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You are Kanaya Maryam, and the girl you love is shitfaced.
Even now—pale hair plastered to her forehead, eyes glazed over—Rose Lalonde is beautiful to you. Even with her reeking breath. Even with her words slurred and formless. Yes, this is your matesprit sprawled across your lap, drool leaking from her mouth. And you care for her so much that it aches.
You have a unique talent for caring, you think. It's a talent you learned from your lusus. A talent capable of resurrecting an entire species. So you run your perfectly manicured fingers through her hair and listen to her quiet snoring, even as your thighs go numb and your body aches under her weight.
You know Rose will be horrified that she's subjected you to this again. A sober Rose—sharp-eyed, canny—is nothing if not independent. Sometimes you go full hours on the meteor without seeing her, only for her to reappear with some brilliant new insight. Sometimes you both spend entire days in her block not talking, just crafting together in fond silence.
So it's a gift that she entrusts you with her weakest parts. That she allows herself to go entirely soft around you. Sometimes she'll have a nightmare and wake up babbling, then half-screaming, then sobbing quietly into your chest. On those nights, you fold her into you with all the tenderness you have, and she eases under your perpetual glow, the strange darkness in her ebbing away.
*
At first, it had been difficult to square the human girl before you with the "tentacleTherapist" you'd idolized. You'd once pored over her Sburb strategy guide with all the fervor of an acolyte. To you, Rose had been almost mythic. And even when you'd figured out how to troll her—learning her human sarcasm, matching her tetchy responses with your own—you'd wondered feverishly how to win her over.
Then you'd truly met Rose, her orange robe fluorescent under the Green Sun. She'd been smaller than you'd imagined. Gangly and a touch fidgety, like a young hoofbeast. When she'd neared you for the first time, she was smiling and tentative, and you could've sworn she was even nervous.
It had endeared her to you at once.
In the meteor, you'd settled into each other, knowing grins and witty repartee morphing into fervent literary exchanges, gossip, crafting advice. You'd slowly become a unit. A stable pillar in this motley crew of shellshocked trolls, hapless humans, and one inscrutable carapacian. Soon enough, everyone began speaking your names as one word: KanayaandRose, RoseandKanaya.
So it hadn't come as a surprise when you'd started spending more time in her block, and she in yours. It hadn't come as a surprise when she’d invited you on a proper date. And when she'd finally kissed you for the first time that night—emboldened by alcohol, the soporific sweetening both your lips—you'd felt utterly incandescent.
*
So yes, you love Rose Lalonde, especially when she's at her very best.
She's in the lab talking battle strategy, her Seer self exploiting ten different futures at once. You listen, awestruck. This is the brilliant alien girl whose guide left you reeling. This is the player who ripped her session apart looking for answers. This is your matesprit! You have to pinch yourself sometimes, because never in a thousand sweeps could you have imagined your lives intersecting.
Rose finishes her spiel, then looks to you with curious eyes. Your bloodpusher thrills—she's soliciting your opinion; she trusts your judgment utterly. So you say something like "I find your conclusions sound, if a touch pedantic" and she laughs, nudging your hip with hers.
"Well said, Kanaya," she remarks, and the way she says your name is all the thanks you need.
She doesn't talk about last night, or all the other nights she found herself incoherent in your lap. She doesn't talk about how she'd started the evening chatting with you in the common room, glass in hand, then ended it hunched over a load gaper. You have an unspoken agreement to keep each other's dignity—which is intimate, you think, and a testament to how well you know each other. But there's still a dried speck of vomit on her cape, an ugly reminder of her heaving in your arms. You wonder whether to bring it up. You end up picking the speck off, quietly, when her back is turned.
*
One night you find her slouched over the alchemiter, a flask of something clear and sharp-smelling at her side. When you approach her, she slurs "Go away, Mom."
The words don't sink in at first. Right now, you're more concerned with hauling your matesprit by the armpits and bracing her against the wall. Then you retrieve a glass of water and hold it to her lips, but she yanks her head away.
