Work Text:
You suppose it’s fitting that your mind paints your dreams in broad technicolor strokes. Every vivid speck of dust suspended in each and every sunbeam, every stitch in every piece of furniture and stray clothing that accumulates on the floor of her room . . . every millionth of a fraction of a second is captured, picture-perfect, and rendered like the most enlightened painting at any one of the galleries your mother used to drag you to by the arm.
Seer, you were called by your dead cat. You see everything in dizzying CMYK, like printer cartridges that use you as their living paintbrush-canvas. Your breath is bated as you try to distinguish the dream from the life you had. The only difference comes down to your eyes. Everything – everything is in its place. Everything except you. You are out of place, the proverbial and literal alternative problem child in a Christmas family photo.
It’s not your fault that you were never any one of those enlightened portraits, nor the space that a masterpiece leaves behind when it is tucked away out of sight. You are more the spot reserved in a gallery for a singular breathtaking painting to steal the spotlight and put everything else into stark contrast. Mother kept an empty seat at the table for the woman she decided that you would be from the age of six, back when your memories in this well-rendered format trace back to.
You are a dream now. You are not her dream. You are your own dream, in this house that is exactly as you left it, that you are almost able to let lull you into the lie that the game never happened. That you are still Rose Lalonde, as you were.
It’s all wrong.
You sit with the wrongness, letting it marinate in the way that you sit with what makes you uncomfortable until the discomfort in and of itself is comfort. You carry out your crude mockery of life in a twenty-four hour cycle as you would have before, except she is not there to populate your periphery. You can feel her , phantom shooting pains just out of sight and reach. She exists in the room that was stained with wildfire hues, flickering orange, heat condensing until it all stopped, until you were whisked away like a story book protagonist in her fucking CMYK nightmare.
She exists in the bottles and bottles and bottles that are stacked high like great stitches in some greater textile. She no longer exists in life as you know it.
Slowly, as though to build suspense in a terrible movie, you realize what else is missing. When you open up your laptop and all the sites and applications are stagnant, leading into each other, and all the messages read out senseless gibberish that makes your head ache. Pesterchum will not open. It says it is open, but it is not. The leering emblem gives you hives until you are forced to shut down your computer entirely before the crawling dread subsumes you.
It’s in your knitting; you finish off the row only to find yourself back at the beginning, and what should be a scarf trails off into nothing, nowhere, endless Gordian nonsense that does not obey conventional physics. You are quite familiar with the strange. This does not mean that you are immune to the helpless frustration it engenders.
And who would’ve guessed that a dream inside a dream inside the sweet, closed embrace of death is nothing like the dreaming of the living? There is no purple, there are no spiraling turrets or dancing slippers to kiss the rooftops, and no brother to pester in his sleep. There is emptiness, just like there is when you are awake, just like there always is. It’s a great, gaping maw and you’re falling into it as it sits, quite passive. There are teeth that should be gnashing, crushing, rendering you into neatly hewn flesh and gristle. And yet even that seems to be too much effort for the monster that consumes you. There is nothing to whisper, nothing to coax, nothing to feed into the complex that you have quietly named in honor of yourself.
You are not worth that. You are the little girl, sitting at the table, waiting for the chair to be filled with a version of yourself strong enough to take on what you have always known is coming. How exactly should it feel, to keep growing up after the realization that that woman will never exist? Your fate always sat on your throat, pressing and kneading and releasing only to tackle you unawares somehow, a reminder of the little lies you ignored. The writing on your walls, clearly in your own hand. How should it feel to know that the version of yourself that will live forever failed at the one task you had been created to carry out?
And oh, it’s not that bad, but the sight of the bathtub leaves your throat acidic and raw, and in your little slice of heaven-hellscape that she always thought you would love once mother dearest was out of the picture – the walls are closing in, that’s all there is to say on the matter. You measure with your eyes alone, and the numbers come to you as easy as breathing. Day after day, the dimensions are the same, but there is still the sensation of air being corralled into a space much too small for its mass. There is a vacuum where your house was. It is exactly the same.
