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Oh, the blood and the treasure, and then losing it all
The time that we wasted and the place where we fall
Will we wake in the morning and know what it was for
Up in our bedroom after the war?
—Stars, The Beginning After The End
“I guess it wouldn’t be fair if we got to keep everything,” John says. He’s doing his best to stay upbeat, and he still sounds bright, but everyone can tell he’s upset.
Rose sniffs and draws her knees up closer to her chest, shuffling to sit more comfortably on the roof. Dave clears his throat and avoids looking at anybody.
Jade stares at her dirt-stained hands. She blinks back tears from behind her thick glasses. “It’s still not,” she says, and her voice shakes.
“Listen,” John says. “It makes sense, right? We’re not in the Game anymore. We won. We did it!” He spreads his hands for emphasis. “We don’t need powers anymore.”
“Makes things easier for me,” says Dave. “Time loops suck.”
“There you go!”
“It’s cruel to draw it out,” Rose says. “I’d prefer to have it all taken away at once. Not this . . . wearing off.”
“It’s cruel to take it away at all,” says Jade.
Dave dangles his ankles over the side of the roof. John’s house overlooks a hill of flowers, which are gilded in the sunset. Their shadows trail long and distorted over the roof.
“I dunno,” he says. “I figured it was part of the Reward. Like, we’re supposed to get to live out normal lives in our new universe. Powers would only get in the way.”
“Normal lives,” Rose says acidly. “Of course. Play gods for a bit, forge a universe or two, and then settle down with two point five kids and a dog, is that what we’re supposed to do?”
“Fuck if I know, Rose, do you?”
“No, but—” She cuts herself off, biting her lip. Her anger fades into a mask of exhaustion. “No,” she admits.
After a moment, he elbows her consolingly in the side. She leans on his shoulder. He drapes his cape over her back.
“Today I woke up and I couldn’t teleport,” Jade mumbles, miserable. “I kept trying to get across the room to the bathroom, and I couldn’t.”
“I’m losing the future,” Rose murmurs. “I’m writing down as much as I can while I still have it, but my vision is getting more obscure every day. One day I’m going to wake up, and it’s all just going to be . . . gone.”
“I don’t know what time it is,” Dave says. It sounds bereft.
“Guys,” John cries, in aggravation. “It’s not that bad! We all survived, right? We’re okay! And all of our friends, they’re fine, too! Everything went great! So we’re losing a couple perks. You know what, I’m fine with being normal. After all this time, we’ve earned it.”
“John, you make gusts of wind,” Rose snaps. “I’m going blind incrementally. What are you losing, exactly?”
He recoils. A hard silence settles over the four of them.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s okay.”
“That was awful of me.”
“No, it’s okay.”
The silence turns brittle, but it does not crack.
“Never knew time powers not to be a pain in the ass,” Dave remarks. “Had to keep track of everything that was going on, where I needed to be, when I needed to be. Forced me to a decapitate a guy once. Hated that. Dealing with other versions of myself, that was a world-class turd.”
“Yeah, exactly,” John insists. “If anything, they’re a bad reminder.”
“Maybe some of us want a reminder,” Jade says quietly.
John glances at her from the corner of his eye. But he says nothing, and neither does anyone else.
Jade Harley is extraordinary.
Was extraordinary. Has been extraordinary. Whatever conjugation fits her mood.
She has read the future from clouds, played billiards with the constellations, and carried planets in her pockets, clinking against house keys and so much spare change. She channeled the power of a sun through her fingertips, dueled monsters, sailed the space between universes in a golden battleship. She had a god for a pet and carried a shotgun at age thirteen, and those are two of the least remarkable things about her.
She hardly knows what normal is, and she was never much keen to learn.
The story of Icarus is not unfamiliar to her, although she’d confess that ancient literature was always more in line with Rose’s vein of study than Jade’s. The gist of it is simple. Man wants to fly. Man builds wings. Man chooses faulty building materials, abandons the scientific method, uses himself as test subject, and disobeys safety protocols. Man dies. It’s very straightforward.
If she were in his position, though, Jade wouldn’t fall. For one thing, Jade wouldn’t do something as stupid as flying into the sun with wings made of wax, because Jade isn’t stupid, and flying into the sun is a kind of dumb thing to do. But the point is moot anyway, because if Jade wanted to fly, she would build her wings from something sturdier than wax.
(Aluminum and titanium, with a ceramic thermal barrier for the heat shield, thanks for asking.)
She’s been a princess and a scientist and a witch, and even when she wasn’t any of those things, she was still special. She was still the girl with the gun and the giant dog on an island in the South Pacific, who survived for years on nothing more than grit and mettle.
Jade still carries the shotgun, nowadays. It’s the only part of that life she has left.
She goes shooting with Jake and Roxy every now and then. Not animals, but at real ranges, with safety measures and targets provided especially for their pleasure. Jade outshoots them every time. She nails a bull’s eye at five hundred feet, then slots another bullet in through the hole that the first one left. Roxy hoots and hollers with excitement, and Jade tags the target another few times for her benefit. The rifle kicks like a mad animal and the scope is off by a quarter millimeter, but she’s good enough that it doesn’t matter. She’s good enough that most things wouldn’t matter.
She used to be better.
The difference is almost imperceptible, but it’s there. She used to be able to track the movement of a bullet as it passed through the air, and at the height of her power she could shift its path after it was issued from the barrel, curving its course, guiding it true. But then, at the height of her power she had no need for bullets. They seemed too crude a tool to use when she had all of physics at her disposal.
Jade spends any time that she’s not shooting outdoors. She gardens. Her backyard flourishes in the spring with fruit and vegetables and flowers and herbs, the greenery peppered with color like a painter’s palette, and her hands take on the permanent smell of rich soil. Nettles cling to her clothes; leaves weave themselves into her hair. Dirt smears her cheeks and the divots in her palms. Sometimes she stays out so late gardening that she falls asleep right there between the plant beds, with grass for a pillow and the cold earth for a bed.
It’s something, but it’s not enough.
Sometimes she looks at the stars and she wants to touch them so badly it leaves her breathless and empty and aching. Sometimes her fingers itch and she craves movement, to leap across the continent and be anywhere but here. Wanderlust is a sickness, and Jade falls ill with it.
Most of all, she wants to fly. She can’t survive on the ground, she knows it. Jade Harley is an avian creature, and she belongs in the sky.
