A Hand in Holding Hands 2nd Draft

by Skaian Redeemer

No friendships. Ever. That's what Kanaya told her, but Rose never really grasped it until she found herself in Ashen crush. Now the demon is pounding on the door and the culture gap widening, and Rose will do whatever she can to keep them all together.

4. The Tale of the Lone Soldier

Over the next few days, Karkat and Terezi's relationship began to fall apart. Neither made it much of a secret. Both of them were predisposed to fight in public, one for lack of foresight and the other for want of focused spectacle, and as time went on, they spent less and less time doing otherwise. This was not to imply that they fought often. Instead, they fought no more often and no more fiercely than anyone did communicating with Karkat, and that was the problem. Terezi had never communicated with Karkat the way the others had. Either Karkat had beaten her at her own game, or Terezi had lost interest in playing. Dave could not really tell which. He was not even sure how their troubles had begun.

Frankly, Dave had never imagined the hundreds of factors that played into a falling-out like this, Human or Troll. His bro had dated on and off - mostly off - but had never so much as shown Dave any pics, much less talked about why things had broken off with Mystery Name #4. He had certainly never come to his thirteen year old kid brother for a slap on the back or a "Dude was whack, yo." With Karkat and Terezi, he got front row seats. For six days and seven nights, Dave got to watch things play out, and found that it was like they were letting hundreds of little grains of sand slip out of their fingers a pinch at a time, until there was nothing left. Words changed: compliments became less enthusiastic one half-step at a time before evaporating entirely; criticism became complaints. Vantas had never exactly been a wellspring of grace and civility, but Terezi's special exception seemed to have expired at last. Karkat was not likely even conscious of stopping, in the same way that he had not been conscious of starting in the first place. Since Karkat's changes were so subtle, especially for him, Dave could not call Terezi's actions a response, but in the same way her jokes and teasing began to lose their affection. Mutual respect bled. The slope was so gradual that Dave did not even notice when he himself realized that Karkat and Terezi were going to break up.

Dave was not sure what to expect when the same finally occurred to Terezi. He wasn't even sure how much money he'd put on a Troll breakup being similar to a Human, but he figured that so long as it didn't involve a fight to the death or something manic like that, he could probably take it. On the other hand, Dave also figured that Terezi wasn't going to come to him for a slap on the back or an in-depth discussion on whether or not alien dudes be whack, so he got ready for anything. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that he was dealing with a lawyer who liked to be sure she had all her cards in hand well ahead of her court date. She had slipped up beside him as they worked on one of their murals, and then had started talking: cagey, trickster-like, as though every word coming out of her mouth was a secret part of a goodbye prank directed at her soon-to-be ex. Or, at least, that was how it had seemed at first. After a while, Dave had started to pick up a vibe that maybe she was being genuine, if a little weird, or maybe that she hoped the scheme might have a genuine aftermath. Dave realized that he had taught her too well for him to be certain. Either way, Dave knew he did not like the direction the conversation seemed to be inevitably heading, and Dave was going to have to do something about it...

Unfortunately, the inevitable had a way of being put on hold, especially in the Lab. Dave knew that better than anyone but Aradia. In a moment of shrieking force, the conversation with Terezi had to be set aside, so that Dave could deal with Jack. With any luck, Dave could ensure that she would not even notice the lacuna.

Not that the conversation didn't continue to boil over in his mind, as he waited for Aradia to catch up to him. Idiot! he scolded himself. Dave tried not to show his frustration, even if he was alone. But he forced himself to think about the conversation, and not just because he wanted to plan a good way to deflect it. It was something his late Sprite/Beta-Self had taught him near the end of the game. His feathery alt-self had recommended that, whenever he went back to change the present, he should keep the soon-to-be-repaired timeline in mind, as if the repairs were guaranteed to happen. That would make the repaired timeline more real than the broken one. Otherwise, Davesprite had warned, the broken one was going to eat at him: it would have him wondering who was who, which timeline was really alpha, and other thorny existential distractions that he did not have time to ponder. Wanting to get back to an awkward conversation with Terezi might have struck Dave like a stupid goal to shoot for, but if it meant avoiding the opposite, Dave was willing to call it a win.

At present, he stood on one of the spare meteors of the veil, a half-hour in the past, and shadow-boxed to vent his mixed frustrations. I am a goddamned... Jab. Na?e. Hook. Idio-

Clang.

Dave looked up at Aradia past his fist caught in her grip, and she looked back with her usual blank of emotions.

"...Ow." he greeted.

Aradia's only response was to say: "Day thirty-eight, hour nine."

"Nah, I'm not doin' it this time," Dave said. "I just didn't keep track, because I don't want to think of myself as a number." Aradia did not respond to that, at least not overtly. In spite, Dave felt like he was on the receiving end of a sarcastic glare. "...Yeah, I'm day thirty-eight, hour nine."

It was an important distinction. Dave and the-Aradia-in-front-of-him had come from the lab when it had been thirty-eight days and nine hours since the Humans had arrived in the Troll session, but they weren't alone. There were probably two or three copies of themselves running around in some other part of the Incipisphere, not to forget the ones back at the lab. This Aradia could have been from the future, or could have come from the past without him, and talking strategy to the wrong person could lead to a beta timeline far faster than Jack could gut them.

Since this was the right Aradia, Dave felt he had to start with the critical question. "So did he find us?" he asked. Dave had not had time to confirm on his way out: survival might have depended on them hitting the past very quickly.

"Attack us, yes. Find us, no," Aradia said, and Dave let out a sigh of relief. There was no sense in playing the coolkid on something so drastic. "I'm not sure how it played out yet, but he was nowhere near the meteor Lab at the time" Aradia said. "I'm running what limited information I have right now."

"Did you see how it hit the others?" Dave asked.

"I was in the main lab," Aradia said. "tavr0s: dead. equius: dying. kanaya has a w0und in a maj0r artery and is n0t receiving pr0per treatment since shes underestimating the danger. shell be dead within the next few minutes, I thi-"

"Hey!" Dave cut in, trying to sound like he only sort of cared. "Past tense."

Aradia shrugged. "Have it your way. Considering we're in the past all of this has yet again to happen, I'd say the tense is wrong in a different way. Which would you prefer?"

"Well I've got a funny idea. Let's try Door #3 and pretend that maybe it's not going to happen at all?" Dave looked her in the eyes, but got no reaction, and all she could make of his was his shades. "No dead Tavros, no dead Equius, no Maryam suffering to death in graceful, emo Anne Ricey silence. I think that sounds like a good idea. Actually, a lot seems like a good idea when it means nobody dies."

Aradia seemed to decide that if Dave was going to ramble, she was going to continue her list. "j0hns c0nditi0n is g0ing t0 dev0lve int0 a c0ma but hell be all right assuming pr0per medical care"

"Oh yeah, definitely with the proper medical care, when he's the closest thing we have to a doctor." Beyond a frown, Aradia ignored Dave's tone. Sick of their conversation, Dave glanced to one side to look out over the horizon of their small platform. Beyond, hidden by a mess of other floating rocks, Dave could just make out the Lab, sitting peacefully and still intact for the next twenty-seven minutes, twelve seconds. It was "triply safe," Aradia liked to say. There were sensors planted all around it, two very peculiar meteors in orbit, and most importantly, the Heroes of Time were on guard.

"Did you see anything?" Aradia asked.

"No, I was in Terezi's room," Dave replied, kicking up dirt with the toe of his shoe.

"And she...?"

Damn, Dave hated working with robots. Not that he had a very wide perspective on them or anything, but this one always seemed to be able to guess what he was thinking no matter how cool he kept up. Probably scanning his perspiration or something. Calculating his thoughts. Dave had a great Forbidden Planet segue he wanted to make, but part way through putting it together, he remembered that she'd see through that, too. He kept his eyes on the Lab, mostly to avoid looking her in the eyes. "What's the organ that goes right here?" he asked, pointing to her a particular spot of her abdomen.

Though they had lowered their hands, Dave's fist was still more or less in contact with Aradia's palm, and she closed her hand about his. Her hand was warm, through some ungodly heating system Equius had installed for some reason Dave did not really want to think about. "You're allowed to... to be upset, you know," she said in one of her off-tones: not quite the intended comfort but all the same not a computer's synth. It was some remnant of her own voice, forced through voice box and ghost combined: a voice that had been forced to struggle free from the clawed feet of the Horrorterrors over the course of the game. "Besides," Aradia said, "you don't know what happens to them. Where they go. Does... does that help?" Dave looked back. "I like to think they all get together in the Dream Bubbles still," Aradia said, almost smiling. "I think they're probably happy!"

"Yeah, happy with Rose's old backers, sure." Dave rolled his eyes. "We know how that played out." Aradia opened her mouth, as it were, but Dave shook his head. "Look, it's a bad day. And to be honest, it's worse to leave them dying than dead, okay? They never get it. That doesn't mean I'm going to turn into a weepy faucet about it. Would you?"

Aradia responded only in the slightest way, by gently squeezing his fist, and Dave replied only with a brush of his thumb. As Aradia should not have and did not expect any more from Dave Strider, it was there that she that broke their contact. Dave turned about. "C'mon," he said. "Let's find out what did this, and I can go back to having boobytrapped chats with Pyrope and you can get back to whatever stuff robot Troll girls do for fun."

"Boobytrapped?" Aradia said. "That's one way to put it." She too turned back to the Lab, but then added, almost conversationally: "I was studying the archaeological relevance of outdoor load gapers used in Troll society before the invention of plumbing."

