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“When am I gonna get to come over to your place, though?”
You're aware that you're whinging. Rose is also aware. She slowly shakes her head and lowers it into her palm.
“Eridan,” she sighs, “You're just going to have to accept the fact that I have a life separate from you. In fact, my entire life is separate from you, except for the tiny fraction to which you lay claim. The tiny, horrible fraction.”
“And maybe I'm just not comfortable with that! D'you ever think about my feelings?”
“Rarely.”
You're tucked into the corner of the restaurant, nearly surrounded by heavy red drapery and shadows. She'd thought about you being a bispecies couple, you guess, and chose to be discreet.
The nutrition-fetching human shows up to lay out your plates. Rose nods at him, then spears her muscular-tailed clawbeast down the center of its underbelly. You jam a knife into yours. It's a lot like the sort you have at home. Had, you mean. But it's bright, angry red, not dusty white. you get a good grip on the thing and rip off a section of carapace. With it, you gesture at her.
“You're ashamed to be seen with me.”
“Yes,” She smiles. She does her lips with the same black that you do yours. In fact, that might be your lipstain she has on.
“Honestly,” she says, meeting your eyes, “It's not entirely your presence I object to. You wouldn't like the place. It's become a bit of a shrine to my research.”
“A shrine, eh?”
“It's the sort of research you don't do halfway. It's spiraling, fervent. Bordering on the obsessive, even. I'm preparing myself for my masterwork.” she sips at her wine. “If you think you can manage not to disrupt absolutely everything and were willing to let me practice my dark magics on you, I suppose you could come over.” She does a finger waggle to portray the dark magics.
You snort. “Fuck your fake-ass shadowtendril religion right in its squelching maw.”
“Well, I would, but I don't think it feels that way about me.”
“Oh, clever. Your sarcasm muscle's loosening, you fuckin lush.”
She takes another long sip before answering, smiling around it. Her teeth are like blunt shells.
“The great thing about being the non-desparate partner in this little disaster is that i can leave, strand you here with the bill, and i'll still have thirty texts from you tomorrow morning.”
“My texts are both interesting and arousing,” you inform her.
“They're about as tasteful as your nudes.”
“I know for a fact that you appreciate those nudes.” She ought to do, she sends back critiques of your composition and lighting. That's how you know a kismesis works, when you improve by it.
She doesn't rebut, just sighs into her drink like she hasn't got the faintest idea what to do with you.
You think going to her place is a step forward. You've already let her in your hive-- your apartment-- your whatever. Your space. For months now. You've not seen hers. And you have to admit, you do want to know her. In order to better exploit her weaknesses, you mean, obviously.
“I think I can manage not to disturb your mystical terrorauras or whatever the shit, seein' as they're not actually there at all.”
“All I ask is that you make some kind of effort.”
You push your deadboiled seathing about on the plate and pick it clean, bit of flesh by bit of flesh. She'd insisted on the two of you going on a human date, which, apparently, means eat food in dim light together and drink fermented liquids and talk all soft. She does kismesis on a small and subtle scale, does Rose. You've gotta give her credit, it takes a keen mind to get every detail like she does. You have to keep your computer thoroughly backed up on an external drive because she likes to find new ways to destroy it remotely.
But she doesn't bother to to take it all the way, really. You wish you each had an armada to command; real royal blackrom should be awash in the blood of the disposable castes. You know she's vicious enough for it. She's blown up a planet or two, in the game. You never got the details of everything straight after the point where you died, it's all fuzzy, but you're sure she blew up at least one planet. Or a celestial body of some sort, something.
You leave your arthropod carcass and, bored, start rifling through her little purse. She watches you reclaim your lipstain and plucks her phone out of your hands.
“Conversation not sparkling enough for you?”
“You have five texts from your hatchmate,” you reply, helpfully.
She thumbs through them. “Dave can wait until later. We'll skip dessert, if you don't mind.”
