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Dirk always forgets to screw the cap back on the tube of toothpaste after brushing his teeth and it gets on Todd’s nerves like nothing else. In the morning, Todd always brushes his teeth before Dirk does so by the time it’s night, the open tube of toothpaste has a calcified ring of mint around the nozzle.
“Perhaps,” Dirk says in his best ‘yes, I’m bullshitting you, but I’m your boyfriend and you love me still’ voice. “The universe wants it this way.”
“The universe wants you to always forget to put the cap back on the toothpaste,” Todd says, unimpressed, screwing the cap on himself.
Dirk smiles. “The universe wants you to forget about this teensy tiny miniscule infinitesimal issue.”
“Using more syllables doesn’t make you right.”
“But it also doesn’t make me wrong.”
“Asshole,” Todd flicks some water into Dirk’s face, laughing as he squawks. “Don’t forget tomorrow.”
“Promise,” Dirk kisses Todd on the cheek.
Todd knows Dirk’s promises like the back of his hand. He knows when Dirk means something, he’ll move metaphorical mountains and travel through not-so-metaphorical dimensions to make sure he gets it done. That’s just the type of guy Todd decided to be in love with.
But Todd also knows that Dirk is a little shit with a messy brain that goes faster than any of them can ever keep up with, so it’s no surprise that the next night, Todd finds that the toothpaste has been left open yet again.
-
Ever since Dirk moved in (and Todd means ever since he moved in officially, because after Bergsberg, Dirk ended up at Todd’s apartment so often he basically lived there anyway) Todd learned all of Dirk’s annoying habits, a surprising number of them related to, of all places, their bathroom.
There is the issue of the toothpaste and the cap, but Dirk also has this thing where he sometimes picks something up (pens, a cookbook Farah gave him, an umbrella, Mona, and many, many other things) and only thinks to put it down when he’s in the bathroom. Sometimes, Dirk gets epiphanies in the shower and walks right out of it, shower still running, and tracks water around the apartment while talking a mile a minute about whatever case related breakthrough he just had. Todd is more than fine with Dirk walking around naked and soaking wet, but he is not as fine with slipping on the puddles Dirk trails behind and nearly braining himself on the coffee table.
Of course, Dirk isn’t the only one at fault. Todd has his own unfortunate habits. One of the first ones that bothered Dirk was Todd’s distaste for mirrors, a distaste born out of self loathing and laziness that he grew so used to he didn’t even have a mirror in the bathroom. Dirk is a certified peacock who totes around a special kind of vanity that he denies he has but that his behavior betrays, so Dirk gets a mirror. He gets twenty three, to be exact, until Todd (after a long discussion that turned into a surreal debate) makes him return twelve of them. One now hangs above their bathroom sink.
Todd also has the tendency to forget to shake his toothbrush completely dry. This was no problem before, when he lived alone, and he set his toothbrush on the edge of the sink. But now that Dirk is here, so is this garishly orange toothbrush cup where their toothbrushes are supposed to go into. When Todd doesn’t shake his toothbrush dry, water slowly drips down and accumulates and nobody notices until they have ganky little swamp at the bottom of the cup. It drives Dirk up the fucking wall (“If this continues—” he says, groggily poking Todd in the chest. “—the swamp will grow microbes, or whatever it is that began life on Earth. Then we’re going to end up with something sentient, perhaps even malevolent, growing in our bathroom. In the cup.”) but once the first tea of the day is in Dirk’s system, he forgets all about it until the next time one of them notices the water all over again.
Together, their annoying habits mingle and balance out. It’s a little weird, but it works. Todd nags Dirk about the toothpaste, Dirk nags Todd about the water in the cup, and then they end up with weird joint bad habits that both of them have to take credit for as a unit. Like the fact that they both forget to throw old toothbrushes out, just moving on to a new one and leaving the others still there in the cramped, swampy, over-toothbrush-populated cup, and go on with their days.
This day in particular ends with Todd getting a pretty huge gash on his arm after a knife fight. The hospital is a no-go because the case they’re currently on has this whole thing where the ER might just be run by mind controlling bodysnatchers. Todd and Dirk’s apartment is closer, so Farah drives them all there.
