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Terezi wants to dream again. Maybe stop dreaming. Anything but living out the vaguest collection of her and everyone she’ll ever know’s collective conciousness over and over. Sometimes it got to be just as exhausting as being awake, with the added threat that anyone could drop in at any time. Any version of her, better ones, worse ones, it didn’t matter, and none of them made her feel better.
She ran into Kanaya once.
“Are you from…”
“The alpha? I sure hope so.”
“Good. I started asking because it’s so… it’s-“
“I know.” Terezi sighed, feeling the memory of breath in her. “We don’t really need to catch up.”
“I know. though I do think the bubbles match people up for a reason.”
“What’s our reason then?”
“I’m not sure.”
The memory of silence played itself out. They were sitting on a candy blue treetop, somewhere south of Terezi’s hive. She had seen it so much, and it just suffocated her that she could only see what she remembered. Nothing new, ever.
A constant rehashing of anything that ever happened to you isn’t the worst afterlife imaginable, but it still came with its fair share of tourture. You did it to yourself, she thought, but you still did it. She sounded so jaded.
Jaded, “Ha.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
She took a breath, sorting out all the images that she could remember. It felt like a trap. She would be on edge if she wasn’t already. She knew Kanaya noticed.
“I know you want to help me.”
“I-“ Kanaya seemed torn over what to say. She approached this like a calculation, and it just, it pissed Terezi off. She couldn’t help it, either of them. Maybe it was just how they were. Maybe it it was hopeless. “want to. I want you to, oh.”
She wiped the tear collecting in the corner of Terezi’s eye.
“Kiss me.“
“It won’t help.”
Meddler, as always. It made Terezi laugh.
“Nothing will.”
She sucked in a breath as Kanaya put a hand on her chest, stopping her from leaning in. She looked at her, waiting for her to spill her guts out or something. The silence dragged on and it was so, so infuriating. She could just feel that there was some strategy behind it, that she’d been talking to Rose about psychology and wanted to try out some gross therapy technique on her like she was some kind of specimen to pick apart and put back together.
But she wasn’t saying anything, she was waiting, finally waiting and just letting go just a little bit and she could see it was hard for her, couldn’t she just play the part a little and fall apart a little? What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she just do this and play along and play family or therapy or whatever, get a band-aid put over everything and a certificate or fucking whatever they do in human counseling.
She started falling apart for real, lost in her thoughts and the silence.
“I just need some fucking sleep! Rest, whatever, I can’t do this I can’t-“
Kanaya held her so when her legs gave out they lowered together, softly to the floor. She held her, and she held her back.
“My body rests and my mind…”
“Doesn’t.” Kanaya ran her fingers through Terezi’s hair as she spoke, “It’s exhausting, I know.”
It felt awful to hear the words that she couldn’t say said to her. Awful and, weightless, like there was something lead pushing her chest down that just… evaporated. It was too much, fuck.
“You suck.”
“Hmm, do I?”
“Yeah you fucking suck.” Terezi weakly let her hand fall against Kanaya, “Do something stupid so I can make fun of you already.”
Her hands moved from her hair to her face, sweeping long, slow strokes over Terezi’s cheeks. She looks up, left, and right, then she pulls, gog,
just,
the funniest fucking face.
Full on clownery. Tongue out, eyes squished, undignified and beautiful. In a moment, it’s gone, and she’s back to serene and concerned. Still beautiful. Terezi lets out a shriek, and then dissolves into giggles.
“Kiss me for real, please.”
Kanaya obliges, swiftly closing the distance and meeting her lips. It’s stationary, but stretches on, both of them just feeling the closeness and breath. When they part she intertwines her and Terezi’s fingers and says
“You know, Rose has found a way out of the dream bubbles.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve watched her do it, and I just can’t follow her. It looks like ascending a staircase that I can’t see. We’ve tried, but it seems to be seer only.”
“How do you know that last part?”
“Kankri can do it, he just hates it. He says he needs to be with his people.”
“That’s so bullshit.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps you could try.”
She helped Terezi to her feet, urging her on as she found the first step. Up and up, the stairs unfolding as soon as she wanted to see them. Up and out, she looked down on the bubble through a glass floor. Kanaya waved. Terezi waved back. She looked around, darkness surrounded her, and space extended in every direction like an empty warehouse.
