DVD Commentary: The Law of Conservation of Mangrit

[edenfalling]

For othercat, for the Fic DVD Commentary Meme.

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The Law of Conservation of Mangrit: It starts out ironically, of course, but by the time Dave's wearing a corset and a swanky evening dress and Terezi's in a three-piece suit, Jade wants nothing more than to get them both into bed as soon as possible. (15,300 words)

Note: This is the fic that for a very long time was known only as "untitled Jade/Dave/Terezi crossdressing porn." And by a very long time, I mean I started writing it back in August 2012. (Yes, really.) That means it's based on canon that has since been drastically altered.

I think the best way to handle that issue is to say that "The Law of Conservation of Mangrit" is a retroactive AU based on the Game Over timeline, with the assumption that the actual Game Over events didn't spin so irretrievably out of control and the players were therefore able to win without Terezi using John to retcon anything. So Davesprite and John lived through all three years of the Yellow Yard and the meteor road trip was miserable for everyone involved. As for why Terezi is blind again, I assume she burned her sight out heroically saving somebody from something -- because of narrative echoes and significant choices and stuff -- and this time even if anyone offered to heal her, she said no.

Thank you to MadameHardy and missvgc for beta reading!

Some further background information! I started writing this fic because of the following kinkmeme prompt: I'd like to see a character of your choosing present as a different gender than they identify as, because they and their partner(s) think it's hot. I'm not really looking for trans!fic here (though that's awesome!), and I don't want them being shamed over either their gender identity or their play. So, for example:

Maybe sometimes Roxy likes to put on a suit and fedora and peg Dirk until he begs her to let him come.

Maybe John thinks it's really hot for Karkat to wear falsies and lacy underthings while he fucks his nook and calls him his loving wife.

Maybe Nepeta likes to switch between presenting as male or female between sexual encounters, and Terezi loves never knowing what she's going to get in the sack.

Would love to see focus on details like how the character dresses/gets ready to present a different gender (possibly with partner helping them?) as well as how that plays out in sexy times (i.e. gendered behavior re: topping, if that'd be a thing for your characters, or how non-hermaphroditic characters make up for having only male or female genitals, etc.).

By the time I finished, nearly three years had passed and I felt I'd veered too far from the prompt to post this as a response, but that was the inspiration.

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It starts out ironically, of course. Dave might have been idly rambling about anime, Jade's furry fetish, Terezi's dragon fetish, and who knows what all, and somehow the conversation might have turned to magical girls, and then to boys who turn into magical girls, and Jade might have said something about Dave having beautiful cheekbones and eyelashes and it was a shame he wasn't a magical girl in a floofy princess dress, and Terezi might have snickered and dared him -- and somehow this might have resulted in a flurry of increasingly stupid online orders and a dozen anonymous gift packages delivered to Dave's swanky penthouse apartment.

Maybe. Jade admits nothing.

Jade ordering the gifts anonymously was a late edit, actually -- originally I think I had them being anonymous (but without any explanation or reason?) and I changed that to make the fic come full circle to the ending.

Now Dave is holding a ridiculous ruffled pink prom dress up against his chest and making doubtful faces at the lack of sleeves. "I dunno, Harley, it's not like I have the chest to hold this up. The boob fairy godmother overlooked me when I was born, you know how it is with fairies, always getting drunk, losing their invitations, tossing curses like confetti to cover for their senior moments."

"You've got muscle -- that takes up space too," Jade says, kicking her heels against the sofa and valiantly trying not to laugh. "Besides, Roxy initiated me into the wonders of double-sided sticky tape!"

"Or we can just make Kanaya fix it up. I should try some of these on already, see how much ladyvim they bring out in me," Dave says, dropping the dress back into its box. He reaches behind his neck, grabs a handful of his t-shirt, and yanks the whole thing over his head. Jade still doesn't know how he manages that without knocking his shades askew. It's not like the neck holes are all that large, and he sure ends up with crazy hair!

Thank you to Tumblr for educating me on the structural differences between men's and women's t-shirts, and how that affects the characteristic methods for quickly pulling them off. (I'd post a link but I've lost it in the depths of the internet.)

Dave tosses the shirt aside, rolls his shoulders -- warm brown skin wrapped tight over muscle and bone, kissed with a tracework of scars -- and drops silk-smooth into a crouch, reaching for the ruffled dress.

The end goal of this fic is porn, so clearly we have to set the mood by staring at the characters and going 'yum!' *wry*

"Not that one," Jade says. "It's not your color or your style. If you're going to wear a dress for more than a joke, you need something... slinky. A little black dress with a neckline halfway down your front and no back at all. Or maybe something tight and red with a bit of black lace. And fishnet stockings. Oooh, that'd be awesome!" She and Terezi could take turns peeling them off his legs with their teeth.

Dave shakes his head, the spoilsport. "Nope. Tight is right fucking out, too hard to fight in. I draw one line and that's it. The day a Strider isn't ready to strife at the drop of a hat is the day the world ends. Again. Nobody wants to go through that shit another time."

This attitude may be a little OOC, given the personal issues Dave talks about with Dirk, but this world is kind of a mashup between Earth and Alternia so I figure weapons and casual dueling and stuff are more of a thing, which would put Dave under pressure to work through those issues and come to a place where he can use the skills while recognizing that his training was straight-up abusive, rather than just drop the entire question of violence. Mostly though, this is an artifact of when I started writing the fic and also my general opinion that swords are sexy as fuck.

Jade pouts and lets her ears droop. "Awww, but please? For me?"

Your quiet heads-up that Jade still has dog ears. For the record, I think they replaced her human ears rather than supplementing them (or just being decorative)... and no, I'm not entirely sure how her glasses manage to stay up without ears to hook over. I'm sure she could work something out with mad engineering, though.

"Tell you what, you can pick the colors -- better you than Pyrope," Dave says magnanimously. "Just make sure I can move."

"No heels, then," Jade mourns. "Damn. I was really looking forward to you learning the true pain of stupid shoes. I need more people to commiserate with." He didn't say no to the stockings, though. Hmm. Maybe something with slits all the way up the thighs, so it's more like a tunic? And the stockings could peek out as he walks...

Dave shoves his hands in his pockets and slouches back against the archway to the kitchen, all super-casual 'oh by the way did I mention I have six-pack abs?' and looking unfairly bitable. "Hey now, when did you get into wearing heels? And why was I not informed?" he asks. "I thought Terezi and I had dibs on any Harley leg appreciation moments that might arise in our mutual journey along this particular timeline."

"I'm not into heels. That's the point!" Jade tells him. She slides her feet out of her leather sandals and points her toes, turning sideways on the sofa and extending her legs over the far armrest. Her skirt slides up her legs, exposing her bare calves and pooling around her thighs. Her legs are scratchy-dry and stubbly, black hair dark against pale skin -- ankle-length fabric covers all kinds of secrets and she's lazy about shaving -- but Dave doesn't give a damn, judging by the way his attention catches at her display. Smart guy, best boyfriend.

I am 'lazy' about leg-shaving myself -- i.e., I don't shave them at all unless I'm wearing a skirt or a swimsuit, which happens maybe three times a year at most, and even then sometimes I don't bother. So I threw this in as a sort of verisimilitude moment, and this is actually where the whole 'shave Dave's legs' idea came from. My initial plot bunny only included the dress and suit, and would have been much shorter and less interesting. (I don't actually remember when the corset entered the picture.)

Dave ambles forward to lean against the end of the sofa, jean-clad thigh between her bare feet. He raises one hand to tip his shades down a fraction, glances at her over the edge.

The door slams open and Terezi whirls into the apartment in a burst of summer heat. She stabs her cane into the umbrella stand -- it clatters against the armful of broken swords -- and prowls forward, picking her way through the mess on the floor. "Ohoho, what have we here? A delicious buffet of space and time laid out for me to appreciate! I can tell this is an aesthetic setup because you aren't touching," she adds, forestalling Dave's most likely response.

"There's an amazing invention called foreplay, you might look into it," Dave says instead, pushing his shades back up. "Anticipation is half the fun."

"And half the torture," Jade adds, wiggling her fingers at Terezi by way of greeting. "Hi, Terezi! As you can see, a mysterious dress fairy godmother has inundated us with riches. But Dave keeps finding reasons not to try them on. He says he needs something he can fight in, and probably not strapless because of his tragic lack of boobs."

"Pfff, irrelevant, I have no boobs to speak of either and do you see that stopping me from wearing your absurd human tube tops?" Terezi says, spreading her arms to display the glitter-spangled neon blue example of that garment she is, in fact, wearing right at this very moment. Her shoulders are sunburned a delicate teal and the skin on the bridge of her nose is peeling. It is criminally adorable. Jade wants to lick her all over.

This is a threesome, so Jade must lust after BOTH her partners. Also I find the idea of Terezi in a tube-top oddly fascinating.

Apparently Dave is thinking rebellious thoughts in Terezi's direction because she shakes her head in mock sorrow. "Embarrassment is not a good scent on you, Dave, far too much grapefruit and puce for your complexion. If you're that shy about displaying your shoulders in public -- which is a crying shame, your shoulders are delicious -- we can work within your restrictions." Terezi turns to Jade. "What about ruffles? Or sequins? My research revealed that sparkles are an important part of magical princess couture. Also giant staves with red heart jewels."

Look, I can't NOT make bad Sailor Pluto jokes when handed the slightest justification. I don't know why that is one of my bulletproof humor kinks; it just is, and I have accepted that. I even have a fic series in a different fandom altogether which contain a Sailor Pluto joke that continues through multiple fics over several in-story years, so really, you should be glad this one is as fleeting as it is. *wry*

Also Terezi is not, strictly speaking, reading Dave's mind, but she is absolutely using her game powers to help her interpret his reaction.

Dave fails to hide his wince.

Taking pity on him, Jade says, "That's mostly for transformation sequences and attacks, I think. And too many ruffles or a huge skirt would make it hard for us all to fit in the frame when we take pictures. I still think slinky is best, but maybe with slits on both sides so his legs aren't trapped?"

Terezi's face is suddenly all gleeful teeth.

"Oh no. Stop right there," Dave says, holding his hands up and making a (presumably ironic) cross with his index fingers. "I know what you're thinking and there is no way in any conceivable timeline that you could convince me to wear your old Flarping getup. The universe couldn't take our combined levels of cool. It would be awesome and terrifying and the end of the world as we know it, and also? I'm a Sagittarius, not a Libra."

Actually, if you go by the Western tropical Zodiac method, ALL the kids except John and Jane are Sagittarius, which is hilarious. (John and Jane are Aries.)

"But Dave--" Terezi says, with crocodile sorrow.

"No," Dave says, and Jade recognizes the rare note of finality in his voice.

Terezi sighs. "You spoil all my fun, coolkid."

"You still get to help Jade pick my dress," Dave points out. He nudges Jade's feet off the armrest, clearing a slice of sofa, and drops onto the cushions in a boneless sprawl. Jade promptly sticks her feet into his lap and digs her toes into his bare stomach in a silent demand. He gives her a blank stare from behind his shades but begins to massage her arches. He and Terezi both have the best fingers, long and nimble and rough with swordwork callus.

I just really like the mental image of Dave and Terezi practicing swordfighting with each other, okay? I am a simple woman. I have simple needs. :D

"It will be pure candy red, of course," Terezi says. She leans over the open boxes and takes a deep breath, smelling the piles of fabric, plastic, and tissue paper. "Or maybe paisley. I like paisley; it has an attractive spicy bouquet. No, wait, a flower pattern! Those are also very colorful, and much less predictable in their arrangement. A new combination of scents with every shift of fabric!"

Terezi's opinions on paisley and floral patterns are courtesy of one of my betas, who said I should do more with her smell-o-vision.

Dave has the particular non-expression that means he wants to beat his head against the nearest wall, or maybe accidentally-on-purpose nick a finger on one of his innumerable swords so Terezi will get distracted by his blood and a chance to ostentatiously pity him. Jade favors him with a sunny smile and scrunches deeper into the sofa, rucking her skirt even further up her thighs. His breath catches for a second.

Jade likes skirts.

"Let's stick with red," Jade says to Terezi. "It's a classic, very sexy, plus we already know he looks good in it."

