#none of this is probably coherent but fuck it I just need somewhere to vent for the time being

[starlit-roses-ships]

don’t you love it when you just burst into tears in front of someone and basically have an anxiety attack over something that is not even a big deal in the slightest 🙃🙃🙃

[karkatvantasistrans]

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Uhhh BIG trigger warning on this one for depictions of mental illness mainly really shitty hopeless internal monologue stuff. And slightly less big ones for alcohol, alcoholism, casual ableist language, internalized misogyny. I mean it’s a fic about alcoholism so tread lightly I guess

Be Rose, 14 Hours ago

You seek out the murderclown.

This might be, had you ever grazed a text about addiction, something that might be called a bottom. Maybe not rock bottom, but enough of a sacrifice to your general set of sensibilities and morals that a particularly sensitive person could begin to see a problem with their lifestyle. Enough of a shock to be a wakeup call for someone still invested in their own life. You might be aware of the concept if, freshly thrust into the world of double-digit ages, you watched your mother's ability to care for you decline and began searching for ways to understand her. To care for her, potentially, if you had to see her decline beneath her own standards. If the "functioning" ever dropped off from before the rest of her descriptors. If you were wide-eyed, optimisitic and trusting enough to believe alcoholic adult men you'd never met to understand your mother better than you could.

But, of course, none of that could be the case. You know yourself as someone who would never allow herself to be that vulnerable, so that couldn't have happened.

So you seek out the murderclown.

Walking here, you'd followed trails of vents in overwhelmingly complicated articulations as they escaped the confines of the rooms' walls, and after a certain point most of the landscape around you became twisted vent shafts, curling around each other in the space between metal wall fragments. The connecting metal box greeting all these vents shifts down until it becomes a room, and this room spans out to meet you in the form of a hallway, shadows cast in such a way as to obscure the actual length of the hall with a blanket of black air.

He shifts out of the darkness very deliberately, and you can appreciate the drama he invites. Green light bounces off one eye right before his gray skin starts painting itself into the air. He looks, soft. Not in a necessarily pleasant way, but his face lacks some of the more pronounced knotting and ridges of the trolls’ usual textured skin. Maybe it’s just the light, or the liquor, but he looks like he’s painted himself into the scene in front of you. There’s something inherently liminal about him. You admit it's somewhat distressing how little it feels like he’s actually occupying any space around you, and something is skittering around in your brain stem, scrambling frantically at the juncture of your neck. You can’t help but picture a gerbil trying to claw its way out, but you’re the cage, and you’re the table on which the cage is sat, and you’re the house in which the table is placed. So you’re not going anywhere.

“Gamzee,” You offer. He tilts his head.

A voice in the back of your head tells you this is a bit far to take your girlhood fascination with the macabre. You call it sexist. Men get to have real amitions and goals with their interests: why not you?

“Rose,” he hits back, and it’s the sureness that bugs you.

You uncaptalogue the bottle of wine.

He doesn’t flinch.

You’re already walking past him by the time he’s caught it in his hands.

“Come on.”

Be Rose, 11 Hours ago

You are leaning against the cold steel wall, your hair in a bunch above your head. It’s hooked on a screwhead, you think, or maybe it isn’t. You’ll figure out one way or the other inevitably. Gamzee is grinning, slick eyes narrowing more and more the more you talk. You are chatting, but you can’t hear yourself, about wine and the distilling process and the alchemy involved, and he is nodding every so slightly as light dances over his split pupils. They’re goatlike, you think, and watching orbs of light bounce off of them as they remain subbornly out of focus, they look unreal. You wonder if he’s taking information in with them or if they’re just there for display: two haunting, bewitching stones in his head as he watches you through his incizors. He feels like a ghoul; like a very ancient consort. You’re getting on amicably and he tells you about his religion; completely absurd but woven together with such a rich lore you’re almost convinced. You offer and interpretation and you swear the lights on his eyes all sync together. He’s enthralled, leaning over one knee and left hand’s claws flying through the air, gesticulating in time with every relevation he delivers. Excited, his wild hair and his horns meet in a soft circle, bouncing around his head as he expounds on the importance of different saints and jugglers, or saint-jugglers, you can’t actually keep straight what he’s talking about, and you find yourself home again. You’re comfortable; you’re invested in the kind of person you need him to be for you to survive. You, leaning against a third wall, watching the two of you conversing and understanding: you need this to survive. The both of you are strung together on a rope of liqour and the feelings of isolation have dug deep, deep into both your pores and if you had the chance to have this with the people who try to care about you you’re not sure if you even would. Your life and your girlfriend and your friends have too many artificial moments, stapled together and hanging on the reliance that Things Will Get Better and Feel Normal and you don’t know how to explain to anyone that it feels better to die with a stranger than to love them. Something churns deep, deep inside you as your girlfriend burns into your mind, her shadow on the walls of your skull as the ghost of her has to feel what you feel and your waking mind rushes back, angrily, and it’s fighting with you to feel w

you wake up in bed.

You are cold. Your clothes feel damp. You realize, with frustration, that it's because you were in the middle of pouring yourself a drink. You put down the cup, and the bottle, and lie down. You stare at the ceiling.

You feel like the ceiling stares into you more than you're able to stare into it. It's gray, it's unwelcoming, it's hostile. If it had the chance to, it would probably kill you.

Maybe it's trying.

You think about your girlfriend and you're, sad. You're so, fucking sad and you can't even be eloquent about it or put into words why you feel that way. You can't explain to yourself what the words and the feelings you have inside yourself are even supposed to mean. You can't even arrange them into something coherent. You heave.

You're holding your hands on your face and crying. Like you're a fucking teenage girl, like an idiot. You picture her and you think about yourself and you just fucking cry. You guess, you feel like you're failing her. So, there's a way to explain it. To organize the emotions, to give them a label. But it doesn't fucking help. It's not productive. It doesn't tell you anything new, it doesn't inspire meaning, it doesn't move you from point a to point b, it just stays the same. Moves you backwards into yourself. 

You keep coming back here, because this is you. You're tired of it. And when you wake up you're going to have to be her again and you fucking hate her. She thinks anything can ever be better and that she can solve any of these problems like what’s fundamentally wrong with you isn’t etched into the core of your being and that if you just keep trying you would make some real progress when you know you keep coming back here for a reason and it’s n

You wake up in bed.

Which is fine; that's always a good place to wake up, and it's certainly a reasonable activit

Be Rose, 21 minutes ago.

You call Kanaya.

You realize as she’s picking up: it’s conspicuous, it’s insincere, it’s overly formal and it invites questions: why call when you can just pester her like usual? Your throat clicks as she inhales on the other end and you feel her question you moments into the future. She’s going to ask what’s happening. What’s different.

But her voice pours out the other end, soprano with surprise, delighted and chatty and just the gentle rhythm of her speech click click clicking in your left ear. You’re pacified in the most mundane sense, soothed and calmed and curling yourself around your phone and onto the wall as she rambles out the speaker into the air. Lingering guilt and questions and blank memories swim in your mind but you’re too deep under the surface to bother. And somewhere beyond the shore of the lake in your mind you have an image of you shoving your own head into the water, anxieties and critiques bubbling up as your last breaths as emotion takes over and your life escaping your lips is the last disturbance in the still waters.

Be Rose Lalonde.

You think you might stop drinking for a while.

You tell Kanaya you’re coming over.

You are still Rose Lalonde.

You are in your girlfriend’s room.

You paint her nails.