Chapter Text
It started at lunch, because of course it did. Lunchtime is absolutely the best time to start vomiting up flowers, doesn't everyone know that? It wasn't like this could happen somewhere more poetically appropriate than a bench beside a cheap dairy bar as embarrassingly bad polka played.
Rose had been having a nice day, carrying a parasol because the sun was bright and she had an aesthetic to maintain, watching as John made jokes and Jade harassed local squirrels and Dave tried very hard to pretend that all the fun he's having was ironic, and then she had to put her ice cream down so that she didn't hack what appeared to be rotting flower chunks into it. Which would have been horrible, because for all the lack of atmosphere this place had, it certainly made delicious ice cream, and ruining that by catching feelings at literally the worst time would be a crime.
Hurridly, Rose attempted to hide the chunk in her napkin, but it was far too late for that. She was literally right in the middle of the group. There was no way to play it off. Everyone had definitely seen. It looked and smelled disgusting. The response was immediate.
"Holy shit, Rose, is that your lung?" She'd like to say something along the lines of, "Yes, that is definitely my lung, please call the hospital before I swoon and die, you're all in charge of my funeral," but Jade was too quick for her.
"Relax, silly, it's a carrion flower! She's just got a crush," and Jade might be a close friend, and other things that Rose forced down in her head, but at that moment Rose genuinely considered taking knitting needles to everything Jade loved.
"We're going to pretend this didn't happen," Rose said, "And get back to what we were already doing."
Unsurprisingly, everyone ignored her.
"Maybe you've got a crush on a zombie," John said, incredibly unhelpfully.
"Are you gonna introduce us to your zombie? Come on, we're your best friends, we deserve to meet the shambling terror you've devoted your heart to," Dave added, and Rose groaned. She's dead on the inside. This has killed her. Farewell, life, you were glorious and now you are gone.
The awful part about this is listening to them throw out speculations about her crush, when she knows perfectly well who her feelings are directed at. Worse yet, she knows that she must crush these crushes in the bud, so to speak, because all of it is a terrible idea that should be ignored. Feelings are so very frustrating, and it's impossible to explain. And even worse still, Rose could still feel a tickle in her throat, which had to mean that a veritable bouquet was still trying to make its way out of her lungs. She could not have that happen in front of them. It's just not allowed.
"I'm going to get up and leave, to escape this vicious mockery. I cannot believe you think I would settle for a simple zombie, I thought you all knew me better than that." She left the table, and there was a pang in her chest as she left the teasing behind. Rose managed to make it to the other side of the building before the other flowers began to come. It's impossible to hack up a ridiculous amount of flowers with dignity, but by all the multilimbed and multieyed gibbering gods did she try her best.
When she finished, her lipstick was smeared and there was a pile of flowers in front of her. Dogwood blooms tangled with carrion flower chunks tangled with blueweed and so on and so on. It's nauseating to think that all that came out of her body, and she hates it. Hates flowers and feelings and the horrible combination of the two that comes with adolescence. She took the time to fix her makeup as best she could without her mirror, and then headed back to the table where her friends are deep in conversation.
"I'm just saying, getting out of gym class is really nice," John said.
"Yeah," Dave replied, "But then you have to be that guy who puked up a bush, and no one wants that, and it's humiliating to be like, sorry teach, can't participate, I just have too many crushes, just too in love to handle class today, I'm gonna lay around and write sappy poetry or something, who wants that?"
"I don't know, Karkat got out of gym class that way, and he's pretty smug about it," Jade added, from her position stretched out on the bench. She was taking up Rose's seat.
"If you don't move," Rose said mildly, "I will be forced to sit directly on you."
Jade did not look particularly intimidated.
"You can try it, but I'm still not gonna budge," she said. Clearly, this meant war. As gracefully as possible, Rose dropped down onto her friend's stomach. Jade's laugh turned into a cough, and a dark chunk of petal came out of her mouth. Oh. Well then. That was clearly a sign.
Rose tried very hard to not let any heartbreak show on her face as she dug through possibilities. Maybe Aradia? She knew the two of them were in the hiking club together. It wouldn't surprise her. Sadden her, yes, but not surprise her. The only thing to do was join in the teasing.
