Folks, it's doing it again. If you see any missing quotes or apostrophes or ellipses or dashes, please tell me. It's this slapdash site, vomiting all over the idea of common, nonstandard characters like curly quotes when you use HTML format (the fastest way to port from AO3). I'm doing the best I can but I'd appreciate any help you can give me! Please, just drop a PM, I'll always appreciate.
Following her rash promise to Vriska weeks prior, Rose had come to swallow her pride and beg Karkat for a sample of his film collection. Not just the ashen films but all of them: especially those with multiple quadrants, though Rose saved those for later in hopes that the simpler ones would help cast a light. While this did help to a degree, she was also punished for it, as films that weren't focused on romances tended to gloss them, assuming that the audience could fill in the blanks on their own. She defaulted to watching the films in order of intended audience, starting with the "grub films." Rose had asked Karkat to leave her alone to absorb the films at her own pace in her own room. He came anyway, prattling on and on like an full-body commentary track as Rose attempted to tuck her head closer to Kanaya's lap in hopes of drowning him out. Occasionally he was even the last one to bed, wrapping up the film or discussing ashen mediation past bedtime, and she would let him lock her in before she settled in to sleep.
All that taken in, Rose did not fully understand the interplay between relationships until Gamzee lost his arm. She was never at her most cognizant when she came to visit him. He slept constantly, in the recouperacoon Tavros had set up for him inside his section of the lab (they had been unable to locate Gamzee's at all). He was not in a coma but perpetually exhausted, and oftentimes Rose's visits would stop four steps away as she watched him sleep, favouring his intact side. She would would clutch tellingly at her own arm and would soon leave, words left unsaid another day. But it was still Gamzee. To think that things would change around the lab because they did not have Gamzee around was almost absurd. But that was where the relationships came into play.
There was a strange, mounting anxiety in the days that followed, though whether because of Rose's possession or the loss of Gamzee the Kitchen Confessor, Rose could not tell. What was more immediate was the loss of Tavros, who now spent day and night with Gamzee inside their now-shared section of the lab. He was not alone, as Terezi often came to visit, to read children stories or law books at random to Gamzee whether in consciousness or not. She would hang scalemates from Tavros' horns, reassuring him that he looked "F4NT4ST1C!", no matter how much heavier Congresswoman Mangoclaws became whenever Tavros looked away. The loss of Tavros meant more free time for Eridan. More free time for Eridan meant more time spent with Vriska, and that was what changed everything.
"Hahahahahahahaha! And that's three!"
"C'mon Vris, since when do you do anything in threes?"
"Shut up! At least I gave you three, and you still fucked up! Now pay up!"
They ignored Rose, and despite coming out to see them, she ignored them and left soon after. Ever since Vriska's promise on the construction site to break whatever Eridan touched her with had led to a broken pinky, Rose's role as metaphorical referee had become literal. Vriska had followed the touching game with a never-ending series of bets that Eridan kept taking against all advice: ashen, ex-pale or shouted at full force. Vriska was gentler from that point on, but hardly kinder. She would food from Eridan when he proved incapable of using someone else's full names for an entire day, would hoist chores on him when he could not beat her in a riveting race at the drydock, or would borrow clothes when he could not catch seventeen hefted rocks out of twenty while Outside on a hate-date.
"Roz, cool it, I've got this one. Serious." But he never did. Rose barely even looked up when he would come back from whatever challenge Vriska had arranged, carrying, for example, a broom and scrub-brush and bound for the Scorpio transportalizer. At this rate, Vriska was bound to carve out her position dominant party by forcing Eridan to serve as her literal throne, but he kept up. As he did, Rose could not help noticing that "Don't touch me for three days" had transitioned smoothly to "Go cook us all a nice meal, shitstain," with a finger stroking down his jawline, or "Don't touch me for three hours," as she removed a hand from his thigh.
When they returned to the lab from Outside, Vriska was wearing Eridan's scarf. Rose was there to see them arrive and was little accompanied. Most of the group had left the lab over two hours ago to shower off the grime of the work day, and had stayed away. Sollux was there, on a roll with his coding and unwilling to stop, and Feferi hovering about, but otherwise it was just Rose. She was watching a banal affair she could only really call "Troll Showgirls", which grew more uncomfortable by the moment. It never crossed the same lines as its infamous Earth counterpart, but only in favour of incompetently handled caliginous gaslighting. She was going to have to have a talk with Karkat about handing her this one. Rose would have appreciated any distraction, and her charges provided with gusto and uncharacteristic happy laughter. It was impossible not to stare.