She deposits Todd on the couch to bleed sluggishly on the cushions before going to the bathroom to fetch antiseptic while Dirk goes and finds bandages. For some reason their first aid kit is strewn around the apartment like some kind of Easter egg hunt.
Farah returns from the bathroom holding antiseptic and a wet towel in one hand and the toothbrush cup in the other. The ridiculous, orange, swamp cup that holds eight entire toothbrushes. She rattles the cup, jostling the eight toothbrushes around.
“How many mouths do you have?” Farah puts the cup down on the table to get to work.
“What?” Todd says. Farah pauses her methodical cleaning of Todd’s arm to look at him, eyebrows slightly scrunched with worry. Well, more worry than the regular day to day baseline of Farah-worry.
“Are you feeling okay?” Farah asks. “You haven’t lost that much blood, but if you’re feeling dizzy or more off than usual or are having trouble understanding things—”
“I’m fine,” he cuts her off before she can begin listing symptoms like how googling ‘my head hurts’ leads to a million results all with different variations of ‘perhaps you’re going to die’. “I heard you. Can understand you. Just—What?”
“Mouths,” she says, dabbing antiseptic into Todd’s skin. “How many.”
“Two,” Todd answers.
Farah raises an eyebrow. Todd’s brain is tired and it takes a second for it to catch up.
“I mean. I have one. And Dirk is the other one. Collectively, two.”
Wound all clean and disinfected, she grabs the toothbrush cup again, showing it to Todd as if he doesn’t see it on a daily basis. “Are you sure?”
“I am one hundred percent sure there are only two mouths living here,” he says, though the way Farah shakes the cup—with the kind of determination and drive one only gets by virtue of having killed several supervillains—is honestly making Todd doubt his answer.
“You have eight toothbrushes. If there are two mouths living here, why do you have eight toothbrushes?”
“Because we have a lot of toothbrushes, not more mouths.”
“Why are you two arguing—” Dirk walks in, holding bandages like they’re unruly eels. “—over the number of mouths in this household?”
“You have a startling amount of toothbrushes for two collective mouths,” Farah says. Todd would ask why she’s so caught up on the toothbrushes, but then he remembers Farah color codes the thumbtacks in the office to relax. This is expected.
Dirk shrugs. “We forget to throw the old ones out.”
“It’s—It’s not a password. You can’t just forget. You see it. Everyday.”
“It isn’t as if any of our lives halts its chaotic nature for either of us to possibly remember what to do when faced with—” Dirk stops to quickly count the toothbrushes. “—eight toothbrushes.”
“Eight whole toothbrushes,” Farah hisses, remarkably managing to stay worked up about one topic while calmly and perfectly bandaging Todd’s arm.
“Just—” Todd sits up and plucks out the two toothbrushes he and Dirk are currently using from the cup. “There. Dirk, throw the rest out.”
Dirk pats Todd’s head, and scuttles off to do just that.
“Are there any other easily fixable and yet inexplicably persisting issues present in this apartment?” Farah asks.
“You have no idea,” Todd sighs. “Don’t open the fridge.”
“Why—” Farah says, opening and closing her hands like she now can’t think about anything else but checking their fridge. “—would you tell me that.”
“Fun to wind you up,” Todd says.
Farah punches him in his good arm softly, and when Todd says softly, he means that she thinks it’s soft while Todd knows it’ll probably bruise. It’s worth it to see her amused smile.
“Farah!” Dirk comes back into the room, holding his hand to his chest, aghast and over the top. “Bullying the injured in his own home!”
“Yep. Dying over here,” Todd deadpans, dutifully throwing an arm over his face to look more dead so Dirk can continue fucking around.
“Look at what you’ve done.”
“God, you two are insufferable,” Farah laughs. Todd hears the soft whump of a cushion getting tossed and probably hitting Dirk perfectly in the face. “How do you stand each other?”
“No clue,” Todd says, and he doesn’t need to look at Farah or Dirk to know that he’s probably got the most disgusting, lovestruck smile on his face. Years ago, Todd would’ve cringed, but now, he just lets himself feel it.
Farah stays for a few more minutes to bicker and set up a game plan for tomorrow. When she leaves, she pats both Todd and Dirk on the arm in her weird, affectionate way, and sends one last suspicious look at the bathroom and the fridge before going out the door. Dirk drags Todd to bed, because they’ve both at one point felt the consequences of sleeping on the couch, and sleep finds them easily in between the mumbles of mundane conversation.
