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It’s taken forever and a half to get to this point—to learn to fly and stay aloft, and then, once she was confident enough in her skills, to decide to fly free from the tightly clamped shells of her twin golden oysters. The first of which is Prospit, a glittery cage suspended in starless darkness. She may be its pearl, sure, but even pearls must get sick of sitting alone all day, waiting waiting waiting.
The second is her Impenetrable (and how’s that for a word!) Wall of Jitters. Picking which shell is harder to crack is like picking a favorite child, but totally not at all, because why would she do that to her kid?!
But all this time spent practicing—not just flight, but prolonging her stay in the Dream World, before waking up and getting whisked back to the Physical World of her island—is all about to be worth it.
Even though the White Queen insists otherwise, apparently.
“I saw you orbiting along the upper atmosphere,” the Queen tells her. “Felt it. Yet there is still so much for you to discover, here on Prospit.”
Jade blinks. When the White Queen had called her in for an audience, this is not what she expected. Most of their previous meetings had centered around rather cryptic conversations that she’s still trying to crack the meaning of, not this… vague scolding. She doesn’t know how to respond, so the Queen presses onward.
“I know what it is that you seek.”
That startles her. How could she possibly know about her plan? It’s not like she shared it with anyone, not Bec, not even Grandpa. Catching herself frowning, Jade tugs it into something more neutral before speaking again.
“Well, I…. I already tried with John, and it’s… none of this is what I thought. But the others could—”
“Staying here,” the Queen interrupts her, “is for your greater good. It’s my responsibility to consider such things.” Her voice is hard as the shell of her carapace, that odd armor she was born wearing, and is just as smooth. Just as cold. “Traveling through the Medium means traveling through their Whispers. And in your current state, you will get lost.”
Truthfully? Most of the Queen’s words go in one ear and out the other, and it’s especially difficult to parse out their meaning when Jade’s too caught up with the refrain of she saw, she knows, and how surreal it is to hear such dire warnings about your inevitable doom with this flat of an effect! The Queen’s not at all like Grandpa, whose admonishments about arming herself or risk dying alone in a heap come with a hefty dose of animated sternness, ones even heavier than his preferred rifle for her.
The commonality between them, though, is how aggravating they are! Responsibility. That’s the part that gets her the most: the assumption that she’s careless or worse, incompetent. As if she can get away with being irresponsible for even a day; irresponsibility is a one-way ticket to drowning in the sea, or a poisoning from picking the wrong mushroom! Death and doom and destruction! But getting angry won’t do her any favors, so she bites her tongue and sweeps her temper away.
“I know that you’re looking out for me, but really, it’s okay! There’s a lot that I can handle on my own, and—!”
“Witch.”
Jade bristles, at another interruption in that carapace-smooth voice, and at the title. The Queen calls her that sometimes, Witch. Just another thing she doesn’t fully get.
“Now is not the time to go to Derse.” It almost sounds like the Queen is more gentle than before, but really, who knows with her. “Not yet. Not until you play the Game.”
That part is more like Grandpa: both of them ooze a stubborn confidence that demands no explanation for itself other than compliance.
And, not to mention, they have that tedious way of going into the gory, gristly details of their conquests, of the billions of beasts that tried to kill them before, of the danger lurking in the shadows of their respective islands, and on, and on, and on. Ugh!
Jade stomps back to her tower while sulking up a storm. Which is silly, throwing a tantrum. But she can’t help it, not when there’s nobody around to see her do it, and when the Queen’s words rattle around in her head still. She’s so much like Grandpa! And! Just like Grandpa, just like the most annoying part about Grandpa, she has a way of intimidating Jade into following her wishes.
Almost.
She leans against her window, gazing at Prospit’s endless gold while her grip on the sill tightens. Out there, beyond the luminosity of the city skyline, beyond the greater planet and the splendid sun that swallows the sky, are others. One boy, one girl. There’s another boy here on Prospit, but that was… no. Shaking her head, she shakes the memory off as well; going down that rabbit hole will just keep her stuck. And that’s the opposite of what she wants. How that went doesn’t matter, because that was then and this is now, story over and a new one starts!
It’s a chance that’s spent half a life in the making. A chance to be with others, others that aren’t Bec or Grandpa or the Carapacians, as wonderful as they all are. A chance with others like her. It shouldn’t matter what the White Queen thinks, she wouldn’t get it; she’s around others like herself all the time.
