Two Feet

The house was old, maybe seventies, with white paint chipping on the siding and cracked wood adorning the shutters and porch. The lawn was small, dead, and littered with ant hills. Dave's eyebrows rose at the state of the townhouse. It was pressed up close to its neighbors, so close that the young Strider was sure there wasn't even a yard of grass between them. Great, they would be able to hear everything their neighbors did.

Dave looked up at his brother, who was talking with their real estate agent and jingling keys in his hand while the other held fast to Dave's. The eight-year-old was prone to running off and doing dumb things that almost got him killed. Like eyeing the ledge that stuck out from underneath a window on the second floor. It had a twin directly opposite, attached to their neighbor's house to the left with barely two feet of air between them. If he was quiet, he would be able to jump it and spy on them. Maybe they would turn out to be aliens.

After a moment, Bro started saying a swift farewell to their agent before leading Dave into the house. The porch creaked underneath their feet, and Dave momentarily wondered if the place would end up turning into a monster house, the kind that ate people before magically disappearing and leaving an empty lot. That would be wicked.

They entered a small stone entryway, where a step up turned to hardwood floors. To the right was the living room, to the left the kitchen. In front was a staircase leading straight up to the second story, and beside it a hallway that led to a dining room and a third bedroom. Boxes littered the floor in every direction. Dave frowned and pulled his hand from Bro's.

"Start unpacking, little man," the elder Strider said, heading into the kitchen. Dave huffed, but listened, and made his way up the stairs, gripping carefully to the handrail. The steps squealed even under his tiny frame. Boy did he not like stairs.

His room was to the left, apparently, according to the signs Bro had graciously tacked to the walls with throwing stars. Dave rolled his eyes and pushed the door to his bedroom open after a slight struggle. Gosh this house was old. He stepped over the threshold only to be welcomed by a window directly across from him, his bed to the right, desk to the left, and a walk-in closet against the outside wall next to his desk. He grinned to himself momentarily before stiffening his expression again; Bro would never forgive him if he was caught smiling. Gotta keep up the Strider Indifference, he reminded himself. He all but ran over to the window and muttered a 'score' under his breath. The ledge he'd been examining outside was directly under his window. This would forever be his secret spot.

Granted he wasn't being watched for the rest of his life, like he found himself now as he opened the window and slid out onto the ledge. He looked directly across the way into the neighbor's window, and saw wide baby-blue eyes watching him from behind thick glasses. Dave froze with one leg over the window frame.

"Hi!"

Oh, so both of their windows were open.

"Hey."

"What are you doing?"

"Getting the circulation to my nuts cut off."

The other boy bit his lower lip before bursting out into high-pitched laughter. Dave's eye twitched involuntarily. How weird.

"Well then maybe you shouldn't have them crushed against the window, stupid!"

Dave frowned. "I'm not stupid." He finished his journey onto the ledge anyway. The kid, who looked to be about the same age as him, continued to watch with intrigue.

"What's your name?"

"Dave."

"I'm John! Do you wanna hang out sometime? We should watch a movie! I have some really cool movies! Do you like movies? What's your favorite movie? Oh! Do you have a favorite actor? Mine is Nic Cage! He's so cool!"

Dave watched with intrigue as John leaned over his own windowsill, his chin buried in his hands and his eyes glowing with happiness as he rambled to the blonde across from him. Dave immediately noticed how his buckteeth dug into his bottom lip constantly, and his unruly black hair fell into his eyes and curled around his big ears. This kid looked like such a dork.

"Aren't we hanging out right now?" the young Strider said, hugging his knees to his chest and tugging at his shoelaces. He saw John's face light up with a big smile, and watched as he struggled out of his own window to sit Indian-style on the ledge connected to his house.

Dave never ended up unpacking that day.

The rest of the summer passed warm and mild, the weather consistently that of autumn in Texas. Dave spent most of his days in shorts and t-shirts while lounging on the ledge outside his window. He and John talked a lot out there, in their own little world, and quickly became friends. The kid was as dorky as his first impression. Dave kept up his cool indifference, but John always seemed to see right through him, commenting on his ironic anime shades, sweet-talking him into agreeing to do something dumb, like watch Con Air for the fifth time in a week.

To be honest, Dave was grateful. John was his first friend.

