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Chapter Text

Summerstorm

One is expected to maintain a certain level of respectability when one is next in line to lead a city-spire.

Experimenting with dark magicks in one's practice ritual chamber does not meet any criteria for respectability that Rose is familiar with, and yet - here she is. There are darker arts than the one Rose has deemed herself capable of controlling, but not many, and not by much, and none of them suitable learning material for an archmage-to-be.

Ah, well. She can't seem to control herself. She must have a weakness for incredibly dangerous pastimes. But she has taken every precaution she can devise; her past few attempts to delve into shadowmagic have yet to produce any measurably negative consequences. A blorb (orb, she mentally corrects) of cyan plasma hovers over her right shoulder, rippling with magenta and streaked with veins of golden light, and she snaps her fingers once to test that the spell recognizes the trigger command. The orb bursts into hot white light that illuminates every corner of the room, bright enough to make Rose's eyes throb. This kind of ritual works best in the dark of night, but late evening is the closest Rose is willing to risk, and never without a burst of sunlight at the ready. Being a lightmage has its advantages.

Satisfied, Rose lets the light fade back into the blorb (sigh) and runs her finger down the lines of the mantra. The page feels almost sandpaper-rough under her touch, the ink dark and glistening as though it should still be wet, though Rose retrieved this particular volume from under preservation wards over a hundred years old. She half-expects her finger to come away with the whorl of her fingerprint dyed black, but when she finishes committing the incantation to memory her finger is unmarked.

She's halfway through the second line and has a palmful of darkness when the wind chime at the door rings quietly, the glass rods tapping against each other in playful, winding circle. Immediately, Rose closes her fist on the shadow coiling in her palm and ignores the squirming as it attempts to slip out between her fingers. With a snap, the blorb blazes through the room, and Rose opens her hand long enough for the shadow to be razed out of existence. To be safe, she uses the same hand to catch the pastel orb of light magic and presses it through her palm until the magic lights up her veins.

While the magic cleanses that hand, she rises to her feet and uses the other to carefully close the shadow book, tucking it under her arm with the front cover pressed to her side. Dusk rites finished an hour ago, and only one person could set the wind chime off without pulling the cord on the far side of the door; as Rose approaches the door, the tiny scrap of breeze leaves the glass chimes and winds through her hair instead, looking for the bells she usually wears as earrings and coming away empty. John has an inkling of what kind of magic Rose has taken to practicing on the side, but if someone else is with him, it wouldn't do for Rose to make it obvious just which book she's referencing in her rituals of late. Once the light magic finishes soaking into her skin, Rose smooths her face into a fittingly benign yet enigmatic smile and opens the door.

"Hey Rose!" John scoops her up in a hug before she has a chance to so much as blink, spinning them around in a wobbly circle as he dances backward. Rose is in her usual practice outfit - soft, loose cotton leggings and a tight, cropped halter leaving her midriff bare - but John's almost in full ritual gear, his ceremonial robe skirts hanging to his ankles on one side in a waterfall of blue, floaty fabric. "Sorry, I know you were practicing, but guess who's back!"

"Back again," a low voice mutters, almost too monotone for the joke to filter through. Rose, in the middle of trying to embrace John as warmly as one can with only one arm to work with, looks up from the crook of John's shoulder in surprise. "Seriously, you two couldn't postpone the wedding like, a year?" Dave says, waving two fingers at Rose in a short salute from where he's ensconced himself in the corner by the balcony, the dark crimson and black of his armor and the tint of his shades almost making him the picture of a warrior - only for the white-blond shock of his hair to give away the game. A year and a half away from home has changed him almost imperceptibly - but perception is Rose's forte, and she sees the steadiness in his hands, the way he relaxes against the wall with an ease born of quiet confidence rather than fragile, fidgety tension of a boy uncomfortable in his own skin. Time away from Summerstorm (away from Ambrose, Rose doesn't quite allow to rise above the level of her subconscious) has done him good.

There's really only one reasonable reaction to this turn of events. "Dramatically toss this book onto the shelf, dearest John," Rose commands, flipping the sinister tome up from under her arm and neatly tapping it against John's shoulder. His eyes gleam back at her with silent laughter as he obediently whistles the breeze into motion, lips pursed as he floats the book over to Rose's messy bookshelves, and Rose bobs up on her toes to kiss him a little too earlier, so that the book drops onto a cushion beside her unmade bed instead.

"You guys put syrup to shame. No, shit, you could put candy apples out of business. The syrup industry called, they'd like their sucrose back." Time away, it seems, has not done anything to Dave's ability to run his mouth like his life depends on it. Rose pulls back, gravely returns John's wink with one of her own, and theatrically kicks up one heel as John rockets them toward Dave as fast as the wind can carry them in an enclosed space. "You're depriving small troll children of their favorite sugar-covered confectio-holy shit no-" Dave has time to say before they collide with him, the metal of his armor scraping against the stained glass wall and digging into the soft part of Rose's elbow as she helps John reel Dave into their hug.

"You cannot escape, brother dear," Rose says in an playfully ominous drawl, as John clumsily attempts to smooch Dave on the cheek while still grinning with all his teeth. It doesn't quite work out, to Dave's clear horror. "No one can escape the huggles."

Unfortunately, even going up on her toes isn't enough for Rose to reach Dave's cheek - it's truly galling. Rose had thought she'd moved past being bothered by such petty trifles as the fact that her twin brother surpassed her in height over two years ago, but apparently not. In every other respect, they're still almost identical - the same shade of warm, sienna-brown skin, hair the color of the sun at high noon, and eyes not quite right for children of a lightmage house, Dave's a deep red and Rose a pale lilac - but where Rose stayed slight and small, Dave shot up past even John. Rose held onto the faintest hint of hope through their younger years that she'd inherited the ludicrously tall gene as well, but it was never to be, and now here she is at twenty two, the presumed shortest of their friendcohort.

(Really, though, Jade was already taller than Rose before she left. Still. A clear case of Schrodinger's stature. As long as Jade cannot be accounted for, Rose can dream.)

Well, this is a grand opportunity nonetheless. Rose leans back as far as John's grip and Dave's reluctant-but-not hug will allow, scooping the first dark, plum lipstick she can off her sidetable and applying it with a flourish that makes Dave eye her warily. "Need a boost?" John asks, grinning evilly, and Rose nods gracious assent. John whisks her a foot off the ground with a plume of air, and Rose offers him the lipstick as she slowly chases Dave's cheek.

"You people are evil. Evil," Dave insists, moving his face away from Rose just as slowly. "Holy fucking shit tits, I should never have left you two alone together. It's like a ungodly nexus of pranksterism all up in this shit and I'm not. Having. It - oh god fine." Having cranked his neck almost to a ninety degree angle in a (futile) effort to evade Rose, Dave turns his head in time to see John has finished applying his own coat of lipstick and toss the lipstick over his shoulder, a smudge of plum purple on the white of his front teeth. "Have at me, you monsters."

Rose plants an enormous plum lipmark high on Dave's cheekbone, her mercy born only of consideration for familial propriety. John, being John, goes all in, pulling Dave down with an arm around the back of his neck for full mouth-to-mouth contact. "There are consequences for leaving to train in the mysterious ways of the warrior at a remote temple in the mountains without sending so much as a letter to your closest friends and family in the interim," Rose says in her best stern, lecturing tone, borrowed directly from John's father. When John and Dave start to get a little more heated, she sighs and starts to loll back, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead in a swoon. Neither of them appear to notice, until she kicks Dave in the shin with the utmost, well-honed subtlety. "Alas, if you want him, you'll need to wait a year and a day, after which our honeymoon phase will come to an ignominious end and John will once again be free for other quadrant offers."

Dave looks up with a purple-lipped grimace, this close to bending John over backwards. John can bend quite far, since he never falls over without the wind buoying him back up, but Rose suspects that she'd get dragged down with the two of them and that would just be silly. "You beat me to it while I was abroad learning mad warrior skills. That's goddamn devious, Rose."

"Yes, I deliberately timed my diamond proposal with all of the cunning at my disposal specifically so that this exact sequence of events would commence, brother dear." Rose tosses her hair as well as she can, with what she thinks is a passable effort; she cropped it short just a week ago in preparation for the wedding ceremony, and after years of living with a river of tiny braids looped into a long tail down between her shoulders, having her hair cropped close at the nape of her neck feels freeing. Still, it's not as convenient for dramatic hair tosses - a truly poignant loss. "Do distant warrior temples even have access to quadrant tokens? Or is it more of an ascetic monk lifestyle?"

"I don't come cheap, y'know," John adds, nodding and rubbing his chin meditatively. This has the side effect of smearing more lipstick across his face; tragic. "I have super high standards. Sooo high. But also, since Jade ducked out, I have a responsibility to marry basically your entire family, so I'll cut you some slack."

It took two years for them to be able to joke about it, and after the third year it's simply become another in-joke - still, somehow, Rose has to suppress an internal flinch. She and Jade had been an arranged match, in an entirely different quadrant, but having one's best friend run away to become a gentlewoman adventurer and see the world on the eve of one's wedding is the kind of thing that...doesn't happen every day. John presses her hand in a reassuring squeeze almost before Rose finishes quashing the thought, a silent apology, and Rose squeezes acceptance before stepping back to let Dave breathe. "Will coming back for the wedding set you back too far in your training?" Rose asks, while Dave swipes at his mouth and looks crestfallen at the amount of lipstick that comes off on his hand.

Dave shrugs with one shoulder, letting John tug him and Rose out onto the balcony to sit by the edge. "Dunno. A lot of it's just 'you'll know when the time is right' and other super deep shit like that, so you just have to feel it? Go figure. But John's my beautiful windy prince and you're my strong yet delicate murderblossom of a sister, and I've got all kinds of protective urges going at cross purposes, see. Gotta supervise this shit like a goddamn hawk."

"Murderblossom," Rose repeats. Sometimes, she forgets just how downright weird Dave can be, and then he comes up with something like that. His lip twitches up in a crooked smirk, which means he's doing it on purpose, too, the faint moonlight reflected and channeled into the glass of the spire below lighting up his face with an unearthly pale blue glow. Most of the city-spire has cycled into soft, white-blue night settings, with the last of the golden daylight cached over the course of the day reserved for the greenhouses of each level of the city, and the veil canopies draped across vast swathes of the city levels flutter and roll in the gentle summer night breeze.

While they settle on the balcony, Rose tucking herself in between the two boys to prevent further shenanigans, John with his legs sprawled out and Dave sitting with a knee drawn up to his chest (not defensively, as it might have been in the past, but in a relaxed slump), and she contemplates the spire below. In just a few years, Rose and John will be responsible for that - illuminating Summerstorm's crystal pinnacles and encouraging fair weather for skyships and plentiful rainfall for farms below, negotiating with other city-spires' archmages in the careful dance of weather magery across the hemisphere.

Technically speaking, they've already taken over a good part of the daily rites for the current pair; changeover between archmages tends to involve an extensive apprenticeship phase, and after Jade - left - Rose was grateful when the current lightmage in power allowed for a reprieve while John and Rose acclimated to being primary ritual partners. Working magic rites with John is a different experience entirely compared to how it felt working with Jade; less electrifying, less charged with unspoken tension, but infinitely more uninhibited, spontaneous without being unfamiliar, and with a sense of warm security. Both John and Jade are open and honest and quick to laugh, but John has always been touched by underlying sadness, and that translated to a devotion Rose could see lasting for the foreseeable future. Even if they hadn't been rocked by Jade's abrupt departure, Rose can't imagine anyone else she would have sought diamonds with.

"Yeah, well, you know this also means you have to pick one of us to help out tomorrow," John says, laughter bubbling up as he flicks Dave's (entirely too amusing) cape with tiny bursts of wind. His skin, a shade or two lighter than Rose's and Dave's, looks ice-frosted where the spirelight glances off his silvery blue windmage tattoos. He could have put them anywhere, but naturally John chose to tattoo curves up one cheek and down the side of his throat, where very few ceremonial outfits would ever cover them up. Rose has her own personal, stylized sun on her back, and she...honestly can't say that's much better, considering how many of her own ritual robes are backless in some form or another. Hmm. "And by picking one of us, I mean me, because Rose can do her own makeup wayyy better than I can."

Dave groans. "Seriously? Dude, I came here to like. Guard your body. By stabbing things, or you know, hitting people in the face until their face breaks. Whichever. You still can't do your own eyeshadow? We need to have a goddamn talk, my man."

John points, mutely, at the smeared purple mess of his mouth. "To be fair, you had fairly excellent technique, considering the rush job," Rose says, and John preens a little. "We shall have to endeavor not to makeout too hard at the altar. Also, really - hit people in the face?"

"Until their face breaks. Look me in the eye and tell me that's not effective as all hell," Dave says. Rose meets his eyes, despite the shades (years of practice), and his expression is so perfectly poised between utter seriousness and the faintest of ironies that she honestly could not say for sure whether he's joking or not. Impressive, and far more effective than his old deadened, brittle mask of inexpression. Rose will be glad to have seen the last of that mask. She crosses her fingers as best she can with John's still threaded through hers, and hopes that Dave's deep-rooted lack of self-esteem has grown over with something better, something here to stay. She'd let him go back to that warrior temple for ten years if it meant never again coming across her brother huddled alone in a corner of his room, and having him ask her if living was even worth it.

"Guarding my body, huh," John adds in, belatedly, waggling his eyebrows significantly at Dave as he leans around Rose a little. "Uh-huh? Uh-huh."

"I'm honor-bound not to bang you when you're marrying my sister in the morning at the asscrack of dawn, so put those eyebrows down, perv." Dave rolls his eyes when Rose and John look at each other and then turn back to Dave with two sets of waggling eyebrows. "Who put you two in charge of a city, again? And speaking of the cracked ass of dawn."

"Let's not," Rose deadpans, while John snickers and then stands. "Yeah, I get it," John says, helping Rose up. "Mr Warrior Temple Guy has to get his beauty sleep, which means he can't stay up all night with us."

"Hey, you try timing three different skyship layovers to get halfway around the planet before D-day when you only get the letter a week in advance." Dave stays seated for a second longer, staring out over the spire before pushing up with a shuffling clang of armor. "Also, if you show up with massive eyebags to your own wedding because you don't know when to go the fuck to sleep, it's your funeral. Because Momma Lalonde will bury you. Yo, Rose, is my room still free, or is it the new in-house distillery?"

"Just as you left it, brother dear," Rose says, tipping her head back to kiss John as he starts to bob off the ground and float toward the balcony railing. "Right down to the piles of shitty swords and preserved dead animals."

"Hell fucking yes." Dave shuffles from side to side, a ghost of his old agitated, insecure fidgeting, and John switches over to kiss him with considerably more tongue involved. "Hell fucking yes," he repeats, more than a little distracted, and Rose does the responsible thing and gently drags him back into the room by his cape. It's looking more than a little worse for the wear, ragged at the edges and showing signs of regular wear-and-tear where Dave's neat stitches no longer suffice, so Rose supposes he really has been fighting with it on. Incredible. She'll have to find a suitable replacement early tomorrow, after she dresses in her own wedding gear, since knowing Dave he'd willing show up to the wedding ten minutes late in the same outfit he's wearing right now. Their household tends towards packrat behavior, and she has little doubt there's a cape tucked away somewhere in the ritual clothing hall.

