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You and Aradia don't mean to start meeting like this every single week. Always covertly. Always pretending it's an accident that you've stumbled upon one another.
The first day it happens, you're sipping a bitter lukewarm cappuccino in a dank corner of your favorite coffee shop. Favorite because: there is no internet connection to be had within a three block radius. It is quiet. It is open obscenely late, and the walls hold books stacked high and haphazard. No one minds if you devour them, silently, as you order strong drink after strong drink.
When she first comes in, the little silver chime of the door surprising you because you are so used to its infrequency, you don't recognize her at first. It's odd, still odd, will perhaps always be odd, seeing the trolls in a human aspect. Her hair is long but swept up in an untidy bun on the top of her head. She's wearing red, of course. You don't think any of you ever really got over your color-coding, your blouse is fresh pressed and a little more orange than looks normal on a girl with a pageboy haircut and a cold smile. Her skin is dusky, her eyes bright almonds, her face wide and open.
When you realize it's Aradia, it's like a bucket of ice water dumped on your heart.
Oh, you haven't seen anyone from back then in so long.
She scans the room, coffee cup in hand, looking for a place to sit, and spots you.
You wish she was passive aggressive, like you. Prone to concealment. Detached. You wish all her second chances hadn't given her a sense of appreciation for things like old friends in quiet cafes.
Aradia slides into the seat across from you without a word. You make a show of marking your spot with a spare scrap of paper, setting the book down on the table with a delicate thump.
For a good long minute you just stare at each other, her wide eyes unblinking, your face a stone mask, pouring over each other's expressions.
She's the one who breaks the silence.
"You look awful."
Your mouth twitches up a little, though you know it's true and so it stings a little. "Why, what a way to greet an old friend," you say. "Nice to see you again too, Aradia."
Taking a sip of cappuccino seems like a good idea. A casual gesture.
"So you're a student," she says, gesturing towards the creased book on the table, the similar stack beside it.
"Some of us read for the joy of it."
Aradia gives you this look like, really? And you remember that she's no fool, never was. Aradia grew up the fastest, perhaps, out of all of you. You went grimdark, you became a god, and yes, so did she. But before that she hovered with one hand in life and the other in death, she floated spectral and heard the voices of the dead, she felt the chill confines of a mechanical body and she has been so much more than you.
And still, Aradia looks less haggard. Not haggard at all, really - the picture of health, nearly rosy. Clean clothes. A bookbag containing a few volumes - you peek, some poetry, Nietsche, an archaeology book or two - sits beside her but it doesn't weigh her down.
You'd like to turn this away from you, now.
"And what are you doing here?' you ask. "Aren't you supposed to be excavating ruins somewhere in China? That's what Sollux told me, last time we chatted."
She smiles, and leans her head in one hand. "Oh, it didn't work out. Grant money came up short, they couldn't afford to take another person along."
This infuriates you. Tamp it down.
"Does that bother you?" you ask, leaning forward. Resuming your thirteen year old self's pose, the concerned, the slightly condescending. "The missed opportunity? I'm sure you must have been so excited, it's a shame."
Her eyes grow warmer. "If I said that it doesn't bother you, would that make you mad? That I'm not bothered by setbacks and failure?" She slugs back some coffee. "Unlike you, of course."
You bristle. "Why, whatever is that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, come on Rose," she says. "Cut the horseshit. Look at you."
Aradia gestures at your lank hair, your clothes, how they're clean, yes, perilously so, but well worn and they slump off your already thin frame. The circles under your eyes. The way you know your hand wavers sometimes when you pick up a pencil or a mug.
"Life isn't turning out the way you expected it to, huh?" she asks.
You're tired. You don't know when you last had a night's sleep that didn't involve nightmares and screams and the sight of blood on the ground. You're barely holding on in school, because what does coursework matter when you destroyed two universes and built another with your bare hands? You're not sure where you're going to live next month, and it's cold, it's always cold.
"Oh, fuck you," you say.
You stand. You gather your belongings. Aradia watches you, not smiling or goading you on or angry, just wide eyed and nonjudgemental, which makes it worse.
"Well, I think our time's up for this week," you say. Your voice is whiplike. "I'll see you next week at the same time, I presume."
You sweep out, then, not looking behind you and trying not to analyze the look on her face when you were leaving.
---
It was a joke but you both show up again next week anyway.
This goes on for quite some time.
---
Some jazz is playing in the cafe, Billie Holiday, you think, and Aradia's humming along as you both pick apart little bits of your shared brownie.
"I was thinking about what you said last time," she says, nabbing a few small crumbs. "About us. About the nature of our selves."
"Yes," you say, around a mouthful of brownie. "Can you really say this iteration of yourself, sitting across from me, is really the same girl that lived on Alternia? Or who inhabited the robot body? Or who went god tier?"
She folds her slim fingers on top of each other. "But I remember all of those Aradias, and everything they did. Everything they hoped and dreamed. So, doesn't that make me them, as well?"
You shrug. "That depends."
"On what?" she asks, curious.
"On whether you believe that the body is entangled with the soul." You snatch the last bit of brownie, and she doesn't stop you because you know she doesn't think you eat enough, and that burns your pride. "Our bodies shape us, after all."
Aradia hums. "But does wine change if you pour it into a different bottle?" she asks.
"No, but I don't think bodies are bottles," you say.
She nods. "Well, you've never been dripped into one like a liquid. So that's fair, I suppose.
Sometimes she acts as if she's older than you and it prickles the back of your neck.
"But surely an Alternian would have an even stronger case for body-as-influence," you say. "After all -"
"Yes, yes," she says. "After all, the hemospectrum." She rolls her eyes. "Always with the hemospectrum."