Her longest stretch without human contact is thirty-two days. On the thirty-third, she’s interrupted.
She’s in the garden, so she doesn’t realize someone’s broken in until she notices Roxy clambering over the top of her eight-foot fence, muttering obscenities.
“Jade,” she hollers, dropping to the ground with in a clumsy heap. “Get your headphones out, I’m here to talk!”
Jade looks up from the sage plant she’s weeding and blinks in surprise. “Roxy,” she says, and the sound of her own voice startles her, hoarse as it is from disuse. “What are you doing here?”
“I told you, I want to talk.” Roxy makes her way carefully across the garden, weaving between planters and under broad arches laced with vines. She carries a towering backpack on her shoulder.
“Not to be rude, but I do have a phone.”
“Yeah, babe, I know. You should try answering it sometime,” Roxy chirps, which Jade concedes with a guilty cringe. “Anyway.” She empties her backpack in Jade’s lap, and half a dozen four-foot rolls of thin sketching paper tumble out. “I want a professional opinion on this project I’ve been working on.”
Jade reluctantly sets down her trowel and picks up one scroll. “What is it?”
“You’ll see.” Roxy leans against a tree, grinning with disarming confidence. “I think you’re gonna be interested.”
She rips off the rubber band tying the scroll together and unfurls it. Black print runs in tightly packed lines from top to bottom, a script as familiar as it is strange to see, and it takes Jade a moment to switch mental gears. The numbers come into focus, resolving into mathematical functions and perfunctory mechanical sketches, the beginnings of blueprints for a machine more complex than anything Jade has seen designed before.
“I ran into a standstill,” Roxy drawls, twirling a curl of hair around her pinky. “Couldn’t figure out how to integrate that pesky motherfucker near the bottom.”
“Why didn’t you ask Dirk for help?” Jade runs her finger down a line of equations, mumbling the functions under her breath. A long-abandoned part of her brain stirs, shakes off the dust.
“Have you ever actually taken a look at one of Dirk’s robots? Those things are held together by wishful thinking.”
She frowns, and taps the page. “There’s an error in your algebra in the third line. That’s why you couldn’t integrate in the eighth.” She takes off her glasses, wipes them swiftly, and shoves them back on. “Also, you could use trig substitution to make the integral easier. Partial fractions is a dead-end.”
Roxy leans over her shoulder. “Why, so it is,” she says, with a suspicious degree of surprise. “Thanks, Grandma.”
“And this is an antiquated method,” Jade says, tracing a line of sloppily cross-multiplied fractions. “Satellite orbits are elliptical, not circular. That means the radius is expressed by a function, not a constant, which also means your velocity functions are wrong. You need the eccentric anomaly to solve—” She hunts around her pockets for a pencil, cusses when she can’t find one. “Do you have more paper? I can show you the equation you need.”
Roxy keeps quiet. When Jade glances at her, her eyebrows make their own bid for spaceflight. She makes the Cheshire Cat look positively humble in comparison.
Jade narrows her eyes. “All right, fine,” she says.
“Fine, what?” Roxy suppresses a grin. “I didn’t ask you to do anyth—”
“Shut up,” Jade mumbles, reaching for another scroll. Equations spring forth and multiply before her eyes, locking into place with the mechanical precision of cogs in a clock. “Shut up and get me a pen.”
Dave doesn’t notice his powers leaving until they’re almost gone.
He wakes up one morning and he can’t feel the threads of time. For years they sprawled out from his fingers, available at the twitch of a hand, but today it feels like they vanished altogether. His mind skips, stutters, and he reaches out to shift the timeline with a deft flick of his hand—
It doesn’t work. Time marches on, at the same rigid pace it keeps for the rest of the universe, unforgiving and unmoved by his appeal to it.
It occurs to him that he doesn’t know what time it is. He has to go to his computer and check; Dave has never owned a watch.
He sits back and waits for grief to come. Rose said it wouldn’t come immediately, and he believes her .He waits to feel what Rose did, that scalding, aching misery. He waits for bereavement to visit on the heels of loss.
He doesn’t.
See, Dave never asked to be the Knight of Time. He never asked for a sword or a destiny or a fancy pair of pajamas and the weight of the job that came with them. He never asked to bend reality to his will, and he never thought much of the people who did. He never asked to be responsible for the world; it was a tall enough order figuring out how to be responsible for himself. He thinks he was always kind of bitter about that.
He goes and changes into a pair of jeans. The old-fashioned way, one leg after another, no wardrobifier required. He slips on a red t-shirt and a beat-up old flannel, no frills, no capes.
The red pajamas go in the back of his closet. He straightens them carefully on the hanger. After a moment’s pause, he decaptchalogues Caledfwlch and sets it down on the floor behind a row of sneakers and some old moving boxes.
Downstairs, a clatter of pots, the shrill of the coffeemaker, and a muffled stream of profanity inform him that Karkat is making breakfast. He cards his fingers through his hair, checks the time again. Breathes in, breathes out.
He leaves his shades on the bedside table when he goes down.
Karkat sits at the kitchen table with a mug of milky coffee and a plate of toast, slathered thick with red jam. Odds are it’s strawberry, although sometimes he puts grubsauce on it just to fuck with Dave. His face is crumpled in a scowl as he reads the newspaper. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s angry. Karkat just doesn’t smile before noon as a rule.
“Hey,” Dave says, swooping in and stealing the mug. He slurps it obnoxiously in Karkat’s ear, swaying out of the way when Karkat squawks and grabs for it. “What’s shakin’, bacon?”
“Nothing, you feculent piece of caffeine-stealing garbage, and get your own mug. I was TRYING to have a next breakfast, which was interrupted by your insolent comparisons to fried oinkbeast.”
“Cool,” Dave says, and lets Karkat haul him down to kiss him — irritatedly, and with distinct disgruntlement — on the cheek. “Sleep well?”
“No. You kept stealing my blankets.”
“Sorry.”
“You aren’t,” Karkat accuses him.
“Nope,” Dave admits. He drapes himself over Karkat’s back, arms lacing around his chest, chin settling on Karkat’s shoulder. Karkat accepts his coffee back with an injured sniff. “You save any of that toast for me, babe?”
“Oh, now you’re asking?” Karkat demands, but he holds a piece of toast up for Dave to take between his teeth.
