Work Text:
The only sound on the moon since Dave’s arrival has been the gentle clicking of Rose’s knitting needles.
He’s not sure how long he’s been awkwardly sitting on the ground about ten feet away from Rose, fidgeting with his hands and wishing she would speak because he has no idea what to say, but it’s been a while. The two inches of scarf that Rose had when Dave arrived have now grown to two feet, and the only acknowledgment she’s given him was one raised eyebrow when he first tumbled down onto the moon’s surface.
In the distance, at the very end of the visible horizon, a sickly green glow begins to appear. Dave honestly doesn’t know if he’s imagining it or if it’s really there. The fact that this is a suicide mission begins to feel real for the first time. He’s not coming back from this. The darkness around him, filled with the faint shadows of the horrorterrors, and Rose’s silence are going to be the last things he knows.
The silence is suddenly unbearable. Dave opens his mouth, unsure of what he’s going to say until the question breaks into the quiet. “What’s the point of making that? Even if you finish that before we get there, I mean…”
Rose doesn’t look up from her work, but her lips purse in a way that means she’s heard him. “It takes up the time better than sitting there regretting your decisions loud enough for me to hear.”
“I’m not regretting my decisions,” Dave snaps. He stands up and starts pacing back and forth; his restless energy is suddenly too much to handle. “I think you’re just projecting onto me."
“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Dave, we both know it doesn’t work.”
Dave huffs but doesn’t try to argue further as he come to a halt in front of Rose. “We’re about to die, okay, can you at least look at me?”
“And whose fault is that,” Rose grumbles. After a few more stitches, though, she places her scarf in her lap and looks up at Dave with a gaze that makes him feel like he’s not wearing his shades at all. “Happy now?”
He prays his poker face is actually holding up as he says, “Not particularly, but thanks.”
Rose’s eyes narrow slightly, but she doesn’t say anything else before returning her attention to her knitting. Dave sighs. “Can we just -”
“I don’t see what there is to talk about,” Rose interrupts. “We’re about to die, even though you being here is completely pointless and quite inane, honestly, and I’m just trying to finish my fucking scarf, and don’t you dare say anything stupid right now.”
She’s clearly fighting to sound angry, but there’s no hiding that rough, almost-crying edge that lingers on the end of her words. The irritation in Dave’s chest unlocks and gives way to a sudden and overwhelming compassion for her. She’s his sister, and of course she has every right to be sad right now, but that doesn’t mean that Dave’s just going to leave her alone and let her sit in her own head while she’s on her way to her death.
So he sits down next to Rose, puts a hand on her shoulder, and waits. He can feel her shoulder trembling through her dream pajamas.
For a long moment, she doesn’t acknowledge him at all. She just keeps knitting, finishing one row and starting the next until she fumbles the needles and creates a small knot in the center of the scarf. With a heavy sigh, she tosses the entire thing onto the ground, closes her eyes, and leans her head over so that it’s resting on top of Dave’s hand. “I really wish you hadn’t come,” she murmurs.
“Yeah, I know,” he murmurs back.
Rose makes a small sound, maybe a protest, maybe the remnants of a swallowed sob, maybe just a simple acknowledgment that Dave spoke. It makes something deep in Dave’s chest hurt, and he slowly slides his arm around Rose’s back and other shoulder so that he can pull her close. Her headband scrapes against his neck as she tucks her head into the space between his shoulder and jaw, but he can’t bring himself to care. He’s about to fucking die, they both are, what does it matter?
“You could still go back, you know,” Dave says. He knows it’s pointless to do so; there’s no way that Rose is going to back down now. Hell, there was never really a chance of her backing down at all.
One of her hands, the one trapped between her and Dave, comes up to rest on Dave’s knee. It’s light, barely there, probably not even intentional on her part, but something about it grabs almost all of Dave’s attention.
“So could you,” Rose points out. Her voice is softer now, still dangerously close to crying but at least without an angry front now.
