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When Rose Lalonde is 4 years old, she has her first nightmare.
She dreams that her mother disappears and is instead replaced with a giant, looming black ogre-ish figure. Before she can attack it or it can come at her, a giant ball of wool and a cat in a little suit come and trample it. The cat looks at her and does not blink. It opens its mouth and the words “Good Luck With The Scratch Rose Lalonde” in dark green appear as text. She then wakes up with the uncanny feeling that the world around her is melting.
When she tells her mother- a tall, smart woman with a nasty habit of showering her with gifts, drinking like the world would end any moment, disappearing for days on end, and caring more about creating the image of motherhood than about her daughter -about this dream and this feeling, her mother gets her a cat with a dapper little suit, green pens, and calligraphy lessons (taught by someone other than her, of course).
She slowly gets more and more dreams like this, which in turn slowly become less and less jumbled. The feeling of displacement in the world grows stronger. Rose begins to predict things that happen in the future from her dreams (both at night and the daydreams that seem to plague her more than any of her peers) (not that she has any peers to gauge an average daydream ratio of. She lives in a mansion in the woods and makes due on tutors years above her age, even if she knows she knows more than them and that she is not, in fact, quite as young as they all treat her as). Just small things, like the fact that her mother will be passed out in front of the second TV, not the third. Or that her tutor of the fortnight will quit after Jasper pees on one of his shoes while he is still wearing it.
Then again, some of them aren’t just small things.
When Rose is 9, she predicts the death of a famous comedian that she thinks her mother would like if she wasn’t busy being blackout drunk and ruining her lungs by smoking a pack a day. She occasionally predicts deaths, but this one feels special to her. She is compelled to write a letter to this comedian telling him of this and wishing him well in the next few months.
John Crocker sends back a package and a little note saying that he knows this, has accepted it, and wishes her luck, Rose Lalonde. Rose doesn’t recall adding her name to the note and sends another letter saying as such. The package he sent includes knitting needles.
He sends another package and note back. This time it says he would always remember her. He doodles a little curving drawing on the bottom and again wishes her luck. The package is a collection of the works of H.P Lovecraft. He dies in a freak accident the next April, and she cries for reasons that seem to stretch beyond him or her.
When she turns 13, the end of the 20th century beckons her, and she sees it as a horrible sign. 13 is the age when she stops pushing away her visions. She winds up in the hospital when she meditates hard enough to see so far back, she can see the beginning of the Universe. Surprisingly, it begins eleven years later with a frog. Rose cannot wrap her mind around this revelation- especially the way something deep in her understands it beyond all else. She looks into the eye of the frog and she sees herself, thirteen years old and holding hands with what seems to be the male version of a mirror. Bright green surrounds them both and Rose goes to the bathroom to throw up before passing out.
She can feel the way her body burned so bad she melted like a candle. She is in the hospital for 5 days because her mother keeps getting drunk every night and passing out, so she can’t check her out.
Rose has a lot of time in the hospital to use this power. She looks into the eye of the frog and looks even farther back. This time, the universe began in 2009, while also spanning years back. She starts at the beginning of her timeline and sees most everything parallel except for two important details.
One, she is born years later than she actually was. This brings the internet into her home when she is a young child, and she is raised by technology and online schooling rather than tutors and nannies upon tutors and nannies.
Two: This Rose has friends. With the marvel of technology, Rose stumbles upon three other individuals and grows up with them. The real Rose cannot fathom ever having friends. She doesn’t think she’s ever really interacted with a child her age ever.
Rose looks into these other children. There is John Egbert, who is none other than a much younger version of dear old John Crocker. She wonders if this was the reason she was so hung up about Mr. Crocker after his death.
The next is Jade Harley, a young girl who she doesn’t have any relationship with in this life. She looks nice though, and Rose almost wishes she did.
The last of the friends is Dave Strider, and Rose almost pukes again because he is the mirror boy who burned with her. She cries because she has a flashback of her death, and it’s another two days until her mother picks her up again.
January 1st, the year 2000, Rose looks into who Dave Strider of this life is, and she sees his life in front of her. He is three years older than her, and fairly fucked up. He spent 12 of his formative years in Houston, Texas, and killed his father when he turned 13. He was never caught. Rose sends him a letter to where he will be living by the time it arrives, which will be his 7th foster home. He is a 16-year-old with an apathetic yet mean streak a mile wide, and nobody wants to keep him around.
Dave writes back almost immediately.
-
When Dave Strider is 3 years old, he has his first strife.
Derrick “Bro” Strider is a terrifying entity, masking all humanity by his emotionless state, creepy puppets, and his affinity for taking pictures of Dave in the bath to do who knows what with. Dave knows he has never seen a picture of himself around the house. He also knows he’s doomed.
When Bro comes at him with a sword for the first time, he’s surprised by the way his tiny toddler muscles already seem to know what to do. Bro gets a nasty cut to the leg, and Dave scampers down the stairs as quickly as he can before he’s got his own scar to match.
While hiding behind a beanbag chair waiting for Bro to inevitably pull him out feet first, he closes his eyes and breathes heavily. Despite the adrenaline pumping through his tiny body, his heartbeat does not change. It’s steady, like the ticking of a clock. Dave doesn’t think it fair he has to go through this again in a new timeline.
When Dave is 6, he runs away for the first time.
He hides out underneath a bridge for several days and tries to pretend none of this is ever happening. But it keeps happening. While trying to catch some z’s, an old woman wakes him up. She has long, insanely curly hair and large glasses. She tells him her name is Jade, hands him a folded up piece of paper, and tells him she was never there.
After she leaves, he unfolds the paper, and a snowflake cut out to look like a ten-point spirograph stares back at him. A clock somewhere ticks loudly, and he remembers that he is doomed. He goes back to the apartment the next day and pins it up in his room. Bro beats him for trying to leave, and he just takes it, thoughts drifting back to the way his last timeline ended.
When Dave is 13, he kills Bro Strider.
Dave is riddled with white, angry scars, but so is Bro. Dave always managed to be good enough to surprise Bro, but never good enough to always dodge him. He is fed up and angry and he figures he’s going to die someday so why not go out with every bang imaginable?
He steals a pack of cigarettes from Bro’s stash and posts a fucked up note telling him it’s time for a strife. When Bro comes up to the roof he sees Dave sitting on the edge, his sword next to him, three cigs in.
Dave crushes the cigarette with his bare hand, stands up, and waits for Bro to make the first move. He looks out upon the city, and Bro makes his last mistake by rushing for Dave. Dave steps out of the way and trips him. Bro falls off and goes splat. It is an anticlimactic death, but Dave thinks that is poetic. Someone like Bro shouldn’t go out as a hero or a villain. They should have to die a death where they fall like a normal human being, and no one hovers over the body, weeping tears, whether they be of joy or of sadness.