"Off you go," she says, giving Dave's back a tiny push to usher him to the door to the rest of the house. John's still lingering on the balcony, by the sound of the wind playing with the chimes and bells outside. A thought occurs to Rose. "How long will you be at Summerstorm? It'll be good to catch up, if you can."

Dave makes an uncertain wave with his hand, watching Rose with a hesitant expression. "Depends on when the next flight out to Horizon might be, since that's the first stop on the way back. It's trade season, so there's a lot of ships going in and out. Guess we'll see," he says, voice stilted, and Rose can guess why he wouldn't want to stick around overly long. She hugs him again, face pressed against the armor, and clasps her arms around his waist until Dave wraps both arms around her back, thumping his forehead against the top of her head. "Missed you," he mutters, an embarrassed whisper, but there was a point in his life when Dave might have been too anxious and introverted to say even that much aloud.

"And I missed you." They stay like that a few moments longer, before Dave reluctantly heads down the hall to his old room, the heels of his boots clicking on the marble tiles. Rose doesn’t shut the door until he's vanished into his own, the wind trickling through her fingers and up her arm until she turns to walk back to the balcony.

The book of dark magicks still lays on the cushion to one side of her bed rather than on the shelf, and her eyes skim over it as lightly as possible before fixing on John, who perches on the balcony railing with one leg swinging over the side. His raven dark hair almost stands right on end as the wind rakes through it in restless furrows, but by the time Rose rejoins him it has settled back down into its usual tousled mess. He's cleaned his face up somewhat, but most of the makeup just transferred to the back of his hand. Rose diplomatically takes the clean hand and lifts it to her mouth, pressing a kiss against his knuckles - just to leave more lipstick there. It's the little things, really. "Tomorrow is the day," Rose says, leaning her head against the side of John's arm; her eyelids lower a little as John laughs.

Then she frowns, as the laugh sinks in, and her finely-tuned John-interpreting skills spin into motion. "Nervous?" she asks, lifting her head a little.

"No, not nervous!" John says, maybe a little too quickly - or maybe Rose merely perceives it that way, because light only knows she has prior experience that urges her towards healthy paranoia on the night before a wedding. John bomps his head against hers and brings her hand over so he can press it between both of his, the soothing touch of a moirail. "Just - I have a surprise for tomorrow! Hopefully it works out, anyway."

"Surprises? At our wedding?" Rose says, dryly.

"It's more likely than you think," John returns, his laughter barely stifled. "Eh. Dave probably has the right idea, though; we should get to sleep soon."

Rose nods, though she's hardly tired, herself. All attempts to keep to a regular sleep schedule over the course of the past few stressful weeks proved fruitless, naturally, leaving Rose currently primed to stay awake into the small hours of the morning, but even so - "I second the motion."

"Passed." John lets go of her hand, his posterior already slipping off the railing as the wind catches him, and Rose settles for a kiss on his forehead to avoid cutting off his whistling while he's busy levitating himself fifty feet above the spire level below them. "I'll see you in the morning! Promise!" he says, brightly, before floating off toward the roof below him. It's not unusual for John to hop from roof to roof while returning to his family's residence further along the spire ring - the wind can only carry him so far before he has to drop and catch his breath - but Rose notes that if he's going straight home, he's angled the wrong way. As she watches, somewhere between amused and curious, John drops another level instead, his skirt flapping around his leggings as he heads down and at an angle along a thin crystal curve of the light rings. Part of his surprise, she supposes; she could come up with some conjecture as to where he's headed, based on his current trajectory, but in the spirit of good faith, she turns away from the balcony.

Instead, she goes around the bed and stoops to pick up the shadowmage book, stroking her fingers over the cover and weighing the decision in her mind. She hasn't lost much more than a half hour to the interlude with Dave and John; if anything, the delay would only make the conditions more appropriate for practicing a shadow ritual. She's still in her practice outfit. It could be done, easily. As long as she follows the correct steps and doesn't falter on the mantra, the risk is minimal, and summoning a new blorb to oversee her practice isn't much of an impediment.

Rose hesitates, and then moves to the bookshelf, pulling four of the foremost books forward and tucking the dark magic tome behind them. With an extra book set casually on top of the row, the four books are small enough that the extra space taken up by the tome at the back makes it appear that the forward line runs in single file with the rest of the row. Not the best method of concealment, maybe, but Rose hasn't caught anyone snooping around since her last unpleasantly bitter argument with her mother.

And soon, she won't be staying in this house anymore. Stripping off her practice gear as she goes, Rose walks to the bathroom to get ready for bed.

Chapter Text

Summerstorm

Rose's sleep is restive at best, completely pointless at worst; when she rolls onto the floor in a bundle of sheets in the early hours before dawn, she mutinously thinks that she might as well have gone ahead with her shadow practice, if this is how much good sleep does for her state of mind. Her stomach feels like it's been strung taught on a wire frame, tense and possibly no longer contained within her body cavity, and though there's no sign yet of her mother or anyone else in the family house, she makes the executive decision to extricate herself from the blankets and start preparing in the bathroom. Her wedding rite skirts are laid out already; it's just a matter of bathing, buttoning herself into the layers of cloth, and making herself presentable for a very public ceremony. Nothing she hasn't done before, with increasing frequency as the years go on and more of the archmage duties have fallen to her and John.

In another time and place, Jade might have been helping her with this, as Dave should be helping John at this moment. But Jade is gone. Thoughts of Jade are too much to stomach on top of the roiling tangle of anxiety and anticipation already vying for dominance over Rose's nerves, so she breathes in and out in a ritual pattern to focus her thoughts on adjusting the fall of her slit sleeves. Her pants fall loose to the knees before wrapping in tight around her calves and ankles, and the skirt over top of them falls in gathered pleats to either side, tiny bells twinkling at the hem. They would cross the line from decorative to annoying if this were regalia meant for a fullday ritual, but since Rose expects to change out of it and into something lighter for the rest of the day's festivities after the dawn ceremony, the fact that she chimes while she walks is fine. She arranges the crystal chimes and weights that are meant to hang off her wrists and down from her neck to her waist to help keep the light fabric from flapping incessantly in the inevitable breezes as she starts to paint her face, leaving the pale yellow veil until last.

She's halfway through lining the crease of her eyelid with gold, glittering liner when Dave bursts in through the door like the Cherub himself is hot on his heels. "We've got problems."

Her immediate reaction is to reply, "Then let us bounce," which just demonstrates how powerful a hold silly in-jokes have over her psyche. "What kind of problems?" she asks, barely daring to move her lips - there's something about the application of makeup that makes one reluctant to make any sudden movements, and having a sharp object anywhere the vicinity of one's eyes multiplies that instinct threefold.

"John being fuckin' MIA kind of problems," Dave says, grimly. "Trust me, I just helped his dad tear their house apart. He's missing."

Rose snaps the eye pencil in half. From a distance, through a slow mental fog, she asks, "And the note?"

Because naturally, if John is gone, there must be a note. Even Jade left a note. It would have been far more polite to inform Rose in person, but it seems that notes are really the only way to go about cancelling one's wedding, nowadays. Must be the new fashion. Archmage candidates truly are trend setters. At least this time, Rose's internal screaming is keeping the racket to a minimum; she'd hate to have to clean off her face and fold away her outfit with some small part of her shrieking in agony at the top of its incorporeal lungs. Her stomach, already roiling with nerves and waiting for a small meal to settle it before the main event, simply implodes, shriveling into a cramped knot of wrenching nausea.

"No note," Dave says, grabbing Rose by the shoulder. She jolts a little, and realizes when her eyes refocus that Dave's out of breath, his shades shoved up into his hair so that the red of his eyes stands out in the creeping pre-dawn light. "Rose, something's up. Do you know where John headed last night?"

Is it just me? Rose blinks the thought away before it can finish solidifying. "I - no. He said that he had some sort of surprise for tomorrow, and went down the spire. That was the last I saw of him." Then, curse her traitor tongue - "Do you suppose it's just me? Perhaps I have some sort of anti-marriage aura. You'd think someone would have mentioned to me that by now."

"And John's not goddamn dumb enough to think showing up late to his own wedding's a good prank. I think. Probably." Dave shakes his head hard, and Rose follows him out into the bedroom in a distant haze, still trying to process that they're going through this again. "I mean, sometimes he can be a dick, but that would be like. Uber-dick levels of dickery. A hefty bushel of dicks." Once they're back on the balcony, Dave leans over the side, jerking his head at Rose when she loses track of her thoughts and starts ruminating on her own terrible, terrible luck. "Which way? Maybe I can run him down - but it's been hours now, shit me sideways."

"This could be a familial thing, you know," Rose speculates, resting more of her weight on the balcony railing than she really means to; it seems her strength is seeping out of her without her permission. How unfair. "Since I would have at least expected him to elope with you, if he was off to join Jade in a grand tour. We'll be unmarried forever, brother dear."

"The hottest bachelor-spinsters to ever live." Dave carefully places his hands on either side of Rose's cheeks like he's still trying to preserve her unneeded makeup, and turns her head out toward the city-spire again. "Now, since I don't really wanna die forever alone, use your enormous brain and remember where John went."

A lightning-flicker of thought sparks in Rose's mind, cutting through the fog. "...You don't think he's bowing out?" she says, frowning. The spire's lit by faint purples and pinks in addition to the moonblue, ready to burst into dawnlight settings in a matter of hours, but Rose easily traces the circuitous path John took last night with her eyes; down and along the outer ring, winding down toward one of the lower levels. Depending on where he would have disembarked from the crystal ring, he most likely would have landed somewhere in the skyport district, which fills almost that entire ring of the spire.

Jade went to the skyport, found the first ship that would take her - or perhaps one that she'd made arrangements with ahead of time - and then vanished before sunrise. It would make sense. But Dave's shaking his head, mashing the heel of his hand against one eye as he openly grimaces out at the city like that will make John pop out of the glasswork, like some manic jack-in-the-box. "No way. You just said you saw him when he headed down, which means he wasn't even trying to hide it. Didn't think he had to. Something's wrong, I can feel it in my sangfroid."

"I have no idea why you think sangfroid works in that kind of context." Rose rubs her arms, the slit sleeves bunching up and falling back, and feels something other than numb disappointment kick her heartbeat to an ominous tempo. Something like worry. "Kidnapping?" she asks, and it comes out sharper than she means it to, as more unease raises goosebumps on her skin.

"Maybe." Dave's hand twitches into a fist on the railing. "Or he's fucking hurt or some shit and us less likely to suspect anything because of the incident. So seriously, Rose, whatever you have to go off of would be fan-flipping-tastic right now -"

No note, not a word. Not like John - but ah, Rose recognizes the signs of wishful thinking when she feels them edging into her thoughts like creeping phlox. From one perspective, the fact that she's managed to lose not one but two fiancé(e)s before their respective weddings might be incredibly bad luck, something no one could have anticipated; from another, perhaps she should have expected this from the beginning, and her current state of quietly buried anguish and fomenting denial is simply the result of callow naiveté. Believing Dave would only work to stave off the truth for a brief period before reality settled in, and Rose knows from experience that accepting harsh facts becomes more difficult after dedicating enough time to avoiding them.

So she can't say for certain whether it's weakness or determination that causes her to walk away from the balcony, retrieve a pair of shoes, and hike her skirt up so that she can plant one foot at a time on the balcony railing to lace them up. The wedding shoes might have worked well enough, but worn-in ritual boots help Rose's mind switch gears. Psychologically, wearing wedding shoes to race around the spire would only feed her sense of futility, and she can't afford that. Not if she's committing herself to the possibility that John might be in danger.

And she is. Blast Dave, but Rose can't afford not to consider that possibility, and must treat it as a potentially terrifying reality. Jade's note cut her to the quick; John's lack thereof leaves the sensation of icy water trickling down Rose's spine. Incapacitated, held under duress, or just gone - the possibilities crowd her mind. Carelessly, she knots the skirt out of the way entirely so that it hangs in a knot by her thigh, and puts out a hand wordlessly to the side. Dave takes it without looking, smoothly boosting her up onto the railing before it occurs to him to ask why. "You're going yourself?" Dave says, belatedly, his nails digging in as he clamps down on her hand. "Shit, no. I'll go. If he comes back -"

"Then you can send word to me, and I'll hasten back as quickly as I can." Rose doubts this is a prank or a simple misunderstanding, though, and from the pallor of Dave's face, they're on the same wavelength. A directionless breeze kicks up Rose's hair and filters through the slits of her sleeves.

"You know I can't -" Dave starts, before breaking off. True. Dave's lack of magic hardly even registers - until, without warning, it does. "Go to Mother, if need be. If I find John, I'll send word," Rose assures him. That would be the best case scenario: find John, sort out whatever mess led to this with minimal distractions...

With a shake of his head, his expression back to unreadable, Dave helps her swing down to the walkway below, his hands clasping her arms longer than necessary as she hangs with her feet dangling above the stone. ""If I find him on this end or - or if some serious shit goes down, I'll go back to the wind house and grab Peregrine, if she hasn't taken off with the search parties. No one does messages like the windy dudes," he says, in a voice not quite ironic enough to make the old joke stick.

Rose nods, squeezing his arms where her hands clasp them, and they mutually let go. She lands lightly on the balls of her feet, knees bent to lessen the jolt. This walkway is part of the spire level itself, flecks of mica glittering in the faint ambient light, and many a childhood afternoon involved Rose and Dave slipping out of the window and using the inter-level ladders and stairs to join John and Jade in their latest madcap games. The drop from the balcony used to feel a lot longer, but as though to make up for her (minute) increase in height these past few years, the walkway itself seems ever thinner. After a curt nod to Dave, Rose starts running along the curve as quickly as she can and keeps one hand pressed to the wall beside her - for whatever good it would do her. The ladder nearest the balcony should work, and once Rose gets down a level and traces the path of overhanging arch of the crystal ring, she should be able to pick up John's trail from roughly where she last saw him.

Well, she could have just walked the ring itself. She's done it before: first barefoot and spurred on by a dare from Jade, and then on adventures later with Jade and John, in case someone lost their footing. But if John jumped off the ring at a point with a significant drop, Rose would have to backtrack and begin again on the ground regardless.

In retrospect, she should have at least removed her weighted chimes; the bells on her knotted up skirt can only squeak out sad, muffled protests, but the chimes to keep her shirt from billowing out thump against her back and sides as she skids down the ladder, forgoing the rungs and hurtling down as fast as she dares. The friction leaves a prickling rash along her palms but doesn't rip open the skin. One lacquered nail chips, but Rose could not care less, at this point. Once she's down in the shadows cast by the buildings of the lower level of the spire, she tightens her grip until the descent slows, and she jumps the last five rungs to land in a crouch.

Only a few people are out in the early morning, some of them night workers returning home from the greenhouses, and a couple do a doubletake as Rose speeds past. "'Mage Rose?" she hears someone call hesitantly, but she's already rounded the corner and started hastening toward the main wheel of this spire level, one eye on the sky to keep tabs on the crystal ring. She knows these streets and side roads; she built a mental map of the spire's levels years before she even consciously understood why she needed to. To guide a city-spire, she and John needed to know the levels better than the backs of their hands. Rose finds the crystal inlay that mirrors the overhead ring at last, curving across the main thoroughfare in an arc - and then stops, barely out of breath as she traces the appropriate symbols over her right eye to enhance another layer of perception.

