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Rose Lalonde is not an enigma. She is a delineated quantity, as are all aspects of Sollux's life, relegated to a specific box of categorization for his convenience. After all, every good programmer knows that it's necessary to assign one's variables, and Rose has been assigned the classification of self-aggrandized intellectual ever since Sollux met her.
Given his way, Sollux would hole up in his dorm room and code until his eyes liquefied in their sockets and his store of energy drinks depleted, until the dearth of sustenance caused him to waste away or forced him to evacuate his sanctuary for the wider world. He's never given his way. The executable that is his life contains very exacting rules, and they dictate that he attend the bullshit classes at his bullshit university, where he will earn a bullshit degree and thereby qualify himself to perform the skills he already possesses and is hardly bettering within the illogical constraints of academia.
They dictated his meeting with Rose Lalonde.
As an intellectual, she's in an umbrella classification Sollux can hack social interaction with. When he gives minimal verbal response, little more than the muscle twitch of a headshake or a lazy grunt of acknowledgment, she does not take offense. When he's up and the words come pouring free, a ceaseless torrent of unexplained jargon only tangentially related to whatever subject was at hand, she does little more than smile knowingly, as if he's an amusing eccentric and not a spastic one step from throwing himself at the walls.
She's the only student in his bullshit gen ed lower-level literature class who will consent to partner with him, by the end of the semester.
She speaks with a poise that is unwavering, each word precise and crisply delivered. She tells him that he's the perfect partner with whom to conduct a literary analysis. That his incisive and unflinching viewpoint, married with a stubborn determination that seizes hold and refuses to relent until a problem is solved, is ideal for digging into the exact sort of rhetoric she intends to unleash upon their peers. Her verdict yanks him between the chill discomfort of flattery, and the hot scorn deserved by naïve praise.
He's assigned her to her category, her safe box where she cannot challenge his painstakingly sterilized worldview. It's unthinkable that she'd turn it around, incomprehensible that she'd assign him his own dispassionate assessment. She's dangerous in her grand ideas. Never silent in lecture, never willing to hold her tongue over ground others fear to tread. She contains all the beauty of self-destruction, and Sollux never has learned not to inflict himself damage.
When Sollux kisses her, it's in her apartment off campus, enshrined within her ring of textbooks and wrapped in the words of authors long dead. It's folly in the extreme, because he wants kissing to be a science, something as clear as code, where every choice blooms from binary simplicity and a wrong move is easily rectified with a single reverse. He's hardly skilled at present, but if kissing were C++ he'd learn it the same way, inundate himself with the process until he emerged bursting with knowledge. Take her breath into his lungs and thrive on the borrowed air. Hold it and make it his.
It doesn't work that way. Sollux can't perfect kissing by noting that he's moved his lips just thus, and had hers meet him just so. There are no field notes. There is no data to be gathered, too many variables to control. He mashes his mouth to secretly smiling black lips and suddenly he's drowning. His lungs burn, no air, or maybe it's just his face doing it. Maybe he's going to die and it'll be mortification that's done him in.
She breathes against him and the puffed air of her laughter alerts him to her parted lips, makes him acutely aware of the slick sheen of her lipstick's texture against his mouth. The cool touch at the side of his neck, fingers brushing his skin, startles Sollux so badly that he bumps his teeth into hers, just hard enough he fears he's split her lip where it's caught in between.
Kissing isn't science. It's a full-contact sport, brutal on the uncoordinated. And Sollux was never one for sports. It's exactly as he's feared – a skillset so radically different from his own areas of expertise that there was never any hope he wouldn't fuck it up. Stupid. Idiotic. That's how it always goes and that he's made this much of an attempt is a terrible miscalculation. The cursing in his head is at such a fever pitch he can't conceive driving it out.
“I can't say that was quite the technique I was going for.”
She's a breath away, floated just far enough from Sollux to again register as a separate entity. But her hand is still on his neck, too-casual, and she licks her lip in perfunctory examination. The color's smeared, but there's no blood. Should have known, his fuckups are always more subtle than that. Insidious and damning.
“Let's try that from the top, shall we?” Rose continues. “I much appreciate the sentiment, but I hazard that it's all in the execution.”
Her lips on his are soft and sure, when she's leading. She doesn't force it, doesn't crush their mouths so they deform around each other in gruesome marriage. It's butterfly-soft presses, brief pecks dropped to him in a gentle advance, like the constant flow and retreat of an unfamiliar tide. Like the Fibonacci sequence, each subsequent entry greater than what had just come before, and the one after greater still than that. Her light kisses grow into an undeniable certainty, a familiarity that placates him.
When Sollux kisses back, it's with significantly less finesse. But he's always been brutal in his execution, has always written code that was spare but efficient, the bare minimum necessary to get the job done at optimal results. He's giving more than minimums, longer brushes from his mouth to hers, and he's drowning again but it feels like a controlled fall. He needs to prove that he's not incompetent, cannot be satisfied with anything less than his best. The calm slide of her tongue against his, when she permits it, feels like a reward. Like beneficence.
She pulls away, and Sollux has the unexpected realization that her lipstick is smeared against his face.
“Could you pass me that book beside you?” Rose asks him, after a pause. “I need to look something up.”
Sollux does it, on autopilot, too subdued to overthink. Once she's leafing pages, quick fingers flipping through the book with all-consumed determination, it occurs to Sollux to question what just happened.
“I don't thuppothe you like to thuck face with all of your thudy partners?” he asks, common sense failing to kick in and curtail his bluntness.
“It isn't a habit,” Rose says.
She's the very picture of unconcern, legs folded to one side, textbook perched atop them. She glances up at him, sharp eyes peering out from underneath wispy razored bangs.
Something about her attitude is more of a comfort than Sollux would have imagined. He grabs for her laptop, banishing himself as well to the protected fortress of work. His brain is buzzing, just stimulated enough that he's itching to dive into this banal assignment and finish off the whole thing, just calmed enough that he's sure he'll produce quality work.
She waits until just after he's gotten fully on task to add: “Although, if you're not opposed, I can't say I'd decline the opportunity to get my mouth back on yours.”
It makes Sollux's heart speed again, a rapid burst like he's performed some heretofore unaccomplished feat of athleticism, and he assesses that kissing Rose Lalonde is neither sport nor science. It's a trial of stupidity of the worst kind, and all the more terrible, he suspects her smugness only makes that more worth it.
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