the scars spread across his whole body, numerous as his freckles. some are mere flecks of whiter than white tissue, and others span longer and wider than her finger.
he has muscle, but it’s lean, drawn thin. he eats as much as she does, spreading meals out long as they can last despite having the alchemeter’s unlimited supply.
“there wasn’t much food, sometimes,” is all he’ll answer with when she asks.
“there was always food, but never any meals,” she replies, sharing her own familial experience. they’re taking turns. it’s almost a year and a half into their journey, and they’re bored beyond belief.
tedium has finally pushed them to share the more intimate pieces of themselves, handling each shard with perfect care lest one of them be cut and bled out. his hands follow the thinness to her waist, only brushing fingertips like he’s scared to properly touch. her approach is both bolder and far more timid- she traces the thin line up his bicep, one of many, without hesitation, but can’t bring herself to examine any lower with her wandering hands.
she lifts them instead to his face, arguably a far more treacherous action than drifting south. his cheekbones are like hers, his eyes more almond shape- their irises are bloody red and make her think of death and wine and the color of sickly sweet valentines.
he’s gone still, letting her hold his face. her thumb finds its way to a scar that nearly nicks his eye, dangerously close and suspect to past terror of almost being half blinded. he flinches away, minutely, at the touch, eyes blinking rapidly and chest hitching with breath- and she draws back, sitting herself further away again and hugging her bare midriff, save for the bra she’s kept.
“sorry,” she says, and means it.
“…sorry,” he echos, and only speaks again after a lengthy pause, rubbing the back of his neck, his scarred arms, skin that’s been marred by someone who deserved what he got. “it just- for a moment, was too much, you know? like, fuck, lalonde. i think we can both agree lettin’ you near my tender strider flesh is like askin’ to get flayed, grilled, and served with garnish. you’re kinda risky business. frisky risky business.”
“a sword, in opposition to a needle, does have a sheathe i suppose,” she replies when he speaks his mind of why he drew away. “it’s natural to fear a sharp object pressed to one’s jugular.”
“been there, done that, experienced what comes afterwards. not fun.”
“then our ‘show-and-tell’ session has reached it’s end. your cooperation of frittering away a void’s evening was appreciated.”
she doesn’t hurt, she doesn’t want for more. they aren’t like that, no matter what jokes and satire they spin of themselves. it’s just. there’s so much time left to keep waiting for the life and death dramatics to resume. so very much time, and it festers in her, like the grimdarkness did, like the loneliness of her house did, like the relationship with her mother did. he bears and bared a hundred markers to her, showcasing the abuse he’s lived and survived. she is just a petty, needy creature, grasping for light in a place where there is so very little.
“didn’t say i wouldn’t just deal with it, lalonde,” he says, his trembling touch on her shoulder betraying his tentativeness, his nerves of asking for more, for her.
(he doesn’t think she’s awful for the neediness, the pettiness- she’s like him, a little, in a different way. she had everything except anything resembling attention. he had nothing except unending vigilance to his every move. they’re both fucked up in the head, in their hearts, in a similar enough fashion he can look into her brilliant violet eyes and see a slightly warped reflection of himself. it pains him as much as it comforts him to not be alone in this.)
she aches so fiercely inside, sometimes. in places the woman who has her eye can’t reach, can’t fill. the emptiness that’s built around by glass and mirrors, reflecting endlessly the intangible light that she passes off as her soul and self.
dave can reach there, simple and easy as his knuckles touching hers as they pass in the halls. with an offhand phrase in the dead of night as they drink more coffee rather than sleep. a whisper quiet admission of trust spoken only behind locked doors. soft and scared and comforting, because it forces her to remember that she isn’t the only one with no idea how to love another person without expecting them to hurt you for it.
rose leans into his hand, reaches back with her own, and they sink into one another again.
I’m researching Carl Jung, specifically the references in Homestuck to his philosophies, and I found some raw as hell quotes that I think are pretty poignant when applied to Dave and Rose’s suicide mission.
“No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.“ “Sacrifice proves that you possess yourself, for it does not mean just letting yourself be passively taken: it is a conscious and deliberate self-surrender, which proves that you have full control of yourself, that is, of your ego”
That first one is I think pretty obviously directly applicable to the whole concept of godtiering. The latter one is most explicitly a belief Rose embodies throughout the early narrative, in a different sense than Dave.
Dave is willing to sacrifice himself for people, both when he lets himself get shot to keep things on the Alpha timeline (and all the other deaths he experiences, even arguably the creation of Davesprite), and his insistence that he take the suicide mission while Rose lives. Dave’s idea of sacrifice is one of self-devaluing. He’s been trained by Bro all these harmful things, and this is simultaneously a denial of the “important role” he has been told he has, and a fulfillment of said role.
Meanwhile, Rose’s earliest suicide threat (to her mother) is empty and meaningless, only an expression of vague teenage rebellion. Rose threatens to kill herself because it gives her “meaning.” Later, she loses her mother, and her rebellion becomes, itself, meaningless. Her rebelling shifts from being a denial of her mother’s love to a denial of the “character building” exercises SBURB wants to put the kids through. She’s rebelling against the concept of the character arc, the myth that hardship and suffering makes you better, more capable. Her rebellion is even against her previous refusal to admit her love for her mother; she’s “gone completely off the deep end in every way,” because her mother died. Rose finally finds a “purpose,” a real reason to rebel, whether you think it’s to avenge her mother, to destroy SBURB, to save her last few surviving loved ones, or anything else.
And Dave doesn’t want her to sacrifice herself for any of those goals. He’s always been willing to put himself in harm’s way, but when the tables are turned (ba dum tss) he isn’t comfortable AT ALL. He refuses, he tries to stop her. And, fulfilling the Jung quote above, when he accepts her sacrifice and joins her, they find a new beginning together.
There are so many conclusions you can make from this, but I’m going to stop here before I end up going on a crazy tangent about how much Dave and Rose love each other, moreso than the other Beta kids, but I really think it’s a good perspective to have when rereading Homestuck and I urge you to do at least some surface level research if you’re interested in Homestuck Meta.
Okay I cheated, I did this months back like before my Maths EOYs exam. I just touched it up today because I really didn’t have time to draw anything or to post the requests (done in traditional which needs to be photographed in the day with good lighting) (I had an event which lasted the whole day)
Where does the light come from? From the power of Dave’s love idk
This particular McDonald’s is a liminal space, connected to multiple dimensions and timelines like spaghetti tangled around a meatball.
Dude and his wife have been finding and losing each other for centuries.
If you go inside next Thursday it’ll be 1993 and you can watch them meet.
It’s very romantic, but quite crowded, due to three hundred years’ worth of mildly curious time travelers showing up.
Also they run out of Big Mac sauce.
Do not go inside.
You will probably trip over the briefcase of a businessman from 2067 and get bitten by someone’s poorly-behaved pet robot archaeopteryx, and the intrepid explorer from 1672 in a steampunk dimension will whap you over the head with her umbrella right when he says his first words to her, and your Big Mac won’t have any special sauce.
Also there’s a small but nonzero risk that you’ll step out into the Upper Cretaceous and be eaten by a confused adolescent T-rex that really only wanted your soft-serve ice cream, but isn’t complaining about the rest of you.
Anyway, the guy in the other window has been living in the McDonald’s for six years straight, after his home dimension was over run by parasitic space wasps.
He’d leave, but every time he tries he comes out into either a Category 4 hurricane or the opening scene of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
He’s got his own secret stash of the Big Mac sauce.
daverosed 