Dave blinked, and then concluded that: "...You're joking. That's what this is. This is you breaking down and finally telling a joke, and it's coming out like Troll Ben Stein thanks to that sexy answering machine voice your boyfriend gave you."

Aradia shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many interesting finds you can find in an outhouse. Trolls essentially treated them like waste deposit bins as well as load gapers, so their artefacts aren't just preserved in the earth, but tend to be chronologically layered."

If Dave had not been so flabbergasted, he might have had trouble keeping a straight face. "You're telling me that... I'd be surprised what you'd find in Troll shit."

"Yes."

"I believe you."

"You should," she said. And then, after a beat and a straight face, Aradia's voice box let out a burst of static that almost sounded like a snort of laughter.

Dave was incredulous. "The hell was that?" he asked. Aradia just shook her head and pulled her music boxes from her inventory. "Hey, c'mon!" Dave said. "The hell was that?" But she had already disappeared. Dave huffed but followed, and soon they were fast-forwarding time, each in their own bubble, until Aradia came to a dead stop and Dave landed a moment later. It was exactly two minutes before the blast, or as Aradia continued to put it:

"Day twenty-two, hour nine," she repeated as he arrived. He wobbled, trying to find his feet on an rock that had begun to spin as they had left.

"Still me, Aradia," he said, stomping his foot to bring the thing to a halt. It did not.

"Just being sure," she said. She raised her left arm slightly and fired a burst of flame from the palm, which slowed the meteor and all but threw Dave to the ground. As he recovered, he looked to his partner and found that the colour of her eyes had flipped as she took to scanning the horizon.

"There he is," she observed. "And there we are." She pointed into the distance. Dave had to set the magnify feature of his shades to see a thing, but soon he too could make out another Dave and another Aradia in a fight against what appeared to be nothing but empty space. Watching carefully, they both independently took out their time travelling tools and made the slightest adjustment, causing Jack to slip back into view. Noir had developed a number of nasty abilities from his prototypings in the month they had been attempting to corral him. At first his powers had just been flight, teleportation and sheer game power, but by virtue of either the Queen's ring or Bec's powers, he had begun to wield a partial form of Breath and Light, and most damaging of all, Time. One trick he had developed early on was the ability to consign himself to an individual's time stream, which would ensure that he fought opponents alone if only for a few critical seconds. Luckily, the Heroes of Time had worked out a way to keep in sync with him, but it raised all sorts of ugly questions for the future, like if their friends would ever be able to come against him.

"That's an early one," Dave decided after watching a few blows.

"Day five, hour sixteen," Aradia replied. "It's early, but at the same time, it's one of our first battles with no - ribbit - need to go back and correct ourselves."

"Well congrats to us," Dave said. "Because now we're gonna have to."

Dave watched every moment of the fight he had already fought, not wanting to miss any important details on one hand, and not wanting to be upstaged by Aradia's perfect survey on the other. It did not take him long to figure out that trying to keep up with a girl with a computer complimenting her brain was boring as all hell, and he was a hairsbreadth from weighing just how ironic it would be to ask about the contents of underground Troll shit piles when it finally happened. Past-Aradia broke away in what was accidentally the direction of the Lab. Beams of green power lanced to follow her, darted past, and soon both of the observers understood.

Dave adjusted his shades. "'Hey, John,'" he dictated to no one in particular, "'Check it out. Got a riddle for you. What's got two legs, two wings, one arm and can kill four of us by missing?'"

"Vriska could fly, once," Aradia murmured. Dave looked up at his partner, who shook herself in a very living way, as if from sleep. When her eyes returned to the lab, she was again fully alert. "sens0rs are facing away on 0n f0ur-0ne f0ur-three and five-0h" she said, referring to the meteors floating near the lab. "That might account for our missing it. Someone should have double-checked their calibration this morning."

"Yeah, let's go with sensors," Dave said. "Fucking sensors," Dave said, "always failing, giving us bad data, making it impossible for us check the Lab for giant smoking holes before we run back home for the night."

Dave could not tell if Aradia ignored him or not, but she continued her report. "Jack's breaking off," she said. Dave remembered well enough. "We've left. i'm running the data"

"You do that," Dave said. "I know when I'm not needed. It's Data Time, time for the cool guy to step aside while the computer does what computers do best:"

"Done," Aradia said, taking out her music boxes.

"...Black. Fucking. Magic," Dave concluded, though he took out his timetables as well, and reached to turn them back.

"Wait!" Aradia's hand touched down on the nearest timetable. "Something's..." She held up that same hand for silence, and then cocked her head. Dave did the same, but for all his effort could not hear anything out in the void. As Aradia focused on the damaged Lab, Dave caught sight of something else odd in the distance: Jack had stopped his retreat. He too was listening to a distant sound. It was only when Dave turned back, and looked past the Lab, that he understood what was happening. The outer edge of the session was beginning to blacken, as though someone was slowly spilling ink onto the outer edge of a glass ball. It spread, and the world around them seemed to darken, then harden, and before the shade had reached the opposite pole, the session began to split at the edge of reality.

Dave had seen it all before. "'Radia," he said, the words coming quick and urgent. "Lalonde: did you see her before you left?"

Aradia lowered her eyes, which were working another scan of the world around. "Yes. She had just stepped into the room. She was fine. Just fine." Her mind on two topics at once, Aradia pointed to the space just behind the Lab. "Look there," she said.

"How 'fine' was she?" Dave asked. He could just make the thing out with his shades: a bright speck of light in the distance, like a star, white-hot.

"She was tired, but nothing immediately worse than that." Aradia said, though she had to repeat herself, as the sound she and Jack had heard at a distance reached them in full. Dave knew it as well. That shrieking, awful sound: drilling at first, and then rending, as the session itself was ripped apart by the seams. The light in the distance began to spread into a crack that split like glass in a jagged path that would soon spread along the whole of the game's sphere. Jack went to investigate.

Dave barred his teeth at Jack. "Fine, huh?" he called to Aradia. "That means all it takes for her to bust the entire session like an egg all over the eldritch floor is three dead friends." Well, Kanaya would be dead, but John would look dead and Dave had outright disappeared from a room that had been nearly eradicated by an energy beam, so what was Rose supposed to think?

"Can you blame her?" Aradia shouted back.

"Considering she's doing this?" Dave spread his arms wide to the crack in the distance, though he soon had to shield his eyes. "The last time this happened, I died! And when I woke up I was nearly pancaked by a thirty-foot, grimdark blacksmith!" The major brunt of the sound - the sound of someone's spell boring through the session walls - passed, but Dave continued to shout. "Whoops, three friends died! Better nuke my own house."

Aradia watched the crack spread, eyes unblinking and unprotected. "...You've got a point," she said at last. "If Lalonde is going to go neutron the moment the wrong person or people dies, she's a liability."

"Glad we can be honest to each other about it," Dave quipped.

"More glad you can," Aradia replied, honest in a different way.

Dave knew what she meant, and groaned into his hand. "Look... Do you think it's anyone, or just us and Kanaya?"

But before Aradia could reply, the two of them were interrupted. Near its point of origin, the crack began to split wide, like a jagged eyelid. Though the skies of the game session were now dark and had once seemed transparent, past blinding light and painful tears Dave could see something being exposed beyond the crack. He turned away at once. He knew better than to stare at something like that, at the eldritch things beyond Human and Troll understanding. But when he turned away from horror and terror, he found surprise lurking at his back.

"Morning, Strider," said Rose.

Dave swatted errantly at Aradia, who turned about. He was not at all relieved when he found that she too could see the new arrival. Dave liked his hallucinations the way he liked his poor metaphors: kept to himself.

There was no doubt in his mind that this Rose was a hallucination. Firstly: logic. Secondly: the blanche-white eyes, no pupils. Third: the horrible amount of blood coming from her Grimdark belly, straining through that mangled Squiddle icon of hers. Despite the wound, this Rose kept nonchalant, with one hand hanging innocently behind her back and her body held lax instead of with Rose's poise. Dave was willing to call that 3-b on Dave's Sicknasty-Official List of Reasons Not to Trust Creepy Ghost Roses. Moreover, Dave could still hear things from behind him, no matter how dangerous it would have been to look. Not long after the Horrorterror beyond got its first chance to look in to the Incipisphere, the lab had cracked like a bomb and Dave began to hear another sound with which he was familiar. It was a strange, screaming patch of white noise that had followed the real Lalonde around like a static puppy when she had gone Grimdark in their original game, though Dave could barely make it out over the sound of the session's rending shell. Without a doubt, the real, hopefully-beta Rose had gone for the Thorns of Oglogoth and had gone after Jack. That was bad, but not surprising. That just left the matter of this one.

Just to rub it in, Dave noticed that the hallucination was smiling: indeed, not just smiling but grinning, as if being there and confounding him was tickling on the edge of the world's greatest gag and all she had to do to seal it was to keep quiet. Even Rose had a better sense of humour than that. Certainly a better poker face.

"So who the hell are you?" Dave asked, though he was not sure if it was really to the hallucination or more to Aradia.

To his surprise, the vision answered in a sense, by pointing behind him. Instinctively, Dave started to glance over his shoulder but he was stopped mid-motion as Aradia cuffed him with the side of her hand. "It's trying to get you to look at the Horrorterror!" Aradia hissed at him. Dave sucked a breath through his teeth and nodded a brief thanks.

