Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It starts with a contrarian thought.

You come home from your job. It was a normal, boring day. You come back to your normal, boring apartment. You’re there before your roommate, which isn’t unusual either. You drop your work laptop at its spot by the door and collapse in your chair in front of your personal computer. You enter your password, open a browser to a blank page, and allow yourself to take a moment to wonder what the hell you were doing with your life if this was all you had to look forward to.

You shrug. You still have growing to do, you still have time. This is a stopping point, not an ending. Shrugging off the despondency, you pull up the social networking site do jour and start scrolling through the feed, killing time until your roommate gets back and you can both avoid deciding what to do for dinner.

It’s not until later, when you and your roommate are both engrossed in your evening activities, that you realize that your usual angst about your state in life was stopped a lot sooner than usual.

It’s weeks, maybe months later, that it happens again. You’re driving to work when you feel a sudden spike of despair: why are you even bothering with this?

You blink back a tear. You know you don’t have time to unpack all of that; you are driving seventy miles an hour down the freeway, after all. But your thoughts immediately turn to the job you’ve got now, that you’re headed towards. It’s an entry-level programming position, and it’s nowhere close to what you actually want to be doing in the industry. But, as you’ve reminded yourself before, before you can do the thing you want, you have to prove you can do the thing at all.

You smile slightly as you feel your resolve firm up once more. And you pay the incident no more mind.

There may be other instances, you can’t be sure. Your brain has had so many shakeups over the last year, between graduating, getting a job, moving, establishing your life for what feels like the first time. It's hard to tell when one of these... episodes occurs when your thoughts already feel more erratic than usual. You're not even sure that there is something going on.

Until one day when an episode gives you more than an emotion: it gives you a puzzle.

You're staring at your computer screen waiting for your code to compile. You're idly tapping the mouse to keep your screen saver from kicking in while trying to decide whether you want to risk having your phone out when you feel the sudden need for a particular word.

You love a puzzle, and you're not busy, so you give the feeling your full attention. What kind of word? What does it need to describe?

...You have absolutely no idea. The feeling stays frustratingly abstract.

You bite your lip and dig in, because you don't back down from a challenge. You try to imagine the problem from another angle: whenever you've had trouble with a word for a thing, it can point to not knowing what the thing is.

You feel a sense of agreement off to another side. A third?

Before you can question that, you feel an idea. The idea. It's... not as complicated as you thought it would be? At least, not to you. It conjures images in your head of driving with the windows down and the music up. Of standing on a mountaintop vista and seeing for miles. Of graduating.

The sense of agreement morphs into other memories: standing in front of a finished building, holding the thing you saved up so much to buy, a warm red sunset.

The first, the one with the problem, adds their own images. A clear sky at morning over a green forest. Pursuing the thing you long for. Of not being held back by...

You recognize another idea attached to the last example: being forgiven. Of not being weighed down. You add that idea to the first.

Red starts with more images—paying a debt, cancelling plans—but Green is holding both ideas, looking for the thing that comes from forgiveness.

You rotate the problem again, and you see the connections. Your whole job is connections: what relates to what, and how to use that to find what you need. You see all the images provided and how they all stem from the one idea. The idea that you recognize well. The idea you've been chasing since you recognized it.

Freedom.

"What was that?"

You start in your seat and look around. Your hurriedly jiggle your mouse to turn the screen saver off and turn to your cubicle-mate. "What?"

He just sighs and shakes his head.

You look back at your computer and get back to work, putting aside your experience for later.

It's a few weeks later when you're staring down another puzzle at work. You've read and re-read the chapter in the book they gave you at work about the single-responsibility principle, but there's some block keeping you from putting it into practice. You stare at the screen, willing it to make sense.

Green wonders what you're trying to do.

You close your eyes and turn the problem over in your head. You need to write the part of the program that can take in a bit of information, combine it with information that's already there, save it to the database, and send a notification.

Green immediately starts picking apart the work. They figured, correctly, that it's all about verbs. Actions. They break the main piece into several smaller pieces.