"No!" Vriska was repeating. "No. No."
"C'mon, why not?" Eridan asked as he came into hearing range. "I think you'd enjoy swimming."
Rose peaked over the back of the couch, to see Feferi gawking as well. Her auspistice buddy looked over and mouthed their shared thoughts. "Eridan, swimming?" Rose hardly claimed to know her charge well, but that little quirk had come across.
Vriska leaned her weight against the desk near Terezi's computer and brushed her hair back from her face Seeing that only her auspistice and two other Trolls present, she turned back to Eridan, a smirk playing on the edge of her lips. "You just want to get me into a bathing suit."
"Well yeah," he said.
Rose provided feedback for his lack of tact by planting her face loudly against the back of the couch. Some days... she thought.
"Well thanks for lettin' me finish, Roz," he said over his shoulder. "But..." he continued to Vriska, who was having trouble of her own keeping a straight face. "But I mean it too. We used to be on the water all the time! It'd be like old times, with less firepower."
"Mm-hm," Vriska said past her hand, trying to cover her grin. And then she did what Rose did not expect. "Well... it's not a bad idea." Vriska had freed a blue-socked foot from a dusty shoe, and reached out with it to brush up Eridan's ankle. "And you're not the only one who'd be gettign something out of it..." She slowly pulled her foot up his leg, guiding him toward her. She stopped his approach with a single upraised finger set against his chest.
"But I think you're forgetting something, Eridan," she said. As she spoke she removed her light jacket, which was now several sizes too small thanks to her still subtly progressing Dream-moult.
"What's that?" Eridan asked. He risked his hand by reaching out to stroke Vriska's bare arm.
"You..." Vriska said, gently pushing away his hand with that same finger. "Keep..." She untied his scarf. "...Losing."
"What, you mean your bets?" Eridan set his hands instead in his pockets, and all-in-all was taking the physical rejection very well, for him. Rose watched those two apparent strangers with fascination, blind to black hole of stage presence that was Troll Gina Ravera. "Vris, I'm pretty sure you didn't say shit about not going on any hate-dates, considering we were just on one."
"That's true!" Vriska said, and she reached up to flip the scarf over Eridan's shoulders. She then gently tugged on it, pulling him slowly toward her. "But that date was my idea. I don't know if you... get to name plans if you just keep losing our games."
"Was that a 'no'?" Eridan asked, keeping his hands in his pockets as Vriska pulled him right up against her. Vriska shook her head, brushing the tip of her nose lightly against his.
"I never said 'no,' Eridan." She leaned a touch forward to work the scarf properly about his neck, stopping short of brushing lips. "I just saw another opportunity for another of our games and thought..." Vriska pulled away, both ends of the scarf now in one hand and the other helping her lean back. She grinned. "...well..."
Vriska's eyes shifted a little to the right. "Don't you think, Rose?"
"Uhh..." Rose snapped back to the fact that she was, in fact, in the room with these people. "Yeah!" Rose had never seen Vriska like this, but Eridan was keeping such a cool head that she could only assume this was not entirely unheard of, in private. What on earth did those two do after she had left them alone?
"Gotta make sure we're able to respect one another," Vriska said, half to Eridan and half to Rose. Rose was not sure how fond she was of Vriska putting words in her mouth, but if pleasant interaction was the result, she was willing to allow it just this once. Vriska pulled Eridan into a lean over her. Their glasses clicked, and she whispered "And you both know how fond I am of games."
Rose checked toward Feferi for some sort of reaction, but her auspistice buddy had ducked over Sollux's computer rather than gawk at her ex-moirail. A tinge of pink tickled at the extremes of her fins.
"So what are you thinking?" Eridan asked. His left hand had snuck back out of his pocket, and Rose willed him as hard as she could to not push his luck. He held. Thata boy...
"How about you... what was it, Rose? 'Kill me two birds with one stone?'" Vriska loosened her grip on the scarf (Eridan did not budge one inch) and collected her jacket instead. "Go find John. He's hold up somewhere on this rock with Karkat. Get the jacket I had him make for himself, without telling him what it's for. I won't have to alchemize a new one if his fits."
