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“So like, now we have all this shit, what do we like. Do?”
“What do you mean?” Rose asked, looking up.
“I mean like. What.. do we do? Just fuck around all day?” Dave pressed, shrugging. Rose thought that gesture was more for show, she knew a thing or two about his behavior. Her brother was not nearly as relaxed as he’d like her to think.
“If you’d like,” Rose answered, short but not sweet.
His mouth pulled to a tight line.
“I’m not sure what you want me to say,” Rose said. It was impossible to hold his gaze with sunglasses on so she simply locked on to the black plastic with her own and did not look away.
Dave was not able to keep up for long, looking away after only a moment with a “man,” with a drawn out n. “Fuck.”
“Dave,” Rose said flatly and only that.
“I’ve been fucking around since we got here. I know everybody loves us and shit, and the kingdoms they built for us are cool, and it’s everything we ever wanted and built together but like, I’m bored,” Dave replied. “Like, I don’t know how I can be bored in a place like this. That’s like fucking Batman getting to downtown Gotham and the Jokers teamed up with all the other villains and the speech bubble on the page says some dumb shit like ‘I’m not feeling it today, guys.’ Like, lame as fuck.”
“Curious that you compare a literal paradise to comic book villains,” Rose pointed out. She could almost hear Dave rolling his eyes. “I can’t give you the answer, here, unfortunately. I can only advise you to find a way to amuse yourself, perhaps a new hobby or skill. Crochet, perhaps? Cooking? You’re much too cosmically young to feel the endlessness to godhood and revel in it this way.”
“Get off my dick with that existential psychobabble, shits like trying to sit through a goddamn seminar on the chemical reaction of paint and the speed at which it dries on interior verses exterior walls. You’re still fucking watching paint dry at the end of the day. Too young, Jesus, what are you? My grandmother?” He was frustrated, and frustrated more than she was unsympathetic.
Rose’s backyard was a lush oasis of plants that Kanaya had fitfully and carefully organized and cultivated so carefully that the plants mature height was taken into account to give their poolside a view like it sprung up from a jungle. Rose had liked Spanish style tiling and had drawn an example so artisans could replicate it for her in a world that had never and would never have a Spain. The tiles covered the insides of her pool in blues and whites but also all sort of places around the city now, the civilians desiring to copy their goddess’s furnishings in a style that had come to be known on new earth as New Traditionalism.
A trellis occupied the walkway, arched and filled with beautiful flowers as it lead the way and seemed to almost frame a new arrival as they arrived at Rose’s gazebo. It was one of those wooden ones, stained meticulously and so evenly no seem could be seen and no dirt ever seemed to stick, not even to the white linen that served as an artfully draped roof for the thing, blocking the sun in a way that it could still be enjoyed by the goddess of light and her wife. Even the chairs, long lounges with custom sewn pillow shams to appear over stuffed and comfortable, with hand crafted tassels and meticulously sewn buttons played into the theme.
It was almost too perfect, back here. Many of these things had been gifts, Dave knew, because he had a bunch of the same crap at his house only it wasn’t his style. He’d only taken it to be nice. Rose’s house was too clean and the bricks that made up the patio too square and every inch of it was just too nice. It didn’t leave any room for want.
The silence by now had stretched to an uncomfortable length and Dave remedied it by sitting down by her feet. He looked back at her, she quirked trimmed brow. Finally, he sighed.
“Will you hang out with me?”
Rose’s black painted lips curled upward. “I’d be glad to, brother mine.”