Dave turns his head slightly and drops his face into Rose’s hair. He has no idea what he’s doing, has never actually had this much sustained, nonviolent physical contact with anyone, but her hair is soft and smells faintly like pavement after rain and this is the last time he’ll ever get to interact with anyone ever again, so why not just do something ? “I know,” he says. The sound barely makes it past the sudden lump in his throat.
Rose’s breath dances across Dave’s neck when she says, “I don’t mean to be cliche or anything, but… are you also currently being overcome with an awful sense of how many things you’ve never done?”
He lifts his head up slightly and turns it so that his ear is pressed into her hair, and he’s staring out into the inky blackness of the Furthest Ring. In the far, far distance, he still thinks he can see that faint green spot. “A little bit, yeah.” There’s a ramble on the tip of his tongue, something about how they’ve done so many things thanks to the game and how they’re basically like Lewis and Clark up in this shit, with horrorterrors instead of Sacagawea, but he can’t bring himself to actually say anything.
“I’ve never dated anyone,” Rose admits, and okay, that’s not really what Dave expected her to be regretting, but… come to think of it, it’s not like he’s ever dated anyone either. “I’ve never even kissed anyone, because I definitely don’t count that time when John kissed my corpse.”
Dave snorts softly at that mental image and refuses to let himself think too much about John and how he and Jade will be alone and - “I haven’t either. Dated anyone, I mean. Or kissed anyone.”
Rose’s hand tightens on his knee for less than a split second. It’s so brief that Dave can’t help but wonder if he imagined it. The moon rocks back and forth slightly as it hits some unexpected space void turbulence. Dave wonders if Rose has just had the same thought he just did.
If neither of us have ever kissed anyone, and no one’s ever going to know anything about what happened out here, would it really be so bad if I just kissed you?
He wants to be able to shove it down immediately, because ecto or otherwise, they’re siblings and that’s gross, but… it keeps bouncing around in his head. And Rose’s silence means that she might very well be in the same boat.
“Did you also just board the U.S.S. Logical but Morally Questionable?” Dave blurts before he can think better of it. The light in the distance seems to pulse in and out.
Rose stiffens along every point of contact she has with Dave - her hand on his knee, their thighs just brushing, his arm around her shoulders, her head against his neck, his head on hers - and he can hear her brow-furrowed, tight-lipped frown when she says, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, are we in the same boat here,” Dave explains. He closes his eyes and tries not to think too hard about the feeling of Rose’s hair against his cheek. “The one where we probably just thought the same thing but aren’t going to say what it is because if one of us isn’t on the same page, this is going to be the most awkward kamikaze mission literally ever.”
There’s a long silence, just long enough for Dave to start wondering if maybe Rose was just being quiet, and now he’s gone and ruined it by saying anything, because now she’ll figure out what the hell he’s trying to imply and then he’ll have to spend his last however long of life on the other side of the moon in absolute, horrific shame.
But then Rose speaks, slowly, deliberately, like she’s checking every word for its possible ulterior motives in the DSM-V before she says it. “If we are on the, ah, same page, though, I think it… may be beneficial for us to consider the subjectivity of conventional morality with regards to our current situation. And also, maybe we should just both say what we’re thinking on three, and if we say different things, we can just banish ourselves to different sides of the moon for the rest of the trip. Or you could go back. But, uh, anyway. I feel… confident that we are thinking the same thing right now. I know both of us extremely well.”
Dave’s heart picks up to the point where there is absolutely no way that Rose can’t hear the
thump, thump, thump
of his pulse. His free hand tenses, releases, tenses, and for just a second, he lets himself imagine kissing Rose, and with a shaky voice he says, “On three?”
Rose disentangles herself from Dave and pivots so that she’s sitting across from him, their legs less than inches apart and her hand still on Dave’s knee. He’s never been more thankful for his shades in his life than when he sees her bright purple eyes staring directly at him. “On three,” she says.