"You make a persuasive argument," Terezi says. "Very well, red it is." She busies herself rifling through the sea of boxes, tossing fabric and packing material to and fro with blithe abandon. "Red, no ruffles, slinky, slit skirt -- long or short, Jade?"

Jade looks speculatively at Dave, who shrugs minutely. "Long," she decides. She lets her focus slide across the city to the harbor island where she and Jake share an antique lighthouse, and tugs; a pair of her own stockings and a garter belt materialize in a flash of green light and fall neatly into her hands. "And these underneath."

In case Terezi's earlier Mind thing was too subtle (and Jade's ears might have some other handwave justification), here I make it textually clear that yeah, they totally still have their game powers.

Dave's hands go still on her feet. "Harley. What the fuck."

"Don't you like them?" Jade asks with false innocence. She holds them up -- sheer black silk stockings with lace panels up the sides, and black silk over something stiff and skin-hugging with delicate straps and little silvery clips -- and mimics Terezi's crocodile grin. "It's not so bad. You can move in these. I could be asking you to wear a Sailor Starlight outfit, but I'm not mean like that. The skirt will preserve your maidenly dignity, I promise!"

Terezi laughs so hard she falls forward into a pile of dresses and tissue paper. The boxes crumple under her dense flesh and bones.

"Oh, I'll wear them. I will wear them so hard your head will spin like it's got star billing in The Exorcist," Dave says. "What I want to know is when you bought these beauties and why Pyrope and I haven't had a chance to tear them off you yet."

"An excellent question. The prosecution demands an answer, Miss Harley," Terezi says between gusts of laughter.

Jade flushes. "Can't a woman have secrets?"

"No!" Terezi proclaims. "Secrets are so completely illegal. Unless they're mine. Then they're just ill-advised."

Belated reference to her 'secret' affair with Gamzee, and the way she apparently kept her guilt about Vriska to herself rather than trying to talk about it and thus work through it.

Jade giggles. "Yes sir, sorry sir, I wouldn't want to disrespect the law sir." She bites her lip, runs the stockings through her fingers, feels her ears twitch back and down, involuntarily telegraphing her embarrassment. "I bought them a couple perigees ago. I like the way they feel on my skin and the way they make me look, but it's so super-sexual, you know? I feel like I'm playing dress-up when I wear them, not like I'm being me," she admits.

I had a reason for Jade to use 'sir' instead of 'ma'am,' but I can't remember what it was. Ah well.

Her rationale for not wearing the stockings is similar to my reasons for preferring to be underdressed rather than overdressed in any given situation: wearing really nice/fancy clothes makes me feel like I am pretending to be someone else, and that is hideously uncomfortable. If I'm dressed down, I may be out of place but at least I feel like I am myself, and that is a source of emotional/mental strength. (I mention this because I know a lot of people have the exact opposite reaction. Human variety is fascinating!)

"Yeah so?" says Dave, jerking his thumb toward the heap of ridiculous dresses. "What do you think all this bullcrap is, my normal everyday clothes? You could walk around in a three-piece suit, a sheet of tinfoil, or a goddamn birthday cake and I'd still think you were the witch of sex."

"The prosecution concurs," Terezi says, propping herself up on her elbows. "In fact, the prosecution admits a sudden interest in smelling you in a three-piece suit -- possibly with these stockings underneath the trousers."

Jade shakes her head. "No suits for me. I like skirts. But you could wear one," she adds, trying to divert the conversation.

Dave's breath catches again. "Oh. Uh. Yeah. You could do that, Pyrope," he agrees.

Jade stops and contemplates Terezi in a three-piece suit. The shirt and the waistcoat gentling her angles. The cufflinks glinting like a buried secret as she turns her wrists. The jacket settled evenly on her shoulders, fabric tailored as sharp as her bones. The trousers clinging to her ass. The long socks, maybe held up with old-fashioned gentleman's garters. The tie around her neck, like a short silk leash... Oh. Yes. "I'd like that," Jade says, a little breathless, her hands clenched tight around black silk and lace.

Those are, word-for-word, my own feelings on the subject of Terezi in a three-piece suit. I did not bother to disguise them one bit. :D

Terezi draws in a long breath, not even bothering to be subtle. Then she smiles, a shark scenting blood in the water. "Ohoho. I see how it is. The law of conservation of mangrit is in play. If Dave is in a dress, clearly Jade or I must be in a suit. I'm happy to take this hit for the team."

"You just want an excuse to roleplay a snazzy celebrity mob defense lawyer," Dave says, his voice gone thick and a few notes deeper than usual.

"Filthy lies! I will be roleplaying an independently wealthy district attorney. Obviously. I would never sully my principles by helping criminals escape their ill-earned fates," Terezi says.

Dave rolls his eyes behind his shades -- Jade can tell by the way his eyebrows twitch. "Yeah, yeah, that's what they all say."

Terezi growls and lunges around the coffee table, wrapping herself around his legs and pretending to gnaw his toes through his rainbow argyle socks. (Jade has never been sure if Dave wears them for ironic purposes or because they're catnip to Terezi.) "Help, help, I'm being attacked by an officer of the law," Dave deadpans. "This is blatant government oppression. I claim my First Amendment rights, free speech for the masses, Harley and I were peaceably assembling until you busted in and crushed our art installation protesting the unfair payscale differences between public prosecutors and alt-radio personalities, not to mention dilettante nuclear physicists."

Random bit of backstory/worldbuilding, because yay verisimilitude!

Jade pokes his ribs with her toes. "Excuse you, I am only five dissertation chapters, an oral defense, and a solo combat with a deadly snake away from a PhD! No dilettante could last through that many years of research and academic politics, to say nothing of the half-meter-long wasp I fought for my master's degree."

This paragraph does two things: first, it gives you a rough indication of how old everyone is -- mid-twenties, give or take a year depending on how fast Jade got through college and her various graduate programs. Second, it lets me work in one of my favorite bits of internet nonsense: namely, the solemn FAQ about fighting snakes as part of one's Ph.D defense. I figure if ever there was a world where that would be literally true, a mashup of Earth and Alternia surely qualifies. And then I got to elaborate on it a little, with the giant wasp battle involved in getting an MA or MS degree. :D

"Fine, professional nuclear physicists who are going to revolutionize this world's science and get us all into space without using anyone as living batteries unlike some people's home planets that shall remain forever nameless, ahem, hint hint, you with the teeth and the color fetish, I am speaking to you."

Terezi sticks one hand under the cuff of Dave's jeans and pinches. Jade curls up on her side and dissolves into laughter.

"Pyrope, I'm warning you, I have a vicious guard dog," Dave says. "If you don't let go by the count of three, it's on your own head. One. Two. Are you even listening to me? Two and a half. Two and three quarters. Last chance. Fine. Three. Sic 'em, Jade."

Jade kicks him in the thigh, still laughing. "Dickhead. Sic her yourself. Some knight you are!"

Dave sighs. Then he leans down, hooks his hands under Terezi's arms, and scoops her sideways onto his lap. After a token snarl, Terezi goes limp and falls against Dave's chest, tucking her right horn up beside his ear. The tip digs into the cushioned sofa back, adding another rip to its collection of snags and tears. Dave frees one hand and uses it to shift her feet up to tangle with Jade's legs.

"I have you now, my pretty," Dave says, flicking his fingers against Terezi's left horn. "Mwahahahaha."

"Yes, you have us right where we want you," Jade agrees as she twists herself upright and tugs Terezi's feet onto her own lap. Terezi licks Dave's neck and snickers when he twitches.

"I'm surrounded by heartless dictators," Dave says, but judging by the way his sock-covered toes are sliding up Jade's calf and his hands are sneaking under the bottom edge of Terezi's garish tube top, he doesn't really mind.

I wanted to show them being in an established relationship and comfortable enough to be silly with each other. I think that's very sexy in and of itself, and also felt true to Homestuck because it let me puncture moments with humor all the way through the story.

"I hereby exercise my authority as co-dictator of Dave to issue a proclamation," Terezi says as Jade unlaces her sneakers. "When we find the perfect dress for you and a nice suit for me, we'll all make ourselves fancy, go out for dinner, and show everyone in this city what they're missing out on."

Jade and Dave exchange an awkward glance. "Uh," Dave says. "I realize this world's a combo of the good stuff from our respective universes with as little of the bad as possible, and also gender's a little different for trolls with your whole incestuous slurry thing, but." He stalls.

"Humans can be funny about people acting out gender roles that don't match their biological sex," Jade continues for him.

"And by funny she means hate crimes," Dave finishes. "Which are still a thing. I checked the legal code and everything." He looks aside, the muscles in his jaw gone tight for a second as he fights to keep his face blank. Jade lifts one hand from Terezi's feet to pet his spindrift hair. That reaction only ever means one thing, and while Dirk doesn't need protection any more than any other Sburb survivor does, it's adorable to watch Dave and his brother stumble awkwardly around the simple idea of family.

This is a fairly tightly-focused story, but I did want to throw in these little mentions of other characters -- Roxy and double-sided sticky tape, Kanaya and dress-making, Jade sharing a house with Jake, Dave and Dirk awkwardly stumbling around showing familial affection, etc. -- as a reminder that they do have a network of family and friends outside their trio, because that's much more emotionally healthy than if they were claustrophobically isolated and trying to be everything to each other.

"Like hemospectrum bigotry is still a thing for trolls," Terezi says. She nestles deeper into Dave's shoulder, a put-upon rattle buzzing deep in her chest. "Sentient lifeforms are all stupid, regardless of species. This is an immutable fact I have discovered and wish to lodge a protest against with the officially installed representatives of the multiverse at large. It is absolutely bile-inducing how many different ways people can find to be stupid, even without raising the issue of active malevolence. The things I could show you in the statute books..."

The buzzing rattle in Terezi's chest is just a little hat-tip toward the trolls being actual aliens rather than humans in gray paint and fancy headgear. Also, her rant is a little bit self-directed because depression and guilt don't just evaporate without leaving marks.

"Preach it, sister," says Dave, tipping his head back against the sofa.

Jade looks down at Terezi's feet and bites her lip. Then she wriggles out from under her girlfriend and stands, hands on her hips, in the wreckage of the stupid ironic frilly dresses. They beat Sburb. She is not going to let anything smaller than the death of universes slow her down anymore.

I really love when Jade takes charge. Can you tell? *wry*

"Screw bigotry," she declares. "We are going to do this thing. Terezi, you are going to wear a suit and be the suavest motherfucking guy in the city and everybody will want to pay for the privilege of polishing your shoes. Or staring at your ass. Whichever. You will have cufflinks, a snazzy hat, and the whole nine yards!"

She raises her hand, finger stabbing the air for emphasis. "Dave, you are going to wear a slinky red dress, my stockings and garter belts, and shoes with heels -- yes, you are, I dare you to learn how to fight in them. You are going to shave your legs and be completely drop-dead gorgeous. Um. Though not literally." Jade pauses, sticks out her tongue at her snickering boyfriend and girlfriend, and regains her steam. "And I don't care that Dave will still look like a man and Terezi will still look like a woman, because you're both beautiful and awesome and fuck the world if they have a problem with that!"

As for what they'll do once they get home from dinner... well, the world can keep its damn nose out of what isn't anybody else's business but theirs.

Two pairs of mirrored shades -- one black, one red -- regard her blankly. Then Dave pulls his hands out from under Terezi's shirt and begins to clap. "Amen, Harley. Welp. Looks like we're doing this."

"It will be an event we cause to occur," Terezi agrees, shark grin splitting her face. "But where will we get the clothes? These dresses are far too silly to use in your proposed scenario."

"Rose and Kanaya, obviously!" Jade says. Then she pounces on them because anticipation is only half the fun, after all, and she wants some payoff while they wait for this plan to come together.

No actual porn in this scene -- it would ruin the narrative flow -- but I felt a fade-to-black reminder that that's where we're heading was tonally appropriate.

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They end up back in Dave's apartment a week later. Jade's lighthouse is great for movie nights and parties, but A) Jake lives there too and B) all their friends have a standing invitation to drop by which is not conducive to anything that might end in sex. Conversely, while Terezi's treehouse hive is definitely private, the lights are a little dim for human eyes, not to mention extremely haphazard in their placement. This is fine for sex but less good for delicate tasks involving razors scraping along human skin.

