#some of us should bring Wade's rarepairs again

[qcomicsy]

Attaching a picture of every time Wade and Weasel are not dicks to each other for emotional reasons.

[thunderhel]

This might be a reach with the rarepairs, but maybe some of Dex with the Waffles? Like either Dex/Bully or Dex/Hops?

I love it.

Dex didn’t dislike Bully, despite what everyone might think.

Luckily for Dex, he had cultivated an aura about him that said he disliked everyone, so the newest freshman was really just a drop in a much larger bucket as far as everyone else was concerned. Not to mention Nursey, whose projected chill was a thin line of frost at best, was only just barely concealing his own dislike for Bully. The jealousy resonating off of him was palpable and therefore a much larger target than Dex disliking just one more person on the team.

And even if their assessment was incorrect, it worked in Dex’s favor so he wasn’t about to look that gift horse in the mouth.

it really was silly, he thought, that they all thought he disliked River so much. He spent more time with Bully than any other upperclassman did, and he was confident that he knew more about him than the rest of the team put together. But pointing that out meant wading too far from land and Dex had never felt comfortable trying to swim when the water was that deep.

Dex wasn’t sure what Bully thought. He tried very hard not to think about what Bully thought, which was part of the problem. As far as he could tell Bully didn’t seem to mind Dex’s standoffish ways. He didn’t seem to have a problem when they walked to classes together on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and at least twice now he had sought Dex out to see if he could help with things around the Haus.

“Why do you think I hate River?” Dex had asked Nursey one night, trying to keep his voice as level as he could as he pretended to focus on the open calculus textbook in front of him. The numbers were blurring together and he couldn’t focus on a single word. He was certain Nursey could hear his heartbeat across the room.

“It’s that look you always give him,” Nursey told him. Dex could hear his chair squeak, could picture Nursey leaning farther back in the cheap rolling chair than the IKEA instructions recommended but he couldn’t bring himself to look. “It’s like hatred man, you always look like you’re just about to deck him. Is it the hair? Like you think he’s cool but he looks like a hippie and you just can’t reconcile it?”

Dex wanted to look back, wanted to glare at Nursey and act like this was normal. Act like he was normal. Instead he turned a page arbitrarily and continued to pretend read the words in front of him. “I think you’re just projecting.”

“I am not-” Nursey’s sentence was abruptly cut off by a crash that Dex couldn’t stop himself from turning to look at as Nursey toppled over backwards onto the floor.

Laughing at Nursey and dodging the pillow he threw in retaliation made the panic in his stomach lessen, and when he looked back to his homework the words were solid on the page again.

If anyone asked who his favorite Waffle was he would have said Hops, but that didn’t mean he hated Bully, not by any stretch of the imagination.

After Tango, Bully had been the only person to ever even attempt to help Dex fix anything. And while Tango had proven to be a much faster learner than Dex would have expected, Bully had actually known what he was doing. So Dex had asked for his help with the dryer, the leaking rain gutter above the back door, and replacing the brakes on his jeep. Bully had asked for help in return with his bike, and it had been Dex who had been the one to sit back and hand over tools. If he’d been braver he might have asked a question, any question at all since he’d never so much as touched a motorcycle before, but he had kept his mouth shut as Bully worked.

He was always doing something with that bike, a Honda not a Harley because they were expensive and pretentious -as Bully had told him at least three times- and Dex wished he knew more about it. Asking questions had never been a strong suit of his.

It was where he found himself less than a week later, his hat on backwards and his flannel tied around his waist as he watched Bully tampering with his own brakes. Dex had no experience with bikes and therefore his own input would be useless so he kept his mouth shut and bit down as subtly as he could on the inside of his cheek to hold himself in check.

Bully was on the ground, the rip in the right knee of his jeans was growing slowly larger with every shift of his leg. His hair was pulled back in a braid, a few strands had already come loose and were sticking to the back of his neck with sweat.

“I think I need a completely different part.” When Bully wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist he smeared a line of grease across his skin. Dex bit down harder on his cheek.

“Need a lift somewhere to pick it up?” He asked when he thought he had his voice under control.

“That would be great.”

Dex took a step forward just as Bully stood up and suddenly they were much closer than they had been a moment ago. It wasn’t weird, not really. There was still space enough for to Bully to clean his hands on the dirty rag he’d pulled from his toolbox. And if Bully wasn’t concerned that Dex was close enough that they rag was brushing his arm with each movement, then Dex wasn’t concerned either.

Bully was taller than him. Not by much, maybe an inch or maybe it was less and Dex just wasn’t used to anyone since Holster being able to look down on him. It felt like a lot more than an inch when Bully finally met his eyes and one corner of his mouth twitched up in a smile.

“What?” Dex’s tone was so much sharper than he had intended that it took all he had not to flinch.