People see and hear the body hit the pavement, and when the police come to the apartment hours later, Dave pretends to be in shock when really, he is just apathetic. He is placed in foster care, and he does not care. He has been defeated since the day he was born, and him murdering Bro does not help him nurse this wound.
He fights, kicks, and the only thing he accepts quietly is his fate. He hates the world and the world hates him. The only person he ever likes is a young blind woman he meets at the homeless shelter after he runs away for the eighth time. Her name is Teresa, ‘like the saint,’ she tells him. She says her life has been anything but heavenly, and that she could use a miracle like the ones her namesake had been doling out before her death that September. She was blinded by her mother when she was just nine and then abandoned. Dave whispers to her angrily that if he could, he would get her justice. She smiles at him, and tells him that one day she’ll be a lawyer and make sure that people like her mom will always get what they deserve.
(When he moves to a foster home in a different city, she gives him her AOL account, but he doesn’t see her again until Dave is 19. Teresa stumbles up to where she heard he was living at the time and begs him for a place to stay so that she can escape her abuser. She’s addicted to drugs, and she stays for three months. He gives her the money to buy her shit because he’s lived on the streets and he knows people who have died from withdrawal, but he doesn’t want her to have to steal. After a while, Teresa says that she has to go back to her boyfriend or he’ll come looking for her. When a few months after that Dave sees her name in the obituaries, he hunts Gamada Makara down and adds his name to the obituaries too.)
When Dave is 16, he moves into a new foster home and gets a letter addressed to him the very next day.
The foster mother hands it over to him begrudgingly, because this is a home not of love, but of taking in children for the money. He will always be fed and clothed, but that is the extent of their care. He rips open the letter, and when he sees purple letters in fancy lettering, he steals cigarettes from the local corner store, then goes to cry and smoke at the abandoned McDonald’s 5 minutes away from the house.
Rose writes about herself and about him, and he doesn’t even question where she got her information. He has known since he was born the way time flowed around him, and he knows the facts of the other timeline. Dave knows he is a constant in every timeline, and he also knows that this is a doomed timeline, at least for him. Someday, he will die, and that will be it. He will carry on in another universe, but it won’t really be him. He heard about John Crocker’s death when he was twelve, and he cursed the world. Rose Lalonde being alive is his saving grace.
He writes back as soon as he gets his hand on a red pen, and in shaky penmanship, he tells her he’d like to meet sometime. He gets two letters from her over the span of a week. The first one has her agreeing, and saying she was going to cry to her mother until she gave in. The second, telling him to meet her at the airport in two weeks time.
He goes alone, and she comes alone. He holds up an ironic sign bestowing her name on it, and she smiles at him when she sees it. She comes over to him and hugs him long and hard. When people look at them weirdly, he tells them, “I’m picking up my younger sister from a long trip.” He blinks back tears behind his shades. A long trip indeed.
“You’re so much shorter than I remember,” he tells her with a grin.
“We are three years apart in age,” she says, and he shakes his head. They stay at her hotel together and just talk.
-
“How much do you remember?” She asks him one night while they’re lying on her bed. The only light is the one from the bathroom, but otherwise, it’s pitch black.
He is silent for a few moments, before he finally responds, his answer drowning in hurt. “Every time I remember we’re both going to die, I can feel my eyes melting out behind my sunglasses in front of the green sun. It’s only because it’s the last moment before the end can I get that much detail. Only the biggest parts of the timeline stick out to me with that clarity.”
“How much can you see in the future?” She asks, her voice trembling.
“...Everything, with two degrees of separation. I can see all of this timeline, in a way. I can see the most important moments in my life clearly. The in-betweens are just… too vague and blurry. But I know everything is fated, Rose. We’re free to make our own choices, but all our own choices would end up the same, adding up to those big moments. We live, and we’ll die. All I wanted to do is be okay, Rose. I just wanted to grow up and be okay.”
“Me too,” Rose says, and the weight of it just sits there.
-
“You’re staying with a college guy?” One of Rose’s classmates asks in surprise when she is nearly 16. “Shit, Lalonde. I didn’t think you were the type.”
Rose enters a public high school an hour away, and every day she regrets that decision, but she knows it was what she was supposed to do. She isn’t quite sure why, but she like a little surprise now and then. Sure, she knows word for word what she’s going to write in the future (if she already knew what she was going to write, was she always going to write it? Where did the words come from in the first place?) but that is a long and tedious process, even if she does know what to say. She has to start now if she wants her first book made when she’s 19.
“He’s my brother,” Rose says without looking up from her book, and her classmate goes silent, reveling in the awkwardness. “He’s not even in college. He’s directing movies. You know, the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movie that came out last month?”
“Your brother is Dave Strider?” The classmate asks in surprise. She just nods. “That movie is shit!”
“I’m sorry you’re so simple you can’t understand the symbolism and artistic value that makes up that film. The fact of the matter is that his films will go down in history as revolutionary pieces of the era, while you will die and fade into obscurity. Also, your face is shit,” she replied calmly, and her classmate sneered at her, obviously confused but trying not to show it.
“Jesus Christ, what? God, Lalonde. You’re such a fucking freak. I bet there’s a reason you live in the woods; like you’re hiding up that your mom is some bitchy homo or some shit.”
“No. That just isn’t true. You’ve got all your facts wrong. For one, I’m actually the goddamn fag here.” Rose snaps her book shut, and before her classmate could say one more thing, she stands up and punches her in the face.
There is a sickening crunch, and the classmate clutches their now-broken nose. Rose puts her book in her bag, hikes it up to her shoulder, and before anyone else in the room gets over their surprise of seeing quiet ol’ Rose Lalonde punch a person out, she leaves. She’ll be in trouble when she goes back, but she’s rich enough to deal with any fallout that would come her way. Besides, she has a call to make. She wouldn’t normally be that challenging, what with the insults and physical assault, but Jade English has or will die that day, and she is reveling in the mourning period that has lasted all her life and will continue until she is wiped off of the planet.
When she steps outside to where the potheads smoke, the two that are out there scramble to hide the weed. She just rolls her eyes. “I have to make a call. Don’t bother me, I won’t bother you. I just broke a girl’s nose, I couldn’t care less.” They stare at her and then each other before shrugging and continuing to get high.
Rose turns away and dials on the latest disposable flip-phone Dave had bought her.
(Two years earlier, Rose had called him in a panic because she was bored and looking into John’s life again and it wasn’t a freak accident. It was a baby. That’s when she looked for Jade and found a young boy named Jake. And it was horrible, it was horrible because they came on meteors and it was happening again. Sburb was happening again. They cried for three hours, and when they stopped, Rose looked into Jane Crocker and Jake English and found Betty Crocker, and found-)
(She wasn’t lying when she was saying Dave’s movie was chock full of symbolism.)
“Yo,” Dave says, picking up on the second tone.
“Today’s the day,” Rose says without returning the greeting.
“Oh damn, why didn’t you say so? Alright, let's get the mourning period over with. I’ll be at the bar.”