The case gets solved. The days go by. Three weeks later, the orange cup in their bathroom acquires an extra toothbrush. It’s how things go.
-
In the grand scheme of things, the toothbrush conundrum is a small bump in the road in all of it. Life ebbs and flows and whatever gets on either of their nerves in the bathroom is gone by the time Dirk switches on the electric kettle and Todd switches on the stove. Once they’re both out the door for the day, it’s forgotten entirely, only to be remembered later that night or the next morning for their grumpier, sleepier selves to have to deal with.
If Todd’s being honest, there’s something comforting about their joint forgetful habit, in some really weird way. It’s an irritating little constant. A sign that Dirk is here with Todd, and that together they’ve made something different, even if that difference is an incongruous amount of toothbrushes. When Farah suggests buying a thing that sticks to the wall that holds toothbrushes individually, Todd catches himself getting awful sentimental about the orange swamp cup. Farah catches his look, rolls her eyes, and doesn’t suggest any more logical toothbrush paraphernalia.
There’s no case this week, so Todd takes the momentary reprieve of chaos to run some errands while Dirk runs his own, which made Todd pretty skeptical, if only because he doesn’t know what kind of errands Dirk would even have. By the time he’s on his way back home, the sky is purpling with dusk. Todd makes a stop to buy some milk and then after a second to think, a tub of the sugariest, most topping filled ice cream he could find in the store.
He gets home and the apartment is quiet. Dark, except for the stream of light spilling out from the bathroom.
Todd finds Dirk there, hunched over the sink, hands clutching the porcelain.
“Hey,” Todd says softly.
Dirk doesn’t say anything. He’s holding himself too still.
Todd places a hand on Dirk’s back, slowly, just in case he doesn’t want to be touched. “You okay?”
“Yes,” Dirk croaks, as if he’s forgotten he could talk. Then he winces. “Well. No. But it’s fine. It’s—”
Dirk’s words stutter off into silence. Quiet. He wears quiet all wrong, like the color grey, like an ill fitting jumpsuit he wants to burn. His hair is mussed with sleep, probably from the afternoon naps he usually takes when the universe isn’t pulling him in every direction. The stillness of his body gives way to a slight trembling in his hands. In his gaze, there’s a distance Todd aches to cross.
There are days like these where something sets Dirk off. Blackwing has given him more than a lifetime of nightmares and Todd would know that the past might leave, but it never quite fades. Dirk wakes up in the middle of the night gasping sometimes, and Todd would wake up and talk him through it. Sometimes it’s quieter, and Todd can only shake sleep off for a few seconds to notice Dirk burrowing deeper into the covers, into Todd’s arms, before slipping under again. Sometimes Dirk doesn’t wake Todd at all, instead leaving the apartment to wander around for a minute, or an hour, or more. That one used to worry Todd a lot. The first time it happened, it sent Todd into panic but after Dirk came back, after hushed conversations that bled into the air the same time the sunrise did, Todd understood. He didn’t like it, but he understood. Sometimes Dirk needed to be alone to deal with the monster of the night. And he’d be gone a while, but he’d always come back.
Other times are like this. Dirk looking at the mirror, not saying a word.
Todd doesn’t know what he’s looking for in his reflection and he doesn’t think he ever will.
“I’m gonna shower,” Todd says, voice staying as neutral as possible despite the worry that fills his chest. “Join me?”
Dirk doesn’t nod so much as lean ever so slightly Todd’s touch, and after months of these kinds of days, Todd recognizes it for the answer it is.
Todd undresses unceremoniously, shucking his clothes to the corner, while Dirk follows in slow, stilted movements. Todd gets into the shower, gets the water going, and waits for the cold to turn lukewarm then to turn into something just before the edge of too hot. Dirk stalls at the shower curtain. When Todd pulls him closer, he shuts his eyes, and there they are, standing under the water.