Still.
The thinnest wash of ink bleeds into the rosy-hued painting of the world. As Jade stares at it, she tries not to think about the Queen’s words.
Game, Medium, Whispers. Words that are vague and mysterious, words that she’s still figuring out the whole scope of their meaning. The clouds of Prospit provide enough mysterious mysteries to leave her tearing her hair out. Mysterious mysteries are not enough to make friends in the here and now.
Clasping her hands together, Jade squeezes her eyes shut—closing them always makes this process easier. In her mind’s eye, she draws out the shape of her intentions: two fuzzy cushions attached to a headband. Earmuffs, earmuffs, earmuffs, she wills.
And then… pop! The perfect set of earmuffs! Delivered fresh from the dreamy magic of Prospit’s ether, they clamp so snuggly around her ears that she can’t even hear her racing heart. It worked! Again!
She dances on her toes. The novelty of dreaming up stuff still doesn’t get old! If only she could dream up supplies for her island this easily, but then where would be the fun in the surprise of those monthly plane drops?
And this is fun too, a different kind of fun, a freeing kind of fun, to lift off the window ledge, footsteps weightless with flight and excitement alike. Ahead of her lies a golden road of fluffy clouds and friendship. Nobody can stop her now, not Bec, not Grandpa, not the Queen.
On the way to the Dark Kingdom—Derse is the name, according to the Queen—she passes by her golden tower’s twin. One that’s home to a boy that sorta looks like her and sorta shines like her, the one she knows to be John, if the cloud visions and that letter he sent her years ago are accurate.
She tries not to peer inside his window.
Something else about John: he sorta sleeps like her, too; “sleeps” being the keyword, bolded and highlighted and underlined with a squiggly mark. Except not really, because he’s conked out while Prospit gets to be her personal playground. When she first learned about him, she’d rushed over so fast that it only took a few minutes to fly from the Queen’s palace—and, after seeing him a million miles away in Snoozeland, only seconds of disappointment to set in! Disappointment that soon deepened into this curious, cavernous kind of emotional calamity, the kind that leaves your stomach hollower than a gaping hole. Because she tried everything to wake him up, and she means everything! Shaking and talking and singing to him, even shouting at him, conjuring up a bucket of dream water to douse him with—everything! Though if John does ever wake up, she would never tell him about all this stuff, because could there be more awful of a first impression for a future friend of yours?
Stop it, you’re better than this.
Better than her anger. Because really, it’s not John’s fault that he needs the sleep. He must need it, because why else would he sleep so restlessly, brow creased as he tosses and turns? Something must be bothering him, and badly!
Besides, she thinks as she crosses over the city’s outer wall, it doesn’t mean the others are asleep! Sailing along Prospit’s shimmering outer orbit, she reassures herself that even if they are, maybe they’ll awaken this time! Maybe John’s just different! Hovering at the precipice of the rest of the Medium (or whatever it is), hesitant to fly forward, she reminds herself that maybe it can mean anything. It can mean everything. Maybe.
So she chases after her pretty maybe everything.
These are Prospit’s different times of day: daybreak, noontime, afternoon tea, golden hour. The darkest it gets is sunset, when everything glistens in the faded glow, when the capital city’s buildings glitter, gems in the planet’s jewelry box. So even though Jade had expected as much, it’s still strange to see that, the further she flies from Prospit, the more the daylight gets swallowed up. It’s like skating along the edge of a sped up sunset. From that golden hued sky, to an orange and pink swirly mess that looks how sherbet must taste, to a periwinkle deepening into a purple, into a black that’s darker than night.
It presses down upon her. The sky. How illogical-–like, it’s the sky. It’s not something that has, or should have, a tangibility to it. But then it gets heavier. And heavier!
She won’t look at it.
And she doesn’t need to look to sense that something’s there watching her. Watched by many, many things, probably more than her mind can handle. It’s a feeling she dislikes, one she hasn’t realized she does until… well, right now! Back home, there aren’t enough people around for her to have a real opinion about it, and when she did feel it, it meant something more comforting. Like being watched by Bec, who always seems to know when she wants to try exploring those weird ruins by her house before even she does. Or being watched by Grandpa, whose glass eyes stare further into her than a real pair would, than his real ones ever could, because he no longer has to blink. Or those planes that come and parachute stuff to her like clockwork—that counts as being watched, right? At least, watched enough that some greater force is conscious of her, or had the foresight to set things up.
