"Damn," he told her when she finished, folding her hands like crocus petals in her lap. "That is one fine-looking dude you've drawn there."

"Painted," she corrected him. It was; hundreds of thin strokes layered over and quiet and precise, delicate in ways that he swore he could see the different colors through each other. She had her eyes trained on it as though she couldn't bear to look away. "And yes, it is. With no help on your part, might I add."

"Ouch, sis, straight to the heart," he'd said back. He leaned over and made to press a finger to the painted nose, and Rose grabbed him by the wrist with just millimeters left and a very unimpressed look. Her hand around his was shivering slightly, was warm with her pulse. "Hey, I can deface my own pasty nose if I want to, right?"

Rose kept her hand on his. Their heartbeats began to match, a rhythm that jumped bloodlines and timelines just to keep itself in tempo. "No," she said. "It isn't yours."

"Scuse me?"

"It's yours," she said, taking his hand by the fingers and tucking it into his own pants pocket, "but it is most certainly not yours."

"Yeah, that really made things clear — "

"One day." Rose stood, crossed the room to a sink and put her stained hands in the water. "One day this won't be you, my dear Strider, when you are old and wrinkled and gaunt, but this painting will still be the inimitable young insufferable prick we know and tolerate. You shall grow old and sick and injured. It will not."

And Dave.

And Dave.

And Dave looked at the dark non-stare of the painting and its optical illusion smile and he said, "oh, shit."

She told him to take it. Can't possibly put this in a gallery, she said, because of reasons, and that was enough for him, grabbing the canvas without even a frame and dropping it (setting it gently like it was sacred, a young insect that could snap in half if he so much as twitched the wrong way) into his sylladex. Don't be a fool, she warned him without looking, still standing at the sink with the water running and with her hair caught up in a neat bun and her shoulders just barely shaking. The water running between her fingers was black, smoky and unreal.

He didn't stay to look into it. Later sis, I'm outie, he walked out of her workshop, the thing she called an atelier and strung up with flowers and vines and hidden burning incense. The portrait in his sylladex was burning holes in him.

—

"I don't really get it, dude," John told him, laid out on the grass and gesturing up at the stars. He had declared this ages ago to be a new palfriendly chilltivity or whatever nonsense portmanteau he'd come up with, the kid was like made of them, but he enforced stargazing at least once weekly because maybe, Maybe, they would see a sparkle up there that was Them.

Wasn't likely, Dave knew, but denying John's childish grin was a lot like pulling teeth.

"I get sick, like, every time a flu comes through," John went on. He'd grown since then, the then that they used always when talking about the game, grown into this tall, broad, scruffy young man with baby fat still rounding all his edges. He pointed at Dave in accusation. "But you never get sick ever! The hell is that, man?"

"Strider immune system," Dave said shortly in response. "We're so fast not even the germs can catch us."

"More like you're such big nerds not even the germs wanna hang out with you," John said. He punched Dave on the shoulder and grinned. "Good thing I'm around to keep you from writing bad poetry about how lonely you are."

"Implying like I don't already, Egbert."

When he went home, though, he thought all the way that he had, yeah, gone a whole terrible flu season without so much as a cold, and it was the kind of flu that knocked out old ladies and infants and halted the whole city to make it cough and hack. He went up to the dusty attic, pushed aside dulling swords and the stray smuppets he hadn't thrown out, pulled the old bed sheet off the canvas.

He stared at the dark bags peeking out from under the brushstrokes of the sunglasses, the dark paint tracing out cheekbones, the ugly sickness that colored the skin.

He put the sheet back over the painting and tucked it under the corners.

—

Even when they started to get older, when they had started to get lines in their faces and aches in their joints, Jade was this nova-bright burst of energy and fun. She dragged Dave out to the park that day — bodily dragged, she grabbed Dave by the arm and pulled him from his house and out into the warm sun. She took him to the side of a lake and put bread crumbs in his hands and showed him how to throw them to the ducks, ignoring his petty complaints that he and birds were not really on the best of terms. She just smiled wide, the same smile he'd seen her use on all her kids (Christ, she had kids, this whole babbling mass of them, not old enough to make Jade some old lady but old enough to chirp a chorus of 'Uncle Dave!' if he ever got near enough to suffer their hug apocalypse), told him you actually have to throw it if you don't want them to peck you half to death, Dave!

Then, after a few calm moments of silence, she said, "Why aren't we friends anymore, Dave?"

"Yo, what?" was his first reaction, and it was a pretty bad one as they went. "We're still friends. You spend so much time around these ducks you turning into one?"

"Dave, I haven't seen you in weeks. That's not what friends do!"

The wind caught at her hair, more straggly and thin now than the thick mess he'd helped her tame in the snow. She kept smiling at him, but it wasn't the same smile.

Weeks, huh, he thought, looking at all four of their hands where they rested on the railing that lined the lake. Hers were thin, the skin going a little papery from age, and his were … they were just like they had been for years, with even the calluses still the same. When had weeks happened.

"I'll see if I can find breaks in my busy schedule of being so damn cool to chill with you plebeians," he said, pushing off the railing and shoving his hands, crumbs and all, into his pockets. He tipped a waving salute off his forehead to her and walked back home.

