“Will you die with me?”
she asks him once, twice, a hundred times across a hundred timelines.
“Will you love me with
all my flaws and failings?” she never asks, never dares to beg of him,
every single time they meet.
“Do you hate me?”
she asks, as a child, as a woman, as a person drowning herself in alcohol and possibilities
and self-reflections too bright to look at any longer. Blind and aching and
without a place to find refuge, in the face of a thousand futures that bear
down on her mind with the accusations of How
will she fail this time?
“Do you love me?”
she can never bear to whisper, to beseech answer to. A shackling, forswearing,
oath of a sentence that would either bind him to her and she to him or break
them apart in brand new ways if he said No.
“Please,” she’ll
start every time, at least once, and then never continue. Never finish the plead;
never find words for even herself to understand what she wants of him.
(Everything.)
(Nothing.)
(All she could have of him and more.)
(Just his presence by her side, if nothing else.)
So many things go unspoken, and he never gets to answer Yes to any of them. To all of them.
The blade bites her flesh clean and smooth- slicing through like a dream, proving the worth of the hours spent honing it. The shallow cut bleeds steadily, slicking her arm in red as it drips onto the drawn runes of the floor.
Rose doesn’t hesitate to open a second, third, and forth cut. They’re all opened in the exact spots of their predecessors; once again reddened scars that never get a chance to settle and fade.
The runes- representation of twin moons, entwined chaos and order surrounding them, a center being which feeds and creates both- burn brighter with each droplet to fall on them. They flare a deep, rich gold for a moment, and then they pale; ghostly white flames spread across the carefully painted spell work, bringing it all to life.
Rose raises her eyes from the flames, meeting the gaze of her partner in this.
The white light of the spell shines oddly across Dave’s face, casting shadows on sharp cheekbones. His aviators reflect the flickering magic between them; the only movement in his solemn features.
He holds out a hand before Rose can extend hers.
She passes him the dagger.
Four cuts to Dave’s wrist, identical to Rose’s, his hoodie sleeves rolled up to the elbow as he does. With his blood added, the ghoulishly white flames burn vividly red, then gold again, and then a mix of the two before settling into the stark ivory they’d been.
The air around them drops to subzero, Rose’s breath misting from her lips. The flames of their spell burn colder and colder, sucking out all other light and warmth in the room. Shadows tower around them, their own twisting and writhing into shapes that are not in any way human. The walls creak, figures darting along them, the single window of Rose’s bedroom cracking across the pane.
Without hesitation, Rose and Dave reach to each other over the burning rune circle, and clasp hands as they step into the flames.
WIG what about more high school content where they’re in her room with the lights turned low and the whir of ac audible just above the cars going past out the open window next to the bed and the springs creak as dave shifts because rose straddled his lap but instead of making out as teened agers do she leaned forward and placed her head against the nape of his neck and they’re both not used to being close, physically, to another person like this but there’s something Different about the Two Of Them that makes it okay because the tingle u get low in ur stomach, of Contact, (u know the one) extends out thru their whole body when it’s Like This in a heady intoxicating sort of rush that Isolates the two of them from everything else like all the cars and the sounds and the darkness because they can’t see anything well outside a grayscale and blurs but dave can feel the cotton bedsheets rubbing against the bug bites on the backs of his legs and the girl in his lap who is all tucked up against him and every time he tries to say words he falls short and something swallows them
he sees her wipe her mouth with her hoodie sleeve (his hoodie, actually), sitting on a playground swing. he has black lipstick smeared around his neck, his collarbones, and a buzzing in his veins that won’t go away. the chains creak as she rocks herself back and forward gently with her toes, dragging little patterns in the sand and fuck. fuck, he’s so fucked, and she’s smiling coy because they both know it.
it’s later, now. she has fingers linked with his and thighs in his lap and her hands are always cold. he painted their nails two days ago and she’s already bitten hers enough they’d chipped to hell and back. when the light hits her hair it almost glows, it’s so blonde, she’s so fucking pretty he is caught in awe. (he reminds himself later, she is vicious, she is tired and ancient and dormant. more than the smudge of her lashes against her cheek, the tilt of her head, more than the press of her lips to his hands, more, more, more)
rose lalonde is a hurricane, she is a tsunami, she throws punches and takes no shit and has messy eyeliner and split ends and a halo of sunlight. dave thinks it is his fate, his choice to be swept away in it all. the quiet elegance earned through blood and sweat and the playful stance of a fighter, the gentle humming and the laughter like a little bell and her callouses and her winking.
she grins and rankles and simpers and plays him like a piano.
dave and rose fall together like the day and the night until he can’t tell which is which, he presses palms to her jawline and hips and curve of her spine and memorizes the feel of her. he tugs and she pulls and they die and die and die and die in each other’s arms and share slurpees and cry and come apart and stitch each other back together.
