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Inside the meteor are offices, lab benches, and bathrooms with stalls. The walls are slab gray, lights white without warmth. There are colors: the orange horns of their troll friends, the reds of Terezi’s eyes. The deep maroons of Dave and Aradia’s godhoods, and Rose’s own blindingly orange robes. Blood on the walls and floors, splotched and sprayed on like lazy graffiti. When Karkat yells at Terezi for putting some of Sollux’s teeth in his mouth upside down, Kanaya offers to take Rose on a tour of the lab.
It’s not a very long tour. They find an empty room with a functioning coffee machine, and end up sitting on the floor, talking over hot beverages. Kanaya’s arms and hands cord in unfamiliar patterns of muscle, and she almost never breathes. She’s smaller than Rose expected. Tall, but more slender and less solid, though when she clenches her jaw, grim angles emerge beneath her skin in ways that make Rose’s breath double back into her lungs. She speaks English, though strangely. Consonant clusters are enunciated with deathly precision—she manages to pronounce light with a clear g, h, and t, and Rose wants to hear her say 'nightingale' for no reason at all. Her vowels have a home deeper down her throat, but said faster and clipped. Maybe Rose’s English sounds like a undifferentiated slurry of letters. Rose has never been more self-conscious of the way she’s spoken in her life, but she’ll be damned if she allows Kanaya Maryam to ever say she’s left her speechless.
They haven’t had much time to talk. Neither of them are willing to talk about death or dying—they’re both sick of it—and so their conversational pool has dried up to the misalignment of troll and human culture, and now, her clothes. Kanaya asks Rose to lower her hood, then to raise it again. She asks Rose to stand, and comments, with just barely sheathed bitterness, on how it’d be a nice color on Rose if it didn’t also clash with her eyes.
“I would recommend that you leave the hood up,” Kanaya says, and the bitterness—Rose doesn’t even know where it came from, and she won’t ask—tucks itself away again. “To avoid the clashing colors. But then you won’t be able to see.”
“I doubt it matters at this point,” Rose says. “Although I do appreciate your suggestion that I should walk into our new universe blindly so I don't offend your delicate sensibilities.”
“Rose, I can hardly stand to look at you, the colors are that bad. And your unfortunate pasty humanish complexion and coloration aside, there are many things that are enjoyable about you.”
“Are all trolls masters of the backhanded compliment, or is it just you?”
“I didn’t mean to insinuate humans are unattractive,” Kanaya says. “Only that the colors do not suit you. It would have been better had the game chosen colors to bring out your natural aesthetic appeal.” Kanaya’s smile, fanged but sweet nonetheless, brings out a smile out of Rose, too. “You are very appealing, Rose.”
“Flatterer.”
Kanaya tucks her fangs into her lips and runs the tip of her finger along the edge of a table. Why is this charming? Kanaya bends her shoulders into her body. She stoops. She is going to end up with a permanently crooked back and arthritic shoulders. She will spend immortality with the posture of a willow tree.
“I don’t understand you. You humans do not respond to pity nor do you respond to sincerity and I am to understand that insincerity is your modus operandi—” Why do trolls have ‘modus operandi’ but not ‘closet?’ “—but Jade has told me that human females take offense to insincere compliments regarding their appearance.”
“If I told you that your dress was an uncoordinated mess—”
“Then you would be wrong,” Kanaya says flatly.
“It makes you look like a depressed Christmas decoration. Baby Jesus is shedding tears as we speak.”
“I don’t know who your Jesus is, but he is a human thing, and I am beginning to think that you humans simply do not understand how to take compliments.”
“Oh, we are a tricky, difficult race. We human women have driven many a suitor mad with our Jenga cities of words and lies. Wars have been fought for our hands in marriage. Helen watched the Greeks and Trojans slaughter one another for ten years while having wild sex with Paris every night.”
