Roxy Lalonde was very upset.

Her good looks had gotten her somewhere in the situation, though, and instead of being escorted off of the premises, the doctors were instead slightly floored and slack-jawed, and managed to calm her down. When Dirk arrived, he took over, hushing her awkwardly, cool-on-the-outside, into the waiting room, with bloodless Dave floating behind him like a silent phantom. The white waiting room that housed them was too cold, smelled too much of cleaning supplies and stark whiteness and the cheap perfume and cigarettes of the nurses, and Dirk could do nothing but placate Roxy, who was shaking and sobbing inconsolably, letting loose incomprehensible howls of Rose's name and swears as to how she was the worst mother to ever have lived.

Dirk dully replied, "You can tell her in person, don't worry," which really didn't help at all, but she did making a heaving noise against his polo as he held her, and he turned to Dave instead. Dave, amidst his hollow stupor, even noted that his brother was kind of incredible at not losing his shit when things got extreme.

"Little man," he said, monotone, yet capturing his attention fully. "Shit is going down that somebody didn't tell me something about. I will skin you and hang the flesh on the satellite dish on the roof if I find out from the wrong people. Your ass will be grass. Clear?"

Dave's head gave a down-jerk that meant to be a nod that meant to be "yeah", and he stared at an 80s watercolour of a still life (vase filled with roses) to keep the vomit in his esophagus and not the tiles.

"Does this have anything to do with you?"

He felt his hand involuntarily twitch hard like a maniac going for his gun, but he had no gun, he had torn jeans and some Goodwill shirt and the girl he was unspeakably insane over in a hospital tomb down the hall from him, but he replied, smooth as marble, "Dunno." Like it was true. Like he didn't know. Rose could be sick with anything, not necessarily rabies or tetanus that she hypothetically could have contracted from him during his fucking fabulous full moon rendezvous-

"Dave."

Have you ever heard your name spoken like it was Christ coming to talk about every single shitty sin you've ever never been caught doing? Because that is exactly what it sounded like to Dave, and he instantly ran a hand through his hair, but bit the inside of his cheek, and looked away, and muttered back through grit teeth, "I don't know."

That had been his last chance. The whole scene was ridiculous at this point. A young man from the casual hip scene, perhaps his 30s, embracing a jaw-droppingly beautiful woman who was in hysterics in his lap, a teenage boy looking like the typical high school heart-throb, completely sketching out in the chair beside them.

Eventually, Roxy calmed down into a vegetative heap on Dirk's lap, who idly kept a large hand on her back like a human security blanket, silent as the dead, and Dave leaned back in his chair with his ear buds in, letting rumbling music absorb as much of his attention as possible.

The doctors did not come in for many, many hours.

Rose slept in nothingness for a long time. But then, she dreamt of sylvan.

There were swirls of cold, night air mingling with the heat of her skin, and the trees of some immortal forest singing blackened crowsong medleys, the ghosting eyelashes of a faraway moon, round and bulbous like a pale and fat fig, sleeping in the hollow of the sky. At once, she felt an extreme disconnection from herself, even the word "her" feeling wrong, because she was not girl, or human, she was this. She was the pines and the mulch and fertile dirt beneath her, the sharp, heady scent of wintry night air, a big, moving presence among them. She was so not herself, so far away from being Rose, and instead of feeling like she was missing something, she felt like this was where she should have been all along.

She smelled blood, and her muscles rocketed with power and saliva surged in her mouth. She bulleted for it, effortless and almighty, a glorious god of the forest she was inside of. The amount of time that passed was so insignificant, and she halted naturally before the creature she was going to consume, ready to easily snap it between her jowls, and it was not a creature, but a small, black little thing, in a sweater, and he looked happy to see her, and Rose sat up in her bed and emptied her stomach with the word 'Jaspers'.

"ROSE!" The shrill and panic of the voice sent Rose's tremors into overdrive, and she looked around like a shaking reed, freezing and drenched in sweat. She saw her walls, saw her bay window wood wood green pine run air blood dirt biting earth, she covered her mouth with her hands and her vision sucked in her mother to her right, scrambling and looking like she hadn't slept in a year but beautiful as ever, looking for towels, and then she breathed in and smelled something more than just male, smelled, she smelled Dave. Her heart obliterated and faded and she felt more stomach acid pile against her back teeth and couldn't stop from coughing and sputtering it all over her sheets.