"You want me to find you clothes?" Eridan asked.
"If you want me out of some of them."
"I just wanna swim, Vris," Eridan repeated, "You just don't trust me." Vriska just laughed. Eridan did himself no favours by joining her.
"Wanna know a secret, Eridan?" she asked. He nodded, and Vriska stepped up onto the floor, eliminating the gap between them entirely and, indeed, almost hanging off of him by the scarf for immediate support. With her now-freed hand, she pushed back his fin and leaned forward to speak into his ear. "I don't think you've got a chance of pulling it off."
"No?"
Vriska shook her head, not unlike nuzzling against him given her position. "Because John was wearing it today, and probably still is. And you're gonna walk in there, poor... desper8 Eridan, and tell him to strip in front of our fearless, jealous leader..."
"Ahh..." Eridan laughed as he picked up on the details. "Hah. You're a fuckin' bitch."
Rose startled at the sudden jump back to insults, but Vriska just pulled Eridan closer. "Mmm..." She stepped them both about until she was the one facing the desk. "And while that'd be fun to watch..."
"I bet."
Vriska knocked him back onto the desk, swapping positions. "I'd rather watch you try to use your half-wits to try to outsmart me. That sounds w8y more fun." She raised the foot still in its shoe and hefted it up onto the table between his legs, just short of his crotch, with a light bang. From there she used her knee as a perch for her arm and chin to look down on him. "On one hand you get chased around by Karkat. On the other hand you get to show your real 'skills' and end up a bloody, crying wiggler with no dignity and definitely nothing from John but platonic pity." Vriska ran a hand down his chest to where a Human would have a navel. "That's what I think, anyway. You think I'm warm, Dualscar?"
If anything, Vriska's shift to insults had thrown Rose even more than Eridan's had, but Eridan was entirely nonplussed. He collected Vriska's hand and sat up, patting it condescendingly. "...Get bathing suit, Vris."
Vriska must have dug her claws into his hand, because Eridan unhanded her at once. "What kind?" she asked, in spite.
Eridan leaned over to whisper in her ear this time. "Surprise me." And he hopped to his feet, adjusted his cape and made his way to the transportalizer with fair dignity, except when turned toward Rose and held up his hand palm-forward. Two purple scratches were faintly visible, and while he did not risk his cool from Vriska's perspective, he shot Rose a What the hell is wrong with her? look mixed with a pleased grin. Rose was becominng all too familiar with that look from this kismesis, and she could not think up a reply before he vanished.
Vriska started talking aloud as soon as he was gone, and flipped her jacket into her inventory as she went. She looked different without it. "Of course it'd be a surprise if he even gets back here alive at all at the rate he goes. Can't even do simple tasks right." Vriska stepped over to Rose, her claw-nails gleaming and her arm muscles sleek and strong in a way Kanaya could not yet compare. "You look like you just got kicked in the face. Wanna talk about it?"
"I..." Rose could vaguely make out Feferi signalling not to admit a thing, not that she needed to be told not to admit anything to Vriska in any circumstance. "I didn't think you two were so touchy-feelie yet."
"Mm, well, you'll get it one day. Fussyfangs likes you enough." Rose was not about to supply a counter for that, and Vriska just laughed instead and ruffled Rose's hair. Rose snapped up a hand to grab Vriska's arm by the wrist, even though, as she pulled away, she became suddenly aware of the claws, which she noticed were vaguely purple-tinted at the tips. "Aw, c'mon, can't take a joke?" Vriska asked, non-threateningly enough, and Rose tightened her grip. "Okay, fine," Vriska said, "I'm sorry," and snapped her hand away. "I'm off to Tavros'. If Eridork shows up here without my stuff before I get back, tell him to wait so I don't humiliate him in front of Nitram."
"I'll pass it on," Rose promised, and Vriska vanished through the transportalizer. She was replaced who signalled to Rose with a double thumbs up. Rose returned the gesture half-heartedly. "She's up to something, you know," she pointed out, and Feferi just shrugged. It was Vriksa after all. Rose returned to her seat with a sigh. "Ugh, I hate them," she muttered. And yet: "I guess that's the point." It was little comfort.