“I can see her salting the puffyseeds as we speak,” Kanaya says. Rose makes the mistake of meeting her eyes. It’s hard doing banter in real life. They bake verbal rejoinders while cracking the eggs to make a pithy comeback cake while simultaneously waiting for the quip to finish setting in the fridge. They are preparing an entire bakery of ill-advised pastry metaphors. Rose is trying to find a way to unstick herself from this metaphor and spit something out before Kanaya can call this a victory. But would it really be a bad thing, losing every once in a while?
What a silly question. Of course losing is bad. It's a matter of pride at this point. It's always about the pride.
“Your lipstick is wearing off,” Kanaya says. She has already removed a tube of hers from a pocket of space, and with a twist, reveals its green head.
“Orange, purple, and green on the same person? Kanaya.”
“Oh fuck,” Kanaya says unhappily. She gives it another turn, and then another. Rose puts her fingers on Kanaya’s wrist. Allowances must be made. She is thirteen years old and has died twice, and is on her way to yet another universe. Those non-accomplishments deserve an indulgence.
“Maybe in the new universe, that combination will be considered fetching,” Rose says.
“Rose, I am going to ask you a question that does not require an answer: have you recently checked your orbital sockets for the presence of eyeballs?”
“That’s not what I meant,” she says. Kanaya twists the tube back to green. Rose must have said yes, with her eyes or some other way, because without a word, Kanaya applies the color to Rose’s mouth with four deft strokes. Not once does her hand shake or waver. There’s a taste, familiar—Rose swipes her tongue along her upper lip. “Is that blood?” she says.
Kanaya’s finger traces the path Rose’s tongue took over her lip. It’s like someone has her spine on a fishing line, and is pulling it towards Kanaya’s hand. When Kanaya’s tongue flicks out, Rose tugs the hand away and leans in.
This is the first kiss she’s been alive to experience, so her main impression is that her cowl is so large that Kanaya can fit her head inside of it, too, horns and all, and oh, god, what is she going to do about those teeth? Kanaya squeaks—ungraceful, blushing—but she responds. One hand settles on Rose’s back and draws her in. Kanaya tastes like blood and a little like she needs to brush her teeth. Her lips and body are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, just—room temperature, really, and Jesus, that’s odd. But it’s a bit beside the point when Rose is practically in her lap, or when she is making Kanaya Maryam wrinkle various articles of clothing without a single complaint.
Kanaya breaks away first. She’s grinning, sly and clever. Her hand on Rose’s back is stroking her spine.
“No,” Rose says. “I am preempting you now. There will be no suggestive one-liners here.”
Kanaya says, anyway, “I should have cleaned my chainsaw better. But in retrospect, this arrangement works well for the both of us.”
“My god, Kanaya.”
“Maybe we could both use some practice in the art of rendering our partners speechless.”
“I was dead when I received my last kiss.”
“As was I,” she says. “So it seems your dead smooching skills are being severely underutilized here. If I may recommend a course of action, then—”
“Hush, you.” She peers into Kanaya’s eyes, and she glows brighter and drops her eyes to Rose’s collarbone. Rose taps Kanaya’s chin, and steers Kanaya into another kiss. This one, she thinks, goes better. She waits until she feels Kanaya’s body twist beneath hers, and then draws away. “Well, Miss Maryam? Would still you say my skills are being ‘severely underutilized’?”
“I think,” Kanaya says, and her attempt at smugness is ruined, so completely, by the gray skin showing beneath the smudged lipstick, “they could stand to be put to work more often.”
“There is no pleasing you, is there?” Rose says. Kanaya reaches up and kisses Rose’s shoulder, then again, closer to the neck. The hard lines emerging from the pull of muscle over bone cast shadows along her skin; the only shadows that will ever appear on her face. And oh, god, Rose can hear the rambling paragraphs forming in Kanaya's head, footnotes and citations and tables and all.
There is one advantage to holding conversations in real life over chat clients. Which is to say, being able to stop people from talking. Decisively. And with one's mouth.