Your hand is cramped from row after row of neat little – the days are embroidered seamlessly together, there is no disruption and – the food in the kitchen is rotting, though it should not be able and oh, oh this must be the madness you always knew would consume you whole like the great beast in your dreams that looms with the teeth that should gnash and your hell is only colored in neon brilliance. It’s paradise. Complacency of the learned, and its counterpart, the itching dissatisfaction of the omnipotent and thus know-nothing.
You know nothing.
There is nothing left to know.
You always thought that it would come as the creeping of shadows that should not exist. You always thought it would be the dark. It is not. It is the endless light that sets fire to all it touches, except the fire is something only you can see, except you are the only one there to perceive it, so maybe you are right after all and it is objective. There is the perversion of domesticality, the feverish motions of a girl who imitates eating, who pantomimes rest, who need not bathe in a bathtub where she. Where she –
Where her life is not her life, where her knowledge is useless, where the walls are too small and her teeth are too big for her own mouth. Colors, colors, colors. Where are you, now that you’re dead? What a theological goldmine. What should you call this? Hell? Purgatory? The dream bubbles, your oasis too impossibly large to fathom (you know of its limits) with your home in the middle (right left right left).
You spool your data into great skeins of yarn that you knit into impossible geometry that folds into itself and into itself and into itself in brilliant oil spill iridescence in the colors that you should not loathe as much as you do and if you knit yourself a sweater, will your body break to match as you take on your mantle of divinity?
You have no edges and no inside and no outside and no beginning or end and you are not in movement, too static, but your movement is frantic, and you drape it about yourself every night before you lie awake and writes and writes and writes and in your brief snatches of lucidity you see enough to know that you have solved something beyond your comprehension, you have solved something you do not have the words for.
Through all this you are calm, though the air around you vibrates like the thicker than anticipation before a storm. If only mother could see you now, if only mother saved that spot for the woman who is Rose, who is bigger than Rose, who is more geometrically significant. If you wanted, you could extinguish the stars with the flick of a wrist, entire galaxies are consumed by the hungry black searching tears in space itself for the mere alleviation of your boredom.
A crushed petal between your fingers lingers longer than the walks around the shrinking growing room that is impossible just like you are, Rose Lalonde who is larger than life, who is trapped up by death. You wind your way through hallways that you will never find again, that have been there your whole life. You crook your arms out and you are a tree, and you have always been a tree, and you are the wind as well. You are an alpine exhale. You are the gurgling depths crushing force into soliloquy and the distant incomprehensibility of space. The stars are burning your mouth, impossibly hot and impossibly minuscule and you cry and your tears loop back to the rivers of the next fertile crescent and your eyes are your womb and,
And,
And,
"Rose, yeah?" he yells over the water that was there only after and only before your tears nourished something out of nothing .
You nod without asking how he knew. Of course he knew you. Of course. You are as natural as the clouds pregnant with their condensation, you are the universe and you have a gravitational pull. You are a fly-away balloon, deflated to a point where you can no longer keep blowing your proverbial hot air.
Sedentary madness sloughs off you in waves, lucidity bringing you heady discomfort that is as novel as the novelty of insanity. Before even knowing him, you almost hate him for the way he brings you to the surface, your blood still frothing in decompression. You do not inhale, you need not fill your lungs, you need not acknowledge the way a switch has been flipped – a flip has been switched – he is all things two. Captor. You know his name, it is the answer to a question you never even had. He is Sollux Captor, from the planet Alternia, which was touched as well by the sickening cue-headed man who was graced with omnipotence before it was in fashion.
Mother Dearest taught you to be polite. You must know the rules before you break them, uttered with a tipsy wink. What this means in this particular instance is that you know to ask anyway.
You still feel it, glancing over your shoulder like the fate that conquered your throat for the few short years of your harried existence. It waits for you to loosen so that it may strike, so that you may dance again, but for the time being, it is not needed, and it can rest.