Prospit’s clouds are kinda similar, too. When she sees their cotton-y wisps curl into a picture that she later comes to pass while she’s awake, she can allow herself to trust the future.
Her mouth goes dry. She gets the shakes, hard. This sort of watching isn’t comforting at all.
I won’t look up.
She’s never given up on a challenge, not since Grandpa died and she had to learn to survive and stuff a body and a thousand other things, all from these bricks called textbooks she could barely read, so why stop now?
It’s only after deciding this that she notices that her hands aren’t shaking, but vibrating. Vibrating from what?—and BOOM, a reverb in her chest, a thunderclap beating any island typhoon that’s washed ashore before. She doesn’t need to yank off her earmuffs to know whatever is watching her now Whispers to her; it’s something that’s felt rather than heard.
I won’t, I can’t—
Their Whispers linger against her skin. They stay stuck there, itching. Itchy like an insect burying into her, like the time a tick had bit her, found only after it swelled up with blood.
Don’t look up, don’t look up, don’t look up.
God, what even are they? These things, their watching and whispering… it’s a fear she’s never known. Flying blindly onward, there’s nothing she can dream up to help her now. Here, she’s no pearl.
But Derse is close by—she has to be close, she must be! And with Derse is the chance to maybe make new friends. Her very pretty maybe, prettier than any pearl.
Don’t look up, don’t look up, don’t look up—!
A boy and a girl. What are their names again? Rose? Dave? If only she had her clouds to confirm it! Or just for the sake of cloud gazing, to pick out their pictures and pick out an answer! Anything but this horrible weight upon her—
Just wake up, this can be all over now—
—I’m gonna meet the girl first, she decides. She’s never met a girl who wasn’t herself.
Wake up wake up wake up wake up—
She knows this fear now: it’s a fear that makes her wish that she never started dreaming. And it’s all a matter of just opening her eyes—her real, physical eyes—to escape this. Opening her eyes, letting it be over. But she can’t, she won’t, not when she’s so close, not when—
Wake up wake up wake up wake up—!
When she forces her (dream) eyes open, a city carved out of violet shadows is in view: a city lit like a lantern, despite the gloom. A city with two towers, crafted just like her own. But as much as it kills her to admit it, even just to herself, she’s too scared to stop and be curious, so instead she rushes and tumbles and flops into the first window she sees with a banging CRASH!
Legs sprawled out and leaning against something hard, what follows her landing is another landslide of… music? Records, CDs, and cassette tapes of all shapes and sizes scatter to her left, to her right, and then all around, all labeled with names she could never hope to know of. Squinting up above her, she spies a set of turntables. Beside it, propped up on a stack of cinderblocks, is a weird blinky little machine, and on the other side of the room is a stereo system lit up more than Christmas time.
A musician! Just like her! She dreams off her earmuffs and hears a steady bassline thumping away. Grinning, she wobble-wobbles her way up to give the room’s occupant a proper look.
Her first reaction: this isn’t the girl. This has to be Dave.
She had a 50/50 chance, but still flipped wrong. Excitement fizzles out from her until her second reaction reignites it: it’s not his fault that he’s not what you want him to be! And he’s probably nice anyway!
As for her third?
For a split second, her heart slams on its brakes. Then it restarts and races forward, ready to THUMP THUMP THUMP! straight out of her chest. Even though this was her wish, she still stumbles backward from sheer shock of it coming true, holding on to the table as the dream world makes her dream… world.
She can’t even muster up a fourth reaction, at least not in the way she probably should, but how can she react when Dave’s standing up! Standing up and moving around his room! Someone else, someone her age, someone like her, awake and alive!
He’s awake! Awake, awake, AWAKE!
The room goes blurry. For some reason, tears well up against her lashes, and they sting when she tries to press them back.
Why am I crying?
Whatever the reason, it's a stupid reason for tears. But despite the commotion, Dave hasn’t noticed her yet, so she takes a deep breath to steady herself and stop the crybaby-ing of it all.
Courtesy of Prospit’s clouds, he’s vaguely familiar in the same way that John was vaguely familiar. But the mop of bright hair and oversized shades that obscure most of his face sends her sense of deja-vu into overdrive. Mostly with how much she wishes he would take the glasses off—it feels like she’s wished for this a million times over, even though this is her first time really seeing him..
