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“That looks good,” Jade says, peering up at the sandwich. She’s on her back, half-lying on the blanket, and she props her head up on one arm.
The sandwich does not look good, at least not by any definition of the word “good” Rose is familiar with. The sandwich appears to consist of: several slices of roast beef, half a jar of orange marmalade, at least three spears of asparagus, a blockish white substance she dearly hopes is tofu, and several very healthy-looking black invertebrates she would not dream of speculating on. (Although she thinks she can see one of them wiggling.) It is, however, very colorful, so she can understand the confusion.
“You will not take my sandwich!” Terezi says. “It is the only thing I have left to me.” She actually–it has been years but Rose is not beyond surprise–distends her mouth, the skin stretching out to accommodate the width of her culinary masterpiece. The whites of her teeth flash as she tears neatly through it.
At no point does she betray any sign that she is anything like serious.
“Oh, I wasn’t going to do that.” Jade grins up at Terezi. Failed teenage generals who treat clinical depression like a particularly inconvenient and heavy article of clothing are not really Rose’s metier, but she does begin to wonder what she’s missing. “I was just hoping you would give me some pointers. You know, from a true expert in sandwich-making.”
“Ah, sensei, impart to me the darque and mystical secrets of the hoagie and the club,” Rose murmurs. “I will meditate on the complexity of the patty melt and fight my way through the Trials of Vegetable Slicing.”
“I’d watch that anime,” Jade says seriously, at the same time as Terezi puts in, “I think this is why you ended up with tentacles in your thinkpan, lavender breeze.”
“Yes, I’ve always had an unfortunate weakness for calamari. Pass the chips.”
Terezi tosses the bag, with reasonably impressive aim, into her lap. She had seemed, at first, to be almost precisely as Rose had expected: all wide grin, long limbs, and strangely fluid motion; canny, cheerful, and dangerous. The girl who had painstakingly coaxed one of her friends through his session and, easily as a thought, sent another to his doom. She made inadequate jokes and laughed loudly at them when no one else would; she covered her entire palm in magic marker and licked the color off, slowly and languorously, over the course of a strategy session; she would cut in, once or twice a meeting, with a surmise or an observation that betrayed a kind of casual brilliance. Rose had not had much cause to interact with her outside those sessions, so it took her some time to notice, and even longer to realize what she was noticing.
She was fluid, yes, animated and almost exaggeratedly so; as loud as a room had previously been silent. In motion there was nothing strange about her. It was the moments of stillness that tugged at the edges of Rose’s consciousness; those moments where, for the moment, their purpose had been suspended, and therefore Terezi seemed to have no purpose at all.
Not her metier, no. Still, Rose looks at her and tries to see what they see, or must have seen: Dave’s guide and playmate; John’s familiar bane; Jade’s newest fascination, if the board games piled like tribute at Terezi’s front door are anything to go by. She can’t tell if Jade is reacting to the ambient Terezi Pyrope-related concern that seems to surround them, or if she’s merely taken to another difficult spirit, the way she attached herself to a disaffected preteen Lovecraft devotee, years and a universe ago.
“I was thinking,” Jade is saying, with all the subtlety of a battering ram, “that we should have a sleepover.”
Rose doesn’t know if brute-force cheerfulness can fix whatever ails Terezi. Though she wouldn’t bet against it. “Will we watch boys and gossip about movies? I fear the reverse might not serve as the social-bonding device that seems to be its usual purpose.”
Jade tilts her head. “Well, I hadn’t thought that far,” she says gamely. “Do we have movies that aren’t Karkat’s or Con Air?”
“I very much doubt it.”
She catches–well, Terezi, for obvious reasons, doesn’t really look at people. She thinks she catches (in the angle of her body, the twitch of her chin when Rose’s mouth opens) Terezi watching her back, one Seer to another. She has seen Karkat’s gaze darting in one particular direction as he talks urgently with Dave, in tones that are not nearly as hushed as he thinks they are; she has heard Dave half-mutter, as though not really meaning to say it, it’s just–like she’s not there anymore, his brow furrowed. A good friend, one who knows what she knows, might point out what he’s missed: that Terezi is noticeably not here because there is no longer anything to be here for. A good friend would tell Jade that the person who least wants to talk about boys in this ragtag group they’ve found themselves in isn’t actually Rose, or even Kanaya.
It’s not as though she wants them to persist this way, frowning around a seemingly intractable problem. It’s not any hostility toward Terezi, either.
Affinity, perhaps. A respect for her secrets, even--especially--the self-destructive ones.
It’s the late edge of spring in this new-old universe they’ve found themselves in, and as the leaves rustle and the wind blows through her hair and Jade studies her newest target with a methodical seriousness, Terezi Pyrope turns her face insistently towards the sun, as though searching out something only blind eyes can see.