“you know, dave,” she looks at him through her bangs, half her face thrown into shitty anime shadow from the denny’s parking lot lighting, “i don’t deserve you.”
People seemed to enjoy my Alpha roundup (Also includes some alpha fics I forgot that are hella sad) and freakshowimprov dared me to break his heart so here’s some of my favourite Rose/Dave sadstucks, but not all:
You are glad that your life does not flash before you; you have already taken care of reliving every moment, every mistake you ever made and didn’t make. A girl must make her preparations, after all, though now you are not sure why you ever entertained ideas of experiencing your last moments fully conscious of the unforgiving world around. It might be nice to spend the end remembering every insult, every catfight, every drink and smirk and lingering kiss, but this is a choice you made and you will be more damned than you are already if you are going to regret it now of all times.
Speak of the devil himself (though you have always thought yourself the corrosive one), something besides memories does appear. Out of focus, splashes of red upon more red, a shock of pale hair just as blood-matted as yours, and of course, the trademark shades that seem to be the only thing not blurring.
Ah, Mr. Strider. How very punctual. What brings you to be actually on time for once?
This is another one about fighting the Condescension. It’s more rhythmic and they nailed their Rose. I mean writing wise- the author didn’t bang rose or anything that was an awkward sentence.
“Sometimes, I was a monster,” she says as she presses his head into the pillow and tangles her fingers into his hair. The tips of her nails scratch against his scalp as she leans in close, her voice soft and rasping against the shell of his ear. Her words are slurred, but not in the same way it gets when she’s had too much to drink and he has to help her back home as her head lolls onto his shoulder. Her breath is not the ethanol-burn of alcohol, but the salt-stink of seawater, the burning-ozone of empty space.
“Sometimes, I wasn’t the Light.” The syllables curl up into themselves at the ends and edges, blending into one another and squirming their way into his brain, black and viscous as the tendrils he imagines coiling from her fingertips. “Sometimes, I was darkness – and I was Theirs.”
She leaves black witch-kisses at the nape of his neck and down his throat. When she leans back he stares up at her and wipes a smudge of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. She smiles and he remembers, vaguely, a girl with sharp elbows and half-lidded eyes clinking glasses with him as they downed a last shot of tequila. One for the road, she said, and kissed him. The alcohol burnt his throat on the way down, but not as much as her mouth against his.
Calsprite!Timeline. Also the title comes from Little Talks which is a really great song.
The bathroom door is open. You can hear the tub’s tap running, and something splashing around. There’s two inches of scummy water on the tiles, and more streaming steadily over the rims of both the sink and the bathtub. Something black is thrashing in the tub, but it’s way too small to be her. You tiptoe into the bathroom, sword raised to parry because she’s pulled stunts like this before, and—
“Fuck—!”
Mutie is all claws and teeth when he launches himself out of the water and onto your face, and then, too damn late, you realize it is most definitely not Mutie when he starts to ooze down your chest. You grimace, keeping your lips tight so nothing can think about macking on your tonsils without your consent, and peel her little toy off. The Mutie grimclone warbles when you drop it the floor with an ugly splat and completely loses its skeletal structure, just turns into a lumpy blob of fur and four eyes scowling up at you, like you’re the bad guy when it just tried to lay eggs in your stomach. Or whatever trick she was trying to pull.
“Neat trick, Rose,” you say, wiping water off your shades with the heel of your palm. “Wanna come out and play or you gonna send more creepypasta my way first?”
Goddam kids giving me so many feels- the Dave and Rose who died at the green sun are together in a dream bubble but guess who can’t remember what happened. Also ghosty is really great just read all their fics.
Life would be easier if everything were soap bubbles. But they’re not, and she’s standing in the middle of the room, confused and misty-eyed and looking more like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus than anyone should ever have a right to. She looks tired, she looks like a lost lamb, she looks like his fucking SISTER!
Orchid eyes lock with apple eyes. Good metaphor — she is complex and a pain in the ass to make blossom accordingly. He is shiny and delicious on the outside, full of rat poison on the inside.
“Hey,” Dave Strider says to Rose. “‘Bout time. Here I thought you were busy signing treaties and having tea and knitting parties with the fucking cephalopod overlords.”
