She answers their questions.
Aradia asks several practical ones, and Karkat several annoying ones. Jade keeps an uncharacteristically tight-lipped silence, and Dave and Vriska devote most of their effort to seeming unconcerned. Kanaya asks one or two, and Rose answers as if they are no different coming from her mouth than anyone else's. She does try to let her eyes linger longer, watching Kanaya's face as though transmitting a pesterlog directly into her brain. She doesn't know if the message is received (or for that matter what exactly she is trying to send).
Then everyone moves to the roof.
Terezi and Dave look like they might be going in for a dramatic goodbye hug but then pull a fist-bump fake-out instead. Aradia grips Sollux's hand between her own and they talk quietly, apart from the rest.
Rose takes a steadying breath and goes to Kanaya.
Backlit galaxies turn in the sky. Her skin is bright here and looks as strong as diamonds. She does not react to Rose's approach other than a tightening of her lips that Rose would not have seen at all if she hadn't spent so much time obsessing over the lines of her face, watching the way each thought reflects in her beautiful features and oh god, how could she have been so blind.
She opens her mouth to wish her luck, but it feels too wrong like this.
She reaches up slowly, allowing time for Kanaya to react or reject. Her fingers brush against her cheeks, then gently curl around the plastic on her face, pressing between the arms of the glasses and Kanaya's temples. She pulls off the shades.
Her eyes, of course, are even lovelier than she remembered, with a jagged bite of pain slashed through the irises. Unburied, now.
This feels like the moment for a speech, or an apology. She wants to send Kanaya off with something to fight for. She wants to be the beloved one waiting at home, praying for her unscathed return.
Unfortunately, such a reality is out of reach, for more reasons than one.
She doesn't know what to say. Instead she smiles, just barely, and feels her throat clogged with something unfamiliar as she mouths, "Good luck."
Kanaya hesitates. Her emotions are suddenly laid bare, ripped clean of the glasses and with them some invisible protective layer that helped her hold everything in. She swallows and blinks hard.
Karkat's voice is fuzzy in Rose's ears as he tells the team to move out.
Kanaya nods and briefly presses two fingers to Rose's wrist, holding her eyes (they can see each other now; they exist fully on the same plane). Rose wonders if she can feel her pulse.
Kanaya turns to go, meeting the others' determined faces.
They leave for the darkness, almost flying.
x
When they are gone, the roof is silent for a moment. Sollux sighs deeply, almost contentedly. Karkat glares out into the Medium until the tiny specks of their backs are gone. Terezi turns her head expectantly towards Rose.
She goes back down the stairs, through the lab and too-large corridors, into her room and straight back to her bed.
She stares at the ceiling, slowing her breathing, clearing her mind with the same techniques she had used for dark meditation on her own world (it feels so long ago now). Gradually her tumult fades to a subtle buzzing in her fingers as she lets herself forget her legs, her arms, her eyelids.
Rose falls asleep.
She slides into her Derse body not by submerging herself, but by surfacing from placid waters that are not quite her own.
She opens her eyes, surrounded by a violet tower in an alternate universe, and stands from her bed.
They are still whispering into her head, of course; in this place she will never be free of them. She finds them easier to ignore than before, though no less insistent. It's a pity such solidified resistance will go to waste.
She has a set of wands here. Not as powerful as her Thorns, but close. A gift from her former masters. They sit in her top dresser drawer, and Rose can feel their excited hum at her presence. It doesn't matter. She won't take them with her. There is no reason to make this more difficult than it will already be.
She steps through her window, supporting herself on the spell-heavy air that surrounds Derse. The planet lies sprawled beneath her, just visible around her moon. It's almost a pity that the place has to be destroyed in the Scratch, wiped from existence with all of its inhabitants so that she and her friends can live.
Almost.
