The roof fell in, and all Aradia could be sure of was that Tavros had died at once. Equius had been adjusting his legs in hopes of detaching the magnetic clamp but it had not been enough, and though she knew from poor-earned experience that he would never once die easy, he had been too close to the edge of the rubble and no stretch of stone or steel in the lab normally struck so blue. Kanaya's leg was pinned, though the rest of them had gotten out from under the collapse, only for John to be brained by a shaft of rebar. Karkat shouted orders with no direction, Rose looked like she was going to vomit even more than when she had arrived through the transportalizer, and Nepeta would not stop crying, not even to breathe at times, such that she sounded less like someone wailing and more like the breath was being forced out by dim necessity. Each time she pulled away from Jade she made a deeper dent in the ground, in the concrete ankle-deep, and there were claw-marks on the desk. She did not have a target for her tears and no one to contain her, so she lashed out at random. She would have a target soon enough.

"Eridan, you're with Vriska and you're both point. Terezi, get down here and bring Strider with you! Feferi, you and... Harley, get her up I need a flank!" Karkat did not shift from his spot, a step from John, though his eyes wavered towards the hole in the ceiling that reached storeys above. "...'Rezi..." he said, unwilling to force out another shout.

Rose was watching Aradia, hands clutched about her stomach as she squatted useless on the floor, and Karkat met her eyes across the room, as the others scrambled about him, his scythe their standard raised above his head. There were no orders for her. Karkat would never surrender. His scythe was held high, not shaking, but his eyes were sunken and without hope, and Aradia could read that well enough. She raised an arm behind her, waited for a moment for Sollux to take a hint and back away, and then blew a hole in the wall, and headed off as fast as she could handle, back towards Time.

"Where's she going?" she heard Eridan shout behind her.

"Where do you think, shitscarf? Where's your damn gun?'

There was no sign of the demon via her new exit, and no sign was the best sign she could have hoped for considering the circumstances. Aradia headed off as fast as her body could bear back out into the game, away from her allies, into the safe embrace of fast-flowing Time.

Dave shadow boxed to wait up the time, because anything was better than jumping in short hops out of simple impatience as it only led to everyone being there late. Then again, maybe he just wanted to pretend to hit something. It was one of those days where hitting something would have really, really appealed to him. In fact, why not? It really struck him that hitting something really hard might just start to balance things out a little. There were plenty of rocks on this asteroid, and he could see plenty of other time-locked asteroids if he needed them. Barring that, he could just swing punches at nothing. That seemed best. Straight, hook, kick for good measure, maybe set things straight again in his head. Roundhouse, roundhouse, left, right-

Clang.

He looked at Aradia past his fist and her palm, and she looked back with her usual blank of emotions.

"...Ow." he greeted.

"Day twenty-two, hour nine," she replied.

"Yeah, me too," he said, shaking the pain out of his hand. "Did you see anything?"

"I was in the lab," she said. "Tavros: dead. Equius: dying. Kanaya has a wound in a major artery and is not receiving proper treatment due to an underestimate of the gravity of her wound. She is suffering in in-admirable silence and will be dead within the minute-"

"Past tense!" Dave snapped.

Aradia shrugged. "Considering we are now 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? John's condition is going to devolve into a coma but he'll be all right assuming proper medical care-"

"Oh yes, definitely assuming proper medical care, when he's the closest thing we have to a doctor."

Beyond a frown, Aradia ignored his tone. "Did you see anything?"

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

"And she...?"

Dave looked over his shoulder, towards the lab, but mostly to avoid looking her in the eyes. "What's the organ that looks kinda like a sock?"

Though they had lowered their hands, Dave's fist was still more or less in contact with Aradia's palm, and he felt her fingers close around his hand, warm through some ungodly heating system Equius had installed for some reason Dave did not really want to think about. "You're allowed to... be sad, you know," she said in one of her off-tones, not quite the comfort of a living Troll but not a lecture either. It was some tone uniquely her own, forced through vocalizer and ghost together and struggled loose from under the clawed feet of the horrorterrors over the course of the game. Dave turned back to her.

"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 don't need a freaking hug and cry about it, though. Would you?"

Aradia's fingers flexed about his fist and he reached up and brushed his thumb to grasp along her finger, but she should not have and did not expect any more from Dave Strider. He pulled away and faced the lab in the distance, stepping atop a high point on the asteroid and set the small thing, no bigger than a large room, spinning slowly on its axle from his momentum. "Let's figure out what happened, shall we?"