A heart beating even faster should be impossible, but hers does, ready and willing to burst out and skip like a stone across his cluttered floor, when Dave turns toward her. Beaming, she throws her arms out for a hug and throws out the first words that pop in her head.
“I’ve waited so long to meet you!”
A beat passes. There’s no response from him; the silence between the music’s notes is fuel for her anxiety. Was that a weird thing to say? Though judging by those goofy glasses, he probably doesn’t know much about being cool, either—not that that’s a bad thing, being dorky.
And then Dave stops in his tracks, sudden and jerky like a windup toy out of juice.
The stiffness of his movements is startling. It turns her cold. Okay, so that was definitely a weird thing to say. Maybe even dorky! Maybe she misread him, maybe she’s reading this all wrong, maybe’s he not the type of person to respond well to stuff like that—though it’s hard to tell what type of person he is at all with those oversized shades eating up half his face, and—
And… he mutters something before stalking to the left.
Huh.
“Um…” She chews her lips; she tastes dream iron. “Hello? Dave? Hell-ooo!”
More muttering from him, louder this time.
Now this is weird, weirder than anything she expected. Maybe there’s something wrong?
Grumble grumble, while he wanders this way and that way.
“Oh!”
Or maybe he’s sleepwalking.
I should have guessed! She flops in his desk chair, tugging out the skirt of her nightgown from underneath her. She gives the chair a spin, and another spin. The desk itself isn’t a real desk, but a board supported by… more cinderblocks. More concrete. The limestone and clay they’re made out of is the closest thing Dave has to anything alive in here, not including the taxidermies. Barren of anything growing or even the color green, it's the total opposite of her bedroom, waking or sleeping. She wonders if he preserved the dead stuff himself; it’s not a far reach from stuffing bodies. Another thing to talk about, if he could.
This is a predicament she didn’t plan for! Which is out-of-line on her end. If you live her sort of lifestyle, you have no choice but to plan for most possibilities. But here she is now, and what is she supposed to do? Just go? Frustrated, she kicks the “leg” of the desk, wincing when she remembers the concrete part and when her pinky toe stings—neither helps her frayed nerves. The thought of doing that, leaving, feels worse than when she left John. Coming all this way, just for it to not matter, and—
No, stop it.
While watching him shuffle around, Jade curls a lock of hair around her finger and uncurls it, as if that’s enough to untangle all her problems. It stops the spiraling, at least. But it’s just… it’s not that she should’ve expected much at all, but it would be nice if someone else was also awake! She wanted it so much that she let Dave fool her at first.
John sleeps so soundly that Prospit will have to break into a million-billion little pieces before he awakens. The girl, Rose, might be awake, but—no, given Jade’s current track record, she’s probably asleep too. It’s hard to feel optimistic about that. But… sleepwalking isn’t exactly like being straight up asleep. Sorta. Kinda? You’re caught in a weird limbo of waking and dreaming, with your body confused about “the laying on your back” part of sleeping. This understanding isn’t exactly correct, she knows that, but right now? It’s better to believe it than not.
She watches him, unsure if his eyes are even open or closed.
Those shades. Why does he even need them? There’s no sun on Derse! Maybe this isn’t right, and maybe she’s throwing another tantrum like she did at John’s tower. Who knows, who cares! She marches up to him and snatches his sunglasses right off to see for herself.
Sleepwalkers, she assumes, would have a glazed over, conked out, zombified fog in their eyes, so it’s surprising that Dave’s are anything but. They’re huge, they’re alert! The pupils are engorged enough to eat up the iris! And they stare at her, unblinking.
Like glass eyes do. Like a puppet or a doll’s.
And that’s not even the scariest part. It’s how he just… stands there. Shaking, trembling, staring. A bead of sweat glistens at the side of his nose. His lips parted, heaving in and out. Like he thinks he’s still being hunted down but doesn’t know that he outran the lion yet.
“Is he watching me?”
Her blood freezes over, a human girl turned icicle. She’s unsure of what to do. Unsure of what to think, until she thaws out, and it floods her at once, all about the who, what, where, why, and how of this he Dave’s referring to. Her immediate thoughts are the things that watched her in the Medium, but her intuition says no.
Did someone build a dreambot for him, too? (Grandpa built hers, she always knew this, but now she’s starting to feel uneasy about the whole shebang.)
