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I.
You bought a star in the sky tonight
Because your life is dark and it needs some light
The stars flying past the meteor were gumdrop sparkles on an inky backdrop, and Rose Lalonde's only clue to the sneaking suspicion that they were, in fact, travelling faster than light speed. But that would open another unwanted can of worms, and she simply wasn’t in the mood to deal with more slimy writhing plot twists.
She sat at the edge of the meteor, blue-clad feet protruding from her eye-insulting uniform, dangling precariously over the harsh drop into empty space. It was one of her few little hideouts, where she could escape with only her own thoughts for company. She enjoyed spending time with her friends, but sometimes she just needed to...stop. Take a deep breath. Think.
Which she was doing now. Currently, her thoughts were on her health. She knew she wasn’t sleeping as much as she should- perhaps some sort of deep-rooted fear of past experiences? Godhood, she frequently brushed off with contempt, less sleep required, for sure. Perhaps. Maybe.
But she knew that things were just still slightly murky for her. She could still taste traces Grimdark even now, under her tongue and in the far reaches of her thoughts and lurking behind every word that slipped past her teeth, the almost undetectable metallic taint of blood and corruption and far too many eyes. Almost.
Her starlight in the dark night- literally as well as figuratively- tapped her on the shoulder, then.
“Hello, Rose.” Her voice was the same as ever, clipped and tinged with a rare breed of uncertainty, though now it possessed a certain concerned undertone. Rose could infer with some level of assuredness that the worry was due to her current aversion to everyone, and she didn't need any special light-influenced powers to deduce that.
"Hello, Kanaya. Care to join me?" Rose gestured besides her with one once-carefully manicured hand, now littered with tiny scars and chips in nail polish. Kanaya hesitated before finally dipping her head into a tiny nod that set her curls bobbing. She carefully slid down next to Rose in a whisper of red skirts. Her skin bathed the left side of Rose's body with a pale white glow, illuminating half of her face in an elegant glimmer of soft cheekbones and light lashes.
"So," Rose said.
"So," Kanaya replied, equally as eloquently.
They sat in silence for a moment, their feet brushing together and united above the vacuum.
Rose spoke, eventually, though after how long she didn't know. It was something that had been nagging at her for a while.
"Have you ever been in love?"
Kanaya avoided Rose's searching gaze and instead directed her line of vision at the far-off pinpricks of light. Someone had once told her, back home at Alternia, that stars were holes shot through the sky with silver-tipped arrows, arrows so sharp that they punctured the universe itself. That the holes could stretch and expand and become suns, suns even more lethal than their own radiation-bathed star.
Now she’d been too far gone from Alternia to remember precisely who had mentioned that to her. It had probably been Gamzee, Gamzee and his preposterous and almost-missed yarns of valiant heroes and defeated monsters.
"To be flushed is a fickle thing," she said simply as a reply.
They both knew what the other was talking about. Being perceptive had its perks, Rose thought.
They shared a kiss, with the far-off Green Sun as their witness.
II.
Oh, we don’t own our heavens now
We only own our hell
And if you don’t know that by now
Then you don’t know me that well
She had been relaxing on a couch with a copy of On the Origins of Species (Rose wasn't sure how useful that book would be now that Earth was gone, but one could assume that other planets operated in a similar way and it had been gathering dust in her sylladex for ages) when Kanaya lightly tapped her shoulder. Rose turned and saw double.
"Ah," she said, blinking. "So this is your ancestor-descendent-paradox clone."
The ancestor-descendent-paradox clone laughed. "More or less, but just Porrim will do fine."
The two Maryams circled around the couch and sat across from Rose, who placed her book to the side. Thus far, the dead had simply been intriguing, but Porrim seemed different. She sat in a different way, held her head higher and her smirk was barely legible. She did look a fair bit like Kanaya, but there were a few differences; her cheekbones were sharper, her eyebrows more arched, her bottom lip thicker.
Something about her definitely drew Rose; perhaps it was the similarity to Kanaya, perhaps it was something altogether different. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that Porrim proved to be a more mature Kanaya, in terms of looks as well as personality. Perhaps that. Or perhaps something altogether different.
Overall, it was as if someone had taken Kanaya and removed the caution and slight of hand, and replaced it with confidence and brash flirtations.
Not that Rose didn’t appreciate those things; after all, in a sense, that was what made up Kanaya. That was what she loved about her, the little hesitations and sweet charms that Rose wouldn’t trade for the world.
Not the world. But, perhaps, she’d trade her already-fading integrity.
a. Porrim Maryam was a work of art unto herself. All soft curves with lithe muscle, she reminded Rose of brief childhood forays into the New York City ballet with her mother, so long ago. Porrim was that lead ballerina, cloaked in grace and deliberate movements.
In a way, Porrim reminded her of her own mother, which made Rose see red.
The common room was growing far, far too crowded for Rose’s tastes, and she considered retreating to one of her private spots. Trolls and humans alike milled about and chattered to one another, some that Rose recognized and some that she did not. One that she did recognize, though, would not stop catching her eye.
Porrim was speaking to another troll, one that Rose vaguely remembered conversing with earlier- the blue one, with bobbed hair and glasses. She couldn’t be bothered to recall her name, not at this moment.
Despite the book in her hands and the many others hanging around, Rose found her attention drawn to Porrim. Dear Porrim and her dead, dead eyes.