She blinked, and the clock would change a minute or two, and slowly the feral creature in her bones subsided, leaving her feeling as if her insides had been gutted and she was nothing but skin, bone, and grime. Her breathing regulated, and her heart slowed, and her mind quietly helped her walk out of bed and get in the shower. Her mouth let her say, "I'm fine, I can do it" to her mother, and her small hands took their time and rinsed her. Things blanked between moments, but it was okay. Rose only took a second to make eye contact with the twin in the mirror pane, stare vapidly, and then trudge back to her room like a dying moth.

She was greeted by the arms of her mother, and amidst her haze of nothing, she felt the most sweet and mighty feeling of warmth, and happiness, and with the softest sigh, she thoughtlessly melted into the hug. Her mind barely grasped the passage of time, but completely memorized the stroking of her mom's fingers in her tangly, damp hair, and her mouth pressing wet kisses to her forehead and temple, and how the pressure of the embrace made her shoulders smush.

And how she felt happy.

"Oh, my god, Rosie, my baby, I love you so much, I love you so damn much, you don't know how sc-scared I was...!" The words floated into her scalp and Rose felt her lips tug up at the corners. Her heart felt so full. So light.

Being coddled ended far too quickly, and Mom pulled herself away, wiping at her makeup-less face and sniffling to say, "I'm gonna throw your sheets in the washer, you just sit tight right there and don't do anything. I'll be right back. Dave, watch her. I'll be in the laundry room. Yell if you need anything. I'll be right back."

The name 'Dave' caused Rose to flinch internally, and her dreamy haze of maternal love took a nosedive as Mom left the room with her soiled bedding in arms. She looked up, and clarity began seeping back into her vision, her thought processes. Across her room, by the window, arms crossed like he was freezing, was her very own knight in shining tinfoil, and if she didn't know any better, she'd say he looked kind of horrified. Like he'd just seen a ghost. Of the teacher he masturbated to in middle school.

"Hi," she said sleepily, body trying to process feeling pleased and nettled at the same time. She was slowly remembering things. Dave crossed the room in a blink, and when she smelled it - him - a metaphysical load of titanium crushed her chest.

Totally sane again, Rose crumpled gracefully to the floor, and took a steadying breath. Dave was beside her in an instant. He still had the same, blank-yet-mollified expression. Maybe she was the only one who could read a blank expression so well. Maybe it was because it was Dave.

"How're you." The mumble was dry, like his throat was parched and starved for water, and Rose cracked a smile.

"Shitty. I am so... shitty. I feel like the last leaf to abandon the sycamore for winter. I feel dreadful. Empty." A defeated hand to the head, to cover her defeated eyes, her defeatist smile. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't remember much, only the petty bits and pieces. Odd things." Talking so much was absorbing her energy rapidly, so she quieted after this, even though she had so much to say.

"You look like someone dug up Marilyn's corpse, no shit," Dave's voice cracked at the end, and Rose was beginning to comprehend how completely shaken he was. The dread that followed, that shot down her spine like an epidural, was unsurprising.

"Tell me what happened." Her hand slowly moved to her cheek, and she hunched up in a lackadaisy heap, elbow on pale thigh. What was she even wearing? She couldn't remember getting dressed for a moment, but glanced, and saw some old t-shirt and pajama shorts. And it reminded her - the last time she saw Dave (how long ago had it been?) he was wearing a... Daft Punk shirt... and...

She squinted, and then asked with unintentional accusation, "You're wearing different clothes."

Dave snorted, the first sign of the tenseness leaving his body, and he replied, "Your sense of time is obviously not as impeccable as mine. I'll let you slide this time, but only because I've never seen anyone shit from their mouth like that in my life." Her laugh was faint and dry, but still genuine, hiding the embarrassment that he'd just seen her throw up like that. "It's been two days since..." His voice trailed awkwardly, like he didn't know what to say, but he tacked on, "Since you decided you wanted to play Munchausen's princess with the surgeon overlords of Rainbow Falls."

Two days. Okay. Rose bit her lip, and sucked, and chewed. An old habit she had thought she dropped.

"But now I'm home," she countered. "So what became of it?"

Dave shifted posture, so he was sitting cross-legged, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands palming the lower portion of his face. He looked at her for a long time, pensive and mulling, and for the first time Rose felt that little wall of lies and furtivity crumble around the edges and lose its foundation.