So you sit with her and wait for her breaths to even, for her eyes to close, for her head to loll against your shoulder. You think of everything Rose has ever told you about her human guardian. Like your own lusus, Rose's mother is dead, and this fact rests differently with you both. Some part of you had always been prepared to lose the Mother Grub. But you know Rose still dreams of finding her mother glassy-eyed and bleeding, of endless white staircases and interminable wet funerals, of empty bottles and love disguised as power plays disguised as love.
You know that there are parts of your matesprit you'll never understand, and that's okay. All that matters is that she tells you what she can, when she can. And when she finally stirs and looks into your face, her eyes wide and childlike, you murmur "I'm here, Rose." She recognizes you, then. She holds you so tightly that it hurts.
*
You don't tell anybody about these episodes. For one thing, your matesprit wouldn't appreciate you airing her business. For another, it's not like Rose is causing any harm. In fact, she's one of the more stable personalities on this awful meteor.
Dave's already seen Rose in varying states of disarray. His reaction is hard to parse. He talks so idly about human soporifics that for a while, you wonder if you're overreacting to them. There's always the possibility that he's masking concern behind "irony," but you've never seen him intervene.
Karkat is a non-starter. You know he's wrestling with guilt over recent events. You treat him delicately, humor his outbursts about Terezi and Dave, smile when he waxes rhapsodic about interspecies redrom. You know he's thinking about you and Rose and how that quadrant came so easily to you both. You imagine that he won't see your concerns, or if he does, he'll try to frame them as "vacillation."
You scarcely see Terezi these days. When you do, you find that you both have very little to say. There's something haunted about her. It makes you want to keep your distance.
(For a moment, you think of Gamzee and his own penchant for soporifics. You realize that out of everyone, he might be the only one who can truly understand Rose's issue. It's a horrific idea. You tuck it away and never think of it again.)
So in the end: you're lucky. You and Rose have each other. You spend hours burrowed in each other's blocks, knitting and sewing and reading and laughing. And when Karkat is screeching and Dave is rambling and the vents are rattling and everything is going to shit, it's Rose who shakes her head and shares a look with you. Rose who anchors you both, reminding you that you have a job to finish.
She is alive, you remind yourself. And so are you. And if it happens that your matesprit needs a bit of help sometimes, that's perfectly alright.
There are worse things in this universe than being helpful.
*
But there's one moment—one little thing you can't forget—and it enters your mind more times than you'd like.
One night you're hunched over your sewing, and then—quite without warning—you're confiding in Rose about the fate of your species. How the Matriorb had pulsed in your hands that day, warm and radiant with potential, and then... just remembering everything makes you shiver, makes you taste your friend-turned-enemy's blood on your lips again. Your face burns so bright you think you might set something ablaze. And then tears streak down your face, stupid jade trails, staining the new skirt you'd spent hours making in Rose's block.
Your matesprit is silent. At first you think she's been taking all this in, imagining the best way to console you. But when you turn to look at her—really look—you realize that she's knocked out cold on her bed. A half-empty bottle rests on her nightstand.
Maybe she's been asleep the entire time you were talking.
Anger sears through you, hot and sudden, and you consider shaking her awake. When she finally does stir hours later, you answer her questions with silence. Her confusion gives you a great deal of satisfaction. Maybe you should be the one to tune out this time. Maybe you should leave her wondering about your well-being.
So you do that, stalking out of her block and through the meteor's endless, labyrinthine corridors, and all the while you're thinking of what else you could be doing with your life. What if you'd never embarked on this stupid voyage? What if you'd left everyone behind to bathe in the Green Sun, like you'd initially wanted? You remember that old saying about how Space players are fated to be alone. Well, what if you don't mind that? What if you really are better off tending to yourself? Nothing good has ever come of meddling with Light players, and it's clear that nobody else on this meteor knows how to help. Then the tears come again, gross and hot, and you feel more stupid than ever.