Back in the bubble, Kanaya was alone again.
She had watched Rose ascend, and come back babbling about all the amazing things that only she could see. Babbling, not a good word to use for someone who she loves so much. Kanaya makes a mental correction and lets it stack up with all of the thousands of others. She hopes one day she won’t think the wrong things and her mind can be trained to just…
get out of the way.
Because it is in the way. The story should be on Terezi and Rose, exploring some twist of paradox space that might mean the world to them and maybe her too; she was always drawn to the light. She just wished she didn’t feel so cold when the light left.
She’s not jealous, not exactly. She’s… and there are no words she hasn’t crossed out in her mind that fit. She knows Vriska doesn’t feel like this, Rose, Terezi, they didn’t do this… constant editing. Or maybe they did, and they just, never edit for her sake. It feels like… it’s always up to her to move, to meet them in the middle that isn’t so much in the middle as it is miles away from her and closer to them.
She sighs, and she can pinpoint exactly where the memory of breath comes from. It’s from when she tried to manage a thousand unwanted auspitisms. It’s from trying to manage Vriska, all those years ago. It’s from yesterday, when she had to clean up another mess that they made, and she couldn’t find the heart to complain because they were making progress, all of them, slowly and inexorably healing each other from their shared scars.
Except… it was never anyone else that helped her clean. It was never anyone else that held her while she broke down. It was always someone else, breaking down in front of her, and then falling asleep or walking away and being completely healed or satisfied or cured before talking about how she felt and how the weight of their hurts is cutting into her and how they and how they and, and she should be happy, right? Shouldn’t she be happy?
Isn’t she happy?
It was exactly ten hours later when Kanaya lost her shit.
It was communal dinner, and Vriska was sulking and Karkat was ranting and Dave was… doing nothing wrong, as usual, but his very presence made her blood boil. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, maybe it was that she hadn’t really been sleeping well and she kept getting interrupted by Vriska or Terezi or Rose for the past few months to help with some passion project when they never bothered to ask what they were interrupting, maybe she had some fucking-
Another word to edit out. She sighed, again, and no one noticed, again.
Terezi and Rose walked in, late, babbling chatting about what they saw in, what was it?
“A little projector room in paradox space!”
“Hmm-“
“We were there, like our bodies or our clones or something and all these beams came through and lit up the dream bubbles, it’s how they form! and-“
“When Terezi used her powers I saw a completely different side of things,” Rose interjected, “we had these, wounds, all over.”
“Yeah, you,” Terezi pointed to Rose, “had all these thorns in you, you,” she pointed to Vriska, “had a huge javelin in your chest, you,” Kanaya, “had ooze dripping from your mouth like blood and I had spines all over my face, and-“
She could feel it a little bit, the ooze like blood. It made sense, at least at an unconscious level. Kanaya could feel it, feel herself forcing it down again and again, and she could feel it burn at her, burn at them, all the things she could say but doesn’t, everything she could do but doesn’t.
And she usually finds this cute, when Terezi and Rose strike some kind of common ground and bubble over with pride and revelation. It just feels so distant to Kanaya today.
Maybe it’s just a little something that she needs to contemplate on. Alone, because she couldn’t ask anyone to help. Why not? It would be a burden. She hears that voice she’s tried so hard to remove from herself; but they’re always so happy to burden you, why are you such-
“Well my day was great.” Vriska drawled it out in that way she does when she’s about to start a fight.
Rose and Terezi stopped, stunned into silence at the interjection. They were hurt, and one of them or both of them if she was unlucky would launch into an all out verbal brawl that Kanaya would have to clean up again, make them make up again, un-burn the bridges that they’ve- she’s been building for so, so, long.
Maybe they had similar thoughts, because everyone at the table was looking at her.
“…What?”
A pause. Excruciating.
“Are you waiting for me to do something?”
“Usually you, um,” Terezi spoke up, “keep this kind of stuff from happening.”
“What. Stuff.”
Another pause.
It was Vriska this time, “you like, defuse me before dinner? You weren’t exactly present when I was trying to talk to you earlier.”
“Would you like me, to do something?”