His turntables were summoned, and he waited until Aradia stepped beside him and brought out her own. Soon they were fast-forwarding time, each in their own bubble, until the telltale blast shot past. Dave almost missed his stop, but after some fiddling seemed to have gotten the right second again, and set himself just before. He found Aradia waiting for him.

"Day twenty-two, hour nine," she repeated as he arrived. He wobbled, trying to find his feet on an asteroid that, in the hours that had passed since they had gathered for their initial conference, was spinning comparably faster.

"Still me, Aradia," he said, giving it a counter kick.

"Of course it's still you. the purp0se 0f the time stamps is t0 inform the other of when you came from as 0pp0sed t0 the what gene-"

"Yeah," Dave said, reaching over with the table still hovering under his hand to pat her on the arm. "I know what the time stamps are for."

She made a buzzing sound that was the best her vocalizer could approximate for an annoyed grunt. She then turned and pointed off the horizon. "There we are," she said. Dave squinted, setting on the magnify feature of his shades, and saw himself and Aradia dodging and parrying in a fight against what appeared to be nothing but space. Noir had developed the nasty ability to consign himself to an individual's time, which would ensure that he fought opponents alone. Luckily, the Heores of Time had worked out a way to keep in sync with him, though it raised all sorts of ugly questions for the future.

"That's an early one," he concluded.

"Day two, hour sixteen," Aradia replied. "Yet, one of our first battles with no - ribbit - need to go back and correct ourselves." Having to go back and throttle Jack more than once in one day was just a pain, but going back to keep Jack discovering and savaging the lab was more serious business.

"Well that's about to change, the question is just when..." Almost as though trying to answer his question, the invisible Jack answered it for him. Past-Aradia broke away in what, from this angle, was clearly the direction of the lab. Beams of green power lanced to follow her, and at once the both observers understood.

"He... he missed?" Dave said, not believing his eyes. "Is that possible? He missed and... four people died?" There was no need for Aradia to reply, for it happened right in front of their eyes. A blast went wide and forever out into space, beyond the chrono-line, beyond the sight of anyone in the battle that - from Dave and Aradia's perspective alone - had occurred six days prior, and the lab ruptured below. A moment later, a wall burst, and out came a tiny dot of past-Aradia and Dave not far behind.

"Can we fix that?" Dave asked as the wall fell further down.

"There... will be a paradox," Aradia said after some analysis.

"How many of those can we take?" Dave asked, knowing the question was hypothetical. Aradia just shook her head.

But even though the lab had been destroyed, the battle did not cease. Past-Aradia, as they had arranged at the time, turned on a point, and reached out towards the next shot, catching it square on her palm and sent it to each side with a burst of energy she had prepared for exactly such a purpose. That was the signal, and as he saw her block instead of dodge, past-Dave struck the demon square across the neck, and it broke off his assault. Satisfied, the two warriors of time vanished into the safety of the past, but behind the former site of past-Aradia, the energy went wild in a spinning conflux. To the horror of the observers, a thread of it shredded through the lab a second time.

"...two paradoxes," Dave muttered. "Poor time stream."

"I will deal with the blasts," Aradia said, "you deal any repercussions my interference causes with the demon, and I'll join you-"

And then the woman's scream hit them, having covered the whole stretch of space between to reach them. As Dave and Aradia scanned the sky for the source, they realized at once that while their past selves had disappeared, for the first time they could recall, Jack had only physically fallen back, not retreated entirely. He advanced on the lab.

"Damn it, no!" Dave shouted toward the lab. He knew that scream.

"I..." Aradia blinked repeatedly, the colour of her eyes flicking from system to system as she analyzed something from her archives. "I hadn't realized..."

"It's all right," Dave said.

She shook her head. Her eyes flicked back and forth so fast it seemed as though they were simply flashing. "It is not, this is the exact 0pp0site of all right..." At last, they stopped back on red, and she shook her head. "They were all over her. They were all over her and I didn't even think..."

Another scream and with a wrench the ruins of the lab lifted into the air and sundered into a thousand heavy boulders as a wave of dark purple light flashed out from out of them and spread in every direction like an uneven sphere of power. The sphere crawled toward them, and the demon crawled towards it, where Rose waited for him.

"Why do all her spells sound like screaming these days?" Dave muttered, not really expecting an answer.

"She is screaming," Aradia said.

Dave shook his head at once. "I've seen her in person when it started to happen," he explained. She just gets a stubborn look on her face, she's definitely not screaming."

"No," said Aradia. "Not present-her."

