Work Text:
To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man
To flee from memory - Emily Dickinson
You slice the meat into thin strips, working the knife down through the rubbery flesh. It peels away, piece by bloody piece and you lay them in a line like fallen soldiers.
(TT: Lickety-split three blind mice and carving knives bloody stump tales like worms all hot and gristle.
GA: Alk’gnn Flgorlp Slkan Skg’sk’coropt
)
It is room temperature when it passes your lips, slick and slippery, and you shut your teeth over it once, twice then swallow and repeat.
Some days you feel so hot you think you’re burning, flares and crackling heat bubbling under your skin. The sun is bright like nails and you see a green flicker imprinted on your eyelids. You like those days better, those are the ones where you don’t have to sleep, don’t need to set up the battery of alarms portioning you out twenty minutes unconsciousness at a time. Those days you can pick through the rubble, sorting burnt papers from mangled mother boards and not feel the back of your neck burning or your fingernails ripping or the taste of salt on your lips. Those days you remember what it was to be a god, and you can see the fragments left to you, scattered in rubble and words and the bottles gathering dust in the living room cabinet, and they make something, some cohesive whole.
(TT: Blrhjd’alor ‘kjoeiglor bloglgoft cnodgf qwruuwut
GA: Rose I Cannot Understand You I Am Really Quite Worried Now)
Then some days your eyeballs burn inside your skull and your tongue is like a swollen strip of leather claggy against your teeth. You stand perfectly still holding the knife over the chopping board and portion out a phalanx of steak strips and slip them, raw and bloody between your chapped lips.
Those are almost the days you liked best.
Dave Strider was a man of action. Sometimes that action was slamming the door in the face of the landlord asking three months back payment of rent. Sometimes it was microwaving a whole three bags of popcorn for dinner. This time, the action was emptying his Paypal, pulling the last money out of his savings, and selling his sub-woofers to the girl with a face full of gauges in the apartment down the hall, to pay for a one way ticket to Who-Knows-Fucking-Where, Lower Cow Turd, NY.
She’s not at the airstrip when he lands in the plane he’s pretty sure was being pedalled - tiny piece of plastic-y shit goddamn rattled the whole way like the bottle of pills tight in the claw of the hypochondriac sitting next to him - and he snipes the one lonely taxi out from under a sweaty salesman in a polyester suit. He holds the crumpled receipt on the back of which he had scrawled Rose’s address before leaving. The driver makes conversation with himself, arguing with the talk radio host and driving at half the legal limit. He gets dumped out on the side of a narrow road where a high metal gate rises to part the tree line. He can’t find a buzzer anywhere on the gate so he hops it, tossing over his backpack before climbing up the hinges. It is a cross country hike down an unmaintained path before he is spat out of the pine forest in front of the white, angular building he last saw half a decade and a sleep disorder away.
Except it’s only half a building now. The right hand side is mostly rubble, fire scorched and structurally fucked. Metal struts poke out of the concrete like twisted, reaching fingers. The rest is solid, if neglected. The paint work is grey and tired, the windows dusty, and the lawns weed ridden. What he remembers is: vast, intimidating expanses of white, a glistening observatory, a sheet waterfall like cut glass, slicing through the building. The observatory is still there, roof wound back and telescope thrust out into the sky. The stream is a trickle, silted up and blocked with storm debris.
He has frozen, looking at the fractured shell of the building, and he doesn’t see the door open. She leans against the frame. It is twice her height and double width. A monolith of an opening, vast and lonely.
“The brave knight reaches the castle,” she says. Her arms are wrapped around her, holding her elbows. She is watching him from under hooded eyes; he thinks she’s wearing lipstick.
“Reaches the post-apocalyptic zombie mansion more like. Fuck, Lalonde, what did you do to the place?” He angles his chin up all, hey, sup, no Strider’s gonna be phased you blew up your house.
“Science.”
He crunches over the remains of the gravel drive, footsteps softened by weeds.
“Could have warned me you’d decided to life-cosplay silent hill. Pyramid Head gonna come chop my fingers off in the night if I’m a bad boy.”
“I reserve that privilege for myself,” she says and steps back from the door.
He feels stupid for thinking it, but she’s smaller than he remembered. Skinnier, sure, but he could knock his chin on her head and he isn’t expecting that. Surely if they’re products of the same batch of ectoslime they should have grown to the same height, like climbing ivy pinned to the same wall. Though she’s skinnier too, her curves have become more pronounced. Her waist is waspish and her arms like broom handles, but her hips flare out in a way that makes his cock ache. She is wearing an expensively cut grey dress and small diamond studs. Her hair has grown out, a wave emerging where it curls against her shoulders. The only familiar thing is the head band - grey now - tucking her hair behind her ears. Now he’s closer he can see that her eyes are smudged with make up, rather than tiredness as he’d first thought, dark and thick and his shades.
She leads him along the hall. All the wrinkled mage mystic crystal-pocalypse decor is gone, replaced by dust and hunks of half crushed technology. The cavernous open plan living area is different viewed from the ground. He realises now he’d half expected to see the place from his mounted in-game view. It’s bigger from human height, more sterile. No Gandalf the Grey or Zazzerpan the Beige here either. The sofas have been pushed back against the wall, a work bench taking up the centre of the room instead. There are tangles of wires, piles of books and stacked petri dishes, a Bunsen burner hooked up to a tank of gas, and a box of spotless flasks, test tubes and beakers.
Shit, she actually blew up her house.
He dumps his bag down and leans against the breakfast bar, and attempts the slickest of eyebrow waggles.
“Get your party panties on, I’m here to introduce you to a little thing I like to call the outside world.”
Rose meets his eyebrow waggle with calm indifference. “Have you been saving that line long?”