“Figured I’d play it polite, see where it gets me,” Dave says, waggling his eyebrows, but it’s muffled by the toast in his mouth.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying, but from your expression, it’s probably obscene. Stop talking with your mouth full, it’s fucking disgusting.”
“Mmkay,” Dave says, and chews loudly.
Karkat lifts his eyes to the ceiling, as if appealing to some other deity to spare him from the one he’s dating. “I have the day off,” he says, and wrenches his coffee out of reach when Dave attempts to snag it again, hissing a warning. “I — stop it, jackass! — I thought we could head over to the Carapace Kingdom and check on things there.”
“We could,” Dave agrees.
“It’d be polite. A very ambassadorial thing to do.”
“Mmhm.”
“. . . Or we could build a blanket fort in the living room and watch a bunch of your dumb human movies.”
“I’ll get the blankets, you get the popcorn.”
“Dave, you heathen, it’s ten in the morning.”
“Time is a social construct and so are meals. Fuck your rules, man, popcorn is a twenty-four hour food.”
“The continued functioning of your gastrointestinal tract is a miracle of modern science.”
Dave drops a kiss on top of Karkat’s head, right between his horns, and ambles off towards their linens closet. “Don’t forget the butter,” he calls. He grins when he receives an irritable chitter of Alternian in reply.
Light steams in through the windows. The house smells like coffee and fresh laundry. He breathes in deep, and he can’t fly anymore, but he feels like any minute he might lift off the ground and start floating again.
He doesn’t know what time it is. He’s okay with that.
Sometimes Rose feels like she’s living someone else’s life.
She wakes up next to someone every morning. This in and of itself is astounding, to a certain extent, although she can’t pinpoint why. They alternate sleeping in the bed and the recuperacoon, which Rose has adjusted to out of a marital feeling of obligation. The breathing masks were unsettling at first, but once you got over them, sleeping in sopor was surprisingly restful. That, too, feels like someone else’s life. Someone else fell in love with and married a green-blooded alien, not Rose. Someone else beat the Game and wandered into this new world, where someone else took up a hobby volunteering at the library and helping her wife with the Mother Grub and wrote fiction on the side, and someone else had tea with her brother twice a week to keep in touch. Someone else had possessed her and maneuvered her through the rote mundanities of sustaining a human life, while Rose, the real Rose, had been left stranded in the past. She doesn’t know where. Maybe on the meteor, maybe further. Maybe that girl is lost in the Medium, wandering the dream bubbles with all the other ghosts.
The problem is that Rose’s life never trended towards routine. Risk, danger, thrills, fine — Rose cut her teeth in those arts long ago — but she qualms at the prospect of the everyday. But routine, to quote an admittedly melodramatic thirteen-year-old version of herself, seems an inexorable lockstep towards death. Groceries, laundry, cleaning, work, sleep, rinse and repeat. An eternity of the same sprawls out before her.
She can survive Armageddon. She’s not sure she can survive the lack of one.
She buries herself in her journal. She stays up late reading by candlelight, burning the wicks down to little nubbins of wax, until Kanaya pleads with her to sleep, wherein she stumbles to bed with purple print swimming before her eyes. Each time, she arrives at the final cache of blank pages at the end of the volume with the intent to write an epilogue, but each time her pen falls short and she ends up closing the book. Her hand refuses to write the words that signal the end. Her brain refuses to script the last lines. To acknowledge that the story is over seems a kind of betrayal.
If she still had her foresight, she could peer into the future and divine the book’s terminus. She could steal the words for the epilogue from a version of herself that has already written them. That’s what she would have done, if she were still the Seer. If she were still herself entirely, and not the remnant that she finds now.
Life crawls by on a day to day basis, and it kills her, living in slow motion like that. Feels like being plunged into the dark. Feels like having all the light scoured out of her eyes, getting left with a handful of nothing and head full of less. Feels like having the importance sieved out of her like water through cheesecloth. And it’s the same for everybody, probably, but honestly, what did Kanaya lose? Everything wonderful about Kanaya comes by dent of her being Kanaya. She never needed the Sylph of Space to be extraordinary.
Rose perches on the windowsill of their bedroom at midnight, reading. A draft floats in off the nearby moor and tosses the silk curtains around, billowing like foam on the crest of a wave, and she holds her book open under the moonlight. A fire chokes out its dying breath in the grate. A mourning croon comes from the eaves, where a nest of owls has taken up residence, to Rose’s delight.
Kanaya stirs. Rose glances furtively in her direction, and then returns to her reading.
…slipped into the fabled blackdeath trance of the woegothics, quaking all the while in the bloodeldritch throes of the broodfester tongues. I advised the members of my Complacency not to be alarmed, as they chronicle the event in tomes bound in the tanned, writhing flesh of a tortured hellscholar, with runes stroked in the black tears bled from the corruption-weary eyes of fifty thousand imaginary occultists…
Her lip quirks. Purple prose, perhaps, but there’s always something to be said for presentation.
A hand drifts absently to the Thorn strapped at her waist, fingering the pommel, tracing a knuckle along its bladed tip. The scariest thing the Thorns have wrought lately is a sweater. Isn’t that a depressing thought? Former conduits of the most eldritch sorceries in all worlds, she thinks sourly, reduced to an elaborate hobbyist’s tool.
The back of her throat itches. God, she wants a drink.
That impulse, at least, she pushes away. She turns instead to the words on the page. It never was clear, she muses, whether or not the Horrorterrors were a construct of the Game. Feferi’s existence would not seem to suggest it. Or, at least, they were no more a Game construct than the rest of reality was, when you got into it, since technically all worlds were a product of Game mechanics. Funny thing to think about, that.
Funnier still because of what it implies.
Rose draws her wand from its sheath. A bead of moonlight races from hilt to tip. She examines it carefully. It’s the same as it ever was: her old friend, her favored instrument of war. An inscription runs along the side; That is not dead which can eternal lie…
The second half of the couplet brands its twin: …and with strange aeons even death may die.
She slips it back into the sheath, and closes the book.
“John,” Terezi says, warming up her stroke with a few experimental swings, “has anyone ever told you you’re a shit actor?”
“No,” John says. He leans on his driver and watches her wheel her club around with absolutely terrible form, arms surging back and forth with all the precision of a drunk octopus. “Mostly because I’m not.”