To call this showering might be pushing it a little bit. Dirk has been very outspoken about the dangers of shampooing every day, something about sulfates and healthy scalps that Todd can never remember, so all Todd can really do is touch him. He runs his hands over Dirk’s shoulders, slides them slowly down Dirk’s chest, feels Dirk’s heartbeat under his palms. It’s intimate. Delicate. Any other day, Dirk would be touching back, more than happy to fawn over every inch of Todd’s body in every way he could think of, before gently pushing him against the tiled wall and making Todd forget about anything that wasn’t Dirk’s hands, Dirk’s mouth, Dirk’s everything.
But now, when Dirk flutters his eyes open, eyelashes wet with what could either be tears or water, Todd sees that the look in Dirk’s gaze is still far away. Dirk is both here and not here, not really, and Todd stays close to him, holds him through it, and tries to bring him back. There are things Todd can’t fix, things only Dirk can, at his own pace with his own choices, but Todd will be damned if he isn’t with Dirk every step of the way.
As Dirk leans his head against Todd’s shoulder, taking a deep, shuddering breath that sounds like it’s the first he’s taken all day, Todd knows this has to count for something.
Drying off and getting dressed anew is as quiet an affair as the shower was, but Todd is relieved to note Dirk has a little bit more color to his cheeks. No longer pale and shaking, Dirk lets himself be led to the couch where they sit and pretend to watch the news before Dirk gravitates to Todd’s body, the both of them ending up in a tangle of limbs. Dirk lays on top of Todd, his head resting on Todd’s chest, listening.
As Todd threads his fingers through Dirk’s hair, trying to think up of ways to help Dirk feel better, his mind remembers what he was doing before he got home, and he sighs.
“I got ice cream,” Todd says.
Dirk perks up, a little slower than usual, but still there. “Where?”
“There,” Todd gestures to the abandoned paper bag on the kitchen counter. It looks perilously soggy and despondent. He should probably get up and put it in the freezer, but Dirk’s languid weight over him isn’t doing wonders for his determination on that front. “I forgot about it.”
“What kind of ice cream?”
“I don’t actually know. I just got the one that looked like it had the most stuff in it.”
“I love stuff,” Dirk lays his head on Todd’s chest again. “Stuff ice cream just happens to be my favorite.”
“Right now, it’s probably more of stuff...soup.”
“Might still taste good.”
“Really doubt that.”
Dirk just hums, the slight vibration of it making itself at home in Todd’s chest. Todd is just about to ask Dirk to get up so he can put everything in the fridge where they’re supposed to be, but before he can, Dirk speaks up.
“Thank you,” Dirk says, words just on the edge of breaking past quiet. Not quite there, but on the way.
“No problem,” Todd tells him, holding Dirk closer.
The ice cream melts into a miserable puddle in its tub. The next day, after its had time to refreeze, Todd has to admit that it doesn’t taste half bad.
-
Todd learns that living with Dirk has made the both of them a little weird on the day an intergalactic wormhole opens up in the bathroom.
It’s a glowing, four meter tall, oval portal in the wall across from the shower curtain. Todd manages to say “What the fuck” which is enough to alert Dirk who pops in behind him and says “That’s new” and after that they can’t say much else aside from “AAAAAAA” because a terrifying looking alien is comes through the wormhole and wrecks havoc on their apartment.
Needless to say, they have to relocate for that week, and the only other person they know who has a permanent address in the area is Farah.
It’s excruciating for everybody involved. Farah is the most organized person Todd has ever known, and her apartment, while still homey and comfortable, reflects that. She has neat bookshelves, a frankly terrifyingly systematic whiteboard calendar, and five locks on her door. She busts out an inflatable mattress for them and sets it up in the living room, and in the middle of Farah’s methodically arranged furniture, he and Dirk stick out like sore thumbs. Their joint weird habits stick out like forks Farah probably dreams of stabbing them with when they get on her nerves.
To say the arrangement is tense would only be half true. Todd loves Farah very much, and he knows she loves him and Dirk fiercely, but the three of them living together is a cocktail for disaster. Dirk’s forgetfulness drives Farah up the wall, Farah being stressed makes Dirk stressed, and watching this all happen in front of him gives Todd a headache, which makes him snap at whoever is closest. Farah is as hospitable as she can be, which means she’s just shy of trying to murder them, and an uncomfortable tension fills Todd’s chest whenever he wakes up and sees a ceiling that isn’t the one he’s grown used to.
