Rose pats you on the back, drying your tears one final time with a box of tissues, and then sees herself out. She has work to do, and her own grieving to manage.
Once again, like the years spent on your island, and the years on the battleship, you are alone.
It’s somehow worse, now. While there are hundreds of people that you can hear and smell and feel moving around you in the base, none of them can really be there for you. They have their own problems, or a job to do, or can’t understand your sorrow in the first place. Rose has Kanaya, and Karkat has Meenah, and for a while John and Roxy had each other, even if they are nowhere near you now. And you, for a blissful while, had Dave.
And now one of the loves of your life is gone, permanently, if Rose is to be believed, and the other is killing himself with guilt.
You’re spending more time warping out into the distant reaches of space because at least out there it’s quiet; the slow pulse of the stars and the utter stillness of the cosmos is soothing, in its own way, because your psychological loneliness is matched by the physical. There’s no sound in space, and you can wail without stifling yourself, without stuffing it down to appear functional and happy the way you always do. You’re dreadfully touch-starved. You always were, but doubly so now, because you and Dave were both constantly hanging off each other. Both products of alienating environments devoid of human affection, growing up.
You were perhaps the only one that noticed it, but Dave started sleeping a little easier after Dirk killed himself. If Dave felt different, more relaxed now that a version of his abusive guardian was gone, he never verbalized it.
You wonder how much guilt he carried over that.
There’s no way to know, now.
You still don’t know whether Dave died or had his soul stolen or somehow transcended his mortal form or what, just that he isn’t coming back. Whatever killed him seemed to do it almost painlessly, but it didn’t even leave him time to scream. No time for you to come running in, no time to say goodbye.
And the thought that Dave left you, that he might have secretly hated you enough to take any chance to get away?
That he never even had the decency to say goodbye?
The thought tastes like broken glass. It burns like ice in your veins, and you hate him, viscerally despise the man you loved for leaving you. You want to rip apart the fundamental laws of reality for treating you this awfully. And the terrifying thing is that you could. The universe itself seems to despise you, so why shouldn’t you fight back?
The anger is comforting, easy, it’s like meeting an old friend for coffee. Old friends you never seem to have anymore, that move on without you, that leave you crying and alone because there are more important things to do. More important things in this world than poor old Jade Harley, the lonely girl raised by a dog on an island, who was never allowed to leave. The girl who doesn’t even get to have her dog at her side because he’s a fucking part of her now.
You would be howling, shrieking like a banshee at the moon if you weren’t deep in space.
You almost don’t notice when you clench your fists a little too hard and you sever the bonds between the nearest mass of atoms.
You do notice when the nearest star shoots off a gigantic plume of radioactive fire, and it makes you want to cry even more.
The world is made of cardboard, too easy to destroy, and much too difficult to put back together.
People are just as fragile. It’s why you had to run from fling to fling when you dated mortals, because you couldn’t stand the thought of outliving them, and none of them could fill the hole in your heart, the endless black hole that absorbs, craves affection and gives nothing in return. You’re selfish, wanting the ability to affect the world on a normal scale, wanting to live a normal life, to have a normal relationship, wanting to be happy, wanting anything other than the shitty hand you’ve been dealt. When you want things, people get hurt, destinies get interrupted, the universe lets you climb a little up the endless hill of happiness before it knocks you back down again.
But there is no life out here, no one to hurt, no grand destiny to get caught up in, and so you let yourself grieve and punish the universe just like it has punished you.
Later – time was never your strong suit – you warp yourself back to your small room in the base. It’s not the one you shared with Dave. A closet, really, barely enough room to keep some changes of clothes. It would be, that is, if you weren’t a goddess that could shrink and grow things at will.
Sometimes you wonder if being a goddess wasn’t just another cruel joke.
You wonder if it made it easier to tuck yourself away in tiny, forgotten corners for a reason.
You toss on your lab coat and start your way toward the research center, where you and Dave store – used to store – the artifacts you dug up from the old world of Earth, from the detritus of destroyed sessions.
You throw the door open and Karkat looks back at you in shock. The lines on his face old and tired, the way you constantly feel. You almost move to close it, to hide yourself once more from the world, but he speaks before you can make a decision.
His fingers lace into yours and your heart jumps a little – reminds you of all those years ago, trying to convince the boys into polyamory, into admitting they loved each other – and then it sinks, because you fucked that up too.
You teleport the two of you to an old, shitty Statue of Liberty before you can think too hard about your regrets.
The pair of you are standing in the rim of her torch, half-dug out of a cliff, perched on an endless ocean horizon, and it is quiet here – not the silence of deep space, or the muted noise of the base, or the endless bustle of the city, but quiet, calm, like your island was all those years ago. As much as you hate to admit it, it feels like home here.
He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and draws one out, produces a lighter from a pocket on his jacket, and lights it, drawing deeply, silhouetted against the sinking sun.
The smell and the sunset remind you again of home, of those good few years you only have flashes of, the years before Grandpa died. He ashes his cigarette, sparks floating away into the distance, away from the shitty statue you both are standing on, the last burning specks of a long-dead dream of freedom.
The question takes you a little off guard.
He lets you think, taking a long drag on his cigarette, the sun slowly sinking below the horizon.
Jane is family, but so was Dave, and so is Karkat; and they are chosen family, like Rose and John, not the blood that abandoned you alone on an island.
And Jane is trying to hurt your chosen family.
He explains, a weapon to stop Crocker’s healing factor, a juju turned into blades and bullets fit to kill a god. The crowbar, recovered from deep below the ocean months ago, heated into raw components with the blaze of a dying star, and forged into knife, chainsaw blade, and revolver bullets. Something to give him and Kanaya a fighting chance to put Crocker down.
A tear catches in your eye, a hitch in your throat, another goodbye that might go unsaid.
You press your back against the wall, sinking to the ground in a slump, trying to choke back tears, because yet another person is leaving you. Leaving you for something as stupid as duty or destiny or fate; it doesn’t matter which, because soon enough, you’ll be alone again.
You force yourself to chuckle, crack a grin, to put some fire in your belly, and mutter under your breath.
He laughs, but it’s sad, tinged with the bittersweetness of a setting sun and the end of an era.
You stand and pull him into a hug, feeling the roughness of his chitinous skin and his stubble against your soft, fragile skin, feeling the power humming through his hydraulic veins. If you didn’t know better, you would have guessed that if one of the two of you was a god, it was him.
He breathes slowly, calmly, settling your pulse against his own. You never were one for quadrants, but you love him, and it’s something more than the friend love you still feel for John.
It could be pale, it could be red, it could be the fury that he’s dumb enough to think he has to throw his life away for this cause.
He gulps, and there’s a deep sadness there, something old and unfelt, guilts of an era passed, of opportunities missed and a youth left behind.
You decide to live in the moment, and you press a soft, slow kiss to his lips, a kiss of goodbyes and resignation. He tastes harsh, like war and cigarettes, and bittersweet, like the setting sun and old friends. When you are done, the two of you stand in silence, and let the moment hang in the air as the sun disappears below the horizon, and one final goodbye is said.
Later, you are alone again in deep space, standing in the heat of a supernova, melting a crowbar into liquid starmetal, forging it into weaponry fit to kill a god. They are heavy in your hands and in your heart; weighted like endings.