And at one end of the bubble, purple light struck green and a sickly glow spread abound as power scorched against power. Boulders flew, spells lashed, until the empty universe was filled with the screaming of a grown woman locked in forever-torment as the bubble seeped closer to the edge of the universe. And when it touched, the whole of the Incipisphere heard the biological tear as the universe rent into the void of horrors and split wide like an eyelid, and the eyes looked in. A million eyes, peering in at every angle, the million eyes of a single god, for only one god of many minds had any interest in the affairs of the little things within. They watched as Jack engaged with their servant below.

Both Dave and Aradia turned away at once. "Don't even look at the edges of your glasses," Aradia cautioned. "even an inch of the reflexi0n..."

"Yeah, not interested in the gibbering insanity game."

"We should go," she cautioned.

"No!" Dave said, surprised by his own urgency. "You go. Look, I understand the crazy eye-stare, but... can you imagine how fast that thing can move? If it wants to grab Rose, pull her out with it, even the death of the timeline won't stop it!" Aradia turned toward him, trying to gauge on his face if he meant exactly what she thought he meant. After a moment of her probing response, he kept his straight face. "Go ahead," he said. "I'll catch up."

"Strider..." she said, at what for her accounted for a whisper. "I'm not going to cover you all day against a demon and just walk away when you've got a different kind of trouble."

Dave did not really know what to say in response to that. His mouth just hung open for a moment. As he weighed searching for words and shrugging off coolly, the purple wave of power reached them at last and crawled over them. It pulled him and Aradia into a world of dark imaginings painted over the real. A drop of burning cold slipped down Dave's neck and spine, as a hissing swirl of whispers filled his ears interrupted only by the screams of the magical fight. He could not imagine what Aradia was going through, but did not for one second think that the horrorterror looking in would have excluded her. He was right.

"Look at the both of you. You look like you're about to drop. Nothing about this says you can't at least sit down, you know."

"Hey..." Dave said, trying with all his might not to even glance in his friend's direction for fear of the reflection of the elder god. "Do you... see an alcoholic on a barcalounger?"

"Is a barcalounger a type of chair?"

"...Yes, then," Dave said, wondering exactly why Rose's mother had just appeared in front of him, in expensive-looking furniture, surrounded by eyes on stalks that had sprouted from the asteroid like reeds.

"I'm serious, you know," said Mrs. Lalonde, swirling a martini in one hand. Her voice was distorted, just enough to be wrong, but even then sounded nothing like he had imagined. "You're both about to be off patching up all the damage to this poor universe, the last thing you really need is stress."

Dave shrugged. "Lady, I'm pressed for time, what do you want?" Dave asked.

"Can't a woman be good natured?"

There was a scratching sound, just to the chair's right, which Dave managed to catch despite the sounds emanating from the horrors that he was blocking out for dear sanity. He looked and saw the tip of a sword that reached into the terror bubble, cut off in its middle and drawing a pattern in the ground. The sword continued its pattern, passing beyond the bubble where it vanished and was unable to touch the dirt, but those very borders followed it and soon it reappeared, in the hand of his brother.

"And as soon as you all finish your patch job," the woman continued, "you'll have to plop down to rest right in the middle of the day at that lab, and goodness knows you'll be back at it only a few hours after noon. The demon is completely relentless."

"Yeah, yeah," said Bro, and Dave was taken immediately aback. Bro sounded nothing like he should, not in the slightest. He tossed his sword to the other hand. "We get it," he said to the woman. "You're 'Sloth.' And it's not working on these workaholics." He snapped up the martini, which tore away from Rose's mother as though her hand were made of smoke, and both she and the bacalounger faded away into the snarling hellscape about them. More things were starting to grow on the asteroid, natural things that looked like they had been born with the pall of death already crisscrossing their every part.

"Oh, I get it," Dave said. "You're part of that hundred-storey octopus back there, aren't you?" Dave pointed over his shoulder, toward the rift and elder god beyond. "And do you realize you sound nothing like my bro?"

"Oh, I'm just me, same as her. Many minds, but the same mind in the end. We're just all trying things from different angles is all, using whatever Rose gives us to work with. She's cute, Dave."

"Sure, Rose is okay, but if you're trying to set up some sort of mind game-"

"Her, Dave." The demon Bro tilted his head towards Aradia and took another step closer to Dave, who responded not by drawing a weapon but by setting his hands again on the timetables. The demon stopped. "'Course, it's too bad that she's a robot. Equius did do his best but you've got to admit there's a little something lacking for the imagination... or the hands... in the middle of the night."

Dave just laughed at him. "Man, my bro could really teach you a thing or two about messing with heads. What kind of god are you?"

