Someone brought a shade along with them to the dream, and the powerful, haunted figment of their partner's mind easily overpowered both Kanaya and Gamzee.
Limbo, for them, is a great desert. Together, they are sentenced to abject loneliness in this desert.
She is stuck with idle musings about the past – a labyrinth of questions over what went wrong when and how she might have saved herself. It hardly matters to her whether he could have escaped or not. He is trapped in the puzzle of his own mind; in that complacency he is content.
Kanaya doesn't know who among their group brought the shade, but after a couple of scorched days and frozen nights, she doesn't care. The climate cannot harm them – it is wholly in their heads. However, there is a certain unease that arises when one spends a few days in sun and heat without feeling the effects. Nighttime is very cold, but they do not huddle together.
With nothing else to do, Kanaya spends her time building and perfecting a walled oasis. Though her work is magnificent she dearly hopes that no one will ever have to appreciate it.
Gamzee is a madman and a clown; he rages at her in the sun and ignores her in the darkness. Aqueducts are kicked over in blind fits, the empty palace loses towers, and everything is vandalized with rainbow paints. He has to assert his power here, ruining a day's work in minutes. Later, he will search for her and apologize. Tomorrow they will repeat this process.
If Kanaya had to choose anyone to go mad with, Gamzee would be the obvious choice. One night there is a full moon and they howl at it until their throats ache. Days later it rains and they run through the bazaar with reckless abandon. She likes making clothes for the two of them without the laws of reality to constrict her imagination, and he has nothing againsplaying dress up.
Indifferent coexistence bleeds into bonding out of boredom bleeds into passive affection and at some point they start huddling together on particularly cold nights.
Like a long-suffering serf under a harsh lord, he will outlast this and any other trial that comes his way. She, however, is the hapless widow: a young bride ruined for all the world by the dead husband that was lost too soon. Kanaya will, out of necessity, endure.
In the end, after the battle of wills has been waged, after the many and various loaded words have been said, after all the late nights and hard days and the brutal heat has softened at the edges, will they ever wake up?
i like inception, gamkan, are writing things that aren't half as fun to read. Hence: this.
