please just stay dead

     Her lips are without her favourite black gloss, without it she looks younger. She's dyed her hair lilac again.  It looks well on her and you've told her so.  For some reason she can find lilac hair dye and not the decency to knock before entering.  She has that book tucked under her arm nice and neat and her tank top straps are twisted and her hair's mussed on one side.  It looked like she'd been trying to sleep.  Nobody can even tell if it's night or day anymore on the meteor, besides you.  It's your curse.  Earth time, it's 6:02:28 PM, January eighteenth, two thousand twelve.  

     Mostly you ignore the little clock inside your head and don't sleep.

     You click off your iShades and face her, rubbing your jaw.

     "Hey there, batshit crazy eldritch goddess.  What brings you to the Dave-cave?"

     Wow, did you actually just say that?  You're losing it, man.  You are going to lose it on this rock hurtling through space with an angry shouting alien, a lesbian vampire alien, a clown alien that nobody can seem to catch sight of, a lawyer alien who has a massive raging hate-boner for the clown alien, and...Rose.  God, you don't want to go crazy in front of her.  She'd psychoanalyse the shit out of you and leave you excavated and hollow.  She's done it several times before.  It's not nice, having someone inside your head.  It makes you exceedingly uncomfortable.  She makes you uncomfortable in general, with off-putting poise and quicksilver-mauve eyes and tiny ballerina feet.  She would have been good at dancing.

     She sets her grimoire on the nightstand you found and sits on your bed, arranging the rumpled, unused blankets around her waist.  She pats her dainty little hand beside her and smiles.

     "Just the solace of a warm body and some human company."

     "Creepy."

     "Come here, Dave.  You haven't slept in days."

     "Three days, eighteen hours, twenty-four minutes, three seconds."  You get up from your spot on the floor and cross the room to sit next to her, kicking off your shoes.  She looks tired up close.  You assume that you do too.  Her eyeliner is a day old and collecting in her tear ducts, her headband is missing, and she looks so strange without her lips blacked.  She looks like a kid.  Hell, you're all kids, even the alien ones.  You're sixteen years old and the universe is a heavy thing to carry.

     You let her take off your shades and set them atop her book of spells and secrets in your darkened room, a stripe of low light where your door didn't quite close.  She knows about your light sensitivity issues and treads carefully round them.  Really, the trolls have the same issues, growing up on a dying planet where the sun was a deadly thing and the moon (moons?) was the only light source that wasn't going to kill them.  You could probably go without your shades if you wanted to.

     You don't.

     You lie down facing away from her and let her wrap her skinny arms around your chest and rest her nose on your neck.

     The two of you don't talk for a very long time.

     "I dreamt you died," she says quietly, her breath warm and human on your skin.

     "Nothing new there." You reply.  "That happens sometimes."

     "I dreamt we all died."

     You don't answer her.

     You want to get some sleep.

     But your thoughts are going to keep you awake for what seems like forever.

(one of these days you're going to die and you're going to stay dead)

(you aren't quite sure how to feel about that)