To stay sane, they all focus on the case so that they can go back as soon as possible. The case reveals itself to be a clusterfuck involving a trip through another wormhole into a literal spaceship in space, some impromptu alien diplomacy, learning that the wormhole is basically an intergalactic cat door that opens up in random places in the universe to let the alien governor’s ‘cat’ out, and being tasked to find the ‘cat’ before it gives somebody in Seattle a heart attack thanks to the fact that it looks like giant, feral slug with four eyestalks.
A fire extinguisher, a creatively used kiddie pool, and many, many bruises later, they manage to catch the ‘cat’ and return it. The governor gives Dirk horrifying plant as a thank you gift and closes the wormhole.
The moment the case is done, Farah lovingly kicks them out of her apartment and tells them to never come back ever again unless one of them is dying.
Their apartment is predictably a mess, but in spite of it all, Todd feels the tension inside of him unwind once he’s through the door. And there really is a lot for there to be in spite of. A window is broken, a couple of plates are strewn around look like they were eaten, and their sofa is just not there anymore since it’s somehow found itself impossibly wedged in the stairwell.
There’s also slime. Everywhere.
“Fucking cat,” Todd grimaces at the goo puddle he just stepped in. It’s uncomfortably viscous.
“It wasn’t a cat.” Dirk says, poking at some of the slime on the walls. “Governor Rgrpth said the species was called a Jrytg.”
The fact Dirk can pronounce those words flawlessly is infuriating. Instead of saying that, which would no doubt launch Dirk into trying to teach Todd how to say it for the third time, Todd tosses him a trash bag and says, “Come on, we’ve gotta clean up.”
A few minutes pass of him and Dirk scooping up slime and dumping it into trash bags, but moments later, Todd notices that Dirk has wandered off. He looks up from the slime pile and sees Dirk walking around the apartment holding the pot that houses alien plant. The alien plant that looks like the unholy offspring between sentient jello and Little Shop of Horrors. The plant that has a mouth.
Dirk places the pot down, steps back, hums a bit, then picks it back up to repeat the whole process all over again somewhere else, evidently looking for a suitable place to keep the thing. Todd quietly cleans to the sound of him shuffling around everywhere, making a note to make Dirk figure out the sofa later since he’s taking care of most of the slime, when he realizes the shuffling has gotten softer.
Todd seals off the garbage bag and looks around. Dirk is not here.
“Perfect!” Todd hears from the general direction of the bathroom.
Oh god no.
He walks in to see that Dirk has placed the plant right next to the sink. Its vines spill out from the pot and onto the floor like limp, translucent noodles. Its mouth is open and threateningly pointed upwards. Dirk turns to him, beaming.
Dirk begins to justify the atrocity. “Now, before you say—”
“No,” Todd cuts him off.
Dirk pouts. “Now, after you say no, I just want to remind you that the governor said it needed low sunlight and high humidity so this is really the best place—”
“It’s an alien plant.”
“It’s called an Vrknv.”
“Of course it is.” Todd sighs. He hates to burst Dirk’s bubble, but the plant has a mouth. That makes three collective mouths in the apartment. “I really don’t know how I feel about a plant with a mouth in the bathroom.”
“Hm. I suppose it does look a little grotesque, at some angles.”
“It looks grotesque at all angles.”
“Oh!” Dirk says, having a little lightbulb moment. “The mouth does solve a problem, though.”
Dirk swipes a few of the extra toothbrushes from the orange cup and shoves it into the plant’s gaping maw.
“Oh my god.” Todd watches in horror as the plant closes its mouth around the toothbrushes and begins gurgling happily. “No. Dirk, no.”
“You have to admit that it looks quite cute, really.”
“Cute sure is—” Todd says. “—an adjective.”
The plant begins making a grinding sound, like rocks in a washing machine, and slowly, the toothbrushes begin disappearing further into its body.
“Aw!” Dirk pets the plant. “It likes it.”
“It’s—It’s eating it.”
“And enjoying the experience!” Dirk turns to Todd, flashing an endearingly goofy grin.
