Excerpt: Stepping Stones

“Don’t. Move,” Karkat says through gritted teeth. “It’s in. Your pants.”

Dave would laugh if he weren’t terrified for his future children as Karkat approaches with the staff brandished like a baseball bat. Both hands fly instinctively to cover his crotch as he curls in on himself. “Jesus, Dude, chill! It was just my dick! Calm the fuck down!”

Karkat blinks at him. He slowly lowers the staff from an imminent ball-bashing position, although he doesn’t actually set it down. “Your...” he trails off.

Dave knows he’s probably blushing, and he hates it so, so much. He’s supposed to be cool about shit. Jesus Strider, keep it together. It’s just a boner, not the end of the fucking world. You already lived through the latter.

But Karkat won’t stop staring. His expression is something like horrified curiosity. “Your... your genitals move?”

Dave is somewhat thrown off by this. “Yours... don’t?”

There is a long and world-record awkward silence. This is some gold fucking medal olympic-grade discomfort here for both of them. The look of horrified curiosity on Karkat’s face does not go away. Finally he meets Dave’s eyes and says slowly, solemnly, “Strider, you have to be dead fucking honest with me here... Do humans have tentacles for genitals?”

Dave raises both hands to his face. He’s not sure whether to laugh, or cry, or maybe just stop fucking existing because Christ on a pogo stick, what kind of question is that? He takes a deep breath. “No, Karkat. Humans do not have tentacles for genitals.”

Karkat relaxes fractionally. The makeshift dick-crushing weapon lowers all the way until it touches the floor, although even now Karkat still doesn’t actually drop the thing. “But it... moves?”

Dave rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure, sorta. Sometimes. It’s not a big deal, Dude. Why, how do your bits work?”

Karkat frowns. “No fair. I asked first.”

They stare at each other again a moment in silence.

Which is how, a few minutes later, the two of them come to be gathered around the coffee table with paper and crayons and Dave drawing what might be the first ever non-ironic dick he’s ever drawn in his life.

Karkat scowls at the picture. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. You draw those all the time. That’s the lame shit you forced me to draw in Rose’s book that time I was trying to explain to you about Terezi and Vriska’s relationship. You drew one out of chalk and tried to make us play Number Square Jump on it that one time, remember? But no one said anything about them moving!”

“They don’t- move, exactly,” Dave tries to explain. “It’s more like it sort of... grows? Like, swells? Like, it starts out like...” he tries to draw a non-erect penis, but it comes out looking more like a sad, lumpy upside-down U shape. “And then when a guy is, you know, interested or whatever, it fills with blood and sort of... stiffens up? And when it does it can, like, twitch and stuff.” Suddenly Dave is very self-conscious about how weird human dicks are. He’d never really thought about it before.

“So they are tentacles,” says Karkat.

“No!” Dave sets down his crayon. “It’s not like, prehensile or whatever. We’re not going around with, like, fucking squid crotches.”

Karkat still looks skeptical. “And all humans have these?”

“Well, all the dudes, yeah. It’s different for girls.”

Karkat throws up his hands, tantrum-style. Dave can sense one of the troll’s famous rants coming on. After more than a year on the meteor with the guy, he’s developed a sort of sixth sense for them.

“Do you mean to fucking imply to me, with all fucking seriousness, that female humans have different genitals than male humans? What kind of fucking bullshit are you trying to feed me here Strider? Do I look like I crawled out of a fucking cocoon yesterday? Am I covered with metamorphosis-slime? Do I look like I’m fucking glistening to you?! How would that even work! I thought your species was usually all about the gender-mixing for sex? How would you even deal with a set of foreign genitals? What, do you like, need to read a fucking manual before you can have sex? So what do women even have then, hm? Like, a curly version or something?”

Dave holds up a hand, not because he thinks it will actually calm Karkat, but more in a sort of gesture of self-preservation. “Dude, it’s just a vagina. It’s not a big deal.”

“What in the massive glub-beast’s fucking fronds is a vagina?”