When you finally return to the common area—feet aching, tear ducts dry—Rose is sitting on the couch before an alchemized tea set and two steaming cups. It's clear that she's been crying too. She takes one look at your face and says "Oh, Kanaya." And then she says "I'd ask you to forgive me, but I don't think that's sufficient."
"It isn't," you say crisply, but you still round the table and take the other side of the couch.
She doesn't breach the distance between you. Not at first, anyway. Then she scoots closer—the movement hesitant, inelegant—and tilts her head up.
"You must be starving," she says, and you hear how her voice wavers. "Please, Kanaya."
You stare at her exposed neck. You've never feasted from Rose before, nor from anyone else for that matter. Since awakening as a rainbow drinker, you've met your needs with carefully alchemized blood substitute. And now your matesprit is offering to you on a silver platter, and for what? To absolve herself of guilt? To let you drain her, as she's been draining you?
She moves closer. She's washed herself, and you can smell her strange human blood thrumming under her skin. She's holding her breath; you can tell she’s afraid.
Good, some vengeful part of you thinks. You realize you’ve been afraid of her too, more times than you’d care to admit.
So you finally close the distance between you. Your dry lips skirt her neck, and then your fangs break her skin. She makes a sound between a gasp and a moan. Her hot blood rushes over your tongue and down your throat, and suddenly your body is electric.
Rose’s blood is heat and ecstasy and the best kind of oblivion. It’s the embryonic dark of the brooding caverns, the scalding red of the Alternian sun. It’s every time Vriska’s said thank you and meant it. Every time Karkat’s said good work, Kanaya. Her blood drowns out the guilt that’s been choking you, festering in you. You didn’t realize there was such a large hole inside you, but now it feels almost limitless, and Rose’s blood is the only thing that can fill it.
You drink and drink and drink and in the midst of it, Rose’s fingers twine with yours. Your thoughts swirl. If you were in a better state of mind, you’d wonder if she feels vindicated. If somewhere in her gleeful Seer’s mind, she’s thinking Now you know how it feels.
But you don’t stop to think. You feast until her hold on you goes slack, until she says “I think that’s enough.” And then she’s nudging you slightly away from her and holding your face in her hands and goodness, she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever beheld in your life. You can still taste her on your lips, feel her warming you from the inside, and it makes you want to live forever.
For once, you are not Fussyfangs, nor the Sylph of Space, nor the only troll capable of repopulating her species. You are not a confused moirail, an ineffectual auspistice, a matesprit completely out of her depth. You are not the only thing standing between Rose Lalonde and the void. You are not even grimAuxilliatrix, posturing at adulthood when you know so very little.
You are none of those things in this moment. You are only Kanaya Maryam. And for the first time in your life, you are drunk.
*
You're both utterly exhausted by the end of it all. You slump into each other on the long walk to Rose's block, then wordlessly, you both sink into her mattress. She splays herself atop you. You close your eyes and breathe her in. You both sleep like the dead.
It’s a peace that neither of you has known in a very, very long time.
The next morning, she’ll cover her neck with a bandage, you’ll cover the bandage with a kiss, and you’ll go about your days as usual. You’ll talk Karkat out of some hairbrained scheme with the Mayor. Rose will alchemize more “apple juice” for Dave. And life on the meteor will go on, punctuated by intermittent dream bubbles and petty dramas, and soon three human years will pass.
(At some point, too, you’ll realize that Rose had never said she was sorry. The fact should perturb you more than it does. In truth, you’ve forgiven her already—you always will. Some part of you wonders if Rose knows this too.
But tonight you hold her, and she holds you, and the meteor hurtles its way through Paradox Space. You feel closer to Rose than you ever have before. There is a dark pit in both of you, a shared need that nobody else could guess. Now you know she sees it in you too.
It’s only natural to be together, knowing what only the two of you know. It’s only natural to love each other with everything you have.)