Todd briefly remembers that same ridiculous smile just yesterday, when the both of them were on the governor’s spaceship in a different corner of the universe. When Dirk smiled yesterday, against the backdrop of the constellations of another galaxy, Todd’s heart skipped a beat. When Dirk smiles now, petting their weird alien plant in the bathroom of their normal apartment, Todd’s heart warms like the bed covers do on mornings they decide to sleep in.
Todd figures out what that feeling was, when they got back to the apartment, the feeling that stretched out and sighed after being curled up tight the entire week. Slime and alien plant aside, Todd is glad to be back home. Back in their home.
“Sure,” Todd says, not wanting to get too derailed by his heart. Plenty of time for that later. Now, there’s still stuff to do. “There’s still slime the whatever left to clean up.”
“The Jrytg, Todd.” Dirk says haughtily.
Todd digs his fingers into a puddle of alien goo on the floor and lobs a handful of it at Dirk.
-
Hilariously, it’s when the aliens are gone that Todd actually gets hurt in the bathroom. He walks in to check if he needed to add anything to the grocery list when he sees that Dirk has inexplicably left an entire head of cabbage in the sink. When Todd picks it up, even the Vrknv looks weirded out by it. Todd is about to yell that Dirk put it back wherever the hell it belongs, but before he can get any words out, a telltale buzz rings in his ears. He braces himself against the wall, breathes in and out, and feels searing pain in his legs.
Todd tries not to look. He can tell enough from the pain that his skin is flaying itself off his legs, and he doesn’t need to see that. He’s busy enough screaming his head off, especially when the pain crawls up his back, his arms, his hands, every inch of his body dipped into slicing agony. Pain in its purest form clawing him from inside out. It’s not real, but everything hurts, his head is pounding, his throat is hoarse from yelling. In a word, it’s bad. It’s really bad.
Todd doesn’t remember passing out, but he does remember that he felt panicked hands flitting over his body right before it all went black.
When Todd wakes up, he blinks at the ceiling of the bathroom. He turns his head and, sure enough, lying next to him on the floor of their bathroom is Dirk. Dirk is scrolling through his phone idly, his Twitter timeline filled with pictures and videos of cute animals.
Dirk glances at him, and he smiles. It’s worried at the edges, but it’s a smile all the same. He angles his phone so Todd can better see the video he’s watching of ducklings crossing the road. He’s careful not to touch Todd. Not yet.
“You know,” Dirk says. “I realize we’ve never had a case involving ducklings.”
It takes a moment for Todd to remember how to use his voice. “Ducklings are probably covered by the universe,” he says hoarsely.
Dirk hums, restarting the duckling video, watching more intently. “Highly probable.”
“You don’t want a case with ducklings anyway,” Todd tells him. “I got—When I was younger, I got chased by a duck. Or a goose. Can’t tell the difference.”
“What did you do to the poor thing to make it chase you?”
“Nothing! I was minding my own business, and it just started running after me. It was terrifying.”
“How old were you?” Dirk asks, and Todd can hear the grin in his voice. “Imagining a child-sized Todd getting chased by evil waterfowl is just fantastic.”
“I was twenty one,” Todd deadpans.
Dirk laughs, loud and bright. The sound of it bounces around the walls, reminding Todd where they are. On the floor of the bathroom.
“You don’t have to lie on the floor with me every time, you know,” Todd says, words feeling fragile and small.
“Yes, well, I can’t move you can I?” Dirk can’t. Dirk shouldn’t. If an attack is so bad it knocks Todd out, any extra stimuli might just trigger aftershocks. It’s best to let all of it bleed out. Todd knows Dirk hates being helpless, but it’s how it has to be. “I don’t mind. I might even enjoy being on the floor, now that I think about it.”
“Right,” Todd says. “Because the floor is a five star establishment.”
“I like to think it is,” Dirk says brightly. He brings a hand up and starts counting off. “No stains. Excellent grout quality. Lovely color and shine. You’re here.”
Despite the dregs of pain still thrumming in his body, the aches and tingles, the cold, swooping anxiety of knowing this will always happen, Todd smiles.
“Are you alright?” Dirk asks.
“As much as I ever am.”
“And how much is that?”
Dirk moves reaches over slowly to hold Todd’s hand carefully. There can’t be too much stimuli. No hugging for at least a few hours, just in case, no matter how much Todd wants to wrap himself up in Dirk’s embrace. But just this, just Dirk’s hand holding Todd’s, his thumb slowly tracing back and forth over Todd’s knuckles, this is more than enough.