“You’re eighteen and I’m fifteen,” she points out, and she knows he’s shrugging beyond the phone.
“Cool. Meet you there?”
“Naturally.” She hangs up, throws the phone on the ground, and smashes it to smithereens with her foot. The potheads look at her weird, but they’re potheads, so what do they know?
-
Dave buys Rose a drink at a shady bar by way of bribery. Rose gets a whiskey, Dave gets some girly, fruity drink. They clink their glasses and mourn Jade English and Jade Harley, who is going to die that day. They curse the Condense. They curse the future. Dave orders three more drinks and then curses every single smarmy fuck who thinks they know better than him on what should happen during SBaHJ.
To John Egbert. To the trolls. To the Seer of Light. To the Knight of Time. To Mom, to Dad, and not to Sburb.
-
When Rose is 19, she sends out her manuscript for the first Complacency of the Learned to thirteen different publishing companies. While she waits for a response, she accompanies Dave to the premiere of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff: the movle. She and Dave hire an up-and-coming fashion designer, Kanya Mariam, to make the shittiest outfits imaginable: matching suits baring the faces of the movle’s title characters. Kanya agrees to make them after a lot of money is offered, on the agreement that if they ever come to her again, they ask for at least one thing nice looking. Rose asks for her number because Kanya already seems to be very nice looking. Kanya stammers and tells her that her number is on her website. Rose finds this very endearing.
The press hounds her, but she is a paragon of chill. When a reporter asks her if she and Dave are together, she leans in very close to the reporter’s microphone, smiles, and tells them that she and Dave are siblings, she is a lesbian, and she really, honestly would like Kanya Mariam to call her sometime. The press doesn’t try to ask her a lot of questions after that.
The movie is as perfectly shitty as it ought to be, and Rose catches every rebellious reference. The 10-minute shot of them farting during Hella Jeff’s birthday party while they are eating cake. When Sweet Bro smushes the jelly out of the jelly tube and it cascades down, often looking like gushers, before getting slurped the fuck up by Hella Jeff. The token female character of the day’s obvious love of video games and the way she just falls down all those fucking stairs when she tries to bring her video games downstairs. Rose catches every single one.
Several days later, her manuscript is approved, and she gets an editor. His name is Karim Vantas, and he has a lot of opinions about her book, most of them good. She thinks he gets off on being in control, and when she mentions this to Dave one day, he asks to see him.
When Rose walks in with Dave in tow, introducing him as “her irritating brother who decided to tag along,” Karim recognizes him and immediately stands up and shouts at Dave about how horrible his movies are for twenty-six minutes. She counts. It’s love at first site.
-
Dave is 25 when he calls Rose over a nightmare. Karim is fast asleep next to him, and the night is hazy with warmth. It’s summer in Texas, and he wakes up itchy. He feels like he did during his first and last LSD trip, where Rose had to restrain him because he thought he had come up wrinkly and bugs had crawled under the overlapping skin.
They know Sburb is happening and they know beta 4 are constants in different ways, so why does only John and Jade have kids primed up and ready to play? He doesn’t know why they haven’t thought of this. They’re busy, sure, but not so busy to miss this fatal flaw. Rose doesn’t have an answer, so she tells him she’ll look into the future and call him back later. She hangs up and Dave can’t go back to sleep.
Karim wakes up blearily, with Dave rocking in a corner clutching a phone to his face with his shades pushed up. There are tears tracking down his face, and the world feels a little unreal because he has never seen Dave cry ever (that’s not the only reason, but it’s the main reason).
Karim gets up, walks over, and lays against him. Dave sobs once, and he holds his hand. He can sort of hear Rose’s voice buzzing through the phone, but he can’t make out anything she’s saying. Kanya texts him to ask if he knows why Dave and Rose are crying to each other over the phone, and he tells her that he honestly has no idea.
Kanya brushes out Rose’s hair while she just sobs and screams screams that one would attribute to being stabbed to death, not a phone call with a brother. Rose yells about how it just isn’t fair, and it breaks Kanya’s heart to see her so utterly ruined.
Kanya only manages to pull Rose away from the phone because she exhausts herself from crying so much that she doesn’t put up a fight when she is picked up and carried to the bed. Kanya tells Dave that Rose has to go, and he tells her seriously to destroy the phone. Rose mumbles a repeated sentiment, so Kanya goes to their backyard and chainsaws it in half.
She doesn’t typically be the big spoon, but Kanya makes an exception when Rose looks so wrecked. Kanya curls an arm around her stomach and breathes in the scent of Rose’s shampoo. Rose begins to whisper sometime in the night about how she’ll never even get to meet them. Kanya, who is mostly asleep, tells her that they’ll get through this. Rose burrows even deeper backwards, but does not otherwise respond.
-
When Rose is 24, she and Dave sit their partners down and present them with hundreds of cheap phones.
“What the hell?” Karim asks, his eyes wide. There are piles of flip phones, threatening to spill out and fall off the table. Rose has been dating Kanya for four years, Dave and Karim for three, but they haven’t told them the whole truth about a lot of things.
Rose opens her mouth to explain, but looks to Dave first, who is sitting next to her. She can just slightly see his eyes behind his shades, and he looks scared. He gives her the tiniest of nods, and she starts to talk.
She explains the nightmare that started her life and the way it slowly progressed into reality. She tells them of the dead comedian that plagues her powers. She talks about finding Dave and then meeting him again.
Dave jumps in and explains the muscle memory that carried on from another life, that fear that ingrained into him. He talks about the old woman only briefly but also tells them that she is dead now for opposing a witch. He speaks with bitterness and in a monotone when he informs them about Bro’s death and the foster home jumping.
They speak together when they talk about Sburb and Betty Crocker and the children of their friends.
“Our children will never know us. They will live four hundred years in the future, and they will be the final harbingers of the batterwitch’s end,” Rose says, and her voice creaks sadly. Kanya reaches a hand across the table and rests it on Rose’s arm.
“So. You guys believe us?” Dave says a little awkwardly, and Karim blows up. He goes through every single stage of grief in an hour, which Rose almost finds impressive.
“None of what you’re saying makes any sense! This is all made up and you’re just trying to fuck with us!” He starts with denial, which is countered by Rose revealing several facts about his childhood he’s tried to keep locked the hell down.
“Well, then why didn’t you tell us beforehand, hmm? Almost five goddamn years of knowing you chucklefucks, and you suddenly decide you’re just gonna pay all the expenses for a five-star luxury vacation at the ski lodge for What The Fuck Mountains we didn’t ask for!” He stews and shouts about this for a little bit before moving on.
“What if- what if- what if we all band together!? All of us! We can inform the world and take down that goddamn evil witch-face with no death involved besides hers! If after she comes down, we’ll just tell them it’s just her on the ship, and then we can defeat her!” He gets visibly defeated after this one, looking like a cornered cat despite there being no need for him to lead.