And the fake bro laughed right along with him. "That's some ego you have there. A teenaged girl's inner Lust walks up to you and you think he's there to tempt... you."

Dave glanced worriedly towards Aradia but before he could even take her in he had been cuffed by the side of her hand. "He's trying to get you to look at the reflection!" Aradia hissed at him. Dave caught his breath and, in the shade of her hand, looked up at her face and saw no sign that the demon was getting to her at all. The avatar of the elder god clucked his tongue down at Dave.

But then there was a new screaming, one that seemed to come straight out of the fake Bro. It clashed with the woman's scream coming from Rose, but was the scream of a girl, shouting out in pain alone as Jack pressed his advantage.

"Ooh, tick tock, tick tock." The fake Bro shook his head. "I'd give her about twenty seconds, wouldn't you, Maid of Time?"

Dave decided not to even entertain that thought. "You're leaving your avatar here pretty far from the void," he said, taking back to his feet from the crouch he had taken after Aradia's blow. Her hand stayed in place next to his temple. "How would you feel if we shut this timeline and see how you deal with a split mind?"

The avatar shook his head. "It's true, you could try to destroy part of my mind by ending this timeline. But you'd both have to leave at the exact... same... moment. Or I'll catch the other. Your solidarity's not actually helping you very much." The younger scream pierced out of the Bro-demon. Rose's scream. Rose, howling in a way Dave had not heard before, though he had been forced to hear her die a hundred times. The demon lowered its shades to look at him over the tops, and Dave saw that his eyes sizzled, literal coals in their sockets. "You should really see this one. I think I can manage that."

"N-not cool man." Dave did not need a visual. It was already running through his head. He had seen too many horrible deaths not to imagine them if the situation called for it, and Rose's voice, like all of his best friends', had been burned into his mind. There was no mistaking her suffering. What love could provide to hear unspoken troubles in a friend's wavering voice wrought nightmares out of true suffering.

There was everything he could do, an infinity of opportunities, and it was becoming harder and harder to remember that they were all dead ends. No way to face Jack Noir single-handed. No way to face the Horrors. The only thing keeping the entire tableau in place was the immortal's worry that they might end the timeline. If he moved, Rose would be plucked out to become the woman screaming in her spells, to suffer forever out of space and time. But Aradia, with her hand on her music boxes and the other blocking Dave's vision, pinched his ear gently between her littlest fingers, and he kept his hand firm.

Then, from the avatar, the screams ceased with a snap that cut through him, deadening. Jack had won, Rose was dead, and the timeline could die with her. Rose, and all of his friends, in the main timeline would be safe. It cut the flow of emotion in its tracks, and he looked up at his Bro, who simply smirked as the bubble of purple receded into nothing, and said: "You lose."

And the avatar looked out from beyond the patches that had formed in it as the bubble fell away. "Did we?"

They stood alone for a moment, as the world around them began to fall into a pall of hideous green emanating from Jack Noir. "Come on," Aradia said. "She's not with them. You did it." He nodded, and together, she guiding his hand, they rewound time until they were once again safe on the tiny rock, alone, with the lab standing far beyond them intact and silent. As far as the rest of the universe was concerned, nothing else had ever happened.

Dave's head fell forward as she let him go. "...Aradia, about... what he said."

"I'm not worried about it," she said. "i sp0ke with the h0rr0rterrors when i was a living teenager as well i kn0w what they can say" She held out a hand to him, which he took. "And I know that if you had any feelings for me you would be more direct with me than some have been in the past, as I would be for you."

In spite of himself, Dave laughed. "I was going to say thank you, first."

"Oh," said the robot, touching a hand to her face. "Then... I suppose he did get under my skin." Dave smiled, trying to look as charming as he could, perhaps to compensate for moments before in another timeline, and she flicked his hand away. "Let's go. We have work to do. After that, Terezi will wipe that smile off your face for me."

"Ooh... right," Dave said.

"What is it? Is something the matter with Terezi?"

"It's nothing. Nothing that stands up to anything that just happened."

And they set their hands on their timetables and disappeared, to set things right again.

Rose reappeared in the central lab shaken and nauseous. The Trolls around her did not notice her arrival. They were spread out as it needed, most of them still at their film, including Nepeta who perched her front arms on the back of the couch, but Tavros and Eridan and to Rose's additional dismay, Vriska were hunched intensely over their monitors. Aradia worked silently in her own corner of the room, and there was no sign of Dave and Terezi. Equius stepped through the transportalizer just behind Rose, and immediately set to work on Tavros, muttering as he went, as Tavros tried to continue his conversation on the side. It was a sorry display, an ordinary day.