This had been no ordinary hospital visit.

Dave slowly lowered his hands, and dropped them to his lap, and drug his fingers against her carpet. And he said, "Really, I can't say I ever wanna see you hurl again. But you vomit like a star, Lalonde."

Rose rolled her eyes and said nothing, because he wasn't going to wiggle out of it. He understood.

"Yeah. So." His fingers drummed some trillion beat per second ditty on her floor to match his heart rate. "You're really sick."

"God bless you, Dave Strider."

"Fuck off. What's the last thing you remember, I guess that's somewhere to start."

Rose paused, and her gaze turned distant, and she clearly remembered the blistering sureness and rawness of the woods and running, but she knew that was a dream, so she skipped, and she remembered obnoxiously bright, sterile lights, and wondered why Dave was so adverse to talking about this but was far too curious to care, and the last clear film strip of memories was a pile of greeting cards and fluttering in her chest and Dave's crooked grin and the timbre of his laugh. So, Wal-Mart.

She spoke fluidly to counteract the swell of emotion that the memories brought, and replied, "We were in a pile of Hallmark at Wal-Mart, and you were laughing over one of my undoubtedly hilarious jests. I can vaguely recall the hospital room in brief moments. That's all." The mention of the nemorous dreamstate could come later, after she'd analyzed and journaled every aspect of them.

"You were out for like, a day, I guess," Dave mumbled after a few seconds. If he were being truthful, he'd tell her it was exactly twenty-seven hours and forty-three minute and twelve seconds, but not that he was counting. "And they ran probably every fucking blood test in the book, because we all know Cullen was just lurking in the back, waiting for a taste of that good ol' Lalonde aged sanguine champagne."

"What was I out from?" Rose quipped, impatient. She remembered her original theories, and the state of her wound, and...

Dave swallowed, carefully, and looked away, attempting non-chalantness as he said a tad too quickly, "They said your white blood cell count was above average or some shit and that there was no other sign of infection that read and your vitals were all stellar and you should be really healthy, and they want you to see a therapist."

She processed the words like she was sifting through molasses. And then she felt her expression sinking into a glare.

"Pardon? A therapist? And how was this conclusion reached?"

Dave felt like he was watching Hiroshima happen, the joyous nuke sailing through the sky, feeling like a bird, realizing as it pelted toward the earth that it was actually a WMD and was going to obliterate like a bajillion slanty-eyed families. And wreck the city. And cause mass havoc.

"They think you're self-harming or making it up." He tried to say it quickly. Rose's catty stare turned from baffled to feral.

"You're kidding me." Her jaw was clenched.

Dave drew his hands away from the carpet and pocketed them for safety before replying, "You're right. This is a huge ruse meant to gaslight you into the next century with the outer gods. Rose, for real, they found nothing."

Rose couldn't react. Her lips parted mutely, and she stared at Dave with complete disbelief. She waited for the "Wow, you fell for that shit?", or "Jesus Christ your face right now hahaha", but none came. Dave was the awkward Mercury, tapping his heels against the floor and itching to never be the bearer of bad news again.

Still emotionally clumsy from her mini-coma, Rose felt outrage pouring into her veins, but knew better not to shoot the messenger. Instead, she remained dumbfounded, and asked the unanswerable: "But how?"

He tched in response. Figured he'd throw her a bone; give her the little bit he could.

"The only guess I have," he tried to get the words out, but there was an unmistakable panic in his throat. It was strange to talk about it. He never talked about it. Dave tried to play off that he was thinking really hard and not trying to stop himself from having an anxiety attack. "Um, the only guess I have, is that maybe when you were in the woods, the cut got infected by some sort of thing that maybe you're allergic to but other people aren't. So, it's not like tests would pick it up. And we all know that doctors are just lawyers with hot assistants and drugs, so they wouldn't even take the fucking time to really make sure you were okay. Not that I blame them for sending you to a therapist, my spawn of Elvira."

Maybe he'd hoped that the jab at the end would lighten her up a bit, but there was no relaxation of her posture, nothing. Rose's dollish little body curled up like a shriveled flower, her petal hands cupping her face, her thorn knees pressed to her forehead.

"This is impossible," she whispered, because she knew, knew deep within her that there was something extremely wrong, something that she couldn't put her finger on. Her mind moved rapidly, oiling every gear, firing up every steam-powered piston in an effort to piece together what she had. She wasn't a medical professional by any means, but thought maybe, just maybe, she could think of something she'd missed...

