trollstuck – daverosed

lantadyme:

roachpatrol:

help help I desperately want to see some troll Rose Strider <> Dave Lalonde action help

He falls out of the gate a tangle of limbs and ridiculous damp fabric, every visible inch of skin burned a painful violet-grey, and Rose just stands there with one eyebrow raised. She’d expected him to be an absolute wreck but the falling down pathetic is a little much.

“Hey,” he mutters, still face down on the expanse of a giant metal gear, two fingers raised in greeting. “You didn’t see that, okay?” Rose rolls her eyes and gives him a hand up.

“Heaven forbid you make a presentable entrance. What the fuck are you wearing?”

It’s sort of like a badly-made stilsuit, but instead of being white to reflect heat, he’s alchemized it in green-on-purple paisley. It’s damp all over, dripping from his joints like a squeezed sponge. “Dude, my land is the legal definition of hell on earth. I would dry out in ten seconds without the Herbetian Wetsuit.” Of course he would call it by its full name. “Don’t knock the pattern. It was the only one of my mom’s robes I felt like sacrificing.”

He’s wobbly on his feet but still grips his needles like he figures danger’s just around the corner. Which it is. This is SGRUB. Rose can hear the imps in the distance roaring and looking for something to do. But right now she doesn’t really care, eyes on Dave, on the exhausted curve of his fingers that are so far from standard English knitting hold. He’s woozy for all he talks a good game, and she can see his fins from where they poke out the hood of his shitty wetsuit, dried out and cracked, burnt a deep uncomfortable purple from the Land of Heat and Light.

She grips her sword and takes the first step out of the clockwork hollow. A force-rainshield pops up over her head, saving her hair from being plastered to her skull and horns. “Come on, I will gracefully watch your back as you strip that damn thing off and bathe in my glorious perpetual downpour.” The rain is usually acidic enough to melt through the soles of her sneakers in an hour, but she’s found a little cove here deep in the cogs around the gate that somehow filters the acid out.

“You sure this is kosher?” He mutters, eyeing the sky from where he stands, still under the shielding gear.

“Scout’s honor.”

Dave shrugs and peels back the hood of his wetsuit, visually wincing as he frees his sensitive fins. His face is burnt all purple around his shades. He looks like the victim of a sun worship cult, strung up as a sacrifice for the holy scalding rays. But when he steps out into the rain next to her, damp hair flattened to his scalp instantly, rain dripping down his nose and chin and the tips of his needles, Rose sees him relax in that perfect, natural seadweller’s response to water on skin.

(Now she just needs to get the rest of him out of the wetsuit so she can throw it into some actual acid rain and dissolve that ugly fabric to nothing.)