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Sometimes what’s supposed to work is clear as the pastel, just-bearable daylight that envelops this new upside down planet. They’re meant to keep a schedule, chock it full of busywork and leisure. Step outside for groceries and then actually try to eat them before the claws of time get the chance. Keep whatever pathetic excuse for muscle they’ve got left clinging to their bones from atrophying completely. Talk to their friends so people know they’re alive. Fill their time with reasons not to fall back on the familiarity of catatonia in the confines of their apartment and watch the dingy yellowed barrier of it’s walls close in on them. Like the walls of the prison they’d been hauled out of half dead used to do. It’s what everything tells them they’re meant to do, and so it is. It has to be enough.
Other days though, it all feels undeniable that it is not. If the point to keeping on is to keep on, what’s to differentiate it from any other self sustaining loop of existence Gamzee has wasted their time chasing? They’re long past exhausted of living in cycles just for the sake of keeping those cycles intact. Of accepting things are how they are because they have to be. Whether it’s the undying remnants of a soul born to covet purpose, or that the little pills they’ve been taking are starting to slip the fuck up on their jobs, they need something else. An answer to make the mundanity less of a blade scraping up against the hide of their psyche and threatening to split them open.
There’s only so many times a person can be split open, and they’re getting tired.
It isn’t a unique feeling, they’re sure, but the scope of their own awareness in living in a loop is an adversary in of itself. One they can’t go to their not-quite-pale-fling with, he’d only catastrophize about how badly they must all be failing them to have them ruminating on such a harshness. It’s sweet, but it isn’t helpful.
There’s Roxy, maybe. She likes them, after all. But so often hanging out with Roxy means holding a heavy awareness in their belly that she’s just as fucking miserable and just trying not to be because everybody’s always relying on her. She’d try to make them feel better, but probably just leave them with the sense they’ve gone and stretched some other poor fucker thin because she’s too nice and cares too much not to. Because that’s how she is.
And… well, not many others are even worth their time on a good day. Fewer even, who they’d be caught dead offering exposure of all their ugliest concerns at.
Rose is the only one they feel won’t let discomfort in the face of reality keep her from thinking straight. They don’t go to her with the intent of asking advice, exactly, but she always seems to know what lies below their surface, and indubitably she recognizes the relevance in being the only person Gamzee hasn’t bailed on seeing in two weeks. A night in together is just calm enough to bear, and just nonthreatening enough to get her teeth into something like they’re desperately needing. She lets them dance around their mood, using the launchpads of polite conversation as a cover as if they don’t both know they’re looking for something while she boils water and then leads them to settle down at a little table on the balcony. Listens when they finally can’t help but divulge that it all feels beyond motherfucking pointless to keep working for functionality when they’re not gonna reach it, and that what it would bear if they could doesn’t seem worth the trouble. Lets them pretend it doesn’t weigh down on their chest or make it hard to talk around the engorged thing they’ve got stuck suddenly in their throat, having lost the memory of swallowing something so hard and sad.
As always, that presence of somebody so assured, farce or not, is a solace in of itself, and they think maybe they’re not going to start crying into her tablecloth after all. But when she gets them through their words and they brace her with the question of how to make it all work, they’re surprised to find someone uncharacteristically hesitant to pry into the inner machinations of a clown destabilized.
"I don’t want to...." Rose pauses, lifts her cup and stares into it a few seconds before setting it down again. "..influence you. Your healing." she says ‘healing’ like it’s a correction, but they got a know by now what people think of their backbone.
"Not so easily swayed anymore." They don’t look up as they say it. It stings to hear as much as hearing it means being denied the comfort they’d sought out, but not like there’s any falsity to be seen, and the threadbare attempt at opposition feels like the biggest lie they ever told.
"That's not what I meant." Rose eyes the troll sat across to her for a long moment, until they start to shrink back under the oppression of her gaze, a little desk plant shriveled under the unrelenting light of a lamp. It isn’t cruel, but the sense of being so thoroughly scrutinized, as to feel stripped of all defenses, is an agony all of its own.
"I was speaking more to my own tendency to rely on gut ideas of psychology to lead me foraying into conversations about my friend’s mental states, which is proving more and more as I age to be basically utter bullshit and probably actively bad for them.” Rose smiles, sympathetic and cocked to one side, but they don’t see the humor in her words that she seems to. “Not your... capacity for..." she looks caught off guard, like they'd put her on the spot, asked her to prod at that most sensitive of somethings in the first place. Well. They’d asked, kind of, but they weren’t looking to delve right the fuck into how being God’s play thing necessitated they lack a spine, and sure as hell not what that meant in trying to cultivate relationships now that they belong to themselves again. Dropping her gaze Rose lets her words fizzle out, and the rarity of the sight is enough to convince Gamzee not to hold the blunder against her. Can’t be offending with the truth anyways.
Besides, it feels better to kick the topic under the table than to spit venom at someone they like for it.