"Oh, I get it:" he said as he turned back to the false Rose. "...you're a dick. Why didn't you just say so? Sorry, if I'm ruining your lunch break here, but we'd rather not go dancing off the sanity train. Let me take a shot in the dark, here," he said to the doppelganger. "You're a part of Psychopus, the million-legged clown back there." The false Rose smirked. "And you're responsible for my friend there, I guess?" he asked, pointing back toward the beta Rose.

"Maybe it's the other way around?" said the ghost. Her voice sounded just like Rose's, if someone else was using it.

Aradia was also keeping her eye on the more immediate threat of beta Rose, just on the periphery of her vision. "We should go," she said.

"Gimmie time," Dave begged, straight-faced and looking forward. Personally, he agreed with his partner. Indeed, his hands had not both left his timetables even after the strange Rose's arrival, but something about this ghost was making him curious. He had Aradia had agreed on another point, after all: Rose was a liability, and just once - just once - Dave wanted to believe that they could get out of this whole rat trap with Jack without Lalonde losing her shit again. If this fake had been sent by one of the Horrorterrors, it might have answers. "Here's an idea!" he called to the double. "Let's try this again, and don't be so fucking literal! ...Who..." he spelled out: "...the hell... are you?"

The rending sound began to approach in a sense, as the crack started to split through the skies directly above. Beyond, Dave could feel a thousand eyes peering in, as the gods watched a Servant of Terrors fight the unusual Jack Noir. Whether or not the beasts behind those eyes provided Rose with any additional assistance, Dave did not know. All he wanted to do was go back and set everything right.

"Dave." Aradia tapped his arm. "Look down," she said. "Careful," she cautioned, and pointed to a spot between their feet. Dave looked, and there he saw a strange stalk-plant beginning to grow. Just like last time. Lalonde was predictable even when she fiddled with chaos. Though the plant was alien to him, Dave had seen Rose cause ones like it to sprout in the old session, as well. He knew what was next. The Horrorterrors were in, and now everything left in the Incipisphere was going to change. By the sounds of things, Rose had not bought victory for the price, yet again. "Dave, there is at least one hundred-storey tentacle god at our backs, there are eldritch plants growing at our feet, and if we so much as look in any other direction, that would be very, very bad. we have to g0"

"I don't want to be here any longer than you do, gal," Dave assured. "Now, I'm gonna ask you for a favour, okay? If you don't like my explanation when we get back, you get two. Just give me a chance to talk to this zombie clone."

"...You get one minute," Aradia said. "Or I'll drag you back."

"Deal."

Rose's double laughed, and then spoke again: "You know what, Strider?" she said. "It's actually good to see you again." And as she spoke, she scuffed her foot in the layer of tight-packed grey sand on top of the meteor. From there, she rather quickly draw a pattern with her foot, and then stepped back.

"What's this?' Dave asked her. She had drawn a symmetrical pattern in the ground: three lines spreading either out or toward a single circle at the symbol's base, with two lines splayed back and one straight.

"You asked," she replied. " This..." she said, deliberately touching the centre line with the toe of her shoe, "...is me."

"...Well, I'm glad we got that all cleared up," Dave said. He committed the symbol to memory but was otherwise not going to give it much concern. "You having fun with the plants?" he asked. He was not sure how else to approach the question of the thing's motives without it catching on to what he was doing.

"Don't be a pain, Strider," said the ghost. "I know what you're going for, I just know what isn't going to hurt me to say."

"And you had been doing such a good job of being genre aware," Aradia muttered.

"Hey, I've still got this," Dave said. But before he could explain how, a black-green fireball swept above their heads as Rose and Jack clashed above. The ghost alone watched them pass.

"Heh," said the ghost, which was decidedly un-Rose-like. "Isn't that funny? Last I checked, you were the type that'dve thrown yourself out there. Be a real Knight, and get yourself gutted all over again. Except now you're outta bodies and it's just too hard to help your friend."

Oh, fuck you you little- "Funny," Dave said instead. "You're not even wasting our time pretending you're Rose."

"I might as well be."

"Uh huh," Dave said. "Well that fills me up. You want any vague and pointless bits of information, Aradia?"

"I'll survive," she said.

Dave smirked. "Awesome. ...Fifty-eight, fifty-nine... G'bye," he said with a wave to the ghost. Aradia hit her music boxes, and Dave was moments behind her.

But this time, it was at least one moment too many. In the split second after Aradia left, but before Dave could follow, the plant struck. It jammed a thorn into his ankle, sending a jolt of intense pain up Dave's leg, which began to spasm. He fell to his good leg, which rapidly lost its strength alongside. The rest of his body, from the tips of his fingers to the tip of his tongue, began to slowly go numb, and his hand fell flat against the timetables and pressed them to the ground under his weight. In the distance, Dave could see a tinge of green light swell at the edge of his vision, and could hear the sound of Rose, screaming. Still able to hold up his upper body, Dave called out his half-sword and severed the plant just above the root, though the sword slipped from his grip as he swung.

"So," said the ghost. "What you really want to ask me what it is I want. What we want. Let's be honest, huh? Well. We want a lot of things, Strider." What strength was still holding Dave up gave out of his arms. When he fell back, his numb body hit the ground in a strange way. It was as though the surface of the asteroid was beginning to give below him, as though the very rock were shifting around him, swallowing him up. "No one ever wants the same things as everyone else, do they? Not even us." She knelt down, and gently pressed on Dave's yielding body until he was flat on his back.

"You know," Dave said, probably slurring more than he wanted to admit, "real Rose isn't usually this eager to get on top of me."

"Cute," she said, as she took to her feet. Then, she reached out with her foot, which Dave suddenly realized was bare, and filthy, and pushed up on his chin. Dave was forced to look up and back, and so caught sight of the wide gulf that hanged there, spreading through the sky above him. "Me, I like to think this whole thing a lot more personal than it is for the rest. That's why I'm the immediate threat. Get it? You should. You're the one who's seen it all." After a moment of thought, it added: "...How about you see a bit more?"

The ghost pushed with her foot, and Dave's head was tilted further back and, again, the rock shifted away, until Dave was staring straight into the yawning gap. Beyond, he saw a great black space, empty and filled to overflowing. Beyond, something began to move, to reach in, and somehow most offensive of all, to enter.

Dave Strider balked, or at least he did at the core of his personality, yet untouched by what he was beginning to see. This was no way to go. Dave Strider was not going to go gibbering off into that good night just because a zombie best friend tapped him on the jaw. Trying to outpace the contradictions his eyes were feeding him, Dave reached inside. He didn't know where the timetables were any more, but he didn't quite need them. Not for all his powers. Not if he wanted to... stop.

Of course, there was little he could do without Aradia once he had stopped, but still...

...Dave recoiled the moment he returned to the present. Whatever it was he had seen before freezing himself in time caught up to him as the seconds began to flow again. His arms and legs thrashed out at the bodies he felt crowding him, and he began to hyperventilate, his lungs soon forcing out more air than they took in. He did not even notice, at first, that it was strange that he could move again at all. Hands held him down, somewhat: warm hands, and one that slapped him across the forehead. A strange, soothing sensation accompanied the pain of that slap, and for a moment, all Dave could do was focus on it until his breathing returned to normal, his thrashing stopped, and his mind settled. It took him a moment to realize where he was, and that the false Rose was gone. It took him a while longer to realize the Horrorterror was gone as well.

As he truly came into himself, Dave also realized he was not wearing his shades, but quickly found them presented to him from a grey hand.

"Here, you big baby," said a familiar voice. Dave snapped on his shades, and tried to look at Terezi only sidelong to stay aloof. She did not seem much impressed. She was dishevelled, wearing a ratty old t-shirt he knew she used as pyjamas, and still dripping with sopor in places. As Dave came to his senses, he realized he was in her bedroom. Aradia was just beside him.

"Thank you," she said to Terezi. "We'll be going back now."

"Whatever," Terezi grumbled. "Just get out of my room." She turned away, not further acknowledging Dave.

Aradia hefted Dave to his feet without much ceremony, set his arm over her shoulder and led him out of the room. He found that he had some trouble moving his legs, and was only willing to keep up if only because Aradia was making it clear that he had to or she would leave him behind.

"When are we?" he hissed to her, though his tongue felt heavy. Only his head was still clear.

"A week ahead," she said. "Day forty-four. I've already gone back to deal with Jack's attack, but I couldn't exactly walk in on the Terezi of the present while you were having a conversation with her. Don't worry, though. Everyone's fine. We can probably assume that no one so much as blinked."

"And what does Terezi have to do with-"

"You were losing your Mind," Aradia interrupted. "I wasn't sure how bad it would be when I brought you back from your Time Freeze, so I went to her before bringing you back. It looks like I was right." Her synthesizer made a sound like - but in quite a few obvious ways unlike - she was clicking her tongue. "I almost hated to bring you back," she added. "You looked very peaceful."

"More like dead, you mean," Dave said. Noticed her volume, Dave made a point to keep his voice down as well.

"I don't think she was very happy I woke her," Aradia admitted, returning to the subject of Terezi. "But weird thing: she didn't ask why you had ended up like you did. Have you told her what's going on?" Dave shook his head, but Aradia had no other explanation.

"So give me the full details," Dave asked as they walked. Together, the two of them began their walk to the roof. Dave knew the route well, as he had often had to take or fly past Terezi's infinite sets of stairs to get out of the Lab in an emergency. "What happened after I turned off my clock?"

"Well, I had noticed you weren't with me immediately..."