I removed a paragraph from the rough draft at this point:

Jade is perfectly aware that her boyfriend and girlfriend are both in love with sharp edges, not to mention Terezi's fascination with human blood, but they save that for their twosome nights. Jade still wakes from occasional nightmares about Jack slicing open Dave's throat, or his torso riddled with her own bullets. Pain can be erotic. Blood, not so much.

As you can see, it was slightly out-of-key with the overall tone -- the idea was to stay light and happy/funny/sexy, to sort of acknowledge but skim over angst and tragic histories and such -- and also the implied characterization doesn't really mesh with Dave's canonical association of violence and swords with emotional and physical abuse.

Dave usually shaves with a straight razor, but no matter how good he is with blades, Jade is pretty sure a safety razor is a better idea for his legs. "Besides, it's part of the experience!" she says when he looks dubiously at the 3-pack of disposable Venus razors with their three blades, bendy heads, ergonomic lavender grips, and aloe goop to smooth the shave. "Now get in the tub, or else."

Women's razors are hilarious, frankly. Their advertising is even worse.

"Just because you do this one particular way doesn't mean your backassward methods are ladyland gospel," Dave says, but he strips obediently and sits in the shallow end of the bathtub, elbows propped on the tiled rim and legs sprawled open in lazy invitation. His penis is mostly soft, but that could change fast. All Jade needs to do is bend down and touch...

All mentions of Dave's dick are courtesy of my betas, who reminded me Jade should be noticing it. I found the shaving/flexibility stuff erotic enough that I clean forgot. (Also I think penises are inherently ridiculous, but that's a separate issue.)

But first things first. Jade turns on the water to lukewarm and locks the drain. Then she shucks her own clothes and steps in to kneel between Dave's feet.

The tub is more than big enough to fit them both. Jade suspects it has dreams of being a swimming pool when it grows up, but in the meantime it's settled for simply being an incredibly tacky porcelain and mosaic extravagance that fills an entire corner of Dave's oversized master bathroom. The wet tiles gleam in the late afternoon sun that streams in from the skylight.

You should look at floor plans and real estate listings for penthouse apartments sometime. They get pretty wild!

Terezi has recused herself from the actual shaving on grounds of cultural ignorance. Now she sprawls outside the tub, bare arms hooked over the longer edge, and watches in cheerful fascination. "Humans are so inefficiently designed," she says. "Trolls are much more sensible -- none of this extraneous hair growth your bodies are so fond of."

"It's not extraneous," Jade says as she dunks the bar of soap into the slowly puddling water and begins to lather Dave's left leg, working up from his ankle in circular strokes. "Some theories say the presence of hair on the limbs helps create an extra layer between skin and clothes that helps trap body heat during cold weather. Even if that's not true, it's a sensory warning system -- it magnifies the sense of touch so we know if something's on our skin -- and even discourages insects from biting long enough for us to notice and shake them off!"

She skims her fingers over Dave's thigh, just close enough to graze the fine hairs without touching his skin, and grins at the involuntary muscle twitch she provokes. "See?"

This has been your mini science trivia lesson for the day. You're welcome.

"Then why shave it off?" Terezi asks. She shifts around to the narrow end of the tub and pokes Dave's shoulder with one pointy, yellowish nail. "The court demands a justification for this strange and counterproductive behavior."

"Cultural shit," Dave says, tipping his head back over the rim of the tub so his hair brushes Terezi's chin. "Like, why sharpen your nails instead of trimming them round or square? Imitation claws don't serve any practical purpose, but it's what trolls do so you do it."

Sometimes I assume the trolls have actual claws. Other times I assume pointy nails are just a cultural beauty trend. In this fic, I took the latter approach.

"Maybe you're trying to look more like trolls," Terezi muses. A few strands of Dave's hair get caught in her teeth and she makes an upset-teakettle noise trying to blow them away.

'Upset-teakettle noise' is, for whatever reason, a phrase I just really like. I am fairly sure I have used it before in other contexts.

"Maybe we are!" Jade says, running the soap over Dave's knee. "But in that case I'd expect beauty ideals to be more similar across human history and cultures. I think it's just random chance."

"Like there's anything random about you ladies taking a chance to get your hands on my body," Dave says. He lifts his leg out of the shallow water at Jade's prompt, bent at the knee to stay within easy reach, and obediently points his toes. The muscle in his calf tightens, standing out in sharp relief. Jade dips the razor head into the water, grips his heel for leverage, and begins scraping away the dusting of spun-glass hairs, nearly invisible against the brown of his skin. First the knuckle of his big toe, then the top of his foot. She swishes the razor under the faucet to rinse out the mat of dead hair and draws a line right up the hard bone of his shin.

Describing fine, pale hair as 'spun-glass' is also a minor verbal tic of mine.

"That is the weirdest thing I have ever felt in my life, and yes, I'm including the first time I put my face in Terezi's junk," Dave says. He shoves his shades up onto his forehead and peers down at Jade's hands, busy drawing lines of bare skin along his calf. "Okay, obviously it's the same physical sensation as shaving my manly beard, but displaced to the wrong part of my body. It's like taking a drink of apple juice and tasting it in my thumb instead of my mouth."

"Weirder than growing wings?" Jade asks, waggling her ears.

Dave curls forward and flicks at the left one, rubs the fur the wrong way as he slides his fingers down to scratch at the base where cartilage joins her skull. Jade bites back a whimper. His fingers are absolutely not fair, too clever by half, and they make some fragment of canine instinct want to sit up and beg until he pets her everywhere.

"Definitely weirder, 'cause in that case there was code making it not-weird. Which was weird in its own way, just like getting a sicknasty buffet of alternate memories shoved in my head at the end, but fuck the game, let's not talk about it. Only shaving now, chop chop Harley, we've got a dinner reservation to meet," Dave says, pulling away with one last scratch and pat. He's smiling, that tiny secretive quirk in the corner of his mouth, and Jade knows he knows exactly what his hands do to her. Bastard.

Another quick backstory/worldbuilding infodump! Because we are working with a version of the Game Over timeline, Davepetsprite was never formed... or if they were, they were also separated at the game's end and current!Dave is actually an amalgam of meteor!Dave and Davesprite. I did that partly because I think a Dave with both those journeys under his belt might have more perspective on his issues, but mostly because otherwise his and Jade's relationship has this giant weirdness pocket (the version of him she dated wasn't him) that I didn't want to deal with.

She follows the next swipe of the razor with a caress over newly bare skin, and grins when his smile flickers around the edges with the strain of not showing a reaction. (Jade's not sure why he bothers. Naked human men come with a pretty accurate gauge of interest level, after all, and Dave's well past half-hard at this point.)

"They were such pretty wings, all oranges and lemons like a delicious fruit basket," Terezi says, worming her fingers down between Dave's back and the side of the tub to trace his shoulder blades with her nails. "You should get a tattoo to remember them." She licks the nape of his neck.

He twitches. A tiny splotch of red blooms on his shin where Jade didn't quite pull the razor back fast enough. Damn. But it's not deep or broad; it should stop bleeding by the time they're out of the tub and Dave won't need a bandaid to interrupt the purity of silk on skin.

Jade blots the blood with her index finger, then stretches her hand forward for Terezi to taste. Her girlfriend's tongue is long and flexible, its moist, raspy texture both like and unlike Bec's tongue was when he would try to groom Jade back in another universe. Jade curls her fingers up and scrapes back.

This has been your regularly scheduled 'yes, the trolls are aliens!' reminder.

Terezi grins.

"I'm not opposed to a tattoo in principle, but how could I wear backless dresses after doing the needle dance?" Dave says as Terezi sinks back into her lazy sprawl. "Do you want me to look like a tramp on our super-classy date, Pyrope? Oh, the shame."

"Tattoos aren't trampy; they're sexy. But it's okay if you don't want any," Jade says. She grips the razor between her teeth for a moment as she straightens Dave's knee a little, lifting his heel out of the deepening water. "Bend your toes back toward your shin," she says, words mangled by the plastic handle in her mouth.

"Eww, Harley slobber in my pristine bathwater," Dave deadpans, but he dutifully repositions his foot. His Achilles tendon stands out stark and straight. So do other things... but business, business!

"There is far too much hair floating around for this water to count as pristine," Terezi says as Jade carefully scrapes the razor over the slightly ridged skin of the tendon and around the knobs of Dave's ankles.

"I still say I could've done this on my own," Dave says as Jade moves up to delicately remove the hairs on the front of his knee. "Can of shaving cream, balance my leg on the toilet, shower to rinse it off -- boom, done, five minutes tops. Not everything needs to be a three ring circus complete with peanut gallery."

"This is a Strider leg appreciation moment," Jade says, a smile of her own tucked into the corner of her mouth. "Terezi and I have dibs on those. Shut up and deal."

Callback to the dialogue about Harley leg appreciation moments from the opening scene, both because that's the kind of in-joke/private reference that people develop in relationships, and because callbacks/internal memes are a very Homestuck thing.

Dave mimes being stabbed through the chest until Terezi winds her fingers into his hair and yanks his head back to kiss between his eyes. "Play nice, coolkid," she says. "We're building anticipation here. Think about how good it will feel to slide the stockings onto your smooth and pretty legs -- and how much better it will feel when Jade and I peel them off after dinner." She grins and nips the air over the tip of his nose.

"I can anticipate just fine by myself," Dave grumbles, but his penis twitches with increased interest. Jade bites down on her urge to giggle.

She manhandles his leg until it points straight up into the air and scrapes along the soft and tendony back of his knee. Dave peers around his leg, unfazed by the position or the effort of holding it there -- his flexibility and stamina are beautiful things -- and raises one sugar-pale eyebrow. "Is that supposed to tickle?" he asks.

Flexibility is sexy! Someday I should write a fic about Dave doing yoga. Or maybe Rose. Dave AND Rose and their partners (whoever they are) getting all hot and bothered? Hmm...

Jade shrugs. "I don't know! It's not like I can tickle myself and I've never had anyone else shave my legs." She lathers the inside of Dave's thigh while it's so helpfully out of the water and starts shaving down toward his ass. His penis twitches again. Jade sends it a mental promise: later.

"What, never? This is a tragic oversight that must be remedied," Terezi says. "I notice that your own legs smell a smidgeon stubbly. Once you've finished preparing Dave, he and I will prepare you. One leg each."

Jade freezes at the pictures and the phantom touches that suggestion conjures in her mind, razor pressed up against the inner skin of Dave's thigh, right where leg hair merges into the rougher, kinkier hair around his balls.

"Hey, watch the merchandise," Dave gripes, flicking at Jade's ear again.

"Sorry," Jade mumbles, and hurries through the final strokes on the left. Then she shifts back toward the drain and lifts his right leg out of the rising water. Dave points his toes before she can ask.

She kisses the top of his foot before she sets blade to skin. It takes great effort not to follow the trail of the razor with her tongue.

I honestly think the shaving and the descriptions of Dave in his dress are the sexiest parts of this fic, moreso than the actual porn. But I freely acknowledge that I have somewhat idiosyncratic tastes.

---------------

After Jade finishes shaving Dave and they all move to the equally oversized shower to share an impromptu but surprisingly chaste group rinse -- "Because anticipation is sweaty work," according to Terezi -- Jade is suddenly faced with two evil smiles (one much larger than the other) and a razor deftly twirled between Terezi's fingers.

"Turnabout is fair play," Terezi says. "Back to the tub with you!"

Jade shakes her head. "Not today or we'll never make our reservation. Besides, remember the law of conservation of mangrit? Dave and I can't both shave our legs on the same night."

"Seriously, Harley?" Dave says as Terezi's face falls in an elaborate pout.

"Cross my heart!" Jade says, and teleports out of the shower stall before either of them can grab her. The coat of water she leaves behind patters down onto the tiles like indoor rain. "Does anyone need help getting dressed, or should we surprise each other in the main room when we're ready?"

"I was going to ask you to help with the corset--" Dave starts.

"--but if you want to play the tease, we can too," Terezi finishes.

Sometimes it's eerie how fast those two can pick up each other's train of thought. But Jade is willing to bet that all three of them think that about the other two, and that's okay! That's what twosome nights (or days) are for -- to make sure that all three sides of their triangle are well anchored.