And if this “he” did, does that mean I’m being recorded too? (She can’t begin to process that without wanting to vomit all over his feet, for some reason.)
In the morning, a playback of various snapshots from her dreambot will be on record forever. The void of the Medium, the void of whatever is happening right this second. Grandpa must have known how special her dreams were gonna be or else he wouldn’t have built her bot, but… they’re her dreams. Hers. Not his, not anybody else’s.
“I—um…” She feels guilty for almost criticizing Grandpa like that. She swallows hard. Wavers even harder. Almost backs out of asking Dave,“Uh, who’s ‘he?’”
Maybe Dave will know something she doesn’t, answers to questions that she didn’t know she had until now.
Even though he’s dead, does he still watch her? Grandpa. At least that’s what she thinks. If he’s watching her—which, is he?—then that means she doesn’t have to be so alone. Same with Bec. Even the airplane and its monthly drops! But the only thing Jade feels now is how she felt when she flew through the Medium. Only worse, only heavier.
“He knows,” Dave tells her.
“But who does?” she presses, more insistent this time. She recognizes this as well, another person being all-knowing. At times, Prospit’s clouds make her that person, but not like this. What Dave’s talking about is nausea-inducing. It might be the scariest thing he could have said.
Well… maybe it goes both ways, knowing things. Secrets. Shifting her weight from slipper to slipper, she tries to remember a secret Grandpa might have had that he wouldn’t want her knowing about. All she can think of is the time she caught him going from faded portrait to faded portrait of his salon beauties, kissing their powder blue lips and lashes. Even as a little kid, she knew she was seeing someone she wasn’t supposed to, the lifting of the curtain of what an adult is supposed to be and do and act.
It was so much easier to think about these things when he was alive.
“He fucking knows—!”
The swear sounds strained, as though it was forced through a grater. It’s enough to prove everything to her, that this is different. Dave’s secret, if he has one, sounds different from whatever Grandpa’s could have been.
(Though the “he” in Dave’s life sounds more like Grandpa than she’d like to admit.)
It’s agony watching him agonize like that, so she reaches out to him, wanting to help, wanting to fix this, “Hey, um, whatever this is, is there something I can do to—?”
Clammy hands wrap around her wrist. She doesn’t realize how tight the grip is until she tries tugging away, and it’s only then does it sink in that he grabbed her.
She struggles against his grasp, but Dave has her anchored. This strength sprung out of nowhere–judging solely on his lank, she wouldn’t have guessed he had it.. Where did it come from? If he wanted to, he could break every itty bitty bone in her wrist.
“Dave, what are you—?”
If anything, he gets taller as he continues to stare at her. Those black hole pupils. Forget his iris, they look ready to devour her instead.
“He’s watching me, us, he knows, no no no—!”
But what betrays him is the naked fear in his voice.
Defensive posture. Animals do it when they feel attacked by a predator, trying to make themselves seem bigger and scarier. A hedgehog will unsheath its spikes, a snake will hiss and flail its rattle. Bec will growl, sparks of neon green flying from his fur as it stands up on end. With Dave’s teeth barred (not at her, she realizes, but at that invisible threat of he), he almost reminds her of Bec.
Bec, Bec, Bec. What do I do when Bec’s in his moods—?
After all, she’s never given up on a challenge.
Letting out a shaky breath to steady herself first, she lifts Dave’s arm up high, raising it over the two of them. Even though he’s in Sleepwalking Zombie Mode, it seems as though a sly hint of surprise crosses his face. Good! Super good.
Then, she tucks her foot forward, and slips, slides, under his arm and into a twirl.
—I play with him, duh!
Jade doesn’t know the song bumping out from his speaker system, except that 1. it has to be called “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” because that’s what half the lyrics are, 2. it might shred her eardrum up, and 3. it’s pretty much the wackiest song ever, especially for waltzing! Not what she’d pick for a first dance. Not that that matters either, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Turns out that, when your only dance teachers are the trained actors in the old-timey black and white movies Grandpa hoarded, they are Not Good examples to follow. Not when she and Dave are only trained in faking it—and faking so much else, apparently.
