For Everything, A Price

   "You're really going to leave like this? Without saying goodbye?"

   She freezes with the door half open, and even from his place on the other side of the room, Dave can see how white her knuckles are from the death grip she's got on the knob. A grip so tight it's almost like she's clinging to it, grabbing at a lifesaver in the middle of the Atlantic because her ship has gone down and the water is icy cold and there ain't no fucking way she's letting go until one of those rescue boats fishes her out of the remains of her doomed cruise ship vacations. Her other hand has a similar grip on the handle of her rolling luggage, but it's loosening in a way that he can read, because Dave has gotten damn good at reading Rose after all these years, whether she wanted to believe it or not. Better that she didn't, really, because he knows she's close to going for her needles, and he'd rather have the advantage of surprising her if she tried to strife with him. Because she's good, far better than he ever admits, and any moment he has to get his katana in hand to block her is valuable.

   "Goodbye, Dave. It truly has been a pleasure," Rose responds, right on motherfucking cue, and she doesn't even bother to turn and face him. Which means it's serious, whatever it is that has led to this late night pack and bolt of hers. They've both long since learned that it's so much easier to lie to each other when they don't look at each other. It's a fact that has gotten them through the hardest parts of this whole thing, that has gotten them through nights of sharing the nightmares that woke them, because they hate to admit what it means.

   "It has that," he agrees, stepping into the full light of the living room that the apartment door opens off of. As quiet as he moves though, he sees her flinch, one hand tighten and the other loosen, and his own hand comes to rest on the hilt of the katana over his shoulder. "Which makes me wonder just why you're trying to bolt now. Have I failed to satisfy lately? I knew I should have looked into those emails that…"

   "Don't. Just don't say it, Dave," she says, voice begging.

   Her hand moves and before it can drop the luggage handle and pull her needles from wherever she's secreted them, Dave's across the room, one hand slammed against the door to force it shut. The other grabs Rose's wrist and keeps it from advancing to wherever her weapons were secreted. Now, for all intents and purposes, Dave's arms are around her, holding Lalonde still, and Rose isn't moving a muscle. Was barely even breathing.

   "Under this Strider's roof we don't just abscond without explaining. Ain't a Strider's way."

   "I'm not a Strider," she snaps back, twisting her head to glare at Dave over her shoulder.

   "You're as much of one as I am."

   That gets Rose to flinch, just like he expected. She usually did when he made allusions to the connection between them. To the secrets they'd learned through dreams too strange to be anything but real. To the lives they lived as themselves before they were themselves. Odd how she had always been the one to take the fact that they were twins in stride better than Dave, and yet it was him using it as a weapon now. Forcing the weight of everything to the forefront. Forcing her to just stop for a moment and think, because obviously there was some lack of thought going on here or she wouldn't be trying to run away now, at the eleventh hour.

   "Let me go," quiet, low, pleading. Not like the famed Rose Lalonde at all. Not the woman who had bested the evil Guy Fieri in single combat. Not the woman gifted with a kind of foresight that couldn't be explained and a detailed recognition of their past/alternate lives that was no less traumatic than the greater multitude of Dave's own recollections.

   "If I do, you're dead. She's already looking for us."

   The Baroness. The very allusion to her left a heavy weight in the air, wedging itself between them as if it could push Rose from Dave's encircling arms. And encircling they really were now. He'd let up on the door, letting his arm instead wrap around her, clasping his other wrist, and thus Lalonde's hand, to her chest. Holding her close and tight and refusing to let her run away. But Dave wasn't about to let the thought of that alien bitch, or their pasts, come between him and Rose now. Because if he did that would be the end. He'd never see her again. If the Baroness didn't find her and kill her, Rose would go to ground in a way that Dave would never be able to ferret her out. The only reason he'd found her in the first place, years ago, was because she'd been famous. And in truth, she'd been looking for him, so what had it mattered?

   "She won't have to look far."

   Resolve, steely and cold in a way that made Dave tremble and hold her all the tighter. "You aren't going after her without me."

   Because that was she was saying. That everything you've been planning for weeks is pretty much worthless and she wants to walk out there and throw her life away.

   It's not like Rose, to be the reckless one. That's always been more of Dave's sort of thing. Throwing himself blindly into the path of danger for her sake. For the sake of a best friend that he'd never had. For a brother he'd never know. For the hope that one day a set of four kids could change the fate of their world, save them from the destruction a cruel, alien woman would wreck upon them all.

   "Dave, don't stand between me and what I have to do."

   "You're throwing your life away. Why the fuck should I not step in? This whole thing is practically a suicide mission as it is with two of us. It's a guaranteed one if you go alone."

   "Yes, Dave, I am well and truly aware of this fact. Please do not assume that I do not have a full perception of the whole of what my actions can result in. It is I, after all, who is the Seer, not you."

   "Then how come you haven't see that there is no way I'm letting you go this alone, or go now at all."

   Silence. Still, it was better than the foolish shit his not-twin was spewing. If she was quiet he could at least pretend she was trying to turn his arguments over in her head. Not that he expected to get through to her with anything but force. As smart as she was, she could be damn stupid when the spirit moved her.