“Special vintage from the Strider wit cellar. Notes of smooth humour and a full nose of my god the man’s a genius, give him an Emmy.”
“How you spoil me. However, I regret to inform you I do not and will not ever own ‘party panties’, and thus have no inclination to participate in this ‘outside’ world of yours.”
Rose is in bare feet on the tiles. Like her hair, her toenails need cutting. She is leaning against a side table, holding on to the edge of it with fingers hooked around. Her mouth is pursed, her bottom lip sucked in like she’s chewing on it all but imperceptibly. She is still looking at him with that knowing smug smile, and it’s times like these he wishes he smoked, so he had something to do with his hands.
“I made an epic voyage like in that story with the Greek dude with shitty luck you told me to read, all the way up here to show you a good time. I’m not leaving till our pretty blond asses have nestled in the well worn butt grooves of sketchy bar stools and we resist the calls of some sirens with the clap.”
Her mouth quirks up. “You read the Odyssey.”
“Might have skimmed the wiki while waiting for some porn to download.”
“Look. Whatever movie John has instructed you to take inspiration from, I’m not playing.”
He pushes his shades up his nose for something to do with his hands. “Nah, girl, this is all me. Here to teach you the ways of the bar fly as practiced in the great state of Texas for many years.”
“Dave - “
“It’ll be fun, trust me. Tequila shots, toilets with vomit on the floor. I’m guessing you don’t go in for mechanical bulls much up here, but I can hold your purse while you get in a bar fight.”
The collar of her dress is twisted, but she’s not fixed it yet. She is off - something too sharp in her movements, voice too lax - and then he sees it. She’s drunk. She’s holding herself very still to hide it, the dark make up hiding the unfocused look in her eyes. The drinks cabinet is dusty, boxed in by a stack of scorched server towers, but the cluster of bottle necks sticking out of the recycling confirms his guess. Suddenly he’s not so sure of his plan anymore - but it’s all he has come up with, and what else are they going to do, play scrabble?
She frowns at him, at the forced casualness of his pose, then lets go of the table.
“Fine,” she says and turns to climb the stairs.
He watches her move, dress pulling tight against her ass as she takes each step, the looks away.
(GA: May I Ask Something Of You)
You’ve seen pictures on the internet of brains in jars; brains that look like sponges, brains with bits gouged out or withered away, like they’ve been eaten at by woodworm. Papery, brittle brains, ready to disintegrate into a mush like sawdust and powder snow. You hold your head when it aches so badly you can’t move it for the splinters digging into your temples and the crushing weight constricting your chest, and wonder if your head was spliced open, would your brain look like that too.
(TT: I suppose that would be permissible.)
You can remember the heavy, wet, bilge feeling of grey-dark water filling your lungs with each breath and clogging up your ears and nose. You remember when you opened your eyes and could see through colours, and light and darkness were nothing. You can feel the slippery coils of tense flesh slide tight around your arms, from you, part of you, beyond you. You remember being something more.
(GA: When It Happens Please Do Not Forget About Us
GA: You Are Not Alone After All)
You remember.
Rose is wearing something small, and black, and probably held on with double-sided tape when she tosses him a set of car keys. He drives the way he remembers the cab driver taking him, back to the three and a half horse town, and circles until he sees the flickering lights of a bar sign. He parks a block away and they walk the difference. The sidewalk is heaped with copper-brown leaves like he’s only really seen on TV before, all perfect New England fall from some overly earnest movie. Rose slides her way through them, dainty on her heels for a drunk, and he follows behind crunch-crunching like the world’s most incompetent boy scout. The bar’s a scummy little brick one storey building, full with Saturday night hopefuls clutching Buds and eyeing each other under the strip lighting. Once inside, Rose slides into a booth before he can take her to the bar. He orders them tequila, as promised, and brings back the bottle, lime slices, salt and shot glasses.
She sets up the shots and downs one while he’s still shuffling around the sticky pleather of the horse-shoe booth seat.
“There. I have partaken of socialisation. Can I go home now?”
“Nope.”
“I see. And how long is this designated ‘fun time’ scheduled to last?”
“I don’t know.” He knocks back his own shot. “Until you stop looking like some disapproving po-faced nun who just found out all the other nuns have been secretly smuggling in vibrators under their wimples.”
“You see remarkably well informed on ecclesiastical sex toy smuggling methods.”
He shrugs. “It pays to know.”
Rose settles back against the upholstered booth back, folding her arms.
“While naturally I am grateful for your concern-”
“Naturally.”
“- concern, which is, I do not doubt, motivated only by purely brotherly affection. However, it behooves me to ask if you feel everything to be quite all right in your own affairs, to feel it appropriate to abandon your home life with such little notice.”
“Did you just say ‘behoove’?”
“Yes I did. Please answer the question.”
“There was a question in there?”
He busies himself picking the pips out of the lime slices to avoid the cool gaze she is levelling at him. Damn girl can slice right to his gizzards in five seconds flat.
“If you’ve got something to say, bar-fly honour demands you come out and say it.”
“I was merely concerned to point out the uncharacteristic eagerness with with you fled the lone star state.”
“Like you said, I got my brotherly concern juices overflowing.”
“Hmm.”
She’s needling him like the pro she is, but there’s no way in hell he’s admitting that maybe he came so fast because he had nothing to leave behind.
“So what’s up with that build your own Skynet freakery? Most of that shit looks trashed.”
“Alas, you have chanced upon my master plan. I hope one day our robot overlords will show us the true meaning of efficiency. Are you going to report me to the Resistance?”
He picks grains of salt out from under his fingernails. Rose is watching him carefully, for all her drunkenly lose joints and flushed cheeks. She is weighing him up, making her hypothesis and setting the variables. He tries not to think about the soft brush of her eyelashes or the redness of her lips.