You nod. You're anxious to see her place, to get out of this squat dwelling into the actual night air. You're itching to touch her in that dress. It's gold, with little gill-like ruffles at the collar. When it brushes against your trousers it makes a faint whispering sound. She pays for the food before the two of you leave, out into the evening air, into the city at night.
She slips her hand into yours and sinks her blunt human nails into the skin between your clawbones.
When, you think, did I start feeling so comfortable with her? Not comfortable in a pale way just, a settled sort of hate. A hate that's calmed down a bit. The game fucked you all and spat you out, her included, which means the only ones any of you are a match for are each other. The pale hair on her neck doesn't seem so alien anymore.
“So, research for the new book, right?” you say, as she leads you down the sidewalk.
“In a manner of speaking. I'm focusing on the beastially strange and fictitious, and with the proceeds from Complacency i've managed to acquire some very interesting artifacts which--”
She does go on. It's sort of a background noise at this point. You don't know much about her first book, only that it's about obtuse magical hoofbeastshit. You threw a copy of it into a romantically burning fireplace, one time, and made her really effectively angry.
You arrive at her apartment before you even realize where you are. You've gotten used to letting her deal with seeing directions, since seeing the way is her aspect and all. The apartment is more of a townhouse, actually, an old, skinny stone building with big, complex windows. She lets you in first, then follows, locks the door.
Holy shit, it's dark. You blink a few times. It doesn't go away. Human dark isn't usually dark for you; being a member of a nocturnal species, there's almost no dark that's dark for you. this... shouldn't happen. Not with windows and a sky and a city outside.
“What the fuck, Rose,” you breathe. “It's dark.”
You can hear her moving, feel her hands finding your wrists, your chest, your face.
“I know,” she says.
“This is advanced darkness. What are you, an anglerfish?”
“It comes with the territory, I'm afraid. Stay there.”
She sounds amused, which is not fucking fine with you at the moment. “Don't leave,” you moan, but you can hear her going, rustling around. Finally, lights flicker on. They're fainter than human usual but they're more than enough for you.
Rose's house is pretty. A little messy. It's aggressively human in here, all angles and wooden furniture instead of smooth, round bioencumbrances. You nudge her closet door a little wider and it's a full-on disaster in there, coats on the floor and mixed-up shoes. You can see through other doors too, into a cute sort of kitchen, a well-used sitting room. There are some promising stairs. Humans like to sleep at the tops of things.
Rose is in the only remaining dark room, visible in the blue-white glow of a human computer. This room is a bit harder to see, but it's crammed with books and papers in looming piles. The bookshelves are full past their capacity and something in it smells-- strange, almost briny. You step through the doorway.
“I told you to wait,” she snaps, not bothering to glance up. “There's something I need to attend to before we--”
Something is Wrong in this room. It's frigid cold in here, and the air hangs heavy. Your hide crawls.
“Oh god, Rose, not the horrorterrors...”
“No,” she agrees, “something else.”
It's in the mirrors. It's in some of the books. It's in the angles of the walls-- they don't quite meet the way they should, and the defiance of sensical geometry makes you almost seasick. Something in the room, in the darkness, in here is watching you, something that would drive you mad if you got too close to it, you're sure. something as tentacloid and vast as gl'bgolyb but more alien, unnatural, tearing its way toward this reality using one speck of brightness as a living anchor. Eyes, eyes unseen, limbs reaching out desperately to seize their chance to rend this small world asunder, a void within a void--
Rose closes the laptop. “We've had quite enough of that.”
And then it's gone. Insubstantial blackness drips in sticky-looking globules from the ceiling, pools on the floor as shadows, then fades. The room takes on the appearance of a rather messy, entirely human study. Except for the book underneath the laptop, the one bound in some sort of slick, beige leather that pulses like an expanding and collapsing vascular organ. You're not sure if that looks not human enough or too human.
“I'm sorry to have to expose you to such fake magics and obvious charlatanism,” Rose says, brushing past you and elbowing you against the doorframe.