Bully didn’t seem to notice. He never did. “You’ve got like, a massive streak of oil on your chin.” He lifted the rag and for one horrible and wonderful moment Dex thought he was going to press it to his face. Instead he hovered an inch away from his skin, pointing out where the grease was. “You weren’t even working, you were just handing me tools. How does that happen?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Dex’s tone was more hollow than he had wanted, but he managed to grab the rag on the first try with dignity as he scrubbed at his skin. ���You’re fucking covered in it.”

“Yeah, but I was the one on the ground.”

“I will leave you here.”

When Bully laughed, it was always on the quiet side, more of a shifting of his shoulders than anything else. He crossed his arms as he did, resting his hip against his bike. “Alright, alright, I’ll stop. I really don’t want to have to fucking walk three miles both ways.”

“I should make you. Consider it hazing.”

Bully shoulders shook again as he caught the rag Dex threw at him. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m calling it quits for the day after this though, I can buy the part today and replace it tomorrow.” Bully tugged at the bottom of his stained and battered tee shirt, pulling it over his head in one fluid movement. His undershirt was grey and damp and didn’t look any cleaner than the shirt he was now using as a rag to wipe his neck. Something in his spine cracked as he closed his eyes and tilted his head to one side. “I’m gonna head back to my dorm to take a shower. Meet you back here in 30?”

Dex nodded, the skin of his cheek back firmly between his teeth once again. He couldn’t find his voice to speak and wouldn’t trust it if he did.

“Cool, thanks man.”

Dex nodded a second time and took a step back to let Bully walk the bike back around the side of the Haus. He’d had to get special permission to keep it there as a freshman. Ollie had said there had been a senior his frog year who had a bike kept in the shed out back. Wicks had said it would make all of them look cooler to have a motorcycle on the property. Bitty had taken three days to deliberate before he had allowed it.

Dex thought he would look stupid, having to walk alongside a motorcycle to move it somewhere. Bully looked a bit like an action star when he did it, covered in dirt and sweat like he’d just gotten out of a particularly hard won fight scene and hadn’t had a chance to repair his bike yet.

“This is what I’m talking about.”

Dex swore, jumping so hard he nearly kicked over his own toolbox still left on the ground. Nursey laughed as he stepped over a puddle of oil on the asphalt. It made Dex feel slightly better to know it was only a stain from a few weeks ago and Nursey was being stupid for stepping over it. Not that anyone else was there to laugh at him. Or that it was that funny.

“What are you talking about?”

“That look man. You spend all this time with Bully, but you still got that look. It’s kind of scary man, I feel like I’d have shit myself if an upperclassman had looked at me like that when I was a frog.”

Dex felt like his face was burning, but the sun was beating down and he tended to turn bright red when faced with even the slightest bit of emotion. Both factors worked in his favor and Nursey didn’t seem to see anything to take note of.

“He’s just a weird dude,” Dex said after a moment. “I just don’t fucking get him.” He forced the words out after a minute of deliberation. He had never been great at lying.

“The fucking weirdest,” Nursey agreed with obvious relief that their found solidarity. Dex didn’t know if it was because Nursey had been wanting someone to agree with him about Bully, or if he had just wanted Dex to agree with him about anything. Either way Dex felt a stab of guilt and promised himself he would do something nice for Nursey to make up for it.

Because he didn’t really think Bully was very weird, and personally he thought he understood Bully fairly well.

Dex knew he had come a long way since he had applied for Samwell. He had deliberated for weeks, going back and forth on the pros and cons and staring at that tiny pixel rainbow flag on the university website until his eyesight went blurry. Now he was close and comfortable friends with Bitty, and Ollie, and Wicks, and Jack, and Nursey. He had close female friends who were only that - friends. He baked on his own time, and he downloaded a few Beyonce songs that Bitty had recommended. He watched romcoms with Chowder and he wore the purple ‘Save the Whales’ tee shirt that Nursey had bought him.

It had taken him nearly a week to decide, but he’d finally bought those pink tennis shoes at Primark that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about.

If he ever shared those things out loud, he knew it would sound silly. It would sound like nothing at all probably, but they were milestones as far as he was concerned. He was a different person from the one that had showed up at Samwell two and a half years ago and he liked who was becoming even if it was frightening at times.

But they were all baby steps in the grand scheme of things and he wasn’t anywhere near the finish line yet.

So for now he was content to let Nursey and Chowder and everyone else on the team think he hated Bully. Because anger was comfortable and it was familiar. Hatred was something he understood and he didn’t mind if people attributed it to him.

“I don’t get why everyone’s always swooning over him,” Nursey continued.

Dex shrugged one shoulder as Bully disappeared from view in the shed. He kept his eyes trained on the spot he had disappeared and tried not to focus on the heat in his face.  Accepting the truth privately was one thing, admitting it out loud to anyone was a step he wasn’t ready to take. “I mean…I guess I can sort of see it. I think it’s the hair.”

At least not yet.