“Afraid it’s my duty, ma’am.”
“Oh dear, how terrible.” She starts shuffling round the booth seat. “Excuse me while I climb out of a bathroom window.”
“Hey, you’re not escaping my intervention that easily.”
She gives him a withering look, like he is greying gum stuck to the upholstery.
“Dave, neither you nor your painfully good intentions are going to prevent me from peeing when I need to.”
“Oh.”
You wobble into the bathroom, suddenly unsteady on your heels. You don’t wear them much and they make the world off kilter and threatening. He’s so damn earnest under his half-baked sarcasm and ridiculous metaphors, all rubbery thick words and too close skin and eyes that see right through you, through tinted plastic and your skin and your muscles, flesh and bone and organs until he can see right into the deep tight wound core of you and you can’t take it.
(TT: Are you still here?
GA: Yes I Thought I Might Keep You Company)
You run the faucet in a sink that doesn’t look to have been cleaned before you crashed in your asteroid. Slick, burning-cold creepers are licking at the small of your back, unfurling like beachside flags in the wind. You glance a look up in the mirror, then look quickly back down at the sink. They are small, neat almost, little harbingers of things to come. The hum and trill along your skin like static shock, speeding up your heart beat, snatching at your breath. You let the water gurgle into the drain, clearing out some dust and gunk, then cup your hands beneath the steady flow catching and releasing pool after pool of water. You don’t remember when the river through your house dried up. Last summer, in the depth of a heatwave and after three days straight trying to recode the DNA sequence you’d finally extracted, you had gone down to the garden ready to strip off and climb in. You’d found a clogged stream of brackish water, weed-choked and dismal in prospect. You meant to clean it up and wrote a note to yourself on the fridge. That note-board had gone too, you realise, and you can’t place that event either.
(TT: I cannot promise to make scintillating conversation.
TT: As you can see, I am rather busy.)
The middle-aged woman who’d been serving food clatters through the door and you turn off the faucet automatically. Watching her enter a cubicle in the mirror, you sneak a side-long look at yourself. The knot in your stomach when you see your plain, pale, dull reflection is, you hope, relief. It feels far closer to regret.
You want to splash the water over your face but it would ruin your make up, so you dry your hands and return to the booth.
(GA: I Dare Say I Will Cope
GA: I Will Tell You A Story
TT: Oh?
GA: Of The Girl Who Stared Into The Sun)
“I’m doing you a favour here. If I didn’t come up and drag you out you’d end up a local paper headline. Drunk Morticia Adams impersonator drowned in two inches of shallow water. Eaten by cats. It’s a sorry tale.”
“I do not have a cat.”
Rose is over-enunciating, to make up for the sloppiness of her movements as she tips the shot into her mouth. Her icy demeanour has melted into outright hostility, as he tries to cajole her into cracking a smile.
“Creative licence.”
She levels a glare at him. “I didn’t ask you to come. Did you ever stop to think it might be my choice to cloister myself?”
“Did I ever think jack ballsy shit.” He knocks back his own shot, feeling it burn a line down his throat and warm his clenched gut.
“Precisely. We both know thinking has never been your strong suit, so I find myself hard pressed to imagine how you came to the conclusion that your intellect would have anything to offer me.”
She pours another shot, portions out the lime and salt.
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m here to stop you thinking.”
She narrows her eyes, and Dave has to forcibly hold himself back from doing something as cliched as tapping his nails on the table or scowling to show his frustration. Rose downs the drink neat, and wiggles her way crablike out of the booth.
“Okay,” she says, tugging down her dress. “All right. If you would like to see me cease rational thought, I am capable of that.”
“Jeez, that’s not what I meant. Come on, Rose, sit down.”
But she’s ignoring him, spiking across the beer-dreg and nutshell covered floor to the man who’s been giving her the eye since they walked in. He is tall and bottle-blond with a battered leather jacket complete with attitude attached. Dave can’t hear her over the music, but he sees her mouth move as she drapes herself over the bar in front of him. She’s half falling out of her dress, lip curling in a lazy smile as the guy leans forward to whisper something in her ear. His hand goes to her waist to notionally steady himself, and Dave’s jaw clenches.
He struggles out of the booth and crosses to her. Her skin is hot when he puts his hand on her arm, feverish almost.
“Time to go home, drunkass.” He tries to pull her away from the bar, but she shakes him off.
The guy looks him up and down, taking in his scuffed converse and shades.
“This your boyfriend?”
She snorts, looking at him. She guesses where to look at the shades to look him in the eye, and gets it right.
“No,” she says with the precision of the truly hammered. “My brother. And he can kindly fuck off, as he might like to note I am following his own advice.”
The man laughs, sliding his arm around Rose’s waist and Dave swallows down the urge to punch him. If Rose wants to keep playing some stupid elaborate game, that’s her business. He’s not interested if whatever deal she’s made with herself. Self-flagellation mad libs. Post-traumatic pictionary.
“Fine. Whatever. Have fun.”
He drives back to hers, seething and not drunk enough for his liking. When he gets to the gate he remember he still doesn’t know how to unlock them, so parks up at the side of the road and curls up in the back seat to attempt sleep.
He’s staring at the crosshatch pattern on the seat fabric when his phone vibrates in his back pocket. It’s Rose, voice low and slurring.
“Dave, you have to pick me up, it is a matter of the utmost urgency.”
That has him bolt upright, only an inch away from smacking his head on the roof of the car.
“Jesus fuck, what happened, what did he do to you. Are you okay? Where are you. Fuck.”
The parking brake jabs him in the stomach as he squirms over into the driver’s seat.
He can hear her breath shaky on the other end of the line.
“Nothing. He - nothing happened. I threw up in his hair. Then he told me to leave but I can’t find my shoes and I left my purse in the car, so,” she pauses to clear her throat, “would you please pick me up.”