“No, you are. You are the worst. It is you. I could smell your deceit from the other side of the continent, that’s how bad you are.”
“I know you’re bluffing. You can’t smell lies, you just like scaring the shit out of people who don’t know better.”
“Can you blame me?” She doesn’t bother to argue, which confirms it. “When I told Dave he wouldn’t stand upwind of me for three weeks. Dirk still doesn’t. It’s hilarious.”
It is, in fact, hilarious. He cannot begrudge her this. “Fair,” he says, with the respectful appreciation he reserves for a well-executed prank. “What makes you think I’m lying, though?”
She purses her lips in contemplation. “John, how long have we been friends?”
He hums thoughtfully. “Continuously, or in aggregate?”
She cackles, swatting him with her club. He dodges. “Jackass.”
“Maybe.” He indicates the tee with his driver. “Are you gonna swing in the next century, or can I take a turn?”
“Hold your hoofbeasts! I’m warming up!”
“My hoofbeats HAVE been held, Terezi. I have been holding them. They have been held in place so long they grew old and died and became hoofbeast skeletons, and I had to hold beautiful hoofbeast funerals.”
She huffs, and lines up to the tee. “For an immortal, you are insufferably impatient!”
She draws back and gives a couple more exaggeratedly slow practice swings. Then she winds up and gives the tee one tremendous WHACK, the kind that would take a man’s head off with less effort, and the ball goes soaring off the edge of the skyscraper.
It leaps high into the air, disappearing against the stark white clouds. John and Terezi both squint looking for it. Then the ball descends in the far distance, a white pinprick descending over the rows of empty towers and business offices that crowd the deserted Houston skyline.
“What’s that,” Terezi says, her face still scrunched up. “A mile?”
“Please. Eight hundred yards.”
“Eight hundred yards my bony grey ass, that’s a mile if I’ve ever sniffed one.”
“Uh huh. Well, since I’m the only one between us who can actually see it, I’m telling you it’s eight hundred yards.”
“Aha! You know you’re beaten, so you’re resulting to taunting me about my disability! Cruel, but not unexpected, I’m sad to say.”
“Oh my God, fuck OFF, Terezi, the range on your nose is like, a foot—”
She sticks her tongue out at him. “You’re just mad because you’re not a member of my totally rad and physically superior species.”
“Yeah, I’m soooooo jealous of your species, Terezi. I long to have horns and a weird bug-involving reproductive strategy.”
“First of all: bug-based reproductive strategies are way better than your gross nine-month incubation thing. Second of all, I’d like to see you do better!”
“In that case I have some bad news for you,” John deadpans, and she cracks up. He steps up to the tee and starts warming up, stretching his arms, bending to touch his toes.
“Joking aside,” she says, folding her hands over the top of her club like it’s her dragonhead cane. “I must admit it was well done, Egbert, but your deflection still offends my ears.”
He grimaces, and whiffs his swing. “What do you think I’m lying about?”
“I have several theories. Your golf game, for one thing.”
Another few warmup swings, and he feels loose enough to try again. “Is that all?”
“No,” she says. Doesn’t elaborate.
He pulls back and whacks the ball off the tee. The strike sends a jolt up through the club, and the ball zips into the distance, vanishing amongst the clouds.
“What do you mean?”
“How long did your session last?”
He runs the tally back in his mind. Time was hard to keep track of in the Medium, since there weren’t really days and nights — it was always day on the planets, and always night on the moons, and sleep happened on whatever vague schedule your circadian rhythms sorted out for themselves — complicated doubly because of time loops, alternate timelines, and the retcon. The way it felt, it could have been years. It could have been lifetimes.
“Months,” he says simply.
Terezi nods, accepting as implicit the uncertainty in the estimate. “Sounds about right,” she says. “I think that a so-called perfect run would last about one half sweep, assuming a sufficiently advanced and equal skill level among players.”
He offers her the tee, but she waves it away, so he ambles over to lean on the railing beside her. The building falls away behind them. The street is dizzyingly far away, and he wonders, darkly, if he has enough flight left to catch himself if he falls.
“I wasn’t blind for six sweeps,” she says.
There’s nothing he can really say to this except, “Oh?”
“Yes. I —” She gives a surprised little laugh. “You know, I’d never thought about it. But as of today, I’ve still been blind for less time than I had sight.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I like being this way,” she says. “Let’s be clear. Being blind owns bones. I am cooler than all of you fools by a factor too immense to describe!”
“I get it,” he says. “You adjusted, right? Like we all have to adjust.” He tries not to sound bitter.
Terezi whacks him in the shin with her golf club. He skitters away, whining a complaint. “No,” she says smugly. “Don’t interrupt me! That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
He waits. She draws out a significant pause, as if to punish him for his impatience.
“If I lost my blindness tomorrow,” she says, “I would be very, very angry. And sad. And I wouldn’t be okay with it. Not immediately, and maybe not ever.”
He tips his head back and massages his neck, biting back a groan. “Oh,” he says. “Listen, I’m fine. I know where this is going, and I’m all right, okay? It doesn’t matter.”
“Who said shit about you?” she says innocently, lifting her gold club and inspecting the head. “I’m talking about me. I’m just saying that if I had something I consider fundamental to myself stripped away forever, I would be understandably depressed.” She pauses. “I did get understandably depressed, in fact. It sucked.”
“What?”
“I lost my blindness in the other timeline,” she says. “The one you prevented. Thanks for that, by the way. Actually, I prevented it, since I was the one who told you what to do, and you didn’t do all that much at all besides the actual time-traveling part. So thanks, me. I remain responsible for every competent decision our session ever made.”
“How do you know that?” John clarifies, “About the timeline, I mean.”
“Seer of Mind, baby,” she says easily. “I’ve got mad memory skills you don’t even know about, yo.”
“Huh.” He scuffs at a bit of turf with the toe of his sneaker. “I mean, how did you take it?”
“Not well,” she says delicately.
“How do you mean?”
“I was lost,” she says. “I hated it. I hated myself, for a while. I didn’t like the person I was when I wasn’t blind.”
John tosses a golf ball in the air, catches it. Repeats the process. “What, you don’t think I like myself?” His mouth quirks, aiming for jovial.
“I don’t know. I’m not the Seer of Heart.” He tosses it a third time, and lightning-quick, her hand darts out and seizes it. “So you’ll have to tell me if I’m wrong.”