You aren't sure when Red first showed up, but they try to move the pieces farther away from each other and can't. They have to be smaller.

You've tried to keep your frustration away from them, but you can't help it. How small? Break them into atoms? Reinvent an entire programming language inside the programming language?

Immediately you brace for a reprimand. You know you're being immature. You just don't understand how to build a machine this way.

Green comes in with scenes of many working together. A true assembly line, where each worker has complete competency in their small part and complete trust in their coworkers for the whole.

Red tweaks the image and removes the conveyer belt, having the workers pass the widget among each other. Each one does their small part, and no one of them needs to worry about the whole.

You're on the catwalk of the factory, looking down at the big picture. And that's your job. You think you're getting it, but you can't help but wonder why you haven't gotten it yet.

The image shifts, but instead of several workers doing one thing, there's just one worker in a blue jumpsuit doing several things.

There's just you in a blue jumpsuit doing several things.

You can't help it, you laugh. Something something I didn't come here to be read like this. Red and Green laugh with you, now that you can see how ridiculous the idea is. It's a laugh of recognition: this is a lesson they've both learned the hard way.

You blink, and you're back at your desk. The screen saver hasn't cut on this time, thankfully.

You're spending a Friday night alone. Your roommate is on a date and will likely opt to stay out. You are pointedly Not Thinking about what that means.

You browse idly through Netflix. You have been for a while.

You start to feel a sense of joy start bubbling up. It's not sudden, you can feel it coming. It's mixed with anticipation, it's for an event.

It bursts open, and if you were guessing it was Red just by the pattern of events, now you're sure. It's all you can do to just sit there and bask in the feeling with Green.

Green calls up an image of a sunrise. You begin to realize that the image is one you've seen. It's a picture some of your friends in college took when they took an early morning drive up into the mountains to catch the sunrise.

You want to be disappointed, but though the image is from your own head, the feelings and emotions Green attached to it definitely feel like theirs. They add a concert, a play, and a questioning feeling.

You chuckle and emphasize the concert. You both feel a giddiness and start throwing out other options. Is it a delicious meal? Arriving at a destination after a long trip? You've made a game out of guessing what is making Red so joyful.

Green calls up another sunrise, this one through the window of an airplane. You remember where the image is coming from: the one time you and your family took a trip overseas on an overnight flight. You add in a more recent image, of an early-morning drive back to college with the sun peeking between the hills.

Green responds with the midair sunrise again. They're insistent about the sun rising above the clouds. You feel a tint of fear in their insistence.

You both pull back, not enough to break the connection, but the sudden emotion startles you both.

You try to pack up that moment and wrap it in a question. What is going on?

Green releases an idea: it's them. They release another, it's you. A third is Red.

You take hold of your idea. The connections to Red and Green are obvious, but still tentative. Sill forming. The three of you, despite your connection, are separate ideas.

Separate people.

The thought is thrilling and terrifying: Red and Green aren't constructs of your imagination. They're separate people, connected to you through some unknown means.

Red laughs. Of course that's the case! You all think too differently to be products of one head.

Their presence brings another surge of joy, both at renewing your game with Green, but also their presence itself. You try to put out one last guess, but your curiosity shoves itself out first and questions what is making them so happy.

Another burst of joy from Red and an image of holding a laughing baby. The bubbling, uncontrollable laughter of someone discovering laughter for the first time and suddenly finding the most mundane things around them so unbelievably hilarious.

Another image comes along with it. A niece or nephew. Their brother's child. Still young, barely babbling, but definitely laughing.

The connection fades as gradually as it came this time. You eventually realize that, though you're still processing the raw joy you experienced, you're processing it alone.

You blink back a couple of tears, but without knowing how it started in the first place you have no idea how to re-assert the connection. You eventually give up and turn back to your screen.

With a smirk, you flip over to YouTube and search for laughing baby videos.