Aradia replied with the full narrative: how she had returned to the scene of the incident and found Dave's temporally paused body looking like it had been half-swallowed by the meteor, which had seemed to melt in the area around his body and thrashed around him as if in violent tides. "The false Rose was saying that something was 'Awful,' but I was not really in the mood to eavesdrop."

"I 'preciate."

Aradia had engaged the ghost, who had proven far more physical able than the real Rose, exasperated by the fact that Aradia had been forced to limit her field of vision to avoid the Horrorterror. All Aradia had needed was a moment to grab Dave's body and escape, but the ghost had stretched the fight out as long as possible, wrestling with his robot partner hand-in-hand before suddenly vanishing. Aradia admitted that she was too hasty in how she tried to get back to Dave's body the moment her opponent had vanished. As a result, she had almost been taken out by Jack, who must have come to see what all the fuss was about. Dave asked Aradia if she knew what had happened to the beta Rose that had summoned the Horrorterror, but Aradia could only shake her head.

Aradia continued. "Of course, I know how to deal with Jack," she said. "At least enough to run away from him, for once, and I made it before he saw the Lab. But when I reached your body, the false Rose reappeared. Only momentarily. And she signed me a message, in ASL." Aradia demonstrated the signs: "She said, 'Be seeing you.' And she held on 'see' for a moment." The sign for "see" involved the eyes, and Aradia flicked hers to bright, white lights to substitute the ghost's.

"There's an Alternian Sign Language?" Dave asked, but as he didn't really care, he changed the subject. He filled Aradia in on the limited scene she had missed, and the ghost's line about its mysterious 'we' not agreeing with one another. "So what are we thinking here?" Dave asked as he wrapped up. "You think that really was an avatar of one of the Trans-Plutonian Squiddles?"

"That seemed to be the only question it was happy to answer," Aradia admitted.

"Yeah," Dave agreed. "Even if all it said was..." He drew the three-pronged glyph in the air.

Aradia nodded. "I'll start checking our Internets," she said. Dave was willing to let her have it. Aradia's "checking the two internets" was nothing like a meat person's.

Dave tried to think of something he could do to help out. "And I'll... I'll hit Rose with 'physician, heal thyself' until she sits down on her own couch? Fuck, I don't know."

"0ne step at a time" Aradia advised. As she did so, she came to the topmost step of Terezi's stairs, and walked out onto the roof of the Lab. Dave followed after her, and looked past the edge and above. There, high above them, orbited one half of their second line of defence. It was a small, purple meteor, modelled as a facsimile of Derse. On the opposite side of the Lab, far below their feet at present, was the false Prospit. To Dave, they now seemed more necessary than they had in some time. Oh, Dave had seen what Rose had done to their game session. So had John, and Jade, and all the Trolls watching from their computer screens. When they had united in the Trolls' session, they had decided that they had to do something to prevent it from happening again. Talking to Rose was only half of it. Before they had fallen lax and all their plans had swirled down the metaphorical drain, the fifteen of them had put all their energies into creating those two rocks with all their game knowledge. The false Derse and false Prospit kept their sleep dreamless, and keep them all out of the dream bubbles in the realm of the Horrorterrors. Safe.

"Hey," Aradia said, as she, too, looked up at their work in the sky. "I know you promised me an explanation for your stunt, but I do... I think I get it. I know you don't want to lose Rose."

"You don't get it," Dave said, and he laughed. "Maybe the other Trolls, not you. Let's be serious here. But that's okay. You can pretend."

Aradia's voice box harrumph-crackled. "Even so. But we still should have left in the first place. You can judge all you want, but I don't want you dead. You saw beta Rose try against Jack, Grimdark and all. She lost. He's not playing by the rules, so we need to break the rules in lock-step or we lose the game. You're the only one I can rely on to do that right now."

"Hey, don't think I don't get it," Dave replied, not breaking his look on the moon. "Who was the one who locked himself in time with no way to get out on his own?"

Aradia smiled, though Dave only caught it out of the corner of his eye. "Fair enough," she said. "But I think I'll leave you here. You have to get back to your 'boobytrapped chats with Pyrope.'"

Dave frowned. "Right. Well!" he said, trying to fake amused, "you have fun with all your Troll shit about Troll shit."

"Thank you, I will," Aradia said, and she waited for him to take his leave. Robots could always afford to wait - Dave wasn't particularly fond of them for that, either. Dave took out his timetables, but hesitated to leave, as he was not quite in any hurry to rush into a loaded Terezi. Still, he had an image to maintain, and left before it became a thing. He stopped, practiced and proven, with two minutes to spare before he would have to be in Terezi's room to swap out for himself. The false Prospit hung high above him, and Aradia was gone.

Normally, when Dave returned to the Lab, it was to collapse into bed and sleep until his alarm went off just a handful of hours later, screeching S Club 7 CDs at him until he couldn't possibly lie there any longer (some days he would sing along, instead: had to mix it up for Jade and John before they started to get ideas about where he stood). Some days, if he was feeling gnarly after the fight with Jack, he would sleep in the shower instead. Today he did not much have that option. Dave mussed up his hair, hoping to disguise the sweat before he remembered that he was talking about Terezi, and the conversation came back to him. Dave shook his head, wishing double that he could just up and go to bed, but he figured it might be better to nip the entire awkward subject in the bud. He'd be honest, he figured. Terezi'd understand. After all, it seemed like sometime between here and there, he was gonna be honest, so why not now?

Ready as he was going to be, Dave headed back toward the lab, cool as he could muster.

---

Rose entered the main Lab half-asleep, but otherwise composed. She had not been sleeping well lately, what with Karkat running her through the ringer on "Imp Flushes" for the "Basement Reclamation Program." Today she was off of both flushing and data work, and so she had celebrated with the traditional Human bout of oversleeping. Rose was not fond of the Imp flushes, which was a polite way of saying that she would have rather tried to gain levels by murdering Karkat the next time he gave an order, or perhaps Eridan, the next time he tried to hate-flirt with her. Sadly, that would pretty much be the next time either of them were so much as in the same room with her. At least Eridan left off if Vriska or Tavros was there to dissuade him. Still, Rose wondered if Karkat suspected why Eridan kept volunteering for her shift. By and large, Rose did her best to simply ignore Eridan, though that somewhat involved dreaming elaborate fantasies where Karkat and Eridan hooked up black and made each other's lives awful for one another, but after a while, Rose realized that that would just make Eridan happy and that was not her business. Nuisances aside, Rose had gained exactly one level from the flushes, mostly thanks to the experience she had been sitting on from her session. It had been the closest Rose had felt to 'good' in days.

Rose had had one other bright moment in the past few weeks, namely the night before. Though she had to admit it was one of the reasons she had overslept that morning. That noon. Whichever. Rose had been on a flush the night before, and the Lab had thrown salt on her wounds by making sure Nepeta's quarters had been freezing cold. Kanaya had found her shivering on her return, and had checked on her condition. Her so-called friend had then driven Rose into legitimate worry by "diagnosing" her with some horrible Troll disease. Kanaya had held up the act for almost half an hour before Rose caught on to the symptoms getting sillier and more outlandish. When she realized the game was up, Kanaya stuck around when Rose went for hot chocolate and mint, and their conversation had turned into one about real Troll diseases, the threat of communicability and the ethics of quarantine over culling. Rose did not regret choosing stimulating conversation over sleep, or at least not so much as... well, she supposed sometimes you reap what you sow. But speaking of reaping what you sow, Kanaya had not yet apologized for her prank, and so Rose had half a mind to work revenge into casual conversation before the day was up: plans which were quickly derailed.

Rose found the main lab to be in its usual late-morning mess. While there was an active patrol in the Underlab today, it was ostensibly Dave's shift, which meant the Trolls on shift were working alone. Kanaya smiled in greeting from her computer chair. Tavros was busy doing data work, as was Karkat himself, but neither seemed to be paying all that much attention to their screens. When he wasn't being actively distracted by Vriska, Tavros was sneaking glances over at Eridan. Karkat was just straight-up watching the program on the TV screen, and was making his disapproval known.

"Oh no!" called a high-pitched voice from the screen. "If Plumbthroat steals the ballots, he'll ruin the Model UN!"

Rose stopped walking towards Kanaya.

"It's like I'm being keelhauled," Karkat griped. "This is scraping the skin of my back with barnacles made of nostalgia and filling my wounds with salt water and saccharine. Both of you are going to pay for this. My foot's going to be so far up your excretion gap, you'll taste heel."

A Human hand appeared over the back of the couch to flip Karkat off. Rose approached the couch warily, and found Jade and John watching from there.

"You're watching Season 1," she said after a moment.

"Yup!" Jade confirmed.

"...Why?"

Rose looked up at the screen in some horror, and glaring neon and anime sheen stared back at her. The main cast was gathering on Main Street to discuss the plot, as ever, and Rose was ashamed to say that she could name every one. The kindly Butterscotch. The zealous Mint. Over there was Creamsickle, who had too much imagination. On the right was Rocky Road, who in localization had been made a token (mottled) black boy. And there was first season lead, whom the first season's localization team had given a voice shrill enough to shatter plate glass: Raspberry. Oh yes. Rose knew even the original Squiddles.

"Do they ever stop smiling?" John asked, who looked like he would never stop smiling, himself. Rose could only imagine he was discovering his televised utopia, but it was hard to tell with John.

"Not until they get cancelled and handed to a team that's actually heard of facial expressions," Rose said, still not sure she was really awake.