He writes the cross-streets on the back of his hand and goes back into town. She’s there, on a bus-stop bench, hunched and shivering. She lets herself into the passenger seat, curling up into it, with her forehead pressed against the window.
“Seems you’re doing good at getting picked up tonight,” he jokes, and regrets it a second later.
She doesn’t move her head, doesn’t even open her eyes.
“Just don’t. Please. Not right now.”
He nods. It’s a few minutes before he realises she won’t have seen it, but by then it’s too late to bring it up again. He’s pretty sure she’s asleep anyway; her is chest rising and falling slowly in the dull glow of the passing streetlights.
Her purse is under the back seat, and he finds a set of keys that open the gates. Carrying her out of the car and up to her room, he tries very hard not to look at where her dress gapes and the swell of her breasts. He pulls a blanket over her, then fetches a bowl, a glass of water, and aspirin and puts them by her bed. Her eyeshadow has smudged, lending a grey tint to her skin.
He makes up a bed for himself in the spare room, and tries not to think what the ash smears remind him of.
For breakfast the next morning Dave cooks a magnificent spread of fried things he found in the fridge that weren’t too far past their sell-by date. He puts two eggs, a hamsteak, some crackers and a small glass of tomato juice on a tray and is about to take it up to her room when he hears bare feet padding down the stairs. She has scrubbed her face free of make-up and is wrapped in an embroidered silk dressing gown that is too big for her. He puts the tray down on the breakfast bar and gestures to it.
“Chow down, my littlest alkie. Gotta reline that stomach.”
She slides into the seat and picks up the fork to push the eggs around the plate. She nibbles a corner of the hamsteak, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces and eats a couple, downing them with juice like pills. When she’s pushed her plate away, he throws everything including the skillet into the dishwasher and puts it on whatever setting he can make function.
They spend the day side by side at her work bench. Rose slaps his hand away when he tries to pick up a vial of something green and familiar looking, so he goes back to filing her notes. He tries to read a page or two but the series of equations and chemical diagrams elude him.
He cooks again when his hangover loses out to his need to down carbs to pad against her crappily heated mansion. He pretty much maxed out his culinary credit with breakfast, and settles on some kind of pasta concoction comprised mostly of stuff in jars. She eats even less of this than the hamsteak and gets up before he’s done to check on her experiment.
“We should do something,” he says to her hunched back.
She replies without looking round. “I am not voluntarily visiting that unpleasant establishment again.”
“I’ll admit Plan A was a good seven on the screw-up-o-meter. From accidentally stepping on your girlfriend’s cat to killing it with a rolling pin, and serving feline minion with a béchamel sauce on her birthday, I’d rate it about a microwave kitty-corn level fucking horrific.”
“Béchamel sauce?”
“Shut up. I watch a lot of day time TV. Unemployed people really like cookery shows apparently. You got a TV?”
She shoots him a withering look.
“I figured. Can’t let a little pop culture destroy that finely tuned mind of dead Viennese dick-cigar and how-to-knit-your-own-tampon guides.”
“I have a television but I am not going to watch impossibly pretty people deducing murderers by intense brooding.”
“How about CSI: Vegas. Sometimes there are strippers.”
“Fine. If you want to do something we can play scrabble.”
“Scrabble? Like the word thing?”
“Yes like totally that word thing where you have to spell and everything.”
He gives her a cool look over his shades and rises from his chair.
“You, ma’am, have challenged a Strider. Prepare to eat the humble last meal of defeat.”
“I hope it’s better than that bolognaise.”
“Victory Arabiata.”
She laughs. She actually laughs and then stands, smoothing down her skirt, working the creases out with short, brisk motions. Disappearing into the kitchen and she comes back a short while later with a bottle of Pinot Noir, two squat glasses, a cork screw and the scrabble box. He eyes the bottle as she works the screw in, considering the wisdom of making a comment.
She gets there first.
“Honestly, Dave. Tequila?” The cork comes out with a soft pop and she drops the corkscrew and cork together on the parquet. “You drink like a sorority girl on spring break. Tonight,” she says setting the glasses in the free space on the board and pouring, “we drink wine, play games that require an expanded vocabulary and at no point will licking salt be involved.”
They play on the rug in the living area, board set up between them and a bag of letters to one side. Rose toys with him, letting him get in a couple of double scoring squares, doesn’t guard a well placed R and T. The first sign the gloves are coming off is the appearance of QUEZAL hooking onto the second L of his TALL. Five minutes later and he’s stuck with a three Ps and a Q on his tray. She’s at the bottom of her glass already, and pours a second while he swaps a few letters. She gets sharper as she drinks, annihilating him swiftly. They clear the board and start again. He knows he’s doomed, but doesn’t care, pleased when he manages EAR or LEFT while she spreads her ZYMES and KOLHOZY and EXEQUY across the squares.
They finish the bottle and pack away the board. She leans against his shoulder as they climb the stairs. He’s not carrying her this time, but she’s weaving, not pulling her feet up over each step properly. Out side her room she levers herself way from his chest to look at him properly. She’s flushed, lips parted and he can see her tongue move to moisten them slightly. Her skin is so papery and thin, almost mottled. He wants to touch her so very much.
“You don’t have to sleep in the spare room,” she slurs, “if you don’t want to.”
For a moment, she doesn’t blink and he doesn’t breath. She’s warm and close and he can smell the camphor and wine on her.
He takes a step back.
“No.”
God, why couldn’t he think of anything, any fucking little thing to say that’s not blunt and final and cruel but he’s drawing a blank like his shitty attempt at Scrabble. He’s got some Ns and a a pile of vowels and he can’t find anything that doesn’t make him want to sew his own face up to stop the noises coming out of it.