Rose rockets towards the Ring thinking of the insubstantial concept of heroism.
x
There is always a hard part. She knows that this is probably not The Hard Part, not yet, but it is incredibly taxing. She relies on vague memories to guide her, tips she's stolen from the gods on how to navigate the Ring. She knows it will not be enough, but she will at least get as far as she can by her own power before giving in. She no longer notices the sights and smells and seizure-thoughts that would send most people into a shuddering ball in the corner.
Of course they try to tempt her, lead her astray with promises of power and grandeur and passionate, conquering love. It's all rather repetitive, really.
It's not that she particularly wants what they offer. Power is only a means to an end, for her. But to be honest they don't really need to try and tempt her, because like it or not she will be trapped here without them. She has already lost track of the way back. She makes it a considerable distance on her own, but what does that mean in a space where distance means absolutely nothing?
So she lets herself slip, just a little.
She does not plunge into grimdarkness the way did last time; she dips a foot in and waits to adjust to the frigid cold. Small eyes that are not her own press themselves into her retinas. Her fingerprints itch.
Slowly, she begins to understand again.
Now it gets difficult. She travels through the dark one landmark horror at a time, vision fuzzy, their whispered instructions only as good as a small candle in the woods behind her house. Her progress becomes a cycle of straining her mind to its utmost until she can no longer find her way then submitting just a little bit more to the gods, hungry for the knowledge she needs. It becomes harder and harder to balance between preserving her own consciousness and using the pulsating awareness that surrounds her, beckons her. Thin somethings coil and shake under her soft Derse uniform, twisting beneath her skin.
She knows that they will take her, by the end. It's only a question of when.
She feels her own tendrils extending into a dimension and a direction she had forgotten. She remembers the way.
x
Time runs all wrong here. She is not surprised to find that the rescue team is already at their destination and have been fighting for what feels like a very long time. She does not see them yet, at least not through her own eyes. She feels, quite distinctly, the thrashing of tentacles as Kanaya hacks away with her chainsaw, throbbing masses reforming themselves around Jade's bullet holes. This in itself is wrong; they know they can't defeat these monsters head-on. Obviously something has gone wrong. They have failed to release John and are now doing their best to hold back the terrors as they try again and again. Rose feels the fear quaking their minds as she digs her feelers into their consciousness with the rest of her kin.
John is suspended at the center of the bizarre battlefield, utterly untouched. The gods want him unspoiled. She can feel the hateful sting of his purity, but also its power. The part of her still in her own control is completely, blazingly relieved.
Being gods themselves, Vriska and Aradia are having the most success defending themselves and their psyches, but their strength is fading fast. Kanaya, though far from panic, is having a hard time thinking clearly beyond frenzied sawing and her roaring displayed fangs.
Rose wants to kill them all and desecrate their souls. She also wants to save their lives, so she flies faster.
She bursts into the battle from between the clenching edges of a gigantic valve. She carries with her a flash of silvery power, a volley of magic against its creators to dig and sting and distract. She does not look to her friends for fear of what she will feel as she hears Jade cry her name and Dave telling her to keep fighting as he slices through something that sounds squishy and wet.
John's eyes are closed, hands crossed over his chest. His body glows white, a beacon in the midst of their terror. Wisps of shadow caress the cocoon of light, but do not breach it. He doesn't look the least bit corporeal, or fallible, or goofy. Rose has to fix that.
She soars to his side, watching his face with eyes that want to see him dead and burning the way he burns her, sparks of power crackling invisible against her skin and raising the hairs on her darkening arms.
The others have tried for a resurrection kiss, but it didn't work. The issue isn't that he's dead. He is very much alive. John is simply being held under by the focus of a thousand tiny giants that want him to stay down. That focus needs to be taken away. She pushes aside the terrible things sliding under her fingernails and thinks of playing a silly computer game with a silly boy.
This is probably The Hard Part.
Rose leans in to kiss his forehead, mussing his hairline.
Her body inhales.
Somewhere she imagines she hears Kanaya gasp, and she holds the sound close to her chest as its beats go arrhythmic.