Her vocal chords had snapped like chintzy rubber bands stretched across a guitar in a sad attempt to replace the metal strings. Speaking an Elder language required more strength of the throat than a quiet girl like Rose had, much more, and after all was said and done, English came with great difficulty. The words that had once flowed so beautifully under her command then sat in viscous, festering puddles, heavy and unfamiliar on her tongue. Nothing sounded as she intended it to.
Non-Game/Adults? Anyways, Ghosty knows how to tug at my heartstrings.
Dinner and a movie was the evening’s title, and the stage was set to perfection. The candles were lit, the table set delicately, the drumming chimes of rain falling in leaflet drops on the rooftop and against the windows, all cleansing and dark. So maybe he hoped the reservation would have gone through, and he wouldn’t be going down her hallway to retrieve her, to show her the display he’d created in lieu of the fine Mongolian restaurant. Who the fuck cared about Mongolian, anyway? Nobody, that’s who.
But the thunder crumbled in the air, and Dave took a mild, steadying breath, only slightly doubting his fine dining skills as he knocked lightly on her door.
A prelude to the big fight with the Batterwitch. Not especially sad but after that last one I think we all need a break.
A month before their showdown with her Imperial Fishface, Dave took her to California. Most of it had sunk, but he had a house on a rocky part of the northern coast, about two hours from San Francisco by car.
One of the benefits of the world ending and the only form of long-distance transportation being a jpeg rocket skateboard was that it was only half an hour from San Francisco by air. She perched on the end of the skateboard, a bored expression on her face as they surfed over blackened forests and towns. It had been weeks since she bothered to find ways to call the skateboard gaudy, or obvious, or sure proof that there was no god, had never been a god, for no god would allow such a mockery of creation and all four-wheeled, twin-jetted objects to come into being. Well, s’up, god, I’ve just made you my bitch, he thought, and didn’t think about the names of the towns and forests, so many of them, and so far away.
oH. that first one is mine?? :’D i’m so flattered to be on somebody’s favorites list! but all of you should check out the rest of these fics, they’re really good omfg.
flashandthunderfire asked you: i just want all the fantasy aus today ok ROSE/DAVE COURT INTRIGUE AU
Their private code elevated itself to a language on their thirteenth birthday (the day their father died), and by now it’s almost more a way to read each others’ minds from the twist of a lip and the arc of a wrist – I don’t trust him, and but you trust me, and this one’s a risk we’ll have to take.
The whole court knows that he took an arrow for her in the Solstice Riots; two people in the world know that she took blow after blow to her pride to keep him the Strider heir when they were young, that they’ve slipped each other napkins-ful from banquets since the age of six, and still do whenever one can’t eat for fear of poison from a seatmate.
Between the two of them they keep John on the throne and gentle-handed, and every time her dress falls to her brother’s bedroom floor she tells herself that surely that’s enough to balance this betrayal out.
i’m in a major mood for some sadstuck fanfiction that involves derse dreamers maybe wondering why they had to be on the planet the ‘bad guys’ come from and what qualifies them as derse dreamers in the first place.. like is there some inherent ‘bad’ or broken quality to them? or it’s just random placement? and it has a happy ending.
lol i don’t know i’m no storyteller i just do the arts herpa derpa have a derse dave
this is random as hell, OP, and I’m afraid it drifted a bit, but hopefully it’s close enough to be interesting! also, um. Hi?
It’s all a blur – the agent, the terror building in her throat as she ducked and dodged and longed for her needles, Dave bright and quick and closer to graceful than she’d ever imagined he could be, the sick green glare building closer and closer and Dave clutching at her arm, twisting, shoving –
“No,” she gasps, and Dave flinches, fingers agonizingly tight around her wrist as she twists in the air, struggles towards him, and
“Sorry,” he whispers, lips bumping against her cheek – sticky, hot – and his other hand collides with her stomach, a hard sharp punch that knocks her back, breathless and choking as she spins into space, helplessly trying to twist herself upright just in time to catch – a flash, a flicker, and as she blinks the spots from her eyes she finds space dark again. There’s no sound.
She hovers there.
“Fuck.” It hisses its way between her lips. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, you stupid, impossible…”
She isn’t sure how long it is before the shadows shift, a patch of gray sliding into shape, dull white eyes and glinting teeth, hair swirling through the Outer Rim’s half-space-half-not and coiling around bright orange points. Rose simply watches, doesn’t move.