There are other sessions like this, moments where your link suddenly asserts itself when one of you is feeling strongly about… something. You enjoy the puzzles, especially when one of the others points out a clever solution you wouldn’t have seen on your own. Sometimes it’s a moment of joy, of frustration, of fear; but always a moment that you end up facing together.

Even when you can’t feel Red and Green, you still find yourself acting like they’re there. They never let you get away with self-depreciation when you’re together, and why should you keep it up when you’re alone? You give a little more effort at work, try to smile more to the people around you, try to be the person they know you can be.

After all, it’s become increasingly obvious that you can’t lie to each other. At least, not without lying to yourself.

But now it’s late on a Saturday morning, and your roommate has announced the end of your relationship.

Your roommate details the many ways you’ve made your displeasure obvious. You can’t argue, especially when you’ve increasingly grown weary of your roommate’s bluster. But you thought you had a lid on it, that you were maintaining the peace. So maybe it’s best that you part ways.

Except your roommate goes further. And mentions how fake you are. How you really are just a jerk and a fundamentally mean person. And you believe it.

Your blood is pounding in your ears. You can’t make heads or tails of your own thoughts. You beg forgiveness, you’re not sure what you get in return.

You mention how your roommate has hurt you. In how you’ve felt living in the shadow of your roommate’s forceful personality. Your roommate acknowledges the disparity and blames you. Your roommate pointedly does not apologize.

Your roommate is moving out tomorrow. In a daze, you gather your things from the common areas so the movers (no idea if they’re professionals or just friends) won’t accidentally take something important of yours. You sit in your room, on the floor, leaning against your locked door.

Red is proud of you for standing up for yourself, even if it was futile. You blink back a few tears.

Green softly points out that you’ve already seen how this person projects and deflects, and that the problems your former roommate sees in you are likely exaggerated.

You bitterly reply that it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Green agrees with you.

Red seethes and demands they explain themselves.

Green has seen so much of humanity. The good and the bad. Largely the bad. Everyone has the capability of being good or bad, to many degrees. Intrinsically, hardly anyone is unique in this regard.

What matters, Green emphasized, is what they choose to do.

Red immediately floods your head with all the times they’ve seen you choose to be good. The time you tipped more than you had to. The time you helped your coworker out with a tough problem. How you left several things in the common areas that are probably yours but you weren’t sure and your soon-to-be-former roommate could use them more than you anyway.

Without meaning to, you contribute more images. Times that you’ve made a conscious choice, even it didn’t feel like a choice to you.

Green contributes one more image: the three of you. How, when faced with strange people in your head, you chose to help rather than hurt, or even just ignore. How all three of you have chosen each other.

You send a pulse of affection, one swiftly returned by the other two.

It’s early afternoon by now, and the apartment’s outgoing resident has left to do something. You wipe the tears off your face, blow your nose, and quickly head out, wanting to put as much space between you and the apartment as long as possible.

You skipped lunch, so you go to a nearby drive-thru and eat in your car. You mutter an apology at Red and Green that you should be eating better, but they hardly care.

You’re two bites into your meal when the thought strikes the three of you: the connection is still up.

You can feel the blood drain from your face. Did you do this? Have you kept them from leaving somehow?

Red responds in the negative: they haven’t tried to leave. Sure, when you calmed down, they weren’t focusing on it, but they haven’t tried to close the connection. Haven’t wanted to.

Green adds that they don’t know how the connection works anyway. None of you know how to turn it on, much less off.

They begrudgingly add that you and Red aren’t getting in the way. The affection is subtle, but present.

Red laughs, and you swear you can hear it.

You swallow the bite of food you’d forgotten. You’re happy, nervous, relieved, and scared all at once, and you can feel those feelings echo from the others in different levels. But your curiosity insists on asking one more question.

Here’s the thing: by now, you’ve gotten the hang of your strange shared headspace. It’s not language, not tied to any of your senses. It’s ideas, and those ideas are interpreted by the recipient. Anything concrete has to already exist in the others’ minds. It also means, to Green’s simultaneous glee and dismay, that precise language is impossible.

