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She’s gorgeous, you think. This isn’t, like, a radical idea or anything, as pretty much everyone on Earth C knows it as immutable fact: Rose Lalonde is gorgeous. You grant yourself a bit of originality, though, because while others describe her as gorgeous like a tornado, a temple, a cosmos, all things grand and important - and you don’t disagree - you know she’s also gorgeous like a rain cloud, or like a shitty #1 Dad mug she found in a thrift store, or like a hand on your shoulder at four am.
You were awake as soon as she pushed your bedroom door open, but it’s only now, when she whispers your name, that you open your eyes and look at her. And she is gorgeous.
“Sorry to wake you,” she says.
“It’s alright,” you say, and you mean it in a way that you usually don’t in the case of interrupted sleep. “You okay?”
“You sounded like you were having a nightmare,” she says, in lieu of an answer.
You roll fully onto your back. The ceiling is easier to look at than her gaze, sometimes, especially when her eyes are so close to yours. “Yeah.”
“What was it about?”
“It was back before the game, and there was a tornado coming for my apartment,” you say, “and then centaur Ben Affleck cantered into my room and swept me away in the nick of time.”
You don’t need to see her small smile to know that it’s there. “Would that perhaps be better described as the nicker of time?”
You turn back onto your side and permit yourself a smile in return. “Sure,” you say, then, before you can think too hard about it, “What are you doing here, Rose?”
You don’t need to see her small smile to know that it’s going to drop, but you watch it happen anyway. She looks… small, suddenly, dwarfed by the blackout curtains covering the large window behind her, her silhouette only visible in the dim red light of your shades-turned-alarm clock. Still, she folds her arms and tries for snark. “I was under the impression that you invited me to stay the night.”
“You know what I mean,” you say.
“Let me make you a mug of tea?” she says.
You do, because you’ve never known how to say no to her. Words fall by the wayside as you pull yourself out of bed and follow Rose into your kitchen, slump down against the kitchen counter and watch as she pulls tea bags and mugs out of cabinets. She knows exactly where everything is, which makes something in your chest twinge. You decide not to think about it, nor to think about how often “not thinking about it” is a thing you do nowadays, around her.
Rose microwaves the water for the tea, stopping the microwave timer before it can actually go off, and passes you your #1 Dad mug a moment later. “Let that steep for a few,” she says, pulling her own mug into her hands as she puts her elbows up next to yours. “We’ve really got to stop meeting like this, you know.”
“Like what?”
Rose’s mug says I Take My Coffee Iced and Black - Just Like My Soul. You don’t think you’ve ever seen it before.
“Like this,” she says. “The whole, me being a damsel in distress and running to you for comfort, then you acting like you don’t need help but letting me give it to you anyway. We’re at risk of becoming unhealthily codependent, if we aren’t already.”
“There are worse things to be,” you offer. You pray that she won’t ask what they are, and while her gaze tells you she’s thinking about it, she grants you the small reprieve. It strikes you that the two of you do this often, dancing around some unspoken, worse alternative than the state you’re in now, and you file that away to not think about later.
“I suppose,” she says. There’s a beat. You can practically see it written in the script that the two of you are following, this late night rerun that no one watches except when they’re fever-high, tossing and turning at four am, and then Rose adds a new, unexpected line. “Dave and I are together.”
You blink once, stop yourself from doing it again because your shades are still on your bedside table. “You’re… together?”
Rose nods. Her fingers, painted with chipped violet polish, tap against her mug. She’s avoiding eye contact, but her voice is clear when she speaks. “Yes. Romantically, I mean.”
“Huh. How long?” Your mouth is dry, your chest is tight, and there’s something like jealousy working its way up your throat, but you can’t figure out who it’s directed at. Sure, you and Rose like to toe the line with jokes and whatnot, but you always figured she was playing with the way you were raised without many social norms, sure, you and Dave are in some weird space that trolls would probably label as pale if they didn’t know how often you catch yourself staring at his lips, sure, it’s obvious to anyone that looks that Rose and Dave understand each other better than almost anyone else, but to put it as close to concisely as you can get, you simply never thought this was a conversation you’d be having.
Rose is looking directly at you now, her eyes searching yours for something you hope they’re not giving away. “Loaded question,” she says, deceptively lightly. “I’ve been in love with him since I was eleven, but we only made it official last month.”
That wasn’t the answer you were expecting, but as you begin to process it, you can’t think of why. You take a sip of your tea. “Alright. Who knows?”