He has Dave take him into another room so that they can talk for a while. 4th stage: depression. Kanya takes Rose’s hand and she stares blankly at the wall while nobody talks. It’s hard to believe this is real. Is this real? Kanya has never been quite sure, and this situation does nothing to help.
Karim and Dave come out together an hour and a half later and they sit down on the couch across from the other happy couple. “So,” Karim says after a few minutes of quiet. “What now?”
-
When Dave is 28, the heir to the Betty Crocker throne disappears, and a giant alien ship appears in her place.
The thing is massive, red, and deadly looking. It sends the world governments into a panic-induced frenzy, and the four meet up. Dave and Karim talk constantly on the phone, and he assumes Rose and Kanya do the same, but with the impending welcoming of the alien empresses, they decided it would be safer for all of them to live separately and meet rarely. It was difficult, the first few months of living alone again, but they adjusted.
The couples hug each other for a long time, and then so do Dave and Rose. They are both several mediums in, with Dave on his sixth movie and Rose on her third verbose tome. Sometimes Dave feels like splitting apart, but throwing himself in his works makes it easier to pretend everything is okay.
They’re all fucked up. Karim looks more exhausted than the last time Dave saw him, and he’s gotten into the habit of chewing his nails till they’re bloody stumps, despite the site of blood making him nauseous beyond all else. When he can’t chew anything because it’s already been mangled to death, he learns to wield sickles by watching YouTube videos Dave sends him.
Kanya bulked up in terms of muscle, but has gotten a lot paler. She attributes this to staying in and working harder on her orders, most of which she hand sews. They’re usually for Rose or Dave, who can afford to give her as much money as she requests. She also informs them her strength is due to her learning to wield a chainsaw better, which she uses for both topiaries, and to sate the fear of death that has been slowly creeping into her mind since she last met up with them all.
Rose has huge bags under her eyes, and looks like an angel who fell to hell face-first. She tells them how she’s begun to drink and vape to deal with the stress, as well as preparing her home for the arrival of Roxy by wrapping up gifts years in advance and stocking the home with food, clothing, and (shamefully) alcohol.
Dave is angry, apathetic, and tired. If not for the other three, it’s likely he would just waste all his time waiting to die. With the loss of his support system being nearby, he began to fall into old bad habits, rehashed, such as smoking and getting in fights. He mentions how he’s trying to make the apartment perfect for Dirk, but it just feels like he’s just giving him random, and perhaps, even cruel jokes. He is not contested on this.
They all meet in Utah, which is out of the way, and hodunk enough to be conspicuous while still modern. They all made a game of counting how many churches the passed on their way driving to the rendezvous point and comparing when they saw each other again. Karim won with a total of thirty-two churches spotted. He made a shortcut through a neighborhood at one point and passed three in a straight line.
They all get waffles at a food truck they see in the parking lot of a grocery store, and finally sit down together at an old-fashioned soda place, populated mostly by acne-ridden Mormon teenagers who thought they would go to hell if they drank alcohol. Jokes on them. They were already in hell.
They sit at a back table, which is made of old soda caps plated over with glass, and talk about what had been happening since they last met. Karim talks Dave’s ear off about the bitch of a client he had a few weeks beforehand while Kanya gazes lovingly into Rose’s eyes. Eventually, it devolves into naming what strange sodas the table has come from between bites of waffle, and it’s the most comfortable any of them have felt in months.
At some point, some poor teen worker approaches them meekly and asks if they really are Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde. After they confirm, she asks for their autographs and their opinions on the big spaceship that arrived in the sky earlier.
Dave whips out 4x6 pictures of him and Rose he keeps on his person most times, and they both sign them, with little doodles of a gear and a sun on their respective photos. They hand them over, and Dave pulls his shades down just a little so that she can see his eyes. He tells her that if she ever gets the chance, to give the asshole alien hell. The worker almost passes out, and then scurries back to the employees only section.
Dave takes the last bite of his waffle, and then suggests they get out of there.
-
When Rose is 29, someone tries to assassinate her for the first time.
The media and press have slowly devolved over the years, and most celebrities are pinned to the same level as political leaders in the desperation for some structure of the world. The alien has not attacked, but the world is always afraid she is going to. The most she’s done is advocate for the destruction of sanity.
The year the assassination attempt happens is, coincidentally or not, the year when Guy Fieri is elected onto the Supreme Court. Rose advocates for his impeachment almost the second he comes into power, and that made the large target on her back that she set when she was born even bigger.
She learned to sleep light, thankfully, and when she hears the gentle press of less trained footsteps creak her floorboard, her eyes snap open, wide awake. Rose catches the assassin by surprise and stabs them through the eyes before they get a chance to fight back. She disposes of the body in a Taco Bell’s back trash and then flies over to where Kanya is living at the time (Vermont, New Hampshire) while drenched in their blood. She looks so angry, no one asks her about it.
She called earlier and gets buzzed in by Kanya when she arrives, and walks up to her bedroom. Rose enters quietly, and when she sees her girlfriend, all her anger dissipates, and she slumps over in her arms.
“I understand if you don’t want to be with me,” she says later while she is in the shower, washing the crusted red and brown out of her hair. Kanya is sitting on the toilet, sitting back with her eyes closed. “Since me and my brother are both so vocal with our rebellion, being so closely associated with us like this might get assassins knocking at your door. I won’t be angry if you don’t want that kind of risk.”
Kanya doesn’t move, but just answers tiredly: “Let’s get married.”
The room is silent, besides the pattering of the water coming out of the showerhead. Rose doesn’t have anything to say to that for several minutes, but when she picks up the body wash, she reads the label and realizes it’s the same type she’s used for years, but knows Kanya hates the feeling of on bare skin. It’s brand new. She bought it for her when she heard Rose was coming because she heard that she had just killed a person and likely wanted a shower, to wipe away blood and the unclean feeling it would leave. She doesn’t care. She just wants to support her.
“Yes,” Rose says, her voice full of emotion. “Of course. Let’s get married.”
Kanya smiles gently, still not opening her eyes.
-
When Dave is 33, his sister gets hitched.
It’s a small ceremony. As small as you can get. Rose’s mom died when she was eighteen and she’s not close to anyone else, so it’s just him, her, Kanya, and Karim. Karim is officiating, and Dave is the witness. They hold it in the woods near Rose’s home, which is actually the one she lived in when she is a child. When Dave first arrived, she pointed out a large tomb and told him that’s where her first cat was buried. He told her that was the most baller thing ever and offered her a bunp she left him hanging with.
Dave will never admit it, but he cries. Everyone cries, actually, so it’s not like he’s an outlier in terms of who is being so not totally wicked cool. Later, before eating the homemade cupcakes that were cooked less than an hour before (no baking mix, but making a wedding cake by hand was a little more difficult), Kanya stands up with a champagne flute and talks about how if she had to spend the end of the world with anyone and while being anything, she's glad it’s Rose, and while being her wife. Rose then adds on that she’s happy to be with her friends and that she’s here with all of them now. For a moment, the future is forgotten, and when Kanya smashes a frosted cupcake into Rose’s face, they all laugh more earnestly than they have in years.
