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Your name is Kanaya Maryam and you’re waking up exhausted for the third time this week. Even putting aside the fifty-fifty split odds that any restorative rest, however small, will involve horror terror nightmares about the unfathomable depths of a universe that is furious with all surviving life for waking its slumber, you never feel like you sleep enough. And you blame all kinds of things for it, from not getting enough blood in quantity or variety, to a lack of Alternian-standard sunlight. They are weak, unfounded, even absurd excuses, but you find them easy to latch onto, because then you don’t have to address what’s actually bothering you. Which works, because you don’t have to address it, the oft-inebriated elephant in the room, you just need to put up with it for another two years. Just another. Two. Years. Fuck. You don’t like to think about it, because the idea of two more years of this is. Unpleasant.
But it’s impossible not to care entirely, because she sleeps her black-out drunk sleep next to you every night until she wakes up, later than usual, with a hangover, and begs you to take care of her. Get her some juice, an ice pack, some water, rub her shoulders, get her the bottle on her desk (does she think you don’t know what’s in it? Does she care?). You actually enjoyed taking care of her the first few times it happened. You like to think you inherited at least some of the ancestral motherly instincts that your caste is known for. You got real, genuine pleasure from taking care of your girlfriend in her hour of need. But then it happened again, and again and again. It just kept happening. And you realized that a critical part of “enjoys nurturing loved ones” was that the loved ones are not in complete and utter control of their ailments in the first place. When they were, it was actually pretty fucking obnoxious.
So now you sneak out before she wakes up.
You have no problem tearing deserving motherfuckers in half with a chainsaw, but you can’t bring yourself to tell your girlfriend that you’re not her hired nurse. It’s a fascinating duality. And by fascinating, you mean pathetic.
You kill most of your time in the library. You’ve hardly been happier in the last few months (has it really been that long since her drinking became a Problem?) than the moment when you realized Dave had actually cleared out of there for good. Now you don’t have to sneak in and out of the library before he wakes up, taking as many books as you can carry and hoping they’re interesting and substantive enough to last you through the day.
You’re avoiding Dave, and Dave is avoiding you. The two of you have a silent but completely understood agreement, and neither of you especially want to continue the conversations that would be hanging between you palpably. There’s a very selfish part of you that wishes he and Karkat weren’t glued to the hip whenever they weren’t in their sleeping chambers or ablution blocks, even though you’re happy for them, because godammit you liked Karkat well enough and everyone else is avoiding you or terrible and now you are completely alone. Uh, when Rose is away, you mean, or inebriated.
What’s the saying she used to use, back when she could pronounce the word, and string together a coherent thought that wasn’t about her immediate surroundings? A Freudian slip?
So you spend your time in the library. You read the ancient Alternian tomes in an admittedly fruitless and mostly hopeless attempt to unearth some kind of hint. Or something. You’ll do anything in hopes of finding something to do. Maybe some side-quest to chase. It would distract you from the slog that will be the next two years of this crushing status quo. You learn several things about the viscosity of powdered grub when mixed with sopor slime, and how ancient trolls fashioned houses from bones of fallen comrades, and how to bake a cake completely with grubs and related byproducts. Nothing related to the game or the session that you didn’t already know. But you’ve only read maybe a tenth of the books on the shelves! There’s plenty more to sift through.
Rose stumbles in today. She does this sometimes (usually). You already feel yourself tense before she speaks, but she doesn’t notice. She sloppily draws the chair next to yours and drapes herself over you, getting in the way of your book. It hadn’t been a fascinating read, but it was eons better than this.
“Nay-Nay,” she starts, and you smell the sting of strong spirits on her breath. She used to smell so good. When the two of you would … be close, you loved to breathe her in. Now the sick, harsh smell of the rotten tuber vegetable spirits ooze from her every pore.
“I asked you not to call me that, Rose.”
“Oh, honeymunch, I’m sorry.”
You grit your teeth. Her pet names get more and more intolerable every day.
“Do you need something?”