Light blooms across her field of vision; she spares a thought to be grateful the city's light is still dimmed for the night, because adjusting to the increased brightness and clarity of the auras around her would take up precious time otherwise. The faint glow of the crystal and glass that channel Summerstorm's pervasive illumination fade as the ancient, periodically renewed spells underlying the light system rush to the fore of her perception. The light of auras doesn't cast shadows; the bright radiance of the crystal ring's spells looks phantasmal when laid over to the dark shadows of the physical plane.

More to the point, John's trail stands out like a ghostly blue afterimage, glittering streams of cobalt blue that have already started to fade away on the breeze. Wind magic can be fleeting like that, but Rose would know John's aura in the deepest night. As she'd guessed, the faint, dancing trail dips off the crystal ring at the height of its crest, and without pause Rose strides after it, watching the aura as she navigates one of the chord side paths toward the second thoroughfare out from the center. Her weighted chimes clip someone as she belts across the road and onto the next side street, calling an apology over her shoulder without stopping. John didn't stop on this level.

Oh no. No. He didn't stop here. He dropped down into the skyport.

The homes of this level crowd up close to the rim just as they do the level above, but there's a clear space at the end of the alley where the buildings give way to a set of three broad stairs that wrap around the spire and lead down to the interlevel ladders for the skyport below. Rose almost spills down the stairs by accident before her feet catch on to the need to stop, and it seems as though her bones have been unstrung as she comes to a halt, the toes of her boots barely sticking out over the edge. For a frozen moment, Rose considers turning back right here and now. She followed Jade's aura all the way to an empty berth at the port last time; why put herself through that again?

"Lady Mage?"

It's the formal title for an archmage-to-be; the automatic response slips out of Rose's mouth before she's finished turning to see who has come up beside her. "Mage Rose, please," she says, her lips numb. Informality was Jade and John's specialty, and Rose had been persuaded to their side long ago, despite several discreet, sniping clashes with her mother. Almost everyone has magic in them, with rare exceptions, and being chosen to guide a city-spire's magical maintenance and development doesn't mean the same as being better.

Rose's eyes take a second longer than normal to recognize the person as someone she knows - the name takes a few seconds longer still to swim to the surface of her mind, which Rose thinks understandable, considering her current level of stress. But she knows instantly that she's seen the woman painting before, at one of the market festivals under the third spire's vast awning, shimmering paint and light magic rippling across the canvas - Rose has one of the works hanging in her quarters on the ritual level. "Something's wrong," the painter says, not quite a question, her dark eyes solemn and shining with worry. Rose can almost make out her own reflection in those eyes, including the veins of light pulsing in her iris.

How many of the others would put two and two together, Rose wonders. It's not as though Jade's departure had been a discreet affair; the sight of lightmage Rose dashing headlong through the streets in search of yet another missing fiancé is going to become memetic at this rate. She has no atramentous romantic interests as yet, and a spire's archmages only tend stumble into an auspicism triad if things have gone irreparably wrong, but if she ever does...she wonders what odds they'll have for her striking out a third time. Cynically, she thinks she'd bet against herself.

But -

Abruptly, it occurs to Rose that she might bet against herself...but she shouldn't bet against John.

She curses herself for a self-absorbed fool as realization rips her stomach out from under her; Dave must have realized long before she did. Forget Rose's moping, forget her own doubts - she's been considering this from the perspective of a fiancée spurned, and not a city leader-to-be. John never felt stifled by the responsibilities of being archmages one day; he loved getting to know the spire and its people from the bottom to the top, insisted on whirling Rose around in every dance at every market festival they could make time for, immersed himself in the greenhouses at every level as the two of them listened and learned what the people wanted to see in their future.

Set aside Rose, and John still wouldn't have abandoned Summerstorm. His sense of responsibility runs too deep, beneath his breezy mask of fun and mischief. Jade...never wanted to be tied down, and none of them had recognized her wanderlust for what it was until it was too late for her to back out courteously.

Rose's hand closes into a fist, and she clears her heart until all that's left burning in her chest is determination. "I am going to retrieve my fiancé. Wish me luck?" she says, with a smile that feels entirely too ferocious.

The painter smiles back, dipping her head in a slight nod, and there's nothing in her eyes but faith. "Good luck."

-

John's trail snakes through the skyport level, past the innermost ring of hostels, repair workshops, and customs offices and over the spacemagic nodes that support the interspiral territory of the docks themselves, built out from the stone of the spire like the fronds of a fern. Like the other spell systems that underlie Summerstorm's infrastructure, the metal nodes burn with old magic as Rose strides by, her eye fixed on John's aura. The early hour means nothing here; as Rose flashes the glyph on the back of her hand to the port entry guard (a man who looks horrified to recognize her name and house sigil, but whose face is not familiar - isn't the face of Arman, the guard who bundled her up in his jacket and helped her away from the dock where Jade wasn't), a skyship approaches with a whine of mechanical engines, its solarsails folded away for the night but still drizzling light magic from frayed wires in Rose's enhanced sight. A crowd queues up outside the nearest coffeehouse, almost all with aviator goggles slung around their necks or shoved up over their scarves, hoods, or hair. Rose's light, airy wedding clothes stand out more here, where the emphasis is on snug cuffs, gloves, tall boots, and close-fitting jackets.

But no one accosts her as she moves fluidly between the crowds outside different food stands; her chin rises of its own accord, and even those who don't frown at her in vague recognition shy out of her way. As long as her focus stays on John's trail, she won't be distracted by the shimmer of many unfamiliar mages in close proximity. Someone starts yelling at the top of their (very impressive) lungs, full of righteous indignation over something to do with watered down coffee, and most of the attention shifts to the front of the coffeehouse queue and the short, irritated troll currently threatening to hurdle over the counter and brew it himself. On any other day, Rose might have interceded and tried to help the port authorities resolve the dispute.

The trouble begins when John's trail unexpectedly deepens in color, the light of his magical aura suddenly much clearer. Rose follows it three quarters of the way down one of the docks, her heart pounding insistently again, when she realizes with a sinking sensation what has happened. Windmage auras tend to be flighty and easily disrupted, but the way John's doubles in magnitude here would normally indicate to Rose that he had doubled back, returning the way he'd come and leaving a second trail on top of the first.

Except there was no sign of that earlier. No sign that John had either doubled back all the way to Rose's balcony, or split off and left the skyport by way of a different port entry. His doubled trail only lasts the length of this stretch of dock, with no indication that he went anywhere else. Uneasy, Rose slows as she comes alongside the lonely sky vessel docked on her left. It's appears to be a solar cruiser-turned-cargo ship; Rose can pick out the lines of the original, sleek vessel underneath the mechanical engines mounted at the back, and the expanded hold area that nestles right up along the net of spacemagic knitted underneath the skyport level. The build may be patchwork, but the craft looks solid, and the paintjob is a remarkably stylish combination of sudden, whiplash white and jade curves on matte base black. John's magical signature loops right up the gangway and vanishes into the vessel itself, and Rose's brain nearly twists itself into a knot trying to determine whether John did, in fact, board this particular vessel, or if by some impossible coincidence, this ship docked in the exact same location as whatever was here before.

Either way, there's nowhere else she can see that he would have gone, barring some outside interference with Rose's aura perception. If he'd been hurt somewhere along the way through some unlikely accident, she would have stumbled upon him by now. She hesitates - she really should go through the port guards before snooping around - but sharp-edged worry and determination are a potent combination, and she flips through the records written in looping cursive on the terminal's notepad just to confirm how long this ship has been docked here.

Rose triple-checks, holding her breath as she looks from the ship designation on the page to the name written on the forward end. The SC Sunderance docked here at seven the evening previous, and hasn't moved since its initial entry inspection. The notation from the dock administrator shows that the skyship came in with the bare minimum of registration papers and credentials, the kind of qualifications any spire with common sense accepted into port simply because attempting to police every potential pirate ship or vessel of dubious qualifications would be an exercise in futility. As long as no red flags for outright theft or other felonies came up associated with a particular ship name or build, most of them are allowed to dock and go about their business in Summerstorm.

She scans the dock one last time. Nothing but the doubled trail - perhaps tripled, if John came here, left, and then returned (or was forced back) to the skyship for whatever reason, all along the same route. Rose suspects that any deductions she makes at the moment are irrevocably tainted by her own biases, and thus not to be trusted. There's any number of magics that could inhibit or disrupt her sight and make it appear as though John's trail stopped here: shadow, void, a lightmage stronger than her...

Though there's an obvious way to eliminate at least one possibility.

What Rose does next is...most likely illegal. At the least, it involves one of the spells taken from the book of shadowmagic, which would be guaranteed to bring her under heavy scrutiny if anyone catches her at it. The dusk spells, on the cusp between light and shadowmagic, were the first Rose was able to master with relatively little trouble. Once she's sure that she has turned light and attention away from herself, her shadow a faded smudge under the skyport beacons, Rose slips up the ramp. If she finds John here of his own accord, she can drop the spell in an instant; if he's not, no one will know she was even here, technically breaking any number of interspiral regulations in order to board a vessel without permission.

And if this is a kidnapping, she'll have the advantage over anyone who stands between her and John. Bringing in the skyport guards might be the more logical, level-headed solution when faced with a situation like this, but Rose has always been one to take matters into her own hands, a habit that John's caprice and earnestness rarely kept in check. Her mother always called it a 'take-charge' attitude, in her special, simpering tone that hinted Rose should know better by now.

Fine. There are holes in this plan wide enough to shove a spire through, but Rose is up the gangway in a trice and on the deck of the skyship proper before she can second-guess herself. Up here, she notes more signs of that this ship isn't part of an incorporated shipping line: the only insignia in use appears to be a personal one, with loops that match the embellished whorls of the exterior paintjob. But Rose can't spare more than a fleeting onceover to ensure no one else is present on the deck before hurrying along the line of John's aura. It leads belowdecks and Rose checks the door it passes through - unlocked - before following the trail down into the interior blocks.

She barges straight into a claustrophobic mess of old magic trails, and picks out a jade-lime mishmash of overlapping space signatures that makes her jerk her gaze back to the blue, the only windmagic present. Setting all the others aside, Rose traces the meandering, overlapping fog of John's aura and creeps through the hall after it, careful not to lay a hand on the tracery of crystalline inlays that cover the walls.

To her quiet apprehension, she doesn't come across a single other soul as she ventures deeper; it's a small vessel, but surely someone should be here? John's trail bypasses a ladder that appears to lead down to the cargo bay, and a faint murmur rises up - but no one emerges. The noise sends her backpedaling, one hand leaping up to still one of the weighted chimes before it can thump against something and give away her position. She remains half-crouched for several precious moments. Just long enough for the faint veneer of sweat she's built up over the course of her mad dash to start to trickle down her face and back. Sweating through my good wedding clothes, she chides herself, in a voice that reminds her of her mother's. John. Just find John, a more practical voice hisses, and Rose, never one to pay much heed to her mother even on a sober day, darts out of her crouch and past the ladder, her steps as light as she can make them.

She checks every door that John's aura brushes up against as she makes her way deeper into the core of the ship. A mental tick for every block that she can recognize as standard for a skyship of this size - crew quarters, medical bay, kitchen - but she discards them as irrelevant when it becomes clear that John's trail delves down into the engine block before looping back to exit the way she came. If he's not down here, then -

Then she'll have to deal with that. Splaying her hand out on the engine block door, Rose holds her breath and swings it open just enough to let her slip through the gap.

A good thing, too. John isn't here - but someone else is. Her caught breath hitches in her lungs, almost sabotaging her with a sudden, loud inhale of surprise, but Rose swallows it down. Her look-away spell only deflects visual attention; if the tall, gangly troll muttering over the main engine block hears her breathing, or one of those damn bells on her skirt, she'll have a pit of a time talking her way out of this. John - John's not here, not in any of the other rooms that she checked, and that means he must have come here to the Sunderance for whatever blasted reason and then left. At least the troll appears to be engrossed in maintenance, several panels popped open so that he's free to comb through the engines' innards and grumble over what he finds within. As she begins the painstaking process of creeping back out toward the gap, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths as she focuses on keeping herself slow and silent, Rose allows herself a mental snarl. Something made John's trail double up and then vanish after he came to this ship, and if it takes every incantation in her arsenal, she'll seek it out.

Naturally, she never gets out the door. The next time someone suggests she get married, she'll just seize the nearest unfortunate soul and drag them out at the crack of dawn with no engagement period or planning, because her luck on wedding days is absolutely atrocious. With a distant, thundering thwoom, the engine block rocks - the whole ship rocks, Rose thinks dizzily - and for an instant she thinks the troll has managed to blow up his own engine by mistake. But there's no sign that the engines that take up much of the room are the source; the troll whips around with a scowl, his goggles' lenses tinted mismatching shades of black and white, but the engines themselves are fine. Thrown forward and to the side, away from the door, Rose scrambles to get her feet under her and rises again, one hand on the bulkhead as the Sunderance's stabilizers presumably kick in. Her shoulder pangs with faint intimations of pain where it hit the door.

THWOOM!

The deck lurches out from under Rose's feet entirely; both she and the troll slam bodily into the wall as the impact flings them to the side, and Rose stays low with one knee down and her head ducked while the troll peels himself off the wall. "Who the thhit is shoving thith ship around?!" he demands with a powerful lisp, punting a spare piston out of his way as he stomps toward the door. Rose would like the answer to that, too, but she's equally preoccupied with the fact that the troll now stands between her and the main exit. If something's knocking this ship around, the skyport authorities will step in any moment to put a stop to whatever shenanigans have ensued, and that doesn't bode well for her chances of making a clean abscond, here. Worse, the more time she squanders here, the fainter John's trail will become. If someone's obscured the rest of the trail from her sight, all the more reason to hurry back out onto the dock and apply whatever perceptive filters it takes to discern where John went next.

But the engine block door flies open so hard the troll leaps back to avoid it, spluttering curses as another troll with a wild, thick mass of curls and heavy rams' horns bounds through, her burgundy eyes bright with excitement as she leaps in. "Gotta go, Sollux," she chatters, dragging the first troll back to the engines by his elbow. He seems more resigned to it than surprised by this turn of events. "Kanaya says we've need to book it!"

"What? Where are we going? What the thhit happened, Aradia?" Sollux complains, as another shock hits the ship. Rose staggers and gropes around for the door; at least with all this racket, no one should notice her slipping away... "God dammit, KK isn't even back with the coffee yet!"

"Crocker Corp is here, and Karkat's on his way," the troll named Aradia says, sounding entirely too happy about all this as she starts slapping panels on the engines back into place and pulling levers of indeterminate purpose.

The name Crocker Corp sounds familiar - one of the major shipping lines, but why would they -

Ah. Damn. This must be a pirate ship. Typical. It finally occurs to Rose that if she doesn't get out of here immediately, this ship is either going to take off with her onboard, or wind up impounded by the authorities with Rose left to hastily salvage her dignity and talk her way out of the incredibly awkward political situation that would ensue. With the two trolls busy with the engines, Rose throws caution to the wind and darts out the door, her boots pounding on the metal floor as she makes a break for the entrance back to the upper deck.