You meant to ask “Who are you?”

But in that moment, facing the prospect of sharing your head with these two others for the foreseeable future and not sure whether to be afraid or happy or both, your question ends up meaning something different.

You ask “Who are we?”

Red works construction. Kind of. Maybe they're a farmer? The image they give is kind of all of that. They work outside, they build and grow things, some days they ache in bones they didn't know they had. They work hard and play hard. Speaking of, there's a concert tonight they're going to that they wish they could show you.

You walk back into your apartment. The outgoing resident is packing the common area. You make sure to mention that you've taken everything you care about and anything else is fair game. You close your door without waiting for a reaction.

Green is a poet. Or an artist? Their image is much bigger, but that's the gist. They see the world from their unique angle and try to show that angle to others. A reporter, then? Maybe. YouTube video essayist? They again express mild frustration with not being able to use words.

You poke back that the idea is communicated, and isn't that the point? You make sure to drench that idea in affection.

Green agrees, and admits how easy it is to be big-headed. Red admits a tendency to impose. You offer up your own laziness, though it's a virtue at your day-job.

You segue into your life, how you just graduated college and got a programming job. The metaphor of arranging machines in a factory turned out to be on-the-nose. Where you are right now feels like a factory, though. You want to do... more. You're just not sure what that looks like or how to get there.

You hear a string of curses come from the common area. On a good day, you wanted to stay away from your roommate's temper. And this is not a good day. You find a pair of headphones and put them on to block out any sound.

Red is in a large family. Cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents: all of them live with or near them. Not to mention being one of five kids. They're going with the other cousins their age to the concert tonight.

Green's family is much more solitary. They see their parents and sibling once in a while.

You think back to the family you have a couple hundred miles away. That you haven't seen in a few months. You should call them.

You should figure out what you're going to do about the apartment.

Do you want your roommate to keep paying? No, not really. Can you afford that? Yes, barely. Can you find somewhere cheaper? Probably, but there's eight months left on the lease. Can you find another roommate? You don't want another roommate.

The thought surprises you. But it's true, you don't.

Green prods you for numbers.

You wince. Maybe a roommate wouldn't be that bad.

Regardless, Red insists you stay social. There's an entire world outside the three of you, and it wouldn't do to miss it.

You wave goodbye to the student, soon-to-be roommate, that you'd met at a coffee shop. They just got back from studying abroad and needed a place to stay for the spring semester. A place that, conveniently, you had.

Hopefully, since you wouldn't be codependent on each other for a social life, you'd be more likely to tolerate each other.

Green reminds you not to self-deprecate. You swat the side of your head and get back to your car. You've got five hours of driving ahead of you, and you'd like to have a little bit of light when you get to your grandparents' house.

The concept of Thanksgiving didn't translate exactly. Red and Green understood a holiday spent with family, but the actual occasion was a bit muddled. It didn't help that the pilgrim mythos had been thoroughly shattered for you a few years back.

But Red did point out that, as something not readily understood by them, Thanksgiving was obviously something unique to your culture. Your snark about colonialism and genocide was also noted.

But back to the present. You have your playlist ready, your car's oil checked, and the crisp fall air you love so much. With a flourish, you put your car in gear and head out.

Green hangs back, knowing how travel can require a certain level of concentration. Red, on the other hand, seems to be trying to shove themselves into your head to hear your music. After getting a slight headache, you eventually convince them to back off a bit.

The compromise is you're singing along at the top of your lungs, windows down, volume up. The images it sends are... well, you're not entirely sure, but Red loves it.

You pass by a major city. You briefly bemoan your timetable and the fact you can't stop at Ikea. You keep driving.

You're in the empty space between cities when Green suddenly gets agitated.

You cut the stereo and roll up your windows, trying to minimize the distractions outside of your head. Something tells you this will not be over quickly.

You and Red try asking what is happening, but Green's thoughts are too chaotic. He sends what is going on, but the concepts aren't making sense to you. Deforestation, a hurricane, mixed-race people, grounded airplanes, and a lone warrior riding into battle?