She feels them rushing towards her, pounding, shrieking, tearing; pulled from an untouched, blinding vessel and into a willing one. They smash her, slam-suffocate into her through pores nose eyes mouth lungs past and rip her conscious and her mind to shreds and blow her identity to smithereens. They break her, rend her in two, then again, then again until there is nothing left anymore but the screaming, screaming –
Nothing.
In the end, everything is deep purple.
She turns to face the intruders, a snarl on her lips and burning.
Behind her, the Heir falls like a cut marionette. The Knight moves to catch him faster than her eye can follow.
It does not matter. He will die with the others.
The Seer hears, with perfect clarity, countless voices vying for her attention. They build on and shout over one another, thronging and melding until they form one great Voice, and this voice tells her what she needs to do and the Seer obeys.
She raises her hands, palms forward. Someone shouts her name and then she blows them all back with a dazzling burst that leaves the air ringing.
If she had her wands, this would be better. She would strike fast and hard and blinding, pressing the immeasurable power of the gods that surround her into the tip of a stick, perpetually tighter and smaller until some atom of dark energy explodes and with it the Medium itself. High on deep purple, she feels she could do this, if only she hadn't been too disgustingly human to bring the wands.
The Sylph recovers first. She moves doggedly forward, her mouth spewing talk. She looks determined as all hell, a vaguely familiar hardness in her eyes.
"I thought you were better than this." She raises a hand as if to pacify a wild animal. The Seer unironically bares her teeth and it's almost as if this is the second time she has looked at the Sylph so completely while that hand is raised and silent.
Without a conscious thought shadows seep from under her sleeves, spiral from her lips like smoke. They slip and reach and enfold that lovely, slender hand and begin to pull. The Sylph is startled but does not panic; she pulls back and finds they keep climbing, oozing up her arm like oil. More darkness sweeps around her legs, pulling them tight together. Anger scrawls across her face.
"You will release me."
The Seer hears every word, and she wants to hear them again. She wants to grind them from the Sylph's pretty mouth with her own teeth.
only take what you want and it is yours yours yours
Shadows knit and bind them, sweeping over both their backs and caressing their cheeks, pulling closer, sooner –
She feels a rush of purpose to her right and drops through dead space, shattering the connection. A flash of orange and blue rams into the spot where she had been half a second ago.
The Thief smiles down at her, curved sword gleaming.
"Vriska, you can't!" The Witch's voice is panicked; the Knight unceremoniously dumps the Heir in her arms and moves to intercept with his inhuman speed, but by this time the Thief is diving, blade forward, wings rigid as a swooping bird of prey.
The Seer does not smile back. Thorned shadows burst from her skin, ride up to meet the attack and she remembers something in that face, a memory bubbling like pitch.
The Knight shoves the Thief out of the way before her torso can be entwined and crushed until the bones snap.
"Don't attack her!" The Sylph's cry more closely resembles a command than a plea, but she in her head, in all of their heads, and what they sound like out loud doesn't matter.
"Listen, get your homicidal urges in check." The Knight speaks from directly behind the Thief, where he holds her arm, but he's speaking to both of them. His voice is practically dead, but she feels the strength of his fear and confusion.
The Thief's hair and eyes are wild, whipped to frenzy like war paint. Her adrenaline is spiking; her clutch is white-knuckled and gleeful on her sword. "No, you dummy, she asked me to."
The Seer feels the clear freeze down each invader's spine.
The Sylph's face is particularly fascinating to watch. The lion-tamer expression loosens, teeters, and falls to the ground like expensive porcelain. She opens her mouth as if to reject this claim, explain exactly why this is a blatant lie and could never have happened. The Seer feels this, sparking through her neurons like marbles colliding. She also feels, in the corners, the truth pressing to make itself known.
As for herself, the Seer does not remember.
The Thief leans forward, yanking herself free. "Hey, you stupid freak!"
She does, however, remember hatred. Burning hands.
She shoots forward, power like missiles like claws. The Thief dances away, lurches up on wings that shine too brightly.