“I mean not - like this.”
Fucking brilliant improvement. The Strider guide to making all people hate you forever. New York Times best fucking seller.
She’s far enough gone that he sees a moment of actual hurt on her face before she straightens up, quiet and hard and brittle.
“Forget it.”
Her door clicks shut and he’s alone on the landing. He has no idea what he’s doing here.
(GA: I Take It That Your Mission Is Finally Underway
TT: How observant you are.)
You think that the heady smell of burning hair will always make something shudder along your spike. The roiling grey fog hisses along the skin of your arms, curling the hairs and taking our the downy short strands at the nape of your neck. From the first time you have been able to pick out the shutter-snap as something in your mind cracks open and the sliding, squirming cold feelers seep out out you, a slow drip drip pooling at the small of your back and spreading out.
(GA: Indeed
TT: Is that it?
GA: Yes)
You stop setting alarms and start sleeping through the day and night together until you wake up starving and stiff jointed. Your bedroom looks like a doll’s theatre made out of paper and matchsticks. You can hear the faint after-echo of them in the rumble and clank of the radiator pipes. The harder you listen the more they slip away. Their words are not clear in your dreams, as they once were. You stand on the edges of oceans stretched up to the barren sky, but you can hear little more than the trailing ends of sibilants and guttural tones like the breakers crashing into the rocks at your feet.
(GA: I Have Come To The Conclusion That In Order To Cover As Much Ground Possible In The Time Left To Us I Must Endeavour Not To Rise To Your Jibes
TT: Thrilling.
TT: And what ground is it that we are forced to sprint over?)
The storm clouds are the best. The lightning and the thunder and the rain like fat bullets makes the air thrum with their voices. In the still summer weeks you forget the sound of them and sleep every couple of days when you can no longer see the numbers on your measuring beaker. Then the weather breaks, and fall is upon your dying house and it is time to let the rains in.
(GA: That You Still Have A Choice)
Dave’s not sure why or when he wakes, but he is suddenly aware of the coldness in his toes that are poking out the bottom of the bed and the ache in his neck. It’s too dark to see much more than the outline of the window and the crack at the bottom of the door.
He hears it, he could swear. Soft like the tread of feet on the carpet or the swish of evergreen branches in the wind. He can hear his name and he really, really wishes he were still asleep.
It’s goddamn freezing, so he wraps the cover around his shoulders and shuffles reluctantly out into the corridor. There’s nothing. No clock ticking, no radiator hum, no gurgle of the boiler. The hair on his neck prickles in the flat silence, muscles tense and waiting.
Again. God damn it.
This is exactly when he should go back to bed, put his earphones on and listen to thrash metal until he’s got a good whack of daylight to work with.
He follows the corridor along until he reaches her door. It’s open a crack and he peers in. She’s there, asleep or looks like, stretched out in a neat line under the covers. He stands sentinel in his peony print coverlet, watching her slack face. His toes are like popsicles when he decides he’s not going to hear it again.
The walk back down the corridor is worse than the way out, which he tells himself is stupid because he’s done the investigation and results have come back negative on demon possession all round.
Climbing back into his bed, he knows there are more things than demons.
Sometimes she vanishes for hours. He finds her hunched over star maps in the observatory, or wiring half crumpled tech in the garden, or sifting amongst the rubble of a building that stood near the house picking out charred bits of fabric he thinks might once have been pink. The concrete and twisted metal have become indistinguishable through years of exposure but he recognises a half-burnt symbol (equals are greater than) and stumbles back, catching at her arm to drag her with him. He gets into a routine: have three meals a day set up on the kitchen counter, place her in front of them, watch until she’s eaten at least half. She has a fridge full of fresh meat she shies away from when he holds it out, asking so how do you like your steak? She ignores him and starts organising the papers cluttering her work bench.
Once he finds her playing the violin. Her bedroom door is open a crack and he pauses outside it. She is standing by the window, head cocked and arm rising and falling with the motion of the bow. Her face is calm, blank and as pale as her hair. He has never seen her play. He watches the twist of her mouth and the pucker between her brows and the sharp movement of her fingers.
He moves - does something, squeaks his shoe or breaths too loud - he doesn’t know what - but she’s stopped playing, frozen for a moment. She’s not looking his way, and he pulls back behind the door frame. He waits a moment but she doesn’t start playing again.
The walls, he remembers later. The walls are still covered in one scrawled, purple word.
Dave realises his master plan is sinking like a punctured lilo, when he burns his fifth attempt at smiley-face pancakes. He tips them into the trash with all due solemnity, and brings out the reserve troops. The weak, underfed troops that only just squeaked the medical.
“How do you feel about record breaking twine?”
Rose is hunched over her coffee in a makeshift caffeine steam inhalation, her hair hanging down like a towel over her head.
“I feel that is a blight on my morning Arabica vigil. Piss off.”
He holds out the spread of pamphlets he picked up from the reception of the motel in town.
“I can also offer you a Tic-Tac that looks like Madonna.”
“No.”
He shrugs. “Whatever. Have a look when you’re done communing with your coffee and we can go out this afternoon and we can ply the fine tourist attractions of rural New York with the snappy and insulting one liners of a talent show judge.”
She sets the cup down with a clack, fingers still wound through the handle. Her mouth is like a knife cut, thin and bloody red and unnerving.
“I”m not Terezi. You can’t distract me with a Rubix cube to lick,” she snaps.
Oh, great, so today is Overly Personal Day. Fan-fucking-tastic. Dave tosses the pamphlets on the countertop and turns away.
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Why not? They are all dead, or as good as.” Her voice is flat and calm like a rip tide. “What does it matter.”
He clatters the breakfast things in the sink.
“Because it does. Can we fucking drop it.”