That night, when Karim is curled onto Dave’s half-naked body as they try to catch sleep in the mansion room assigned to them, he brings up the topic that had been on both of the men's minds since they first heard of the quiet affair of a proposal a few months prior.
“Do you think we should get married?” Karim asks, tracing the moles on Dave’s skin that he’s always thought looks like the star sign for cancer.
“Do you want to get married?” Dave inquires a little defensively. “I know we’ve been together for a while, but that’s different in a way. We live far enough apart and have so few in-person interactions that it takes a bit of digging to really connect us. Getting married.. With Rose and Kanya, I don’t know. They wanted this. This- this- quiet thing. I don’t want that. I want you. I want people to know you. Everything about me is a personal fucking secret. If we do get married, I don’t want to have to hide you.”
Karim is quiet as he considers this, and Dave finds himself afraid, which hasn’t happened since Kanya called him in the middle of the night to inform him Rose was staying over at her place because she had just killed someone. One defining moment from his last life (so he could actually remember it) was when Rose went horrorterror. He knew her mom’s death had taken a toll on her this time around as well, but she hadn’t been studying her ‘voodoo majiks’ as well as she had been recently. Kanya was too tired to explain everything in that phone call, so it took a few hours to find out it was in self-defense, but he had been sort of terrified she had gone off the deep end. While him diving into that pool would probably make him kill himself, he always worried that the whole situation would make her batshit crazy and start going after others. It was a relief, to say the least when he found out nothing remotely close to that happened.
“I always dreamed of having a fairytale wedding, even as a kid. Even when I thought I wasn’t going to live past sixteen. Even when I would’ve thrown up at the thought of having to be in a dress. I always looked past that, and I stayed a romantic. And here I am, with everything I wanted, and a few things I never expected I’d have to deal with. And here I am. With you. When we hit the four-year mark, I guess I got quietly resigned to being silent about you, and I figured I wasn’t going to get that, like, Hallmark movie wedding. But hearing you say that, it’s just- it’s just-” Karim stops because his voice begins to break, and he brings his hand to his eyes, which are slowly beginning to leak tears.
“Yeah?” Dave asks, bright hope peppering in through the cracks of his life. He’s found more and more things black and white for him. His death, the unfairness, the cruelness of Bro, the loss of friends and family. He’s gotten bitter, yet whenever he thinks his ideologies are set in stone, he’s surprised by his own ability to change. “You’d put up with a big, public, stupid, somewhat ironic yet surprisingly sincere wedding?”
“I wouldn’t just put up with it. I’d gladly go with it!” Karim laughs gleefully. “You, on the other hand, would have to put up with me taking so much control over it, you’d be wondering why I’m not just fucking it, with how tightly I’ll have it by the balls!”
“I can’t believe you’re having an affair,” he replies with a laugh and tangles his legs with him. The heat of Karim’s thighs is warm, but the heat of Dave’s heart feels even warmer.
-
When Rose is 38, things begin to blur. Just a little bit.
2024 is the year the first (and last) dual-presidents of the United States are elected into office. The acts of the Juggalos are insane, but nothing quite sparks an outrage in the public like the presidents and Supreme Court, consisting only of Guy Fieri, deciding to change several sections to many important U.S documents and regulations, such as abolishing the electoral college, along with the free vote. The two-year term clause is also scrapped, and it’s a measure of how long the presidents will live to determine the rule, much like in a monarchy.
When protesters go outside the White House to protest, all of them go missing and end up dead. They are found in various states over the next few months, but this is before the death toll really begins to climb, so they are searched for. Kanya’s older sister, Prim, is one of the missing. When Prim is found, bleeding dark green, Rose realizes how young she was when she died.
There are so many moments when she was a kid when everything seemed to blend into each other. Thirteen and thirteen mixed like paint, and then that was the end of her memories. She is thirty-eight, almost twenty-five years older. She was so young then. How young will she find herself when she actually does die?
Kanya cries frequently, and Rose thinks she knows how she feels. It’s raining during Prim’s funeral, which is so cliche, but it’s also insanely bright; almost white. When Rose leaves the hotel they’re staying at that evening to buy cheap beer from the corner store down the street, the sun is setting. The sky is a mess of colors and looks like it’s being ripped apart, like when Kanya will tear failing sections of her sewing apart in quick movements.
After the death, she and Kanya go to their respective homes, and she focuses on really making sure that Roxy will be living in a prepared house. When inspecting the future rooms through meditation to assure there aren’t any continuity errors (how would that even work? Everything is predetermined yet nothing is? Years and years and years and she still doesn’t know how it works), she notices her daughter has a poster for Complacency and she stops and smiles. Rose had been thinking about having Dave do the movies. Her story, his directing genius, and they’d make something pretentious, rebellious, and shitty, which describes a majority of their relationship.
Rose holds Kanya’s hand as she tells her about her future daughter and the way that she’ll have at least something to remember her by. Kanya, who is breathing slowly and trying to focus on anything but Prim, congratulates her.
“She’d technically be my daughter too, wouldn’t she?” Kanya asks eventually. Rose is silent for several moments after she says that, and then breaks into uncontrollable giggles. She never did want to get married and have a family. She was always too worried about turning into her mother. Divorced, a single mother, and distant. How funny, the way life works out. Rose has the power to see into the future, and she never saw it coming.
Eventually, Kanya joins in on her laughter, and they form a halo with the way their hysterics light up Roxy’s room and heart, exactly four hundred years later.
-
When Dave is 45, the Hilarocaust begins.
There are so many things that are killing people those days. First, they made all the tap water Faygo. Replaced the national anthem. Got rid of the vote and the two-term policy. Enforced a law requiring every school to have a class dedicated solely to listening and memorizing their songs, non-optional. Then, this.
It’s just too fucking much.
When Dave sees on the news stories about people being dragged from their homes for not ‘mirthing it up,’ it takes everything in him not to go after them right away. At the moment, all he can do is hide people, make movies, and quietly oppose their rule.
When on the red carpet for his newest movie, Rose’s first CotL book out on screen and ripping into the Condesce as poetically as possible, he is questioned by a gang of reporters. First, about his outfit (A custom-made Mariam-Lalonde suit. Made of smooth, fancy red and black silk. The entire back half of it is cut off, exposing his heart-patterned boxer shorts for the world to swoon over. Karim is wearing a sweater and a long plaid skirt. Because he has a little more class. Yes, Dave, the combat boots COMPLETE the class because this way he can stomp on assholes with grace), the movie (It’s sicknasty, is all he has to say on it. Rose gave him a hell of a job for trying to turn a book that can knock an old lady unconscious into a two-hour movie), and then, about the Hilarocaust.