She's halfway up the stairs when the door crashes open and someone collides with her so hard the wind's knocked out of her lungs, even before she hits the floor -

Chapter Text

The SCSunderance

Waking up after being unconscious rather than properly asleep does nothing to improve Rose's mood; her keyed-up nerves protest when she opens her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. The back of her head throbs in equally vigorous protest as Rose lifts her head to survey the room, trying to place where she is. She recalls twisting in a futile attempt to turn her fall into a roll, but the stairs and the other person toppling down them with her prevented Rose from getting more than a hand up to cover her head before she hit the deck. Her fingers steal up to probe the source of the faint, throbbing pain near the back of her head and find little more than a tender bruise. With luck, the short fall may have spared her a concussion - the lack of blood seems promising indeed.

But falling is her last memory. Which means that, when Rose sits up gingerly and absorbs the medical bay around her, she has to take a moment to scream internally, because yes, she's still on board the Sunderance. Judging by the subdued but steady thrum of mechanical engines, either the skyship's stabilizers are utter shit, or the ship's absolutely gunning it. None of these are promising signs. Depending on how long Rose was out, they may well be out of Summerstorm airspace by now. Forget John missing the wedding - Rose just removed herself from the equation entirely, unless she can somehow persuade the vessel's crew to turn around and dump her over the side on the first spire at the crack of dawn. She somehow doubts they'll be willing to return to the skyport, given that she strongly suspects them of piracy.

Tch. She should have known better about stairs - they are not to be trusted under any circumstances, as Dave has warned her many a time.

Rose stops herself from thumping her head back against the medical berth, but only just. Combing through the snarls in her mind to formulate a plan on the fly has to take priority over expressing frustration, though both options are guaranteed to make her early morning headache ten times worse. She assesses her own physical condition, running down a mental checklist, and the bump to her head appears to be the worst of it. Better still, she hasn't been restrained; whoever brought her here to the medbay of the skyship left her unguarded, which bodes well for her odds of sneaking or talking her way out of here. Sky pirates might flagrantly disregard any number of interspiral laws and shipping corporation specific regulations, but she sincerely doubts that anyone aboard the Sunderance had 'accidentally kidnap one of the Summerstorm spire's intended archmages' on their criminal agenda for the day. This improves the chances that they'll be willing to drop her off at their next port of call, at least, rather than keeping her for ransom and further delaying her. She and John might both miss the wedding, but...

Rose folds her hands into a steeple, taps them against the bridge of her nose, and then drops the contemplative pose to rub her hands over her face. Step one - ruthlessly silence the tiny but powerful section of her mind currently in an incessant loop over the fact that John isn't here, John's trail cut off after doubling back which implies interference by an outside party, John is gone, because that loop isn't helping anything right now. Rose has fucked this rescue/investigation mission rather spectacularly, and worrying about John's whereabouts won't accomplish much until she has a handle on her own predicament. Does it count as being kidnapped when you are the one responsible for stowing away on the pirate ship of your own volition? Truly a quandary to ponder at a later time. Once that first step has been implemented (with only marginal success; Rose can't stop worrying about John no matter what she tries), on to the second step, which is -

- to blink, apparently, and stare as the medical bay's door flies open, and someone charges toward her. All Rose registers is a blur of dark, slate grey, gunmetal blue, electric green, and black before the person comes skidding to a halt beside her, chest heaving as they lean their hands on their knees to catch their breath.

Then Jade looks up at Rose through a curtain of thick, jet-black, wildly untrimmed bangs, her eyes full of frantic amazement, and any remaining thoughts of Rose talking her way off this ship take a flying leap off the handle. For a moment, everything freezes, and Rose can only make her mouth open and close in tiny, soundless gawping. After a pause, Jade laughs wildly, a sound so familiar even after three years that it sends needles stabbing through Rose's heart, and flings her arms around Rose in a boisterous hug.

Numb as she is, Rose still finds the processing space to note with incredulity that Jade is, in fact, at least six inches taller than her. "Rose! Holy crap, it's been a while! Jeez, it's good to see you again," Jade says. "Your head okay? Karkat knocked you silly, the dumb asshole..."

"My head is - Jade. How -?" Rose once again loses words. The other girl smells like engine oil and the sharp burn of spacemagic, and the latter at least is unmistakably Jade. Rose brings her hands up belatedly to hug Jade back, fingers hesitating over the dark blotches that stain most of Jade's close-cut jacket. "This is - not what I expected," she says at last, in perhaps the most egregious understatement of her life. Words simply cannot express the unmitigated levels of sheer what the fuck Rose must now filter out before she can string a cogent sentence together.

Naturally, she's speculated what might occur if and when she ever encountered Jade again in the flesh - the first few months after Jade's disappearance had involved a great deal of imagined over-the-top, bitter arguments, with Rose reworking her planned opening speech numerous times until it was tweaked to achieve maximum passive aggression, a masterpiece of monologuing truly worthy of her household. As Jade's period of absence stretched on, Rose had stopped envisioning angry arguments, and just wondered where Jade might have ended up - if she'd ever found what she was looking for, away from Summerstorm. It wasn't as though Jade ever sent word; Rose could envision an entire itinerary based on speculative estimates of when Jade might have hopped between skyships to head to her next destination. As far as coping mechanisms go, it had at least given her some measure of emotional distance from the subject; it took John a full year to convince her to jam it out properly.

Nowhere in her many hypothetical scenarios did Rose ever come up with something as convoluted for the circumstances of their reunion as, 'John goes missing and Jade reappears on a random ship in the space of a single incredibly hectic morning.' This kind of coincidence is about as contrived as it can get, and Rose wonders just how hard she hit her head in that fall.

Jade pulls away, her hands resting on Rose's arms as she holds her at arms' length and lets out another burst of startled laughter. It sounds more hesitant, this time, and despite her thoroughly gasted flabbers, Rose picks out lines of tension around Jade's eyes. "What happened, though?" Jade asks. "I didn't think John planned on bringing you down to the ship this morning - did he come back with you, or -" Jade's smile fades further still as Rose continues to stare. Then she bites her lower lip, a nervous tic so familiar that Rose lurches from befuddled, numb incomprehension to the cold shock of reality. "Rose?"

"This is your ship?" Rose says, drawing back until Jade's hands fall away to hang limp at her sides. Their mirrored confusion doesn't bode well. At all. Why on earth would Jade think - "What - no, of course John didn't bring me here. He's been missing since last night, and this was the last location I could trace him to." Comprehension douses her with cold water again. Jade...expected John to have... "He knew. He knew you were here."

Jade winces openly, one hand opening and closing at her side as she watches Rose's face with mounting trepidation. "I - yeah. I got back in touch with him a couple months ago, on account of - uh, reasons. He wanted me to come back right away and stuff! But we were working a job down by Lost Light and I couldn't exactly ditch everyone here!" Rose is uncertain what her own expression looks like right now, but Jade starts hastily picking up steam, her explanation expanding into uncharted territory, so it must be something a bit darker than incomprehension. Her well-trained instinct to smooth it out into something amenable and polite can't quite overcome the churning in her stomach. "But I talked with Kanaya, and since you guys were getting married and stuff, John agreed to hold off and wait so that me visiting be a surprise for after the ceremony. I don't know, maybe that was dumb of us, but..." Jade swallows hard, then finishes in a rush, "But I didn't want to upset you before your wedding. Since. Since I know what I did was...pretty crappy. But also it was you and John, so I really didn't want to miss it, either -"

"Jade." There was a time when Rose could have broken one of Jade's chattering fits with a snap of her fingers and a good-natured, reassuring smile. But the sound of her name stops Jade cold, regardless. "John didn't tell me any of this."

"He really didn't bring you here? Or tell you I was in the port?" Jade says, weakly, shoulders slumping further when Rose shakes her head. "He came to check in last night, and made sure everything was okay, and then he left to go back home - he said he was going home. Something about getting beauty sleep? Like I said, I didn't think he'd gone back to get you early or anything..." Jade's shoulders huddle inward, and she hugs herself, rubbing at her arms to ward off a chill not caused by the physical temperature. "His trail really just ended here?"

Rose nods. "I noticed that it doubled in on itself, but then cut off - this was the only place my sight could confirm he'd been, so I came aboard to investigate."

"You totally trespassed on our ship." Jade smacks her forehead with her palm, her other hand still cupping her elbow. "Oh, crap. I mean, obviously we'd already figured as much, but Kanaya's not gonna be happy...about, well, any of this. Yikes."

"Kanaya?"

Both awkwardness and concern for John are temporarily forgotten as Jade's face twitches into a half-distracted smile; Rose wishes it were so easy for her. "Our captain -"

THOOM -

Rose, perched on the edge of the medical berth, slams forward as the impact knocks the ship off-kilter; Jade, always perfectly balanced and with a well-grounded stance no matter the circumstances, catches her with both arms. She grimaces as she automatically helps steady Rose, her eyes going up and following the track of something Rose can't see through the hull of the skyship. "Crap! Okay, that was a bad noise! Very bad noise. C'mon, we need to get on deck -"

When Jade pulls you along, you go, or risk dislocating an arm. "Why a pirate ship, again?" Rose asks, idly, filing away an acerbic observation that going out on deck when the ship is apparently still being fired upon might not be the best idea Jade's ever had. The hallway from earlier flies past in a blur, but this time the stairs pose no threat at all; such pitiful obstacles tend to melt away when Jade's on the move.

Jade huffs, indignant, as they burst out onto the deck. A quick check shows that there's nothing in the sky above them, which was Rose's immediate concern - she's not sure whether being grounded by the authorities is the best outcome, now that she knows Jade's aboard. Her pettiness doesn't run that deep, yet. "We're not pirates! Technically! Just scavengers! Which would be fine except Crocker Corp's got a massive friggin' cactus up their butt because they want to rule the world."

Ah, yes. Of course. That falls completely in line with Rose's knowledge of how interspiral shipping companies work. Except not at all. "Really, now?" she says, unable to keep the dry drawl out of her voice. The only way she could sound more like her mother would be if she mysteriously produced a flute of something sickeningly sweet and profoundly alcoholic from some undisclosed location on her person and sipped at it with an arched brow to punctuate her every sentence.

"No, literally. They want to rule the world. Why do you think we hightailed it out of Summerstorm? If we hadn't beat the blockade, we'd be stuck with worse than drone ships." Jade shudders, turning to look toward the rear of the vessel. Rose follows her gaze and this time manages to pick out the dark red shapes over the rise of the Sunderance's stern; two of them, both little more than mounted cannons and mechanical engine when Rose ticks up her long-range vision. Drones, indeed, bearing considerably heavier armaments than Rose would expect to see on commercial vessels. Even if Jade's exaggerating to make a point, that surely can't be normal.

But still - "Worse? Jade, you're not making sense." If Rose lets the full intensity of her frustration out, she's going to lose her iron-clad grip on her self-control, which is the only thing keeping her from either screaming at Jade or hugging her to within an inch of her life; she hasn't decided which. Those drones demand her full attention, and she is missing important context here. The things Jade is saying...if they're true... "A shipping line like Crocker Corp can't just - just blockade a city-spire's airspace without advance notice. We would have gotten word if they tried something that heinous, from one of the other spires' mages, at the very least," she adds, trying to inject something like reason into the situation. Later, when they're not being fired on by overpowered drones, Rose needs to sift through her knowledge of Crocker Corp - a fruitless effort, she thinks. Her awareness of specific trading corporations doesn't go much deeper than knowing how interspiral law and Summerstorm-specific contracts apply to them, learned by rote.

Another burst of cannon fire rocks the skyship, disrupting Rose's chain of thought. It's a near miss that glances off the gleam of the Sunderance's atmospheric shielding, but the resulting explosion spikes Rose's heart rate. A direct hit from something that strong wouldn't just ground the ship under her feet; it would gut it, and send the eviscerated remains careening into the water below. They can't do that, her brain argues, but reality is rapidly proving her wrong. "Heard anything from Astahi in the past month?" Jade asks, almost casually, as though she's not eyeballing the drones on their tail with genuine worry written plain across her face.

Another unpleasant prickle joins the general turmoil wreaking havoc through Rose's insides. Astahi lies well beyond Summerstorm's normal range of political and trading scope. "...We barely interact with them outside of accord conventions. They've been blockaded?"

Instead of Jade, an unfamiliar voice answers Rose. "No communication gets in or out of a city-spire once the Crocker Corporation arrives, and there doesn't seem to be much warning before they show up. At all. The spire of Zarya is supposed to have been the first to go under, but there has been no credible confirmation."

"Captain!" Jade says, the cheery respect in her tone making up for the fact that she can't toss off a salute at the troll who drops down from the quarterdeck - she has to grab Rose instead when another explosion goes off too close to the rear of the Sunderance. Despite everything - despite even the next round of cannon fire that rockets past the starboard side of the vessel, Rose's embarrassingly overwhelming first thought is a rather inglorious, Oh no, she's hot. The captain's face could have been carved out of marble - her nose strongly arched, a placeholder piercing in the right lobe where a hoop link might attach if she were a spiredweller rather than a skypirate, with high cheekbones and whorling spacemagic tattoos inked around the right side of her eye, similar in style to the pattern of the ship's ornamentation. Her horns don't quite match, but the hook and curve flows naturally, rather than showing the signs of cracking or scarring that would usually give rise to a lack of symmetry. She might even give Dave a run for his money in terms of height, carrying herself with easy dignity that even the faint, portentous intimations of disquiet in her expression can't belie.

The fact that Rose expends precious time and concentration on mentally waxing rhapsodic about this is, quite frankly, embarrassing beyond words. Self-control - and a touch of self-preservation - stops her before she can begin to delve into purple prose on the subject of the captain's (well-tailored - damn it) outfit. "There's no way Crocker Corp could keep something as extreme as that hidden from other spires," she attempts to argue, flimsily. But her mind is already noting that Zarya spire is even further from Summerstorm's sphere of influence than Astahi, in low geosynchronous orbit over polar latitudes. Summerstorm's primary point of contact with the space spires is usually the more central Luna 2, both independently and by way of Horizon.

There should still have been rumors of this sort of thing. A shipping line taking over spires, with zero effort at subtlety? It rockets straight past 'conspiracy theory' and into absurdity.

"Any ships that attempt to abscond in the middle of a Crocker blockade tend to be shot down with extreme prejudice," the captain - Kanaya says, her tone level. "Please take note of the subtle concern underlying my voice. Because I am concerned. This is a concerning situation, and as captain I am officially opening the floor to any suggestions that might enable us to outrun the enforcer drones. Sollux has informed me that he is 'giving her all that she has got,' and he has Karkat covering for him at the helm, which does not exactly fill me with confidence in our current situation."

Jade makes a noise of frustration. "Yeah, they've got more powerful engines than us, and they're wayyy smaller. Depending on how much fuel they can carry, they might just outrun us. Me and Aradia can only jury-rig so much before things start going boom!" She hesitates, then rolls her shoulders back as she offers, "I could give us a another push -"

Conspiracy or not, drones or not, Rose can't help pointing out the incredibly obvious solution. "If power and speed are the primary obstacles here, just unfurl the solarsails and channel what you can into upward lift," she says, gesturing upward at the slim line of the mast. It's built to minimize drag, the sails themselves folded in tight along their horizontal frames instead of spread and angled to catch the sun overhead. On a sunny day like this, they should have already been up and running. "Those things are matching pace with you right now; an extra burst is all you would need to start pulling ahead."