"What's this?" she asked, "Could you be hiding a secret yearning for someone? Do we have to put our matchmaking gloves on? I assure you, there's no one who could possibly have a better idea of how to set you up than us."
"No!" Jade shouted, startling everyone, "I was just eating flowers!" That was very unlikely, since there were no flowers, black or otherwise, anywhere near them, but Rose decided to leave it alone. Besides, John was laughing so hard he was snorting and Dave was already rambling, so it wasn’t like her slack won't be picked up on.
"Come on, it's not like we'll scare them off," Dave said, "We got some social skills, we can charm the fuck out of people. It'll take like five seconds, be like hello yes our wonderful bff wants to smooch you, look at her, look at her endearing weird behavior, she barks sometimes, man's best friend as a person, we love her and you will too. And if you break her heart, I got a fridge full of swords, my dude."
"Dave! I think the fridge full of swords would scare people off!" Jade says, and rolls to force Rose off. The two of them go down in a tangle, taking Rose's parasol with them.
"Look what you've done, now I can't reach my ice cream," Rose reproaches, and everyone is laughing again.
It seems like everyone's forgotten Rose's earlier flower for Jade's, and even with her disappointment Rose is pretty happy about that. Less awkward questions, less embarrassment for her. Quite frankly, it's unfair that her friends can go around without this sort of absurd mess of feeling weighing them down, while she suffers under the weight of far too many feelings. She's never seen John cough up a bouquet, and she's extremely jealous.
In between the laughter and the teasing, Rose makes her way to get everyone a second round of ice cream. Dave follows her, slipping out from where John's arm was around his shoulder. When she took a quick look back, Rose was pretty sure that she saw John looking curiously at Jade's flower, but he might have just been looking at Jade herself, who was still rolling on the ground.
"Hey, seriously," Dave began, awkwardness radiating off him, "You, uh, know if you got a crush on someone we'll support you, right?"
It breaks her heart, it really does, the way he says that. He doesn't know, he can't know, and there's no real way to tell him. And what would she even say, I've been in love with not only you but both of our other friends too for over a year now? That is stupid, and she won't even consider it. Luckily, the topic changes to whether or not Dave will be allowed to take a preserved cow fetus home, and Rose is spared from the embarrassment.
The rest of lunch passed fairly uneventfully, and pretty soon it was time to head back to class. English was next, which meant nothing of note would happen and everyone would probably fall asleep. The most exciting thing to ever happen in English class, to Rose's great disappointment, was the time that several of the incredibly old desks gave out and sent their occupants crashing to the floor.
Today was exactly as dull as always, and the only thing that broke up their teacher's insufferably dull Hot Takes on The Odyssey was Nepeta gagging like a cat with a hairball and spitting bleeding heart flowers onto her desk. And granted, that happened weekly, so it wasn't particularly notable. Quite frankly, Rose was ready to go home.
Unfortunately, there were still two more classes to go. Biology, the last class of the day, wasn't bad, but to get to that she had to suffer through a History class taught by someone who didn't actually care about the subject, and therefore just put on poorly researched films. If she had to see one more conspiracy theorist talk about how the pyramids were made by aliens, she might cry.
Sure enough, history class was painful. In between the subsitute teacher who apparently couldn't keep anyone's names straight, the bizarre movie that had been left by the regular teacher, and the fact that no one in the class could stop talking, it was by far one of the more chaotic lessons.
Luckily, the lights being off meant it was easier to sneak away when a well timed comment left her hacking up more flowers, and she had to retreat to the bathroom. As far as she could tell, no one who wasn't sitting beside her noticed, and no one asked when she returned. The only comment she got was a quick summary from John explaining what she'd missed. When the lights came up and class ended, the only discussion anyone was having was about what drugs the actors had clearly been on. Rose decided to count herself fortunate.
Biology was entertaining. Most of it was taken up by a long debate on feathers, dinosaurs, and feathered dinosaurs. Dave got to keep his cow fetus, and tried to hide how overcome with joy he was over it. Most of the class had done their homework, shockingly. Next week they would be dissecting frogs, and therefore had to prepare accordingly.