With one hand on his shoulder and one of his at her waist, she leads him in a small semi-square, into twirl after twirl, after it feels like they’ve shuffled around for long enough. Dave doesn’t stop looking surprised, but he also doesn’t stop dancing. This counts as a win! 1… 2… 3… carries their feet to the 1-2-3-4 of the song that abruptly ends and switches to something else, and to another, and three more next. By the time they fall in line for “Blue” by Eiffel 65, she’s lost count.
And when Jade looks at him, like really looks at him, she sees the stress fall from his face—some of it, anyway. And there, at the corner of his mouth, is the tiniest smidge of a smile.
I can get used to seeing that.
In the old-timey movies, there’s always a point where an electric current is made visible. Usually when the dancers stand toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose, cheek-to-cheek, until the charge between them is too powerful and they have no choice but to touch each other. Now that she thinks of the possibility, it’s a lightning strike to her senses; now that she thinks of it, her body and brain are turned into a conductor for this want, a dire need to cup his cheek.
But as she reaches out, the room plunges into darkness.
It’s only a brief flash, as though the world’s lights were switched on and off. The music stutters with it, and the touch of Dave’s hand on her waist fades.
Jade had forgotten that important detail about dreams: like anything else, they have to come to an end.
She stops dancing, but she won’t let go of him. Not now. Not after coming so far, not after only just beginning. But it happens again, the flickering, and this time, Dave, too, blinks in and out of her consciousness. Gravity pulls itself out from beneath her when this happens, strong enough for her to fall through the floor. It takes every ounce of willpower to not wake up.
Dammit!
Pulling away from Dave stings eighty times more than her toe stub from earlier did. But what choice is there? In the waking world, morning’s coming, and fast.
When he turns to restart his shuffle-mumble, shuffle-mumble thing, he blinks once at her, and then twice. And, just for a second—but not two—his hands follow hers before they drop to his sides.
She flexes her hand, feeling a pang in it and the rest of herself. It’s not from squeezing his shoulder too hard, either.
Eventually he settles at his computer, clicking and typing away. Doughnuts would be jealous over how glazed over he is, not that she’s ever tried one. She rests her back against the desk, turned away; after everything, it doesn’t feel right to be watching him. But she wants to be close, even if he no longer sees her.
Who is Dave, really? Like, the real him? In some ways this is the real him. She’s done stuff on Prospit that she would never do awake on her island, and it’s not due to Dream Logic. Something about this place makes you want to jump on your impulses and get so goofy with it all. She likes to think that, maybe, your dream self is what your real self could be, if you let it happen. It’s one theory that could answer the many riddles of this place.
She’s barely tethered now to her dream world, but still she clings, and hard, desperate to hold on as long as she can, breathless when it hits her how lonely the island really is.
Someday, she promises herself, she’ll talk to him about this, to get his opinion. And she’ll talk with John, too, and also the girl. For now, though… For now, she just wants to remember this, to let it be a flower pressed to the memories of her heart.
Flowers, wait—
She stuffs her hand in her skirt pocket. Dreaming self, waking self, it doesn’t matter, there’s always a constant between these two sides: she keeps her flowers close. It’s the perfect pick-me-up after a hard day, stroking the colorful petals in her candy store of a garden atrium, chitter-chattering and listening back. For having no ears nor mouths, they always seem to know what to say, and maybe Dave will feel the same.
Another magical part of this place: flowers remain as bright and fresh and soft as the day they were picked, and that goes for the cosmos she carries around. It’s kaleidoscopic, the petals painted in an impossible rainbow gradient, realer than her real flowers. Tracing the petals and taking care not to tear them, the meaning of the cosmos is on her brain, body, spirit, and soul:
‘Hold my hand and walk with me.’
Dave doesn’t look away from his computer screen when she lays her gift on his desk. It’s okay, though. He’ll be able to see whenever he’s ready, ready to wake up to what’s realer than real.
And when Jade wakes up, she’s bathing in gold and birdsong alike, almost reminding her of Prospit. Bec’s head is tucked beneath her palm in the way that he likes to do while she snoozes. He snores softly, radioactive green particles showering from his fur with each exhale. Even when he’s asleep, he’s always a loyal companion. Always by her side. Always watching her.
Sometimes she wishes he wouldn’t.
Not until later, much later, in the middle of his insane jam session with Rose, will he find the flower at his desk. He will trace the outline of each petal with his thumb, and wonder not who gave it to him, not if her creepy voyueurbot caught him acting like some fucking doofus or some shit, but how she managed to fly all the way out here to Derse, just for him.