“Kanaya, Karkat, and now you,” Rose says. “We’ll tell Roxy at some point, but we haven’t figured out how. And as for everyone else, we’re just - waiting.”
Before you can think about what you’re doing or how it fits into this strange, strange space, this dark kitchen with light beginning to creep in at the very edges of the world outside of the window, you reach over and cover her fingers with your own, holding them against the warmth of the mug. Her fingers are like ice. “Why me?” you ask.
Rose stares down at your hands. You think that the plural pronoun should probably feel like a shock, but it doesn’t. “You’re family,” she says, then laughs a little to herself. “Which, I suppose, is a bit of a loaded concept in this context. But you are, and you’re both unlikely to be freaked out and unlikely to hide it if you are. So. Are you?”
“Freaked out?” you ask. “Nah. I mean, you’re both gods, it’s not like you were raised together, and -” You pause for a moment, realizing that you’re readily offering a defense that someone who has never given much thought to the ramifications of incest within your friend group probably would not give. “And honestly, it wouldn’t be my place to judge regardless.”
The small smile Rose gives you makes you think of galvanism, of the idea that just one electrical spark could be enough to start a heart. “That’s why I said we should tell you first.”
“Glad I could live up to expectation,” you say.
Rose is quiet, and you abruptly realize that your hand is still on hers. You withdraw it, take another sip of your tea, and try not to think about what they must look like together, her and Dave. If they’ve done anything, or, more realistically, what they have yet to do. If she’s being honest about why you’re the first to know, when Jade, for one, surely wouldn’t care. Why she’s here tonight instead of with Dave or Kanaya.
You force yourself to break the silence with something else. “Honestly, I’m more surprised by the fact that Dave actually presumably confessed his feelings,” you say. “Has he worked things out with Karkat yet?”
The look she gives you, sharp out of the corner of her eye, tells you that she knows that that wasn’t the question you were thinking about. “No,” she says, “well, at least, not in that way. I think they’re in some sort of pitch-pale vacillation situation, but Dave says he’s never felt flushed for Karkat.”
“Huh,” you say.
“My thoughts exactly,” Rose says dryly. Another beat, but at this point, you’re both so wildly off-script that you’re not sure if it matters. “He said he wanted to be here for this, actually, but I thought it would scare both of you off.”
You think about that for a moment. More light, soft and pink, is spilling across the sky and into the kitchen. “I’m not gonna, like, flip my shit if I see PDA or anything,” you finally say.
“Not what I meant, but good to know,” Rose says. Her fingers are tapping against her mug again; you don’t think she’s drank any tea yet. “What was your nightmare really about? Earlier.”
“The game,” you say, half-hoping that that’ll be enough but knowing that it won’t. Rose waits. “We were back - I was on my land, and I just got this message from the AR, I think it was. You know how people are in dreams, like, recognizable but not themselves, and he said that Roxy was dead, and I just … I wasn’t even there, I didn’t know how or when it happened.”
You pause. Rose keeps waiting.
“I used to think,” you continue, “back before the game, that if she ever died, I’d know, somehow. Like an achievement notification would pop up out of the corner of my eye, congratulating me on being the last human left alive, or that my stomach would turn and I would just know. But in the dream I had no idea. I might not’ve ever known, if Hal hadn’t told me.”
You don’t dare to look over at Rose as you take another sip of tea. Your hands are shaking, but you think you’re disguising it by pressing them, white-knuckle, around your mug. You just keep thinking about Roxy, who you know is immortal and safe, and about Dave, and about Dave and Rose, now, and -
“I’m sorry,” Rose says softly. Her hand is on your shoulder, cold but comforting. “I used to dream about dying, every night. After everything with the Tumor, after we got to the meteor, I would wake up every night thinking I was back out there, just watching the timer tick down, only without Dave there.”
You forget, sometimes, that they died together because they refused to let the other die alone. “When did those dreams stop?”
Rose shrugs. Her hand slides down from your shoulder to rest in the crook of your elbow, just below the sleeve of your t-shirt. “They stopped happening every night after Dave started hanging out in my room until I fell asleep, most nights, and now they’re only every now and then.”
A beat. “What did you mean earlier? When you said PDA wasn’t what you meant.”
“Well, I didn’t come here solely to drink your tea and discuss the nearly circular venn diagram of our trauma,” she says, wryly, like it’s a joke. “The original plan was for me to use my historically successful wiles to charm you into bed, then alert Dave so that he could arrive just in time for round two.”