"We do not have a lightmage in the crew," Kanaya says, stopping Rose dead just as she's ready to toss out a sarcastic quip to round out her argument. The troll's face is firmly set, her arms folded under her chest as if daring Rose to say anything about it.

Rose stares, at a loss for words once more. It's as though she tried to make another withdrawal at the bank of Flabbergasted, only to find that she'd overdrawn her account. "You modified a solar cruiser into a pirate ship and you do not even have a lightmage?" she repeats, not entirely able to process this latest turn. That's - just - what would be the point of that? Jade at least has the decency to shuffle her feet and start clearing her throat, head bobbing slightly in the direction of the drones while Rose and the captain stare at each other. Incredulity versus impassivity, with neither giving any ground.

Then Jade jolts and smacks her own forehead. "We do! We have a lightmage!" she exclaims, whirling back to Rose with an ecstatic grin.

It's sudden enough that the captain blinks, nonplussed. "Wait, what."

Jade seizes Rose's hand, lifting it up into the air so abruptly that Rose dangles with her toes barely scraping the deck before Jade adjusts her hold to account for the difference in their heights. "We have the best lightmage in the spire!" she says, eyes dancing with excitement as she beams at Rose.

Oh. Oh.

To be honest, Rose is...not entirely sure why she didn't think of that herself. A token protest rolls out of her mouth before she can suppress it. "Jade, you really expect me to -"

The next rocking blast shakes the entire ship; the deck lurches up under Rose's feet so quickly that she lands hard on her knees before the sensation of weightlessness has time to flutter in her stomach. Jade and the captain both stagger but stay upright, the captain's efforts requiring more obvious concentration than Jade's - though matching Jade would take impressive skill, since Rose knows that Jade could walk upside along the keel of a vessel like this if the mood struck her. Jade is many things, but she's also a spacemage par excellence.

Rose rides it out with her legs folded up under her and Jade clutching her hand for stability. There's a yelp from someone Rose can't identify, from the direction of the stairs to the lower decks. "They shouldn't be firing without warning like that," she shouts over the sound of the Sunderance's engines roaring at top speed, grinding with an ominous hint that damage may have been done. "Suspect vessels are supposed to be driven to lower altitudes before being grounded -"

"Hate to say it, Rose, but these guys aren't exactly law-abiding good guys!" Jade grunts and once again Rose loses track of the deck as Jade hauls her up onto her feet with an extra pinch of spacemagic and a hand on her elbow. "They're just drones; they're not gonna stop until we're scrap!"

Well.

That changes things.

She turns to Kanaya. "You now have the best lightmage in the spire."

The captain looks disconcerted; Jade laughs again, any signs of worry clearing from her face like clouds burning away under the sun. "Thank you, Rose!" she says, with the fiery confidence of trust rewarded burning in her gaze, strong enough to make Rose look down and away. Then with one last squeeze Jade bounds away, banging on the interface panel set in the side of the mast with a fierce expression. "Feferi, help me with the solarsails? The port mechanism likes to jam, you might need to give it a kick," she calls.

A squeak from the direction of the door, and then a troll with even horns and the sleek, slinky hair of a coldblood scrambles past Rose to stumble toward the mast. "On it!" the new troll promises, despite the shakiness of her footing.

Which leaves Rose with the captain. At least the foolish, admiring section of Rose's brain has stopped prattling on about the troll's appearance. "Direct me to your channeling platform, if you would," she asks, slipping into more formal phrasing without missing a beat as she dips her head ever so slightly. There's even odds whether the platform's located at the bow or the stern, and she'd rather not waste time tripping over herself and wandering off toward the wrong end of the ship.

The captain looks her up and down - and then nods, her jaw set with determination as she spins them around and starts running toward the bow of the ship. Another blast goes off too close to starboard for comfort, and there's no time to wait for the rocking to stop; Rose catches herself on the railing of the steps up to the raised staging area and drags herself upright by sheer force of will, while Kanaya almost dances to keep her boots under her. The barriers lining the edge of the deck flatten out here, sloping down until they're almost flush with the floor itself; Rose would murder for a decent guard rail, this high up. "Here," the captain says, banging a hand against a switch panel until the clasps holding the cover plating down all pop off at once.

Instead of waiting for the aerodynamic plates to retract manually, the captain seizes the nearest edge and forces it up and down with a screech of protesting metal. It's a rather impressive display of strength, actually, but Rose's focus homes in on the ritual patterns carved into the rough surface of the deck. They're old-fashioned, a style that fell out of use decades ago, and worn down from the friction and wear of prior rituals. None of that would matter, except that the overlapping curves and spirals abruptly cut off in the upper left quadrant, where an entire chunk of the deck appears to have been replaced with a plain, serviceable patch job.

Well. The patterns and intersections are just a guide for her feet, after all. If Rose can keep the dance in her mind's eye with perfect focus, she shouldn't need it. As long as the solarsails themselves are in one piece, and Jade can hack a connection to the main engines, the ritual floor won't matter. The most basic of dances will do just fine. Even if Rose hasn't danced a skyvessel pattern in - er - well, there was that one time she channeled power as a courtesy for a diplomatic vessel on the way to Horizon spire to meet -

She steels herself, and summons a blinding smile to reassure the captain. The effect is ruined somewhat by the wind tossing her bangs around like streamers in a hurricane. "If you have tinted lenses, now's the time to wear them," she advises, straightening up from a slight crouch and finding her center as she walks out into the center of the spirograph. Again, she thinks dryly, guard rails would be lovely right about now. Once she transitions into a dancing mindset, a solid, steady weight balances her core, and the next time the ship bucks she doesn't miss a step, sweeping to one knee and back up in an opening move. Not one she'd have chosen under better conditions, but one that launches her directly into low, controlled stance. None of the lighter, fancier footwork she could indulge in with John; this just needs to get the job done. Gravitās forms would help balance her more, but inviting Jade in to assist is - out of the question.

And the captain is a stranger.

It doesn't matter. The sun is shining, the sky is clear. It's truly a beautiful day outside. The Sunderance speeds along through the sky, the expanse of the Ratnakara glittering like gems far below and barely visible where the low sides of the prow give way to empty space.

Light leaps into her hands with far less effort than any shadowmagic; Rose lets it flow through her and pass into the circuits of the deck. The bleed off soaks into her veins and nerves and licks through the crystal weights, while the rest channels through her into the deck, the solarsails slowly flickering to life for the first time in what must be ages as old crystals sit up and pay attention. A shame, really - a ship like this was designed to make use of light as a primary energy source, not careen wildly around the skies with mechanical engines. As long as the sails don't burn out, Rose could keep them aloft as long as the daylight (and her own stamina) last. If John or Jade were up here to give them an extra push, nothing could catch them.

Rose presses her knuckles together and draws to a halt in a holding form, balanced almost effortlessly with her heels off the ground. "I have us up," she says, her voice sounding distant to her ears. "Your engineer can redirect the engines whenever he's ready."

"Are you certain?" the captain asks, and Rose nearly slams back down on her heels with an internal groan. She can't turn around to face the jadeblood without breaking her focus; nor can she catch a glimpse of the drone ships chasing them down. "Generally solarsails require at least ten minutes to reach full lift, and it has only been two. As much as I would like to escape the drone's tracking range in a timely fashion, I would also like to not drop out of the sky and die horribly."

That is a perfectly reasonable, rational concern to have. If Rose weren't devoting ninety percent of her attention and energy to charging the sails and keeping them that way, she'd have more patience to point out that she didn't become the heir to a city-spire without considerable proficiency in managing large quantities of lightmagic in a short span of time. "They're at capacity," she grits out, before she has to drop out of rest and slide back into another turn of the dance. All she can do is gather and channel energy in a ritual like this; if the crew doesn't take advantage of it, Rose doesn't have the ability to force the ship to go any faster.

Then again, hijacking vehicles with mechanical engines fighting you every step of the way probably wouldn't be as much of a fun time as one would think.

When her eyes pass over the captain, a fleeting glimpse before Rose has to drop low and brace for another blast from the drone's cannons, she sees the troll has one hand on the retracted cover, watching Rose with an unreadable expression. Then Kanaya whirls at the same time Rose has to spin back toward the bow, and by the time Rose can twist to look back out over the ship again, the captain has vaulted up and over the rise of the prow and rolled back up onto her feet on the deck below, spacefire burning in one hand as she makes some kind of tugging gesture. She's barely through the door to belowdecks before the engines give a telltale shudder, and the skyship starts gunning forward. A kind of spacemagic-based signal for those below, then. Rose's hair and clothes whip back to smack her in the face as the ship accelerates. The weighted parts do nothing but thump her solidly in the back and sides, while the wind blows her sleeves up and out. The magical shielding up here needs reinforcing.

She falls into two more lulls before the drone becomes a tiny speck behind them, and each time she makes sure to end at an angle so that she can watch over her shoulder to keep tabs on their progress. The sunlight pours through her like warm, fizzling champagne, lingering longer in her limbs and stomach as the solarsails reach the point of satiation. Once the drone ship's shots begin to fall short, and the immediate urgency dies down, Rose lets herself relax into it a little more, her movements slowing into a more sustainable pattern. Working magic like this is a nice distraction from the fact that she's on board a pirate ship with Jade, bound for some unknown destination, with John missing in action and her home spire purportedly blockaded by a corporation gone rogue.

...Not a very effective distraction. Rose bites the inside of her cheek firmly, and starts slipping unnecessary embellishments into the dance, just to keep herself occupied. Whatever the drone's range is, she's fully prepared to prolong this if it means putting off the moment she has to have a proper conversation with Jade. Funny - now that she has the chance to obtain some closure, it's the last thing she wants to deal with. The circumstances aren't conducive to a heartfelt dialog. The stars are out of joint, or something to that effect.

Or maybe Rose just isn't in the mood for an argument.

The next time she turns, there's two pairs of eyes watching her from the steps up from the main deck: one pair achingly familiar, the other a murky violet and set in a heart-shaped face covered in dusty freckles. "You can take a break, if you want," Jade calls, her voice pitched soft but carrying. She shovels her hair back out of her face, a faint echo of exhaustion visibly catching up with her as she sprawls on the stairs. "I signaled Sollux to switch the engines back over. I can tell we're pretty much out of tracking range, by now, so they should give up. They're not all that smart without pilots."

"Very well," Rose says, her throat drier than anticipated when she clears it to speak. She sounds clipped and this close to dropping from merely hoarse to the kind of lower pitch she discovered years ago, while helping Dave train his voice down to something less contralto and more tenor. The distant ache in her head from the earlier fall spreads back into awareness as Rose starts in on the reverse steps to close the ritual, letting the last of the light sink into the sails for one final, radiant burn. Her body feels pleasantly scorched, which helps temper the pain somewhat; not a sensation many would enjoy.

But now, as she drops her hands and relaxes back into a regular stance, she realizes that the immediate urgency has passed. Which means she no longer has a dire situation to distract her from the two glaring issues she now has to confront head-on. The first - John, still missing, presumably somewhere back in the rapidly receding, freshly blockaded Summerstorm.

The second -

Well.

She and Jade are long overdue for this conversation.

Chapter Text

The SC Sunderance

Jade asks Feferi to fetch coffee from the navigator's helm. It's the kindest way of excusing Feferi from enduring the full weight of awkwardness that descends upon them, as Rose considers Jade with a dull weight in her stomach.

She's new," Jade offers, in a good effort at simulating normal conversation. "Just joined up a couple weeks ago, actually! We're not really sure what she does yet, but she's trying to be the main cook, and she has a lot of gumption! I mean everything ends up kind of over-salted, but she's getting better. Oh, I should have asked if there was anything leftover that you could eat...darn it..." Tapping her fingers together, Jade shifts awkwardly on the step, eyes flickering between Rose and her hands and the door Feferi vanished through.

"Mm," is all Rose can muster in reply. A million responses buzz around her head, not helped at all by the throb of low-level pain radiating through her skull; a not-inconsiderable part of her wants to step over Jade, locate the nearest lifeboat, and bypass this conversation entirely. That would be incredibly immature, however. It wouldn't be fair to either of them. "I'm not hungry. Yet," she says, the most innocuous thing she can think of to add.

It's true; hunger won't hit until the last of the channeled lightmagic finishes tingling through her system. From the looks of things, Jade recently used her powers for something big, and has already started to tip into the tired, hungry phase. Rose will join her there in short order, but she's not there yet. Jade laughs a little. "At least there's coffee," she says, rubbing the back of her neck. "It's kind of hilarious - Karkat rammed into you, and he was so busy saving the coffee that both of you hit the floor and conked out for a bit, there. His priorities are so dumb sometimes. Plus, he swears up and down that he didn't even see you!"

"Ah. Right. On the stairs." If Rose doesn't shape up soon, she's going to be reduced entirely to monosyllables. Focus. Adjusting her skirt, she settles down on a step above Jade's sprawl to collect herself, clinking as she goes. That's going to get annoying, fast. She's aware of the veneer of sweat building up under her good wedding clothes, and depending on how long of a trip this is, that could rapidly become a problem. "I'll have to apologize to him."

Jade scrunches up her nose. "Let him apologize first! Karkat's a total grump, but he still should have seen you and stopped!"

Whoops. To admit she'd been sneaking around under the cover of a semi-legal spell, or to not to admit it - Rose comes down on the side of not, for the moment. Jade, she can trust (or at least, she doesn't think that much has changed). But the rest of the Sunderance's crew remains a question mark, as well as how close of a relationship Jade might have with them, and Rose rarely divulges her secrets to total strangers. "Well, I was trespassing," she says lightly, brushing her hair back out of her face. "I should have at least have had the decency not to get caught, but alas."

Jade winces. "Yeah, about that. Uh. Actually, I'm not sure what's gonna happen now. I vouched for you with Kanaya because - well, obviously I vouched for you! But it's not like we can just turn around and drop you off at Summerstorm...we'd never make it past the blockade twice."

All the sweat on Rose suddenly feels cold. They've both been avoiding eye contact by silent mutual accord, but now Rose finds herself in need of it to better impress upon Jade how that is not the answer she needs to hear. Jade, who already knows this, becomes deeply engrossed in twirling a strand of hair around her finger and staring at the door to below decks, so that Rose's serious stare fizzles out against the back of Jade's head. "Jade. What happened back there?" Rose asks, choosing her topic with care. Demanding that the Sunderance turn around isn't going to work, and she finds herself in dire need of an explanation or five, anyway.

The tension leaks out of Jade's neck and shoulders, and the spacemage eagerly jumps on the slight change of subject. "We don't know much about it, either. Before this morning, all this stuff with Crocker Corp was just rumors, mostly. Nobody knew anything for sure." The door across from them swings open and Jade's head perks up further as Feferi totters out, two thermoses tucked into the crook of one arm. "Only...the rumors have been going around a lot more, lately, and more than a few ships have dropped off the radar," Jade finishes, in a quieter voice, as Feferi charges over toward them with a determined expression.

"Pirate ships?" Rose can't resist the low key gibe, and Jade rolls her eyes in reply.