"How's the movie?" Rose asked Jade after a few minutes of deciding what to do. She kept an eye on Tavros as he was repaired, but Tavros was too busy monitoring his computer like his life depended on it to really talk.

"They're pretty good!" she said, passing Rose the popcorn. "I mean, I don't really get them all the time, but I get that she's trying to save him from exposing himself to the empress so that he'll be culled. I mean, I don't get why but that's still what's going on."

"If this is anything like the ones on earth?" Rose said, "There might not be an actual reason."

She looked around the couch. Feferi watched with continued interest, Karkat with big, puffy eyes. Nepeta, who had never seen it, chewed on her hat enough that if she was scared she might very well bite through the thing. She stopped only to yank Feferi back down to her seat when she tried to leave during a "good part", though Rose suspected she had been stopping her from yet again going up to visit Aradia, judging by the smile she flashed at Karkat, unrewarded. Kanaya watched the film with only half her attention, still distant, and John last of all sat with the biggest grin on his face Rose had seen since the day he had slipped Karkat a joy buzzer.

"Hah! Oh my god Tavros, could you be more adorable?"

Rose shuddered. Vriska, and she could not have been more cutting in how she said it. She turned slowly back towards the room, and saw Tavros turning his monitor away from a curious Equius. Eridan snarled at her from across the room. "Vris, don't make me come over there."

"I'd love that, Eridan."

Eridan's eyes went wide. "Would you? ...Really?"

Kanaya and Sollux, who had otherwise been able to ignore the whole affair, slowly looked up and stared with incredulity. Rose was aghast, and it was only worse how he did not seem to realize how he sounded. She set her head in her hands and hoped that maybe that would hide her from the world.

But then the roof shook above them. They all jumped in their spots and looked straight up, no one with more urgency than Aradia. They waited, wondering exactly what it was they had heard when suddenly the muffled sound of voices picked up on the floors above them. It continued until the point that everyone was listening, even Gamzee, who had otherwise slept through even the shaking. The kept listening until for a moment, it appeared directly below them, in the transport hub, and then last of all when it picked up at full volume right in the middle of the lab.

"You are shit! I don't believe you, you little piece of... argh! This isn't over. You just wish this was over. 1 W1LL M4K3 YOU HURT FOR TH1S"

Rose had seen many terrible things in the games, horrifying things, but nothing had struck her as dangerous as Terezi did at that moment, as she corralled Dave against a desk with her one finger. She was covered in dirt and dried paint, but she emanated pure Troll rage in every muscle, and though her hands were bare Rose would not have said much for Dave's chances if she decided to attack him bare handed. A teal streak cut through the grime on one side of her face.

"YOU DONT H4V3 TO... damn it. You don't have to even put up with me! But once you've fucked with my feelings, it's over, Strider! And it is over!"

Rose took a check of the room and was appalled to see first Vriska, who looked like Chrismas had just dropped into her lap, and then Karkat, whose face had gone from weeping over the plight of his fictional stars to ecstatic joy. Dave, on the other hand, had said nothing in his defence but to raise his hands up between he and Terezi.

Terezi glared at him for quite a while, before it seemed that she felt she had said all she had said, and simply whispered "FUCK YOU" before turning about and leaving via the transportalizer. The room was left in silence, a sepulchral pall that hung over all of them. Dave looked about the room, and cast a meaningful look towards Aradia before settling on the couch area. He met Rose's eyes in particular for a particular look she could not make out with his shades in the way. It was Vriska who took it upon herself to break the silence.

"Oh my god Strider! What did you do?"

Dave picked himself up and dusted himself off, as though trying to regain his cool. "Not much," he said, "I just took a friend's advice to have a talk with Terezi."

Rose's heart sank and she fell back against the couch with a thump. Vriska, it would seem, thought this was the funniest thing she had ever heard, and began to break out in a fit of Terezian laughter.

"Hah hah hah," Dave said, bland as could be. "And I'm out."

"Dave, wait!" Jade shouted.

"Yeah, bro!" John said, scrambling to take to his feet. Dave ignored both of them, but they followed him through the portal. The room was again silent, except for Vriska, and the low sound of Gamzee's horns as he settled back in for his late-morning nap. Rose turned her astonished face up to Kanaya, but her interest was immediately drawn past, towards Karkat, who had laid back down and restarted the movie. She took angrily to her feet, and Kanaya slapped Karkat across the shoulder.

"What?" he said. "What's with those looks?"