Palms still covering her pale cheeks, she looked up to Dave, as if he could affirm her, and spoke, "The wolf. It could've been carrying any manner of disease apart from rabies or tetanus or what-have-you. God, I have to tell them, it could be like a lake amoeba or something else-"

At that moment, Dave Strider was thinking about the dog in his body, and how she was speaking about him so fearfully and with resentment, how he did this to her. His palms sweat, shook. His breathing came in muted, harsh gasps that he played off as humming, and wondered if he had to kill her, had to give in and make her prey and everything worse, and deep inside of the sable pit of his body was an exultance that made it all that much worse. And Rose almost, she could have, leaned over to press her hand to his face to ask if he was okay, because he looked like he was in a waking coma suddenly, and he could've bent over and snapped her thin, weakened neck and consumed her merrily, but none of this happened.

From Dave's back pocket, there was a quiet rumbling, accompanied by electronic music, Rose only recognized that was it Gorillaz, and Dave fumbled more than necessary to fish his phone out and answer the call.

"Yeah?"

He curled his knuckles up against his mouth, nursing them; Rose felt an uncomfortable twist in her stomach that told her to replace them with her lips and she swallowed it down.

"I know. I'm fine. ...Yeah, cool. No. Nah. ...Do you really. She is. ...I am not being recalcitrant, get off my ass. ...K. Later."

His whole body language and posture and shorthand form of speech screamed I'm-talking-to-Bro, and Rose drawled, "I wish you felicity in the future."

Dave shrugged. Said, "Asked if you were cool, said to tell you he hopes you feel better soon. He's gonna pick me up tomorrow."

There was that sinking feeling that made her a tad mortified, but it was quickly shoved away and offered the most saccharine smile she could. "Does he, now? My my. The gentleman genes must have missed you, it seems."

From the expression on Dave's face, a twisted combination of spite and ill-humour, Rose Lalonde learned that joking about Bro wasn't in Dave's repertoire, and the flimsy knife's edge of the situation dissipated into meek silence, calming breath, quiet allure. They readjusted and leaned back against the low frame and mattress of Rose's bed, looking off in different directions - Dave picked idly at the alabaster carpet fibers, and Rose gazed forlornly at the moon and star chart on the wall.

The conversation might've resurrected, but Mom came back with fresh linen and a tired, anxious expression, and together, she and Dave made the bed, leaving Rose to stare out the window at the trees instead.

Somewhere in her heart, the forest stared back.

Dave breathed in, plumping up a pillow, and a scent hit him that almost made his knees buckle. For the second time in the hour, his phone went off, and this time he dropped it before managing to answer.

"Hey."

Rose blinked out of her stupor, and turned. Dave spoke incredibly quickly and his voice slurred like iced alcohol; she barely comprehended what had happened when he suddenly hung up, his mannerisms boiling over and electric like he'd just run a marathon in a dream.

Mom didn't seem to notice. She only smiled, and all sing-song, went, "Dirk giving you hell? If he's ever too nasty to you, Davy, I can always take care of him."

"No," said Dave too quickly. He touched his hair, absently, and then added, "Sorry, but I'm gonna have to relinquish your hospitality. He's picking me up in a few minutes."

Rose felt a deep umber rise in her chest, and frowned. Everything was happening too quickly. Not willing to let him slip away without trying for answers, she asked politely, "You told me you were leaving tomorrow. What is so important that he would suddenly have you abandon your bedridden friend?"

"Dumb shit. I-"

"Dave! Language, please."

"Sorry ma'am. It's stupid, I'll tell you later, get on Pesterchum, okay? Sorry."

Rose moved to stand up, but felt immeasurably dizzy, and in a flashstep Dave was before her, blocking Mom's view of him smoothing down her hair in an uncharacteristic display of affection, his eyes staring fathomlessly into hers. His voice, appled and soft, was a whisper quiet enough only for her to hear: "You'll be okay, Lalonde. Tough it out for me."

Rose blinked, and he was sweeping out the door like James Dean in an old flicker.

Then he was gone.

"Geez, he sure was in a hurry. What'd you slip in his drink, Rosie?"

Rose looked at the door for a long time, almost able to feel him scampering down her stairs, sliding on the banister, slipping out the front door lithely and silently as a ghost.

"...I don't know."