I still think that paragraph is badly phrased, but I couldn't think of a better way to get across the notion that within a three-person relationship, you're always going to have moments where two members are REALLY in sync and the third feels a bit on the outside. The trick is to make sure that you work on each two-person relationship so they will all have those in sync moments, instead of being a pair and a satellite.

Uh. Which is not to say that pair-and-satellite relationships are bad! They can be great and fulfilling for all parties, assuming that is what people thought they were getting into. If people thought they were getting into a balanced trio and it then fell into pair-and-satellite, that is emotionally painful. So I wanted to acknowledge that that's a risk, and show that Jade, Terezi, and Dave are aware of it and working to make sure it doesn't happen.

Sorry, long note, back to the fic!

"It's a fashion show, then!" she says, and claps her hands, letting her biggest smile spread across her face. "Awesome! Hey Dave, you have some slinky runway music, right?"

Dave's face goes completely blank for half a second. Then the corners of his eyes crinkle in amusement. "Yeah sure, I can dig something up."

Jade suspects the music she gets may be wildly inappropriate, but it's not as if she really cares about the proper atmosphere for fashion shows, and ironically inappropriate things are par for the course around Dave. "You do that," she tells him.

"Do you still need help with the corset?" Terezi asks, turning her head so she's not quite facing Dave.

He shakes his head. "Nah. If we're going for surprise, let's go all the way. I'll loop myself, no big."

He means 'time loop,' of course. I sometimes wonder if I should have said that explicitly in the text, to remove ambiguity, but I think the phrasing on the page is what Dave would actually use as verbal shorthand, so. *shrug*

Terezi snorts. "You are both terrible cheaters who cheat, with your extra hands and telekinesis. What's a poor troll to do to level the human sports playing field? How can I drive for the basket when the big man has all the downs on his side?"

"You hit a long drive to the goalposts and start stealing bases while the umpire's standing there going, 'Jegus fuck, that troll can smack that racket good,' and the big man's left eating dust as you tear around the track like the champion sports bandit. This shit is obvious, T-Z, come on," Dave says, grabbing his shades from the marble sink counter and slipping them over his eyes.

Facing Jade, Terezi closes one blank red eye in a horribly overdone wink. Then she turns back to Dave with a scandalized expression. "Stealing bases? A scheme so nefarious cannot be allowed to continue! This demands a government investigation into the highly questionable ethical practices of professional sports, and perhaps also the big man's personal finances since he is clearly a beneficiary of the system."

"Holy shit, you're right," Dave agrees. "We've gotta call the House of Ancestors, get them working on this case, maybe pull in the FBI, nail the dude for tax evasion like those old time gangstas--"

Hall of Ancestors being a troll name for a human political institution, a little reminder that we're in a blended world.

Jade escapes across the apartment to the guest room and collapses on Dave's spare bed, laughing so hard tears leak from the corners of her eyes. Dammit, Terezi knows how much Jade gets turned on by people who aren't afraid to be silly. She set Dave off on purpose.

Jade's always loved the way Dave makes her laugh, even when she's laughing at what he'd probably think were the wrong parts of his patented rambling monologues. But really, he is such a ridiculous dork underneath, around, and on top of his ironic veneer that it would be impossible not to laugh at the things he says. The worst part about the way her relationship with Davesprite disintegrated was that he started to think she was laughing at him instead of with him, like she was having an eternal private joke at his expense. Terezi's Dave, meteor Dave, got similarly awkward and defensive, falling into the well of his own insecurities -- it wasn't just the Condesce's influence that made Jade want to slap him when they met again in the alpha session, and Gamzee wasn't the only reason he broke up with Terezi. And neither version of him would talk to anyone about it!

Oh look, character analysis and backstory for why/how they're all together despite Jade and Terezi each having a relationship with Dave that fell catastrophically apart.

These days he's more okay with being ridiculous. Ironically enough, it turns out that's one of the secrets to really being cool!

But Jade can't afford to get distracted by thinking how much she'd like to tie up her girlfriend and her boyfriend and tickle them both until they're breathless. She has a dress to put on... and a couple other things to get ready for when they get home after dinner. After all, there's a law of conservation of mangrit and someone will have to wear a penis on Dave's night as a lady. Grinning to herself, Jade teleports her favorite dildo and harness from the toy drawer in her lighthouse bedroom. After a moment's thought, she teleports some lube as well. Dave almost certainly has some around, but his organizational skills leave a lot to be desired and there's a significant chance he bought weird flavored shit to surprise Terezi into making terrible faces. It's simpler to use her own supplies.

Trivia point: so originally, the strap-on was ALSO going to be a new element in their relationship, which Jade had been asking Rose for tips on how to use. But when I got to the actual sex scene, I realized that that would be too many complications to deal with at once. I also realized that it was slightly improbable for them to have been together long-term and not tried pegging even once, given their general awareness of kink. So now Jade has been pegging Dave for years. :) I suspect they've worked out a method for Terezi to peg him too, though she gets less out of it physically given the genital configuration I picked for the trolls.

Jade drops the supplies onto the spare bed and begins to get dressed.

She's long since outgrown her Three in the Morning dress, but the basic principle of green, black, and starlight spangles is sound, and while the members of their merry band of ectobiological mayhem aren't publically known as gods in this reconstituted world built from scraps and memories of their former universes (they might be, if they moved to the planet whose eventual inhabitants will one day play the game themselves, but they've seen too many examples of power corrupting to go that route) they are all quite comfortably well-off. Which means tailors and one-of-a-kind dresses are things that can be made to exist, if someone so desires.

Jade pulls black silk over her head and lets the fabric settle on her hips and cascade down her legs in a whispered waterfall. The layer of dark green lace is slightly askew; she tugs until it sits properly aligned. Swirls and constellations of blue-black sequins and silver beads wander over the black silk, gathering the muted light of the single lamp and peeking out between gaps in the lace like stars behind a scrim of fog.

Jade twirls, lifting her bare arms over her head. The skirt floats outward like a midnight bell, hem rising from her ankles to swirl nearly level with her knees. She stops, facing the small square mirror on the wall, and smiles conspiratorially at her reflection while her dress shifts and twinkles with her every breath, the pitch-black fabric making her skin look ethereal in contrast. Yeah. This is good.

She pulls on pantyhose and a thin black slip (taking a moment to scold herself for not thinking to do that first), shoves her feet into black wedge sandals with interesting ankle straps, and tints her lips in green the color of her eyes. She gives her hair a cursory brush but otherwise leaves it alone -- it's too thick to ever lie down tamely, and anyway Terezi and Dave both like to sink their hands into the tangles, working out knots by touch. A bit of deodorant under her arms and she's ready to go.

I would buy Jade's dress in a heartbeat, fyi. Also, yeah, this is totally clothes porn. What else were you expecting, given the story premise? ;)

Jade opens the door and peers into the main room of Dave's apartment. It's empty now, the air vaguely bluish as the sun moves west and no longer streams in through the skylight or the bank of south-facing windows. The massive entertainment complex is turned off; the sofa, armchairs, and coffee table are suspiciously clean. Across and to her right, the door into Dave's master bedroom suite is shut tight. She moves forward and glances left down the short hallway in case Terezi is being less mysterious, but no, the door to Dave's Man Cave of Manly Art (a.k.a. the workroom where he keeps his mixing equipment, his analog and digital art supplies, and his collection of dead things in jars) is just as firmly closed.

The amount of research I did to come up with a functional apartment layout was kind of ridiculous, especially since most of it ended up invisible. But I am glad I put in the work, because having a fixed sense of the physical space I'm working with is very helpful in choreographing the characters.

"You are a giant pair of slowpokes!" Jade calls, raising her voice to make sure the others can hear her through the walls. "You're going to make us late for our reservation at a very nice restaurant. We'll walk in and instead of people saying, 'Wow, those people look so cool!' they'll say, 'Wow, those people are such jerks, showing up a whole hour late and still expecting to get a table!'"

"Hold your hoofbeasts! This outfit has far too many intricate layers and pieces. Its construction cannot be rushed," Terezi says, opening the workroom door and leaning through the gap into the hall. Only her head, a white-clad shoulder, and one gray hand are visible. A green silk tie hangs loose around her neck, swinging in and out of the shadows.

"Also what gives, why are you out in the main room already?" Dave adds, his voice slightly muffled by his bedroom door. "I thought you wanted to surprise us with your runway strut and you jumped the gun on the music front."

"We can't watch each other without opening our doors," Jade points out. "It's easier to just come out into the open once we're dressed. But don't worry! I promise to clap when I see you."

My initial draft had Jade promising to whistle and clap when she saw Dave, to which he responded:

"Sexual harassment," Dave says, lightning fast. "For shame, Harley. I'm not that kind of girl."

Jade takes a deep breath through her mouth and lets it out through her nose. "There isn't any kind of girl who deserves to be harassed -- or any kind of boy, or any person at all for that matter. So okay, I won't tease.

I cut that and tried again because wow, that was a sharp left turn into a completely different story. Those are obviously important issues, but this story is about sexy clothes and loving and consensual porn, not hierarchies of institutionalized and internalized social oppression.

"We can even set up the music for your grand entrance, if you'd like," Terezi offers, shouldering her door open further and walking toward the main room. She is all stark monochrome -- black trousers, white shirt, black waistcoat, black hair, white teeth, black lips, gray skin, white lacquered nails -- and then, drawing the eye like magnets, the brilliant red of her glasses and the vibrant green of her undone tie. Her sharp-nailed feet are bare on the thick white carpet and make no sound when she moves.

Initial description, so you have a general sense of Terezi's outfit. We get into the clothes porn details in segments as Jade gets closer and notices them.

"Do you want help with the tie?" Jade asks.

Terezi starts to shake her head, then pauses. "Do you have experience with this type of knot?"

"Grandpa showed me how to tie bowties," Jade says. "It's not really the same thing, but I looked up a bunch of regular tie knots online yesterday, just in case."

Terezi spreads her arms and tips her chin ever so slightly back, baring her vulnerable throat. "I am at your mercy," she says.

Okay, I lied, Jade fixing Terezi's tie (and Terezi letting herself be that vulnerable, and they both are extremely aware of the implied vulnerability) is ALSO one of the sexiest parts of the story. I may kind of have a Thing for power and trust and stuff like that.

Jade finds herself crowding Terezi against the wall without any clear memory of either walking or teleporting across the distance between them. She raises her hands and strokes up the sides of Terezi's waistcoat -- it's thick and soft, like a combination of satin and velvet, with a paisley pattern embroidered into the fabric in jet black thread.

Terezi draws a sharp breath at the touch, leaning forward to press her nose against Jade's cheek. "Beautiful," she whispers. Then she licks Jade's cheek and grins. "Tie now. Sloppy makeouts later."

"Jerk," Jade says fondly, but she lifts her hands from Terezi's ribs and picks up the ends of the tie instead. The fabric is heavy silk shot through with nearly microscopic threads of gold, just enough to lend it a subtle, sunny glow. "This is too thick for a full Windsor but a four-in-hand won't be formal enough. Half-Windsor?"

Terezi shrugs. "I usually tie them like nooses and no one's complained to my face, but whatever you think is best."

Jade grins. "Half-Windsor it is! Hang on a minute, though -- I need to flip the instructions since I'm not looking in a mirror."

"Sprite flipping is the one thing I miss from the game," Terezi says idly. "It was useful to be functionally ambidextrous. We should work on that in our next strife session."

Your daily reminder that Homestuck is bizarre. Normally I do that via mention of sylladexes, but they seemed a little bit tonally off for this story, so I went for a game mechanics mention instead.

"Shush, you, I'm concentrating." Jade sticks her tongue between her teeth and frowns down at the tie. "Hmm. Wide end down here, narrow up there, and... yeah. Wide over narrow, around, up, down--"

"And here I thought I was the one with the copyright on mumbled narration of my own actions," Dave says, startling Jade into dropping the tie halfway through the knot. She and Terezi turn their heads in unison toward his bedroom door.

"Voila," he says, spreading his arms. "Dave Strider in a dress for your viewing pleasure. Accept no substitutes, one night performance only, no rain checks or refunds."

Terezi breathes deeply through her mouth and nose, letting her tongue slip out between her teeth to taste the air. Jade rakes her eyes up and down, taking in all the nuances on the off chance that this really is a one time only thing and they'll never talk Dave into a repeat.