"We had better go!" shrieked Raspberry. "But before we do, let's all-" The audio skipped as it fell into a stock clip: "-hoooooold hands for:"

"SQUIDDLE! POWER!"

Right. That. Rose rubbed at her temples to dispel the effect the flashing lights had had on her vision, but could not help but watch afterwards, hypnotised. This was definitely twisted enough to be one of her nightmares. Hopefully the Horrorterrors had broken past the False Derse and were slowly dragging her into insanity?

Rose was shaken out of her snark several minutes later by what sounded like an explosion above them. They all jumped in their spots and looked straight up, no one with more urgency than Aradia, who had been sitting quietly plugged into her computer. They kept listening until the sound of voices came from just below them in the transport hub. A second pause followed, and then the noise picked up at full force right in the middle of the lab.

"Stop running away from me!" Terezi appeared in the room a second after Dave - which did not even seem particularly safe. Dave flicked his eyes about the room, as if taking stock of his audience. Terezi only had to yell a few more words before Jade reached the pause button on her remote, since the giggling of a half-dozen Squiddles seemed more than a little impolite.

"I'm not running away from you!" Dave replied, but Terezi was fast on his tail.

"No, you're just trying to get in public where you think I won't shout at you!" When he tried to object, Terezi cut him straight off: "Seer of Mind!" Rose was not entirely sure how honest Terezi was being about her powers, but was not about to second-guess Terezi as she struck out, fists trembling. Rose had seen many threatening things in the game, but nothing had struck her as dangerous as Terezi did at that moment, as she corralled Dave against a desk with her one finger. Terezi and Dave were both covered in dirt and dried paint, but Terezi emanated pure Troll rage in every muscle, and though she was bare handed Rose would not have said much for Dave's chances if she decided to attack him. A teal streak cut through the grime on one side of her face.

Terezi jabbed Dave in the chest with her finger. "You're a dick, Dave Strider. You don't know when to keep your mouth shut. You want to turn your stupid pink tail and run? Fine! But this isn't over. You just wish it was. 1 W1LL M4K3 YOU HURT FOR TH1S" Terezi reached up to adjust her glasses, though Rose saw it was just an excuse to wipe at her nose and sniff back tears. As if worried that Dave or someone else had heard her, she immediately lashed out: "You couldn't even pretend! You couldn't even pretend to care how I felt, because you're too busy pretending that you don't! Who does that?" She swept an errant look about the room, as though demanding an answer. "1TS OV3R" she said to Dave. She took a step back, as if to turn, but then stalled. When no counterattack came, verbal or otherwise, Terezi left the room as she had come, in greater fury.

The room was left in silence. Rose took a check of the place and was appalled to see first Vriska, who looked like it was Twelfth Perigree's Eve, and then Karkat, who looked even happier. Dave, on the other hand, having said nothing in his defence, and added nothing now. He cast a meaningful look towards Aradia, and then a peculiar one to Rose that she could not make out with his shades in the way.

"Oh my god Strider!" Vriska said. "What did you do?"

Dave broke eye contact, to remove his shades (he kept his eyes shut) and rub them against the hem of his shirt. When he had replaced them, he announced "I'm out," and headed for the transportalizer.

"Dave, wait!" Jade called. She scrambled over the back of the couch, past Rose.

"Yeah, dude!" John said, following after. Dave ignored both of them, but they followed him through the portal. The room was again silent, except for Vriska who was cackling to herself. Rose turned her astonished face up to Kanaya, but Kanaya was already glaring at Karkat, who had taken John's spot on the couch and had restarted the DVD. Kanaya got to her feet and slapped Karkat across the shoulder.

"What?" he said. He looked from Kanaya to Rose "What's with those looks?"

"Aren't you going to... I don't know...?" Kanaya suggested.

"What? ...Terezi?" He looked back and forth between them. "You gotta be kidding me. Gonna play a big joke on poor Karkat, huh?" His sarcasm was evident, but when they refused to budge, he at least admitted to it. "Look, all right? You want me to go up there and go 'There, there you big blubbering idiot,' right? But guess what? Terezi doesn't wanna talk to me. She and I have been on the rocks for weeks now. Big, sharp pointy rocks!"

"Weeks?" Rose asked, sarcastic. Karkat just jabbed a finger in her face for interrupting.

"Now, if I go up there right now after she's been having a fight, she is going spear me on one of those rocks like a grub kebab." He demonstrated with one of his hands, 'impaling' it through the fingers with the other. "Now, the alternative is for me to sit down here, basking in the idea that Terezi and Strider hate each other! The spiteful, dead-ended Human way, even! So either I do one thing, and get screwed over, or I just stay here, and my life is stu-pendous! This is the best news I've had since you punks showed up and started chafing me day-for-day! You actually want me to go up and step in it?"

"...I'll go," Rose said, not wanting to listen to Karkat any further. "Someone should. I suppose I could... try to apologize for him? For all we know, Karkat's not the only one being a dick here." She shook her head, ignoring Karkat's dismissive spit from the couch. As Rose moved to leave, she reached out a hand to brush Kanaya's shoulder to get her attention away from Karkat. "See you," she said.

"See you," Kanaya whispered.

Rose did not much mind the elder gods as she passed them on her way through the transportalizer, and they did not much mind her in turn. Rose found Terezi's transportalizer unlocked, perhaps forgotten, and took it before its owner could change her mind. Beyond, Rose found the startings of a long mural Terezi and Dave had been drawing, which went off into the distance and equal parts impressed and detracted Rose. Rose went along for quite some time before she came to the unfinished end of the mural, where she found the source of the loud noise that had started the whole affair. Embedded knee deep in the floor, at the edge of a massive gash in the tiling, was Terezi's original cane. Rose was not entirely sure she wanted to go past that point, the literal line in the ground between her and Terezi. She could not imagine the sheer game-driven force that had gone into the swing. She was starting to regret coming up here with no information. What on earth had Dave done?

Rose went on, to knock on doors and check down corridors, before finally going up the long stairs to the roof. There she found Terezi perched on the edge, legs dangling over the side. One hand lay limp in her lap, and the other was held clutched to her face, spread wide over shadow-cast eyes. When she heard Rose approach, Terezi lifted her hand and took a sniff of the air. Her face screwed tight with anger at first, but all she ultimately did to communicate with Rose was to look away. Rose stopped her approach. Above them, the sky struck black in all directions, save the false Prospit hanging high.

Terezi snapped back to attention well before Rose was ready for her. "What do you want?" she asked.

Rose did not reply. She was not entirely sure what she wanted herself. In a manner of speaking, she felt like she was simply there out of propriety, and it was now very clear that Terezi was not going to fish for comfort. Terezi took a moment to glare Rose down before continuing, but instead of piling on the passive-aggressive hypotheticals, like Rose would have expected, Terezi repeated her initial question, legitimately: "What do you want?" She was brusque that time, as though she felt that if she could ask quickly enough, Rose would be gone all the faster.

"...I want to talk," Rose said. It was automatic. Terezi was upset, and wasn't this what Rose had always at least pretended to do when the time came?

"Talk about what? Sit me down on your couch? T34R 1NTO MY H34D" Terezi had turned enough so Rose could see her dagger teeth, perhaps not truly not as sharp as Terezi wanted to pretend, but more than sharp enough. "...I'm the one that does that here," Terezi said. She tapped her temple. "You don't know the first thing."

Rose started to step forward, but Terezi slammed a hand down onto the roof beside her. The stone buckled under her hand. "No!" she snapped. "You don't get it! You think I haven't seen you? You think I haven't seen you trying to ditch Eridan and Vriska like the... plague they both are? You think we haven't all seen? You won't even talk to them straight when it really matters! You have to go around, and around, in circles, like you think it's a good thing, and you think I'm going to let you come here and play head games with me?"

"Is that what he did, then?" Rose said, trying to keep the conversation focused whether Terezi wanted it or not. It had been clear that Terezi was going to continue trying to change the subject, and Rose found her patience was at a premium. "You told him you like him, didn't you?" Terezi growled in reply. "Don't be ridiculous, we've all seen it coming for weeks. Everyone but the two of you. What? Did he not give you the decency of a 'straightforward response'?"

"Strider?" Terezi asked, sarcastically. "What if he didn't? Dave Strider's an ass." She swept her arm across the rooftop. "I'm sure everyone here is so surprised, too! Dave Strider? An asshole? You think..." she started, but paused to turn and take to her feet. "You think that I'm here because Dave, fucking, Strider doesn't know when to stop playing head games? Yeah, sorry Rose, I know him. Maybe not perfect, but well enough for that. Better than you know me, at least... or... or any of us!"

"I'll choose not to take that personally," Rose said.

"Oh, well CONGR4TUL4T1ONS! You're going to do just... fine." And where Terezi had not let Rose come near her, she walked straight up to Rose. Terezi was short an inch on Rose, but that only allowed Rose to see over her glasses, where she saw eyes like two dried wounds on her face, tinted in a faint teal of tears already passed. "Not going to take it personally, Rosie? Not going to take it personally, when Vriska finally gets tired of you poking around in her life and goes volcanic?"

"I intend to be out of the way," Rose said, testy. "You want to talk about Vriska and Eridan? I can do that. The way I see it, there's no reason for Vriska to go ballistic at present, and I don't intend to exasperate her."