"Stop this!" the Sylph shouts after the two of them as they spiral upwards (or downwards or inwards, it's impossible to tell). She feels the panic, then, that the pretty girl had banished so completely, pushing into her vocal cords.
"If she needs…let them go!" the Maid says, distant and buzzing now.
Then the Thief looks back over her shoulder and says, "I have all of them. They keep choosing me."
The Seer no longer feels the Sylph past the fury in her own rip tear kill devour veins.
The Thief puts on an extra burst of speed and the Seer responds, calling down curses in ancient tongues.
Things move to intercept her prey, great monstrosities acquiescing to her will. The creature darts around them, dodging and stabbing as she sees fit. Her sparkling trail burns against the Seer's retinas until she can't stand the sight of it mangle her body cut off those smirking lips
Then the Thief stops and turns on the spot. Just for a moment she sticks out her childish little tongue tear it out swallow it down before rocketing forward again, and nothing matters except that she dies.
She may be a god, but she is surrounded by thousands.
Globs of shadow spurt from the fleshy walls. They criss-cross and harden, forming a web to block their path. The Thief swings wildly but only penetrates the first layer; the darkness sticks to the blade. She tugs it free and turns to face her death destruction obliteration head on.
As the Seer opens her mouth in a final roar, wisps dancing jagged towards her prey, the Thief proves her luck.
Another flash of orange explodes to her left, and the Seer catches sight of wings and sword and sunglasses. A shout, and the Thief darts sideways to answer it. The sprite is gone as soon as it appears, and with it the Thief.
The Seer howls and bolts to the spot. A small, invisible pressure pushes back until she slides through it, following them into a landscape of metal and red heat.
The bubble has the form of LOHAC, and the air is sweat-shimmering. Reality takes the loose dreaming quality of memory; she feels details creating themselves as she looks and dismantling behind her as she speeds past. The sprite is gone; the Thief darts to a giant revolving gear. She touches down and pirouettes to face her pursuer, too focused even to wear her patronizing smirk.
The Seer feels the pulsing consciousness that surrounds them, but it manifests differently in an imitation of a place where it's not meant to exist. The connection to their limbs is strangely muffled, though still stronger than she had ever felt when she was human.
She flings magic. It's met by speeding blue dice and a briefly-summoned shield.
She slams down to the gear's surface. It shudders under the weight of her energy. Somehow her opponent has the dice in her hands again.
"I wonder," the Thief says, "how you even think in there. You don't, do you? You just attack things when they tell you, like a stupid pet."
She gives one last guttural warning in the Tongues. Not because the Thief deserves it, but because the gods' will contains an inherent yearning for formality, and when it can be met she can no longer resist.
The Thief continues, too loudly: "You're not a dumbass human anymore. You're not even the same person."
Something is wrong about the words. She feels it, rattling in the small closed boxes where she keeps her memories, but it doesn't matter now. Shadows are sweeping, crawling, pulsing along the gear, wrapping along its edges, and it's only a matter of time before the girl dies falls shatters on spires of metal and burns
She inhales and draws herself into her chest, muttering words of power.
The Thief is looking over her head when she says, "It's not the same person."
And she realizes that these are not things the girl would say. Not to her.
Arms wrap around her torso, a body pressing into hers from behind. Something smashes into the back of her knees, bringing her to the ground as a hand slams between her shoulder blades and pushes her forward into a bow.
She cannot feel who or how. She has built a wall of rage and forgotten to leave herself a door, so she roars because it's the only thing she can do, tries to wrench her shadows back so that she can strangle the interloper –
"…be alright," she hears.
The Sylph Kanaya the –
Kanaya leans to whisper something else in her ear, and the Seer feels a cool drop hitting her own cheek from above. The shadows that have risen tall around them mirror the water; they drip and fall without purpose, frozen.
She can't understand the words and suddenly she can't breathe, because she can't understand –
kill them kill them kill them kill
The Thief makes a sudden movement. A blue monstrosity glows into existence. It is made of wood and metal and a lucky role of the dice. It builds itself around her exposed neck, and she does not need to see the axe gleaming high above her head to know it is there.
