#sometimes a family is a bundle of lies in a trenchcoat that still loves so so dearly yknow

[jojotier]

so for your spy au you have Rose adopting both Dirk and Roxy, but later on you say that Dave is taking care of Dirk? how does Dirk end up with Dave?

yeah!! so basically Rose adopts both Roxy and Dirk bc for her spy mission she needs kids to send to a prestigious school so she can slide in and make connections with the parents, but later on Dirk ends up kinda moving more in with Dave, though he officially still lives with Rose, and the crux of that comes down to

Dirk cannot function in a traditional school.

He's a smart kid, but traditional schooling kinda eats him alive- it's both incredibly understimulating and overstimulating for a 7-yr-old, and he's not particularly good at playing with other kids or socializing the way Roxy does.

Compounding it all, though, is his telepathy. He can't turn it off. So every day he's in a classroom with about 30 or so other voices loudly talking in his brain over the teacher, who has two monologues going simultaneously, and he's got his own internal monologue- it's a Mess. eventually comes the moment where he kinda breaks and, with the special ed resources lacking, Rose agrees to pull him from the school.

but that leaves Rose in a Predicament. Because Dirk still needs an education, but she can't stay with him during the day, because she has spywork to attend to. There's the option of hiring private tutors, but that also adds unnecessary risk to the mission, since anyone onto her could try to slide in as a tutor to counteract her spying.

And Rose absolutely cannot send Dirk back to the orphanage (because she loves him) because with Roxy being her only in with this prestigious school, the mission rests on Roxy's mental health being intact, and sending Dirk away would cause unnecessary stress.

So Rose tries to get a few of her civilian friends' help. Kanaya turns her down (because as Auxiliatrix, Kanaya has to hunt down Agent Arachnid and her house is just full of weapons), as does Ms Vris (because as Agent Arachnid, there's this fucking terminator esque character trying to murder her???). Karkat just flatly tells her that she doesn't want any of his connections teaching her kid shit. Jade agrees to help a bit, since she homeschools Jake, but she's fairly STEM-heavy and tends to get lost in her (nuclear research) florist work fairly easily, so it's not a long-term solution. June is still likely in the enemy camp, to Rose's knowledge, so that's a no-go.

So finally in comes Dave for weekend babysitting duty and finally he sighs real big and goes hey Rose? I can take it from here. And Rose is a bit... dubious, about having Dave be in charge of teaching any children, and Dave's just like you do realize I have a master's, right, I know how school works, and Rose is like I didn't realize you went to school, and it just kind of goes unsaid that 'maybe you'd know if you didn't disappear for 15 years and make me think you were dead'. But they both silently know it's there.

and lo and behold- Dave's actually probably the most well-suited for teaching Dirk. He's got a working knowledge of politics, philosophy, economics, history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, literature, art and more, and even if he doesn't quite know science or the real advanced mathematics, he can usually outsource to Jade and teach himself first before passing it on to Dirk. (And hey- if that knowledge just so happens to make the wheels of the propaganda machine he runs turn to trying to turn the Prospitian public against nuclear power, that's just a coincidence)

so at first Dirk bounces between being taught at Dave's apartment during the day and then going home to Rose at night, but as the months go on and he starts being able to stomach not being in the buddy system he and Roxy have been in since they broke out the lab, he starts asking to stay over with his Bro more.

It suits Rose fine. In fact, it makes things easier in the long-term- when the mission is finally over, and when she is asked to shed this identity and become someone else once more, kill this persona and burn the name Rose from her memory- when she has to leave this pretend family behind- she won't have to send the kids back to foster care. Dave will take good care of them. She doesn't trust anyone in the world more than her twin.