Work Text:
“Now you simply turn the crochet hook around, so you can start on hooking in the second row to the first,” you instruct, and you watch benignly as Gamzee’s fingers struggle with the unfamiliar motions. Crochet was the first needlecraft you learned, and you have no qualms in teaching it to Gamzee. It’s calming, and something you can do anywhere. Easier almost than knitting, although just as unforgiving. You look forward to the manufacture of his first lopsided granny square, missed loops and all. You know you will treasure it, and you plan on keeping it. You have lost so many of your little treasures, the things a girl might want to keep to remind herself of things and events and - people.
It has taken so much work for the two of you to get here, after all, and you’re not just talking about how you’d alchemised purple yarn out of Gamzee’s blood and some thread you’d teased from your God Tier robe. That had just been tedious, trying different combinations until you got CLOWN FUN DYE in hanks of purple gradient and smelling faintly of spilt sugar. You don’t know why it smells like sugar but it does; Gamzee had said absently that it smelt like Church and then looked at you afraid and shamed and rebellious all at once. You’d shrugged and agreed (as though you know what clown church smells like, he would know better than you, an atheist human from Earth), and he’d simmered down watchfully as though expecting you still to turn on him but he trusts you now. It has taken time for both of you to trust each other, for different things, in different ways.
“Tricky little motherfucker, wants to up and wrangle itself to wrong directions,” he grumbles, and you hum with agreement. Your fingers are busy with your own handicrafts, but you barely need to think about knitting anymore. Just clickclickclickclick and the knits and purls extend from your needles like web from a spider. It’s not as though you’re working on something hard; just a scarf. Thick and comforting, and knitted in alternating bands of golden-orange and deep purple. It’s ghastly and you know Gamzee will love it.
“You’re doing well,” you murmur, and watch him slowly and carefully work the hook in and out of the loops of thread. His fingers are surprisingly tender with the yarn, skinny digits learning their way into this new skill. It’s strange, this trollish thing called moirallegiance. You hadn’t seen it coming, despite your title of Seer.
The thing that had occurred to you about the third or fourth time you’d spoke to Gamzee in the hornpile, was that you’d realised that things with Gamzee could not be allowed to continue as they were. And despite your inclinations to dive head first down into alcoholism and following the tottering footsteps of your elegantly wasted mother in an attempt to escape your feelings and everything that has happened through the machinations of the Game, you have not succumbed since you had entered into this relationship. No need for some future you to get up and announce in a crowded room that smelt of instant coffee and quiet despair, I am Rose Lalonde and I am an alcoholic, instead you had found a kindred spirit who had already been to the depths and together you had both swum for the surface. You keep each other on the straight and narrow, as it were, and you manage each other’s madness to ensure that you remain on this plane of existence and no other.
You understand what it is to have an absent and neglectful parental figure, although how you’d both been neglected had been different. Abuse comes in different flavours, but you’d recognised each other once you’d started to share about more than just the banalities. When you’re really started to wax pale for each other (pale as bones, Gamzee hums to you with his arms around you, as you listen to the strange rhythm of his heart in his chest, pale as stars, sister mine), you had shared more than you’d meant to. More than you’d thought you had to share. You’d cried yourself to a snotty, red-faced mess and he’d listened and held you and you’d known, known as certain as you know what it is to be possessed by Those of the Outer Rings that he would never tell anyone how you’d broken down.
Before that had happened, you had gone to Karkat and told him firmly that he was not only failing in his moirallegiance but that he was endangering the rest of you by doing so. It hadn’t been foresight per se, but you had let him think so. If only so he would let you do it, despite his own determination to see something through (but he hadn’t been seeing it through, he’d taken Gamzee on and then ignored him and that was so - it was just - you take a deep breath to calm yourself). Scooping Gamzee up after that had been surprisingly easy - if composed of uncomfortable wriggling through the airducts and then a most disgusting clean-up job. It’s not so much that he kept the dead bodies - Dave kept all sorts of dead things and you’re on quite good terms with Dave - it was more that he hadn’t made an effort to preserve them.
“You’ve almost got it,” you say coaxingly, pausing in your own efforts for a moment and laying your knitting aside. Leaning across, you murmur correction into Gamzee’s ear (with its adorable little frill of fin) and guide him through the next step. And then stay focused for a little longer, making sure he’s got the feel of it before returning to your own work. “There. That’s good, Gamzee.”
“You got the patience of the motherfucking saints, Rosesis,” he grumbles, and you put your hand on his, leaning in to make sure you get his gaze meeting yours. An aggressive move, for a troll but required for moirails. You think at least. That the eyes are the mirror to the soul seems to be a shared concept, and moirails need to be able to see all the way to the depths of their pale partner’s soul. Otherwise, could it even be called a pale romance? You don’t think so.
“I want to be here,” you tell him softly, the two of you in some neglected corner of the meteor where you are sure to be uninterrupted. Alone. Together. Doing nothing more than working to create, and learning new skills. Both in fibrecraft and relationships. “And I want to be here, with you.”
The smile he gives you is small and secret and you treasure it to your heart; as much dismay as this relationship has brought to everyone else around you. You’d beaten Karkat down with logic and what you even now consider brutal emotional attacks to make him let go of Gamzee, Kanaya had been horrified and keeping them apart has become an all consuming passion, Dave had been laconic at you and you know that for the tell it is, how much he doesn’t approve and doesn’t understand, and Terezi had told you solemnly that His Tyranny would have no mercy. You don’t understand Carapacian but you think the Mayor at least has been understanding; he’s willing to let you and Gamzee both work on Can Town in peace, at least.
You’re not sure if you’re a perfect moirail, but you think that you are not doing too badly despite your inexperience. If anyone would bother to ask you, you would have said Gamzee is doing quite well at holding up his end of the seesaw as well. But no one asks. No one wants to know. You suppose you shouldn’t be so surprised - mass murder is a lot to get past. But eventually you hope, perhaps...that things can be like this, but with everyone else on the meteor at the same time. They think that you’re the one holding Gamzee in check; how surprising would they find it if you told them that he’s the one who’s holding you and all your dark impulses in check.
People really only do see what they believe is the truth.