much which shouldn’t be a problem because, oh wow, it’s your goddamn job to sit still.”
“I laud your stellar concern for my safety.” Rose frowns at the structure, strips off her robe, and tentatively ascends. You watch the upper box sway slightly as she shifts, and you bite your lip in concern. She manages to steady herself and works her way into a reclining position with one knee bent and the other leg straight. She places one hand on her hip, elbow akimbo and the other arm draped over her head. She turns her head and settles her gaze to what is probably two inches above your head but feels more like she’s staring right into your soul.
“Comfortable? Think you can hold that for the hour we have left, princess?” Karkat adjusts a few lights with a grimace.
“If I fall off this thing, I am suing the MFA program.”
“How does everyone feel about ditching the lamps and just using natural light?” Before anyone can answer, he switches off all of the lamps. “No objections? Wonderful. ‘Cause I’m the god of this class and you are all my little order-following peons and we’re using natural fucking light today ‘cause it looks nice.” He opens the blinds on all of the windows and nods at the change. You are glad for Rose’s sake that you are on the third floor.
You have to admit that the sunlight is lovely filtering in through the studio windows, grimy though they may be. You also have to admit that Rose is lovely bathed in said sunlight filtering in through said grimy windows. Every time you glance up to take measurements with your charcoal, you find your eyes wandering to the contours of nude flesh spread out before you and forget what you were measuring in the first place. It does not help that Rose keeps catching your eye every time you glance anywhere near her face.
You gulp down a mouthful of saliva and what you hope is your unprofessionalism and force yourself to work. By the end of the class, you have what you think is a suitable enough piece to turn in for critique, though you also think that it would look infinitely better in chalk or colored pencil where you could really capture the golden glow of sunlight as it caresses the soft curves of her lounging form like she’s Cleopatra drifting down the Nile after a particularly gratifying tryst with one of her purported lovers. A lover that is definitely a woman and not Marc Antony. This metaphor is running away from you; Dave would be proud. Or perhaps disquieted by the fact that you’re inserting his sister into your daydreams of the Classical Mediterranean World. You decide to keep your musings to yourself.
Karkat calls the final time, you make a few hurried excuses for shading beneath your figure’s eyes and cheekbones, and Dave sighs in barely-restrained relief. You glance at Rose to see her perched precariously atop her pedestal shaking out a hand that you figure has fallen asleep. She peers nervously at the ground, swaying slightly on the haphazard scaffold.
Visions of Rose’s imminent death by falling dancing through your head, you leap up and offer your hand. She regards both you and your hand suspiciously until you smile and say, “This thing looks moments from collapse, would you like some help?” Her features soften, and she places her hand in yours.
“It’s hardly a successful modeling session if I don’t wind up unconscious on the floor, but perhaps we can forgo the formalities just this once.”
With your support, she manages to find safe footing on solid earth. Her fingers leave yours with what your over-active romantic imagination construes as a spark and a decidedly incongruous rustle of silks. You watch her grab her robe and begin to don it until you realize that you are being an awful creep just standing there.
Dave is packed up and waiting impatiently by the time you return to your horse.
“Kanaya, Jesus Christ, stop ogling my sister and get your shit together. I have class in an hour, and you are wasting my precious fucking-around time.”
“I’m touched that you so highly value my presence that you’d squander even a priceless second on my repugnant pokeyness.”
“Pokeyness? We doin’ pioneer times now? Need me to hitch up the buggy to ol’ Annabelle so we’s can make the trip ‘cross the Oregon Trail to get to finite? Sorry, prof, can’t run a billion T-tests today, I got me the dysentery from some bad crick water, looks like the bakery’s gonna have to figure out its own damn supply needs.”
You giggle at his surprisingly well-crafted southern accent.
“Do you not say ‘pokey’ in big ol’ New York? Perhaps it is a Western thing.”
You shoulder your backpack, grab your portfolio, and gesture towards the door in an overwrought ‘after-you.’ As you turn to follow Dave, you sneak a glance to where Rose is engaged in what appears to be a decidedly one-sided conversation with Karkat. She catches your eye and smiles. You look quickly away.