Red picks up on the last one. Your mind interprets their response as a green Don Quixote.

You suddenly hope Green isn't literally heading into battle.

Green is literally... angry enough to head into battle.

You wonder if anyone else knows. If there's anyone Green can tell. Do they have a platform they can use?

Green's anger immediately shifts to despair, and you struggle to keep your attention on the road.

There's a rest area in a mile. Thank God.

Green has a platform. And they've told people. They've told everyone for months that this was going to happen.

And no one cared?

People cared. Lots of people cared. Just not anyone with any power to do anything about it.

You swerve into a parking spot in the rest area and wrench the car off. You lean your head against the steering wheel, close your eyes, and cover your ears.

Green, what is happening?

The concepts start to gel a bit more. There's a community that lives on a mountainside. It's dangerous, but it's also theirs. They've lived there for generations, and there's few if any other places these people could thrive. You know the actual reason isn't translating, but you see the strong connection.

There's other interests, some kind of natural resources? Your mind jumps to oil discovered on Native American land.

Green jumps to that metaphor and shifts it: oil on every side. And even though no one's touching the land, it's still dying.

What changed?

You get a jumbled image of a hurricane, a mudslide, and a tree that's rotted out on the inside.

Red asks if anyone's in imminent danger.

Not yet. This was a chance to stop things. But the people in charge chose money over people. As usual.

You start to rotate the problem, wondering if there's some connection Green missed that could change things. As you do, Green sends more info.

They're talking to one of the people affected.

This is not the end of their story. Only another chapter. And because of Green, more people know the story.

You feel Green try to deflect. You flick their ear and tell them not to self-depreciate.

The crisis passed, you get out of the car. It was about time for a bathroom break anyway.

Thanksgiving dinner isn’t the uproarious event you envisioned. But for the first time, you feel like you belong at the grownup table. As in you’re actually following the conversation and contributing a joke or two.

Red knows better than to try jumping into your skull again, but they do want to know all your favorite dishes. Green too, but to a lesser extent.

You were afraid the mental Bluetooth would make you more distracted. You had trouble staying in the moment normally, despite your best efforts. But instead the opposite happens: you have two guests along for the ride whose only way to experience this is through you.

So you do your best, like with the singing in the car, to portray the ideas and experience. Green seems particularly amused by you getting dessert alongside the main course. Red cackles, and you have an impression of Bill Murray yelling “Dogs and cats living together!”

It doesn’t help when your aunt asks what’s new with you.

Out loud, you talk about the job, your new roommate, the tv show you watched a few episodes of to maintain conversation at the office.

In your head you’re sarcastically describing how space aliens are clearly trying to assimilate you into their hive mind. You all laugh, but also start turning over the problem of how to tell your families.

Not now though. Now is for food.

It’s when you’re sitting on the couch, barely paying attention to the football game, that the melancholy of these family visits hits you. The in-laws that you grew up seeing that… aren’t in-laws anymore. The trees you would climb now seeming so small. The memories of spending all day watching Nickelodeon now ruined by… what’s currently on Nickelodeon.

You know now that there has always been family drama. But you think back to the summer you and your cousins first realized what it was, what it meant. How the uncle you had once been so excited to get wasn't your uncle anymore. How the grownups didn't necessarily feel about each other the way you felt about each other.

Red commiserates. There's places, there's moments, and when the two are separated, it feels wrong.

They turn the memory in your mind. Of being a kid and climbing the tree that seemed so gigantic. The moment is a part of you. It can't be re-experienced, but it can be remembered.

You smile despite yourself. The memories are there, and you can make more.

"You alright?"

You turn to your aunt who sat next to you on the couch. "Yeah," you say, "just feeling nostalgic."

"Word," she says. She leans in conspiratorially. "There's vodka in the freezer," she whispers.

You hesitate. You haven't drunk much alcohol lately, largely because you don't trust yourself to drink by yourself. Physically by yourself, that is.