“Hey,” the shadow says, shrugging – undulating, really, shoulders and hair and all. “Are you Rose?”
She nods, automatic and slow, holding the rest of herself still. The shadow smiles, nervous, unreal. “I’m Feferi. It’s – I mean, I’m sorry about your. Friend? Your human moirail? I’m not sure…”
“My brother.” The words echo strangely on her ears, tinny, distant, as she stares at where the Green Sun used to be. “My… he was my brother. David.”
“I’m sorry,” Feferi repeats, twisting her hands behind her back. “I… brothers are important?”
“Yes. He was.” Rose clears her throat, closes her eyes, opens them again. “Feferi. Why him?”
“It’s…” She shrugs, gaze skittering away. “I don’t know. It just happens.”
“Why?” Rose steps forward, feet steady on the half-nothingness beneath her. “I want an explanation. I want to know why this happened to him. He shouldn’t have been involved in any of this.” The words come as easily as reciting a passage in school, as destroying a classmate trying to argue without having read the book assigned. “He shouldn’t even have been on Derse. He never cared about any of this – this -” She gestures, sharp, fingers stabbing at the shapeless shapes around her. “He didn’t care. More than that, he hated it. He – he even warned me away. The horrorterrors, the Furthest Ring, he had nothing to do with them. Not until me.”
“Rose -” Feferi’s hair is limp around her, flat; it makes her look oddly like Jade. Rose barely notices, focuses more on forming the words, not thinking them until she hears them:
“He deserved better. He wouldn’t even have played the game if I hadn’t asked him, never mind gotten twisted up in this. He wasn’t frightening. He wasn’t uncaring. He wasn’t – he wasn’t grimdark. He should have been on Prospit, he should have been somewhere safer.” Rose swallows, hard – her throat feels tight, but it seems as meaningless, nothing more than a sign of infection. “Why did they choose him for this? He did nothing to gain their attention, nothing whatsoever. Was it just because he was my family?”
“I don’t know!” Feferi wails, stomping her foot; her hair uncoils. “I don’t know either! Some of ours – I mean, I had Golly, but Equius, Nepeta, there was no reason! I guess it’s – I guess it’s just because we can, that’s the only -”
“I don’t know if you noticed this,” Rose snaps, feet slapping against emptiness with every step, “but he died. That would seem to blow a few holes in your theory, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe he was -”
“If you say one. more. word –” Rose starts, fist shining slate-silver in the dimness as she steps in just a little closer, and –
“Christ, are you actually beating up a dead ghost?”
“Dave?” She’s turned before she can think to move, staring – yes, a thin shock of purple in the dark, unhurt, unbloody, shades unbroken. “David. How did you – ”
“Uh.” He shrugs, drifting closer – distance is warped and hard to measure, and suddenly he’s close enough that his hair shifts with her breath. He’s not looking at her, head tilted towards the ground and weight shifted from foot to dangling foot, and she reaches for him, thoughts caught in her throat. Her fingers close around the arms of his shades, pull down. His eyes gleam, dull and white.
“Yeah. I didn’t.”
She swallows hard. Her hands are shaking, the glasses trembling against the air, she slaps them closed, swallowing hard, once, twice.
Then she punches him, full to the jaw. His head jerks; there’s no sound, no mark, nothing.
“You miserable bastard.”
“What the hell was I supposed to do?” he snaps, shoulders hunched against the shadows. “Let you die?”
“Yes!”
“How about fuck no?” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, wincing a little. “No. No, no, no way. You’re – no.”
“So you decided to abandon me instead?” She crosses her arms, tucking her fists against her chest, spits the words out through her teeth. “Yes, isn’t that noble and clever. Save the girl who’s been preparing for this kind of thing for years, slated for it, who’s already given in to their machinations once, it was clearly meant to be me -”
“Okay, seriously, what.” He stares, wrist still pressed into his cheek. “What. No. You’re gonna be – you’ve got John, you’ve got Jade.”
“Yes. Dear friends both.” Her lips are shaking; she can’t speak. “David. It shouldn’t – it should have been me.”
“Yeah, I heard you.” He sets his jaw, blank eyes closing; his hand knocks gently against hers, their knuckles brushing. “It’s still bullshit, and anyway, it’s too late now.”
holy heck this is long and embarrassing and i’m only posting because i do not possess all of my faculties at 2am. im serious about this being the only homestuck fic ive written past a paragraph. it’s not even finished but i probably won’t be touching it any time soon.
also i dont think anyone will get far enough to notice but it’s pretty nonlinear
daverosed 