And Kanaya, who has cut off one friend's legs and driven a saw through another, who would never hesitate to hurt a friend to save them, holds her steady under the guillotine blade.
"Think of lights," she gasps, and it doesn't mean anything and is ridiculous besides, but the Seer –
The blade comes down with an earsplitting shriek.
A universe away, Rose jolts awake, hands at her neck. She takes in great gulps of air like drowning.
x
There is a moment, short but stretched in an impossible way that she suspects only Dave Strider would understand, in which she is utterly empty. She is free of the gods hanging heavy over her every thought, but she does not remember who she is.
It's odd, forgetting that you are alive.
What's odder is remembering.
x
Almost the moment her pulse settles and she can breathe again, when she doesn't see dark colors fuzzing her vision or hear the edges of her own howling, there is a knock at her door.
"They're back." Terezi sounds smug, her voice already fading down the hallway.
Time runs all wrong in the Ring, but she wishes temporal insubstantiality could have given her a little more time to recover – and prepare.
The imposing hallways seem longer and larger than ever, her footsteps failing to echo. She can't make out the walls in the thin light of the overheads. She walks with her chin tilted at a carefully impervious angle and locks her breathing into a set tempo, despite the occasional drop of her insides when she thinks too far forward through the doorway into the lab and the full view of the universe. She resolves to look said universe in the eye.
When she does arrive, she has a hard time seeing anything at all over the sudden faceful of black hair.
"Rose!" Jade cries with the barest hint of a sob. She nuzzles her face into the front of Rose's shoulder, clinging tightly. "You're okay!"
"Yes," she manages, undeniably relieved to hear the word come out in English. She doesn't know what consequences exist for dreamself suicide, but for now the English is enough. She even feels herself smiling, just a little bit, as Jade presses a sloppy kiss to her cheek. It's only when the girl steps back and grips her shoulders, beaming just like her brother would, that Rose sees Kanaya. She catches her in the moment before she stops moving forward, eyes wide.
She looks unusually tall, back straight and proud. Her expression becomes guarded but not entirely contained, as if she can't quite decide what emotion she is supposed to convey. The fluid change from one unreadable mixture to another is enough to make her look sick to the stomach, and the messy wisps of hair sticking to her forehead suggest that she has not stopped to think. She holds a red-stained tube of lipstick loosely at her side, and her cheeks are practically dry.
"Rose Lalonde," she says, just a bit softer than usual, as Jade steps hesitantly to the side. "That thing you just did was reckless and kind of terrible."
Rose shrugs, a bit helplessly. "I have come to terms with my poor decision-making skills." She tries to keep her eyes from the blood rubbing off on Kanaya's hand.
"I would like to congratulate you on your survival." She slides the tube into her pocket. "But the issue here is that I would also like to punch you very hard in the mouth."
"Quite the conflict of interest," Rose responds.
They watch each other. Rose remembers, at the beginning of their acquaintanceship, how much watching was involved. They have played so many pointless games of chess, laying traps for each other and proving their points with large words and theatrical actions. And to be perfectly honest, Rose regrets none of it.
Kanaya takes two steps towards her. Jade watches warily from the side. Rose does not blame her for being unsure; it seems impossible that she could be privy to their thoughts without looking at Kanaya's bright, angled face and fingers stretched against her skirt (it's red already; it doesn't stain).
Kanaya takes another step. Rose's heart skips a proverbial beat when she reaches out (Kanaya always reaches out) to her chest. She unhooks her glasses from the collar of Rose's shirt where they have hung, forgotten, since the roof.
"I believe," she says, as she sticks an arm of the shades into the waistband of her skirt, "that I still have your book." She smiles then, a shaky, unsure thing, stretched tight around the eyes.
Rose says that yes, yes she does, and she's almost positive that it comes out in fully-formed English with only minimal hiccup.