"It was never about failing to resist." And there she goes again anyways, knowing just what the fuck their innermost worry is. forgoing all forms of pleasantries in preference of plunging prongs knuckle goddamn deep into the depth of an open wound like she's looking for the relief of a fresh tin of sneeze. Piercing purple eyes are zeroed in on their own, punching holes in the false projection of neutrality, and the discomfort must be clear on Gamzee’s face, because she looks again like she’s been forced to say something she didn’t want to. They’re pretty sure they’re starting to lose their grip on the conversation at hand, if Rose Lalonde is too thrown to run her mouth.
“Motherfuck you don't waste even a second in thrashing 'round the shrubstalks." They almost have to laugh. Their chest feels too tight to try.
"Sorry." its surprisingly curt for an apology from Rose. Not that Gamzee minds otherwise, that she can actually explain her regret is more than they can say of others. But now it means bracing for more. "I trust your judgment, Gamzee." She's staring again, but without that analytical shroud it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. "I thought that it could be helpful letting you know that your ability to decide things for yourself isn't what's at question here, or at any point in time. You weren't given the chance to make a decision of any caliber." She almost looks sorry for the last part, too. Eyes dart briefly from Gamzee's face to their hand on the table, and she moves slowly to drop her own atop it before looking back. "This is what I meant. Letting my own perceptions of a situation cloud how I should be asking you to approach it for your own good. I’ve overstepped.”
Gamzee watches the hand settled over their own, stroking comforting circles over the skin of their knuckles and helping to smother the fear having such a knowing set of eyes puts burning within them. It’s not her fault she knows how to read them. She didn’t learn it by taking something.
“Don’t worry about it,” they mumble, use their free hand to bring their cup to their lips so they’ve got something else to put some focus into. It doesn’t feel good know somebody can glean so much of their mental state just from looking at them, if even that. Obfuscation had been a string in God’s hands, used all for the benefit of keeping him a mystery and all at the detriment of a chance of someone seeing Gamzee as a person owed a lick of consideration. It had been only a piece of his dominion, though, and being understood is it’s own set of bitters to swallow. There’d not been secrets with God, not with him forced all up inside of them and demanding every inch, crumbling any walls that they hadn’t managed to break down on their own already. It’s why they never come to her willing to ask for her input without the protective layers of playing dumb, and why it feels like they’ve made an idiot of themselves for asking.
“Without imposing my own worldview and sowing the potential for the nightmare scenarios that could follow that,” Rose tries again, squeezing their hand as she speaks. “I don’t think feeling overwhelmed with the existential reality of life is all that unusual. Or surprising, considering everything that’s happened.” She smiles again, like she knows saying so isn’t all that helpful, and she moves to take that hand into both of hers now. They finally curl fingers to meet hers, folds them hard for a moment around the brittle human bones within. “I do know what it feels like,” she adds, softer, and again Gamzee feels like they’ve swallowed something too big. She knows what a lot of their troubles feel like. “It isn’t easy, stuck in stasis after so long without so much as a chance to catch your breath. The slowness of it all leaves you open to endless barrage of thoughts that wouldn’t have been given the time of day when you thought life was impossible beyond the limitations of your circumstance.” If she notices them tilt their face away to scrub at their eyes under the shield of their hair she says nothing of it. “Sometimes I think the vastness of what’s suddenly possible works to trip us up in the smallness of ourselves. It’s too monumental to move on from all at once, but being stuck with it feels equally frustrating when we think like we should be able to work past it. Trying to force something to be the thing to keep you going isn’t a real answer though. Nobody here expects you to do anything but keep yourself upright. Bad days are allowed, Gamzee, and they don’t mean the end of the world.”
When it seems like she’s finished digging up in their brainmeats despite her own best attempts, Gamzee sighs, propping their free arm onto the table and dropping their chin into their palm. She’s right, for all she was worried about messing them up further. “Yeah, sister, I hear you. Don’t mean a thing to feel useless when point of being here ain’t to have a use. I guess.” It still kind of feels like bullshit; both because it still seems the easiest answer of all is to die to be rid of it all, but also because their inability to push through acclimating to this new life feels like the most sickening sort of indulgence for what they came from. They’d never wish any of it back, not really, but some days it’s still scarier to be the one with their life in their claws than to relinquish it to a higher power.
“It’s a process. That you still had it in you to come talk to me means something, doesn’t it?” She smiles when they finally look up again, and the tightness it puts in their chest to see it makes them smile back, even if they have to hold back the urge to cry again.
They hum agreement in lieu of a reply and scoot their tea aside in favor of resting their head in its place on the table. One of the hands in theirs retracts so that Rose can gently card her nails through the hair at their forehead, pulling little ghost tails of white into their curls with her. It's rare these days that touching their face risks leaving behind the stain of grease paint, but if it bothers her now she doesn’t say it.
It's a process. It isn’t an answer that helps everything, but then again they’d not really expected her to fix it all. They never do, even if sometimes their mind gets to telling them she could. Just… gives them a space to think on things, and looks that catch when they’re dragging themselves uselessly in circles to make them feel enough shame to switch approaches.