#; plot

He swallows. 

“You fed off my desperation, like a parasite, and treat me like the villain for my hesitation to want this again? To trust this? To trust you? How dare you.” 

Another step forward from you, another step back from him. 

“I’d lost everything. I discovered I was a pawn, a mere pitiful punchline in the joke of my own universe, robbed of my childhood, my state of mind broken down from the moment I was born on purpose ‘for the good of the many.’ I had to watch as my stepbrother, my soulmate, abandoned me, and what did you do?” 

You’ve reached his desk now, and your arms throw themselves forward, to shove half its contents to the floor. “You said you loved me, and then you fought me! Every step of the way! Pushed me away and isolated me all at once as though one on its own wouldn’t be cruel enough? You wanted me to love one person, you, no one else, and not so much as breathe near anybody else. And God forbid I made the mistake of doing so. It was never enough for you, no amount of my finite attention, no cornucopia of my sacrifices could ever satisfy your stupid trophy shelf. Like the fact that I tolerated your pathetic Frankenstein complex with that monster of an AI you built wasn’t proof enough of my love for you! None of it was enough!” 

You round the corner of his desk, so nothing stands between the two of you. His back hits the wall. 

“And you have the audacity... to come back, come back into my life, only to embarrass me in person, and then embarrass me on that platform, and then leave? Do you know how many times you promised me to stay by my side no matter our dynamic when I never even asked you to? You said it then, you said it again this round, and you used the fact that every single person in my life broke down my psyche on purpose, against me.” 

“Rosine, you’re completely overreacting. That’s not what happened. I was scared, for fuck’s sake, and I was trying. Trying, apparently, not hard enough for you--” 

“You’re damn right you weren’t trying hard enough, you piece of shit.” 

That shuts him up. 

“What?” A laugh comes from dark parted lips, dripping with bitterness. “You think I’m sorry, for expecting more from you, after what you put me through? You think I have any sympathy left in my body for you, any drop of mercy for your fear left in my bones? Am I supposed to apologize?” 

You’re close to him now. Too close. Close enough that part of your heart wants to kiss him, feel his arms around you again, feel how he can draw you in and hold you close and feel safe from the crumbling world around you. But you know better now. You know it’s a false sense of safety; you know it’s a trap.

You start to lower to the ground. He watches your hand slip down your boot, your eyes fixed right back on him the whole time, as you stand up again with your switchblade. He flinches when the blade clips out. 

“What the fuck are you doing.” 

“You shouldn’t’ve made me beg, Dirk.” 

“What?” 

Your body is against his. “That night, when you demanded reassurance I was yours, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t done a godforsaken thing. You told me to get on my knees, and plead for you to stay.” 

“...Rosine...” 

“And I did it. I did it for you, because I loved you, and I will never, ever, forgive you for it.” 

“I told you I was fucking sorry.” 

“You shouldn’t have made me beg,” you repeat.

His features are paler than you’ve seen them in a long time. He doesn’t seem capable of bringing himself to hurt you. You know he can’t. You know, in his own, broken way, he meant it when he said he loved you. He does love you, to the extent he can love anything. 

“Don’t come near me again.” 

He nods.

“Understand?”

He nods again. 

“And if your demon robot amalgam even sets foot in my universe again, I’ll consider you its keeper. If I survive whatever it tries to do to me, in order to get you, you will be the one pay the price. Understand that?” 

He nods yet again. 

“I’m done fucking around with men that want me brought to heel like a dog. That means you. Breathe near me again, Dirk Strider, and I’ll slice your throat open.” 

Another nod. Another nervous swallow.

The harshness in your features fades. You step back, he blinks. 

You’re smiling as you put the weapon away, sliding it back into your boot, fixing your hair as you look back up at him. It’s hard to tell if your smile is genuine, or completely empty, but there’s no in between. 

“I got you good with that one, didn’t I?” 

He stares at you for a few moments of silence. “What?” he finally forces out. 

“It’s April Fools’ Day. You should see the look on your face.” 

He chokes out a laugh of confusion, still tainted with nerves. “Oh?” 

“Yes. Seems I gave you quite the fright.” 

