title: The Impossible Project
fandom: Homestuck
rating: G
characters: Cantown Council: Dave Strider, Terezi Pyrope, The Mayor
challenge: "self-portrait"
length: 1200 words & 900x1100px
content notes: none
author notes: Thanks to G. for brainstorming and indulging me.
summary: Dave used to be into photography.



Once upon a time, you could have said that Dave was pretty into photography. He sucked at it, of course; that was a given. The hell did he know about composition? He used an old Fujica, one without autofocus whose lightmeter's battery was blown. It went without saying that everything he shot was a little (or a lot) blurry. That was where the art lived.

Douchebags online loved his bokeh.

This was not as dirty as it sounded, but it was a little, come on. Pasty hipsters with scraggly Amish beards messaging on Flickr to ask a 13 year old about his bokeh? That was some shady shit.)

If he didn't care about shooting, he was slightly more careful in the darkroom. Not just because the lightfast closet was also Bro-safe (dude was afraid of the dark), though that did matter, but also because chemicals were pretty fucking expensive. Dave was old Vaughn-Favreau type "money", but he sure wasn't made of it.

He catches himself, here on the meteor to nowhere and certain death, thinking about the darkroom. He could hardly turn around in there. The ventilation wasn't. Though he did his negatives in a portable tank, there wasn't that option with prints, so he kept his enlarger on a higher shelf, above the bath trays. When he needed to use it, he got up on a rickety piece of shit stepladder and hoped like hell it would hold until he was done with the exposure.

That place was a tiny, narrow, dark, and stuffy sliver of hell. And it was all his, sharp tang of Dektol and silver-recovery solution, chemical burns on his fingertips (gloves were for old ladies and paramedics, and he was pretty sure he was neither), close and warm as some shitty Christmas jumper Mrs. Weasley or Rose might make him.

There's no darkroom here.

There are plenty of dark rooms. He has his enlarger in his sylladex.

But there is no darkroom darkroom. (Repeating the word clarifies the meaning.)

Whatever he tries, Dave can not seem to hit on the correct combination of elements to make the alchemiter produce darkroom chemicals. The closest he came was a last-ditch trial of Karkat’s spittle (launched during his regular late-morning rageahol attack), ink from Rose's ridiculously pretentious fountain pen, and a hock or two from Terezi for good measure.

Close (and gross), but no cigar.

Once he says *that*, of course, he has to make cigars for Terezi and the Mayor. That was relatively straightforward, just one of Rose’s knitting needles && half a chunk of beef jerky he’d found in his old pants. (No, he never inquired as to how his old clothes got into his sylladex when he woke up a god. A gentleman never asks too many questions.

(Besides, he doesn’t really care.)

"Strider!" Waving her lit cigar, dumping ash on the Mayor’s head, Terezi motions him over to the far edge of Can Town. Canburbia, really. Outer Canboonies. ”Show us how to blow the rings.”

”Nah,” Dave said. He drops down to a crouch beside the Mayor; his excellency is contentedly puffing away, cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth like an old Teamster. ”Maybe later.”

”C’mon, all for one!” She pronounces the Musketeers' motto like Dave might try to say something in German, a little haltingly, a lot unfamiliarly. "One for all!"

The Mayor, upon hearing the magic words, straightens up and salutes.

"Busy," Dave tells them. That's patently untrue, but that makes it funnier.

”Buzzkill spoilsport party-loadgaper-filler,” Terezi says, not sounding all that upset.

"That's me." Dave sketches a bow with his hand. ”At your service. Only not, because. Effort.”

She sticks out her tongue before going back to trying to blow smoke rings.

It wasn’t that Dave was *anxious*, per se, to get back to photography. He was a god, an esteemed civil servant of a hypothetical municipality of awesome, and a halfway decent artist (better than Karkat, anyway). And that was all just as he sat here and handed the Mayor bits of chalk. He wasn’t anxious in any sense of the word. (”No, of course not,” the Lalonde in his head notes acidly, ”anxiety would suggest a level of emotional investment in an activity that you have yet to demonstrate in anyone, or anything, more important than apple juice.”

”Leave apple juice out of this,” he tells the imaginary but entirely in-character spectre. ”It never did anything to you. Besides delight and refresh.”)

It’s his head, so that shuts her up. Faithful characterization’s overrated, anyway.

”Gimme a fruit roll-up!” Terezi tackles him, straight-on, fondling his pockets already, nose sniffing madly, tongue flickering.

”Out,” he tells her. It took him way too long to get the captcha combo right to waste the resulting tastiness on whatever pervy plans she has for it. The stub of her cigar pokes his shoulder. "Hey, fire bad, remember?"

”Lies!” Hooting, she yanks out his second-to-last raspberry-quince roll-up from his back pocket. She reaches back in and grabs his ass one more time for good measure, then scuttles away.

The Mayor catches his eye and shrugs.

”Women,” Dave says. That’s what bros say in these situations, right?

The Mayor waggles his cigar all Groucho-like before getting back to work on the Vantas Memorial Social Housing Projects.

"Your honor? Might you have a moment?" Terezi calls sweetly from over by the alchemiter. She's always nice to him. She barely even licks him. Much. That might just be because she dislikes licorice. "Bring chalk! Please."

Like you have to tell him that.

Dave gets back to shading in the exceptionally long, dangerously steep stairs at the center of the Vantas Estates. The haze of cigar smoke dissipates slowly, too slowly. His eyes are still stinging, his stomach still kind of queasy, when his estimable comrades finally return.

Terezi clears her throat. Dave adds some detail to a green space, scratches the back of his neck, roots around for some purple chalk, and waits. She clears her throat again, then kicks him in the chest.

"Ouch. Ow. Help, help," he says and finally looks up. "Sup?"

The Mayor steps forward. He has a bulky, weird-looking camera hanging off a strap around his neck.

"Ta da!" Terezi does a full Vanna sweep with her hand. "All for one, right?"

The Mayor has to salute at that, so the dropped camera bangs against his sash.

Dave cocks his head. "Is that a --"

It looks like a classic Polaroid, a big wedge of plastic with a flip-up top for viewfinder and flash, but, at the same time, not quite. He squints and realizes there are two little orange dinguses jutting out, one from each side.

"Oh, hell no," he says.

"TROLLAROID!" Terezi claps her hands and throws back her head, laughing so hard that the whole damn meteor is probably shaking.

It took a fruit roll-up, some chalk shavings, and the ghost image of the Leica that Dave used to hope he'd own one day to produce this beautiful monster.

Dave knows when he's beat. (Not really, most of the time, but this is so straightforward a defeat, even the combined acuity of Egbert and Gamzee could recognize it for what it is.)

"Okay," he says. "Let's do this."

They end up with him holding the Mayor up, arms around his little barrel torso, Terezi leaning in close, and the Mayor holding the camera for the shot.

"Say Starsky," Dave says.

"No," Terezi says. "Say creamsicle!"

The Mayor says his own thing in his weird purr-clack language.

The flash goes off like a goddamn nova, white and blue, blinding them all. Through the glare, the machine clicks and whirrs, and finally grinds out the picture.

It's not so bad, Dave decides, looking at it later while pinning it up over his bunk.

This may be the least ironic thing he's ever done.

[end]