Ten minutes later, Sollux broke Rose's half-hearted viewing of Karkat's film with a call of "Ey! John!"
"Rose." A reflex response by now. Rose was not going to humour her old passive-agression lest she end up venting the same all over Eridan and Vriska. It felt odd to think, but no matter how often they irritated her, Rose had not distanced herself from her charges with her mother's old techniques. She wondered why, instead, she continued to let them in. One day she just knew she was going to regret it.
"Right, whatever. KK says you gotta go find EQ. He wants an update on the arm."
"Why me?" Rose asked at once.
"Hell, I dunno. I could interrupt my coding and leave you with your awesome movie there."
Rose did not take long to weigh her options. "So where is Equius?"
Rose's first attempt was to try Equius' transportalizer's "bell", but he no more answered it than he had the pesters from Karkat. The next plan involved squeezing an approximate map from Sollux and headed off to find Nepeta, instead.
Rose really hoped that this was worth all the effort, as it seemed to her that getting a status update from Equius should have involved little more than waiting for him to come up for food. A quick check of her headbandtop showed that Karkat had turned from Sollux to her and she readied herself for adventure. The route through the service tunnels was mostly ladders, and they got more and more rusted and wet as she went. Adventure.
Ratlings greeted Rose to the Under-Laboratory, but it was a long while before she came across any other sign of habitation. The chambers she passed through were entirely distinct from those she had seen when she had visited Nepeta from the transportalizer. After several dozen coin-flip turns, she rounded one of the many vats in the Under-Lab. This one was filled to the brim with three different densities of fluid, long since separated into layers. It contained some sort of centaur creature that had existed in the Troll's session, another subtype like Imps and Liches, it seemed, as it lacked both the telltale moustache and udders of Equius' prototype. There Rose found herself face to face with something she had not expected to see for the rest of her life.
"Hxxxxxxxxxxx."
Like a static buzz, the Chalk Basilisk warded Rose away with a hiss and backed up the vat in reverse. Its amphibian grip suctioned off the smooth cylinder. Its eyes watched her behind transparent lenses as dragonfly wings buzzed on its back. In those eyes, Rose saw a rapid flickering of letters and numerals flash by at an impossible clip: the game was scanning her. The Basilisk slowly advanced, its muscles growing as it stepped, dynamically levelled to an appropriate challenge for her Level 76. Rose drew the Quills of Echidna.
The Basilisk lunged and took a needle-tip straight to the eye, but retreated as though unharmed. It used its height as its primary advantage, snapping at Rose as she waited for it to descend, but it would not wait forever. Soon it would come crashing down, and Rose's arms felt very heavy. It had been so long since she had tried to Strife with the needlewands as melee weapons. She resolved that if she got out of here in one piece she was going to start practice at once. Until then...
Another lunge, and Rose's arm shot out faster than she thought capable. She missed the Underling by a hair and her wand went hilt-deep through the safety glass and into the vat. It would seem Sburb had levelled her as a melee fighter despite her pact with the Elder God. Rose freed the wand just under the teeth of the Basilisk and water streamed through the hole. Another bite closed about the wand, which proved invulnerable, and then a third stopped just short of Rose's face. Rose was about to counterattack when the entire Basilisk stopped dead and pulled back a second time. Again, its eyes were seized by the digital output. Rose glanced about for her reinforcements but could not catch sight of friends.
"Nepeta?" she called.
Without warning, the basilisk's tail exploded in a burst of brown gore and filthy vat-fluid. Rose saw a black shadow leap off the edge of a platform overhead, which collided straight-on into the Underling. The entire vat, already punctured twice, caved under their combined weight and Rose scrambled back onto an upturned table's bar-legs as a thick fluid flooded the chamber. A piece of Chalk flew out from the mess and struck Rose on the temple before it was absorbed into her cache.
A face peeked up over the back of the centaur. "Hi Rose!"
"H-hi Nepeta," Rose said, as Nepeta wrung out her hat as she approached at a run.
"Rose, are you okay?" called Jade from above. Her favourite rifle, the Curian Blunderbuss, was still in her hands.
"Just fine," Rose said, catching herself on the wall as her balance slipped. "What on Earth was that?"
