John looks
up to see Rose waving at him while hanging out the hatch of a troll
cruiser. John tries to smile at her, but all he can muster is a
weird, queasy expression. Rose looks glad to see him anyway. She
drops to the ground when the modest cruiser comes in for a landing,
followed out, regrettably, by her daughter, Vriska.
Shit. John flies up to greet them, more quickly than he would
ordinarily in a situation where he wasn’t trying to divert his
friend’s and her teenage daughter’s attentions away from a couple
making out in a bush. He dips forward like he’s going in to hug
Vriska (to her apparent surprise, due to his historical complete
lack of desire for any physical contact to be made between them),
but instead uses his momentum to spin her all the way around so
that her back is facing the cursed shrubbery in the distance.
VRISKA: Whoa! Hey, Old Man.
JOHN: hey vriska, hey rose. nice to see you
both!
ROSE: John, I—
John and Rose appear equally surprised
themselves when Vriska hauls him in to seal the deal with a
crushing hug of her own.
JOHN: haha. geez! hi vriska!
VRISKA: Hi John!
JOHN: this is great. just great. hey, why don’t we
just go over here to talk, for like. no reason at all? ha ha.
ROSE: O... kay? If that’s what you want.
JOHN: oh yeah, it’s the thing i want most. the view
on the other side of this ship is just... AMAZING. trust me.
Rose cocks an eyebrow at him. Behind her, the
bush releases a strangled, lusty honk.
ROSE: Was that...
ROSE: Nevermind.
ROSE: Vriska, why don’t you go and help your mother
with the deployments?
VRISKA: UGH. I can’t 8elieve I have to Actually
Listen to you now that we’re At War.
ROSE: Run along now, dear.
Thankfully, Vriska heeds her mother’s command
and heads back to the cruiser. Rose tries to glance back toward the
source of the suspicious honk, but John pulls her behind the ship,
beyond audible range of the activity taking place in the offensive
bush.
On this side of the cruiser, troops are departing the hold in
single-file efficiency. They’re all decked out in full Alternian
military garb. It’s the cool, Tron-looking stuff with the
luminescent cording that matches their blood colors. Rose is
wearing it too, John notices, in black and lavender. He gives her a
concerned look up and down, then holds out his hands, palms up.
JOHN: so... i guess this war is really
happening?
ROSE: Yes.
ROSE: I understand that you don’t want to be
involved, and I respect your decision. However, I wanted to speak
with you before we left.
JOHN: oh, thanks. i actually appreciate that a
lot.
JOHN: i think i would have been pretty bummed if
you went off to your potential doom without saying goodbye.
JOHN: now that i think about it, that’s how this
all started, isn’t it?
JOHN: you were so sick that it looked like you were
dying, and i was about to leave on a perilous mission.
JOHN: but now, here we are.
JOHN: it’s almost like...
JOHN: the circle of stupidity is complete?
Rose laughs.
ROSE: Don’t be ridiculous John. Nothing is
complete.
ROSE: There is no true ending or beginning in this
scenario.
JOHN: ha ha. yeah, right. because this is real
life, right?
JOHN: i guess reading narrative relevance into a
bunch of dumb and totally random events is kind of lame and
childish.
ROSE: No, that isn’t what I meant at all.
ROSE: By all means, apply a narrative to our lives.
Up until a certain point, it would have been perfectly accurate to
do so.
ROSE: But not anymore.
JOHN: because... it’s not canon, right?
ROSE: Do you remember what I told you years ago?
About the three pillars of canon?
JOHN: um.
John strokes his chin and thinks very hard on
this. Maybe too long, because Rose sighs and taps the bridge of his
spectacles.
ROSE: “No” is a perfectly valid answer to that
question, John.
JOHN: i just didn’t want to make it look like i
don’t pay attention to your wordy philosophical babble!
ROSE: I philosophically babble rather a lot, or at
least I used to.
ROSE: It would be unfair of me to expect you to
retain nearly three decades of oblique technical jargon regarding
the metaphysics of the reality in which we inhabit.
JOHN: wow, we’ve known each other a long time.
ROSE: Yes, we have.
ROSE: Well.
ROSE: It would be more accurate to say that we both
have and haven’t known each other a long time.
ROSE: As I explained to you on that morning sixteen
years ago, there are three critical features of canon:
essentiality, relevance, and truth.
JOHN: yeah.