Rose reels back, looking baffled and, god, hurt, you can’t do this, you shouldn’t have snapped at her. You hate arguing with her, you hate making her upset.
“Did I do somethin’ wrong, Kanny?”
“No. I’m sorry for my sharp tone. You caught me right as I was in the middle of a captivating passage, and I’ve lost my place.”
“Shit! Kanya, you shoulda said so sooner.” She gets up and almost falls over, holds onto the chair to set herself right. She can’t have been awake more than a few hours. You barely restrain the urge to yank out your hair and scream as she sits on the chair a few feet away from you and leers at you stupidly. “What’cha readin’ that’s sso interesting?”
Shit. Well, the best course of action is clearly more lies. It’s not like she would remember them tomorrow, at least not in enough depth to pick up on inconsistencies.
“A fascinating story about ancient Alternian politics. You do remember the caste system?”
Rose rests her chin on her hands and nods, but she doesn’t speak. She has nothing to add, because she never has anything to add anymore that isn’t blindingly stupid. But you love her, you love her despite this, because you know she’s still there under the sopor, and you know she’ll stop drinking it eventually. Won’t she? She would probably stop if you asked her to. You just don’t because. Well. Because you don’t.
“Tell me more, Kanaya.” She actually manages to pronounce your name. Incredible.
“This author theorizes that the blood caste system reflected not by any inherent quality, but that it was instituted first and then the various classes fell to their roles with time, as outliers from the imposed system were culled.”
“Humans have that too!” she says excitedly, which surprises you because you thought you were pulling that directly from your ass. “It’s called evolution. Selevtive.”
Oh. Of course. You were pulling it not from your ass, but from the old conversations you had with her. She might even remember this one, if she wasn’t so fucking smashed.
“Yes, I did think that as I was reading. It reminded me of something you’d said, but I forgot the human term. Selective evolution, of course.”
She nods along happily. She is more than easy to play for the fool.
You miss when you could have gotten half this far into the conversation and she would have smelled the lie on you and made you come clean. Instead she asks you a few more easy questions, and then trails off. You politely ask if she wouldn’t mind if you got back to your reading, and she agrees. You start to read again, and she stares at you for a few minutes, then gets up and stumbles her way to the bookshelf. She was learning Alternian before she started drinking, and she had a remarkable capacity to pick it up, but you would be surprised if she could make much sense of even her human writings in this state.
She doesn’t make sense of it. She’s transparent like this. She can’t understand a thing. You hope she doesn’t ask you to teach her like this.
She doesn’t. You’re thankful.
She only gets a few pages in before she falls asleep, head first onto he book.
You sigh and consider what to do. Part of you wants to leave her there, but you can’t bring yourself to be so cruel. You close your book and get up, pick her up and carry her to her bedroom. She doesn’t wake up as you tuck her in, or when you come back to her room to leave a glass of water by her bedside table. She might not remember that you did this. That’s fine. You close the door quietly on your way out, but you don’t need to bother.
You stare at the hallway wall, the dizzying pattern that makes up the wallpaper in this part of the ship. For the last few hours you’d wanted nothing more than to resolve the issue of her presence. Now that that’s resolved, the crushing weight of the next eight hours of loneliness chokes you. You start walking, because it’s better than staring at the wall.
You miss Rose. Desperately. You miss being able to talk to her like an equal. You used to have long, sparkling conversations about fascinating subjects, wherein she would match your wit and snark phrase for phrase. Talking to her used to be a delight. When you think about what a warped husk of the past your current relationship is, you want to yell. Or cry, or both. You hate this. You could probably do something about it if you talked to her, maybe, but you can’t bring yourself to do it, because you are a horrible coward and you don’t want to upset her when it will only be another two years at most. You have to last it out. You can last it out. It’s 598 more days of this. Maybe less, if Jade can pull of some space shenanigans. A girl can hope. A girl can pray. And you do. Please. Jade. It’s me, Kanaya. Hurry this along before I launch myself off the side of the ship and into the uncaring void of space. Not to be overly dramatic.
Please.