On the way, he wondered if he was going slower or if time was going faster. He wondered what it meant that he wasn't sure, seeing as he and time were like real close friends. Making it do tricks was just his thing.

He was just getting it jump through hoops and into paint, was all.

Jesus.

—

Dave Strider laughed hard, laughed so so hard, laughed in these high hysterical bursts that empty out his lungs of oxygen and keep going, because he'd just come from a show and he'd just met Jack Noir in an alley and he'd just walked away from having a dagger stuck between his ribs straight into his heart.

Walked. Away.

He slumped against the wall right by his front door and laughed, digging his fingers under his shades to rub at his eyes with his palms. He could still feel it, practically, God it's weird having metal jar up against your bones from the inside, his heart had opened around it and Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. There was a mad little voice in his brain saying wait, Jack Noir, isn't that fucker dead, isn't he dead but the rest of him screamed ha, ha ha, you invincible little shit, look at you, you can take a fucking knife and live.

It was true. He clawed his shirt open and looked and not even a scar, not a single mark.

He ripped the torn, ragged old sheet off the painting and the red paint coming off it was fresh, went onto his fingers and stained out the grooves of his fingerprints.

Haha, his brain echoed, hahaha. Hahaha.

You invincible little shit.

—

Fuck it, he said, really fuck it, and he gave up his job and his life and he dropped himself straight into all those clubs he worked and turned right into the flashing lights and sticky disgusting dance floors and sweating strangers that ground skin to skin through fishnets and t-shirts two sizes too small. He lived off booze and drugs, drank shitty fruity shots like water, took unidentified pills with alcohol and he never once died, just lived the high, just screamed into the organic throb of the twenty thousand rooms that interleaved into one until his throat bled raw. It was all double-bright even through his shades, sunglasses given to him by some thirteen year old kid who was turning, like, forty now, and Jesus Christ that just had him drink harder.

He spent a decade in a stupor, a full ten years with his head spinning around a high and the high of his own life. He forgot completely that he knew anyone human. He forgot he even knew anyone. He forgot himself.

John showed up at his apartment while he was watching the slow breaths of the walls, and tossed him into his shower with only the cold water on. It didn't break the high, and he spent the rest of the night shivering and sobbing into John's shoulders while John cooed, "I have to go home, Dave, I really gotta go home, I can't stay," and stayed anyway.

When Dave woke up the next morning, burning with lingering embarrassment, he could only hope that he hadn't mumbled anything that made John want to call some sort of fucking mental asylum on him.

—

"I do hope you haven't called to do another sitting, Dave," Rose said on the phone. The years hadn't changed her much, either. She was still this closed flower lined with thorns, voice smooth and gentle like someone wrapping a scarf too tight around your neck. He said back, yeah, sis, I want a matching portrait of my cock to go with my beautiful face, and she said she would be right over.

When he opened the door for her he had to swallow his shock because she was, she was old, you know, not falling apart, not dementia and Alzheimer's but lined and unpretty and really an adult. She was like a tree nearing winter; not all its leaves off, and still with blossoms here and there, but the bare bone branches starting to show through. Rose let herself in in typical fashion, and she hadn't brought paint or anything, her hands were empty. Good, because Dave didn't really wanted to whip it out for his sister who happened to be decades older than he was.

He showed her up to the attic, let her take the sheet off in a dramatic flourish, winced at the wrinkles and shadows and spots all over the face in the painting.

"A cute prank," she said, tilting her head at the marks. "Do you fancy yourself a painter, Strider? You should have told me, we could have painted while listening to soap operas and — "

"You know I didn't fuckin do it, Rose. What the hell."

She looked at the old, sick man in the painting, then to the Dave standing near her. "What the hell," she echoed coolly, emptily.

Her words edged shadowy and when she blinked her eyelashes trailed with darkness.

"Oh, hell no," Dave said, looking between her and the portrait. "Hell fucking no."

She had this dark unglow to her, like light vanished in a vacuum when it came too near to her body; she had gone colorless and sweet and cold just under the flush of her skin. Rose, Rose who was too many apostrophes and letters that shouldn't stand close to one another and knowing smiles, Rose who had let shadows drip from her hands and her brushes into the sink years ago, Rose who had —

—

Dave washes his hands in the sink, too.

Dave washes dark black out from under his fingernails and they didn't even crack once that whole time.

Dave rubs his skin till it goes red, wipes a wet hand through his hair shakily.

Dave doesn't think too long about Rose, now, because he knows a guy who knows a guy.

He puts the sheet back over the painting. He doesn't look into its ugly eyes, shown where the lenses of the sunglasses have cracked and popped out, or at the dark blotches all on its face, or at the wounds torn across its skin. He doesn't smash a hole through the thick canvas or cut it open in a slashed diagonal. Just covers it right back up.

A grandfather clock ticks in his head, tick tock tick tock. Ticks onto just, the pendulum skimming over the blood pooled under Rose's head.

Nah, he's not ready to die, not yet. He's got lots of things to do.

And he's got so much damn time.