Kanaya is strong and perpetual and unfathomable, but they are learning to show instead of tell.
She isn't sure which of them moves before she is surrounded by bright and burning warmth, their arms wrapped unapologetically tight around each other. She steps on Kanaya's foot and a horn scrapes against her cheek as Kanaya buries her head in her shoulder. They hold on, crushing until the close.
Rose breathes in. The air tastes like sweat and inky rot and alien flowers as she presses her palm between Kanaya's shoulder blades, and the past hours-minutes-days congeal into the tiny "oh" that falls from her mouth like epiphany. Her fist clenches in the fabric and her eyes scrunch shut as she turns to press her face into Kanaya's hair, lips just open.
They cling to each other like waking up from someone else's nightmare.
x
John recovers.
For a little while everyone is afraid that he won't eat, because the first time Vriska shoves a glob of something into his mouth he throws it back up. Turns out that he just thinks alien jell-o is absolutely disgusting, thank god. He starts a bit dazed and confused but quickly gains steam, convinced that it's kind of hilarious that after Vriska tried to resurrect him, Dave had a go.
"It's not like we got to be picky about it," Dave says, sounding casually defensive, stretched out sideways over Jade's bed with the other three. "Sorry your virginal lip-purity was so heartlessly ganked before your wedding night."
"Sure, Dave," he says with a round giggle that Rose is quickly becoming embarrassingly fond of. He lies between the two of them, trapping Rose's hand in his palm like it's the most natural thing in the world.
"Hey, 's not like macking on you was my top priority here. I was just the closest in a long line of suitors hoping to claim you on your tentacled marriage bed, surrounded by handmaidens straight out of fuckin' Lovecraftian lore."
Jade sits up on his other side, glowing down at the three of them with a toothy smile. "Guys, I'm so happy right now I could explode!"
Dave snorts and Rose makes a pessimistic, snippy remark involving the irony of both the statement and its juxtaposition with their current scenario. At the risk of sounding trite, they are not out of the woods yet. They are not even close to where the trees start thinning. She's not positive they're even on the path because it's practically new moon and they don't know which way is north on this shitty, crayon-colored map.
John smiles and squeezes her hand tighter, even makes a friendly grab for Dave's. Rose can't see if he succeeds or not.
Honestly, they just might be okay.
x
Rose is writing poetry when Kanaya knocks on her door.
She sticks the thin book under her mattress, still pondering the myriad of ways she could phrase the sentiment "I find you exhilarating enough to bend spacetime" and make it less awful.
She checks herself in the mirror, smoothing her hair down in the place where her headband would normally be. She doesn't have much variety in terms of wardrobe anymore, so she chooses to mark the occasion by means of omission. If asked, she would state that her unusually light makeup is the result of casual experimentation, not a ridiculously long time spent with a tube of dark lipstick and too many tissues, trying to get it just right until she gives up entirely.
She opens the door.
Kanaya is wearing an outfit she hasn't seen yet, a short grass-green dress specked with yellow dots at its edges, tied with a pink sash around the waist.
"Kanaya, I'm not sure this is acceptable," she says, stumbling for an appropriate greeting. "I thought we had some sort of inexorable obligation to become Polaroid negatives of one another." When the girl looks bemused Rose clarifies with, "We're supposed to match."
"Oh," she responds, looking very serious. "This is a grave offense indeed. If we do not follow some sort of preordained set theme then who else will?"
"No, Kanaya." She steps out into the hallway. "We cannot thus impose upon the rest of the world. This is our burden to bear, and ours alone."
Kanaya's eyes are very wide and solemn as she nods. She has gotten quite good at this. "How terrible, that you will have to adjust your wardrobe to suit my own ingenuity."
Rose says "ha," and closes the door behind her.
They go quiet, briefly unsure of what's supposed to happen next.
"Have you been to the roof?" Kanaya asks. "Well, besides during the obvious incident. That would be a quantifiably different sort of experience."
"Yes, actually, I have."