It’s time like these that really hit Todd. There are cases, of course. There are moments where Dirk smiles at him dazzlingly after solving a puzzle, moments where they barely cheat death and Todd holds Dirk close as if Dirk is the only thing stopping him from drowning, moments where he’s running alongside Dirk while Dirk follows the universe and Todd knows he’d never have it any other way, and those moments are good. Great. Fantastic. He doesn’t know how he got this lucky.
But it’s times like these, the quieter moments, the moments so small that Todd could fit them in the space between his and Dirk’s hands, that really get to Todd. It’s times like now that he really gets blindsided by how much he loves Dirk. By how much Dirk loves him.
“A lot, actually.” Todd says, squeezing Dirk’s hand. His grip is weak and barely there, but Dirk holds him through it. “I’m pretty alright.”
-
Despite the new routines in his life, Todd still never knows what to expect. He figures that no matter how bizarre his life gets, eventually, things should stop surprising him, and to an extent, they do. Ghosts, rifts in the space-time continuum, something that was probably zombies but never officially confirmed to be zombies, Dirk constructing a pyramid out of his newly printed business cards, these are all things Todd can take in stride after a few minutes of disbelief. But just because he can adjust to situations pretty quickly, that doesn’t mean he can ever tell what’s going to happen next.
So one night when Todd finds the tube of toothpaste, sitting innocently on the sink, completely and pristinely capped, his entire universe feels like that one time Dirk decided to move all the furniture seven inches to the left.
“Tooooooodd,” Dirk calls out from somewhere. Todd is still looking at the toothpaste when he hears Dirk shuffle into the bathroom. “Have you seen my—” A pause. More shuffling. “What are you doing?”
Todd gestures to the toothpaste. “The toothpaste is closed.”
“Oh,” Dirk brightens, then immediately schools his expression into something more smug and proud of himself. “It seems it is. I told you I’d remember eventually.”
“Yeah, it only took, what, two years?”
“That kind of attitude doesn’t seem conducive to my memory.”
“‘Your memory,’” Todd rolls his eyes. “Stop talking like you’re eighty.”
“I’ll talk however I want to,” Dirk huffs. The desired effect is probably lost thanks the the soft smile on his face. “What would you do if I remembered every day from here on out?”
Todd scoffs. “Probably ask you to marry me, or something.”
“My answer is already a yes,” Dirk says, easy as breathing.
A beat of silence.
Todd blinks a couple of times. The syrup slow realization of the last few words the both of them just said trickles into Todd’s awareness, and the exact same thing must be happening to Dirk because his face tinges with color, his eyes wide and gaze sharp.
“Uh,” Todd says eloquently.
“Did—Did I just—After you just— er, asked—” Dirk flounders, words darting around, unsure which direction to go in first.
“Uh,” Todd says a second time, just in case the first one wasn’t enough. “I mean, it wasn’t really—”
“Yes, of course, it wasn’t actually—”
“Unless you actually—”
“Things just slip out, proposals included—”
Proposal, holy shit. “I mean—”
“We can forget all about it,” Dirk says, finally giving them the first complete sentence in the past few agonizing seconds. “If you want to, that is.”
If Todd wants to.
Todd takes a moment to forget the sheer awkwardness of the situation to think about it. His life, and how it is, and what he wants from it. The only thing he can think of wanting is more days like all the ones he already gets to have; weird, wonderful, and together.
It’s not a realization so much as a confirmation of something that’s been in his mind for a long time, now. A quiet little thought Todd had tucked away somewhere soft and warm, finally uncovered to look at and hold. It’s the possibility of the rest of their lives like this. It’s the clear, sure fact that Todd wants that possibility to be real.
Carefully, Todd asks. “Do you want to forget it?”
“You were joking,” Dirk says seriously.
“Yeah, I was, but—” Todd starts, and there really is no easy way to put this. “What if I wasn’t? I think—I think I meant it. No, I know, I meant it. Or I know I’d mean it, the next time I did it.”
“I—” Dirk looks at Todd, his gaze a just on the edge of shy but more on the edge of brave. “I’d stand by what I said. You must already know that.”