John folds his arms and blows out a breath. The quiet settles over him like the lid of a casket. She hums, not unkindly, in acknowledgement of his answer.
He turns his face to the west, where a lavender evening sky is populated by a trail of fireflies. Gold splatters against purple. He remembers—
“You ended up blind, though, didn’t you?”
She tips her head to one side, equivocating. “Yes.”
“What would you do if you knew it was never coming back?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, with a frankness he appreciates. “I’d like to think I’d learn to live with it.”
“And how would you do that?”
“I said I don’t know.” She turns the golf ball over in her palm and thumbs away a piece of grime, unveiling the number: twelve. A tiny, sharp guffaw trips out of her throat, and then she drops it into his open hand. “Not much alternative though, is there?”
He closes his fingers around the ball. “Guess not.”
She doesn’t drink anymore.
Rose’s thighs burn as she ascends to the cliff peak. She had to hike for eleven miles to approach the summit, far beyond the prescribed hiking paths, a heavy pack of provisions carried on her back. The trail to the top was a three-day climb, requiring her to scale a forty foot cliff face and bring an oxygen mask for the thin air.
She remembers soaring between planets with nothing but the clothes on her back and the wands in her grip.
(Three days in the northern wilderness for a measly few thousand feet of altitude, and God, but Rose misses flying.)
Now, standing atop the mountain range, she sheds her pack and lets it drop behind her, forgotten. Snow crunches under her boots. Her wool skirt snaps and billows around her legs, writhing in the wind. The ground falls away mere inches from her feet, replaced by four thousand feet of void, and then far more than that of cold black sea. Fog rolls off the waves in thick silver tuffets, like down caught on the breeze.
She stops with her toes peering over the edge. She put a lot of work into researching this. If it doesn’t work, it won’t kill her. Nothing can kill her. But it will be extraordinarily, exquisitely painful.
It requires an emotional trigger. Something traumatic, preferably, or some other such intense surge of emotion. It should be easier for her now than it was the first time; she’s reactivating an old subroutine, so to speak. The neural pathways are still there. They’ve just been dormant for a while.
Staring at the drop, fear twitches in her belly. Rose doesn’t fear death, nowadays, but she does fear pain. And that’s good. It has to be genuine, she reminds herself. It has to be real.
The old books — the grimoires, the arcane texts, profound volumes buried in fallen temples and left for eons to decay — said that possession, when it came down to it, was a cleansing experience. For the properly attuned host, it was not an act of violation. It purged the subject of anything human. Pain. (Pleasure.) Sadness. (Joy.) Grief. (Hope.)
She doesn’t drink anymore.
Rose opens her hands, and a dark flower blooms inside her chest like a drop of ink unfurling in water.
She falls.
light
light fortune book sight color yellow sun stars night
night dark void empty nothing gone mother house
house cat tomb shed watershed river water clouds light
and rain
She wakes up on a frozen beach, face down in the dirt with sand caked in her hair.
The ocean laves at her legs. Her skirt has been shredded to a knot of rags and weighed down with saltwater. Bruises mar her arms in sleeves of purple and blue and green. Her muscles burn. She feels heavy in her own body, as though she has recently been reintroduced to it.
Blinking crust out of her eyes, she runs her tongue around her teeth and gags. Her mouth tastes of bile and salt.
She rolls over, sits up, and empties the contents of her stomach on the sand.
Then she scrubs her wrist across her mouth, shoves herself up, and starts walking.
Breath scrapes ragged through her throat. Her steps are shambling and short. She is hungry, and tired, and in pain, but her body rings with the dull afterglow of magic. Real magic, not the pittances of luck and placebo she scraped together before. Deep magic. Old magic. Magic suited to a God.
Rose’s lips twist into a wide grin.
Long before she was the Witch of Space, and long before she wielded the might of an emerald sun, Jade tugged at the binding cords of the universe in a different way. A more difficult way, by all accounts, but a way is a way nonetheless.
“Second-order differential equations,” she says, pointing at one section of the ten-foot chalkboard swallowing her bedroom wall, covered from head to toe in tiny white scrawl. “Functions for airspeed, velocity, and then the derivative below, that’s acceleration. That one’s for drag, and this is for lift. A little string theory in the corner, ignore that, I got distracted. Here’s a function I was working on for atmospheric pressure, but it’s not finished yet. There are more in my lab; if I’d known you were coming over, I would have brought out the blueprints. I have my team working on a prototype of the machine right now, if you want to come back in a few days it’ll be finished—”
“Holy shit,” Roxy marvels, pivoting on her heel. Dizzying walls of equations and chicken-scratch graphs stretch from edge to edge of the board and climb over the border, spreading onto the wallpaper, crossing occasionally onto the ceiling and trailing off on the floor. It papers Jade’s bedroom in white.
“I had to start from scratch,” Jade says, a bit abashed. She draws a nubbin of chalk from her pocket and absentmindedly dots a negative sign in front of an odd integer near her window. “Since we lost all the physics textbooks with our Earth, you know. Calculus was easier to reverse-engineer, that’s pretty intuitive, but the physics I had to hash out myself.”
“You did this all from memory?” Roxy reaches out to brush her hands over an equation that trails four feet long and twelve feet high, its corresponding algebraic proof running from the ceiling to the floor.
“Mmhm. Wait, no. I couldn’t remember the principles of electromagnetism. I’m still waiting on you for those, by the way.”
“Oh,” Roxy says faintly. “Of course. Sorry.”
Jade hops up on a rolling ladder and scratches out a few lines of functions. “A lot of it was intuitive,” she says brightly, and kicks off, soaring around the room. Her hair flies behind her, a fluttering black ribbon. “Once I got started, the rest of it made sense pretty quickly. Math is nice like that. Everything’s built on everything else.”
“Why?” Roxy whistles. The symbols dance and spin before her eyes, weaving variations too complex for her to even track without paper and pen, and Jade waltzes right along with them, spitting numbers like Dave does lyrics, pulling answers from functions like Rose does a chord from a violin. It’s as if she can hear a rhythm in them, trapped within integral signs and Greek letters — the language of a dead universe, singing from behind the grave.
Jade wipes her nose on her sleeve. She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, smearing chalk dust on her temple, and nudges her glasses up her nose.
“Had to,” Jade says simply. “I wanted to fly.”