"Oh. Would you like to go again?"
Rose hesitates, because she has other memories of the roof, but she is reasonably certain the two incidents cancel each other out. "Lead the way."
"Alright."
They smile at each other, and part of her stutters a little.
In a rush of something that looks like courage, Kanaya grabs her hand.
x
"I have a confession to make," Rose breathes. The two of them lean into the low wall, shoulders brushing, staring out into an unfriendly but beautiful space. Behind passing asteroids the stars are brilliant, and they can just make out the piercing brightness of Skaia in the distance. Rose has a theory about where Kanaya came up with "think of lights," and it involves rooftops and silent goodbyes and now is not the time.
"It may startle you."
"Oh?" Kanaya turns her head, lips just barely quirked.
Rose takes a deep breath. "It turns out that I may not be the quintessential example of human heterosexuality. My god, I am incredibly glad to get that off my chest."
Kanaya laughs, and the sound somehow catches Rose off guard. It occurs to her that, although Kanaya is often happy, she's not the type to laugh loudly and frequently. The sound is wonderful on her ears, lower than she expected, but she would have gotten the same gratification from just that amused smile. With Kanaya, the things that go unspoken are often the most important.
Matching set, indeed.
"Actually, I do have something else to confess," she says, turning to face Kanaya fully. She proceeds delicately, almost gingerly. "During our…in the interim of the period in which we were incommunicado, Vriska and I…there was significant confusion as to…" She resists the urge to play with her hands because this is silly, they have faced so much worse.
"I'm well aware," Kanaya says, tapping an idle finger on the top of the wall. "Of course I am thrilled for you, and should you ever like to discuss a schedule between the two of us-"
"What?" she says, bluntly. It takes her a minute. "Oh. No. No, don't…don't concern yourself with that," she says, and now she's doing it too, running a hand along the wall like calming a startled animal. "I'm not looking for that type of relationship, it…must look entirely different from your perspective. I should have thought of that."
Kanaya, naturally, only looks confused, and Rose finds herself laughing quietly, shaking her head. She isn't much of a laughing person either, but honestly, she has overthought enough for a lifetime.
"Karkat told me about your romance system," Kanaya says, still lost, "but I just assumed, after what Vriska said about what happened between you two, that you had decided-"
"It wouldn't work in any case." Rose turns and leans her back against the wall, looking up at the swirling sky. "From my understanding of the quadrant it requires both mutual hatred and respect, and my feelings towards her, especially recently, rocket too strenuously in and out of both those categories."
Kanaya turns with her. She rests her hand over Rose's; the color of her skin is practically back to normal, for a human.
"She did well," she says quietly, summing up exactly what Rose had meant to say.
"Careful, you're becoming more concise," she parries. "You are dancing with wild abandon on the edge of conversational convenience, and it's a long way down."
Then Kanaya leans in to kiss her, so Rose stops talking.
It starts slowly. This is not Rose's first kiss, not anymore, but it might as well be. The experience is mindblowingly different, so much so that Rose wonders if there is a separate word she should be using for "kiss," one that encompasses relief and passion and force and, over all, peace. A sort of spiritual awakening, all bound up in teenage fumblings in the dark.
She runs her hand over Kanaya's hip, tracing the edge of the bone and following the sash to the back.
You are fascinating. You are radiant. You – goddammit you ibend spacetime,/i how –
Air is electric and time is subpar.
Ah. There it is. Still time for poetry.
Kanaya flings her arms over Rose's shoulders and they move with a new spark, ragged breath and bodies. Air is electric –
Kanaya gasps into her mouth, and Rose forgets about the poetry as her thoughts go white.
When they finally draw apart, Kanaya lingers, leaving kisses over her cheeks until Rose bows her head against her shoulder, taking deep, shuddering breaths.
They stand together at the end of a universe. They begin.
(Later, as they are curled up in her room reading a self-indulgent dark romance, tracing absent circles on each other's wrists, Kanaya informs her that she has still reserved that punch.)