There’s a brief stand-off where neither of them want to be the one to count, but finally, Dave swallows down everything he’s thinking except for one crystal-clear idea, four little words that he prays will actually come out as We could just kiss and not some nerve-induced jumble, and says, “One, two, th-”
He doesn’t even get to finish the count before Rose leans forward and kisses him on the lips.
The contact is gone in a second, and Rose’s hand leaves when her lips do, like she’s completely drawing back, and Dave thinks he might have forgotten how to breathe. He doesn’t know what to think - can he even judge the kiss itself when it was less than a second long, Rose is his sister , Jesus Christ, why does he kind of want to do it again -, let alone what to do, and that’s probably why it comes as a complete surprise to both Dave and Rose when he puts a hand on Rose’s cheek, guides her forward, and kisses her again.
It lasts longer this time, which isn’t hard, necessarily, but… the difference is clear. At first, Dave has literally no idea what he’s doing, just sitting there with his lips closed and pressed up against Rose’s with so little pressure there’s barely any at all, hand resting limply on Rose’s cheek like a half-melted gel cling in a summer window, but then Rose seems to process what’s happening and starts kissing back, and oh.
One of her hands moves to thread its way into Dave’s hair, and something about the contact is so unexpectedly tender that he can’t help the soft gasp that falls from his mouth to Rose’s. Once his mouth is open, Dave starts to realize why kissing is a thing.
Rose’s lips are soft (a little chapped, but nowhere near as badly as Dave’s probably are), and when she slides her tongue into his mouth for just a second, he feels like his whole body was just pressed against a live wire.
He doesn’t let himself think about where they are or how, if he opens his eyes, the face he’s now cupping in two hands will parallel his just a little too well, and for a long time, things are as close to perfect as they can get.
Rose’s other hand wraps around Dave’s back at some point, tugging him closer to her, and while being horny isn’t really high on his priorities list right now, but he can’t help the small groan that forces its way out of his throat when he feels Rose’s chest pressed against him.
Rose smiles against his mouth at that, a small, brief quirk of her lips that Dave unconsciously mirrors, and then it’s her turn to gasp as Dave gently nips at her bottom lip. He has no idea what he’s doing, can’t think about it for fear of freezing up, but for a first kiss, he thinks auto-pilot is doing pretty well.
Dave lets one of his hands slide down Rose’s neck and across her shoulder blade until its resting on her lower back. She leans into him, the angle slightly awkward due to the way her knees are tucked under herself, and so it’s not really a surprise when Dave loses his balance and they both go tumbling backwards.
They end up lying on the surface of the moon, the ground pressed up against Dave’s back, Rose pressed against Dave, their lips still moving together with a bit of half-hearted laughter in between. Dave opens his eyes for a moment and is surprised to find Rose staring intently at him.
He can feel the heat rush to his cheeks, especially when her hand slips from his hair down to his face and carefully plucks his shades off, placing them off to the side with her knitting. She pulls away from him just enough for their noses to brush and says, in a voice Dave has never heard before, all breathy and light but still so Rose , “We should probably stop, huh.”
Probably and want to are very different things, but Dave knows she’s right. There are things you can do with your ecto-sister while on the way to your mutual deaths, and there are things you can’t, and it’s probably best to stay on the right side of that line. “Yeah,” he says. “Probably.”
He can’t stop himself from pressing a kiss to her forehead, though, and the ache in his chest settles just a bit when she closes her eyes and tucks her head under his chin. One of her hands is still resting on his face, her thumb tracing small circles right where the temples of his shades usually are.
“Thank you,” Rose says quietly. Her voice is right back to that almost-crying tone.
Dave doesn’t know how to respond to that. He leans his head back onto the ground, lets one hand idly rub circles in Rose’s back, watches the shadows of the horrorterrors pass by, and doesn’t think about what just happened.
They don’t speak for the rest of the trip, and later, after they’ve both risen as god tiers, alive again and more powerful than ever before, they never talk about those few minutes again.