   "Dave, I…"

   Then Rose is leaning back against him, her chest heaving with silent sobs. All Dave could do was loosen his grip, letting the blond woman twist all the way around in his arms and rest her head against his shoulder. Through his t-shirt he can feel the tears, flowing freely now. Or maybe they had been the whole time. Rose's mastery of the impenetrable facade was almost enough to put Dave's to shame, and he'd been working on it for the whole of his life. To see her there, raw and exposed for all the world to see—or even just for him—was a true testament to just how broken she was. Whatever had done this, whoever had done this, he was going to break. See them skewered on his katana, and pleading for her forgiveness. No one hurt Rose, ironically or otherwise.

   "Sit down," he insists, and she's silent, obedient, wrong, as he leads her to the couch in the middle of their borrowed living room and sits down, quietly weeping into his shirt.

   That's the worst part about it all was that nothing around them was familiar. Everything was borrowed. Dave couldn't give Rose a favorite pillow to hold, a beloved blanket to wrap around her, couldn't offer her anything familiar other than himself. It was the cost of acting against the Baroness. Everything about their lives was borrowed now, except their clothes, weapons, names, faces. This was nothing more than the latest in a long line of borrowed lives. A place left conveniently abandoned while its owners were out of town on some vacation, and handily opened by a little of those magic fingers that Dave possessed. So the only familiar comfort Dave could offer was himself. Silent he sat there, letting Rose curl against him, weep, silent and even now refusing to let whatever it was off her chest.

   At length—ten minutes exactly, Dave always knew how much time had passed to the millisecond—she stopped abruptly. Instead she leaned back and stared into Dave's sunglasses, and he was forced to stare back, looking at the runny black mess that had been left by her mascara—apparently Lalonde didn't feel the need to invest in waterproof, unsurprising considering normally her mask was so much better—and wonder just what had happened.

   She didn't leave him to wonder for long.

    "I'm going to die."

   "Hardly news. We're all just rotting away, slowly but sure as fuck, from the inside out. Breaking down every day as little bits of us fall off into the great…"

   "Please, spare me your attempt to pacify me with what will ultimately devolve into a misguided and unscientific diatribe on apple juice being people."

   "Oh come on, look at it this way, Rose…"

   "I'm not talking about years from now, Dave."

   "Of course not. We're going out in a blaze of glory by gunning down the Batterwitch."

   Not that either of you have ever believed that you'd manage it. The point is to try, though. Because Striders, and Lalondes, they never give up. Are in your face until you either surrender or they can't keep moving. Something in his dreams assures him that it's the only way their lives can be. The only way that they've ever been. When they die, they do it in ways that are talked about for generations. That would do their brother and sister, or whatever they were, proud.

   "Must you be so purposefully dense, or is this just an aspect of your personality that I'm yet to have encountered? No, please don't answer. For once in your life, Dave Strider, just sit there and listen without interrupting for your 'coolkid' nonsense. I am dying, Dave."

   He wants to interject, but the look on her face keeps his lips buttoned up, sealed tighter than Fort Knox on cleaning day. Problem was, he'd already figured it out. Figured it the first time she'd opened her mouth to say it, but hadn't, and he just didn't want to admit it, didn't want to hear it. Too bad the world didn't just work the way he wanted it to.

   "I have been endeavoring to keep in contact with my physician throughout all of this. I know it was a risky decision, you need not lecture me on that, but shortly before I departed my comfortable life to find you, I became frightfully ill. Three weeks spent in a hospital bed, attempting to keep such hidden from the public, and suffering from a variety of ailments. There were numerous tests performed, but it has only been recently that the source of my difficulties had been determined."

   There was no need to say the word. Part of Dave had always known it, after all. Ever since he'd met Rose he'd known it. Could feel it deep within himself, just beside the place that ticked like a metronome. It felt like an hourglass, rapidly losing its sand. One that couldn't be turned over because there was a huge chunk missing from the glass, leaving the sand to spill everywhere but where it should. The feeling of something running out. When he was younger, he'd thought it had been a countdown until the most important day of his life. When he met Rose he'd known it was something different. And now that he reached for it…

   Dave must have zoned out, because the next thing he heard from Rose wasn't the word he'd feared, but something else entirely, shot through with melancholy.

   "It's my own fault, really. Or at least the fault of another part of me. It was clear that the dark power that she was allowing into herself could only be a corrupting influence. That they'd take from her as much as they would give…"

   All Dave could do was stare, uncomprehending, as she spoke of horrible things. Of the kind of dreams they never spoke of. Of darkness consuming her, eating her from the inside out. A cancer made not by cells going mad, but because once, somewhere out in the multiverse a Rose Lalonde had made a deal with the worst kinds of devils, and they weren't too picky about which Lalonde paid the price for it. All he could do was sit there, pulling Rose into his arms as she told him all the worst things that she not-quite remembered, and told him that no matter what they did, no matter how well they fought, he was going to lose her. And for something she hadn't even done in the first place.