There are parts of Todd’s life where he wouldn’t know that, actually. Huge swathes of time where his self doubt would chew up any sliver of something that could possibly be good, but those times are over. Now, Todd knows. He knows it like he knows the water at the bottom of the cup, like he knows they’ll always end up with more toothbrushes in that cup than they logically need, like how he knows the Vrknv is going to stay in the bathroom no matter how unsettling Todd finds the thing. He knows it like how he knows Dirk will always be with him after an attack. He knows it like how he knows that sometimes, Dirk will disappear in the middle of the night in more ways than one, but that he’ll always come back.
Todd doesn’t know how to say any of this. How to make words that could possibly do this justice. How to explain that loving Dirk has made him completely certain of something he once thought he’d never deserve.
Loving Dirk, it seems, has also made him the stupidest person on the planet because the only thing Todd does think to do is grab the tube of toothpaste. He holds it out to Dirk and says, “Will you, uh. Will you let me ask you again some other time?”
Dirk blinks, eyes almost comically wide, looking at the tube of toothpaste as if it’s going to spontaneously combust.
“Well, unless you wanna do it, then, uh. You should probably say so now. Or not. Seems kinda stupid to schedule it, or—jesus christ, none of this is coming out how I want it to.” Todd laughs nervously, but he pushes forward. “I’m trying to say that I want to ask you, just not now, not here because—ambiance. Alien plant. Sometimes you leave the sifter in the shower.”
“It’s not too bad of a place,” Dirk says, sounding stunned. “I rated this bathroom five stars.”
“I cannot—Can you imagine telling people the story of how we got engaged? Because you remembered to put the cap on the toothpaste? Nobody would let either of us live it down.”
“We’ve done worse.”
“I want to do this best.” Todd tells him. He needs Dirk to know this. “I don’t want to ask because of an accident. I want it to be sure, because I am. You—you changed my life. You made it better, you make me better, you make me want to be better every day. This life is so weird I sometimes don’t know what to do with myself, but I’m—happy. And I’m all in for it, all of it, as long as you’re there with me. Or I’m there with you. So—so this is me. Proposing to propose.”
Dirk stands there, looking a bit dazed, eyes darting from the toothpaste before settling on Todd.
“You don’t, uh, have to answer now. Or answer to—have an answer.” Past the nerves and the overwhelming love in Todd’s system, he can vaguely feel his brain hurting. Trust the two of them to make something as straightforward as a proposal so complicated. “This is all pretty informal so—”
“Shut it, I’m trying to collect myself and failing spectacularly.” Dirk says, breathless. He smiles, brighter than anything else in the world. “Yes, Todd. Yes. This is me, proposing to say yes.”
“Dirk—”
Dirk doesn’t let Todd say anything because he else plucks the toothpaste out of his hand and tosses it over his shoulder. Todd thinks he hears the hiss of the Vrknv getting hit by it, but he can’t notice anything after that because Dirk grabs his face and pulls him in for a kiss.
It’s no romance movie kiss. There’s no great swell of music or cinematically placed rain. Instead, there’s Dirk, who is a little bit too excited, and Todd, who isn’t expecting it, and the resulting uncomfortable mash of teeth. There’s a second to lean into it, to meet each other halfway. There’s the softer press of their lips, the sound of Todd’s relieved and content sigh, the feeling of his heart beating steadily in his chest, sure that an answer is echoing it in Dirk’s own. There’s this moment, stupid and ridiculous and probably one of the best moments in Todd’s entire life.
It’s perfect. It’s perfect in every way that matters.
-
There are days where Dirk remembers to put the cap back on the toothpaste and days where he doesn’t. Same goes for Todd and the water in the orange cup, constantly reminded by Dirk’s incessant quips about it when he pours the swamp down the drain. The extra toothbrushes get killed off, but they end up with three more somehow and have taken to sticking the extra ones in Vrknv’s mouth until the plant devours them.
But then there are other days where Todd opens his eyes blearily and the weight Dirk’s arms around him convince him to delay the morning for a few minutes. Days where the seconds trickle forward and Todd and Dirk lag a few moments behind, content to stay in each other’s warmth for just a little while longer.
On those days, Todd lets it happen. They’ve got all the time in the world.