“Oh look at you. All sturm und drang in a teacup.”
“Jesus, I’m trying to be fucking nice to you at great personal cost and you just can’t resist the chance to kick me in the fucking kidneys.”
Her mouth twists up like a gum wrapper and she pushes her mug away.
“It may surprise you to know, oh selfless Sir Dave of Guy, that I have kidneys too.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Rose smooths her expression and gathers up the pamphlets before stalking off.
Twenty minutes later she drops a flyer for an aquarium in his lap, and goes upstairs to dress. Ten minutes after that she emerges wearing a short, dark skirt and an oversized cardigan that looks suspiciously hand-knitted. She is quiet in the car, and he keeps up an inane prattle to annoy her if nothing else. He wonders if she’s drunk again - been sucking the centres out of liqueur chocolates for breakfast - but her breath smells clean when she leans over to turn the heater on. Fat drops of rain splatter on the windshield as he drives towards the dank grey horizon.
The aquarium is four hours drive away, and consists of one giant tank fringed with artificial rock pools and plastic displays keychains of penguins and guppies holding letters of the alphabet. Tuesday afternoon makes it mostly empty. They pass a school party being herded back onto a fleet of buses as they arrive. It’s cool and dark inside, the lighting angled away from the tanks. She takes a map and leads him around the tubs of crustaceans. The mass of grasping legs and antenna make Dave step back. Rose is bent over the tank, watching the segmented bodies slide and weave over each other. He finds a nice tank of carp and settles himself against the railing to clean the grime out from under his nails. When they’re clean and he’s thinking he’s about ready for some overpriced cafeteria pizza, she’s gone. It takes him a few minutes to spot her, round the corner in a stretch of deserted walkway running along side the vast central tank.
The glass stretches up to the double height ceiling in one sheer wall of murky blue. She seems even smaller, paired with this quietly unsettling vastness. Standing on tip toes, she presses herself forward over the barrier, nose up against the glass and one palm laid flat against it. There is something - octopus? squid?- whatever it’s got a sloppy mess of tentacles suckering onto the side of the tank where Rose’s hand touches it. It writhes and pulsates as though it’s trying to squirm its way through the glass. Through to her.
He wants to laugh, make some terrible joke but his lips are dry and his mind is overwhelmed by the need for her not to be alone.
She doesn’t notice as Dave comes up beside her. There is sweat beaded on her forehead despite the industrial aircon and her neck, her shoulders, her arms are trembling with each shallow breath. He slips one hands down next to her free one. There is only a moment’s hesitation - a moment’s memory of her hands against his chest, her hooded eyes and flushed cheeks - and then he’s sliding his fingers around her palm. She starts at the contact and pulls back from the glass. On the other side the creature jerks away at the same time, fanning its tentacles then sucking them back to propel itself through the water.
Her eyes are too bright, unfocused as they skitter over him, trying to make him out. Her fingers clench and release against his, then she comes back, exhales and sags down. He doesn’t let go as her attention is caught by a flickering school of surgeon-fish darting across the tank. The strip lighting catches their scales flecking a sheen of colour in the dull water. He watches her eyes flicker, following the movement. Her irises contract and expand, following something he can’t work out. He looks at the grey sheen to her sweaty skin and the hollows under her eyes and wonders what else she’s seen.
You find her books when you are fourteen, digging in the rubble for the first time. Every morning over breakfast you look at the mess of mortar and concrete and rust through the trees. After a week of knitting with your back to the window, you pull on a pair of rain boots and your thickest gloves and tromp through the woods where bunt stumps are slowly being overtaken by new growth. The old mulch of pine needles and moss squelches beneath your boots, unpleasantly loud. You make it to the ruins as the sun reaches its low autumn zenith.There are pools of stagnant rain water caught amongst the corroded supports and rendered concrete, brackish and covered in a fine scum of leaf and paint flakes. You can’t move any of the blocks. They are too huge and heavy for your young arms and you fall back, panting, your gloves torn and dirtied. But the rubble is not so large everywhere. You find a stretch where the chunks are smaller, and you kick them back, digging down deep down.
(GA: Rose)
Your first discovery is a crumpled battery block and it brings back a sudden flood of memory so strong you have to sit down on a roof strut and breath slow and deep like the books you used to read always advised. The smell of burning greenwood and smoke and chemicals is fresh in your nose and you feel a twist in your gut that you quickly quash. After that there’s just a lot more debris: pieces of twisted mental, cracked glass and blackened ceiling tiles. Then a flash of colour. A scrap of something pink and you’re digging through the pain in your arms, yanking and heaving until you can get hold of the edge of it. It is a strip of cloth, dirtied and faded but still obviously pink. A bedspread. Tiny curls of flowers and a splatter of hearts and paw prints. You tug it and it rips messily. You stuff it in your coat pocket and pretend you can’t feel the heat in your eyes the wetness on your cheeks. You can do this.
(GA: Rose Are You There)
You find the filling cabinet pinned under a coil of once-green metal tubing. The top half is done for, but the bottom draw rolls open at your touch. There are a stack of ring bound note books. The pages are curled and warped, ink smudged beyond reading in places. That familiar looping hand, ys and gs dipping far under the line before swooping back up. You know those letters so well. One notebook falls into pieces as you lift them up. You try and scrape them all together and make a pile to clutching them up to your chest, so it’s awkward when you clamber out of the rubble armless and unbalanced. You trip on the last iron girder and crumple forward onto the grass. You hit the sodden ground hard, half winding yourself. You put no arm out to break your fall; the note books are still bundled tightly against you, constricting your breathing, making it hitch and catch in your throat as the tears wet your cheeks. It hurts. You have a grazed knee and your arms ache from hauling masonry and your throat feels like an emery board. In amongst the pain and the fear come slipping dark slithering things. They slide along your stinging skin, coiling around your throat and blacking out your vision. They come from inside you, from something you thought was lost and gone like everything else and for a second it’s just familiar. You ease back, sink into it and though it is too tight (too heavy, asking too much) it is simply easier.