When school started back up, Dave and John walked to campus together. The blonde immediately got stares, but he played it cool until he had to break off from his friend and head to his first class. People laughed at him behind their hands as he walked by. He simply shoved his hands in his pockets and strode elegantly through the hall, ignoring everything around him.

He was asked several times during the day to remove his shades in class, and he complained, but did so; Bro would kill him if he got detention on his first day in a new school. The whispers escalated when his red eyes squinted against the fluorescent lights.

When he met up with John at lunchtime, his shades hanging carefully from the collar of his shirt, he was in a sour mood. John did his very best to shake him out of his funk, and for that, Dave smiled his first smile in front of his new friend.

Weeks turned into months and months to years. Dave grew tall and lanky, but continuous strifes with his brother toughened him up and he was able to defeat John easily in their arm wrestling competitions and occasional tussles. John himself grew, but stayed pudgy around the middle (he blamed the cakes and cookies his dad always forced on him) and two inches shorter than Dave. He grew into his teeth, but they had forever made a divot in his bottom lip that they still rested in when he was nervous.

Dave had outgrown his anime shades by the time he was thirteen, and John had been constantly bugging him about how he could tell they were squeezing his temples and the bridge of his nose. The Strider chose to ignore him, but on his fourteenth birthday, he returned from shopping with Bro to find John waving at him from the ledge under his window, his cheeks flushed from the cold December air despite being buried under a winter jacket and a blanket.

"Dave! Come here!"

The blonde waved back and followed his brother into the house. They parted with a fist-bump and Dave trudged upstairs with bags of new clothes and CDs. After tossing them unceremoniously onto his bed, he forewent removing his jacket, heading directly through the window onto the slab of roof that was his home away from home but still home. Wow that made a lot of sense.

John automatically jumped up as Dave settled on the shingles. He leapt the two-foot gap easily and sat right up against the other boy, shoulders shoved together. John wrapped the blanket around both of them before procuring two boxes from under his arm. He shoved the larger of the two into Dave's hands and the blonde flipped it open, laughing shortly.

"Dad made it for you! It's chocolate, but it's got cream cheese frosting in the middle! I wanted him to make more but he ran out of stuff, so you gotta let me have a bit," the brunette explained as Dave lifted the giant cupcake out of the box and ripped a piece off. He took a bite, and closed his eyes; he'd taken to no longer wearing shades, since he finally got tired of having red welts behind his ears.

"That shit is god-sent. Not even being ironic here. The angels bestowed the power of the cooking gods on your dad and he became the Hercules of motherfucking baking," Dave replied, shoving his finger deep into the cake and pulling it out covered in frosting. He didn't notice John watching with red cheeks as he licked the sugar from his finger.

"Haha, I guess so!" John put in. Suddenly the brunette was shifting in place impatiently. "Come on," he whined, stomping his feet against the roof, "You need to open your present!"

Dave finally finished cleaning the frosting off of his finger and set the cupcake aside, twisting around so he was facing his friend. "Well are you gonna give it to me or not?" he asked when John continued holding the package. It was a beat-up priority shipping box, the addresses crossed out as if John thought he was going to steal his identity. Pfft. What a dork. He leaned over to grab the box, but the other boy moved it out of reach. Dave raised an eyebrow.

"Nope, I changed my mind! Close your eyes!"

"Oh come on, bro! That's not fair," he retorted. His shoulders drooped.

"Well then I guess you won't get your present. They're pretty sweet, it took me forever to find them, and even then they cost me a whole month's worth of allowance!" John's expression shifted into one of mischief, a smirk quirking his lips. Dave groaned, but complied, sliding his eyes closed and twiddling his thumbs together in his lap.

He heard John messing around with the box, the crinkle of paper and a quiet laugh. There was a pause, then he felt the other shift around, and suddenly warm hands holding cold metal against his temples. John's fingers were soft, but slightly calloused from piano. As the glasses, which were all he could assume they were, slid to rest on his nose, John pulled his hands away, and Dave immediately missed the warmth against his skin. He had to stop himself from grabbing John's hands to get that heat back.

"Okay, open your eyes!"

Dave obliged, again, and found his eyesight dimmed by a pair of aviators. However, John was holding up a card. A card that was decorated by a crude drawing of shades, much like the ones on Dave's face, the stylized retro title to 'Starsky and Hutch', and a signature. A one Ben Stiller. He felt his breath hitch in his throat and he pulled the shades off to see that, yes, they were the very ones. The ones his idol had worn in his favorite movie.