“I guess,” Rose said, noticing the growing rage Kanaya was no longer hiding in her expression, “but dear-“
It was easy enough to flip the table. Sometimes they all forgot how powerful she was, and she knew deep down that she could, not would, but could, wreak havoc on this entire. Fucking. Meteor. She had enough strength to flip the concrete table and slam it against the wall, breaking it in two. She had enough strength to storm out of there and enough strength to completely break down as soon as she got in her room.
Maybe that part wasn’t strength, but it made her feel better to think of it that way.
When a knock on the door comes she just sits there.
Another… she just sits there.
The door budges, the way she sits blocks it, and she doesn’t bother to move.
It’s not a tantrum, exactly. It’s being too confined it chokes her, too relied on it makes her chafe, and maybe she did ask for it, in words at least. The expectations she thought everyone shared weren’t, and that’s fine. Not everyone’s a mind reader… wait.
She’s going to fucking kill Vriska.
She swings open the door and-
“I made you grub cake.”
“Did You Clean, The Kitchen, Vriska?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
She would have asked how she knew exactly what she wanted, but that would be redundant. It was good cake, in that generous homemade kind of way.
“I’m… sorry.”
It’s hard for Vriska to apologize. To really, really apologize. She doesn’t really, change her behavior for anyone or anything, and Kanaya knows this better than anyone alive.
“Do you even know what I’m mad about?”
“Vaguely. You don’t feel taken care of.”
“That’s part of it.”
“You feel… taken advantage of.”
“Yes, that too.”
“I haven’t been… a good girlfriend.”
“And what about the others? Did they send you to apologize on their behalf?”
“No.” Vriska looked at her with an unflinching gaze, “I wanted to do this, it was my idea.”
And that just made Kanaya start crying again. Because Vriska did do these kinds of things, unexpected things, rouge things, wonderful surprises to anyone lucky enough to receive them. It was just never for her. All this time it was for someone else, someone who wasn’t as safe a bet as Kanaya, who she wanted more than Kanaya, who she really cared about.
She held her while she cried, copying the things that Kanaya does for her when the roles are flipped, and promising to do it whenever she needed it again. Kanaya knew that it wasn’t all true, that this was her best effort, not her everyday, but maybe it could just be enough for now. She knew, and it was enough.
Rose and Terezi’s apologies were a little bit harder to understand. Terezi snuck into her room and “cleaned” it, but she just moved everything where Kanaya couldn’t find it, and it wasn’t about cleaning anyway, not all the way. Rose wanted to do a deep talk but Kanaya was way too tired to engage. Eventually she just, fell asleep on the couch.
In the dream bubbles she was alone again. She’s mostly alone in her dreams. She feels a deep connection with herself when she’s alone, and this time it isn’t completely drowned out by loneliness. She needs some time alone, and she gets it for just a few hours in the memory of a beach somewhere.
When she wakes up the sound of the waves is still in her ears and the first thing she sees is the blanket over her. Next she seed the small table by her head, with a warm drink and the book she was last reading.
It was another few hours of loneliness-free alone time before Rose walked in. She had a knitting project in her hands and just, sat across from her and knitted. It was nice. After a few more hours Vriska and Terezi walked in. They unpacked one of the human board games that Dave recommended to them.
It was another few hours before she spoke up.
“It would be nice,” Kanaya said, not looking up from her book, “if I didn’t have to clean up after you.”
“Done.” Terezi shot out. “What else?”
Vriska jabbed her with an elbow and shushed her. It made Kanaya smile a little bit.
“It would be nice if I didn’t have to manage all your tempers… clean up after your fights…”
“I’m certain that can be arranged.” Rose met her glance with a light smile.
“It would be nice if I wasn’t ignored all the time.”
Terezi got up and gave her a kiss on the forehead.
“That can definitely be arranged…” the post ironic sincere suggestiveness made Kanaya laugh a little bit.
“I just, I want to read, for now.”
With that Terei hopped back down to whatever game she was playing with Vriska and it was… nice. It wouldn’t last, two of them would eventually fight or hurt each other, argue, but Kanaya felt like, maybe she could be taken care of too. Maybe she could ask for truces like these where everything is just… nice, nice and quiet and everyone is together but no one expects anything from her.
Maybe she could be seen, and maybe that was enough.