(GA: Rose)
They tug you up, pulling your legs into motion, forcing you through the bracken and puddles towards the vast white wall of your house.
But first, into the woods.
She is still checked out when they arrive back, and disappears up to her room without a word. The rain has been sheeting down since they left the aquarium. The river through the house nearly resembled its old form when he pulled up in the drive, fast moving and shimmering in the moonlight. Inside it rattles deafeningly on the tall windows. Dave eats a cheese sandwich while watching a rerun of a terrible sitcom.
He falls asleep at some point. When he wakes up his mouth is stuck with spittle to the skin of his arm where he’d pillowed it and he’s kicked off one shoe. The rain is still falling outside the glass, wind bending and flicking the tops of the pine trees.
He’s staring at the wall and pointedly not considering his fucking incapability to ever know what to do next (he’s not the plan guy; he is one half of a team trying to handle things without backup and it’s not working), when a door slams somewhere upstairs. He waits for the sound of feet or the toilet flushing, but nothing comes.
“Rose?” He sits up on the sofa, pushing the hair back from his forehead. “Rose? You okay?”
Grade A work there, Strider. Talking to the fucking walls like a professional maiden aunt. Enough wind gets through the damaged sections of the house it could slam a door no problem. And yet he’s climbing the stairs with his heart in his mouth like some overemotional nineties new man who wears argyle sweaters and eats muesli three times a day.
His hand twitches for the handle of something he doesn’t have, and he takes the steps two at a time. If brutal fucking honesty is the name of the game, he’ll admit he doesn’t like being alone in the house. Lights are still on, by he’s open the wrong door and stumbled into broken rooms with caved in ceilings and rotting furniture enough times that he’ll take Rose hammering at his crippling self-doubt any day.
The door to her room is standing open, covers rumpled and window wide open. The wind is making the curtains whiplash into the room, bulging and buckling under the force of it. He pulls the door to, and checks each closed door off the hallway.
He’s left with only the door to the outside walkway to the observatory. It’s unlocked and slams behind him. The walkway is slippery with rainwater and has no hand rail. Dave eases along it, keeping his back to the wall, and darts through the again unlocked door up into the tower. A short flight of circular steps takes him up into the observatory itself. The room is dominated by the telescope, pointed at a forty-five degree angle out of the open roof.
Except the open slit in the domed roof is blocked.
Rose is rain-lashed and frightening, toes curled around the edge of the wall to grip. She has her arms raised up to the thunder, fingers splayed out and mouth open in a rictus grin. Dave can’t seem to focus on her properly, her outline is foggy, features dark. At which point he realises how stupid he’s been because her silhouette against the storm sky is not blurred but coiled and writhing, inky tentacles whip cracking out, arching and shuddering as she holds herself out to the chaos.
The observatory floor is slick with puddles. He dodges them barefoot and shivering. It is colder as he draws closer to her, she is radiating a thick frost-like blanket that slows his arms and dulls his mind. He latches one hand around her ankle and his skin sears with cold-burn, but he doesn’t let go. He drags her down, yanking her off the ledge and tumbling into his arms. They fall back together, his back slamming into the sharp edges of the telescope. She is clawing at him, mouth moving with nonsensical words. This close he can see the decaying grey of her skin, how it looks ready to crack and peel. There is a red smudge beneath her nose, trickling from her ears.
She digs her finger nails into his shoulders struggling to pull away from him. He can feel the freezing tendrils wrap around his chest, twine about his thighs and elbows and squeeze.
“Rose, stop it,” he yells against the competing noise of the rain hammering on the dome.
Rose bares her teeth and him and snarls. His bowels liquefy but he keeps his grip on her arms. She is trembling, eyes darting across his face.
“Fuck this.”
Dave throws her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, feeling the tentacles lap and curl around his arms and back as he carries her away from the storm. It’s nigh-on fucking impossible to navigate the narrow catwalk back across to the house with the tentacles streaming out of her buffeting against the wall and throwing off his balance. They make it in, and he stumbles into the bathroom. Peeling the waning fronds from him, he lowers her into the shower and sets the water scalding hot. She jack-knifes when it hits her, back arching and hands scrabbling at the glass walls of the shower cubicle. He holds the door shut, and watches with the adrenaline still fast in his veins as the dark coils recede, slipping back under her skin. When she is again a small, bedraggled bundle of Rose Lalonde with soaking pyjamas and tired eyes, he shuts off the water and hauls her out.
She’s warm again, thank god, and puts up no resistance when he leans them both against the tiled wall and tucks her under his arm. He takes his time, letting them drip onto the bathroom floor as her shivering slowly subsides. She’s pressed up against him so he can’t see her face. He quashes the desire to stroke her hair, then thinks fuck it, and slides his hand up to gingerly touch the damp clumps of hair that stick to her temple. Bit by bit, Rose relaxes against him, muscles slackening until she is a heavy lump against his side. He can feel her eyelashes brush the skin of his neck when she blinks.
“So,” he says eventually. “Let’s start with what the fucking hell do you think you’re doing?”
Rose is unresponsive, face turned towards the far wall.
“That is some messed up shit,” he continues. “Fucking warn me you’re about to do some one-man The Craft reenactment. Gonna start telling me about blood rituals and listening to The Cure and will you stop that. Fuck.”
Dave catches himself, reins in the panicky edge to his voice. He’s squeezing her arm tight enough to leave five splotches where his fingers were. She doesn’t reply, so he keeps going, reaching for familiar ground. Never has Dave Strider met a hint he can’t happily ignore.