Karkat opens the door with a scowl on his face and a curse on his tongue, both of which wither and fall by the wayside when he finds Kanaya standing there, her face illuminated only by the dull glow of the flashlight she brought. The beginnings of dawn glisten in the east.
Her hands knit and her brow furrows. “I’m sorry,” she begins, “but I didn’t know where else to come. I’ve tried pestering and pestering and pestering her, and then when I asked, Jade said she hasn’t seen her in weeks, and John is out looking for her already—”
“Wait,” Karkat insists, as Dave comes lumbering downstairs, hair mussed and his face stretched in a yawn. “Wait, hold on. Who’s missing?”
“I can’t find Rose,” Kanaya frets, and Dave’s mouth snaps shut so fast Karkat hears the crack of teeth.
Rose — the Rose who is not Rose, the Rose better than Rose, Rose’s body in the arms of something else’s mind — drifts somewhere in the stratosphere, a black pearl at the heart of a writhing hurricane.
The clouds knit and wrestle. Lightning springs from the friction between them, thunder screaming in their collisions, and she catches one prong of flickering white in her hand. Dull eyes consider it, unimpressed, and she lets it go, springing from her fingertips to lance the ground beneath her.
From several hundred feet below, Jade steps to the left and barely misses being electrocuted by a lightning bolt.
She plants her hands on her hips and grinds her heels into the dust.
“Well,” she says over the sound of a hurricane, which is to say that she shouts it at the top of her lungs, “fuck.”
“Found her,” Dave says bleakly.
“—can’t just fly up there like we used to every time she gets friendly with eldritch beings, so how the shit are we gonna get Mrs. Cthulu out of her funk—”
“That is still my wife you are talking about, and I will thank you to be civil—”
“Your wife and my sister, let me remind you, and I’m asking a pretty reasonable question, IMFO, so—”
“—both of you are being absolute doofuses! We need to figure out how we’re going to get through to Rose!”
“Maybe we should just let her have this,” John mumbles.
The other five round on him with incredulous gazes. They’re sprawled out on a damp beach somewhere near the Pacific, while Hurricane Rose thrashes and storms somewhere over the sea. Rain drizzles lazily from the clouds. A bitter wind slithers across their necks.
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘let her have this,’” Karkat demands. “Your friend is out there getting seven different kinds of possessed by the fucking Horrorterrors, and you want us to sit on our asses and—”
“She’s not getting hurt,” he says defensively. “She’s not hurting anybody, at least, not now—”
“She almost electrocuted me,” Jade says, not unreasonably.
“And she knocked over the better half of a forest in southern Albania,” Kanaya adds, blunt but factual.
“I think I just watched her murder a seagull,” Dave says, squinting.
“I — okay, whatever. I just thought that maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on her,” John insists, defensive. “She’s desperate. It’s not like we’ve never been desperate, right?”
“Um,” says Dave.
“No,” says Karkat.
Jade tilts her head at him. “Never that desperate,” she says.
“Well — good for you!” He throws up his hands and gets to his feet. “Good for you, Jade! And Dave! Good for both of you, you are both awesome well-adjusted people with great coping mechanisms! That is so fantastic!”
“Where’s this coming from?” Jade leans back, startled. “John? What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing! I just—”
“You think you were the only one who lost something?” There is an edge to the question. It is a warning shot. It clams him up. “You think you were the only one who lost everything?”
She stands up and follows him when he tries to storm off. “Don’t walk away from us,” she says, and her tone is ice fucking cold. Cold like the black hole between universes, the kind of cold that reminds him where she’s been and what she’s done, and why John was perhaps never the person with the most to lose.
He freezes. Space powers or none, there isn’t a man in the universe that he would put money on against Jade Harley, and the rage that crawls up thick and languorous under her words scares him far more than the woman floating in a wreath of dark magic several miles away.
“No,” he says, finally. “I don’t think that.”
She regards him. Evaluating. Calculating.
“Good,” she says, after a beat. “Because you weren’t.”
“I know.”
“You really weren’t.”
“I know.”
“Rose wasn’t, either,” she says, and it’s the closest she comes to saying what she means.
“I know,” he replies, belatedly.
Jade looks him hard in the eye. Then her shoulders drop, and she retreats. “Anyway,” she says brightly. “How are we gonna get up there, folks? Any ideas? Now is the time to brainstorm!”
“Weren’t you working on something that could fly?” Dave suggests. “Could ride that up, try and talk her out of it.”
“Not in those conditions,” Jade says automatically. She wipes some rain from her brow and bats a stray piece of windswept hair out of her face. “It’s not built to withstand a storm.”
“If I was still the Heir,” John says, forlorn, “I could just fly up and stop her with the Breeze.”
“And if I were a fairy, I could shit twinkies,” Karkat says. “Truly, the imagination is a wonderful thing. Got any other fascinating counterfactuals for us, Egbert?”
The vulgarity startles a bark of laughter out of John. “Dude,” he complains.
“Don’t you ‘dude’ me, John Human. I’m still your god, you know,” Karkat informs him. “Do you need me to get out the monologue? So help me, I will get out the monologue.”
“I killed your Empress,” John points out, bemused. “Doesn’t that technically make me your emperor by succession?”
“First of all, Roxy killed the Empress,” Karkat sniffs, “which means that lawfully, the Alternian throne is hers. Get your fucking facts straight before you try to come at me with assertions of monarchy, you ignoramus, that’s how we get civil wars. Second of all, we live in a democracy. Third of all, if you by some twisted mechanism of governmental blasphemy managed to grasp even one iota of political power, I would personally shatter the foundations of the state that allowed it to happen and reconstruct in its place a functioning republic, one of the absolute commandments of which would be to not give you any power, at all, ever. Capiche?”
Dave is giving Karkat an insufferably fond look. John makes a pointed gagging noise at him, and Dave flips him off.
Oddly, John feels better.
“Okay,” he says. “I think we should probably focus on the topic at hand, though, Karkat. I mean, we’re supposed to be talking about Rose, not me.”
“Oh my dead malignant gods, you absolute gibbering jackass—”
“Well,” announces Jade, “while you guys were busy being idiots, Kanaya and I had an idea.”