"Vriska Serket doesn't need a reason!" Terezi snapped. Her voice was rasp. The young Trolls had always struck Rose as a little deep-throated, even the females, but Terezi's voice had gone into a rumble that would have done her well in a future in court. "Gog help you if you give her one! You haven't talked to her, you haven't hunted with her. You do. Not. Know. Her. and what you're doing is going to get you killed, and you will deserve it!" Terezi threw up her hands, and suddenly began an impression of the Spidertroll. "Oh, 'We should be partners,'" she recited, "'That's so aw8some! You're the best moirail ever, did you know that?' FFF-" Terezi paced a small circle to recover herself. "Murdering innocents on my watch, the second my back was turned. And if you rub her face in it, and is she sorry? Oh, very. Very sorry, Terezi. And then she pushes Tavros off a cliff on a blackcrush impulse, and just when I'm trying to pull everything together, Aradia... Aradia..." She shook her head, again and again. "Tell Kanaya she's an idiot! Picking up Vriska right after that? Is she insane? Just because she felt a little flushed one afternoon and didn't know how to say? Idiot! If you knew anything about Vriska Serket, you would already have told her you were done. Carved it in stone! Bronzed it! Vriska ignores pity and she doesn't deserve hate."

There was venom in that, venom Rose could not place but could taste in the air. Terezi rounded about and put distance between them both again. Rose did not know what to say, and did not make the mistake of trying to do so in spite. Terezi paced for a moment, but when it seemed that the topic had died, Terezi spoke up again.

"So what did he say?" she asked. "Once I left?"

"Which one?" Rose asked. "The one who just pissed you off, or the one who didn't come as soon as he knew what happened?"

To Roseﾒs surprise, Terezi almost laughed. "...Letﾒs try both."

Rose sat down. It was the only thing she could think of doing to look casual, and began to fidget with her hands to carry on the illusion. "Dave left," she started. "I think he went to his room. John and Jade went after him."

"Did he say anything?"

Rose shook her head. "Karkat was... less than kind. He made excuses to not to come up here."

Terezi looked away. "Fuck him," she said. "Fuck him and his candyassed... wriggling..." Terezi's attempt to parrot her former matesprit's insults fell to the side. "...Fuck him."

Terezi broke away and returned to the edge of the roof. Rose, who was still not sure if it was safe to approach, squatted on the rooftop far behind her. As she sat, Rose churned the situation in her head. Frankly, she wanted to leave just as Terezi had near-demanded, but something kept her. ...Empathy? It was not doing her much good, as Terezi soon began to ignore Rose entirely, and instead stared straight on. At first, Rose thought that she was lost in deep thought, with her face turned up toward the sky, but soon, she began to fidget with her hands, on and off. Only her face was not moving: it seemed as though she watched some invisible point in the sky, and kept lock on it. After a while, Rose realized that Terezi was talking to herself, but Rose could hear no sound. Terezi's lips moved only a little, but her hands picked up the motions: first her fingers, and from time to time, her whole arms. At last, whatever she was dictating came to its conclusion, and Terezi looked down at her lap.

But as she did, the second after her eye contact had broken with that invisible spot in the distance, Terezi let out a choking cry and an uncontrolled look of misery passed over her face. She hid her face from Rose at once, shocked and perhaps even frightened at her own emotions sprung from nowhere to overcome her the moment she had lost focus. Rose started to her knees, to move forward, but Terezi had recovered enough of her bearing to lash out with her palm and warn Rose away. Doing so seemed to cost her composure a second time, and so Rose obeyed only with hesitation. Terezi braced her head against her free hand, as if trying to gently suffocate further outbursts. She then took her outstretched arm back to her chest, and clutched it close, like a normal girl.

Don't think like that, Rose scolded herself, but it was hard not to. Terezi's cheeks were flush teal with embarrassment, the teeth that bit at her own lip could tear flesh from bone without trouble, and in and idle moment, Terezi pushed a lock of hair over her nearest horn. But she was still a teenaged girl, wasn't she?

Terezi breathed deep and seemed to test her own lips before she risked saying what it seemed she had meant to say when she had first begun to turn. "...When I was... about two or so, I learned to read," she said, and waited for Rose to acknowledge that she was listening. When Rose nodded, she continued: "Or maybe I started to like reading, or read interesting things for the first time, or something. And one night I just had to show my lusus, so I went to... to read to her, and..." Terezi sniffled. "And I think she liked to listen, so we started doing it all the time. And after a while, I think stopped doing it because I wanted to show her and it started to be just something we did? Especially if I wanted a distraction. I mean, we couldn't really talk in the normal way."

Rose, still wary about speaking up and shattering whatever had inspired Terezi to speak to her, leaned forward to communicate her interest, though she did not approach.

"Back then," Terezi said, "I used to have this really old book." Terezi looked down to her hands, which Rose realized were posed as if holding the tome. "Found it somewhere. Used to read it... all the time. It was a collection of old fairy tales, and fables... lectures, really. Last-generation propaganda, that sort of thing. My favourite, was... uh..."

Terezi turned, somewhat, partway towards her invisible point in the distance, her feet firmly on the ledge. She gathered her focus, and then began to recite.

"...Once upon a time..." she started, and as she spoke, her shaking tone was slowly replaced by practiced recitation. "Once upon a time, when the world bled with the deaths a thousand loyal Trolls in the face of shock rebellion, there was a soldier who lived in the northeast, where he lived a simple life and was content. And when he was called, no matter the night, or the weather, or the state of the world, he would stand for his empress and fight. And when he was allowed to rest, he would gather his closest companions to his table, where they made hobby and trade in the making of small wooden figurines.

"His moirail, a blacksmith, provided the tools, and tended to them as they sat and spoke together for all the time it took the project to complete. The soldier's kismesis, a soldier of like stock, would go into the forests, to find wood as per the terms of an arrangement that had been made between them, and would bring it to the soldier and his companions. The soldier's matesprit would work with drawings, planning the figurine, drawing out the shapes of Trolls, and beasts and scenes, to give each its perfect form. And the soldier would work the wood, and detail them, for he was ever skilled with a knife, and had no equal in battle or trade or show. He could cut with it, spin it, throw it in the air and catch it, hilt or blade without harm. He could throw it to a target, or he could sit with his companions and use it to carve out truth and fantasy, embellishment and detail, and he was content. And whenever he had finished, and brought that perfect form to life, he would give the figurine to two others. They were rivals, a couple he had guided in the way we call auspistice today. Together, the couple would paint it the figure in every colour of cloth and blood, or bark and soil, and they made the figures real. Together, they made figures and scenes, from near at hand and far away, from beyond the mountains and the oceans, or in the depths of the seas, which they had never seen but shaped with uncanny realism. They carved glories in the stars, and horrors in the pits, and heroes and villains alike. Together, the soldier and his companions could make the world breathe without ever leaving their workshop. And they were content, to sit and speak and work together.

"Now, as often happened in those days, when the world bled, there came throughout the land a call to arms and readiness. The time of great battles and great monsters was long over, but unity is a forever war, and the Empire fought its rebels. The soldier took up his weapon alongside his companions and went to the front and the lines as the Empire demanded of their talents. And they fought in petty battles, for what glory could be found, until each night was done. And the night came when the kismesis of the soldier fell in battle, and died, though the soldier stood by alongside, fighting with tooth and claw and glutted knife.

"When the war had ended, the soldier returned to his home, which his moirail had kept in his absence as he made weapons for the Empire. And the home was clean and tidy, and so the figures waited, in rows and rows, full of colour and intricate life. And the companions sat at their table. The soldier's moirail tended the tools, and went out into the forest, to gather the wood. The soldier's matesprit would work with drawings, planning them down into the shapes of beautiful trees and hideous plants, and soldiers in dress and rebels in rags. They would make the sights and sounds they had seen in the field, and recreated the places they had been, far beyond their homes. And the soldier took the wood, and worked it, and his pieces were beautiful, but lifeless. His trees were dead where they should have breathed in the wind; his soldiers stood stock and still, like any wooden toy. The land the companions made for their set looked dry, no matter what effort the feuding rivals made to paint it.

"And the rivals began to joke that the Troll figurines were corpses, doomed and lost in a hellscape. They said that they would paint the soldiers bled out, so the blood might show some sign of life, and feed the land. And so the soldier began to lose the respect of the rivals, and over time they went another way. And one so died.

"And the night came that the companions gathered again at the table, and set to work. And the moirail tended the tools, and gathered the wood. And soldier's matesprit pared her designs, down into the shapes of things they knew would rile the soldier, and spark the fire of craft in his heart. But the quality his work did not improve, and there was no paint to make them real.

"And as time went on, the soldier did not improve. Soon, his matesprit became ashamed him, and they fought," Terezi said. Given the circumstances, Rose watched for a reaction, but Terezi carried on without a moment's falter. "They fought until they had traded pity for scorn, and drifted their own ways.

"And the soldier ceased to make his beautiful things, for he had no way to give them life, and no inspiration to guide his hands. He became sullen and began to... well, falter." Terezi was proceeding so naturally that it had never occurred to Rose that she might be adding her own embellishments, or picking and choosing the perfect words. "One night, the inevitable: a message went out across the lands from the heart of the Empire, warning that the Drones had been dispatched. And one by one, from the lands closest to the hives and out, Trolls began to prepare with their kismeses and matesprits, to be ready for their terrible guests.

"And the soldier's moirail came to him, made him a promise that he would find new pity and new hate. But the soldier was not listening, for he had fallen ill in the mind, to fits of cowardice and immobility."

"He was depressed?" Rose asked. Terezi nodded. "I can't see that coming up often in children's stories, much less Troll. It seems..." Rose was about to say 'weak' but decided to go with: "...cullable."