Okay, you’ll admit - you choke on your tea, just a bit. You don’t need to look at Rose to know that she’s giving you a small, smug smile and is fully aware of its alliterative properties. “Well,” you say, after a moment, “that’s not what I … expected.”
“What happened to expecting the unexpected?” she asks.
“Pretty sure that’s just for people that are, y’know, expecting, and I certainly hope neither of us are in that category,” you say.
Rose laughs. You want to catch the sound in a conch shell. “No worries there,” she assures you. “But yes, that was the plan. I really intended to go through with it, but I … well, obviously I’ve lost my touch since I was brave enough to do things like suicide missions and all that. And then I heard you tossing and turning and figured that I’d at least tell you half of it, and here we are.”
“Here we are,” you say softly. “So…”
“So I love you,” she says, your daughter, the world’s Light, one of the most gorgeous women you’ve ever seen, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “And so does Dave, but I told him you’d rather hear that from him.”
You know you should say something, that Rose is waiting, her eyes steadfastly fixed on the far wall, but for one of the first times in your life, you can’t find any words that feel right. The thing is that you’ve loved Rose almost as long as you’ve known her, which has also been just enough time to remind yourself that you can only love her in certain ways. You’ve loved Dave for longer, loved his adult self through tapes and loved the Dave you know since you held him on a rooftop. And you love Roxy in a complicated, messy way, one that you’ve avoided and denied because you still don’t know quite how to define it, in the way you love your last hope and your best friend and the girl that had cybersex with an AI copy of your mind, and if there’s a way to put any of this into words, you’re still searching for it when Rose speaks again.
“Of course, we have contingencies, I - well, to be honest, I don’t know what I was expecting from tonight, and so I think it’ll be hard for you to disappoint me,” she says carefully. “I know that saying that you’re fine with Dave and I’s relationship doesn’t mean that you’re personally comfortable with incest or that you have any sort of reciprocal feelings, so-”
“No, shit, Rose, I love you,” you interrupt. It doesn’t feel like a confession, not really, when you feel like you’ve worn it on your sleeve for as long as you’ve been on Earth C, just - in a slightly different way. “Both of you, I ... but what is this, exactly? Like, are we talkin’ a threesome or, or what?”
You chicken out before you can say the word “relationship” or anything similar. That’s probably more telling than you’d like it to be in more than a couple of ways, and you’re thankful that Rose seems too distracted to call you out for it.
“It’s whatever you want it to be,” Rose says, “but I would be lying if I said that we, Dave and I, weren’t hoping that you would - it could be the three of us, I mean.”
You nod like you’re processing her words. You’re trying to, but the sunlight is getting brighter, warmer, and that means that this is actually happening, it’s not some late night imagining, and Rose Lalonde is asking you to date her and Dave Strider. You feel like you’re past a point of no return with no idea of when you stepped over the line, and there’s nothing you can do but push forward. “What about Kanaya?”
Rose’s eyes are still on the far wall. It allows you to watch her, which might be the most dangerous power you’ve ever been granted. “Well, like I said, she knows. And I’m in love with her, but things are - different, with Dave. Troll culture is inherently polyamorous, with the quadrants and all, so even though this is different, she understands.”
“Huh,” you say, then, “Does … where does Roxy fit into this?”
Rose finally looks at you. For the first time tonight, you feel like you’ve caught her without a prepared response. Slowly, she says, “I don’t know yet. For honesty’s sake, I think I’ve ended up in love with all of you, you and Dave and, well, Roxy. But I don’t … she’s Roxy, and I guess Dave and I just haven’t figured out how to, you know.”
“Okay,” you say. There’s a pause. You look up at the ceiling for a moment, then back at Rose. “So you two just have, like, this recruitment plan, huh?”
Rose, thankfully, lets your weak attempt at a joke break some of the tension, and she smiles at you. “Like a secret society, but it’s just-”
“An semi-secret incestuous polycule,” you finish.
“Well, there it is,” Rose says. She finally drinks some of her tea, and when she places her mug back on the table, her expression is serious again. “I’m not expecting an answer immediately, of course.”
“Rose,” you say, and she lifts her gaze from her mug to meet your eyes. Your left hand is on hers again, somehow, and you reach out with your right to brush a loose strand of hair from her forehead. There are a thousand words on the tip of your tongue: telling her that if she thinks there’s ever a universe where you turn her down, it’s one where you’ve been replaced by someone else, that you love her like an ache and a miracle, that she might just be the most dangerous person you know and you’d trust her with everything, but all you manage is a soft, “C’mere.”