His nerves are obvious in the careful blankness of his face and the tension of his posture. Jade can't think why, though. He's gorgeous.

The dress bares his shoulders, but short, gauzy sleeves grace his upper arms, fastened to the main dress by a wide band of darker rust-red fabric. The dress itself is the same scarlet as his eyes, its rust-trimmed neckline daringly low across his chest. The bodice pulls in tightly at the waist, then falls in a straight sweep nearly to the floor, emphasizing both the breadth of Dave's shoulder and his lack of boobs and hips. Even the corset Jade knows he's wearing underneath doesn't do much to create an illusion of curves -- can't fight if you're laced too tightly to breathe, she supposes. The hem is rust red again, as are the edges of the side slits that run halfway up each thigh. When he turns, the fabric moves just enough to let glimpses of black silk stockings and lace trim peek through the side slits.

Totally clothes porn. :D

"Beautiful," Terezi says, like she did for Jade.

Dave raises his eyebrows, the gesture both easily visible and oddly vulnerable without his shades. "Isn't that my line?" The words lack some of the snap he'd usually give them.

Ooh, and a vulnerability mention! I'd forgotten that part, actually.

Jade favors him with her brightest and most sincere smile. "Thank you for the compliment! We'll all be beautiful together." She feels Terezi's laughter through the palms of her hands, and pokes her girlfriend right over the top button of her waistcoat. "Didn't I tell you to shush?"

"You also told me you'd tie my tie, yet it remains strangely unknotted," Terezi says between snickers.

Jade pokes her chest again. "Anticipation, remember? Besides, I'm going to have to undo your waistcoat to get the tie positioned behind it. Maybe I should get started on that."

"Oh yeah, do the collaborative striptease thing, pretty please with maraschino cherries and bloody rare steak," Dave says, his voice almost back to normal.

Jade gives him the finger. "You keep out of this! Go put on your shoes if you have nothing better to do than make distracting comments. Terezi and I are busy."

"Remind me why I thought having two girlfriends was a good idea?" Dave mutters, but Jade knows he doesn't mean it. She presses her hands flat against Terezi's chest for a moment, feeling the tiny swells of her breasts and the subtly inhuman angles of her ribs through two layers of fabric. Then she begins to unbutton the waistcoat, top to bottom, spreading the heavy black cloth to the sides as she goes.

"Hold that out of the way, please," Jade says, and picks up the tie to start again. This time she succeeds without interruption and tugs the finished knot up to rest gently against Terezi's throat between the narrow wings of her shirt collar, like the promise of a bite once they're done with dinner and public display.

She fastens the waistcoat buttons from the bottom up: one, two, three. Terezi lifts her hand to brush the soft, bare skin of Jade's throat. Jade's breath hitches at the cool slide of heavy lacquered nails on hot skin. Jade sways forward, Terezi's clawtips like little pinpricks against her throat as she tilts her head to slot her mouth against Terezi's gentled grin.

Hello, trust and vulnerability, here we go again. *waggles eyebrows*

Terezi tastes indefinably alien as always: honey-mustard, tarnished silver, seawater with a slightly skewed balance of salts. But mostly she tastes of candy-cherry lip gloss, invisible against the black of her lips but a screaming brand to Jade's nose and tongue. "Addict," Jade whispers into the corner of Terezi's mouth.

Her girlfriend grins unrepentantly.

Jade licks the flat face of Terezi's jagged upper teeth.

They were totally going to make out in the living room and forget their dinner reservation. :)

Anyway, narratively this scene exists to make sure that Jade/Terezi also comes across as a sexual relationship instead of two women sharing the same man and mostly being platonic friends with each other. I needed something very sensually charged, and also for them to temporarily forget about Dave even though Dave in a dress was the original point of the story. Hopefully it worked!

"Okay ladies, I'm stepping in to break this up on behalf of our poor neglected dinner reservation," Dave says, his hands falling lightly onto Jade's and Terezi's shoulders. He pushes them gently apart -- not enough pressure to actually move them, but enough to make the potential force obvious.

The gauzy sleeves highlight the muscles of his arms very nicely, Jade thinks: a veil that serves more to draw attention than to conceal. She lifts one hand from Terezi's collarbone and threads her fingers between Dave's, bringing his hand down where she can study it. "You're really going all out," she says, admiring the fire-engine red polish on his nails. Maybe she should have painted hers.

"Did my toes, too. Sorry about butchering the stockings, but since fingerless gloves are a thing, I figured why not equality for feet, thong socks for all," Dave says. He raises his left leg between Jade and Terezi, knee bent to hold his foot at their eye level, displayed in its all its scarlet leather, stiletto heel and peek-a-boo toe glory. The front half of his skirt strains over his thigh before falling to the right like a pulled-back curtain. Jade spares a moment to dutifully note his red toenails before her eyes inexorably dart along his leg toward his torso. She can't quite see Dave's panties, but the black stockings and garters are plain as day, taut and inviting over the smooth, hairless skin of his shins and knees and lower thighs.

She reaches toward his raised leg, fingers hungry to touch.

Dave swats her hand away, somehow not losing his balance in the process. "Bad Harley, no biscuit. Dinner reservation, remember?" He starts to lower his leg.

Terezi catches his ankle at shoulder-level. Her nostrils flex as she takes a deep breath. "Jade?" she says, not bothering to make any pretense at eye contact. "How much do you care about dinner?"

Jade teleports in her phone and texts a quick cancellation to the restaurant. "Dinner? What dinner?"

Added courtesy of my betas, who reminded me that skipping out on reservations is rude. :)

Dave looks hunted for half a second, his hands jerking involuntarily toward his trapped leg. Then he stills, eyes narrowing as he glances from Jade to Terezi and back. He raises his eyebrows. "Man, if I'd known this was the silver bullet shot to your libidos, I'd have tried the skirt thing fucking ages ago. Or at least a kilt. Kilts are totally manly and don't even call for stupid itchy lace panties."

Jade tosses her phone onto the sofa and scoops up the front half of his skirt. She looks down.

Yep. Black bikini-style panties, though she wouldn't call them lace when they're solid cloth with just a little scalloped trim. His penis and scrotum make an obvious bulge between his thighs, distending the fabric so it's almost sheer. Jade is pretty sure there are ways to make male parts less obvious in female lingerie, but that's not the point of this outfit, is it? Otherwise Dave might have bothered to shave his sideburns or even found some earrings and a ribbon to hide his Adam's apple instead of being so obviously a man in a dress.

Original version of that paragraph: Yep. Black panties, though she wouldn't call them lace when they're mostly solid cotton with just a little scalloped trim. She's not quite sure where he's tucked his penis -- back between his thighs, maybe? That sounds incredibly uncomfortable. It looks uncomfortable, too, judging by the bulge in his panties and the way he's subtly trying to shift his weight.

Cut and rewritten because suddenly the sexy ran away, goddammit.

Jade likes the contrast of his physical sex with the cultural gender of his outfit.

I do too, in case you hadn't noticed. ;)

The bottom of a black corset rests on Dave's hipbones right above the panties, thin leather flexing slightly with every breath he takes. Knowing Rose and Kanaya, it's tailored specifically to him and the boning is steel or even skywhale baleen, not cheap plastic. Jade takes a half step forward and rests her right hand on Dave's left hip, trailing her fingers along the thin line of skin visible between silk and leather.

You should not get corsets made out of actual baleen. Please do not kill whales for fashion! But this being fantasy-land, I figure the presence of trolls may have allowed for more wilderness and wildlife protection (you will note that Alternia seems to have quite a lot of wilderness), such that skywhales aren't endangered and can be hunted in careful quotas. Also I like to keep throwing in little reminders that we're not exactly on Earth.

Dave's breath hitches once, but his balance never wavers even when Terezi kneels and props his stiletto heel on her chest, dropping tiny, teasing kisses on his bare toes while she unbuckles the straps of his shoe.

Slowly, Jade feels her way up Dave's torso, insinuating her hand into the tiny space between corset and dress. She presses her fingers and palm to the leather to trace the stays in their channels, tugging inward against Dave's torso. The lacing is tighter than she expected, given the straight lines of the dress; she can feel a slight but noticeable curve to his waist before the corset flares outward around his ribs. She shifts her hand to his stomach, finds only the smooth, hooked line of a busk fastening. The laces are in the back.

He has to have time-looped himself to pull them tight.

Jade's breath hitches. She imagines Dave in an already tightened corset pulling the laces on his own body, both of him breathing in unison, both in their little black panties and stockings with the toes cut out to show scarlet-painted nails. She imagines Dave's breath going short and fast at the pressure of leather and steel against his skin. She imagines Dave running a hand over his own shoulders, resting his forehead against the back of his past self's neck, muttering nonsense into his own ears.

Spoiler: this is exactly what happened.

She wonders if the laces are red.

"Switch feet," Terezi says, tossing Dave's shoe over her shoulder. It crashes into something -- probably a wall or a door by the sound. Nobody bothers to look.

Dave sets his stocking-clad foot on the carpet and raises his right leg, switching balance smooth as silk despite the four-inch heel on his remaining shoe. His thigh brushes against Jade's dress as Terezi takes hold of his ankle and begins undoing the shoe straps. Jade dips her fingers under the lace edge of his panties, presses the side of his penis as it stiffens.

"Hey, uh, y'all. Executive decision here. We're moving this to a bed." Dave's voice hits that particular deep note Jade first heard years ago on a golden ship in the middle of an impossible voyage, when she stroked her fingers through the feathers of his healing wing and realized he might like her as more than a friend. A faint hint of Texas creeps in as well, the way it always does when his emotions are running high.

In retrospect, I think Dave probably always talks with a faint hint of Texas -- he can keep it out of his typing, but not out of his speech. But I stand by the idea of his accent getting stronger when he's emotionally worked up for any reason.

Jade glances sideways and down at Terezi. Her girlfriend nods. She rips loose the remaining strap.

As the ruined shoe falls, Jade teleports them onto Dave's bed.

---------------

Time stutters as they drop, the river of passing moments gone syrupy-thick until Jade thinks (oh-so-slowly) that she might almost be able to reach out and stroke her fingers along the edge of a fleeing second. Then Dave's left foot hits the mattress, everyone's combined weight shoves him off balance toward the headboard, and he loses his grip on the cosmic pause button.

I don't know exactly why the image of Dave slowing time while they fall is sexy to me, but it is very sexy to me.

The next minute is a confused montage of people's elbows, knees, and hair in places other people would prefer those body parts not to be, plus a fair bit of coughing.

I didn't want to actually write them sorting themselves out. Fortunately prose allows you to skim past stuff like that!

"Not one of your best ideas, Harley," Dave says once everyone is more or less sorted out and he is sandwiched firmly between Jade and Terezi on his silly card-suit quilt. He tosses Terezi's red shades over Jade's head in the approximate direction of his nightstand.

Getting both sets of sunglasses out of the way. Jade keeps her glasses because otherwise she won't be able to see what she's doing.

Jade sticks out her tongue. "Meanie. How else were we supposed to get here without letting go of each other? And no, rock-paper-scissors to decide who takes which position in the bridal carry does not count as a practical solution!"

"I don't seem to remember you protesting at the time," Terezi says, stretching her left hand over Dave's face to scratch Jade's right ear.

"Of course I didn't. I was laughing too hard to breathe!" Jade says. Her dress is riding up into her armpits and her slip is tangled oddly around her knees, but it's hard to fix that when her left arm is trapped under Dave's torso.

"I also don't seem to recall you putting up any struggle when I swept you off your feet," Terezi continues. Her thumb grazes over the base of Jade's ear, where white fur blends into black hair, and canine muscles and tendons sit oddly against her skull. Terezi presses down with the pads of her fingers, then digs in her nails just enough to prickle.

Jade whines in the back of her throat, heels digging into the quilt.

"Good girls," Dave says.

You know he would. :)

Terezi bites him.

You know she would. :)

Jade takes advantage of his flailing attempt at retaliation to rescue her trapped arm. She pushes herself a few inches away, toward the edge of the bed, and sits up on her knees to watch her lovers squabble. Neither is very serious, their blows soft and formless, aimed mostly to taunt and tease, and their beautiful clothes are wrinkling as they squirm.

They're adorable and they're hers, but Jade has plans for the night that involve more than tickle fights.

