For the 'Graveyard Smash' challenge on Livejournal, in which the request was Dave/Rose – I will fight the spirit/with a sword in my side/she found a way out/crack my rib, wait to die.
.
then.
"I dreamt we were gods," she says. He surveys her, sidelong – how much does she remember? "Or rather, you were."
Sometimes, he thinks she's crazy, and he's just crazy enough to believe her. Other times, the memories float too close to the surface like small, darting fish, too fleeting for him to get more than glimpses, thin shreds of the pasts that he's lived and never lived through. He's lost count of the years they've spent dancing circles around one another, orbiting close but pulling away before they can burn each other; perhaps it started when he had his first big break, when Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff was only just getting off the ground. Perhaps it began when she was still a struggling author panting at the edges of literary circles staring down their collective noses at her, hungry for her tale to be heard.
"Oh, yeah? What about you?"
She smiles thinly, her mouth a black lipstick slash. "Many things."
.
now.
"Sometimes, I was a god too," she says. It's the middle of the night and he returns to his apartment stumbling drunk with the alcohol pounding and humming through his veins; when he hears her voice the thrill of recognition kicks in almost too late – he's already stepped swiftly across the room, nausea forgotten. He doesn't need the lights – never did, his Bro taught him better than that. He's used to it, anyways – this purple-veiled darkness is too familiar, a memory that lodges in his mind and refuses to be shaken free.
Rose lounges in the shadows on one of his uncomfortable couches far away from the window, where no light falls; when she looks at him, he can only just make out the midnight-skyline gleam of her eyes, the pallor of her hair, washed myriad colours by distant flickering signs. As he calms his breath she grasps her champagne flute between black-varnished talons and sips measuredly, oblivious to the silvered steel pressed against her throat.
"Fuck, Lalonde," he says as she curls her fingers around his wrist and pushes his hand – and the sword – away with practised nonchalance, nails pressing against his skin. "How did you get in?"
She smiles sympathetically – almost condescendingly – and suddenly he's thirteen and in another world again, fidgeting with discomfort as loquacious purple text scrolls across a too-bright screen. "Right, keys."
Nearly four decades and thirteen years, give or take a few. That's how long he's lived, how long she's lived – he stopped counting when he saw the first few grey hairs, the first signs of wrinkles at the edges of his eyes, the faint hint of translucency in the skin on her hands. All that time, and she can reduce him to a boy again, surly with insecurity. "What are you doing here?"
The smile slips from her face like an oil slick. "We're going to die, Dave," she says without preamble; her voice is a cold snap, harsh and brittle. "We were gods once – but not anymore."
He's used to her coolness, her frigid calm that broods and festers; he's used to her verbosity, the caress of the words across her tongue as she mouths them against his skin. What he's not accustomed to are her outbursts, the rare moments when she lets slip that maybe – just maybe – she doesn't always have things together.
"I'm sorry," she says after a moment, crossing and uncrossing her legs. He listens to the whisper of fabric over her skin, the rustle of silk and chiffon against her thighs. "I forgot myself. Have you made your preparations?"
"I—" He thinks of what the other apartment would look like in ten, twenty years. He thinks of the equipment he bought in preparation gathering dust, atrophying as the centuries pass. He thinks of a fridge stuffed full of rusting swords and a glass-eyed puppet leaking stuffing. "Almost. Gotta make sure everything's still around for the l'il guy."
Rose doesn't blink. "Of course," she says too calmly, too conversationally, like they're discussing cuts of meat or the kind of sandwich fillings they prefer, and not planning for the arrival of meteorbabies four hundred years from now. "I can help you with the preservation process, if you wish."
Unlike him, she never quite relinquished her power – or rather, she had more to fall back upon than a godhood from a fickle game, more to rely on than a shitty level-up bonus game construct that's taken away during a new game plus. Perhaps if it actually tried to, it could draw it all out of her, the last traces of the broodfester tongues – but they'd still cling to her like a shroud, torn away shred by screaming shred. They never speak to him, never lead him into dreambubbles with his past replayed on loop. He only remembers because that's all he's got left, the only realisation of Time the game left him with.
"Thanks," he says. He's painfully aware of the years catching up with him, of the weariness threaded through his bones. The Time doesn't come as easily as it used to – he still feels it in his nerves, pulsing in the scars that still ache from phantom wounds incurred from all the timelines he's gone through or will go through. "That'd be great."
Unlike him, she gave up her Light all too readily and in exchange, They filled her with Themselves.
.
then.
"Sometimes, I was a monster," she says as she presses his head into the pillow and tangles her fingers into his hair. The tips of her nails scratch against his scalp as she leans in close, her voice soft and rasping against the shell of his ear. Her words are slurred, but not in the same way it gets when she's had too much to drink and he has to help her back home as her head lolls onto his shoulder. Her breath is not the ethanol-burn of alcohol, but the salt-stink of seawater, the burning-ozone of empty space.
"Sometimes, I wasn't the Light." The syllables curl up into themselves at the ends and edges, blending into one another and squirming their way into his brain, black and viscous as the tendrils he imagines coiling from her fingertips. "Sometimes, I was darkness – and I was Theirs."
She leaves black witch-kisses at the nape of his neck and down his throat. When she leans back he stares up at her and wipes a smudge of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. She smiles and he remembers, vaguely, a girl with sharp elbows and half-lidded eyes clinking glasses with him as they downed a last shot of tequila. One for the road, she said, and kissed him. The alcohol burnt his throat on the way down, but not as much as her mouth against his.
Rose splays a hand on his shoulder; when she slides her hand up to his face, he feels only coldness, the distant chill of the Furthest Ring.
.
now.
Two days and six hours.
Two days and six hours later and he's staring at the gilded edges of Her Imperious Inconvenience's trident. He shifts reflexively away as the prongs trap his sword. In theory, it's simple. Everything is. In theory, he lets go of the sword – now useless deadweight – and ejects another from his strife deck. In theory, everything should go smoothly.
In theory, he should have thought about the Condesce wrenching back her trident and grabbing the sword. In theory, he should have accounted for her and her magic as she takes aim and throws. In theory, he should be able to escape, just fine.
In theory.
I'm too old for this, he thinks as he shifts his weight. After this, fuck everything. I'm retiring. I'm done.
It doesn't even register, not until the Condesce smiles her shark-toothed grin and allows her arm to fall to her side, veiled in magic.
"Fuck," he says.
Rose sees and hears and knows and it undoes her.
Sometimes I was a monster, she had said, two days and six hours ago. It's the only thing They left me with.
The Condesce's mouth curves with displeasure. "You know Them?" she spits, harsh and high and cruel. Rose responds in kind with a voice not entirely her own, the words strange and alien and writhing. She is ash, she is soot, she is burning before his eyes. The darkness flakes off at first, thin and hesitating before taking firmer hold on her, anchoring itself to the ridges and whorls of her fingers, to each dip and hollow of bone flush against her skin. Sucker-lined limbs coil and curl from the hem of her skirt, oozing across the rooftop.
The Empress eyes her with a kind of ravenous hunger. "Seer," she purrs, almost as an afterthought. "I have waited long to see who dared seek Their patronage."
Atta girl, Lalonde, he thinks. You show her.
Rose's smile is a lamprey's grimace and it's the most beautiful fucking thing he's ever seen.