They'd been given at least six worksheets with labeled diagrams of frogs, and almost everyone had lost at least three of them. There was a decent chance the class would get banned from participating anyways, if something like The Egg Incident happened again. No one wanted a repeat of The Egg Incident. Granted, as long as all chickens were kept safely on the other side of the school, it was unlikely to reoccur. But still.
There was also always the chance that someone would steal all of the frogs. That had happened last year. Rumor held that it was part of a particularly stupid bet, taken in an attempt to get laid. Apparently, some people thought doing stupid things would guarantee female attention. Which was stupid, obviously.
Eventually, class ended, and they were free to escape the confines of school. Rose had barely finished packing before she was dragged out of the room by her enthusiastic friends. Dave must have been extremely startled, because she could hear him choking in surprise as Jade dragged both of them out by their arms. He was clinging to his jar of cow with one hand, and had apparently dropped his bag. Luckily, John had caught it as he participated in shoving everyone out the door.
Together, they made their way towards the buses, through the crowds of people. John and Jade’s bus was closest, and Rose was quite possibly a little bit jealous. Her bus was all the way at the end, and her bus ride was an hour long. Hour long bus rides were ridiculous. The only benefit to it was that she had a chance to sleep, and also to write embarrassing fanfiction that would never see the light of day. John and Jade, the lucky bastards, had a fifteen-minute ride, with shockingly few patches of horrible dirt roads. She walked them to their bus, walked Dave to his bus, which was directly in front of hers, and then made her way to her usual seat. She dug out her writing notebook, full of character sheets, and settled in for the pointlessly long ride.
Rose, much to her frustration, lived in the middle of the woods, off of a dirt road, off of another dirt road, off of a third dirt road. It was absurd, and made getting mail an awful challenge. The internet was patchy, the ticks were numerous, and she’d twice been late to school when a bear wouldn’t move out of the driveway. There wasn’t exactly much to do. On top of that, she didn’t particularly want to spend much time at home.
Luckily, John had begun hosting weekly dnd games, and Rose had repeatedly sworn her eternal gratitude to him for that. Sarcastically, of course. Always sarcastically. Even better, apparently no one cared if she, say, spent the entire weekend over his house, and just didn’t go home. When she’d first realized that, she’d had many sharp words about child neglect, but honestly Rose considered it a blessing. It wasn’t there was anyone to interact with there, anyways. Her mother had better things to do, like vacuum. Meanwhile, Roxy was still apparently competing for the “Most Oblivious Sister of the Year” award, since Rose was pretty certain she hadn’t actually noticed that her little sister had been spending every weekend out and about. Rose was tempted to begin making snarky jokes about how they were clearly enabling her to become a hooligan and get Teen Pregnante, but no one would probably even notice.
Moving on from that, Rose had a new dnd character to make, so that she’d be ready for tomorrow. Sir Flitterwick the paladin was being retired, since they were going to be starting in a new setting. John had promised her tentacles and cultists, so she was in. It was really sweet, the way he added in the things that she liked into the game. Almost immediately as she though that, a tickle began in her throat. She made a noise of annoyance, and began to cough. A piece of blueweed landed on her notebook.
“Disgusting,” she mumbled under her breath. She got a couple of confused looks from the people sitting in the closest seats, but who cared. She was just going to pretend that none of this ever happened. Because it was undignified, and stupid, and never going to go anywhere.
Unfortunately, it was hard to distract herself on the bus. The only things she had to distract herself with were dnd character sheets, and fanfiction. Even more unfortunately, the dnd characters were inextricably intertwined with her beloved friends, and the fanfiction, well. The fanfiction was what could quite possibly be considered a poorly veiled self-insert. It was extremely enjoyable to write, yes, but also writing the adventures of herself and her friends as planeswalkers was absolutely not going to distract her from the problem of her terrible unrequited love for all of said friends.
Eventually, she decided to just take a nap. Her busride was long, and it would be far nicer to sleep through it than to stay awake the entire time, moping. She plopped her backpack onto her lap, laid her head upon it, and passed into blissful, if temporary, unconsciousness.