"Okay guys, time out," Jade says, leaning over to press her hands on their shoulders. "If we're skipping an awesome steak dinner, I expect something worth my while. Let's talk logistics."

Terezi and Dave make nearly identical faces of dismay. "Aw damn, Harley, don't go bringing science all up in this bed. I am a man of flawless spontaneity, freestylin' like a champ, don't harsh my flow with your if/then hypothemental nuclear physistry proof shit," Dave says.

I think Dave actually knows a lot about science (whereas his ignorance of sports is probably at least 85% genuine), but he pretends not to because it's funnier that way.

"You're also a man in a corset and a very sexy evening gown," Jade points out, leaning back and resting her hands on her partners' knees. "We should decide what to do about that variable."

"Leave it on," Terezi says immediately.

"Motion seconded, any objections? I hear no objections. Motion passes with two in favor, hurrah for democracy," Jade says while Dave is still furrowing his eyebrows in confusion. "Next question: Terezi's suit, on or off?"

I am not sure why I find parliamentary procedure hilarious in this context, but I do! It also makes for nice continuity with the co-dictators of Dave shtick from the opening scene.

"Uh," says Dave.

"Fairness suggests that if one of us remains dressed, all of us should remain dressed," Terezi says slowly, sightless eyes narrowing in thought. "However, it seems a shame to subject such well-made clothing to the inevitable stresses of kinky threesome pail-free sex."

"You just don't want to tell Kanaya why your trousers need repairs," Jade teases.

Terezi waves one hand in grand dismissal. "Also true, but the point stands!"

"Uh," Dave says again. He licks his lips. "Okay. Yeah, Kanaya, whatever. Who cares. I have had a thought. No. I have had the thought. I keep my robes of maidenly virtue on, sure. That's the point of tonight. T-Z, you gotta keep the vest and tie -- same reason. But lose the pants. Shit will just get in the way. And Jade, you get naked. If I'm in a dress, I damn well want payment in boobs and ass. It's only fair, right?"

Confession: most of this is me using the characters to figure out logistics in real time, because I had no idea how to choreograph the sex either.

Jade looks down at her pretty, silky, starlit dress. She shrugs. "Okay." A blink and sizzle of green light and it's gone, safely back on the spare bed beside the dildo and lube. She kicks off her shoes, pauses, and decides to leave the panties and bra for now. Anticipation is a beautiful thing, after all. But the pantyhose and slip will just get in the way; she zaps them into the guest room as well.

Dave's central air system kicks on and a cool breeze whispers across the bare skin of Jade's back and shoulders. She shivers. Her nipples crinkle, tenting the black fabric of her bra.

"Uh," Dave says for a third time, his train of thought derailed.

Beside him, Terezi snickers and wriggles herself into a more-or-less seated position, propped up by the nest of pillows Dave insists on building against the headboard of every bed he owns. "I think you broke him," she says. "Hold on while I find the reboot button." She bends down and traces the tip of one sharpened nail through Dave's eyebrows before poking him in the nose. "Beep!"

Dave crosses his eyes and wrinkles his nose. "Dude, seriously? This is how you get my attention?"

"Why not? It works every time," Terezi gloats, and pokes him again for good measure. "And speaking of time, it's a valuable commodity we are wasting in shamefully extravagant fashion. We need to move on to the actual sex! Step one is for you to take off my trousers."

Jade leans forward and props herself up on hands and knees, fingers just shy of touching Dave's right thigh. "That's a good step. Can I help?"

Terezi gives this grave consideration before pronouncing, "Alas, you cannot. That sidequest is for Dave alone. You can, however, take off my boxers," she adds magnanimously.

"Deal," Jade says. "Who gets Dave's panties?"

"Terezi, obviously, and I get yours," Dave says. "Like a circle-jerk, only less dick and more lint -- oh come on, don't give me that face, it was an obvious comparison."

Jade rolls her eyes and pretends to look stern. Terezi's snickers spoil the effect somewhat.

"Just for that, you have to take off my panties with your teeth," Jade tells him. "Without touching my skin."

Dave waggles his eyebrows. "Yes ma'am, Miz Dictator, ma'am. I'm the man with the talented tongue, you know it, let's prove it. Come a little closer and we'll get this party started."

Jade starts to crawl forward, but Terezi presses one hand to Dave's mouth and waves the other lazily in Jade's direction. "Objection! You seem to have forgotten that this is a co-dictatorship, and my sidequest has seniority. Dave cannot remove Jade's panties without first removing my trousers."

Bringing back both the dictator thing and the parliamentary procedure, because if you can't be ridiculous with the people you're going to have sex with, who can you? (Sex is inherently ridiculous, you see.)

Jade pouts. "Damn the fine points of the law! I was really looking forward to getting stinky man-breath all over my delicate ladyparts. I guess I'll have to settle for an assisted striptease instead."

"It will be the finest striptease known to either of our species," Terezi promises. "Isn't that right, Dave?" She uncovers Dave's mouth and pokes his cheek.

"24-carat gold-plated truth," Dave agrees. "Come over here, sit on my lap. We have a show to put on for a discerning audience."

"Show, show, show, show, show!" Jade chants. She hooks her ankles together and lets herself fall back until she's sitting cross-legged at the foot of the king-sized bed (and also on her hair, ow!), then catches her hands on her knees and leans forward to keep from tipping off onto the carpeted floor. Her hands are warm on the stubbly skin of her legs. She wishes they were Terezi's hands, or Dave's. But that's for later.

I kind of harp on Jade's unshaved legs, don't I? Well, it's thematically relevant that her legs are currently hairy while Dave's are shaved, but also I feel it lends a note of realism because female legs don't come auto-shaved and that doesn't make them any less sexy.

Dave elbows himself back until he's reclining half-upright against the pillows, dramatically backlit by the track lighting over the headboard. He mutters under his breath when the corset prevents him from bending and twisting freely. Meanwhile Terezi wriggles sideways until she's settled between Dave's thighs, back to his chest and legs extended in a neat line that ends in narrow gray toes with pointy nails. Dave's legs press tight around her, the front panel of his skirt pinned beneath her weight leaving smooth brown skin and sleek black silk open to the air. The red polish on his toenails is a vivid contrast to the white polish on Terezi's talons. Even after their recent mistreatment, the creases in her trousers look sharp enough to cut.

"You want fast or slow, Harley?" Dave asks, peering around Terezi's shoulder.

Jade bites her lip. "You're both so pretty like this, but..."

"Fast," her lovers say in chorus. "Hop to it, coolkid," Terezi adds, digging her heels downward and pushing back just an inch. Jade imagines the pressure between their bodies, imagines feeling Dave's penis pressing up against her own ass, imagines the incredible heat radiating down from between Terezi's thighs. Her right hand creeps down to stroke over her panties, light and indirect, more a tease than anything.

Dave yanks another pillow behind his back for support, then leans forward. He's not quite tall enough to hook his chin over Terezi's shoulder in that position; he settles his nose there instead, looking thoroughly ridiculous. His eyes slide toward Jade, freeze for a moment. Then he waggles his eyebrows and blows a raspberry against Terezi's shoulder, mouth wet and open on the fabric of her shirt.

More silliness. I cannot emphasize enough that this is happy sex and they're all having a great time.

Terezi snorts and flails her hands behind herself, thumping Dave's ribcage in protest. "Less tongue, more fingers!"

"Only valued for my body parts," Dave says mournfully, but he drops his hands to Terezi's waist and starts to unbuckle her belt. He slides the matte black leather through the white lacquer buckle, then sets to work on the buttons of Terezi's fly. They are silver and discreet, nearly flat despite their curlicue embossing. He slips them through their holes: one, two, three. Terezi is holding her breath. Jade curls her fingers tight against herself. Dave unfastens the little hook closure on the inside of Terezi's waistband. He pushes the opened fabric out and down, tugging it against the slight flare of Terezi's hips.

"Lift up, T-Z."

Terezi braces the heels of her hands and feet against the bed and pushes up. Dave hooks his thumbs over the edge of her waistband and tugs her trousers down. They slide slow and easy, soft black wool over black silk boxers, then over smooth gray chitin as Terezi's thighs come into view. Dave pushes as far as her knees.

"Sit down, lift your legs."

Terezi lets herself thump down onto Dave's thighs, sucks in a gasping breath. She leans back against his chest for support and lifts her legs in one perfect line until she's bent nearly double, folded like a jackknife pointed straight in the air. Dave's hands are still at her knees, holding the trousers. Now he raises his arms until the fabric is bunched around Terezi's ankles. Jade hooks her fingers around the edge of her panties, scratches her nails lightly across sensitive skin.

"Bend your knees."

Terezi folds her shins downward. Dave lets go. The wool clings to Terezi's legs for a breath, and another, and then gravity wins over friction. They begin to slide down, catching for a moment on the oddly articulated knobs of her ankles, then slither off and fall on Dave's legs with a muffled thump.

Jade presses against her clit for one second -- oh wow, how is she so wet just from watching clothes? -- then pulls her hand back and up and pastes an innocent expression on her face.

"Is that it?" she asks. "I thought I was supposed to get a show?"

I feel I could have done more with the striptease trouser-removal, but I'm not entirely sure how. I just think it could probably be more erotically charged. *sigh*

Judging by the unimpressed looks both Terezi and Dave are shooting her, she didn't manage a very good imitation of innocence. Well, and Terezi can smell her arousal, of course, but pssh, details.

"If you had a tail, it would be wagging so hard right now, don't even lie. So hard," Dave says.

"I can confirm that via empirical evidence," Terezi says, letting her legs drop back down and squirming on Dave's lap. "So hard, indeed."

Jade snickers. "It's a hard life, being Dave Strider. But somebody's got to do it!"

"Oh, I'll do it. I'll do it so hard and so long it won't be able to remember its own name. Poor little pronoun, all lying there sprawled and sated on the bed, done to death, but what a way to go," Dave says. "Assuming I get permission from my co-dictators, of course, can't get carried away and start thinking I'm a free man, what if they need me to save my awesome powers of doing to make sure they're done?"

I am not entirely sure that that paragraph remains in English the whole way through. *wry*

"I think this conversation got away from us at some point," Terezi tells Jade.

Jade nods solemnly. "You're right. There's only one solution. It's simultaneous panty-removal party time!"

She pounces on Terezi, and then it's another confused mess of body parts, but with less flailing and more tickling than when they fell onto the bed. It ends with Jade's panties in Dave's teeth, Dave's panties in shreds, and Terezi's boxers on Jade's head like a bizarre trophy crown.

Time compression, because this was getting bogged down.

Dave drops Jade's panties into his hands, looks her up and down with a measuring air, and says, "Love the hat. Especially how it matches your bra."

"I am at the forefront of the fashion world," Jade says, raising her chin imperiously and pressing her hands to her thighs. "Models everywhere are dying to wear my new season collection."

"It can't be sillier than some of the things they do wear," Terezi agrees as she sits up and adjusts her waistcoat, refastening the buttons so it closes neatly over her tie. "And speaking of things to wear, what became of your dildo?"

Jade raises her hands, palms up -- reaches -- and grins as the strap-on and harness drop neatly into her grip. The lube thumps down onto Dave's skirt.

He stretches her panties tight and fires them at her like an overgrown rubber band.

Look, obviously a panty-and-tickle fight is the way to go when you write yourself into a narrative corner. :p

---------------

When the retaliatory tickle fight is over -- Jade and Terezi win, since the corset ruins Dave's ability to hold his breath and keep a poker face -- Jade snuggles down between her girlfriend and boyfriend and says, "I have one word."

"Fusion," Dave suggests.

"Rifle," Terezi offers.

Jade wiggles her fingers dismissively. "So little imagination! No. Like I said before, the word is logistics. As in, how do we work around the corset? It takes a whole bunch of positions off the table."

Although this resembles the earlier logistics conversation, by this point I was NOT making the characters solve the problem for me in real time. I had gone off and written a brief 'and then they done sex' summary so I knew roughly what I was aiming for.