"Rude. Yeah, okay, pirate ships and other scavengers. We've got our own network. And when just one vessel vanishes, that gets attention! When ten stop showing up at ports for rendezvous, it's a bad time. Crocker Corp has never been sneaky about sending drones to crash people accidentally-on-purpose, but usually you at least hear about it happening. There hasn't been chatter about IA pulling off a sting operation, either!"

"And now Summerstorm will be radio silent, as well." Rose accepts the thermos from Feferi, murmuring thanks as she mulls over this influx of information. "Zarya is one thing. Summerstorm is a major trade nexus in the southern hemisphere."

"I know," Jade says, voice tight. The general exhaustion in her face transitions into a more specialized, grim frown. "Which means...bad things."

And Jade would understand the potential political clusterfuck of interspiral proportions laid out before them better than most. After all, she was once in training to lead a city-spire, too. It doesn't make sense for a trading company to have the forces necessary to overrun an entire spire - their vessels should be spread out across the globe trading, by definition, and Rose's mind boggles at the logistics that would be necessary for Crocker Corp to have pulled this off.

Of course, she thinks, something else to consider is whether or not she trusts that Jade is telling the truth about the blockade. It could be simply the truth as Jade knows it, a story fed to her by the other members of the crew - or it could be an outright lie, told with Jade's full awareness of the deception. Rose can't bar the possibility that everything that has occurred since she regained consciousness in the medical bay has been one elaborate ruse set up to convince her they're on the run from a genuine threat. She doesn't want to be suspicious of Jade, but the confused circumstances of John's disappearance, the explosions that rocked the Sunderance before it even left the dock, and now news of a shipping line gone completely mad with power and moving against city-spires with impunity -

It's simply a lot to take without a generous helping of salt. Until Rose can verify some of this information with independent sources - something that won't be possible until they reach another spire - any conclusions that she draws from this will be purely speculative. She can work with speculation, but the underlying lack of confirmation will eat at her for the foreseeable future.

"Are we talking about those shellfish Crocker guys?" Feferi asks. Rose rather suspects, from the wild look Feferi shoots over her shoulder before kneeling on one of the steps, that the violetblood isn't supposed to be here gossiping. Not when the ship is in disarray after a hasty departure, and there are presumably a few dozen things that need doing before the Sunderance is operating normally again. If the captain of the ship is even half the spacemage that Jade is, she'll be aware that one of the crew isn't where they're supposed to be soon enough. "Shell, what a bunch of bassholes, am I right?" The troll emits a stream of rapid-fire, nervous giggles.

"You can say that again!" Jade says, cracking open the other thermos with a weak, fading flicker of spacemagic. She tips it back and starts drinking with audible, greedy glugs, and Rose nods agreement before twisting open her thermos to take a small sip. It's warm and familiar, but the heat sits oddly in her stomach beside the leftover lightmagic, and she sets it aside for now.

"What is the next course of action, then?" she asks, once Jade polishes off her coffee. Why yes, Rose is dancing around the subject of Jade's long disappearance; why yes, indeed, she will exhaust every other conversational topic at her disposal before she embraces the inevitable, no matter how futile an effort it might be. "I need to get back to Summerstorm, Jade, blockade or no blockade."

Another wince from Jade. "Prrrobably not gonna happen. There's just no way we'd be able to talk Kanaya into heading back now, after we nearly got our butts whupped." Before Rose can respond, Jade stops her with a raised finger and hastens to add - "But! But but but! We're on course for Horizon! Once we're there, you and me can get in to see Jane and Roxy and Callie and they'll help! They'll definitely want to know you're okay, at least. After that, it'll be a total cakewalk to figure out what's happening at Summerstorm."

In her hurry to placate Rose, Jade forgets to avoid eye contact. Rose can only withstand a few paltry seconds of meeting Jade's wild green gaze, alight with that old enthusiasm and verve, before she's forced to look away. "That's...not a bad idea," she concedes. In fact, it falls pretty much in line with the course Rose was charting out on her own. Horizon has long been Summerstorm's sister-spire, and Jane, as the life archmage there, would have the ability to confirm Summerstorm's status, for good or ill. She's technically John and Jade's aunt, just as Roxy is somehow related to Rose and Dave - Rose thinks she's a first cousin once removed, but has thus far failed to confirm this with any coherent, sober sources - though both are barely five years older than the Summerstorm cohort. Calliope, the space archmage of Horizon, may prove more of a wildcard, but from what Rose can recall from their last visit, is deeply devoted to Roxy. If she can reach out to them, Rose is reasonably confident they'll be willing to assist.

Then she blinks. "Wait. You and me?"

Jade fidgets with the cap of the thermos, spinning it over one finger with magic that's definitely wobbling, and then snatching it out of the air with a flick of her hand before it falls. She gives a small, sad laugh, turning the cap over in her hand before answering. "Well, yeah!" she says, with an edge of false cheer. "Summerstorm's in trouble, John's missing, Dave's probably up to his butt in dangerous crap as we speak - of course I'm gonna come help!"

"Are we allowed to do that?" Feferi asks - Rose had almost forgotten the violetblood, so caught up in...well, Jade. "Going up against Crocker Corps is kind of crayzy, I don't roe if Kanaya would be okay with that."

Jade harrumphs, and for a moment looks the spitting image of her grandfather. "I mean, you guys will probably go off and do whatever, and I'll catch up with the Sunderance later. Kanaya will understand!"

Right. Of course. "I guess it would take rather extreme circumstances to bring you back, after all this time," Rose says. She takes another quick sip of coffee, before something less diplomatic can spill off her tongue.

"Uh," Jade says, all the bluster and self-confidence winking out. She has suddenly, magically become unable to meet Rose's eyes again, tapping the cap against the thermos to make a tiny, repeating click that Rose suspects might be helping the other girl ground herself. Old stims die hard. "See. That's, uh. Kinda why I didn't want to - yeah." Finally she huffs and shakes her head so vigorously Feferi has to duck the trailing edge of her hair. "There's something I need to tell you! It's. Ummm."

"My dread grows with every false start," Rose warns.

Jade hisses through her teeth, screws her eyes shut, and spits it out. "I'mkindamarried."

A distant bubble of comprehension pops in the back of Rose's head, but it's too far off and muffled for her to drag it to the surface. Something in that blurted sentence triggered recognition - and yet - "Come again?"

Eyes still winched shut, Jade takes a huge breath. "I'm. Married?"

She then opens one eye to peek at Rose's expression, wary.

Rose finds herself staring into the middle distance somewhere over Jade's shoulder. Then she looks down at the drink cupped loosely in her hands. "What is in this coffee?" she asks, before lifting the thermos to her lips and chugging the rest of it for good measure.

-

Jade is very much married.

She's also emphatic that there's nothing at all interesting or hallucinogenic in the coffee, apart from hot bean water and a smidgen of cream. This Karkat seems to have the clout to insist on decent coffee supplies, when most skyships would resort to powdered creamer and artificial sweetener in between ports of call. It's also fresh from Summerstorm's homegrown stock, by the taste, so despite the fact that there's nothing reality-altering in the brew to explain the general surreality that pillows Rose's mind, she accepts another thermos when Feferi worriedly passes it to her. The troll even throws in a sheepish pat on the shoulder, which would have more effect coming from John, but which Rose recognizes as being honest and well-intentioned in nature.

"So who is the lucky person?" she asks, sipping at the new coffee and inspecting the Sunderance with an enhanced eye. She can pick out the difference between Jade's spacemagic trail and the captain's with more surety, now; Kanaya isn't as strong as Jade, but her experience and familiarity with the vessel have left leylines running from prow to stern. Feferi, inelegantly seated near Jade and Rose as though ready to leap in between them, has a bright spark of undifferentiated lifemagic to her; if she's specialized for healing or growth, Rose can't perceive which.

"...Aradia," Jade says, hesitant. Under normal circumstances, Rose would tease her about not knowing absolutely for sure whether she was married to someone or not - these circumstances are far from normal. "Um. Yeah. We've been together for a while, now! And finally got Kanaya to marry us a couple months ago. So, that's a thing. That happened."

"And you contacted John to let him know," Rose fills in, nodding sagely over her coffee. She lets her eyes fall shut for a moment to take comfort in the dark insides of her eyelids as she sips again. Really, she's never been a big fan of coffee, but it tastes so strongly of home. "Hm. That's nice."

Her ineffable calm just seems to make Jade more agitated. Rose can't say she blames her - Rose's reaction isn't really standard, and Jade's social protocols for responding to the fortified, emotionless composure of the Strider half of Rose's lineage are surely dusty. "She's - she and Sollux were kind of the engine guys before I joined up," Jade says, babbling, with the air of a person trying to talk down someone from a ledge. "Now Sollux has more time to focus on navigating, mostly, while Aradia and I trade off between lookout and engines. Except, you know, things kind of go to crap in an emergency, so -"

Rose can put two and two together - the short, soft troll with coiled horns, from the engine room. "Interesting," she says, perfectly polite.

It would be very, very easy to be very, very cruel. There are words she could use to lash out and flay Jade to the quick, sweet and sardonic and sharp as shattered glass.

But Rose does try not to take after her mother.

And it turns out, as her mind processes this news and gradually clears, that regardless of everything else, Jade is still her friend. One of her dearest and closest friends, matched only by John. Dave always had the natural head start of being her brother. None of that has changed.

Rose sets the thermos on her knee and then gingerly lowers her head so she can rest her forehead on it, breathing one of John's patterns as she sorts things out. Feferi's claws tap skittish and quick along the toe of Rose's boot, cautious rather than comforting, but it stirs Rose from her ruminations and, at last, she angles her head to smile at Jade. It comes out exhausted and strained and wistful, maybe, but it's the best she has. "I'm...happy for you," she says, skirting around the sharp thorns of her mind.

Jade's jaw drops.

Rose goes on. Feferi's watching the two of them with avid fascination, but Rose can ignore an audience. "It hurt more that you never told us, you know. That you were unhappy. Dave and John and I, we would have helped you find somewhere new to go, if only you'd asked. But you wanted to leave and didn't tell any of us until you were already gone, and that. That's what I...have trouble forgiving." Jade flinches, but Rose soldiers on. "I came to terms with the fact that you weren't content to stay a long time ago. With me, or with Summerstorm. But I never wanted you unhappy. You are my friend."

And finally, Rose lifts a finger and pokes Jade in the middle of her forehead. Jade flinches and blinks rapidly, her mouth a tiny 'o' and her eyebrows scrunched in confusion. "But how dare you get married without inviting any of us. Simply outrageous."

And that's enough, finally, for Jade to burst into wobbly, laughing tears. "John said the exact same thing," she sobs, pressing her hands to her cheeks. "Oohhhh nooo! You guys! That's - so - silly -"

Rose draws herself up, her haughtiest expression summoned from the depths of her soul. "Silly, is it?" she replies, raising her eyebrows - and waggling them. Jade howls with laughter, and that appears to be the end of her: tears begin pouring down her face like the polar flood. She doesn't so much hug Rose as flop up against her, the hiccupping sobs too mixed up with laughter to properly distinguish between the two. Rose makes a grand show of nodding magnanimously and gently patting Jade's shoulder, a small smile touching the corner of her mouth while Jade makes a new damp spot on her wedding garments. Feferi looks on, her eyes as they can go with surprised delight, and fails to realize that her hand supporting her weight on the step is slipping until it goes out from under her. She bangs a horn on the side of the stairwell as she goes down.

Well. It's a start.

-

Feferi cooks with more heart than skill. Rose can at least follow directions with mechanical precision, if needs must, but that doesn't make her in any way good.

Tossing the two of them into the kitchen seems to be the only way the captain can think to keep them both occupied and useful once the immediate crisis has passed and the Sunderance has risen to a comfortable cruising altitude. As the resident stowaway, Rose weighs her options and decides that being questionably useful is better than goofing around like a sluggard, and obediently chops the onions, ginger, and chilies that Feferi shyly puts in front of her with brisk efficiency. On the sly, when Feferi turns away to rescue the rice from the mechanical cooker, Rose pockets every salt shaker she lays eyes on. There are four in total, scattered around the stove top and the cutting board, and Rose can quite easily picture Feferi indiscriminately snatching up whichever salt container sits nearest her hand and applying it with gusto.

The droop of frilled ear fins and the overall crestfallen expression on Feferi's face when she spins around in a circle prickles Rose's conscience a little, but if she let a little thing like that get to her, she wouldn't be where she is today.

...Stuck on a solar cruiser that, at the very least, has pissed off a major shipping line to the extent that normal interspiral law doesn't prevent unholy retribution, bound for Horizon with no word on how her own spire may fare. Hm. Maybe she should reconsider her tactics in the future. If nothing else, she's learned her lesson about investigating strange aircraft without notifying the proper authorities.

The journey to Horizon can take between three to five days, depending on the weather, the exact route taken, one's luck, and the state of the Sunderance's engines. By now the Summerstorm archmages must know she and John are gone. If they've been distracted by a Crocker Corp-themed invasion, however, they won't be able to spare anyone to track Rose down. More worryingly, they won't be able to look for John.

And Dave. Dave won't stop looking for either of them, once he realizes what's happened. By now, he must have gone to Peregrine to try to reach Rose on the wind, but if a message came through while Rose was unconscious, no one appears to have heard it. And the Sunderance, alas, is as short on windmages as it once was on lightmages.

Dave will be fine. He's capable and quick on his feet, and smarter than he lets on. An absolutely appalling actor, true, but he should be able to fight his way out of anything he can't improvise his way through. If he hasn't found John already, he'll go to ground in the wind house, where John's father can run interference against Mother and Ambrose. As long as Dave doesn't get wrapped up in some silly self-sacrificing muddle, he'll be absolutely, perfectly fine.

"And if you say it often enough, it'll surely be true," Rose murmurs to herself, dumping the vegetables into the saucepan to sauté.

Feferi has it too hot - the oil in the pan fizzles and spits at them before the violetblood throws a towel over it. "Oh, glub me. Sorry, sorry!" Feferi says, turning the knob for the heat down. Her sleek hair keeps creeping loose from its bun, one stealthy strand at a time. "Wait, did you say somefin? I didn't quite catch it."

"Nothing. Just talking to myself." Never a good sign. "What do you need me to do next?" Pilfering the salt to save the dish is all the initiative Rose has in the kitchen, really.

"We've got to let that sit for a whale, and then add the fish and coconut milk and stuff." Feferi pats her claws over the counter again in an anxious tempo, humming to herself as she stoops and starts pulling open the sealed compartments. There isn't much space in here, and Rose has to sidle out of the way to make more room. "And if you sea the salt, let me know? I don't know where it cod have ended up..."

"I'll keep my eyes open," Rose promises. The door to the kitchen block opens just as she presses a hand to her hip to ensure the salt shakers are safely tucked away in the waist of her pants. She drops her hand and blinks pure, undiluted innocence at the troll who leans in, one hand on the side of the door.

Blast. She should have readied her nerves to run into Aradia sooner than this; it's a small ship, with a small crew, but she thought she'd have more time. A meeting like this was inevitable - planned, even, judging by the way Aradia's twinkling eyes zero in on Rose. "Hey Feferi! Heya Rose! What's cooking?"