“No more tentacle monster shenanigans or I start hiring you out to anime cons for five hundred bucks a show,” he says, giving her shoulder a shake. “And the drinking. Did I mention the drinking? You can stop cauterising your liver, any time now. I’m the only donor you got and I don’t feel like major surgery before I’m twenty five.”
She peels herself from his shoulder midway through his speech to angle a narrow-eyed glare at him.
“Will you please be quiet for a moment?”
His mouth is open and he shuts it quickly. Her face is too close and he has to squint to look at her. She looks like Rose, sounds like Rose. He wants to smell her hair, prod her cheek to made sure no distant terror god has swapped her for a glassy eyed a substitute.
“Not gonna happen. You pulled some sicknasty traumatic bullshit right there so I think I get to talk all the fuck I want. Girl you probably gave me grey hairs tonight.” He talks and talks to see her lips purse up and shoulders tense.
“I do not need you to look after me,” she says. “I thought I’d made that point abundantly clear.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Who else is? Don’t see you doing a good job of it.”
“I was doing fine before you interrupted everything.’
“Interrupted your mind-melding with fucking Octogoth hell spawn? Excuse me if I don’t drop to my knees to beg your forgiveness, Miss Teen Cthulhu.”
“Shut up. That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean? Interrupted your decent into three pints of rum a day to steady the nerves while you try to earn your dead mother’s approval by trying to work out how to clone her back into life?”
Dave feels sick. His mouth kept moving while his brain was trying to scramble into the lifeboats. She looks like she wants to hit him, but instead, she pulls away from him to draw her knees up and wrap her arms around them. He decides shutting his mouth for a while might be a plan worth investigating, so he clams up and counts to twenty.
He’s at fifteen when she starts to speak.
“They’re still out there,” she says to her knees. “But it is very faint, like some sort of terrible radio signal.” She glances at him, watching his expression.
“Okay but you’re going to have to fill me in here, because what I don’t get is: why would you want them back?”
She half sighs, but her voice comes out sudden and hard. “Because it was better. Because I was doing something. Because I meant something.”
He doesn’t know if it’s the flicker of recognition or the fear that makes him squeeze her arm and say, “you mean something to me.”
She looks up at him sharply, body tense. He thinks he might be learning something, because he’s not going to make her talk about the other stuff. It’s enough that she’s offered this up. Of course his over-taxed brain makes up for this leap of progress by letting his mouth run in another direction uncensored.
“Please don’t leave me again,” he says, and despite the cold tiles at his back he can feel his cheeks burning.
Her teeth worry at her bottom lip, a small frown line puckering her brown. Dave is waiting for her to dig her teeth into his slip of the tongue, or else get the punch he’s been asking for. Instead, he gets neither. After a moment, Rose seems to come to some decision, because she’s sliding a hand around the back of his neck and pulling herself up to bring his lips to his ear.
“I won’t.”
Her breath is warm and soft against his skin, and then she brings her mouth to his. Her lips are chapped, mouth a little sour but he doesn’t care. He brings his other hand up to touch her cheek, feeling the residual moisture with the pad of his thumb. He draws back to look at her, look at the flush in her cheek, the strong line of her eyebrows at the curve of her lips.
“Promise?”
He seriously needs to invest in some kind of medieval tongue restrainer.
Rose laughs, a puff of hot breath against his cheek, and he feels her fingers tighten where they’re wound into the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Oh, do shut up, D-”
He shuts her up with a kiss.
They don’t sleep the rest of the night. She makes him move to the bed, and he picks an empty room neither of them have slept in. He’s clumsy and she still shivers if they don’t have the blankets piled all up on top of them, but it’s so good just to be able to hold her.
Afterwards, they wait out the storm with a pot of coffee and a game of uno where she cheats with professional intensity. By the time dawn light begins to creep through the windows, the rain has abated.
Over the next few days, he helps her sort through the heaps of scraps from the laboratory rubble, tossing the ruined pieces and putting aside anything salvageable. While rummaging around the living room, under one of the sofas he finds a squat, dusty statuette of a bearded mage in swirling purple robes. The top of his staff has snapped off. Dave finds it after a little more rummaging. It is the single most hideous thing he’s seen, but he slips it in his pocket anyway.
She is drinking tea on the balcony when he finds her the next morning. He knows she’s still not sleeping much, and the dark hollows under her eyes make that more than clear. He stands beside her to lean on the railing and look out over the pine forest.
“Here,” he says, taking the statuette out of his pocket. “I found this.”
Dave’s glued it back together as best he can, but he got fidgety holding the staff in place while the glue dried, so it’s stuck at an angle. Rose looks at it a moment before reaching out and taking it. She snorts and holds it up to the morning light.
“He’s wonky. How can I ever forgive you this slight.”
Dave takes her mug of tea and slurps it.
“You’ll manage. It’ll be hard and take a lot of soul searching. Maybe a contemplative montage of my best moments, but you’ll come around. It’s my disarming smile that wins your heart over.”
He smiles earnestly, and she cracks up.
“You’re wonky, too. I understand now.”
“What are you talking about, these are classically perfect features right here.”
“Dave, your smile is so lopsided it’s like part of your face has been anaesthetised.”
She takes the mug back and eyes it before taking a sip.
“Dirty lies.”
“I see now that Davendilthas Silentread’s wonky staff is representative of your well-intentioned but ultimately inept overtures.”
“Davendilthas has a swag purple nightdress situation going on. Don’t bandy around words like inept.”
“Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m going to have to demand proof on this matter, you realise.”
He tilts her chin up, meeting the imperious look she is shooting him. On the balcony of her half ruined house, as she holds a mug of tea in one had and Lord Silentread in the other, he kisses her.