The summary in question: Okay, I need to hash out the logistics of the sex scene. It's going to end up with Dave on his back on the bed, Jade pegging him with his legs around her waist, and Terezi kneeling over his head so he can lick her nook and tendrils (I am using the same troll anatomy from "The Fire in Which We Burn" and "Milk and Honey," because it is my headcanon and I think incompatibility is more interesting than otherwise). Jade orgasms once before finishing Dave off, at which point she uses her hand to finish Terezi while Terezi licks her to a second orgasm and Dave mumbles appreciative dirty talk in their ears. (They are lying more or less on top of him, I guess.)

But how do they get there? Oh, questions, questions...

That's not 100% how it played out on paper, but close enough for government work. :)

Dave makes a scandalized face in the corner of her eye. "Harley! All these years and you never told me you were into tables? For shame. Think of all the fun we've missed."

This is a blatant, stupid lie, since they had sex on, against, and then under his coffee table just last month, but whatever. Jade sticks out her tongue and forges onward. "Your breath control's going to be weird and you can't bend as far as normal, not with the corset ribs jabbing you if you twist the wrong way. So we have to make plans."

This time Dave makes an offended-hissy-cat face. "Oh Jesus, not another negotiation scene."

"Yes, another negotiation scene," Terezi corrects. "Negotiation is very sexy and I know you think so too, but if you want to play unimpressed, Jade and I won't stop you. Just be aware that there will be punishments for breaking character, should you choose that route."

"Punishments, you say? What kind of punishments?"

"The sexy kind, duh," Jade says. "But seriously, come on, the faster we figure this out, the faster we can all have sex. Yay sex! Such happy, many cool. Wow."

Oh look, the girl with dog ears uses doge. How terribly clever. *rolls eyes*

Dave rolls his eyes at her. Jade thinks Terezi does the same, but without visible pupils it's a little hard to tell.

"Fine. You've beaten me into submission with your superior mastery of internet memes," Dave says. "In honor of that achievement -- and in no way, shape, or form should this be construed as a comment on my breath control or lack thereof while wearing this bodacious body gear vulgarly known as a corset -- I will lie on my back with my legs open and think of Texas while you deflower me. T-Z can sit on my face."

I hadn't consciously noticed this, but Dave is the one who decides both how to deal with the fancy-clothes aspect of this experiment, and what positions to use. Obviously either Terezi or Jade could have vetoed either suggestion, but they go along with him. I think that may have been an attempt on my part to balance the way I was sort of objectifying him and his dress -- you'll note that even when Jade is going 'oooh' over Terezi's suit and fixing her tie, Terezi is a more active participant whereas Dave mostly gets ogled and felt up and doesn't get to physically reciprocate until the next scene. Also note that he chooses to be the one staying almost fully dressed (and therefore an object of desire) and picks a sexual position where he's the recipient of anal sex and the giver of oral sex, which are both culturally weighted as 'submissive' sexual roles.

...In summary, I'm not entirely sure what I was going for there, but probably something. Sex snags all kinds of weird shit up from one's subconscious.

"Sold!" Terezi says, and scrambles over Jade in a tangle of knees and elbows to reach the nest of cushions at the head of Dave's oversized bed. "Get up, Jade. I can't start building my pillow fort until you have his legs where you want them."

Jade blinks. Then she shrugs, sits up, and wriggles off the bed, turning Dave's legs as she goes until he's lying sideways across the center of the mattress. "Okay. Hey Dave, do you think you can hold onto your own knees, or would you rather I hold your legs for you?"

Dave bats a stray cushion tassel off his forehead -- "Hands down, you'll disrupt my brilliant architecture," Terezi says -- and hesitates. His toes twitch. (He doesn't think to control them since they're usually hidden inside his shoes. Neither Jade nor Terezi has ever told him about that tell.)

"I can hold any position you can imagine, and a hundred more than that, but..."

Somebody asked me about the meaning of Dave's toe-twitch, since I apparently failed to make that textually clear. (Whoops.) Basically, it's something he does when he's preparing to front about being totally able to deal with a thing that is, in fact, kind of bothering him. In this case, given all the stuff in my previous note about objectification and submissive sexual roles, he's reluctant to seem 'weak' even though he consciously knows that's ridiculous and also they will all enjoy this more if Jade holds his legs, so he's dithering over whether to front or be honest.

Jade sees his tell, realizes what he's doing, and cuts through any chance of bullshit.

"No worries, I've got you," Jade says. "Like you said, all you need to do is lie back and think of Texas. Well, and Terezi! It would be incredibly rude not to think of her, and lick the edges of her nook, and run your fingers up through her tendrils until you touch the very heart of--"

"Yeah, okay, your show," Dave says as Terezi snickers. "Hang on, lemme move closer to the edge, give you a better angle."

He braces his feet against the edge of the bed and levers himself toward Jade, then pauses with his hips still in the air. "Hey, pull my skirt down? It's all bunched up under my ass."

Because sex is not tidy and perfect, and works better with communication and people helping each other out!

"No problem!" Jade says, and tugs the scarlet fabric forward until it's as straight as the disheveled sheets and comforter will allow. "There, all better. I'm going to put on the dildo now. Do you want to finger yourself or wait for me to do it?"

"Your show, remember? Besides, I seem to recall someone disparaging my flexibility and breath control. Wouldn't want me to strain myself, now would we."

"It would be a fate worse than dismemberment," Terezi agrees. "But we wouldn't want to distract you from reminiscing about your lost homeland either, and you're not the only flexible person in this relationship. See?"

She plants her knees on either side of Dave's head, feet toward the wall, wriggles to brace herself, and bends down over his body to slip her hand between his thighs. Then she pauses. "Whoops, slight technical difficulty. Jade, what became of the lube?"

"Here," Jade says, fishing the bottle out from under a pillow.

Original version of that exchange: "No clue, sorry."

"Oh come on, use your zappy spacy powers and grab it from wherever it's hiding," Dave says.

Jade frowns at him as she untangles the straps of her dildo. "It's not that simple and you know it. I'm used to focusing on galaxies. It's hard enough to narrow my focus to human-relevant distances when I already know where things are. I'm not a magic lost-and-found detector."

"Never mind, I found it," Terezi says.

Cut and rewritten because the sexy just ran away AGAIN, what the fuck, why is this so complicated!

She drops her bra beside Terezi's shades on the nightstand and busies herself untangling the straps of the dildo. Meanwhile Terezi squirts a dollop of lube onto her fingers, rubs them once or twice in a vague nod toward the concept of warming it up, and sticks her hand back between Dave's thighs to press her fingertips against his ass.

Dave twitches. Then he takes a deep breath -- well, deep-ish¬ -- and Jade can see him consciously relaxing his muscles to let Terezi in.

They make a delicious picture, Jade thinks. Terezi arches over Dave, the formality of her shirt and waistcoat and tie a shocking contrast to her nakedness from the waist down. Dave sprawls boneless beneath her, red dress come askew at the shoulders and the skirt panels carelessly shoved aside to bare his shaven legs and the rumpled silk of his stockings. His penis rubs against Terezi's forearm as she works her fingers inside him, and little dots and splashes of teal streak his neck and chest, fallen from the slowly retracting shield of Terezi's bulge. Dave reaches up with one hand, strokes the little tendril-tips just visible between the hard cartilage seams. Terezi's breath stutters. Her hand clenches. Dave's own breath goes harsh and shallow.

I know fandom at large has decided that bulge-and-nook means tentacle-penis and vagina equivalent, but I think that shows a certain lack of imagination. Trolls are aliens! Let them be alien! And... there was a fic (I think Doctor Who?) I read ages ago which made the point that even if convergent evolution or pattern-setting or whatever renders two species similar on the outside, the pressures on their reproductive systems are going to be different and so those are the areas where they may be most physically incompatible. And given the trolls are eusocial insects of some sort (possibly haploid-diploid, or maybe diploid-tetraploid?), I figure the weirder we go, the more plausible we get.

So I took the 'bone' in 'bone bulge' relatively literally rather than treating it as a metaphor ('boner'), and figure that all trolls have a sort of cartilage shield over their genital region (the bulge) which retracts with arousal to reveal the nook. The nook itself is filled with small prehensile-ish tendrils, whose goal is to entwine with another troll's tendrils and eventually reach deep within the other troll's nook to stimulate the release of genetic fluids.

Someday I am going to write a DaveJadeKat fic using that anatomy, since thus far I've only used it for female trolls (Terezi and Aradia) and I want to make textually clear (via Karkat) that I think it applies exactly the same to male trolls.

Jade crosses the room and twirls open the blinds that cover the glass doors to the master bedroom's private balcony. The evening sun pours eagerly in through the slats, streams across the white carpet, and breaks over the bed, drowning Terezi and Dave in a cross-hatch of golden light and broken shadows as they flex and breathe in rhythm. They move like wild jungle beasts, Jade thinks, dappled and camouflaged, and deadly to anyone who dares to touch without invitation.

Minor scene-setting, and also eliding the question of exactly how and how long Terezi fingers Dave, since I didn't especially feel like focusing on that.

Jade could watch them for hours. Maybe some other night, she will. The law of conservation of mangrit is only a suggestion, after all!

But tonight, she really, really wants to fuck her boyfriend.

I could really go for some consensual voyeurism with these characters, you know? ;)

"My turn," she says as she steps toward the side of the bed. Terezi grins as she settles back on her haunches and braces one hand on Dave's chest, fingernails digging into the neckline of his dress, just above the rim of the corset. Dave makes a wounded noise.

"Get busy," Terezi orders as she fumbles behind herself to brace Dave's head with a spare pillow. Obediently, he cranes his neck and begins to lick.

Jade takes the discarded lube bottle, squirts a handful into her palm, and slicks up her dildo. It's sparkly green plastic, one shade darker than her eyes, and shaped more-or-less like a real human penis... except for the bulge at the base. Terezi's anatomy renders that part entirely irrelevant - trolls aren't built for penetrative sex to start with -- and Dave can't always take the plastic knot even when he's willing to try, but Jade lives in hope and now and then things come together perfectly. Probably tonight is not one of those nights, since the unfamiliarity of the corset and a lack of proper breath control won't help Dave's ability to relax. But that's okay. Dave in a corset and dress and Dave taking the whole dildo are like mint chocolate chip ice cream and rare steak wrapped in bacon. Both foods are delicious, but eating them together would be kind of weird.

I am not entirely sure where that stuff about Jade and her favorite dildo came from, but it feels in-character to me and also I love the bacon-wrapped steak and mint chocolate chip ice cream simile, so whatever!

"Ready?" Jade asks as she tosses the bottle aside.

Dave's mouth is otherwise occupied, but he raises one hand in a haphazard thumbs-up. Terezi tweaks his nipples through his dress and his whole body undulates -- or at least tries, constrained by Terezi's weight on his head and neck and the corset fixing his torso into a solid plane.

Jade traces down the underside of his penis, through the rough, curly hair on his balls, along the smooth skin of his perineum. The smears of lube Terezi left are warm and slick against the pads of her fingers. She circles the edges of his anus, tickles the tight ring of muscle. Dave twitches and bucks.

You've probably noticed by now that Jade tends toward relatively clinical terms for genitalia. I think some of that is a conscious choice on her part, some is a tendency toward an analytical viewpoint in general, and some is being raised on an island in the middle of nowhere without people around to teach her slang.

He moans into the dark heat of Terezi's nook. She gasps. A gush of teal trickles down his cheeks.

Jade lines up her dildo and pushes in.

Friction and muscle resistance make the motion slow. She moves in increments. Each little push shifts the base of the dildo slightly against her clit, pulls the straps around her waist and against the opening of her vagina. There's a vibrator she could turn on for additional stimulation, but really, why bother? Listening to Terezi's bitten-back trills, watching the contrast of her formal waistcoat and tie and the pornographic grind of her nook against Dave's nose and chin, feeling the heat of Dave's body through the cool silk of his stockings as she hefts his legs and helps him cross his feet behind her... who needs any extra toys?

Jade pulls back, almost all the way out, then pushes in again. And again. And again, a little further and faster every time.

Dave says something garbled into Terezi's nook. Little translucent tendrils tap around his lips, leaving sticky dollops of teal behind. Terezi closes her unseeing eyes and tips her head back, breathes through her mouth. Her hands clench and flex against his chest. Dave's legs are heavy in Jade's arms, his heels knocking randomly against her thighs.