Red and Green both point out that you are the opposite of alone right now.

You smirk at your aunt, and you both leave the couch.

It’s a Tuesday night in that liminal space between Thanksgiving and December. You just finished your serving of the frozen casserole you headed up, and you’re waiting for the rest to cool down so you can divvy up the leftovers and put them in the fridge.

You feel a sharp, stinging pain in the ball of your foot.

You look down at your foot, a sock and shoe between it and anything that might have poked it. Did a bug get in your shoe?

Green doesn’t see anything around them that could have caused the pain.

Red is cursing up a storm.

Wait, Red and Green both felt that? Felt that?

Of course Red felt that, it was a nail! Where there should not have been a nail!

A pause.

Wait, you felt that?

You and Green both say yes.

Red’s first instinct is to step on another nail. Thankfully they don’t act on it. They do concentrate on the feeling, though. The pain and the nerve endings and the signals and the sensations and the physicality of it!

Green catches on and tries to open themselves up to the feeling.

You hurry to put up your leftovers. It might be a little early, but that’s better than forgetting about them. You can’t help but share your anticipation with the others.

You’re scurrying back to the living room when your foot goes numb. You stumble a bit and end up hopping on the other foot back to the couch. You can tell your brain doesn’t know what to do with the new set of signals.

Green points out that brains are very good at processing input, it just might take a little while.

You debate on calling in sick tomorrow if you’re going to be dealing with phantom limbs all day.

Red is doing their best to send while also cleaning their wound.

The pain begins to dull, but the foreign sensations in your leg are still there. That’s progress!

It’s about a half-hour later that the sensations spread up to your hip. A minute later it’s both legs. You barely have time to process that before it covers your whole body.

Green asks what Red is doing. Red is walking around their room making exaggerated motions.

Well, that explains the strange vertigo you’re feeling, where you know you’re lying on the couch but it feels like you’re moving. A couple of your muscles twitch, trying to make reality line up what you’re feeling.

Green is feeling it worse than you. They’re trying hard to separate the sensations, trick their subconscious into thinking the foreign sensations are just in their imagination. You try the same.

One of you suggests moving your own limbs opposite to Red’s. You’re not sure which at the point. But it does seem to help.

Red quickly tells you to close your eyes.

You do. It’s the usual pseudo-darkness. Just as you start to wonder, it starts to shift. Your brain is still confused about the new input; you see the backs of your eyelids shift, like a streaming video that glitched halfway through. Colors start appearing, patterns start forming—

And Red turns their body to the right. The sense of motion and feeling lines up with the visual change for a moment.

You and Green excitedly tell her to do that again.

A few minutes of calibration later, and it clicks. Kind of. You are lying motionless on your couch, arms folded, eyes closed.

And you are walking with exaggerated motions around a small room. The walls are vine-covered lattice, the ceiling lamp is giving off a warm, steady light, there is a simple bed in the corner, and a full-length mirror is on the wall.

Red turns to the mirror, excited to show you how they look.

Green gives a feeling of bracing for an impact.

You… are just confused. The image is not making any sense to you. It looks like a person, but the head and legs are shifting, like your brain is still trying to make sense of the information.

You open your eyes and try to re-calibrate your own senses. Maybe your brain can make more sense of Red’s vision if it knows what your own vision is.

Green is slowly growing more afraid. It’s making Red uneasy.

You consciously try not to filter what Red is sending. But it doesn’t make sense… they’ve got… horns?

You’re reminded of Mr. Tummnus. You try to send that image in the usual way.

Green doesn’t have a frame of reference. Red sees their uncle.

Your heart skips a beat. Red’s a faun?

You can see the image clearly. They’re a faun that, if their biology is anything like yours, is around your age. They’ve got a slight tan, rich brown hair and fur, a pair of cute horns peeking through their hair, and they’re wearing a loose white blouse.

You're almost giddy. A faun? A real faun?