"John, what the fuck." Dave's voice was a tad breathless as he looked John in the eye. He noticed him blush a little and he lowered the signed card, fiddling with it with the fingers the blonde wished were still on his face.

"A-are they ironic enough? I don't know, I just knew it was your favorite ironic movie or whatever and I thought you might like them and stuff so I got my dad to bid on them in exchange for like a month without allowance 'cause you're my best friend and stuff-woah!"

Dave pulled the brunette forward by the front of his jacket and tugged him into a tight hug, his arms wrapped around John's shoulders and his head buried in his neck. He felt John hug him around his middle, and they both laughed, sitting on the ledge under Dave's window on a cold December afternoon, the best of friends.

The summer before high school, John and his father traveled to Wyoming to visit family. They were gone from June to September. Dave stayed cooped up inside and wasted away in front of the computer working on the comic he had created in seventh grade with the help of John. The younger Strider brother was still growing, and he was still as skinny as ever, with blonde hair reminiscent of his ironic celeb-crush Justin Bieber and freckles dotting his body.

He hadn't spoken to John since school let out and he wished the Egbert's luck on their vacation. John had tried crying and begging to stay with Dave, he didn't want to see weird old people he didn't know, he just wanted to play video games with his friend. Dave would be lying if he said he hadn't gotten a little choked up at not being able to spend the summer with his best friend. Half of him though, despite this, was glad that John wouldn't be around. It gave him time to think.

Since December, when he turned fourteen, Dave had started to become confused as to what his feelings for John were. He was certain that no kid's heart started racing whenever his best friend pushed him over after beating him at Mario Kart. No guy started blushing at his friend's face when it lit up with a goofy smile. And certainly no one had… risqué dreams about their best friend while they lay in their bed at three o'clock in the morning, staring up at the ceiling with wide crimson eyes.

Dave had never been too sure of his sexuality. Bro had never taught him to prefer one gender over the other. He told Dave it didn't matter, that it shouldn't matter, because love was love and nothing could change how one person felt about another, whether it be a boy about another boy, a girl about another girl, or a boy about a girl. Dave was grateful that Bro wasn't very interested in his romantic endeavors, because he didn't think he could tell him that he was pining after his best friend. That was secret information that wasn't quite ready to be spilled into the media like Britney's cooch.

He ended up torturing himself over this throughout the summer. When his hand cramped around his tablet pen, he would push his chair away from his desk and sit in the middle of his room, legs pulled up to his chest, head on his knees, staring across the two-foot canyon between his and John's windows. Dave stared at the dark window across the way a lot.

John returned late Monday night the week before school started. Dave was sitting at his computer again, pestering his cousin Rose who was currently living abroad in Germany while her mother pursued an English teaching career. The blonde Strider felt the thump reverberate through his room before he heard his window slam open. He never locked it; when they were younger, John suffered from frequent sleeplessness and nightmares, and he made it a habit of sneaking across to Dave's room and sleeping in his bed when things got just a bit too scary.

"Dave!"

He whirled around in his chair, tablet pen dropping to the ground and legs stretching out in front of him, prepared to stand and fight. Immediately he saw John leaning over the windowsill, grinning even in the dim light from the moon, skin far more tan than it had been a few months prior. He looked a tad bit taller as well.

Dave stood from his chair as John finally scrambled through the window and met him halfway, arms swinging around the blonde excitedly. The younger Strider stiffened in his grasp, but hugged back just as tightly. His nose buried subconsciously into John's hair.

"Gosh I missed you, Dave! Wyoming is so boring!"

"Washington kinda sucked balls while you were gone, too."

Freshman year came and went surprisingly fast, but not without faults. Dave and John were still very close, and shared most of their classes together. It was God-sent to them, but the rest of the student population decided it was enough evidence to spread rumors about the boys. Rumors that made Dave clench his jaw with irritation, and made the tips of John's ears turn pink and affected his demeanor. The brunette was jumpy around Dave, always blushing and flicking his eyes every which way to avoid meeting the Strider's gaze. His laughter became nervous, and after a while Dave started keeping quiet around him. As the school year dragged on, they stood farther apart when they walked to campus together, even farther when they wandered the halls. They sat beside each other, but their shoulders no longer touched.

John told Dave one night on the ledge that he was afraid of being called a homosexual.

Dave told him that it shouldn't matter. Love was love.