“Y-yeah.” He doesn’t know how to respond. “Yes, you did do that.” 

And then your smile is gone again. You can see how his body tenses. 

You don’t say another thing. You walk to the transportalizer in the corner of his office, enter coordinates back home, and send yourself back out of the room without another word. He’ll spend the rest of his night, rest of his week, wondering if you were serious, robbed of the closure that you just gave yourself in confronting him. Because you know the answer. You know whether you were serious or not. And you could have made your threats in a more direct way, untainted by the possibility of a psychotic joke like this one, but you chose not to. You chose not to because you’ve decided it’s high time Dirk be left as confused and distressed as he forced you to be, for years. You want him torturing over those moments, wondering what on Earth you were thinking, what could possibly have possessed you to do that the way you did, whatever your intentions. 

 You’re finished trying to make sense to Dirk Strider when it’s clear he never understood you to begin with, and never will.

Your steps are light as you make your way back to your bathroom, tugging the sleeves of your sweater back down to your wrists, and picking up your lipstick to fix it once you’re in front of a mirror. You see the tears in your eyes even though you don’t feel them, not until, that is, a few fall and drip down your cheeks. They hit the porcelain below in silence, the last (the beginning?) of your heartbreak over him demanding to be felt. 

But you ignore them anyway. Demand and command and direct as they will, you’ll continue to refuse to give that heartbreak the satisfaction or time of day. Because even if he’ll never know it, even if he’ll never see it, you refuse to give Dirk the satisfaction of crying over him. 

He’s broken you badly enough. He doesn’t get to make you cry over him anymore. 

She realizes what she’s doing. 

Three hours and counting, and she forces herself to stop, dropping her knives. They hit the rooftop with a clang.

Then there’s no sound but the panting of her breath, panting near wheezing, labored, cut through by only by the muted sounds of her sneakers stepping along the concrete, back towards her things on the other end of the rooftop. Stepping, not scuffing; she can still hear her stepfather, “Do you know how much energy you waste when you drag your feet like that?” 

She sniffles as her hand lifts to wipe under her nose. Here, she is most herself. She is flushed, she is tired, she is a burning body, she is sweating, she is ugly. Her muscles cry with a euphoric tension that only exercise can bestow. Here she sheds the skin of the world of the fashionable and the beautiful, the most effective way to hide herself that she could have possibly imagined or hoped for, and she’s left exposed, left bare and raw.

Heavy exhale, followed by high inhale, followed by heavy exhale, followed by high inhale, followed by muttered “Kill me,” soft and hoarse and facetious, followed by a sharper inhale to correct the extra breath. 

She sits down, falling the last few inches. She pulls her gloves off. Her knuckles are still red, because she was hitting stone and brick. One leg folds up, the other stretching out, leggings moving with her and still clinging as easily as ever to the skin underneath. She can hardly afford the lung space required to stop breathing for a few seconds, to drink from her bottle, but she forces it anyway. Back to panting again once the water bottle is lowered to her thigh. 

She drops the bottle down beside her. She lies back. Her eyes close to shield themselves from the sunset peeking out through the clouds. 

She thinks about him coming back. 

She thinks about digging up his grave, and about Kris reviving him -- something she’s grateful Kris swore to refuse to do -- only to let her kill him again. To have a fair fight, to cut his throat fair and square, to send him back into the ground not for self-defense, not for protection, but for vengeance. She thinks about how her so-called stepfather deserves to lose.

She’s reminded that the only person that can keep her safe -- from She Knows Not What -- is herself. No one else can change that. Not Vizcai, not Aradia, not Kris, not even John. She’s safest by herself. 

If she had more energy, she’d do exactly what she’s spent the last few months practicing so well. She’d nudge the Strider-instilled paranoia aside, and remind herself that not everybody is like that, not everyone will let her down. Not everyone is a danger. She’d remind herself there’s nothing to be scared of anymore.

Right now, however, she’s too tired to do that. She’s beyond too tired to do that. She’s exhausted, she hardly has the space in her mind to remember to keep her blood pumping, much less talk herself through such winding paths of logic. Right now, the paranoia is familiar and comforting, it’s encouraging and empowering, and right now, she lets it stay right where it is.