Terezi smiled. "But if you don't know what they're coming from, how do you know that they went anywhere at all?" She continued: "Though the soldier was pitiful, and through his cowardice a subject of scorn, he had lost his charms, and was ill-kempt. His moirail brought him to a seeker's place, where Trolls in desperation could find some company. There, the moirail boasted of the soldier's skills with a blade, but even that had fallen aside for want of regular practice. The moirail kept up efforts for weeks and weeks, until one night, the soldier would not leave the sopor to face the sunset.

"And the moirail was upset. Angry. Sad. He had hoped to craft with the soldier again. 'I have to go,' he said. 'You've made a fool of yourself, and I will not be any part of it.' And he left, and met with his own kismesis, and went to live with his own matesprit for many sweeps, close at hand.

"Time passed, and the Drones came." Terezi swept out her left arm before her. But this gesture was different. It was not like the ones that had come before, complimenting the story. Terezi was not pointing the village she had brought into being with her story, but to the invisible point she had been watching before, as she had rehearsed her story in silence. She pointed out in the void in the real world, past safety, towards Jack.

"And the soldier rose that morning and found that it was too late to run, if he could have. For a time, he waited in cover - a coward," Terezi clarified for Rose, "blade in hand, though he knew he had lost his true skill. And when the Drones set to work at the other side of town, the man who had once been a soldier wandered his home, and came upon his figurines. His companions had left them all behind, the poor, unpainted samples alongside the marvellous, which cut him in his heart. But as he examined each one, and turned them over in his hand, he began to remember his companions, and what they had accomplished, and what they had meant to him. And he found his confidence, a ground on which to stand that had eluded him for so long. And he examined each piece, and could see where the poor figures had failed, and set each one in the place it would have stood if things had turned out better, and thought on his companions, as they had been in better times."

Terezi stopped her story for a moment, and looked at her empty hand, which she clutched as if holding a wooden figurine. Rose was not sure whether she was play-acting for effect or genuinely distracted. "And he left his knife as a tool," she said, "and went out to meet the Drones, head high, with a smile on his face."

And that was the ending, Rose realized, quite slow. "And I never understood," Terezi said, "when I was little, why someone like that that would fall aside so easily. Why he'd get so depressed because of their kismesis. I mean... how could he have let his life fall apart when he was so strong in the end? Biology? But... then why... I mean, who would let that happen! Screwing up the mating season is something you think only happens to everybody else. Who would be so stupid as to screw it up? It's not hard! But this guy... even though he did... I never thought bad of him. Because when it really mattered, he died like a Troll. That's the point! And now..." She looked up again, towards the doom unseen, and began to cry anew. "And now I don't know! I always thought I'd be fine, but I don't know how he did it alone."

"You mean... Jack?" Rose was not sure what sort of response Terezi was looking for. "That's not really the same thing, is it? I mean, I know what you're saying, Terezi but I think you might be stretching your metaphor."

"Not Jack. Just... scared. I'm scared, all right! So cull me!" She shook her head. "I'm scared and I've got nothing. I threw it all away, like your douchewit friend decided to point out before he left. Fine! Karkat doesn't want me? Fine. He wants to burn all his bridges and spit in my face on top of it? Fine! Fuck. Him." Terezi's hand crushed its invisible statuette in her fist. "And if your friend and I don't see eye to nose, I can live with that too. He didn't have to be a dick about it, but fine. But..." Realization flashed across Terezi's face for a moment, and frowned, and slowly the aggression trailed out of Terezi's voice, and she sighed.

"...Hadn't sunk in, had it?" Rose asked, when Terezi did not continue. "It's funny, isn't it? How some things just don't seem as final as you think in your head."

"Thought I had," Terezi said, wistfully. Terezi turned away again, back to the horizon. She looked again out toward Jack, this time without shifting. "I dunno, Lalonde. Who cares."

"You seem to."

"Don't be trite," Terezi cut.

Rose gave the approach a rest. "...Terezi?"

"Yeah?" Terezi replied, still terse but all the same, answering.

"What did Dave say?" Rose asked. "...I mean, he's fond of pointing out faults but you knew that before today. What did he do?"

Terezi shook her head. "You won't get it."

"Try me."

Terezi seemed more inclined to up and leave, but for some reason, answered all the same. "...he said that maybe we could still be friends."

Rose felt jolted in her confusion. "...I don't-"

"No. Neither did he. Or maybe he just didn't care. Can't tell with Dave." Terezi hugged at her legs.

Rose was hesitant. "Terezi... I know I shouldn't ask, but...?"

"It's insulting!" she insisted. "How am I supposed to explain it to you? I already tried to explain it to him, but did he listen? No, he just kept trying to throw it in my face!" Terezi's voice went from angry to shaking as she described it. "And then... he leaves."

"And that's when you chased him downstairs, I guess?" Rose asked, happy for the change in subject.

"No! Oooh no, STR1D3RS 4PP4R3NTLY NOT TH4T SM4RT!" Terezi wiped at her nose. "No. He time travelled in the middle of our conversation. He thinks he's stealthy, but he screwed up and I noticed. And... and I didn't know what was worse, I mean... that he didn't want to go back and take back his insult? Or that he had the power to do that and was willing to use it in any way. So I start yelling at him. 'What did you erase?'"

Rose squirmed. She knew Strider better than that, and realized that Terezi did as well, thus the sense of betrayal in thinking he had done otherwise. Rose knew that there was only one reason he'd have left the conversation in mid-sentence. She wondered just how to broach the subject, when Terezi showed that there was no need.

"...and after we've been screaming at one another for a while... Look, what do you know about Jack?"

Rose was one part relieved and one part hurt. "...he told you?" Rose asked. Dave hadn't told her a thing, she had just worked it out. Terezi seemed to assume that Rose had been told about Dave and Terezi's patrols as well.

"Yeah! I'm there screaming at him and Captain Hero tells me about Jack Noir. How he hasn't actually been leaving us alone? How he probably can find us if Dave and Aradia don't watch him all the time? And how we've all died like... four times each? Even with all we're doing?" Rose swallowed - she had not guessed that number. "And I'm nervous, and I have no idea how to deal with this. And before I realize it, I think 'I have to talk to Karkat,' because he knows all about this, but then I remember: Oh! Right." She sighed. "But I'm doing okay. For a while. But then Dave slaps me in the face with this friend crap, and when I ask him about it, he starts being this stoic jackass, and I can't tell if he's trying to be a stupid hero to keep me away from Jack, or if he really means... all of it." Rose said nothing. "I mean, I thought Dave liked me, but I'm not going to be shaken up if he doesn't. Push off, move on. But I figured Dave liked me well enough to just say so and not humiliate me like a black crush, that shit!"

"Maybe he was just stressed about Jack," Rose pointed out. She really had no idea how things went on a normal patrol for Dave, much less the one that had just preceded.

"I thought about that. But then I did a little more thinking, and I really don't think that was part of it," Terezi croaked. "Because then I realized that maybe he's not trying to humiliate me. I mean, you Humans really seem to mean the friend thing. And he keeps saying that I'm a great friend, and he likes just hanging out with me, I realize it... that's it. Maybe he's right. Maybe that's why Karkat's gone and dropped me like a hot rootbulb. Maybe that's why I don't see Nepeta anymore. Maybe Dave's just the first guy telling me the truth. People lie to me all the time, it's part of the job." Terezi was shaking again. "And then I realize that I have nothing and maybe it's all my fault, and everything I hadn't been thinking about Jack comes crashing in. And I let it all out on Dave, and he doesn't even have the nerve to say he's sorry." Terezi stood, seemingly to regain control over her emotion. "So yeah," she said, after she had grasped them. "I blew up. Do you get that?"

It would have sufficed to say that Rose did not, but she was no fool to say so out loud. Terezi was legitimately upset, and so Rose gathered up every word and every bit of information she could muster to try to understand why. When that failed, she stayed quiet, thinking. Rose felt as much torn between her own beliefs as she was with the desire to not sound like a Squiddle defending the core concept of friendship to a briny old sailor-man. It seemed like a cheap sentiment, not at all like Terezi's righteous anger over Rose's flitting touches with auspistice.

...But why did Terezi care what I did with Vriska? Rose looked up at her companion, who was still gazing out again in the dark. Terezi, sensing the look, turned back part-way. With Rose sitting, Terezi towered over her. From there, Rose coudl see that Terezi's poise and control was so carefully trained that even this spat of tears had barely eroded it. The lawyer had never stopped operating just because she was upset, and her improvisational skills were still primed. Rose realized now that those instincts had watched the conversation go bye, and that Terezi had been able to take everything she had said without thinking, in malice and pain at the start of the conversation, and had use even those to make her point.

"I do get it," Rose said. Or at least, she understood as best as Terezi could teach her, which she reflected was very still little but considerable for the small span of time. "...when you were talking to me about not being straight with Vriska, it was because that was what Dave did with you. I get that." Terezi looked up, and nodded. "'Vriska doesn't deserve hate.' That's what you said." Nod again. "It's a death threat." No reply. "Because of the Drones. Someone who doesn't deserve hate... or pity, right Terezi? They're worthless, and deserves to be culled." Terezi, looking almost ashamed, turned away. Rose had to slump forward.

"You're pretty smart, for a Human," Terezi said, her voice low.

Rose rubbed at the bridge of her nose. She could not really agree. It was only because she had been talking to Kanaya for so long, and had learned all that she had about Troll culture that she could even fish this one explanation for Terezi's behaviour from the ocean of cultural impulses that probably struck her every action the way Rose's did to her own. She wasn't sure any other Human would have made the connection, though she hoped she was not alone in this. "You tried to tell Dave... what he was saying?"

