Chapter Text
By the time she's ten years old, Rose Lalonde knows how she's going to die.
She wakes up, sweating and screaming, and her foster mother is holding her tightly, breathing anguished comforts into her ear and stroking her hair.
Rose clings to her foster mother's arm, tightly enough to dig in her finger nails and draw blood, but she doesn't see the room around her.
She sees a building top with a sky on fire. She sees a towering woman with grey skin and masses of tangled black hair and horns rising high into the sky. She feels her chest bleeding out, and solid gold piercing her lungs and her heart and her stomach and her liver and her spine. She feels herself coughing and feels blood drip down her chin and knitting needles falling from her hands. She feels herself collapse onto the building top, and hears the thump of something collapsing right beside her. She feels dizzy. She sees blackness closing in and the towering fish woman grinning down at her with sharp teeth.
Her foster mother whispers confused questions into her hair and Rose scrambles away. She falls onto the floor and shrieks because this is not her mother. Her mother is… her mother is… her mother is…
Her mother is Martinis and vodka and gin and rum and wine. Her mother is wobbling in impractical heels and her mother is magic and wizards and love with no way of knowing how to express it.
But Rose Lalonde has never known her mother. Rose Lalonde does not know how she knows her mother is science and hairspray and pink and cats and love and love and love and so much love.
Rose Lalonde does not know how she knows this is how she dies. But she knows. She knows this is no simple nightmare, and she knows that she should never tell anybody what she dreams of, and she knows that no one will ever believe her.
Rose Lalonde has always known things, you see.
Dave Strider does not know how he's going to die.
But he does always know the time.
At ten years old, he shares a room in a foster home with another boy, because there's too many kids without families or with families who can't take care of them in this part of town, and every kid has to share a room.
He wakes up at exactly 3:56 am. There's no clocks in the room, because his roommate doesn't like the ticking of analogue clocks, and he can't sleep unless its pitch black, meaning there are no light up digital clocks.
But he knows its exactly 3:56 am (wait… 3:57 now. He could tell you the second, if you'd like, but then he'd start counting).
He wakes up and he doesn't know why. He feels a twinge in his stomach and feels as if someone far away is in trouble.
He stares up at the ceiling, chewing on his lip, listening to the deep breathing of the boy on the other side of the room.
He falls back asleep exactly twenty two minutes later, and even though he wakes up thirteen minutes later than usual, he knows exactly which morning tasks to cut back on in order to be in time for school.
Dave Strider always knows what time it is, you see.
The next day at school, Rose flinches when she sees one of her friends playfully pretending to stab another friend with a fork.
The next day at school, Dave borrows a pair of sunglasses from his friend because his eyes are starting to hurt and he's tired, and he considers that maybe he should wear sunglasses all the time.
By the time Rose Lalonde is thirteen, she knows when she's going to die.
She wakes up breathing shallowly and shaking, but her foster mother is not there to comfort her. Her foster mother thinks her nightmares have gone, or, at least, gotten better, thanks to several therapists and a prescription of drugs no one is quite sure children should actually be taking.
Rose Lalonde quietly slips out of bed, turns on her bedside lamp, and looks into her mirror. She sees two faces.
She sees her own, current, face. Young and peachy and pudgy with baby fat. Rosy cheeks and large purple eyes with dark shadows painted underneath. Chapped lips and sleep tousled blonde hair reaching down past her shoulders.
She also sees her own, future face. Older, with thinner skin and sharper bones. Pallid cheeks and tired, purple eyes with dark shadows mixing with smudged make-up. Cracked black lipstick and slight greasy, greying hair ending at her chin.
Rose Lalonde blinks and looks around her dresser. Its scattered with make up and plates and cups and books. Behind her possessions, amongst them, on a table that isn’t hers far into the future, she sees black knitting needles and a sword and two take out boxes and a shitty, cheap birthday card with a big number 50 splashed on the front, but the 0 is crossed out in bright red felt tip pen and a 3 is scrawled next to it.
Rose Lalonde doesn't know how she knows that this is the night before she dies, but she does.
Dave Strider is never late, even when common logic dictates that he should be.
At fourteen years old he joins a sword fighting club in the community centre exactly eleven minutes away from school. He joins because one of his friends said he should get a hobby, and the classes are free because they're part of some 'area improvement' programme, and he thinks swords are pretty cool. He doesn't tell his new foster family that he joined it, telling them instead that every Thursday he joins a couple friends to study and work on anything they've let slide over the previous week. His foster family thinks this is an excellent idea and tell him that his new foster father will always be at the school gates at 4:00 pm to pick him up.
At the end of the school day every Thursday, Dave walks the eleven minutes to the community centre to sword fight. The class always lasts around fifty five minutes. At 3:55 Dave always walks the eleven minutes back to school.
During these eleven minutes, his grip on time always gets a little fuzzy. He thinks, logically, that 3:56 shouldn’t last as long as it does. But he always reaches the school gates a 4:00 pm, just seconds before his foster father pulls up and grins at him from inside the car. Dave always readjusts the cheap sunglasses he's taken to wearing, to stop his eyes hurting against the sun, and hops into the car.
Dave Strider is never late, even when he knows he should be.
At twenty two, Rose Lalonde knows who she's going to die with.
In her dreams, she sometimes catches glimpses of a person. A boy. A man. A blonde with sunglasses and the same jaded tone in his voice as her. She sees a freckled back, or a long hand gripping a sword, or the sleeve of a red shirt. Sometimes he says her name. Sometimes he blows smoke around her. Sometimes he wraps an arm around her as she types away at her laptop.
She meets him when she's twenty two. Three months out of university and she's at a party thrown by one of her old lecturers. He invited her because he's inviting all his recently graduated, promising students, and Rose is definitely promising. She's definitely promising because her final project, a collection of short stories about ghosts in the afterlife watching the real world they'd left, has been published by a small, indie publishing company.
The party is classy. Its small, and private, and held in a rented house out of town. Men wear shirts and ties and women wear smart dresses or long skirts. There are semi-expensive bottles of wine and semi-elegant plates of food.
Rose wears purple, because she likes purple. And she's straightened her hair, recently cut short up to her chin, and she even paid to have her nails filed and painted, because she'd never done that before.
She spends two hours casually making her way around the party, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up with several old classmates. She reminds herself to pace herself on her wine, because normal people don't usually make their way through a whole bottle of wine within an hour. She hadn't really drunk until recently, but after house party in her first year of university, she'd found she hadn't dreamt at all, and even though she had woken up foggy and feeling ill, she hadn't seen the small blonde girl she'd been dreaming about recently.
She thinks the girl is her daughter, even though she knows she's never going to give birth.
After two hours, she sees a boy wearing sunglasses. He standing next to a man she knows is another lecturer, but not in any course she's ever had any contact with. The lecturer who had invited her is there as well, along with several other new-graduates.
She doesn't recognise the sunglasses. They're not the same ones she'd dreamt of; they're cheaper, lighter, a slightly different shape. But she recognises the blonde hair they rest under. She'd dreamt of running a hand through it one night, briefly, before she'd dreamt of a small grey child without a gender and wizards being killed.
She sees this boy in a red suit and knows that she has known him, will know him, and will die with him. She sees this boy in a red suit and knows that eventually she will tell him that she dreams of the future, and he will believe her. She sees this boy in a red suit and knows that she has about thirty years with him to turn the world upside down.
Its exactly 10:04:19 pm on the 14th August, 1998 when Dave Strider looks up to see Rose Lalonde approaching him.