"Evil monsters were guarding the Crystal Palace!" Nepeta failed to explain. The fluid from the cylinder was slipping away into nearby drains, and Nepeta sloshed toward Rose against the current.
Jade proved more helpful. "We were roleplaying and opened another door we probably shouldn't have."
"I see. And you didn't learn not to do that the last time?" Rose asked Nepeta as she approached. The Troll only smiled, showing a mouth full of teeth save the two at the top front, which the moult had recently removed, giving Nepeta the gap-toothed mouth and lisp of a grade schooler.
"We thought it was for another room," Nepeta admitted. "But it's confusing down here! The real door was probably walled off."
"Was that at least the last of them?" Rose asked, not really hoping for a good answer. She dropped down into the thin layer of liquid that remained.
"We think so," Jade said. "Why are you here? Did they set off an alarm or something?"
"No," Rose said. "Karkat wants a progress report from Equius. Nepeta, do you...?"
"Oh, he's in his room," she said with a roll of her eyes. "I'll show you."
Nepeta led the way, dripping as she went. Rose was reunited with Jade as they rounded a second corner, only to discover her friend had been made up with tiger stripes on her face and arms.
"What?"
"Nothing," Rose said, calmly suppressing a reaction. "I'm glad you didn't get wet."
"Thanks," Jade said, checking her arms. "Sorry you did."
"I'm glad too! I'm also glad these didn't get wet!" Nepeta said as they entered another room. Rose supposed they had entered Nepeta's territory proper as she passed through the door, not just for the improved lighting but more for the murals that greeted her. The room had been covered, from rusting head to filthy toe, with shipping diagrams.
"This is Terezi's room," Nepeta explained before Rose's had even taken in that one of the Trolls in every drawing was wearing red shades. There was just so many of them, of varying sizes, often duplicated. From the sheer number of duplicates, Rose gauged that Nepeta was perhaps more fond of Terezi/Aradia than she would have ever suspected. Also fairly frequent were a few drawings of Nepeta herself with herself and her friend, both with and without scalesuits, each one decorated by a question mark or written criticism. But the biggest drawings were new.
"ohhhh my paawwwwd, rose!" Nepeta said, her eyes lighting up when she saw where Rose was looking. "have you s33333333n them? before? after? ohhhhh! " Nepeta wrung her hands, but her gap-toothed smile lost none of its enthusiasm. "This is such a sensitive time in their relationship! I wish I could help! They're friends so they're testing the waters and who knows what they're going to find! They could go any of the four ways and you just... you just hope they're going to do something great because they're just so kyoot!"
Nepeta had been very observant, and had already diligently updated her shipping wall to match those observations. In at least one drawing Terezi was hunched over a book, and Nepeta had already smudged out Gamzee's left arm in every iteration. True to her word, Nepeta had drawn the couple in every possible relationship, with duplicates in the red and light grey. "Rose," she said. "Rose. Rose." Rose looked up. "Rose. Gimmie a hint, Rose. You're their friend. I mean, their friend, not their..." She coughed into her sleeve. "...their friend." And she waved a hand at her wall of suppositions to demonstrate what she meant. Her smile twitched on and off her face as she gauged their reactions, to see if she was properly understanding their system compared to her own.
"I don't really know, Nepeta," Rose admitted. "I mean, Gamzee's mostly asleep, I don't really think he's considering... that... sort of thing."
Nepeta nodded acknowledgement but kept talking. "I know but like, I really, really, really hope that it's crossed their mind, because... uh... because..." Nepeta tapped her pointer fingers against one another. "I really think they could go, like, for flushed! I do! Because she's... Terezi's... I don't wanna seem... like I know but Ithinkshe'sdonewithKarkat?" Another grin teased at Nepeta's lips and then vanished. "And Gamzee could be really into her! I mean... if she's interested."
Nepeta suddenly cast a look over her shoulder and her tone shifted dramatically to confidence. "But I think..." she said, waving both of the Humans closer so that she could continue at a conspiratorial whisper. "I think this might be moirallegience. Shh!" Another check of her surrounds. "Now I don't wanna, you know, what with Tavros. Because he's been doing great but I think, just maybe, that Gamzee might actually be more violent than him. I do!" she said, as if they had doubted her in reply. "And it should be... like... closer to each other, in terms of anger, unless you're a Pale Dom, and Tavros might be but I can't really think of Gamzee as Pale Sub, you... you know?" Rose did not. "And I don't want them to be upset! But Terezi, well... picture this. Trust me."