"...I guess," Terezi admitted. "Just... there I was, right? He tells me about Jack, and I realize that everything I thought was safe about this place and my life is junk. And since we were just talking about Karkat, and Dave had just rejected me, I realize that everyone I care about is abandoning me. And the only person I've got left that I even trust is starts telling me that I'm not good enough to...

"But that's not what he meant," Rose said, without thinking. "Terezi, I know that friendship is this temporary, trial phase for you, but..."

"Oh, good, Rose is here to explain things! US3 L1TTL3 WORDS SO MY STUP1D 4L13N BR41N C4N UND3RST4ND OK4Y?"

"He wasn't trying to consign you to it!"

"Of course I know what he meant, Rose! And I say it's shit! I mean..." Terezi dropped back to the floor, across from Rose, wanting to get to eye level but far too angry to do so casually. She rubbed at her temple. "I mean: I get it. He thinks of me the same way he thinks of you, and John, and Jade, but Rose: that doesn't mean anything to me. That upset you?" Terezi gave her a chance to answer, but Rose was not going to take that bait. "...Because it shouldn't. Think about it. I think if you had to choose between one of your friends and your mate, I think we know who you would pick, and everything else is smokescreen. You want to fight about this? Because I say I'm the one being honest. Your friends don't care about you the way you'd need when things are... are worst."

As Terezi finished her threat, and got no reply, she almost seemed to deflate a little. She seemed very tired, and empty, like the last threat had been all she had left in her, and with Dave too far gone to hit with it, she had thrown it at Rose. What she said next was almost the same sentiment, but it was as though Terezi now felt the need to say it without bile as fuel.

"I mean... what if..." she said, and then cleared her throat, swallowed. "What if Kanaya decided she wanted to be kismeses tomorrow. What would you do? Would you have it in you to start treating her with pins and needles? ...I dunno. It's not even a very good comparison."

"I follow," Rose said. Since Terezi had calmed, Rose felt the opportunity to open up herself. "What I mean is that I get it to a point, I think. I get that you were upset, and that that was too much for you. I think that if I were in your shoes, I'd have blown up for for lesser reasons, even, before friendship even came into play."

"But you don't get how I feel," Terezi said.

Rose wanted to tell Terezi that she understood, but it was becoming rapidly clear that she did not. Once again, her mind strayed back through her conversations with Kanaya. "...Terezi, I don't know what to say about most of this," Rose admitted at last. "I don't even know what to offer." Terezi looked over, questioningly. Rose sighed. "If you don't feel you can do it, when you're calm, I could tell Dave that you two should be apart. If that helps."

Terezi curled up her legs tight to her chest, and set her glasses aside so that she could rest her head against her knees. "I think he gets that much," she said. Rose could not help but agree with that.

And then, with everything else calm, finally the Squiddles won out. It took Rose a moment to build up her courage, to express something she had previously found cliche, even vapid, but now did not truly want to leave unsaid. When Rose found her voice, it even started out in a squeak, and she had to clear her throat. "...Terezi, I know you're not going to believe this, but I have to say it. I think - adamantly, even though it's not a solution to your problems - that Dave really... does care about you. As much as Strider does anyone. And that that's what he was trying to say, and that I hope you'll talk this out together."

Terezi hid her eyes for a moment, behind her own legs, but her proper response was firm enough. "Rose, when we want someone to be in our lives?" she said, referring to the Trolls, "we ask them to stay. And I did." And Rose nodded.

They sat there together one last time, like before, but facing and proximate, both of them thinking about what the other had said. This time, Rose actually did feel like she was doing some good.

"...Rose?" Terezi asked after a time.

"Yes?"

"Do you think you ever... stop liking someone? I mean, do you think you ever look at them and say 'I guess his eyes aren't really that cute' or, 'You know, he doesn't make me laugh anymore.'"

Rose was not honestly sure what to say. "Maybe. Maybe if they change?"

"If they change..." Terezi said, like a sigh. "Don't you wish... don't you wish you could just go up the next night and say 'I'm sorry! It was all a mistake! I was pale for you all along!' Or... 'We can be friends. We can be best friends, the best f-fr...'" Terezi reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek, in the process replacing her glasses. "...Hmph."

"Are you going?" Rose asked, when it looked like Terezi was about to leave. "I have a..." Terezi stopped. "...Look. This is only sort of related, but you're the first person I can really ask." Rose was not sure where the question was coming from, but with Terezi leaving, Rose suddenly felt cold, as if she were being left alone with that invisible spot in the distance. "Do you think Dave and Aradia can hold Jack off?" Rose asked. She worried about her phrasing, that it might stray too close to implying that Terezi knew Dave better at a time when that might be hurtful, but Terezi did not seem to mind. Indeed, she chuckled.

"He's Dave fucking Strider," she said. "And Aradia... well, she might have not been very smart about how she hit Vriska, but at least she knows when somebody needs to be hit." Terezi was grinning, but ruefully, and when Rose looked up at her she looked up at a mouth full of shark-teeth, wide and terrifying, and up at sad eyes, still not hiding the truth for all the rest of her marvellous fa?de.

Rose looked away. "Are you sure you don`t want me to talk to him?"

Terezi's smile faded back behind her lips. She then reached into her sylladex and pulled out a piece of paper, which she looked at, sighed, and crumpled it into a ball. Then, she looked down at Rose, hefted the ball and bounced it gently off of Rose's face.

"Bonk," she said on impact, and turned to leave the roof behind.

Rose reached over and took up the wad of paper and unfolded it carefully, discovering a print out from a laser printer, with a pen signature indecipherable in the corner. She leaned in to read the contents. She wanted to laugh but really, the whole thing just caught in her throat.

"...okay, TURN the spoon first you shit..."

Rose returned to the Lab the way she had come, and made her way back to the central computer lab. She ignored everyone that talked to her, pressing on without a word. Rose had never really imagined what it would be like to break up with someone, but she was imagining now. She could only imagine Terezi's hurt if she saw Dave in the next few days, and could not imagine what nonsense Dave was likely to go through to bury the same emotions. There was not much left to bridge that gap now.

Terezi had wanted some support when things were at their worst. But for her, there was no one to do that if they did not fill a quadrant, and now Dave was out, and Karkat was on the exact rocks he had predicted. Worst of all, it seemed that Terezi was right. If Jack were to come tomorrow, Terezi would have no one. Rose knew that Dave would have her, John and Jade, and for all Rose knew, Aradia on some level. Where the Trolls needed their connections hard-forged, the Humans were happy loose, in a manner of speaking. Personally, Rose did not feel like her connections were that loose at all, but had not been willing to say so to Terezi. Rose wished she could change that without spitting on the Troll's culture, or her own. No one would win for that. But she could not think of a thing she could do. At least, there was nothing she could do for Terezi.

Maybe she had too much of Kanaya in her after all, but as the idea planted in her, and grew, Rose could not find it in her to sit still. Not while there was work she could do. Not if she could still, just maybe, try to forge one connection between the sixteen of them, to bring some joy. She was not going to stand aside if she could help someone else hold hand in hand together at the end of their world.

And so Rose went to talk to Tavros.

---

END OF ACT 1

---

I'm afraid there is an image of the symbol Ghost Rose draws in the dust in the AO3 version, but I can't possibly show in any fashion because of the limitations here at FFn. Sorry, folks.

Technically, the timetables/music boxes keep the Time players from "blind jumping." If they focused a little, or perhaps went God Tier if that were an option in this 'verse, they wouldn't need them. Since Dave can't guarantee he can time travel and not end up inside the slowly-spinning meteor (a good call, since the warped meteor was swallowing him even if he didn't realize it), the only thing Dave could have reliably done ws freeze himself. Aradia's powers are a little different, but thinking about it, the result's probably the same in this case.

"Vriska doesn't deserve hate," has always been meant as a death threat. I was going to leave it just as unexplained in this draft as it was in the original, but decided that if I was going to explore this chapter's topics in depth, even if it meant being blunt. I really, really, really hate spelling out the Weird Alien Shit, because I feel these things have a greater impact when you work them out on your own, but I also wanted to avoid the confusion that accompanied the original draft's early chapters, no matter how much that confusion may have come from the sloppier writing of the original chapters. One of the things I decided to do with this draft was to guide the reader explicitly until EOA3 (where we left off - or rather, somewhere in the middle of the chapter after we left off) to avoid the pitfalls of the original draft. Beyond that, we'll enter the weird and wild world of personal interpretation.

First drafters may remember a time when there were no act breaks in this fic, but I added them later on. Suffice to say, the latter half of the fic is built around act breaks and the former is not, but I figured I had to put them somewhere. I think this is still the best thematic break we're going to get for a while now, no matter how little I think four chapters (no matter how long) constitute an "Act."

One day I'm going to have to come back here and list the pages and pages of crap I had to mention or mostly couldn't mention, all for the most twisted of reasons. I stand by all of them, but that doesn't mean they didn't make editing this an absurd exercise in notation and alternate drafts.

Notes for First Drafters: I'm going to include a few notes from time to time that will include spoilers for people who haven't read the first draft. To keep from accidentally spoiling anyone, they will be put on my Tumblr (skaianr) behind a Read More cut, but I can't directly link them from this version because FFn is a pain like that. Today's topic is Ghost Rose and moreover, that symbol of hers.