“Mr. Strider-Vantas, what do you think of the presidents’ new policy of sending anyone deemed insufficiently mirthful being sent to the new death camps, led by the Condesce's High Chaplain of Interstellar War, Guy Fieri?” The reporter asks, shoving the microphone in his face.
Dave looks to the distance and vaguely says: “I’ve dealt with clowns before. Both metaphorical and literal. Don’t care for ‘em. I find with clowns, Juggalos… someone always ends up dead. Guess I was right. Never liked their songs, anyways. No more questions, please.”
He and Karim travel down the red carpet a little farther, and he can hear Rose and Kanya, only several feet behind, being asked the same questions. They look baller thanks to Kanya as always, the movie is definitely gonna be great. Rose provides misdirection from the Juggalo question by telling the reporter that their mother will be taken to the death camps in two weeks time and they really should call her while they have the chance.
The movie isn’t his finest work, but it’s still good. The books are a lot better, but he knows that most in the present won’t consider reading them. In the future, they’ll likely be an inspiration to rise against the Condesce. Or something to kill old women with so that they might put them out of their misery. One of the two.
He hugs Rose when they exit the theater, anyways.
-
When Rose is 44, she holds a dinner party and invites Ryan Seacrest.
“You’re in romantic comedies, correct? My brother’s husband is a very dedicated fan of the genre of romance. I would call him my friend, but I do think two degrees of separation is best for this field, wouldn’t you say?” She asks and passes Ryan a mostly full wine glass. “Walk with me?”
She is wearing a dark purple, velvet dress. The train pools and sweeps behind her, and the only things that indicate the slightest patented Lalonde oddness are the earrings that look like rather sharp, realistic daggers, and the fact that the dress was made by her own wife. Rose is not the most elegant looking woman at the party, but she does seem like it, with the way she carries herself, and how her eyes seem to hold more knowledge behind her sharp eyeliner than any mortal person should have.
“Haha, I can attest to that! This business is so much of who you know rather than what you do. Well, I may have a name that sounds like it should be in rom-coms, but, ah. No, I used to produce Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but now I produce that reality show about the White House workers, trying to make sense of the way the world has changed.” He takes a sip of his wine and makes a face. “What is this?”
“This? Oh, it’s Chateau Margaux from 1875. One bottle was owned by Thomas Jefferson, at a point. Delectable, non?” She replies, and the corner of her mouth quirks up just a bit. “I paid an extortionate price for it. But nothing is too good for my guests. Not to mention, I have so much money, I could use it as toilet paper if I so wished. Anyways, Ryan, I have a few questions about that show you are producing.”
“Go right ahead,” he says, frowning at his wine before drinking some more. They found themselves in a large hallway decorated with several pictures of wizards.
“Don’t mind the paintings,” Rose says. “They were my mother’s. Right, yes. Mr. Seacrest, it’s well known that you are a supporter of the Empress’s eventual takeover, as well as her candidates in the presidential seat. Can I ask why you decided to make a show highlighting many of the in-between moments that the White House provides?”
“Well, I- I suppose I wanted people to realize that the insanity gracing the outside of the world is nothing like the inside of their place. Help them rationalize. People always like to remember things could be worse. Ms. Lalonde, this wine tastes a bit off to me.”
“Right. Well, Mr. Seacrest, it’s surprising that you’d like to tell me that you wish to inspire a "grass is always browner on the other side of the fence” disposition. Actually, I must say, it works quite well. Too well, in fact. I’m sure you know of this, eh, Mr. Seacrest?“
"I- I-” he stammers, but Rose barrels on with no regard for his pathetic attempts to steer her away from the topic.
“Oh, you’re just too good, Mr. Seacrest. If we get up the people’s hopes while still lowering their expectations for the present and the future, they won’t be any position to make any demands. If you can settle the world for disgusting creatures who intend on ruining our love for living, this gives those creatures space to let in someone that will take away any feelings for living.”
“Ms. Lalonde, what-” Ryan attempts to interrupt, but she just raises the volume on her words ever so slightly and ignores him.
“Then, once the people are used to them, they will have no objections when the Empress comes and sweeps them away and gives the place more class. If they did haven’t any disagreements, there would be too little of a populace to even consider opposing her. All this subtle manipulation, without having to leave the true comfort of your bed. Crafty, crafty, Mr. Seacrest,” she states, her voice cool and clinical like she is a doctor describing what medication to take for the flu.
“Um, Ms. Lalonde-” he tries once more, and she finally pins him with a look.
“Oh, no, Mr. Seacrest. What is it? Please, do go on.”
He is silent at her mocking sympathy for a moment, but then meekly questions: “Did you- Did you- What did you put in this drink?”
Rose blinks at him, and then smiles, raising her own glass a little bit, as if she is toasting him on some unspoken joke. “Arsenic,” she says, and then takes a long drink of her wine. His eyes widen, and she turns on her heels. She leaves him in the hall, and only stops at the doorway to turn to him and tell him: “Have a good last few hours.” With the push of a button, two large metal doors slide closed on both ends of the hall, trapping Ryan in with the wizard paintings. He faintly hears the clicking of her heels as she walks away.
-
When Dave is 52, Ben Stiller, one of his closest friends and confidants outside of his family, is crucified on the Washington Monument.
After his death, the Condesce bundles up all his SBaHJ movies, cleans up all the shitty glitch artifacts, and releases them all over the world in killer HD quality. With a decent business model and everything! Dave gets pissed. Super pissed. Too far, too fast. Those are lines you don’t cross. You don’t touch Ben Stiller, and you don’t. Touch. The memes.
“We have to wait, Dave,” Rose tells him, and he’s shaking hard. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it is. For personal reasons, and then for different personal reasons.
“We’re all going to die, Rosie,” he says with a gasp. She would chew him out for calling her that, but he’s obviously in distress. His entire life, he’s known he was going to die. It shaped how he lived, how he loved, and how he played cat and mouse. But deep down, he’s always been so sick of it. So scared. So mad.
Whenever he would ask Rose how close they were to their deaths, Rose would tell him to wait until Stiller stilled. And now, they’re so close. He needs to- he’s not ready to- Karim has to be- “Two years, Dave.” That’s her calendar. He breathes in, then breathes out. Two years and he dies. Two years until the end of the end of the world, at least for him.
After leaving Rose, he goes to Karim, and they spar for hours. Dave’s sword against Karim’s sickles and it leaves him even more exhausted and aching inside. When Dave blocks a hit, he feels the power reverberate down to his bones, and he feels like sobbing. They finally collapse together on one of the couches and cuddle while they watch bad TV. He pretends to be okay, and Karim pretends to be alright, and they both pretend to believe each other.