Nepeta stepped back to give herself room, apparently to gesticulate. "So... so Gamzee just hit somebody." And she struck the air. "He's sober and he's mad and he just hit somebody really hard! B-but I don't want him to have hit someone I like s-so maybe he just hit Jack! Yeah! He hit Jack so hard that Jack flew away!. And Gamzee's like 'MoThErFuCk, My mOtHeRfUcKeRs, I'M So mOtHeRfUcKiNg aNgRy!' You know?"
"Oh yeah," Jade agreed. "That's totally how he'd sound."
"Great!" Nepeta said with a grin. "And then Tavros is like 'uHH, gAMZEE, i DON'T THINK I CAN REALLY CONTAIN THIS KIND OF STUPENDOUS ANGER.' Stupendous. No, no, not 'stupendous'. Uh... stup... would he say 'motherfucking' for Gamzee's sake?" Rose opened her mouth but Nepeta stopped her. "Nevermind.
"So he can't do it! And Gamzee doesn't want to hurt his friends but he's so angry, and then Terezi shows up! And she's like 'G4MZ33 1 KNOW YOUR3 4NGRY BUT YOU DONT H4V3 TO B3' and he's like 'No, My mOsT MoThErFuCkInG PrOsEcUtIn' PaL, i dOn't wAnT To hUrT YoU ToO! ' and she's like 'NO G4MZ33 1 H4V3 TO STOP YOU. 4ND NOT JUST B3CL4WS3... ah... B3C4US3 TH1S 1S TOT4LLY 1LL3G4L BUT B3C4US3...'"
And Nepeta reached out with trembling hand and cupped Jade's face. Nepeta was actually shaking in her act and looked Jade straight on with her intense yellow eyes as vat water dripped down Jade's neck. "'B3C4US3 1 WONT L3T YOU G1V3 1N.'" Nepeta's arm shook but her Terezi found new strength and she stepped forward, much to Jade's obvious discomfort. Nepeta's eyes softened. "'1 WOULD ST4ND 1N FRONT OF YOU...'" She gasped in air. "'t-to the end.'"
And then Nepeta gasped, jumped back and rubbed both palms together. "Ohhh my pawd I have to draw this. i have to. I will be right. Back!" And she bounded away to collect her paints.
"Well," Rose said into the silence of the room. Jade wiped at her face with her sleeve. "This sure was a thing." Jade nodded. "Are... we here?"
Jade smiled a little, despite the oily green smudge still running along her ear, and pointed to the far corner of the room. Rose headed over, curiosity building, and was greeted by the sight of a blonde-haired stick figure in a purple dress holding hands with a Troll figure wearing red shades, a red heart perched between them. A nearby picture had them both with arms raised as if in a cheer, also slotted for moirallegiance. Not far from there, stick!Terezi grinned at stick!John, with the caption "ehhhh... not really~"
"Are you here?" Rose asked as she looked around, not finding any more Human stick figures.
"I must be somewhere," Jade said. "But I... think she's been hiding my ships, since I come down here so often."
"Am I not supposed to be looking at this, then?" Rose asked. Jade just shrugged behind her and so Rose moved in. She bent to examine a few splotches of paint that seemed to have been misplaced in the exact corner. The more she looked, the clearer it became that the splotches were not just random. Rather, they were all that remained of a drawing Nepeta had canvassed over with long, slow swipes of gray paint.
One drawing, with what looked like the dimpled top of a heart poking out from under the cover, was mostly lost. The other, the relationship symbol properly obscured, depicted a stick figure with a red-sleeved arm. Since this was the Human section, Rose did not have much trouble determining who Nepeta had once shipped with Terezi here.
Jade had obviously reached the same conclusion in the past, if she had not outright seen the original drawing. "Even a great shipper's wrong sometimes."
"Jade did... you ever talk to him about this?" Rose asked as she took to her feet.
"Dave? ...No." Jade started walking and Rose picked up her pace. "I mean, John and I went after him after the fight but it's not like he listened to us. I didn't even get the details until I talked to you. Did... you talk to Terezi? I mean, after?"