"Aren't you going to...?" Kanaya suggested.

"What? ...Terezi?" He looked back and forth between them. "You guys are nuts. Look, look at this this way. You want me to go up there and go 'There, there you big blubbering idiot,' but guess what? Terezi is not my matesprit. No no! I know exactly what you're going to say. But the fact is, she and I have been on the rocks for weeks now. Big, sharp pointy rocks!"

He held up a hand flat against the other's fingers to indicate. "Now, if I go up there right now after she's been having a fight, she is going to press me down on one of those rocks," he did so with his hand, 'impaling' it on the fingers, "until I'm feeding Nepeta's rats in a trough! Now, the alternative is for me to sit down here, basking in the idea that Terezi and Strider hate each other! In the first scenario, I get screwed over, while in the second scenario, my life is stu-pendous! This is the best news I've had since you punks showed up! You actually want me to go up and step in it?"

"...I'll go," Rose said, and she sighed. "This is my fault too. I shouldn't have said anything to Dave, I..." She looked up and saw the transportalizer glaring at her in the distance. "I'm just going to take the stairs, is all." She stared at the teleporter, wondering exactly what it was that was bothering her. She reached out a hand and brushed Kanaya's shoulder "I'll see you tonight," she said.

It took forever to actually walk anywhere in the lab. It was not built for that sort of access, except for maintenance, and the maintenance hallways had not been well maintained in their own right. In time, Rose found her way into Terezi's sector and began the long climb of the stairs. As she went, she followed the half-finished mural Terezi and Dave had been drawing, which equal parts impressed and detracted her. As she went, she eventually came upon the end of the mural and the sound of the crack both. Embedded knee deep in the floor, along a massive gash in the floor, was Terezi's 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?

Terezi sat perched on the opposite edge of the lab's roof, one hand limp in her lap and the other held clutched to her face, grasping over mouth and eyes, though her fingers were pried apart enough to reveal a shadow-cast socket and the faintest outline of a scorched eye beneath. Terezi lifted her hand and took a sniff of the air as she heard Rose approach. Her face screwed tight with anger at first, but it was lost in a breath, when an uncontrolled look of misery passed over her face, and all she ultimately did to communicate with Rose was to look in the opposite direction. Warily, Rose stepped forward and sat down beside her, legs overhanging the rock below. Above them the sky struck black in all directions.

After a time, Terezi must have realized there was nothing she could do, and she let her hand fall down to touch the other tip of her shades in her hands, fiddling with the arms and shaking her head. Those simple gestures, eyes shut, only came in extended moments of calm, but most of the time she was bracing. She would clutch her glasses towards her lap and flinch, trying to gently suffocate her own cries and block her tears. They sat there as the minutes passed by, night immeasurable, as Rose made no move further away or closer, save to set her hand beside her on Terezi's side, and Terezi made no attempt to shoo her away.

And then a pale tear slipped past, and in surprise, Terezi's lips parted and she took in a gasping cry, and shook from head to toe, shades clutched so close Rose thought she might break them. Her arm came up to cover her mouth and she pushed it all down again, as the tear fell down her cheek and out of sight. Once she had buried it deep, she spoke at last.

"So what did that bastard say as soon as my back was turned?"

Her voice was incredibly rasp. The young Trolls had always struck Rose as a little deep-throated, even the females, but crying had turned Terezi's piercing voice to a rumble that would have done her well in a future in court.

"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?"

Terezi laughed, not her usual cackle if only because it had cut into barks of laugh and cry intermingled, and she soon called it off. "You really know how to cut to the heart of it, don't you? Maybe if you knew not to say it after you might just be a pathetic auspistice instead of..." But whatever she had been trying to do was swept up in a sudden cry that she tried at once to disguise as another broken laugh, and turned away, and soon enough, had began to cry in earnest.

Rose reached over, to put an arm around Terezi, who without her normal personality suddenly seemed very small indeed. Terezi swiped away her arm at once and with no break in her voice snapped: "Don't touch me!" Terezi gave Rose a look that asked just where Rose had gotten the impression that hugs were even on the table. "Dammit, don't you know you look like him?" Terezi had opened her eyes to shoot her the glare, and it took all Rose's reserves to keep from backing away at the sight of them. Like two open wounds on her face, tinted in a faint teal of her tears, shooting a look of anger at her, it threw Rose completely off whatever silly plan that might have occurred to her before she sat down.