"I'm sorry if it offends you that I find the caste system in your society fascinating."
"Former," says Aradia. "Former society. Former system."
"So would you agree," you say, "That now that you no longer inhabit a troll body, that you no longer identify as a troll?"
Aradia actually looks a little pissed off, which sends a thrill down your spine.
"You never lived in it," she says. "You wouldn't know.
"But, as a member of the lowest order of the hemospectrum, didn't that influence your behavior and your outlook on life nearly as much as any other factor that fused together to create that which we now call 'Aradia'?"
You're gesturing with your hands, but Aradia grabs a wrist and squeezes, tight. "I don't want to talk about the hemospectrum," she says.
"Oh?"
You arch an eyebrow. You're pushing it. You know you're pushing it, but you don't give a shit. You've got half a box of oatmeal to your name, and three papers due this week, and you're lonely and you don't fucking want her pity, the way it pulses out of her every week. "And whyever not?"
She slams your wrist down on the table. It'll bruise , you think. It's not an unpleasant prospect.
"You didn't live it," she says. "You didn't spend every day constantly devalued because you bled a dark red. You didn't grow up a peasant, didn't live in constant fear of culling, of servitude, of the fact that you were only going to live a quarter of the length of time of some of your friends. You didn't get excluded from education, barred from cities, because of what you were. You didn't -" her voice is getting lower and faster - "get told to use the back door, every damn day. You weren't treated more like an object than a person. You didn't - just - fuck."
You take your arm back, and fold your hands in your lap.
"Add it to the list of things we do not fucking talk about," she says, before snatching up her bag and slamming the door behind her.
Only then do you allow yourself a small smile.
---
Here is the list of things that you, Rose Lalonde, and Aradia Megido have agreed to never speak of in your little weekly chats:
1. Your mother.
2. Her lusus.
3. The time when Dave stopped talking to you for a year, how that made you feel, how pathetic and gutted and utterly, utterly sorry you were.
4. How she didn't always hate Equius, not as much as she should have. How it felt to rip her own still beating heart out of her chest.
5. The day you both found the Handmaid's corpse. What she'd been. What she'd been through.
6. That one time you made out with Eridan.
7. That one time she made out with Dave.
8. Gamzee
9. Puppets.
10. What it felt like to die.
11. What lay beyond the Furthest Ring
And now, you suppose,
12. The Hemospectrum.
---
The next week you wait at your usual table for an hour, bitterly throwing back shot after shot of espresso. But she never comes.
When you get back to what you charitably call home, your hands are shaking, your feet are tingling, your chest feels as if someone's pulled it loose and you could go flying up and out of your body at any second.
Somehow, systematically destroying coffee cups seems like the sensible thing to do. Throwing them with tight lipped fury, till the tinkle of broken porcelain isn't enough, till you feel like your skin will crawl off and tendrils of black will cloud your eyes unless you tip a bookshelf over, screaming, kicking the contents, watching pages flutter. Till you're too sweaty and tired to give a damn anymore.
---
So you don't show up the next week.
Or the next.
Partially out of anger. Partially because the distance from your mattress to your closet to the front door grows greater every day, and why not just stay inside and watch the afternoon light filter through the broken blinds?
---
The third week, you hear a rustle at your door, the sound of it creaking open.
You know who it is but you just roll over and pull the covers over your head.
"Rose?" Aradia calls. Her voice is soft as ever.
"How'd you get the door open?" you croak.
"I just shifted it to a time when it wasn't locked," she says. "It's not hard, really."
You pull the quilt back down so you can see her. She's leaning against the door, surveying the room. "How come you didn't show?" she asks.
"How come you didn't?" you volley back, a little too fast.
She sighs, and taps her fingers against her elbow. Aradia looks as if she's attempting to decide something, and you wish she'd just hurry up and leave already.
"You don't have to pull the passive-agressive stuff with me," she says.
You want to say this isn't passive aggressive, but come on. This is you, here.
"Why?" you mutter into your pillow.
Aradia moves to sit beside your mattress (you don't have a bed frame, didn't bother). "We're not very different, you know," she says.
You laugh. She's wrong. You grew up on different planets, completely different societies, with vastly different parents, different issues, different hopes and dreams.
You tell her as much.
"Yeah," she says. "But I think the game might be the great equalizer."
You don't say anything. You sit up in the bed, allow the sheets to pool around your waist, raise one eyebrow.
Her voice is soft. "We've both died. We both know what it's like to be gods, and then to not be again. We both -" Aradia's voice trails off. "Do you still hear them, sometimes?"
Your spine curls in on itself, and you try not to think too hard about the way your dreams sometimes try and scrabble and claw their way out of your skull. How you write, and the words that flow out of your pen spell out thoughts you never had. "Yes," you say, hiding your face from her. "Sometimes."
Aradia curls her hands around your skull and tilts your face back towards her. "Me too," she says. "Always. Like the rumble of a motor in the back of my mind."
You are so relieved and you don't even know why. You lay a hand on top of one of hers, and bite your lip to stomp back silly, stupid tears. "Oh," you say. "Oh thank God."
You're both laughing, the sounds trilling, high, foreign. Aradia leans her forehead against yours. "So pull yourself together, Lalonde."
You want to ask, can you help me? But you can't. You hope Aradia can alchemize your response from the way your tears are clinging to your sky white eyelashes, and it seems she can, because she presses a gentle kiss to your forehead. "Now get your ass out of bed and start cleaning. I'll supervise."
---
The next week, when you catch the glint of her hair as she steps in off the sidewalk, everything gets a little easier. Aradia looks at you and her eyes are a challenge and the voices in your head get a little quieter.
You've got to take this one session at a time, you suppose.