Jade’s newly fortified flying machine makes liftoff over the waves. The air current generated by its engine sends a ripple through the water underneath it, the ash-grey sea flickering like silk being ruffled in the breeze. It’s a beautiful machine — a fluid grey hull in the shape of an inverted teardrop, a glass cockpit at the top and three legs to stabilize it on land — made more beautiful by the obvious care that went into its construction, in the scrawls of graffiti left on various panels and the hand-welded seams between flanks.
Kanaya pilots the helm. Jade stands atop the hull, her feet planted squarely on the glass and set hard against the wind, her gun clasped firmly between her hands.
Hair thrashes like a black shroud in her wake. No black skirt, now, or trailing hood. Jade wears a bomber jacket and sneakers, and rises through knots of electric clouds with the same hard expression of someone in the armor suiting a god. The gleam of lightning reflects off her glasses. Hard, flinty shards of green stare behind them.
Rose turns to face the ship as it approaches, her skirts twisting and trailing into billows of smoke. Pale and clear as white marbles, her eyes roll listlessly in their sockets. Ink trails from the corner of her mouth. She looks properly godlike, with a Thorn protruding from each hand and an unnatural ashen sheen to her skin.
Jade Harley is not a god.
Her thumb trails down to the safety and disengages it. It’s an old hunting rifle. Not a very sophisticated piece of technology, just a beautiful one, with a glossy wooden barrel and a muzzle kept spotless through consistent polishing. Virtually all of her concentration is going into not falling ass backwards off the top of a flying machine, so it’s not as though she’ll be aiming her best, but she doesn’t need her best to get the job done.
“Rose,” she shouts. If it gets the possessed girl’s attention, she doesn’t show it. Jade grinds her teeth as a whip of wind steals around and almost dislodges her feet.
Gravitational equations for falling flicker through her mind like one of the lightning forks that dart in and out of the clouds. Distance to the waves: too far. Terminal velocity after eight seconds. Death after ten. Fine. Jade processes this and sets the information aside.
“Rose, you have to stop,” she says. “You’re going to hurt someone.”
Rose’s head tips unnaturally onto one shoulder. Her levitation dips and rises with the air currents, as though she is no more than another object being carried on the breeze.
“You’re going to hurt Kanaya. You remember Kanaya? Rose? You’re going to hurt her. You’re going to hurt me.”
Her finger wraps around the trigger.
A stream of gibberish flows from Rose’s mouth, a guttural, horrific rasp of a sound. Jade winces.
“That’s not an answer,” she says. “I need you to calm down. Can you do that for me? Rose?”
Rose floats closer. A more pointed stream of nothing issues from her throat, as if aggravated. Jade supposes that’s better than nothing. It implies that she still cares enough to feel something, which suggests that she is, in fact, Rose.
“When we were kids,” she says, which is a good joke, she thinks, as if they’re not still kids, but speaking frankly Jade figures they lost the right to call themselves kids a long time ago — “we used to talk about this thing called a trust fall. You remember that, Rose? Back when we’d never met each other in person. All we had was Pesterchum. But we’d talk about what we’d do if we ever saw each other. See, I’d never seen another person. So the idea of someone being around to catch me if I fell,” she says, “was really nice to think about.”
Maybe she’s imagining it, but it seems to her that Rose’s eyes clear for a moment, revealing a blot of wide lavender.
She lifts up the gun, and Rose’s lips curl in wariness. Then she drops it, and it goes freewheeling into the waves below.
“Loneliness is about a lot of things,” she says. “But mostly it’s about trust.”
She spreads out her arms, and the wind beats itself against them ruthlessly. Trying to dislodge her from where she stands atop the machine, at the still eye of a storm. It’s not so difficult. It’s far from the worst thing she’s ever done. Still, the stakes are considerably higher.
“Trust me,” she adds. “I know.”
Jade Harley is not a god. She’s a human woman with a shotgun and a lot of unresolved issues, and on some days, she thinks that’s better.
She lifts her foot and thinks, Icarus—
And Jade plummets towards the sea.
From the beach, Dave leaps to his feat as the tiny dark blot that is Jade tumbles headfirst from the top of the machine.
“What the fuck is she doing,” he demands, clinging to John’s arm. “What the fuck is she doing, she said she had a plan, what the fuck—”
“I don’t know, maybe she just slipped—”
“It’s Jade, when in her life has she ever fucking ‘just slipped’ — John, she’s going to get hurt—”
“Look,” John says.
Because the black pearl at the heart of the storm, that tiny knot of smoke and ink that knits the clouds, has just plummeted after her.
Rose is dreaming.
—No, she’s not. Because if she were dreaming she would be on Derse, and she’s not on Derse. She’s lying on her back on a bed of very comfortable material, her eyes closed, while a flurry of low-pitched voices clamor just outside her range of perception.
Maybe she’s dead. But that isn’t right, either, because if she were dead she would be in the Dream Bubbles. And she would feel it, too. It would start with a hollow emptiness at the center of her sternum, a ringing void where her pulse should have been. Then it would spread out to the rest of her, slowly, until she could feel nothing but a cold sort of abscess in the cavity of her heart.
She knows what death is, and it is not a warm bed.
“. . . two days, maybe we should think about—”
“—old-fashioned slap method? Startling her seemed to work — thanks for that, Jade, by the way, you can expect the bill for my fucking cardiac arrest soon—”
“You weren’t even the one doing it, you big baby! And anyway, it worked, she just got tired—”
“—try that again and I will glue your ass to the pavement indefinitely, Harley, I swear to whatever fucking hell god spawned you—”
“You are all big babies. Every single one of you.”
“Just because you have balls of fucking platinum doesn’t mean the rest of us can be depended on not to shit ourselves when you decide to go diving from a height of several hundred fucking feet—”
“Wait! Shh, it looks like she moved!”
“Okay, that’s a distraction that only works the first time. Fool me once—”
“No, seriously,” Jade says, and a hand shakes Rose’s shoulder. “Rose? Are you awake?”
Reluctantly, Rose peels her eyes open. She’s greeted by a chorus of grateful sighs.
Jade perches on the side of her bed, with a fresh set of clothes on her back and several sleepless nights on her face. Dave flanks her, while John and Karkat sit in chairs at the foot of the bed, and Kanaya stands to her left. Gift baskets of flowers and fruit and candy pile high over every flat surface in her bedroom, bearing notes from every person of any importance across the four kingdoms. News of her illness has, apparently, spread.
Rose, her mind still fogged with sleep, reaches out and fumbles for Kanaya, who immediately laces their fingers.