You slide your right hand back, cupping the back of her head and threading your fingers through her soft hair, and she meets you perfectly in the middle when you lean in. Rose’s lips are warm against yours, just this side of tacky with lipstick she must’ve missed when washing her face, and she’s so impossibly perfect that, for a moment, the idea that she’s related to you feels like the most absurd thing that you’ve ever heard. But then she pulls back just enough to give you a smirk that, despite her best efforts, fails to belie its own hesitance, and you know that she’s yours in every way that there is.
The hand not still in yours has ended up cupping your cheek, cool and gentle, and with everything considered, you don’t begrudge yourself the sharp inhale that you take when Rose’s thumb brushes your cheekbone.
“It’s probably narcissistic to compliment you on your looks,” she says, “but damn.”
That knocks a laugh out of you, and you squeeze her hand. “Well, if that makes you narcissistic, I think I legally have to get to the nearest reflective surface t-minus ten minutes ago.”
Rose arches an eyebrow. “And miss what comes next?”
God, but she has no right to be able to look like that, so close to composed when you still feel like you’re catching your breath. “Depends. What’s that, exactly?”
“For starters,” Rose says, and then she’s catching your lips again, nipping playfully at your lower lip til your mouth falls open with a silent gasp. Even though you’re sitting down, the feeling of her tongue slipping into your mouth has your knees weak, arms are heavy, shit, Rose is pulling back and looking at you with wide, amused eyes. “Dirk.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you mumbling Eminem to me while we kiss?”
Well. Shit. It’s good to know, if not a surprise, that Rose can short out your verbal filter, but that doesn’t make your cheeks any less flushed. “Look, I’ll be embarrassed about it if and only if you can tell me that Dave has never rapped to you in bed.”
Rose actually laughs at that, tilting her head forward and resting it on your shoulder. “I guess it’s just a Strider thing, then,” she says, still laughing, and you’re moving your arms to wrap around her back before you make the conscious decision to do so. It’s just that she’s yours, and yeah, okay, you probably need to unpack how possessive that makes you sound, but that’s not even how you mean it, not really. You just want to hold her.
“Guess so,” you say. You don’t know when your voice decided to go all soft again, but judging by the way Rose honest-to-god nuzzles into your shoulder at the sound, you don’t think anyone’s really complaining.
“Speaking of,” Rose says after a moment. “We’re already careening wildly off track of the plans I pretended to make, and I - well, don’t misunderstand me, there is a not very small part of me that would very much like to keep you all to myself, but should we call Dave?”
Dave. You knew, of course, that he was part of the deal, you had the whole goddamn conversation, but somehow, he feels even more out of reach than Rose did. He’s Dave, not your Bro but quite literally as close as it gets, and the idea that he could be yours like Rose is now, somehow, impossibly -
“Dirk?” Rose asks. She tilts her head to the side so that she can look up at you, the smallest hint of concern in her eyes. “I’m not trying to push, I promise. Trust me when I say I’ll understand if this is, well. A lot.”
“No, no, that’s not - okay, I mean, yeah, it’s a lot, but … call him. Please.”
Rose waggles her eyebrows at you, the worry in her eyes fading away. “Now that’s a word I’d like to get out of you more often, Mr. Strider,” she says.
Your cheeks flush an even darker red than before, but you’re proud of yourself for holding back the splutter that tried to escape you. “What do you mean by that, Ms. Lalonde?”
“Oh, you know,” Rose says, pressing a kiss to your neck before sitting up and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. She gives you a smile, warm and genuine and open, and doesn’t say anything else before dialing Dave’s number, putting the call on speaker, and placing her phone face-up on your kitchen counter.
Dave picks up on the second ring.
“Hey, babe,” he says. His voice is groggy, and your heart skips a beat at the realization that this thing that they have is, in fact, a thing that they have, and now it’s a thing that you’re going to get to have too. “S’early as shit, what’s up?”
“Well,” Rose says, and you have a feeling that she doesn’t know how much she’s smiling at her phone or how her eyes lit up, just a bit, when she heard Dave’s voice. You also have a feeling that you’re now permanently stuck in a loop of falling more and more in love with her over everything that she does, now that you’ve let yourself take the first step. “I talked to Dirk.”
“Oh, shit,” Dave says. There’s the sound of rustling and the soft click of a lamp, and then, “Shit, okay, how’d it go? And why did you wait until now to call? ‘Cause, like, okay, you’re doing your smug voice so I’m assuming everything went, y’know, well, and full offense, but you were definitely supposed to call me for round two, and I did not think that any human had that kinda stamina-”
“You’re on speaker, Dave,” Rose interrupts, and she meets your wide eyes with a laugh.
