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Life got lonely sometimes, being one of the only two human beings on Earth. It got hard filling his social needs when the only other person was on the other side of what used to be considered the country.
It was a last resort, Dirk always told himself. Only when he got desperate did he allow himself to dig into the deepest depths of his closet. When he pulled a shirt that didn’t belong to him and that was a little too big, and pull it over his bare torso.
Dirk wondered in those moments as he pulled on jeans that also didn’t belong to him what the owner of those clothes was like. What he sounded like in person. What sort of faces he would make to someone close to him. Dirk wondered, as he sat against the wall of his bedroom what it would have been like to have him as a brother that was there. What it would have been like to live with the legendary Dave Strider.
Closing his eyes, he thought about the way that stoic face might have revealed things to someone who was really looking at him, even with those shades on his face. He thought about the way he would offer him those small gestures of approval and acceptance. About the way it would feel to be out in the hot sun with a man like him, swords in hand and grinning like nothing else really mattered but the strife that was happening right then and there. Like nothing else mattered but one another.
He tilted his head back against the wall and he wondered what kinds of things Dave would have talked about in private. If he would have made stupid references to his own movies or the things around him in ways that only made sense to a Strider. To one of them. He wondered what it would feel like to have another person, a person in his family even, touch him, even in ways that were purely platonic. He wondered what it would be like to have the hand of such a powerful and famous man on his shoulder. What it would feel like to connect a fist bump with someone that he liked and was right there in front of him.
It was when Dirk opened his eyes again and touched the record on the front of the old, dusty shirt that he wondered if a guy like him would really be accepted by Dave Strider. If all of the work he had put into himself would have made Dave proud. If he would have been okay with calling Dirk his little brother, even with all of the flaws he had.
Dirk liked to think that Dave would have loved him in his own way. That he really would have been proud of the person Dirk became, was becoming, if they were face to face. Yes, that was a nice thought.
Pulling his arms around himself and around the shirt he had pulled on, he closed his eyes again and tried not to wish too hard for the man who would have raised him.