“Rose,” she murmurs. “Are you—”
“Yeah,” she manages. “M’alright.”
Plus or minus one world of guilt resting squarely on her shoulders, and with a considerable margin of error. She doesn’t doubt that in a while, she’ll be feeling like death warmed over in a shitty microwave. But for the moment, she’s fine. As fine as she gets, anyway.
“If you ever fucking do that again,” Dave begins, and she waves him off.
“I won’t,” she says. Her voice rakes against her throat.
“No, but I mean it, Rose. If you ever—”
“I won’t,” she repeats, and turns for the first time to look at Jade.
“You could have died,” she says. She tries to keep it matter-of-fact, but it’s difficult when her voice wants to vault into tremulous arias and her chest wants to cave in on itself at a moment’s notice.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“You could have been hurt.”
“I wouldn’t have been, though.” Jade looks insufferably smug, but Rose is too busy being furious to be irritated.
“If I hadn’t caught you — if the magic had given out earlier, Jade—”
“Then I would have deployed the parachute I was wearing,” Jade sighs. “Jeez, Rose, how stupid do you think I am?”
There’s a moment of silence.
“You fucking asshole,” Dave says, dumbfounded. “You didn’t tell us you had a parachute.”
“I assumed it was implied! Jesus, do none of you know the scientific method? Would I just yeet myself into the ocean without a backup plan?” She rolls her eyes. “God. I love you guys, but you are kind of dumb.”
“Not our fault you took all the braincells in the ectobiology chamber,” Dave says faintly. “I, uh. I need to go sit down.”
“Me, too,” Karkat says. “John, you wanna—”
“Actually,” John says uncomfortably, “I think I want to talk to Rose for a sec.”
“I would also like a moment,” Kanaya says, significantly, and Rose winces. Then, after a pause, she says: “But since mine will likely take a while, I will let John go first.”
Jade drops a quick peck on Rose’s forehead and then stands. “I’m going to go have food,” she announces. “I haven’t eaten a good lunch in days! Dave, you wanna check out that Alternian place in South Cantown?”
“Is that the one where they fry the bugs right at the table?”
“Yeah! Roxy said it’s really good.”
“As if Roxy has any idea what constitutes good Alternian cuisine,” Karkat grumbles. They file out together. Rose kisses the back of Kanaya’s hand, a premature apology, before she follows them.
The door closes, and their voices fade from behind it.
“Kanaya is going to kick your ass,” John says, matter-of-factly.
“I know.” Rose understands this with the same ineffable clarity that she understands where the sun will rise next morning. She preemptively winces.
“For real, though. She is going to kick your ass so hard you won’t even feel like you have an ass afterwards. You may have to get an ass transplant in order to recover from the ass-kicking she’s going to give you.”
“I’m aware. I may preemptively start seeking ass donors in order to prepare for the operation.” She pushes herself up in bed groggily.
“Good idea,” John hums approvingly. He flops over in one of her bedside chairs and kicks his legs up on the bed, unperturbed by her peeved glance. “So. You wanna talk about it?”
“About what?”
“The weather,” he deadpans.
She huffs a sigh. “No,” she says shortly, and foolishly believes that will be that.
He whistles something. It’s a simple, haunting melody, a melancholy round of notes that folds back in on itself and repeats. Soothing, in its own way, but sad.
“It sucks,” John says. “Doesn’t it?”
The room smells of bleach and Kanaya’s perfume. Cleaning, probably, to sort out her anxieties while Rose lay asleep. Her ribcage constricts.
“Doesn’t what?”
“Not being the Seer of Light,” he says. “Or the Heir of Breath. Whatever. Not being a god? It sucks.”
She blows her breath out slow.
“Yes,” she says, finally. Out loud, the understatement rings with chilling finality. “It very much does.”
“I mean, walking everywhere. Such a pain, right? I don’t want to have to get up and use my legs to go into kitchen and get some chips. I want to be able to just levitate over and grab them. Is that so much to ask? Or when it starts raining, and I can’t just wave a hand and banish the clouds, so I have to go and actually get wet. Ugh. And if don’t get me started on stairs—”
Rose’s temper flares like bludgeoned flint. She snaps, “I don’t know if you’re deliberately demeaning me to make a point, but it’s not funny—”
“Sometimes I hate being human,” John says. “But recently, I haven’t been sure that the Game had anything to do with that.”
Rose quietly looks at her hands. They’re branded with a pair of burn marks where she gripped the handles of her Thorns.
“Maybe,” she allows.
“Maybe. Yeah.” John tips back in his chair. “Like, you can hate the thing that fucked you up however much you want, but you’re still the thing that got fucked up, right? And you have to deal with it, because it’s you. Even fucked up, it’s still you.”
Rose turns her head to watch the other four from the window as they march through the front gate. Dave ruffles Karkat’s hair, who responds by elbowing him in the midriff, and Jade loops one arm around Kanaya’s shoulders.
“I’m not sure I agree with that,” she says.
Instead of persisting, he shrugs and steals some candy from one of her gift baskets. Around a mouthful of Skittles, he asks, “Do you play golf, Rose?”
She frowns. “No.”
“You ever think about it?”
She tilts her head. “I suppose not.”
“You should,” he says. “Me and Terezi, we have this thing where — when one of us is feeling shitty, we go out to Houston and play golf. Doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter when. If one of us starts feeling like they want to . . . I dunno, random example — invoke the eldritch forces of darkness, we just call the other up. And we get in a car and we go.” He pauses, shuffling the Skittles package. “You should come sometime.”
She swallows. “I don’t like golf,” she says.
He rolls his shoulders with a defensive air and pops another candy in his mouth. “Okay, then,” he says. “You don’t have to, then, I guess, it’s not like I’m holding a gun to your head or—”
“But if you really want me to,” she says, “then I will. Come golfing, that is. For you. And for . . . others.”
John stares at her. The corner of his mouth tugs.
“Okay,” he says. “Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Shake on it.”
“Your hand is sticky.”
“And yours hasn’t been washed since before you went voodoocrazy, but here I am, aren’t I?”
“We are a disgusting pair,” she agrees, and shakes on it.
John’s hand is warm, and a pulse hums under his wrist, and his fingers are slightly sticky from recently handling candy.
It’s a meager recompense for godhood, she thinks. But even so, she’d rather have this.