"Terezi's only mentioned it off-hand one time," Rose said. "Other than that... well." She waved her hand to the murals depicting Gamzee and Terezi, the Troll-friends Nepeta felt were on the cusp. "I guess when you think you're there but you're really not even on the board, that's a kick to the gut. But it's not like Dave knew." Jade nodded. "So..." Rose said as they continued to walk. "Do we all have full rooms down here?"
"Well, only the girls have rooms or there'd be even more doubles!" Jade explained. "Nepeta said it was because her room was already 'her room'. But no Human rooms yet. Oh! But there is one thing."
Jade head off at a jog and led Rose through a few corridors to a junction not far from Feferi's ships. Jade gestured with spread arms toward the floor. The floor below was set with a grate, but on the four solid corners of the intersection, Rose made out four stick figures of the Humans. In the middle, on the bars of the grate, Nepeta had painted a great blue circle.
"Friendship," Jade said, her arms wrapped as if about the circle. "She said she got the idea from King Arfur's Round Table."
"'Arfur.'" Rose echoed as she examined the drawing.
"I'm allowed to make up plot, too, you know!" Jade snipped. "Because everyone is equal, they look out for one another and... well, a circle's easy to draw."
"It's great," Rose said. As an artist herself, Rose had more than a few problems with Nepeta's sketches she would never voice, but she found this gesture genuinely moving. She wished she could show this to the others, to Kanaya, but she could only imagine John appreciating it. Kanaya, as much as she hated to admit, would be a risk of the opposite. "Are there..." Rose was worried to ask. "Are there many circles down here?"
Jade shook her head. "I think there's one of Karkat and Sollux or Karkat and Gamzee somewhere, but Equius saw it and got mad. Oh!" Jade took her bearings. "You were here for Equius, right? Well, I can show you the way. Nepeta's... honestly going to be busier for a lot longer than she thinks."
Rose agreed, and Jade guided her through the tunnels until they came into an basement administrative section. There she found less exposed, decayed lab equipment and more exposed, rotted office supplies. In the back they came to a heavy door, where Jade knocked.
"Oh, hi Jade!" Nepeta said when she opened the door. "Hi Rose! I'm sorry, if I knew I had left my paints all the way back here I'd have just brought you along!" She then stepped forward and mumbled something in pig latin that Rose translated to "Please don't tell Equius about the Basilisks."
Jade walked in at once, but Rose hesitated, still vaguely remembering the unspoken rule the Trolls had drilled into her once upon a time. Never go into Equius' room, she would not understand. She could see where they were coming from as soon as she crossed the threshold. The room was split down the middle by a clothesline. On one side of the clothesline were a series of furs; on the opposite, protective mats hung up to keep the furs from catching fire. On Equius' side, every other available surface was wallpapered with exaggerated horse pornography that flickered in and out of sight in the glare of Equius' welding torch. The Trolls had been right. She did not understand.
"Equius! Rose is here!"
Equius did not respond. Ear protection aside, Equius was not unlike Sollux at the moment, completely and utterly engrossed in his work. She would have admired it if he was not so unfortunately flanked by fetish posters that now seemed poised towards him.
Seeing a spare pair of eye protection probably intended for Nepeta, Rose collected them and approached Equius. "Equius, Karkat wants an update on the arm."
"Stand back," he said, giving her his attention only when a bit of slag flew off in her direction. "Tell Vantas that it will be done when it is done. Surely he does not want the Highblood to be disadvantaged with shoddy work."
"Look, Equius," Rose said, her eyes drifting toward the object of Equius' diligent attentions. The robot arm was not at all what she had pictured considering Tavros' legs. She had heard that it was based on a model that was originally worn by Vriska, but that had not really prepared her for the sight of the new. "Even if Karkat was just doing this to annoy us both, it'd be a lot less annoying if he doesn't send me back down here to do it again because you weren't giving details."
"You want details?" Equius said without looking up. "All right."
And he proceeded to give her details, at length and buried in roughly translated jargon. Only her thorough education managed to give Rose the fact that the arm's ring finger was functioning more-or-less as intended at this point in time. The rest was lost on her, whatever it had been. When he finished, he dismissed her with "Is that satisfactory?" and did not wait for a response. Rose left with more respect for the racist blueblood, even if she knew that she would never understand him, literally and figuratively.