ROSE: We have been untethered from the mooring of
“truth” for some time now.
ROSE: So while we, in our subjective experiences of
conscious perception, feel in this moment that we have known each
other for a very long time, technically it’s not true at all.
Contemplating the vastness of that statement
makes John feel suddenly very small and sad. He shuts his eyes and
runs a hand through his hair.
JOHN: oh my god, rose. it’s too early in the day
for this.
ROSE: I agree.
ROSE: And besides, that’s not what I wished to
speak to you about.
ROSE: John.
ROSE: Look at me.
Rose wraps her narrow hands around John’s arms
and pulls him gently toward her. He cracks his eyes open to see her
face glimmering in the late morning sun. Her eyes are glossy and
bright in the gleaming light.
ROSE: I want to thank you.
JOHN: for... for what?
JOHN: didn’t i fuck everything up by not going to
fight lord english?
JOHN: it’s my fault we’re all living in this
meaningless hell world where everyone’s vaguely out of their minds,
and we’re all about to go to war over... freeing prisoners from the
whipping cream camps!
ROSE: Oh, whatever.
ROSE: The war is just as irrelevant as everything
else that’s happened here in the last decade and a half.
ROSE: At least with a conflict, we have something
to DO.
ROSE: Something to strive for and against.
Something to believe in.
ROSE: I’m thankful for that. But more than
anything, John, I’m thankful that I got a chance to be happy.
ROSE: I never...
Rose pauses meaningfully, as if the
realization is falling into place as she says it.
ROSE: I never thought I would actually get to be
happy.
JOHN: rose... you weren’t happy before?
JOHN: when you married kanaya? before you got sick?
when we were all together?
Rose shakes her head. She brushes past John,
out toward the open field, away from the brewing battle. The land
is so flat that it rushes out to meet the horizon uninterrupted for
miles and miles. Rose is a pale flame against the brilliant haze of
a perfect Earth C morning.
John doesn’t follow after her. He lets her compose herself
privately with her back to him. She clasps her hands in front of
her and raises her head to look at the perfectly blue sky with its
perfect sun and its perfect clouds, unmarred by the dark storm
brewing on the planet below.
ROSE: In Complacency of th—
She corrects herself.
ROSE: In the silly wizard story I wrote when I was
a child,
ROSE: The realm most comparable to heaven existed
in a state of subliminal conditionality, dependent on the inscience
of the individual experiencing it.
ROSE: Which is to say that it would cease to exist
the moment you realized what it was.
ROSE: And so, those with knowledge could never
truly be happy.
John looks at his hands. The same hands that
held Harry Anderson when he was a baby. The same hands that tore up
Terezi’s photograph just a few hours ago. The same hands that
remember steadying Rose on her sickbed sixteen years ago, and the
shaking feeling they’d awoken with that morning: a subharmonic
symphony that can only be heard in the bones. All things that
remain “true” to him. Knowledge of what came before his choice, and
then after. There are things that he can’t forget. That he won’t
forget. Is this the reason he’s felt like this for so many
years?
ROSE: But that isn’t me anymore.
ROSE: I am blind against the veil of this
world.
ROSE: It’s all ambrosia to me.
ROSE: I don’t care if it’s not true. I care even
less if it’s not canon.
ROSE: I have a beautiful wife who I love more than
I thought possible, and a daughter who I am immeasurably proud
of.
ROSE: It can all be senseless, ephemeral noise that
dissolves in the void. A whisper swept up by the wind before it’s
uttered.
ROSE: I’m still grateful to have felt this way.
ROSE: So, John...
Rose turns around, smiling. The smile is calm
and honest. Her eyes are perfectly clear. There is no other word
that could possibly do justice to her expression. She looks
happy.
She comes forward to give him a kiss on the
cheek. John wraps his arms around her shoulders, pulls her into a
tight hug, and breathes in the scent of her hair. Whatever the
truth of the matter is, she still feels tangible and real to him.
What does it mean to be real, anyway?
Around them, the first wave of bombs start to go off. Bright
pinpricks of light and dark that flash and flame out, leaving a
nanosecond of absolute, dead silence in their wake.
John’s laughing when they part. They’re enveloped in a cloud of
smoke and dirt so thick that they can barely see each other.
Despite what Rose said about there being no ends or beginnings for
them anymore, it feels very final. And in that moment, he thinks he
understands. Finality was always up to him.
He finally decides to allow it.