Terezi closed her eyes and scooted a step away, taking ahold of her own arm, just a normal girl again. No, Rose thought. Don't start that, Rose. Don't say 'normal.' You know better. Her cheeks were tinted green-blue, teeth that bit her lip could tear the flesh of Rose's arm, and she was still a teenager, wasn't she? But it was hard.

"You shouldn't," Terezi said.

"Shouldn't... what?"

"Vriska," Terezi said, spitting. "I know he's asked you. Don't. Take it back if you have to. You have no idea what you're dealing with."

Terezi shook, this time with rage. Rose was astonished to see it. Thanks to the tears, she had seen Terezi go on longer than she had ever remembered her going without her tone: that manipulative, charismatic sneer she loved to use when things were going just her way. But this anger, callous and unprepared, was the opposite of that tone.

"'We should be partners,'" she recited, "'Oh man, you're the best moirail ever, did you know that?' FUCK YOU, YOU..." And suddenly Rose was able to place her tone: Karkat's. Terezi seemed to probe her memory for something Karkat would say to Vriska, but came up blank. "Murdering innocents on my watch. Pushing Tavros off a cliff on a blackcrush impulse, and then just when I'm trying to pull everything together, Aradia... Aradia..." She shook her head, again and again. "Tell Kan she's an idiot! Picking up Vriska right after that just because she felt a little flushed one afternoon and didn't know how to say. Fucking idiot." Terezi looked up again, straight in Roses's eyes, arms clutched around her chest in a protective hug. "Don't help her, Lalonde. It's been perigrees and it's still just right there. I thought it was gone but now it's just... Everyone and their consorts has a reason to hate Vriska. But she doesn't deserve someone to hate."

Terezi returned to looking out over the edge when all of a sudden, she laughed again. "I don't even hate him!" she shouted. "Just my luck. That shit comes up here and says 'Wait, aren't we just friends?' under fifteen levels of sarcasm and irony. 'I never thought you meant it, I thought you were just playing.' 'No, Terezi, I can't just...'" That break was hers, the quote just fell apart. "'Of course I love you, I just... I don't love you like that.' Well what the fuck did you mean, you big dope? Just my luck." And she sat still again, curling her legs up to her chest.

"So..." Rose said, not sure if she could truly approach even in words. She shifted the blame as far away from Terezi as she could. "Dave got his signals crossed pretty badly."

"Thought I had something there," Terezi muttered, so into her own lap that Rose was not sure if it was meant as a response. "I thought I had something back home. Law strong as a rock. And I had Karkat, and... Nepeta and..." She shook her head. "But now I don't have Karkat. And that was okay. And Nepeta doesn't want this kind of heavy stuff, and that's fine too. But now there's no coolkid. And the only law left is him." Terezi pointed up in the direction of lost Skaia.

"I'd hardly call Jack 'the law'," Rose said.

"What's closer to the law than who lives and dies?" Terezi mused, almost neutral. "And the rest of us? When everything else is cut, we just have to deal with it." A sniffle, but then a revelation: "...Do you know why I came up here?" she asked. "It's because when I was little, and I was sad, I used to go up into my hive, and I would talk to my lusus. And even though she's been gone, I just had to come up." She looked out over the horizon and shook her head, seemingly at the wrongness of it all. "I used... to read her stories, once she had taught me how to read. I used to have this one..." Terezi held up her hands casually to indicate a book, about the exaggerated length and height of a children's picture book on Earth. "It was about this Troll, who lived way back before we had interstellar ships.

"One day, the Troll's kismesis dies fighting in the wars. And even as he just gets this news, his auspistice comes in and tells him that he's leaving, because he has no more reason to stay. And the guy is so upset that his hobby, these, uh, woodcarvings that show up all over the book, just start to fall behind. And his matesprit says 'You used to be full of so many ideas and...' and... 'we used to make so many beautiful things together, but now you just sit and do nothing.' And after a few days, she leaves. And he goes looking for a new matesprit, and a new kismesis but no one wants him because he's so sad, and in the end the drones come."

Terezi still looked breathless from her crying but her narration continued with a certain sense of grand theatrics despite her limited audience. She even had, or had recovered in the drama, a special voice for the next character: "And his moirail comes to him and says: 'I have to go. You've made a fool of yourself and I won't have any part of this.' And so he's all alone, as the drones go from door to door. There's no one for him in the whole world except his carvings, so he looks through them and remembers all the days when he was strong and happy. And finally, he sees... he sees the drones through his window, coming over from the next house, and..."

She blinked out at the sky. "And he goes out to meet them with a smile on his face."