“Oh, uh, hey, dude,” Dave says, and your heart decides that it, apparently, is getting into free-style dive when you hear the nerves creeping into his voice. “What’s up?”
“Dave,” you say, and you’re surprised by your own composure. “Just get over here, okay? You, uh, you didn’t miss anything.”
“Didn’t - okay, Rose, what the fuck happened to the plan?” Dave says. His words are hard to pick out around the burst of sound coming from his end of the phone: more fabric rustling, the creaking of a bed, and footsteps on hardwood floor.
“I improvised,” Rose says, like it’s obvious. “It’s really not important, but hurry up.”
“Alright, alright, I’m coming,” Dave says, and Rose has the audacity to wink at you. Cue that thing you said about falling more and more in love with her. “Be there in just a few.”
“Alright,” Rose says, “I love you.”
“Love you too, babe,” Dave says. He hesitates for a moment, then, “You too, Dirk. In case Rose was being cryptic about it.”
“She got the point across,” you assure him, hoping that your voice doesn’t betray the way Dave’s words make you feel like you’ve tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs that you, for all intents and purposes, really should have known about. “Just get your ass over here already, okay?”
“On my way,” Dave promises, and then Rose hangs up.
She looks at you, still so close, then glances out of the window towards the sun, which is now almost completely above the horizon. “What do you bet that he’s going to try to pull some time shenanigans to get here in, oh, let’s say now?”
You open your mouth to answer, but the sound of a knock at the door beats you to it. Rose grins, reaches across the counter to take your hand again, and calls, “You can just come in, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, I just woke up, give me half a second,” Dave calls back, and then - he’s here. Walking into your kitchen, hands shoved into the pockets of his sweatshirt and shades hooked on the front of his shirt, hair mussed from sleep or the wind, and you love him not so much that it hurts but so much that you’re almost numb with it in the best possible way.
He nods at you, cool as can be, but you know him more than well enough to see the tension in his shoulders and the way that his eyes are flitting between you, Rose, and your intertwined fingers. “Hey,” he says, something like casual, “so, uh. Rose was right, huh?”
“You say that like it’s a surprise,” Rose says, and you can tell that she’s going for dry but doesn’t quite make it through her smile. “Give me a minute, I’ll be right back.”
Before you can quite register what’s happening, Rose is slipping her hand out of yours and disappearing back down the hall. It’s not her smoothest way of leaving you alone with someone to talk about your feelings - and believe you when you say it’s happened a few times - but there’s no denying that it does the trick.
“Do you want to sit down?” you ask Dave, forcing yourself to turn and look at him. Part of you feels like there’s absolutely no way that you can mess this up, but part of you feels like one wrong step will bring everything crashing down. “I can make you some tea, if you want.”
“Nah, but thanks,” Dave says, taking Rose’s place in the stool next to yours. You have a feeling that he’s avoiding your gaze, but you can’t quite confirm because you’re doing the same thing. “So … okay, I mean, we could talk about it, or we could just, I dunno, kiss or something.”
That knocks a surprised laugh out of you, almost too loud in the quiet kitchen, and you force yourself to turn and look at Dave. “Well, I’m pretty sure that the two of us aren’t allowed to have serious conversations within twenty feet of the ground, minimum, so...”
“So,” Dave agrees. There’s a pause, and then he turns to look at you. His eyes are warm and his expression is soft, and kissing him is the easiest choice you’ve ever made. He meets you there, because of course he does, his hands resting on your hips and squeezing on so tightly that it would be uncomfortable if you weren’t holding onto him with the same intense grip, like if you let each other go you’ll lose whatever this moment is.
When you finally break away to breathe, leaning your forehead against his and letting yourself meet his eyes, crinkled up at the corners and a little wet, you don’t quite make the conscious decision to say, “Love you, dude,” before it happens.
Dave laughs a little, probably at the absurdity that you’re just realizing of saying ‘dude’ during a love confession, but you can’t even get offended when the sound warms your chest. “God, you’re a dork,” he says. “I really know how to pick ‘em, huh?”
“You sure do,” Rose says. You’re not sure when she got back, but her hand is on your shoulder now, and she smiles at you when you turn to face her. The sun is fully risen now, bright behind her back and throwing her and Dave into a soft golden glow. “Alright, to Dirk’s room?”
*
It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
green beautiful green.
It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.