"Something new: fish curry!" Feferi says, planting her fists on her hips as she grins, skinny chest puffed out with pride under the apron she's tied over her basic black uniform. "I'm wave better with fish than with chicken, you'll see."

Aradia's laugh sounds sincere, but her eyes haven't left Rose yet. Rose doesn't want to call it anything as uncouth as a staring contest. "Sounds tasty! Is it okay if I borrow Rose for a minute?"

Never let it be said Dave is the only one in the family who can think on the fly. Rose tips her head to the side, smiling back at Aradia with every ounce of amity in her, and waits for Feferi to assure Aradia that it's 'tidally fine!' before hiding a single salt container behind the pile of soup ladles and other utensils. Hopefully Feferi can't unleash casual ruin on the food with only a single salt shaker to work with. Then Rose follows Aradia out of the block and into the hallway, where the floor hums quietly in time with the engines and the crystal inlays on the walls spark with leftover lightmagic, lighting the path back up to the deck with a faint golden glow.

Contrary to Rose's expectations, Aradia starts them off by holding out a hand palm-up and waggling her claws, eyes glittering with mirth. "Here, I can hide them better than you can. I've got a few stashes on board."

Rose doesn't feign ignorance. She sighs, hiking down the top of her skirt to free the salt containers at her waist. "Jade favors understatement when she's attempting to be nice. The moment she said Feferi tends to oversalt things a little, I knew," Rose says, wryly, handing over the goods. She notes that Aradia's hand sports some kind of circular, carved marking across the palm; something with swirls and blunted chunks.

"And you've done the Muse's work. Trust me." Aradia unzips a long pocket along the side of her dark pants and lets the salt fall into it with a clatter. It's a bit...blatant, until the troll tugs the hem of her tunic out from under her jacket to hang at a careless angle over the tell-tale lumps so that they vanish into the wide curve of her silhouette. "C'mon - want to see something nice?" The troll tilts her head back as far as it will go, and Rose raises an eyebrow before following Aradia's gaze up the mast to the folded solarsails - and the lookout post, far above.

When Rose looks back down, Aradia watches her with a wide, unreadable smile.

Hmph. As if heights are any sort of challenge, after growing up with a spacemage and a windmage as two of her closest friends. "Lead the way," Rose says, the pinnacle of civility and charm as she rolls her wrist, then presses at the heel of her palm with the other hand.

Before they start up the ladder, Aradia digs through the lower compartment of the paneling Jade opened earlier to activate the solarsails, and tosses Rose a pair of dark gloves. They fit her hands too well - she could have sworn they'd been intended for someone with broader palms before she slid them on. Sure enough, she catches glimmers of spacemagic worked into the stitches and inner lining. "Not Jade's work," she comments aloud, splaying her fingers to inspect the gloves more closely. Very fine work, stitched to last a long time. "The captain's?"

"Yup! Kanaya's got magic fingers!" Aradia waggles the claws of one hand. "Won't do much good if we get flipped too hard or something crazy like that, but it'll keep you on the ladder in a stiff breeze," she explains as she swings up onto the ladder and starts to climb. "Why splurge on mechanical harnesses when you've got two spacemages aboard?"

"Well, I could make an argument for concern in the event said mages were ever incapacitated for any significant length of time." After Aradia has enough of a head start, Rose grasps the ladder and starts after her. Her bells clatter with every sway of her hips, and though she's not overly concerned about ruining this outfit - clothes are just clothes, in the grand scheme of things - unless someone on board is both similar to her in size and willing to lend her something else to wear, she's rapidly going to descend into grubbiness. She has no resources here but her mind and her magic and Jade's support, and she'd rather not cavort about a skyship in an outfit with as many loose, trailing ends as this. If there's even one spare crew uniform, she and Jade should be able to alter it to fit.

If the captain is a stitchwitch, though, Rose might be able to beg an indulgence. She files away a mental note, and concentrates on scaling the mast with a minimum of clumsy mistakes. She keeps having to remind herself that she's not trying to compete with Aradia, or prove something.

Urgh.

The wind picks up a little as they near the top, and Rose looks out over the side of the skyship exactly once, refusing to get sucked into the view. There's absolutely no need for fancy footwork in climbing a ladder, but Rose rolls in through the lookout hatch with more flare than strictly necessary. The post has exactly enough space to hold her and Aradia, another quiet mark of spacemagic sunk deep into the Sunderance, and Rose takes advantage of it to settle herself to her satisfaction, while Aradia shuts the hatch and slides the horizontal windows open.

Thanks to the lull in the conversation, Rose feels a bit more prepared to deal with Aradia. Whatever the burgundyblood expects to get from this talk, Rose intends to hold her ground. Aradia hauls the spyglass around and digs her claws into the side of the mechanism until the cover irises up with a tiny pop, revealing treated glass. The troll's face mostly disappears behind her cloud of hair as she peers through the scope. "Looks like we're all clear ahead, so that's nice. And -" Rose ducks out of the way as Aradia contorts herself, spinning the scope on its stand to overlook the back of the skyship "- no one behind! So good news for Kanaya." Humming, the troll takes her eye away from the spyglass to grin cheekily at Rose. "Now. I guess you and I have a talk to have?"

Rose dips her head to one side, her shoulder coming up in a small shrug. "If you think it's necessary. I'm less than inclined to cause...unpleasantness, while we're all stuck in close quarters."

She can't read whether Aradia's joviality is genuine or feigned. The troll hums, mulling over Rose's words. "If we weren't stuck on this boat, would you be more inclined?"

To the point, then. "Not particularly. I've been trained to avoid open aggression from a young age. But I don't object to you and Jade, or anything like what you might be worried about. I'm not going to try to undermine your relationship. It would be horrendously crass of me to act like a jilted lover out of some tawdry romance at this stage, when I have already by and large 'gotten over it.'" Rose makes the air quotes deliberately, attempting to convey with her expression that it is done entirely for the purpose of lightening the mood. Aradia's grin ticks up another notch, but her eyes remain serious. "I'd rather see Jade happy, and so - to that end - it is a genuine pleasure to meet you. I only wish John, Dave, and I could have attended the ceremony."

Rose pauses, and settles on a sweet smile as she leans forward to clasp Aradia's hand, with a perfectly correct amount of pressure. It's meant less a balm and more a warning. "However - if I learn that you are in some way coercing or otherwise harming her, rest assured that I reserve the right to utilize all of my not inconsiderable talents for the sole purpose of making you pay. Jade is one of my oldest, dearest friends. I do not take half-measures."

She waits for Aradia to bob her head in acknowledgement before sinking back into her seat. Once she has breath again and trusts in her ability not to elaborate, Rose finishes, on a lighter note, "We should get along just fine. My only concern is that Jade and I are friends, and before she left, we were in the habit of exchanging affectionate gestures that are most likely no longer appropriate, given the circumstances. Please tell me immediately if I overstep, so that we can avoid miscommunication." A joke. End with a joke. Make it count. "I have no conscious intention to try to steal her away from you, and I should dearly hope there's nothing unpleasant buried in my subconscious, after all the time I've spent scrutinizing it."

Aradia giggles. She might just be indulging Rose's painful attempt at humor, but as long as they're both putting effort into this... "Eheheh. That all sounds pretty fair! I'm probably gonna trust you, because being jealous and stuff isn't really my thing." Aradia grins with teeth just a tad too sharp, eyes sparkling as she folds her hands over the spyglass. The winsome smile is honestly getting a little creepy. Then the troll's voice drops. "But just so you know, if you screw with Jade or something because of her leaving, I won't hold back, either. I won't even bait Kanaya into an intervention! I'll do something far worse."

"Oh?" Rose keeps her smile small and mostly receptive - threats do so amuse me.

Aradia winks, her already wide grin inching wider still. "I'll sic Jade on you. Let's be honest, if either of us starts acting dumb, her wrath will be mighty and terrible to behold. She'd definitely smack sense into us before it gets too bad."

"...Fair point." Rose decides to continue the diplomatic course; it's serving her well enough for now, and she prefers honest dialog with Aradia compared to the alternative. "Friends, then?"

"Hmm. Let's hold off and get to know each other better, first. But I do intend to be married to Jade for a pretty long while, so we'll see!" Aradia flings open the hatch, the influx of fresh air tossing their hair around as it courses past them. The troll drops out onto the ladder in a deft jump, pausing a second to tilt her head back and bask in the sun, before grinning at Rose with a halo of light playing in her horns and hair. "Also, welcome aboard! Don't worry, the Sunderance is a good ship! The rust and the spirits of the dead just give her character!" Then the troll nods her head, and starts down.

Conversation over. "I'll keep that in mind," Rose calls over the breeze. "And thank you."

-

It is incredibly unfair that, upon further inspection, the captain of the Sunderance is just as distractingly attractive as Rose's beleaguered mind insisted while the ship was under attack. Rose makes a valiant effort at subtlety, but Kanaya has an undeniable presence that invites the eye. Her hair frames her face perfectly, the waves tamed into effortless elegance, and every article of clothing has to have been personally tailored to fit that well. Just looking at her reminds Rose that she hasn't seen herself in a mirror since she left home this morning - her own clothes are windblown and unkempt after traipsing through the streets of Summerstorm and aiding and abetting a pirate ship.

She's not used to feeling outclassed, and she needs to regain some semblance of dignity before she makes a complete fool out of herself. Kanaya may be hotter than a thousand suns, but eventually the initial rush of embarrassingly potent chemicals will pass out of Rose's system, and phrases like 'hotter than a thousand suns' will stop cropping up in Rose's general train of thought.

At least she's still capable of maintaining a filter between her head and her mouth. Dave would have committed five Freudian slips by now, at minimum.

"My first mate and I would like to speak with you," the captain says, while Rose wrestles with her brain in the hopes that it will spit out something other than 'take me now,' when the time comes for her to speak. "If you would come this way?"

Said first mate lurks at Kanaya's side, a burgundyblood with horns that are barely more than rounded knobs poking up through a thatch of violent hair, who barely clears the captain's shoulder. His uniform has fewer color accents and embellishments than Kanaya's and Jade's, closer to the plain black of Feferi's outfit, but Rose's eye catches subtler tags of silver grey, and heavy boots are a deep shade of garnet that matches the undertunic where it peeks out from under his cropped jacket. "Captain," Rose says, nodding to both of them and folding her hands together over her sternum. She does her best to appear composed and faintly apologetic as she walks with them below decks and down a side corridor, to a small block that might well be a repurposed broom closet. The majority of the available space is taken up by a faded chunk of quartz crystal half as tall as Rose and twice as wide, and Rose suppresses her instinctive grimace at the dusty, chipped state of what must have once been the solar cruiser's main lightmagic matrix. Judging by the faint scent of char in the air, Rose probably burned out an indeterminate amount of circuits forcing such an old crystal to hold charge. If she'd pushed too much solar power through it, the crystal would probably have shattered.

Moreover, the place is a conflagration waiting to happen. The walls are papered with schematics and heavily annotated aeronautical charts, and the first mate marches over to fuss at a curiously blank sheet that Rose suspects is covering papers of a more illegal nature. Jade can call this a scavenging vessel all she likes - scavengers are, in essence, more polite pirates, and it wouldn't do for Rose to forget that.

"Before anything else," Kanaya says, "we'd like to extend thanks for your assistance earlier. It would have taken longer to outrun the drone ships without your help."

But she's confident they would have managed it, Rose notes. She raps a knuckle against the battered crystal as she circles slowly around it, wondering just what kind of modifications they'd need for the mechanical engines to make up for the dead weight of the solarsails above. Mixing magic with machines requires careful finagling; the two spacemages alone would be able to manipulate the engines' capacity a great deal if they knew what they were doing. "I'm opposed to having a ship blown out from under me, as a general rule. I owe you thanks for permitting me to stay," she says, brushing her fingers over a chunk of the crystal and meeting Kanaya's entrancing riveting intent stare with one of her own. A quiet smolder -

(She really needs to stop that.)

Karkat snorts - a welcome distraction. "After you trespassed all over our hunk of junk? Ha." The abrupt hostility shocks Rose out of her thirsty mental segue, and she directs her full attention to the first mate as he glowers at her over the crystal. Once he knows he has her attention, he jabs a claw at her, while Kanaya watches them with a careful, assessing look. "Yeah, about that. How the fuck did you get on board without setting off our fucking magical-ass alarms? Is nobody wondering about that except me? No? That's fine, I'll just sit here and scratch my head until I dig all the way into my curiosity fluid gland and perforate it."

Rose's brain gives a mental sympathy cringe. "An old family trick," she says, her voice honey smooth as she quietly avoids mentioning shadowmagic by name. She may be among sky pirates, but she doubts even they'd look kindly on the kind of shadowmagic she has in her repertoire. Scavengers are more likely to have standards than most. "Not something anyone would be able to replicate without access to the Summerstorm lightmagic house archives, and a deft grasp of lightmagic. Normally I wouldn't have intruded, but I had reason to believe that my fiancé was aboard."

Odd. Rose thought her delivery on that little digression was fairly solid - but something dark flickers through Kanaya's expression, too quick for Rose to place it, and though the captain obligingly follows the conversational detour as Rose had hoped, she's left wondering what Kanaya is actually thinking. "The fiancé. Right. Jade mentioned her brother had gone missing after he visited last night."

Rose shrugs, palms up. Her regret is genuine. "And my options for tracking him down from here are...unfortunately limited, by my own foolish actions. As lovely as it is to see Jade again, I must return to Summerstorm posthaste." Rose holds up a hand to stave off Karkat before he finishes opening his mouth. "Jade's already informed me that you're bound for Horizon. You have my word that I will formally resign as resident stowaway the moment we make port. Do you have an estimate on how soon we'll arrive?"

She's not expecting the captain and first mate to exchange significant looks. "That - will depend," Kanaya says, the delightful cadence of her voice not enough to distract Rose from the actual content.

"I'm sorry?"

The captain folds her arms over her chest, nostrils flaring slightly as she sighs through her nose. "We left Horizon without delivering on any of our business arrangements. There's still cargo aboard that would have been unloaded later in the day. Because of our abrupt departure, we now have a hold full of extra weight, no way to reach the intended buyers, and no payout to show for it."

Karkat jumps in, the hostility from earlier banked to a faint rumble in his voice, his glare sour as he scans the blank screen on the wall and rubs one of his eyes in frustration. "And there's fuck all reason to try to foist this stuff off in Horizon when half of it came from there in the first place. That's just asking for someone to come around wondering what kind of shit we've been up to in our spare time. So yeah, Crocker Corp basically fucked us with a massive, rusty fork."

"That does sound like it would be an issue," Rose says, swallowing an instant, agitated no. There's a 'but' coming, and she gets the impression that she's not going to like what comes after. "If not Horizon, then where are we going?"

Deep disapproval emerges from Karkat's mouth in the form of several words Rose didn't know could be used as swear words until just this moment. Kanaya gives him a reproving look until he subsides and drowns his swearing in a thermos. Reluctantly, the jadeblood picks up the thread, shifting her weight so that the dark skirt of her long captain's coat swings. "Before we left, one of our old acquaintances offered to include us in a potential scavenging run on a wreck she was reconnoitering. Considering who she is as a person, it is more than likely this venture will be beyond risky, possibly life-threatening, and may violate far more interspiral regulations than we're generally prone to. In short, it's a gamble."

