You're taking prompts!! How about that good ol' Google brain Dirk???

(Oh jeez tbh I’ve skipped around this AU so much I really need to sit down and just write it.)

( #throat trauma )

“I know you’re angry,” you say into a room torn to shreds. It’s his bedroom, nicer quarters than have ever been provided to you, and it lies in total disarray. There’s a dent in the wall, books strewn everywhere, every cabinet in the kitchenette is open—some pulled off completely. His mattress is on the other side of the room from its sleek, metallic bedframe. His knuckles are bloody.

“Dirk,” you repeat. His hand twitches and he flinches and oh, oh he’s hurt himself. He makes a breathy gasp of frustration and flinches again and you see a faint line of red seeping through the bandages wrapped tight around his neck.

“Fuck, Strider,” you can’t help but say, this time. You set down the lunch you brought for him on top of the dresser, as the kitchenette’s little table has been overturned. You’d only been gone fifteen minutes. You’d thought he could handle it—

I can handle this.

He’s scratched it out on the top half of a little notepad he’s ripped in half. He shoves the paper in your direction. Then pulls it back.

Adds: Really, English, I can.

“Let’s get you patched up, hm?” you say instead of a proper response, and set the notepad down. You’re remarkably good at dodging him. Maybe that’s why General Strider put you in charge of him in the first place.

The scar across his neck is jagged and harsh, bright pink where it attempts to knit his skin back together. You sit on a properly returned and righted mattress, change out the bandages, and press a fresh butterfly stitch to the thin slice of neck that had slit open in his hurricane of a tirade.

Every so often he opens his mouth and the whole mess of an injury constricts beneath your fingertips and you watch the air in his throat strain against nothing but determination and pink scar tissue.

“Djya,” he attempts, mouth flexing, the meat of the syllables no louder than a whisper, “—ck.”

Your name. You shoosh him, heart aching. “Yes,” you say, “I’m here.”

You reach over his lap to pick up more bandages for his hand. When your head bobs back up, he’s there, closer than you expect. He stares at you. He places a short kiss on your lips.

There’s words behind his eyes, words he can no longer express. Words and facts and databases and Wikipedia articles and an endless stream of information he can no longer let bubble out of him in mumbled, desperate streams while having a fit beside you in bed.

The Empress knew a human couldn’t handle all that information unfairly stuffed inside of him, and she put a cork in it.

“I’ve been thinking,” you say, “there’s an Old Earth language, using only one’s hands, you probably already have all of it in that noggin of yours but you can teach me—We can practice—”

There’s tears in his eyes, too. They blur the thoughts you thought you could see.

“I’ve also been thinking,” you start again, softer, this time. “…that you and me might want to call it quits on this war.”