Chapter Text
Once upon a time, when you were very small, you had a dream. You dreamed of your forest, only it wasn't your forest - instead, it was one that looked like your forest, but for all the ropes and bridges amongst the trees. It was a wonderful place, to be sure, but there were no other trolls despite looking almost urban. In your dream, you wandered, you played...and you felt watched, but no matter how you searched for what spied on you, it was never more than a flash out of the corner of your eye. All you knew was that it was red, like a flamestone set in gold, and that you wanted nothing more than you wanted to catch it. You were always fond of colours, but from that point on, red would always be the one you favoured.
You stopped having the dream when you met Team Charge. After you and they and Vriska started FLARPing together, your dreams grew stranger, more relevant to the life you were living and the people who lived in it. You started to dream of golden towers and friendly plastic bug-looking folk in jovial pastel clothing. The red flash stayed, though, elusive as ever. It had even begun to show up more often, and once you could have sworn you saw it while campaigning, over your shoulder like a fairy guide, even though fairies couldn't possibly be real.
Then the incident happened, and you saw nothing at all ever again.
Instead, you tasted and smelled, and just as you thought, red remained the best of colours. There were so many different kinds, and you loved them all, but none of them were quite the same red as the one in your dream. You thought for a while, over the course of SGRUB, that perhaps Karkat was the answer to the riddle, but it didn't take you long after learning his secret that his shade wasn't quite the right flavour.
As the game continued and your abilities as a Seer developed, you started to catch whiffs of it here and there, whether waking or sleeping; not the bright cinnamon heat Karkat left on the back of your tongue nor the dusty strawberry of your chalk, but something sweeter, something you couldn't quite place. Not yet, anyway. Your newfound powers granted you patience - surely, with time, you would find the answer.
That would turn out to be truer than you expected - you met Time not long after the game had ended, when you were stranded on the meteor. Dave Strider became your very favourite shade of red, a decadent cherry cordial: the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask before, but not the question you first wanted answered. Even as the two of you grew closer, the first riddle still plagued you, more than ever without SGRUB to distract you; between conversations, you had taken to wandering the meteor, and it was there you finally found what you'd been searching for.
At first you're so lost in your own thoughts that you think it's just Tavros, asleep on the floor, but something else catches your nose. You face him on your right, taking a deeper breath, smelling the peanut butter and gunmetal that makes him...and something else. Your heart nearly stops in your chest when you finally identify it.
Apples.
The red from your dream was apples.
You turn just a little more to the right, opening your mouth as you inhale, taking every bit of the faint familiar scent, and for the first time in your life the red flash stays still, allowing your senses to paint you a flavourful picture. It's another troll, sort of - your bodily sense tells you only Tavros is there, but your Mind tells you otherwise. He is hazy, but his scent is comfortable and inviting, moreso than the more solid troll on the floor despite being the same shade, and even bearing the same sigil. Instead of peanut butter, this one smells of cinnamon, but not the same as Karkat's - warm and savory instead of sharp and hot, a perfect complement to his apple-red hair and clothes. You take in another breath just to be certain of the brown sugar sparkle of the half-troll's wings, spread out behind him like pages from the storybook he must have stepped out of.
You don't know why, but he smells like home. Not your forest, not your planet, but home as a concept, and you want to curl up in the middle of that smell forever. No wonder, you think as you step closer, no wonder Tavros clings to him so.
"Rufio?" The name passes your lips so quietly you barely hear it yourself.
He looks up at you and smiles as if he's been waiting for you to notice him.