“What the fuck are you playing with?” you breathe.
“I'm studying to see how much of our game universe remains in this new one, starting with a little help from my old friends. Or something very like them.” she taps the side of her nose. “You might even call it a scientific pursuit.”
She smiles, beckons, and offers you a drink. You think you're probably going to need it.
….....
In the morning, or the afternoon or whatever unholy hour she calls this, you're a little hungover. You're alone in her room, amongst the half-knitted sweaters and the books and the framed pink tentacle prints, with her sheets on the floor. You feel, pounding alongside the hangover, the thud of a bad and soporless sleep.
This is the first time since the game that you've clawed your way awake, sweating, with a head full of horrors. Of course you'd be fucking the only human capable of shearing reality in half.
“Oh, pay no fuckin' mind to the otherwordly terrorbeasts, Eridan,” you say, picking her robe off the back of a chair and slipping it on. “They're just my friends from another reality, goin' up through my study for a pleasant evenin' in your thinkpan. Right. Right.”
If this had been your place, she'd have probably broken all the eggs in the fridge and left cryptic runes on the mirror and left already, by now. But as it's her house you feel like you ought to wreck some of her shit. You pick things up off the dresser aimlessly. Why does she have a bird skull? You heft one of her sparkly wizard statuettes, its expression somehow both growling and vacant. He looks like a small, angry vagrant laughably bedazzled and you don't know whether this is human earth irony or not. You're too tired for this.
You hear some clinking and shuffling downstairs and can actually feel your earfins perk up. Maybe she made food. Unlikely, sure, but possible. You stumble down her weird narrow hive stairs and into the hall and oh, shit. Fuck.
There's a wave of intangible, salty darkness rolling out of Rose's study, out into the hall, all over the carpet, up the walls. You scuttle backward up the stairs, away from the tide.
“Rose?” you chirp. “Rose?”
You hear a distant, high-pitched screaming. It sounds nothing like Rose. Oh my god, oh my god.
“Rose?”
She comes stumbling out of the study. “What, Eridan? I'm busy.”
Her skin is rippling with patterned light, as if she's far underwater. Her hair weaves through the air like short snakes.
“What the fuck--”
“Oh, god. I don't have time.” She turns and rushes back in. You hear her smashing and sloshing around. “I'm fine!” she yells. “I'm handling it!”
“D'you want me to call your hatchmate?” you yell through the door, “Or Kan? Fef, even? Or your other human friend, what'shergills, Jade? Do you need a space player?”
“Shut up, Eridan!”
You hover there for a bit. “This is so rude!” you yell.
The door opens a crack, and you can hear her voice, low and whispery. “If you want to come in here and help me with this, then do. But keep in mind that if you fuck up, we will both. Die. I really actually see us both dying if you do.”
“And you don't see me fuckin' up?”
“Not within a decent margin of probability, no.”
You stand there for a moment, staring at her.
“Nah. You seem to be doin' fine.”
Her eyes widen a fraction.
And all the way down the hall as you stalk off to raid her kitchen, you can hear her cursing your name.
......
TG: rose i swear to shit if you dont answer your phone im going to send someone down there
TG: it wont be me because i wouldnt get within ten miles of your fishhump hate rumpus
TG: but it will be someone
TG: probably jade she promised to bring me chinese food and a dvd of hansel and gretel witch hunters
TG: fyi were doing awful movie night and youre gonna miss it
TG: fishdick mcglub is still banned from awful movie night
TT: Actually, your timing is good.
TG: jesus finally youve been offline for like nine hours
TT: If Jade is coming, ask her if she could do me a favor. I need some help moving some fluid out of my study.
TG: what the fuck i dont want to hear this
TT: Also, a person.
TG: um
TT: Eridan has been locked in my study with a cracked portal to an unknown horrorterror demesne for about an hour now. Tell Jade I'll put some coffee on.