“It’s like...” Dave puts the crayon back to paper before realizing that he actually doesn’t really know that much about vaginas. He draws a vague, upright oval and then, after a moment’s consideration, draws two smaller ovals inside of it. “It’s sort of like that. It’s like, this part sticks out a little, I think, and that’s the part that you stimulate or whatever. And then there’s a hole part here that the penis goes in.”

“Goes IN?!” Karkat shrieks.

“Keep your fucking voice down,” Dave hisses. The last thing they need is fucking Rose Lalonde finding them and seeing Dave’s piss-poor attempt at drawing a vag. “Yeah, it goes in. That’s how human reproduction works. The male uses his penis to put the... uh, seed inside the female, and then the baby grows in the female’s uterus or whatever, and then nine months later it comes out. What, do you guys not do that?”

Karkat ignores the question. He looks pale. “Comes... out?” His voice is dazed. Dave hopes he’s not about to throw up; he looks like he might. “Like... a whole human?”

“Not, like, a full-grown human. But yeah. A baby. It’s usually like-” he holds his hands out in what he assumes is roughly baby size. Not that he’d fucking know, but whatever. Not like Karkat’s going to call him on it.

“And it bursts out of her... uterus? Where is that?”

“It doesn’t burst out. You’re making it seem like some kind of face-hugger shit. No. The uterus is connected to the vagina, so the baby sort of... comes back out the hole?”

Karkat still looks overwhelmed. “That’s utterly ridiculous. You realize that, right? Your reproduction is practically nonsensical. It takes place inside the human? What’s wrong with your species?”

“Alright wise guy.” Dave hands him the crayon. “What do your bits look like then?”

Dave’s not expecting much from this drawing; if anything, Karkat’s an even worse artist than he is, and that’s saying something. And, as usual, Karkat does not fail to disappoint.

He draws a series of wavy vertical lines — two smaller inner ones, and two larger outer ones — and then draws an oval at the top and a couple of circles at the bottom and leans back. His expression is smug, like obviously these are the superior genitals, but Dave’s not even sure what he’s looking at.

Dave nods. “Oh yeah, I can totally see how you’ve got us humans beat. Man, I didn’t even know I really wanted wavy-line genitals until this very moment. How have I even lived my life up to now?”

Karkat scowls at him and gestures to the lines with the crayon. “Those are the seed flaps around the nook.” He draws a smaller oval in the middle of the lines. “You don’t normally see the nook much; the flaps protect it. It’s sort of... recessed? That’s where the... you know, the stuff comes from. The seed.”

“Okay,” says Dave, absolutely 0% clearer on anything. “So what’s with all the lumpy bits?” He points to the round shapes at the top and bottom of the lines.

“Well, in the front you have the bone bulge,” he points to the larger oval at the top, “and in the back you have the shame globes.” He gestures to the two circles. “They’re the... umm... the erogenous parts. The bulge is for flushed arousal, and the globes are for caliginous arousal. Depending on which part is aroused and, uh, stimulated, you get the corresponding seed. So, see? Totally sensible.”

Dave is unconvinced. “So your globe-y things and bulges and whatever — they don’t, like, get bigger when you get turned on or anything?”

Karkat shakes his head. “Not really. I mean, they get softer. The chitinous bone-shields retreat, and they become like...” he glances around for inspiration, and finally picks up a stress ball that Rose had left on the floor from an earlier session of playing therapist. (The crayons had been on the floor too. God, this place is such a fucking mess. You’d think a bunch of teenagers lived here or something.) He hands the stress ball to Dave. “Sort of like that.”

Dave squeezes the stress ball. “Your chitinous... what?”

“Bone-shields,” Karkat replies. “You know. The plates under the skin that protect the genitals. Why, what do you have?”

Dave shrugs. “Nothing, I guess. Our genitals are just squishy and unprotected.”

Karkat levels him a look like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.

Dave raises his hands, palms out. “What? I didn’t design the damn things, okay?” He feels unaccountably defensive on behalf of the entire human race. They’ve been getting along pretty damn well so far with the genitals they have, thank you very much! Dave certainly has, anyway.