Jade gives herself over to the rhythm: back and forth, in and out, the pressure of the dildo against her clit, the tug of the straps across her pelvis and waist, the brush of silk on her thighs, the twitch and clench of Dave's muscles under her fingers and palms. Dave's hands grip the sheets. Terezi's fingers slide under the neckline of his dress, scrape along the top of his corset. Jade can't tell whose breath she hears, whose gasps and moans and grunts. She can't tell whose sweat she smells.

"You are," she says, "so beautiful."

She doesn't know which one of them she means.

Dave's legs are shaking like he's in the last stretch of a marathon. Lightheaded, Jade thinks. Can't breathe. Not with the corset around his lungs and his face in Terezi's nook. She should say something about that.

Terezi leans toward her, braces her hands on Dave's hips. "Jade," she says. "Jade, Jade, Jade." Jade shoves forward, wrings a breathless keen from Dave, mashes her mouth against Terezi's, grinds the dildo against her clit.

Terezi sinks her teeth into Jade's lip.

Jade shatters.

I don't feel I am very good at writing actual sex. I find it much less interesting -- less sexy, in fact -- than foreplay, aftercare, and a bunch of other things that are only tangentially related to sex. But a story with this structure NEEDS on-page sex, so I did my best.

When galaxies and quarks finish colliding behind her eyes, she comes back to the texture of her own breath scraping harsh through her throat and her knees like water as she leans forward, weight driving the dildo further into Dave. He's pushing up toward her, little twists and thrusts of hip and ass, trying to take more, touch his skin to hers.

Jade pulls back on shaky legs, does her best to pick up the rhythm she dropped. She shifts one hand from Dave's leg -- she still has the other; he won't fall -- and smears precome down his penis from the tip. It's sticky-tacky-slick against her palm, and she holds him tight for a breath, just feeling the heat and pulse of blood beneath his skin. Then she starts to stroke, syncopated against her thrusts.

Dave isn't doing Terezi any good anymore, too caught up in what Jade's doing to him. Terezi rolls her blank eyes at Jade and clambers off her perch to kneel at his side. "You're beautiful like this," she says to him. "Smooth and pretty and all wrapped up for us."

Because simultaneous orgasms are nice in theory but not terribly practical.

"Gorgeous," Jade adds. "I could eat you right up."

Terezi trails her lacquered nails along Dave's collarbones, pierces through the rumpled neckline of his dress to trace the top of his corset. "You're dizzy now, I can hear it. You're gulping for air, can't get enough. Colors are starting to run in the corners of your eyes. You want to stop thinking. You want to let go. Let me help you with that."

She rests one hand on the sweat-slick arch of his throat, and presses gently down.

Dave comes in a thrashing jerk, spurting all over Jade's hand and the blood-red fabric of his dress.

I am fairly sure it's canon that Dave is cool with being ordered around by women with forceful personalities. I don't think it's much of a stretch to give that a sexual component. *wry*

Jade shoves him back and to his left just far enough that she can let go of his legs without dropping him off the bed. She strokes his penis a few more times, to feel the aftershocks through his skin. He's beautiful like this, wrecked and breathless and pushed too far to be anything but selfish, to think of anybody's time beyond his own. Terezi lifts her hand from his throat and cards her fingers through his sweat-damp hair, scrapes her claw-tips gently across his cheek.

Jade wipes her hand on the hem of his dress and scrambles onto the bed. "I think we broke him," she says as she tugs Dave toward the center of the king-sized mattress, toppling Terezi's abandoned nest of pillows.

"Mmm," Terezi agrees. She grabs Dave's shoulders and helps Jade twist him around until he's perpendicular to the headboard.

Oh look, I am (literally!) objectifying Dave again.

Jade moves her hair out of the way and lies down beside him, her back to the wall. She grins at her girlfriend. "Want to see if I can break you too?" She wiggles her fingers demonstratively, then reaches across Dave's slack, trembling body to touch the smooth gray chitin of Terezi's hip, slides her thumb down to press the gaping edge of her nook.

Terezi twitches, a full-body jerk almost suppressed by pure force of will. Then she shoves Jade's hand aside and throws herself sidelong onto the bed so they sandwich Dave between them, Terezi's head near his knees and her feet well up past his face. "Let's break each other," she says, and squirms up onto Dave's legs until her mouth is a bare inch from Jade's own thighs. Her clothes skew and twist with the motion; her tie rides up, forming a little loop between the knot and the top button of her waistcoat.

Jade reaches down to tug the tie free just as Terezi reaches over to undo the harness. Their hands collide, and Jade giggles before adjusting her aim. The tie is warm now from body heat and friction, the heavy fabric faintly wrinkled, but still smooth and sleek between Jade's fingers. The dildo sags free, straps hanging loose over Jade's left hip and thigh, and she tugs Terezi close where her tongue will do the most good.

The clothes porn returns! ...Sort of, anyway.

Then she drapes herself across Dave's chest so she can return the favor.

"Mrgph," Dave says.

Terezi snickers. "He wakes!" Her breath tickles between Jade's stubbly thighs.

"He also says, holy shit you guys are fuckin' heavy and since when am I your pillow?" Dave mumbles.

Jade kicks gently at his ankle. "Since when have you minded?"

"Since I'm wearing a corset and can't breathe, obviously. Put two and two together, this is not rocket science."

"Rocket science is simpler," Jade agrees, and twitches as Terezi hums agreement into Jade's skin. "Now shush, you're making me neglect Terezi and it's expensive to keep a lawyer waiting."

She unfastens the lowest button on Terezi's waistcoat, and flips it and her shirt out of the way. The edges of Terezi's retracted bulge press her legs apart and pull the chitin over her stomach into strange ridges and grooves. Teal-flushed tendrils paint desperate streaks against Terezi's thighs, tug at the neckline of Dave's dress in a futile attempt to fill her nook.

Jade traces her fingertips along the cartilage of the bulge and lets the sticky-slick tendrils pull her hand inside. It's a little awkward doing this left-handed, but she's lying on her right arm and moving enough to fix that sounds like a terrible idea while Terezi is licking a slow and careful spiral inward toward Jade's clit.

Tendrils writhe and twine around Jade's hand. She wiggles her fingers in imitation, curls them inward around a handful of slick, pulsing fronds, then flexes until her fingertips just brush the inner walls of Terezi's nook, hot and swollen with fluids. Teal coats her palm, streaks across her wrist and drips on Dave's already ruined dress.

"Oh come on, hurry up before I suffocate to double death," Dave mutters into Jade's hair.

Jade is going to say something suitably ironic but then Terezi presses the flats of her teeth against the crease of Jade's thigh. She twitches at the not-quite-ticklish sensation, the gentle tug of stubbled hair against the grain, and loses the rhythm she's been tapping out inside Terezi's nook.

I had someone question whether Jade should have stubble on the insides of her thighs. I certainly don't assume that every woman does, but I do personally have fairly thick hair there, so. *shrug* Write what you know, yeah?

"Hold still," Terezi says, and tilts her head to bite. The sharp points of her teeth sink into Jade's skin, dance right on the edge between pressure and pain.

Jade bites down on Dave's chest to steady herself, feels the shift of fabric and leather under her cheek as he sucks in a startled breath. She counts five beats of his heart, then scrapes her nails -- blunt and short, but still tough -- around the base of Terezi's tendrils.

Terezi gasps, breath hot and moist against Jade's skin. Her hands dig into Jade's leg, fingers clenched against a stray harness strap.

Jade finds the seam at the deepest center of Terezi's nook and dances her fingers along it. Terezi stills, tendons and muscles pulled tight and mindless in anticipation. Tendrils thrash wildly around Jade's wrist, along the neckline of Dave's dress, seeking a non-existent nook to return the favor.

Jade slips one finger gently into the seam.

Terezi keens in pleasure, thrashes once, goes still. Hot, sticky fluid gushes into Jade's hand: a single overwhelming flood, unlike the pulses of Dave's release. Terezi's breath is rapid and shallow, fluttering against the skin and hair between Jade's thighs.

Jade presses her legs together, curls up a little trying to rub against Dave's hip. He shifts underneath her as she gives up and moves her teal-drenched hand off his ruined dress and down to touch herself.

Dave pokes her in the ribs. "Hey now, hold your hoofbeasts. Gimme a sec to rearrange and I'll give you a hand. What's the point of partners if we check out and make you do everything yourself?"

"Whmrgzed," Terezi concurs through Dave's skirt as he sits up and displaces her. She flops one arm across his lap and prods Jade's stomach with a pointy nail. "Don't be selfish," she says more clearly. "Your silly understated mammalian orgasm is mine. Theft will not be tolerated."

Well. Far be it from Jade to break the law!

She sprawls sideways on the bed and parts her legs to let her lovers in.

I probably should have written her second orgasm, but I was hopelessly bored by that point and figured I would do it even less justice than the rest of the sex, so I pulled a fade-to-black instead.

---------------

"Wow," Jade remarks some time later. The room is dimmer now, with the sun fully set and only the discreet track lighting shining down from the wall over the headboard. She should probably get up and close the blinds.

She doesn't really want to move from between Terezi and Dave, though. At least not without a better payoff than just shutting out the city's nighttime glow.

"I think we killed the dress," she adds.

"Mmm," Dave agrees into her right breast.

"Would that count as murder or just manslaughter?"

Terezi buzzes high in her throat: a considering tone. "The latter, since the destruction was incidental rather than the goal of the exercise," she decides. Her fingers never stop gently scratching the base of Jade's left ear. "If we ever repeat the scenario, however," she continues, "I believe our foreknowledge of the likely results would tip us over the edge into premeditated homicide. Or dressicide, as the case may be."

And we're back to silly conversations, because of course we are. :)

"Totally worth it, though," Dave says, turning his head slightly to free his lips from Jade's skin. "I admit I was not one hundred percent sold on this gig at first, but let it not be said that I stand in the way of the duly gathered scientific evidence. Good clothing, best sex."

And here is me acknowledging that Dave comes off as slightly uncomfortable earlier in the proceedings.

Jade ponders this for a moment. "You do realize that one experiment proves nothing. It might be a statistical fluke. We need more data to have confidence in our conclusions." She wiggles her right arm out from under the stained pile of Dave and Terezi's fancy clothes and stabs the air by way of emphasis. "Further experiments are required! It's our duty to science!"

Terezi and Dave exchange an unreadable look across her body. Then they grin, in perfect sync, and twist to catch Jade's eyes.

"Further experiments sound wonderful. Next time, you wear the suit," Terezi says. "With a cummerbund. Which I will steal for nefarious purposes after the dinner reservation we will grit our teeth and keep."

Nefarious purposes being what? Blindfolds? Bondage? So many possibilities... But even so, there's a principle at stake, above and beyond Jade's general preference for skirts. "Introducing new variables into an experiment in progress is terrible laboratory procedure," she says, "and none of the resulting data--"

"You also wear the stockings, and we get to shave your legs," Dave adds. "You owe us some grade-A prime Harley leg appreciation moments, remember?"

Jade flashes back to the bathtub, to the shivery dream of her boyfriend and girlfriend holding one leg each, tracing Dave's straight razors along her inner thighs like a deadly, delicate kiss. She thinks about silk stockings sliding cool and easy over smooth skin. She imagines Terezi and Dave watching her the way she watched them tonight.

If anyone else wants to write that scenario? PLEASE DO. YOU HAVE MY BLESSING!

She curls her toes, trying to contain the wave of rekindled heat that sweeps through her body. Judging by Terezi's sudden inhale and the interested twitch of Dave's penis against her leg, it's a futile attempt.

"Sold," Jade says. "But right now it's still a Strider leg appreciation night, and I want to find out exactly how flexible you are in that corset."

"Motion seconded; any objections?" Terezi says as she pushes herself upright.

Dave shakes his head.

"Motion passes with three in favor," Jade says, and pounces.

Another callback to the parliamentary procedure jokes, and another fade-to-black because holy shit I could not face trying to write another sex scene.

---------------

Next week, there's another dress delivery to Dave's apartment.

This time Jade's name is on the bill.

Bringing it full circle back to the beginning, because I needed to end on the same tone of the opening paragraphs. And here is where I got the idea that Jade deliberately kept her name off the first dress order so as to make clear it was sort of a joke, but now it's an established kink they are all enthusiastically in favor of exploring so she puts her name on the bill as a statement of intent.

*blinks* Wow, that was long!

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I hope that was of some interest. :)