After Stiller’s death, he saw people beginning to immortalize him. They crucified him; like Jesus if he were real. Stiller, such a peace-loving man, was martyred, which was the exact opposite of what the presidents were trying to do. There were statues made of his weird, sort of gaunt face. They were making good statues of him. Making a legacy for him. It was hopefully something resembling the legacy Dave would leave behind, with the way it inspired people to live.
“What’ll you do when I’m gone?” Dave finally asks one night, a couple of months before Rose said they were due to fight. The night is cold, despite the global warming that was starting to happen. Apparently, all the ice caps were set to melt, and that’s why he and Rose had to set their kid’s places so high up.
“Blow my brains out, probably,” Karim answers gruffly. “I’ll be old. You’ll be dead. I don’t want to be tortured. I think Kanya’s probably going to do the same thing, honestly. We would help try and fight good ol’ fish Hitler, but I think we’re banned from that, yeah? I honestly think we only lasted this long because of you and Rose. With the state of the world, and no more you, what’s the point of it all?”
Dave is silent for a very long time. He pets Karim’s hair, threading his fingers through it, and thinks very hard. The night is mostly quiet, but there’s a government building near there, and it’s mandated that all government buildings have to play ICP songs 24/7.
Dave is silent for so long, that Karim falls asleep. He didn’t have anything totally not-pathetic to say, anyways. He just kisses the top of his head and hopes that the other him will be a lot happier, wherever he is.
-
When Rose is 50, she kills Guy Fieri.
“Rose, darling,” Kanya says as she shakes her awake in the morning. “Today is the day.”
She groggily pulls herself up and stretches out, her back cracking. Good lord, she’s getting old. Wonderful that she'll be dead soon then. She doubts her fifties would be kind to her.
Rose pulls Kanya in for a kiss. Deep, hard, sleepy, but still magical enough that it makes her dizzy. Oh, how she'll miss this woman with all her heart. Well, another version of her has another version of Kanya, or so she's been brought to believe. She's glad someone out there is happy. Besides, can you really miss someone when you're dead?
“Are my wands all charged up?” Rose asks while she drags herself out of bed. Contrary to common belief, Rose does not have magic powers outside of her ability to see the future. The skill is that her wands are very sharp, very long, and pack a very powerful laser that glows white like most would expect of magic.
“I checked on them earlier. They're full, dear.” Kanya’s voice is sad, and Rose frowns when she enters the bathroom. She flicks the light on and yawns to the mirror. Her eyes trace the knots in her own hair, and she begins to claw them out.
“Thank you, Kanya. Remember, I’ll be meeting you and the other two in three days at that twenty-hour place that has the horribly addicting mozzarella sticks,” she informs her, and she hears her wife hum in agreement from the other room.
Despite the impending murders, the morning is startlingly normal and calm. Rose irons out the day’s outfit while Kanya scrounges up breakfast for the both of them. They make conversation over the coffee machine, and Rose dumps too much sugar and creamer into her mug. Rose backs up her latest writing project. Kanya kisses her goodbye before one or both of them head to respective engagements. They both said fuck it and moved in together a while back, taking on hatred, fear, and death hand in hand, and lapsed into a domesticity that is not left unappreciated.
Rose smiles at Kanya before she gets in her car. She smiles back, tears threatening to spill out of her glistening green eyes. Practically jade. Rose steps into the driver’s seat and closes the door before she can have second thoughts about just staying and letting the world crumble around them. She’s gone the easy way on a lot of things, but this is something she just can’t back out of.
The house was in New York, and she had to drive hours to get to where the fight would occur. She had been tracking the High Chaplain for long while, in more public ways than she truly needed. She just wished for the Chaplain to know he was being watched, and to get ready for a fight. So, the next day, she would strike. Guy Fieri would find himself in Nunavut, Canada, and soon after, so would Rose.
When she crosses the border, she receives a text from Dave on the burner phone she brought. They’ve slowly been wearing thin, but also, they’ve been looking to make their intentions known, so they haven’t been needed quite as much. That day is an exception.
The text reads “just got my sword sharpened got my board itll be totally sick ttyl” and then an emoticon with sunglasses. It is a relief that he will never be cool, despite how much time and how many universes pass by. She replies with the location she was at ten minutes before and then throws the phone out of the window as she drives.
Rose goes in a mostly straight line, going as fast as she can. With the death toll rising, there aren’t as many people on the road. Eventually, Rose discards her car in a lake, and hops on a private plane she made sure was ready to be flown weeks before. She’s managed to cram as many miles as possible into the short hours of the day, but, inevitably, she must go faster.
The plane is automated, so Rose spends the trip sleeping and watching old noir movies while letting the computer to do the work. She tries her best not to let the situation sink in, but she knows she has already failed such a task. Her fate was brought to her on a pink platter many years before, and she is no more equipped to handle it than she was then.
She falls under the spell of sleep when it’s dark out, and she wakes up when the plane lands several hours later. Rose breathes in and out deeply and steps down the airplane’s stairs. She watches the sky, matching the blue paint swatches that Kanya brought home ages ago when they were redecorating the place. It smells like fire and death, which is a stench that Rose has found polluting the air for years.
The last leg of the journey is nothing compared to the space she compacted in less than two days, and it is barely evening when Rose reaches her location. The roar of Bloody Falls nearby is nothing compared to the screaming she can almost hear dripping off of him, that disgusting fiend. The High Chaplain’s back faces her when she steps onto the bridge, but there is no doubt that he is aware of her presence.
“So,” he says with a dark chuckle, “you finally came, then.”
“Guy Fieri, High Chaplain of the Interstellar War,” she says, cold and flat. There is no forgiveness for his crimes, so she grants him not a second to spare on his trickery. “The harbinger of billions of deaths. The third and final Antichrist.” She pauses. “The host of an abhorred Food Network show. How do you plead?”
“Oh my, Ms. Lalonde. Jumping right into that, are we?” He grins, and Rose hisses at him. Guy Fieri turns around slowly, the night sky making contrasting shadows with his spiky hair to give him a look that borders on menacing. “Well then. Guilty, I suppose, to everything about the comment about my show being bad.”
“Do you feel guilty about any of your actions?” Rose questions, pulling her daggers out of her dress. “Any of them? Do you feel remorse, empathy, anything, anything at all for the millions of millions of people who have died under your hand?”
He narrows his eyes at her, and his gaze flits from her weapons, then back to her face. “You can’t bring them back, Lalonde. I feel nothing but like a god. Antichrist. That’s basically a god, right?”
Rose snarls at his mockery and crouches into a position where she is ready to strike at any moment. He sees this movement but just grins at her slow and easy, like she is not a force to be taken seriously. His crimes had already been committed. She couldn't repay them by any stretch of the imagination. But she could wipe the bloodstained grin off that fat bastard's face.
She launches towards him, and he makes a move to block her with his death-stained hands, but she twists out of the way and lands on the other side. As she moves, she spits in his face, and jabs her needles in his eyes. He turns with her, but by then, it too late. He screams in agony, and Rose’s hands tighten around the purple yarn connected to the daggers. With a grin, she pulls hard, and he falls when the daggers are removed from his eyes.