"In short, it's a Vriska plan," Karkat snarls, rolling his eyes. "And we're all going to die. Horribly. While that one-troll walking disaster flies away without a scratch on her, as per fucking usual."

Rose wonders exactly what she's walked in on, here. She's starting to get a handle on the odd dynamic between the striking captain and her splenic first mate, but it's too new for her to judge how deeply the two might disagree on this. "That does sound like it could be a slight problem," she says, unable to completely keep the wry twist out of her voice. "But if one assumes that we have some slim chance at surviving, you would still continue on to Horizon after the pillage and plunder have been accomplished?"

That earns her a pair of synchronized, assessing stares; Karkat is more openly suspicious, glowering at her from under thunderous eyebrows as he bristles, but the captain pauses to go over Rose's words again. "...Yes, that is the most likely course of action," Kanaya says, inclining her head. "Vriska did not disclose the exact location of the potential salvage -"

"Which means it's either so dangerous we're going to have a repeat of the 'oh look, my arm's off! Better grab it and haul ass before someone gets decapit8ted on the next trap!' incident, or it's going to be so illegal and/or skeevy I'm going to have to spend at least five hours in the trap trying and failing to wash the sin away," Karkat mutters, sounding resigned, while Kanaya seamlessly raises her voice enough to be heard over him.

"- so unfortunately, we cannot tell how long of a detour it might require," Kanaya finishes, her face a mask of polite contrition.

Rose's heart settles like a stone in the pit of her stomach, and she straightens her shoulders to compensate for the quiver of denial that runs down her spine. "I presume it won't be as quick as a day trip," she says lightly, to cover the sinking sensation. "Or that it wouldn't be possible to drop me off once we get closer so that I could walk the rest of the way to Horizon? The sooner I'm back in contact with Summerstorm, the better." The sooner I can check in on Dave...

She may not have been on this ship for very long, but Rose recognizes the mask of the authority figure imparting bad news that has firmly taken over Kanaya's stark features. "We'll alter course the moment we pick up the Antares's rendezvous signal. It should be in the vicinity of Horizon's airspace, but realistically, I estimate we won't return for another week. Assuming Vriska hasn't changed her mind and decided to go at it alone."

"Or maybe we'll get lucky, and someone will arrest her for being a shithive menace to society and free us all from her recurrent presence in our lives," Karkat continues to mutter, widening his eyes and raising his eyebrows at Kanaya.

"Or that," Kanaya agrees.

The contrast between the captain's polite, stoic mask and the first mate's...less-than-professionalism is most likely a cooperative tactic they've cultivated to throw off their opponents - Rose can't let it distract her. "Well, I understand," she says, a faint sigh escaping her.

Karkat blinks and then squints at her. "That's all? Not even a token 'oh no, I can't stand by and watch as you break the law'? 'Take me back this instant or so help me' - no? Plausible deniability? Nothing?"

"Oh, it doesn't particularly strike me as something I'm willing to expend effort protesting. Somehow, the diabolical shipping company that may be in the process of instituting a hostile takeover back at Summerstorm is higher on my list of concerns than legal matters. I don't like not returning right away, but antagonizing the command team of the vessel I'm currently on strikes me as what they call 'a bad idea.'" Rose draws herself up as much as she can throughout this, monitoring the captain's expression in particular as Rose falls into the attentive, respectful posture of a dignitary facing someone with right of command. She could make a strong argument for commandeering the skyship, legally speaking, and a large part of her wants to pounce on that slim opening to turn this ship around.

But under the circumstances, she'd prefer to go home with Horizon backing her. She has to consider the good of Summerstorm as a whole over her concern for John and Dave and their houses. "And anyway, Jade seems to trust you all," Rose finishes, bowing her head to Kanaya, and then tilting it toward the door. "I trust her judgement. As a guest aboard your vessel, I'm willing to assist however I can to compensate for my rude arrival."

"Even crime stuff?" Karkat asks, flatly.

Rose smiles beatifically. "Within reason."

Kanaya studies her for a long moment, while Karkat makes sputtering noises that never quite form words, his jaw dropping and slamming shut multiple times. "Then you are going to need a uniform," Kanaya says, at last, her thumb claw coming up to stroke her lower lip as she looks Rose up and down.

Mmm. Yes.

...Shit. Rose keeps her face perfectly still. "Something more functional for everyday apparel would be nice, yes, if you have anything to spare. I would deeply appreciate it." A slightly deeper bow than necessary, so that she can pull a silly, petulant face at her feet under the cover of her bangs - simmer down right now this instant - and then she smooths her mouth back into a normal, benign smile, her eyes almost all the way closed, as though she's staring into the full light of the sun rather than at the face of a skycaptain.

Karkat rolls his eyes with extreme force, shooing at the door. "Can we not do this in this tiny, tiny block? Leave me alone to be the only responsible fuck on this floating pile of junk, you schlubs." With that, he starts ripping up pieces of paper from the wall.

Kanaya flicks the nearest nubby horn on her way toward the door, ushering Rose before her with the other hand. "I strongly object to insults to my ship."

Karkat's eyes don't leave the aeronautical chart in front of him. His growled response sounds...sharpish. Less joking, and closer to outright criticism. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. I strongly object to your Vriska thing. And by strongly resent, I mean I hate it with every finely-tuned hatefiber of my spite-powered meat engine, and would give my left frond to never have to suffer through one of her monologues again in my pathetic excuse for a life."

Kanaya sighs. Then she murmurs to Rose, apologetically, "One moment," before ducking back into the compartment. She only closes the door part of the way behind her.

Judging from the lowered voices, Rose isn't supposed to overhear the two trolls, but she conveniently forgets to tune them out. She hovers outside the entryway, leaning on the wall with the dull half-light of the crystal inlay sparking cozily along her back, angled ever so slightly toward the entrance to the block so that she gives off the illusion of not paying very close attention.

"I know," the voice of the captain says, muffled. Rose closes her eyes, willing her perception to focus on what she hears rather than what she sees, with mixed results. "...appreciate that you want to watch out for me." An equally muffled grunt from Karkat. "...nd I wholeheartedly agree that Vriska is very, very dangerous, and that this is going to be untenably perilous." Kanaya's voice drops again, and Rose strains to make out the next few words. "But...can handle her...'rust me?"

Karkat makes no attempt to lower his volume. "Yeah. I just don't trust her. And now we've got someone extra on board. You know Vriska."

"Noted. And that is why I have you at my back." The captain's voice is perfectly clear, and warm - Rose knows that fond tone of voice.

The faint scuff of boots tips her off in time to straighten and open her eyes, and Rose steps aside so that Kanaya can emerge and take the lead. "Diamonds?" she asks, dropping some of the formality in favor of a tone more suited for slyly teasing Dave.

The captain gives a half nod, her mind clearly elsewhere; her distracted gaze flickers past Rose in a manner which is most dissatisfying. "Mm. Come with me." Kanaya sweeps away, and Rose has to step quickly to keep up with the jadeblood's long stride. They turn off at another juncture before the engine block, and have to step over a chunk of floor that has been stripped clear to allow a protruding, out of place mechanical pipe to cross the hall. Kanaya steps over it with an air of long practice and enhanced spacesense, while Rose has to swallow an instinctive grimace at what a mess they must have made to alter this cruiser to handle the heavier engines at the stern. She may be spireborn, but there's something about marring the aesthetics of a perfectly good lightmagic-attuned skyvessel that, as John would say, rustles her jimmies.

She continues to maintain careful control of her face as the captain leads her into a room that's slightly less compact, compared to the one they left the first mate in. Rose's first impression is that there is far too much cloth bestrewing the walls for this to be the captain's official block - but there's a formidable desk toward the back of the cabin, buried beneath a small mountain of fabric and a sewing machine so deeply imbued with spacemagic that Rose can't believe it wasn't visible through the walls. To her regular eyes, the sewing machine looks well used and somewhat battered, though someone has paid loving attention to restoring it and keeping it in working order, but to her other sight - either that's the ancient family heirloom of a powerful spacemage house, or Kanaya has enough talent to have created a formidable magical artefact all on her own. Almost all of the magic leylines of the ship converge here, in this room. "If you have something to spare, I'll make due. It doesn't need to be perfect," Rose says, eyeing the sewing machine like it could rise up and start tailoring of its own accord - which she would not put past some of the older spacemage houses, honestly.

Kanaya shakes her head, wading with ease between the spools of fabric and dress forms to reach the center of the room. "I believe that you will find that no one aboard my ship goes around in something ill-fitting. Here." She turns and beckons Rose with a curl of her fingers, just the briefest hint of a fang sticking out over her lower lip as she smiles. It's an open, honest expression, the troll's eyes alight with some inner eagerness that can't be tamped down by the formality of captaincy, and Rose locks in on it with a focus that would be, quite frankly, mortifying, if not for the fact that she's wholly entranced by that look.

Magical artefact? What magical artefact? Riveted, Rose lifts her hand and drifts after Kanaya like some spellbound fool, and the fizzling, fluttering sensation that fills her torso when Kanaya takes her hand and draws her toward a set of full length mirrors almost sends her into a daze. "Er - I -" she stammers, and oh dear, the captain almost-but-doesn't-quite place a hand on Rose's waist to guide her into position, a perfectly respectable half-inch of air between them rather than a point of contact that Rose follows. And Rose would not have minded that hand pressing all along her waist, either -

This is getting out of hand. She breathes in a set pattern, meant to clear the dizzy rush from her head before it can fall apart into a hopelessly turned on mess. All this accomplishes is that she gets a thorough inhale full of the scent of cloth and metal - there's a filing kit on the desk, half-buried under linen, and the sewing machine itself - and then she finds herself confronted by her own image in the mirrors. The captain is reflected behind her, the jadeblood a middling cool presence at Rose's back as the troll brandishes a cord of measuring tape that may as well be solid spacemagic. "Hold as still as you can," Kanaya instructs, and Rose makes a courageous effort to swallow down whatever Dave-worthy feat of mangled wordplay tries to pry its way out from her traitorous lips. Her mouth is remarkably dry, and the captain is remarkably hot - do not say that out loud.

The worst part is, for the first few minutes, Kanaya is utterly, unspeakably professional about it; Rose has had clothing fitted before, and the captain is brisk and efficient, taking measurements around the outside of Rose's clothes and asking quiet permission before touching or moving anything out of the way where the fabric hangs loose or the bells get in the way. Occasionally the measuring tape does move without Kanaya's claws actually moving it, and that's impressive. Yet it's still driving Rose to the edge of distraction. She - really, not, she cannot recall being this intensely distracted before in her entire existence, and that's not fair. She schools her facial expression, and the mirror tells her that she's doing a fine job of looking impartial about this close examination of her person, but Rose remains convinced that something in her body language must be screaming take me now. Why else would her face keep threatening to erupt into a blush the likes of which she has not felt in years?

Very distantly, she thinks that she can hear a voice in her head that sounds worryingly like Dave, chanting 'get it girl,' over and over again ad nauseam. This is absurd. "Really, I - there's no need to -" she says, weakly. They're probably almost halfway done, at the rate Kanaya's going, but if Rose doesn't locate the nearest shower and douse herself in cold water, she's going to make an absolute fool out of herself. She can physically feel the genes she shares with Dave awakening to the tune of some unearthly, insanity-inducing choir.

Kanaya finishes turning Rose slightly, and so Rose has the spine-tingling pleasure of the captain looking her dead in the eye as she says, "Indulge me?"

The jadeblood stands just a tad too close, her free hand still hovering just over the dip of Rose's waist, and - well. That's it. Any thoughts of protesting fly right out the window, presumably, plummet into the ocean miles below. "Whenever you like," Rose says, and her voice drops straight down from neutral into a husky rasp without so much as a by your leave.

...So much for that. Mentally, she directs whatever vestiges of her self-discipline remain to go forth, hunt down that mental Dave that appears to have wrested away control of her tongue, and throttle him posthaste. It's that, or admit to herself that she's inherited the Strider house tendency to flirt with the subtlety of a battering ram, and like hell. Like fucking hell.

Kanaya pauses, and Rose bites the corner of her lip as the troll processes that. Rose cannot decide what outcome she wants - the one with the least amount of mortification, probably. Even saying something to the effect of 'let's pretend I didn't say that,' would consign them both to the pits of the deepest indignities, and so all Rose can bring herself to do is stand completely still. If her body sways closer to Kanaya, or Kanaya's hand, and makes contact, that's it - game over.

"...I. Right," Kanaya says, stilted. Or perhaps it just sounds that way to Rose. The troll's hands start moving again, and Rose can't tell if the brisk pace from earlier has slowed, or if it's just her imagination. Damn her befuddled brain. A hand tips Rose's chin up a little more so that Kanaya can lay the measuring cord along her neck, without the troll asking permission first. "Sorry, sorry," Kanaya says, and Rose starts to blink out of her daze as she gets hastily turned around to face the mirror again. There's something off about the room, but she's at a loss as to what. "Just. One last measurement." A cool hand presses to the nape of Rose's neck, and she drops her head and sweeps her hair forward more than necessary so that Kanaya can measure from nape to waist along her back.

Then Kanaya steps back, an entire foot of distance opening up between them, and Rose is - not put out about it, dammit. "That should do," the captain says, wrapping the measuring tape deftly around one hand and walking to the desk before Rose has finished emerging from her horribly inconvenient stupor.

She snaps back to attention entirely at the sight of the sewing machine on the desk, which is lit up like a cityspire at dawn. Rose does not recall a pale, cream-colored crew jacket resting over the sewing bed when they entered the room, but it's there now, complete with a tunic the color of persimmons, edged in cream, and tight, red-brown leggings. It's not nearly as dark as the actual crew's uniforms that Rose has seen throughout the day; no one's going to mistake her for one of them. But despite the suddenness of its appearance, and the rich colors, it looks as trim and sturdy as the regular uniform. Certainly far more convenient than what she's wearing now. Kanaya scoops it all up from the sewing machine and the cloth appears to fold itself; the troll almost makes the motions needed to give the appearance of folding them herself, but Rose knows sleight of hand when she sees it.

"Let me know if the charms don't stretch enough to accommodate freedom of movement. I would like to assure you the way to Horizon will be smooth sailing, but Vriska throws most predictions into chaos. You'll need to be ready to move quickly," Kanaya says, offering the outfit to Rose. Any sign of the confusion Rose's slip earlier may have solicited from the captain has vanished behind that mask of professionalism again, and as much of a relief as it should be that they're going to Not Talk about this, Rose can't help but feel a quiet sting of yearning as she accepts the uniform.

Then she opens her mouth, and what comes next would be innocuous if not for the fact that her mind is well and truly in the gutter. "I'll keep you abreast of the situation, if need be," she says, and immediately winces, wanting to strangle herself. Did she put too much emphasis on - well, not with her voice sounding so out of breath, how could she have? This whole incident has been a mess, and Rose needs to make a quick exit right now. Before it gets worse. "Thank you for your...attention."

Right now.

"Of - course," the captain says, mostly to the back of Rose's head as she makes for the door as quickly as she can. Manners are all well and good, but there comes a time in every young woman's life when she must put aside niceties and retreat in the face of irrepressible thirst, and for Rose, that time is right this very instant.