The last day of the school year, they walked down the hall holding hands.

It was late into July after tenth grade when Dave decided enough was enough. He was in love with his best friend and he was going to tell him, whether John accepted or not. Well, maybe, because holy shit what if John didn't like him back. They had bantered back and forth since eighth grade, and they were sixteen now, surely the suggestive innuendos and sexual tension were bubbling into something. That was really all the hope Dave had. He was just scared shitless that John thought they were simply insanely close friends. Wow, what a way to be friend-zoned.

On a decent Friday evening, while Bro was out on a gig (he planned this just right so that he wouldn't be cockblocked if John miraculously returned his feelings), Dave let himself out onto the ledge underneath his window. This was as good a place as any to confess to John, the spot where they first met, where they had some of their deepest conversations, where they shared most of their childhood. It was a special place to both of them, and if things turned out well, it would be even more special.

Dave sucked in a deep breath, steeled himself, and picked up a tiny pebble that was wedged between the shingles. He tossed it, and it bounced off of John's window quietly. Not enough. He felt around for a bigger stone, and found one about as big as his thumb nail. He lobbed it at the window and it made a satisfying click. Movement in the dark room caught his attention before he saw John's face peer out of the window. The brunette smiled his goofy smile, and Dave watched as he pulled on a thin blue jacket and opened the window.

"Hey Dave, what's up?"

John's voice had fallen with puberty, but it was still squeaky and kind of dumb. The blonde could easily pick him out of a crowd of voices. He was also even taller than when he had returned from Wyoming the summer prior, but Dave still trumped him by two inches. Tan skin was lightly freckled from playing in the sun and stretched over lean soccer muscles. In the moonlight, John was absolutely stunning.

"Hey," and damn his voice for breaking, "Wanna talk?"

John blinked owlishly, but shrugged and crawled through the window frame, settling on his ledge Indian-style, just like he had all those years ago when they first met. "Sure. Whaddya wanna talk about?"

Dave opened his mouth. Whoops there went his resolve. "I don't know. Stuff. School's starting up again soon." He rested his elbows on his knees, hands dangling between his legs as the fingers fidgeted together.

"Ugh, don't remind me," John groaned. He threw his head back and scowled. "I haven't done any of the reading for English." There was still a month before school was back in session. Dave wondered why he didn't realize this.

The Strider clenched his jaw together and mentally berated himself. If he didn't do it now, they would get sidetracked and he would lose his chance. This was going to be a special night. "John, I love you."

He could see John's body stiffen ever so lightly, and the brunette brought his head back down, blue eyes level with Starsky shades and smiling. "I love you too, man."

"No. John. I love you."

The toothy smile faltered for half a second before lips closed in a flat line. Dave watched John sit forward and then stand, dusting off his pants. Oh God he was running away. No response, just a silent no and they would never speak again. This wasn't what he wanted, this wasn't how it was supposed to go, John was supposed to love him back, he wasn't supposed to run away-

John jumped the gap between their ledges with practiced ease and settled next to Dave, forcing their hips and shoulders together as if they were puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit. The blonde froze in confusion. Why confusion? John wasn't running away, he was sitting right beside him, lacing their fingers together. When did he grab his hand?

"I was waiting for you to say something," John said finally, eyes on their hands. His other hand reached over to run across the back of Dave's palm, sending goose bumps up his arm. The brunette was smiling again. "I've had a total dude-crush on you since eighth grade. This is kinda cool."

Dave watched John's movements carefully before twisting his upper half, placing his free hand on the boy's cheek, and pressing their lips together softly. It was definitely a virgin kiss, kind of awkward as their noses bumped and their glasses clacked together, but it was sweet and it was theirs. Dave felt John laugh into it, and he couldn't help smiling himself. This was more than cool, this was boss.

They spent the rest of the night on the ledge underneath Dave's window, eight years of friendship melding into the first evening of saccharine romance.

The space between their windows didn't seem so wide anymore.

stories are posted at least 24 hours early on my fanfiction blog, kitty-cane on tumblr. requests are closed for the time being, need to catch up on prompts.

I do not own Homestuck in any way except for the cosplays in my closet. :U Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie, and this fanfic belongs to me. Reviews are appreciated, not demanded, and flames will be used to stoke the fire of Mrs Lovett's oven. Or to fuel the sick fires of Dave and Tavbro. Whichever floats your boat.