The ending took Rose by surprise. She had previously been picturing something akin to one of her own children's books, the kind these sort of deep stories had, always with the lovingly painted set of pictures, but the moral struck her too hard to belong to that set. But as Terezi paused in a certain sense of relish, it sank in for Rose that, for a Troll, that was almost certainly what the sort of book it was, an important life lesson bundled tight with detailed pictures to draw the eye and simple words to guide the reader.

"And I never understood, when I was little, why someone like that that would fall aside so easily. Why he'd get so depressed because of their kismesis. Why he'd let his life fall apart when he was so strong in the end. He died like a Troll. And now..." She looked up again, towards Skaia, and the doom unseen, and began to cry anew. "And now I don't know how he did it alone!"

Rose started. "Terezi, we're not-"

"Yeah, I know," Terezi said. "We've all seen you running around, testing the w-waters, like you've still got time to live it from start to finish." She sniffed and wiped her nose. "Call me a pessimist. I just wanted someone to be there with me. Doesn't everyone want someone's hand to hold at the end of the world? But I guess that's past. Your friend and I just don't see eye to nose, I guess. And Karkat... well I think the only one that doesn't realize he's a lost cause is him. And without V-Vriska... I'm all alone."

"But... Terezi," Rose said, touching the other girl's arm. Terezi looked up at her, red eyes leering out from under heavy lids. "I... it's not just optimism. Not on its own. I can't say anything about where you'll be in your life when Jack Noir comes for us, but haven't you seen? Didn't he tell you anything either?"

"Tell me what?"

"Aradia and... and Dave. They've been going out, day in and out, to buy us more hours, days... Terezi, didn't you ever wonder what we were doing sitting here week after week?" Rose stretched out her hand toward the voice. "Did you think he was admiring the scenery? They're not just going to let us go if we're going to die. Not like that. We might still get out of here. There might still be a chance, a good chance, to..."

Whispering voices calling at the back of her memory, the voice the elder gods made sound like Jade's grandfather in her mind, but Rose snuffed them. She would not listen to that tempter again, not when there were other ways to seize what he promised. "...to live."

Terezi was taken utterly aback, and she froze, stock-still, until she turned to look back to the sky, and out. Her eyes stared dark as the sky she could see through other means, and her arms slid back, lying part-way to the ground, as if she wanted to see the whole sky, and nothing came to meet her gaze. She shook her head, eyes closing as she took full to her back and lay in the dust and rubble. Reaching up, she brushed her hair out of her face as her an indiscernible look crossed her lips.

"...Rose?" she asked.

"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 any more.'"

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

"If they change..." Terezi said, like a sigh. "Don't you wish... you could just go up the next day and say 'I'm sorry! It was all a mistake! I was pale for you all along! We'll be the best moirails, the b-best...'" Terezi reached up and wiped a tear from her cheek, in the process replacing her shades.

Rose shook her head. "'But I hope we can still be friends.'"

"Is that what you humans say?" Terezi asked. She had sat up, and was slowly taking to her feet.

"It's what we shouldn't," Rose admitted.

"Heh," Terezi said. She was grinning, but ruefully, and Rose looked up at a wary mouth full of shark-teeth wide and terrifying. Rose felt her stomach sink as she looked up at Terezi and her sad eyes still not hiding the truth for all her marvellous faade.

"Do you..." Rose said, eyes lowering as she did. "Do you think you might take a chance to talk to him?"

Terezi's smile faded back behind her lips. She 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 ground the way she had came, and made her way back to the 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 would go to bury the same because she knew that when Dave said he was your friend, he meant it so adamantly that it could never have been a lie. There was nothing to bridge that gap now.

Terezi had wanted some support when things were at their worst. But there was no one to do that if they did not fill a quadrant, and now Dave was out, and Karkat was one the exact rocks he had predicted. Had it had to come to this? Had it had to have even begun? If Terezi had been a human, wouldn't she and Dave have had a chance to be friends? If Dave had been a Troll, would they have hit a heart or a diamond running? All the time they had been together, they had been at simple odds with one another, assuming a default they had not shared. When Jack came, Dave would have her, John and Jade, and for all Rose knew, Aradia on some level. Terezi, as it stood, would have no one. Rose wished she could change that without spitting on the Troll's culture, or her own. No one would win for that.

But maybe she had too much of Kanaya in her after all, because Rose could not find it in her to sit still. Not while there was still work she could do. Not if she could still, just maybe, build some bridge, bring some joy. Not if she could be the one to help someone else hold hand in hand together at the end of the world.

"Tavros," she said to him, just above a whisper. "Are you maybe still interested in having a little talk about Eridan?"