It's Red's turn to be apprehensive. You see her smile fall as you feel the emotion. You act like you've never seen a faun before.

You haven't. Neither has Green.

Red is confused. But you had that image?

From a story, not real life.

How had we not known this?

Green infodumps everything you've learned about your shared headspace. How you could only share concepts back and forth. How it depended strongly on how each of you interpreted them. How people's shapes never needed to be defined, they were just people.

You think back to what you know of Green. Back to one of your first interactions. The insistence on the sunrise over the clouds instead of just a sunrise while traveling. Can they fly?

Green affirms with a small pulse of happiness. Red starts to beg them to show you. Green pulls back.

They will you to understand. They return to the image of the three of you as separate but connected ideas.

They put an insurmountable wall between the three of you.

Red turns away from the mirror and close their eyes. Maybe it's not so bad? There could be flying people somewhere?

Green doesn't know any people that can't fly.

You add that your entire world has been explored. No flying people. No fauns.

Green's fear and sadness spills over. To know people as deeply as you know each other. And knowing how deeply you could know each other. Could love each other.

And you will never touch each other. Hug each other. Hold each others' hands.

You're crying before you realize it. Red too. You're assuming Green is.

That's why Green is so afraid. They were afraid of this. That the three of you wouldn't just be different people. You'd be in entirely different worlds. Or planets.

You hope that it's worlds; travel to parallel dimensions sounds more plausible in your lifetime than travel to other planets.

You hear Red steady their breathing. They apologize; they wouldn't have tried so hard to make the connection deeper if they knew...

If they knew it would be this futile.

Your head is in chaos. Green is despairing, Red is lamenting, and you...

You wonder if this is worth it.

It is. You refuse to let that idea take hold. You've only known Red and Green a few months, but it feels like a lifetime already. You've gotten too used to having others in your head, you've gotten too used to the person they've helped you become.

You get flickers of affirmation from the other two, but still sadness.

You dig in. It's another puzzle. A problem. You rotate it. Looking for some angle.

Red lets out a pulse of sadness. There may not be a solution to this one. Not every problem has one.

But this one does, you insist. You know it. Five minutes ago you didn't know that there was even a world where fauns and flying—

Wait, Green, are you a dragon? You try to send an image. It ends up looking like Toothless. You don't care.

Green removes the front legs and adds feathers to the wings.

So. Awesome.

Green and Red laugh a little through that. Your head has calmed down some. Enough to address Red's question:

We know this problem has a solution. You have two pieces of evidence in mind, but you want to get it right. You run over to your bookshelf.

Your first pull is Mere Christianity. "Creatures are not born with desires unless the capacity exists to fulfill those desires." The book goes on to list a few: hunger has food, tiredness has sleep, horniness has sex. "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Red and Green are the strongest desire you can remember feeling. If language existed for you, you would have confessed your love months ago. You can't imagine life without them. You don't want to imagine life without them.

And you refuse to accept defeat.

Green, though hopeful, notes that you all were not born with this desire. They've never heard of any link like this forming at all, much less naturally.

And that is where your second piece of evidence steps in.

You try to portray the concept of God. You try to reach through all the cruft in your mind, the cultural artifacts posing as pious faith, the thoroughly shattered illusions built up around your faith, down to the core of hope that keeps you going when everything else is gone.

They understand.

You emphasize one part of that concept: the God you know is not cruel. One verse comes out from deep in your memory: "He will give you the desires of your heart."

You can think of two desires aching in your heart right now: to see God, and to see them. And if you see God first, the next thing you'll ask is to see Red and Green.

One way or another, you are going to be together. You swear it.

There is silence in your head for a moment. You start to wonder if you went too far.

Green swears it. You are going to be together.

You can hear Red start crying again, but she floods your heads with love and affection and pride and awe that she got two such incredible companions. You hear a voice say something in a strange language, but Red supplies the meaning: they swear it. You are going to be together.

You grin. You're glad that worked.

Now you just hope you don't have to step on a nail for your senses to open up to the others.