His eyes squirted out an obscene amount of blood, and now her dress is all dirty. So when Rose breathes heavily, attempting to calm her nerves, and she hears the waterfall crash behind her, she has a wonderful, awful idea on how to clean herself up.
She rides the chaplain down the falls, and leaves his body for the wolves.
For no obvious reason, Rose finds herself bone tired. Before changing or heading to the rendezvous point, she somehow finds a payphone, still intact, and dials a number that she knows by heart.
When the phone picks up, she smiles a little unsteady, but happily, and says: “Hi, Kanya. I just got finished down here. How’s your day been?”
-
When Dave is 54, he holds Karim’s hand alive for the last time.
It all mushes together. Dave kills the presidents several months beforehand, skateboards away into the air like a badass, and then goes and eats with his favorite people at his favorite least favorite restaurant. After that, he goes into hiding. He’s almost kind of disappointed there isn’t more celebration after the Juggalos deaths, but you win some, you lose some.
The four of them- himself, Karim, Kanya, and Rose -keep together, and keep moving. There’s always a new place to be, a new supporter to kill, and a new person chasing them. Keeps them busy and on their toes.
He and Karim go in disguises on his last day, and drink at a coffee shop like their lives are normal. Dave kisses him like it’ll all be okay. Karim smiles like he didn't buy a hundred-pill bottle of sleeping pills a year ago he's saving up.
Then, the scene changes, and they're both crying. Goodbye, he says. Goodbye, his husband echoes. The sky is angry and red, and the Condescension knows they are coming for her. Rose grips his hand after saying goodbye to Kanya, and they begin to roll out.
The scene shifts again, and he's still holding Rose's hand. There's a sword in his neck and a hole in her stomach. They fall, but they fall together, and Dave dies from the asphyxiation, or maybe the blood loss, or maybe from choking on his own blood.
His last thought is 'Why don't I get scenes as long as Rose does?’ which makes him think he's going delirious first.
-
When Rose is [ERROR ERROR ERROR], she finds herself in a new place.
It hurts, and then it doesn't. When Rose Lalonde opens up her eyes, she closes them back down. It is too bright, wherever she is. She thinks she'll never open her eyes again, until she hears the sound of a balloon popping in reverse and the movement of a person in front of her. Slowly, she raises her eyelids.
She hopes her heart is carved out before she catches the glimmer in her eyes. She smiles and the white of her bones changes into a deserted, rotting black. She smells faintly of your lavender and hate and blood, and she cannot resist any of them.
“Kanya,” Rose whispers, and staggers forwards. She opens her arms and she falls into them. They catch her and grip tightly, warming away a coldness in her core. She brings two fingers to Rose's neck and they realize at the same time that she has no pulse.
“Rose,” she croons. She looks up at Kanya and watches intently as her head shifts ever so slightly. It buzzes and softly blurs into a younger shape, something with horns. Then again, the horns disappear, and the head is changed into a face one must strain to recognize. The features move for several moments before it slows to a stop and Kanya settles at the bottom, where you began. Kanya smiles at her.
“Are we dead?” Rose asks, and her voice cracks and drags. She nods, and she feels sad in a way you haven’t in years. “Dave? Karim?”
“They’re dead too.” Her voice is gentle like it’s never been before, and there's a realization that she has never been fragile enough for her hands to wrap Rose's heart and keep it warm. A sob builds up in her throat, and Rose's hands fall apart violently. Multiple versions of herself glitch away, and she can see past all of them into the bones that are harbored deep under layers of skin. Kanya’s fingers dance up her spine until they curl into Rose's hair. “Are you alright?”
“A-are they here too? Are they safe?” She cannot breathe. No. Wait. There is no urge to breathe. Rise finds no urge to breathe, so in defiance of her body, she sucks in cold air through clenched teeth. Kanya kisses her forehead, and another hand touches the small of her back. She jerks in surprise and twists, her hands going to where she keeps her wands.
Not only are the weapons not there, but there really isn’t a need for them. Rose is met face to face with the boy she grew and died with. Dave, dead and well before her. He still wears shades, even in the haunting afterthought of a god unsteady, and she finds comfort in this. He is accompanied by Karim and a young, alien girl none of you have never met before. Her eyes sparkle pink, but the color falls away when Rose's dead heart threatens to fly up to her throat. She has a striking resemblance to the woman who just killed Rose and Dave.
“Hello!” She says brightly. Once again, Rose reaches for her weapons. Kanya places a hand on her shoulder, and Dave touches her hand gently. “I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you. I don’t normally make house calls, but you are all very important. You’ve been requested for an audience.” The girl smiles slyly at them like it is some sort of game. “Come with me.”
Rose resists, but the others drag her along. She talks as they go, and Rose notices how the weight of sunlight seems to have been lifted off of her. “I’ve been moving along for a very long time. I am usually alone. I am the creator of the dream bubbles and the figurehead of the horrorterrors that I sought to bring them into reality. My name has been lost in the infinite of billion years I have lived here, swallowed by the cries of the dead and the whispers from above. But, if you so like, you all may call me Feferi Peixes.” There is a subtle upturn of her lips, and there is the wonder of what is in store.
They seem to travel for ages, but also for only minutes. At some point, the environment turns over, and a new planet is brought forth before the party can blink. Feferi stops them, and they look around.
It is an itch on Rose's brain, with the way she can almost place the room. It is messy, with an abundance of scarves, socks, journals, and other knick-knacks. There is a violin left haphazardly on the dresser, and while Rose is inspecting it, Dave bends down and scoops one of the journals up.
He reads the title and laughs loudly, which catches everyone's attention besides Feferi, who settles down on the unmade bed.
“Look, Rosie. Your first draft!” He says and holds the notebook up, clearly exposing the title reading Complacency of the Learned. Rose's eyes widen, and she snatches it away.
“Stop,” she hisses, though not unkindly. “That's mine, but also we have no idea whose it actually is besides it being me.”
“That would be my mom's!” A new voice says cheerily, and Rose turns to face the new person. Her jaw drops.
“Roxy? Dirk?’’ She whispers with uncertainty, and Dave moves in closer to her, clearly seeing the same thing. In front of them, are two teenagers. Roxy smiles at them, and Dirk's eyebrows raise over his shades in the way Rose has learned is Strider for happiness.
“Not all of the alpha timelines are a true alpha,” Feferi says with a grin, “but Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider… You sure glubbing helped.”
A Disney happy ending where they died. That's not something you see every day.
-
Distantly, Dave Strider is 15 when he wakes up from a dream.
He hardly dreams normally with bubble interference, but that one felt really, truly real, which is just plain weird.
He waits a few moments, before mentally shrugging and rolling over, intent on sleeping just a little bit more. Maybe he'll tell Rose about it in the morning.