The jadeblooded alien had glanced up, noticed Rose’s gaze, and smirked. (Rose thought Porrim had met her eyes, anyways- it was hard to tell when she didn’t have pupils.) Undeterred, Rose raised a single pale eyebrow and stared back for as long as she could. That became a depressingly short amount of time, as she wasn’t blinking and her eyes were watering and Porrim showed no sign of giving up and her eyes absolutely repulsed Rose, dear lord. Rose bit her lip and looked away as casually as she could, at something, anything, else.
Rose had always known that she disliked the eyes of the dream bubble dwellers, right from the get-go; they made it hard to read them, to understand what was going on in their heads. After all, very few people were good enough actors to hide what their eyes would spill.
For the first time, though, she realized that they disgusted her; they reminded her of textbook images of rotting corpses with bubbled eyes, or cataracts on the elderly.
Porrim’s eyes repelled Rose, and she found more and more that that was okay.
III.
All my life I’ve been so lonely
All in the name of being holy
Still, you’d like to think you know me
You keep buyin’ stars
“What are you doing?”
Rose glanced up and immediately regretted it. Porrim had somehow migrated from her lone spot on the couch to her chemistry table more or less silently, and was leaning over to glance at the numerous bottles, reaching out to take one to inspect further.
It was then that Rose realized that at some point, Kanaya had left. It was just the two of them.
“Chemistry,” Rose replied, carefully prying the bottle from Porrim’s lithe fingers and replacing it on the table in its place, attempting to ignore the chill that radiated from the troll. “Dave requested apple juice.” Rose felt like there was more to say, somehow, but fell silent and resumed her measurements (which were exceedingly careful before, but now she felt she had to double-check all of them to ensure their reliability), attempting to avoid Porrim’s deadened gaze.
Then there was a crash and a small “oops”, and Rose sighed in defeat and hoped that it wasn’t anything special that had broken and that Porrim’s hand wouldn’t touch hers again.
She wasn’t sure she would have the strength to pull away, this time.
The troll and human sat crouched for a while in silence, picking shards of cloudy blue glass out of the thick carpeting. Rose could practically feel Porrim’s presence beside her, radiating the weird musty feeling that all the dream-bubble-dwellers seemed to emanate, the feeling of graves and loosely packed dirt.
Rose did her best to avoid Porrim’s milky eyes, eyes that in any normal situation Rose would consider blinded, except this wasn’t a normal situation, she was a god now and on a meteor travelling outside the universe and there was an attractive dead alien besides her,and oh god her fingers were freezing.
Porrim had reached out and snagged Rose’s wrist, her long fingers easily reaching around like a bony grey bracelet. Rose felt her hand go limp, dropping the glass shard she had been holding.
“Is it just me,” she said, and her voice was huskier than normal and at this distance Rose could hear her piercings clicking against her pointed teeth, “Or have you been paying quite a bit of attention to me?”
It took a moment for Rose to get her tongue working again. “It would be hard...not to,” she managed out. She could hear the little Dave in the back of her mind shouting, “LAME. LAAAAME.” Rose quickly silenced him with mental gifts of apple juice.
Porrim smirked. “Likewise. Kanaya’s a very lucky girl.”
That alone practically plunged Rose into a bucket of ice-cold water. Kanaya. Poor sweet Kanaya, who (hopefully) didn’t have a clue.
Along with that thought, however, also came the realization that Porrim was dead. Very dead. Deader than dead, and from a different timeline, no less. Eventually they would stop going through dream bubbles, and considering the amount Rose slept, the likelihood of running into Porrim in the near future was slim. The likelihood of Porrim telling Kanaya anything was even slimmer.
There was almost no point in holding back, she (almost desperately, though she wouldn't realize until later) reasoned. She had one opportunity to pull this off. Whatever happened between them would be dead when it was over and done with, as dead as Porrim’s eyes.
Porrim's piercings, Rose found, made interesting sounds when she scraped her teeth over them.
IV
You bought a star in the sky tonight
And in your man-made dark
The light inside you died
Rose's chambers were always dark. She felt some sort of English-class worthy symbolism could be made with that. She'd fashioned herself someplace to sleep out of an old computer room in the far reaches of the meteor, and while it was nothing fancy, it served its purpose.
In most cases, this one included, its purpose didn’t involve much more than the bed.
It wasn't long before Porrim was pinned, quite securely, to the bed. "Moving fast, are we?"
Rose snorted and made to reply, but caught Porrim's gaze and felt the retort shrivel and die somewhere in her pharynx.
"You don't need this intact, I hope," she said instead, and she tore a strip of fabric from the silky dress that Porrim wore. Before the alien could protest, Rose tied it securely around her head.
She sat back on her haunches for a moment to survey her handiwork. Where frosted-over eyes once stared accusingly at her insecurities, Rose found herself assured at a blindfold. The folded cloth rested on the bridge of her nose and pressed her hair against her head, splaying the rest of it out and creating a dark halo around Porrim’s head.
Rose found that Porrim Maryam's skin felt and smelled of flower petals and her lips were slightly chapped and her nails left angry pink lines down Rose's sides and back, and the room reflected back the pale glow that Rose seemed to consume greedily from Porrim's skin.
They lay together, afterwards, and the freezing Rose found herself drenching her companion in her own self-loathing.
So Porrim told her a story, a story of silver-tipped arrows and holes in the fabric of life itself.