When she came to Nepeta's side of the room, she found that Nepeta and Jade were still searching for the lost paints. A quick exchange told her which of Nepeta's many piles (furs, bones and bait) had yet to be searched, and Rose joined them. Nepeta and Jade worked as a team, bustling and chatting animatedly. Rose felt just a touch left out to hear them go on with stories in which she had no part. But if she had been with them, she never would have found the paints. She found them tucked behind the furs next to a hidden shipping wall.
It had been drawn in chalk (the chalk was also there, stuck under the white fur of a bear-beast of some sort) and had been smudged away in a hurry. Rose could not help but note the pile must have been made with similar urgency, perhaps dumped from a sylladex all at once. The wall hosted four drawings in a standard grid, with red smudge, pale grey, black and dark grey in their proper quarters. In each quadrant there had been figures: the same pair, Rose quickly gauged from the colours. One was a Human: Nepeta liked to use snow white for their skin and the shade hardly corresponded to anything on any of the Trolls. The other was a Troll. Rose thought back to her Doyle as she looked at the rest. Black hair on the Troll, of course. Black hair on the Human, much more useful. The Troll's body was a smudge of black... no, black and green. The Human was wearing white. That was useless, as they all wore white from time to time. She had to squint, and get much closer to the wall than she was comfortable, considering that Nepeta might turn around at any moment. There, she found her clue. A tiny patch remained of the shirt's symbol in the matespritship quadrant. Light blue.
Rose did not know what to think, but the conclusion was clear. Nepeta had drawn herself with Jade, four times: once in every quadrant, even moirallegiance
Rose shifted a fur to cover the wall. "Found them!" she called. Rose watched Nepeta's face when she turned about to heft the tray of cans. Sure enough, a moment of panic overtook Nepeta's face. She stepped forward at once, but calmed down when she saw that the wall was safe. She quickly switched to joy at recovering her paints.
"Equius!" she called. "I'm gonna go paint!"
"Then I had better go," Jade said. "I don't want to get in the way."
"Okay Jade!" Nepeta said. "We'll go back to the Crystal Palace some other day!"
But farewells were halted by a voice from the back. Equius was listening more than he had let on. "Nepeta, didn't you have something to ask Miss Harley?"
"Oh. Uh..." Nepeta looked about furtively, which seemed to be her way of hunting down a lost train of thought. "Oh yeah! Did you want to come over tomorrow after work to see the art Equius has been restoring? It could be a lot of fun!"
"Uh..." Jade flicked her eyes to Rose. Rose was briefly, but ultimately not surprised that her friend's love of Anthropomorphic Fauna did not extend to hardcore pornography, no matter how artistic. "No thanks, Nepeta, Equius. I promised I'd hang out with Rose tomorrow!" Rose nodded at once. After all, what were friends for if not for entangling lies upon lies?
"Okay!" Nepeta said, not at all perturbed, and she threw her arms around Jade's neck and squeezed goodbye. When she turned to Rose there was an awkward pause, but soon she was also taken into that same clenching grasp.
Once Rose and Jade were off on their own, Jade heaved a sigh of relief and flashed Rose a circle sign with her hands. "Thank you," she said. Rose laughed and returned the sign, and they headed back toward the exit as Rose had come, discussing her and Nepeta's ongoing story as they went. Rose waited. Jade was talking at such energetic pace and it took a good while for her to even explain why she was in tiger stripes. The chance to interrupt her arrived as they climbed the second-last ladder to the main floor.
"So hey," Rose said, an excuse ready to be used. "Do you want to get something to eat? I... wanna talk about something."
"Oh nooooo, is something the matter?" Jade said when she saw her friend's face. "Not you and Kanaya, right?"
"Ah... no. No. This is more like... well it's like Dave and Terezi but with someone else." Rose looked back at her friend as they approached the last ladder they would need to climb. "I'm worried that, uh..."
But Jade slapped her hand on Rose's shoulder. "Feelings jam," she said.
"I... what?"
"It's something I learned here," Jade said matter-of-factly, and she headed off in a different direction, toward Aradia's and their rooms. "Follow me."
Rose watched her go. "Who do you think I'm talking about, Jade?"
"Get in the feelings jam first, Rose!"
And so Rose followed.