Work Text
Rose Lalonde. Sharp as a blade and twice as deadly. Mind always analyzing, always rationalizing. She notices every glance and twitch, each fidget and movement. Knows how to tell the different between a bad liar and a good one. She breaks people down to their bare essentials and strips them raw, can deliver a fatal blow in a simple sentence. Words are her weapons and she knits them together as well as she can with any thread, better even. She can predict the next ten movements someone will make before they even think to make them. “Cunning” and “sly” fall too short in describing her; she’s a fucking mastermind and knows it all too well. The only brain she’ll never be able to understand is her own. Dave Strider. Aware of every breath he takes. The second he walks into a room he’s already scanning, already calculating. Escape routes, weapons, enemies and allies. It’s not his fault he was raised in a world where each step could mean danger. He’s always processing; every sound and every movement in his peripheral is taken note of. His body is his weapon and his weapon is an extension of his body. Every move he makes is precise and purposeful. If each step could mean danger then it’s important to make every step count. After the game he counts seconds but he used to keep measures in heartbeats, in a steady pulse or a racing one. ‘Gut instincts matter, kid,’ his brother told him. It’s probably the only important thing his brother ever told him. He’s got a soldier’s mind in a boy’s body. Jade Harley. Ever the observant one, the watcher. When you’re stuck on an island for the first 13 years of your life, you pick up a thing or two about learning from your surroundings. She’s the room reader, she’s fluent in body language. One glance at someone and she can tell their entire life story. Sometimes it’s hard to know so much and not be able to explain how you know it. She can’t tell people how she sees the worry in the hunch of their shoulders or the joy in the tapping of their fingers. It’s not something she tries to do; it just comes to her. Her grandfather’s voice often whispers in the back of her head, lessons where the subject wasn’t important but the learning was. John Egbert. Earnest and empathetic. A boy still soft despite what the world has thrown at him. Some could call him slow, but all he is is steady. He may not know people as well on an intellectual standpoint, but he’s smart about feelings. Where the others are a jumble and a mess, he straightens them out neatly. He can spot the sadness in someone even when they don’t realize it’s there. So patient, so willing to listen. The world prepared him hardships and he opened his palms readily to take them. Too determined to see the good in others. Kind to a fault without even noticing. They go together, somehow. Jade’s keen eyes and Rose’s clever brain, Dave’s honed body and John’s strong heart. Four kids in tandem. In unison. Four kids who may feel like broken pieces alone, but fit alongside each other’s edges perfectly. And maybe that’s all they need.