#derscest

She won’t be needing it again, not according to the premonitions that have plagued her for years.

This is a last stand, against an impossible enemy. Rose plans to take this final opponent down with her, like she did to the countless other cronies the Condesce sent her way the last week. A wave of final suppression to any who stand against her in the last hours of a formerly free world.

The world is ending. They’ve lost. Rose is going to burn down everything she can as they fall. For the sake of the two that will take their place, so far into the future.

Two kids. Their kids. Hers and Dave’s.

A son and daughter, who she’ll never meet.

Rose knows they’ll come, long after this is over, and she can only hope against hope something will be left for them to inherit.

She wonders if they’ll look like Dave. Like her. She wonders if they’ll be anything like them.

Rose hopes not. Failure is what’s come of their efforts, however much they dedicated their lives to the cause of resisting the troll witch. She hopes they’ll be better than either of them.

Fieri waits for her on top of the steps, the looming stocky shadow he casts blackening the stairway. He’s laughing, smiling, like all the other smugly successful servants of the empress have been.

Rose hasn’t had nearly enough vodka tonight to stomach the sight.

She doesn’t give him the courtesy of a greeting before she launches herself forwards, streaking upwards at him and trailing the white of her dress hem.

The strife is brutally paced, Rose’s feet skimming the concrete and barely touching down, the bastard she fights opting for terrifyingly heavy blows that shatter the ground just as she leaves it. He’s stronger than any she’s faced, and the ghost of power she possesses makes it ring true and clear this will be her final strife.

Her Bluetooth rings in her ear, because of course it does. 

"This is a bad time," she answers.

"Shit yeah it is, but what can you do," Dave replies, breathless. "Last goodbyes don't usually happen when its convenient." 

He’s states away from her, and yet still somehow manages to find a way to be a buzz in her ear. Even now, even as they take up arms, separated in the last days only because of badly timed business trips. It’s terribly welcome.

"I didn't take you for a sentimental romantic, Strider," Rose says cooly, avoiding a snatching grip that would tear off her arm. 

"Read too many of your novels, Lalonde. It's your fault I'm infected." 

"And yet my last gift from you was a child's birthday card sharpied over to say 'congratulations on the murder'."

"Hey, that senator was a tough bitch. You deserved it."

Rose nearly slips up and trips on the crater to her left. She pivots and narrowly avoids her neck being grabbed, snapped like a twig. She stabs two bright red holes through Fieri's hand for it.

"Admittedly, the crudely drawn portrait of me slitting her throat was quite compelling," Rose says, flicking the blood off her weapons.

"I spent a whole five minutes on it, it better have been," Dave says. Something like tinny rancorous laughter comes over the line, along with metal against something solid. Then, "Hey, back on topic."

"Yes?" Rose sprints across the platform, doubling back and delivering a whip of purple yarn that shreds Fieri's side.

"I'm about to die, so just wanted you to know I love you and shit."

Rose feels the disruption of air as Fieri's punch misses her face.

"I love you and shit, too," Rose replies, just like every other time Dave has said that to her.

"Cool."

They've spent the better part of their lives fighting the overwhelming infiltration of their world together. It wasn't nearly enough time spent with one another. And yet, no other words are required in this moment. They know what they mean to each other.

Dave, of course, has a few more anyway.

"Kinda wish we could've met them," Dave says absently, sounding harder and harder pressed to be casual about it.

Rose feels her ankle break as its kicked. She swallows the scream and keeps going, numb with adrenaline.

"We only would have screwed them up," she says, ignoring the inelegant rasp of her voice.

"Maybe. Still would've wanted to."

Rose thinks they only would have passed on all their worst qualities, had they met. And yet.

"I suppose I feel the same," she says, and the soft chuckle Dave lets out is one she commits to memory with all the others he's given to her.

She wraps Fieri’s neck in strangling garrote yarn, stabs him through the eyes, and kicks him over the edge of the platform. Her weapons pull her with his flailing body, and she lets them.

Rose is a crescendo of a symphony and a screech of off-key strings. She’s bones and blood and teeth clenched, moving with grace and poise or none at all, lain out on a bed or slumped over a table or stumbling down the meteor corridors. She’s a first-class disaster and a gallery worthy portrait, composed out of light and sharp edges and an ocean too deep to see the depth of.

She’s bitten or sharpened nails, painted or plain. She’s an articulate analysis worth an entire essay, or a slurred collection of sentences that don’t make sense even to her. She’s a compendium of dark secrets and darker knowing, and she’s a grimoire of blindingly bright revelations and brighter rhapsodies. Rose is.

Rose.

She’s always been Rose, even when she was younger and less a woman, even when she was off the rails with plots and plans she never fully explained. Even when she’s scared, or brave, or brash and brilliant. Even when she’s not looking at him at all.

She’s Rose.

And Dave can’t imagine her any other way.

He can’t imagine Rose without her barriers of words and psychoanalysis, without her hundred mirrors and all the smoke she produces around her own issues. He can’t imagine her being anything less or more than the sometimes frightening, or distant, or irresistibly stunning flare of warmth and life and power.

She’s Rose, and she’s been there for all the years that have really mattered to Dave. She’s Rose, and she’s his Rose, even if she’s not really.

She’s Rose, and he died with her. For her, for all of them. Trusting her intrinsically that even if it wouldn’t be okay, that at least they’d be together.

Dave is pretty sure he loves his sister. Probably not the right way, either.

She has Kanaya, and they’re both a mess; a mess that clicks with all the right notches and all the wrong ones as well. They’re both filled with light in their own way, even brighter when together, and Dave has to keep his sunglasses on to not be blinded. They’re in love, everyone can tell. Especially them, for all the missteps they manage about that simple but complex emotion.

His hand always lingers against hers, when they walk the long hallways of the meteor. He stays as close as he can to her warmth, basking in it in the grey and gloom of their temporary home. Dave gets as close as he dares, and he’s never certain whether or not Rose is doing the same. He can’t ever tell if her hand lingers too, or if when their shoulders bump it’s entirely his fault.

Sometimes, he thinks about actually keeping their fingers laced together. Of not letting go when they return to the occupied rooms filled with their friends. Of lifting his glasses and looking her right in the eyes, and seeing if what he thinks is there really is, somewhere in those wells of pure and clear purple.

He never does.

Rose is a beautiful array of contrasts and contradictions, held together by will and luck and a strength that wanes at times. She’s beautiful when she’s prim and pressed, lipstick immaculate and words flowing like rivers. And she’s beautiful when she’s collapsed and ruined, eyes ringed and words barely managing to convey just how much she needs, how much she loves.

Sometimes, Dave thinks those slurred words are aimed at him. The way her eyes linger, and then fall from him, tugs at his awareness time and again.

When those times come, he lets himself hold onto them for a brief moment. For however long it takes for Kanaya to return, and for Rose’s eyes to leave him.

Then, Dave slides his headphones over his ears.

See, there’s a difference between saying “I hate a perfectly innocuous ship” and putting that in the tag, and saying “something that is objectively, morally wrong is objectively, morally wrong” and putting that in the tag.