Chapter Text
You’ve never been so enthusiastic to be back for A-season, which is normally the most miserable time of the year. Aranea practically lost her shit when you said you’d be down to get back in the field right after Thanksgiving. To keep their roster of observers full, they typically have to dangle incentives in front of the newbies - a pretty substantial data quality bonus paid out in early January, preferential scheduling for the rest of the year, shorter deployments, that kind of stuff. You volunteered.
For no reason, really, just wanted to make the most of your year, bring in as much cash as you could - fuck off, no reason!
It’s still dark out, through the windows of the motel lounge, even though it’s going on ten in the morning. After a few months, this usually gets kind of unbearably depressing. Four hours of sun a day isn’t enough, and you get a lot less than that, even, if you end up in one of the northern ports.
But you’ve always been pretty lucky, and from your position at the impossibly outdated countertop, sprawled out over three different bar stools, you can’t think of anywhere you’d rather be.
“I’m telling you,” you insist, closing your laptop with a muted thud to increase your counter space for emphatic gestures, “I would win the shit out of Fear Factor if it was still a thing. I would destroy Fear Factor. I would kick its ass! I told you about that one boat where the hanging bread basket had gotten so moldy that the fungus from the decaying bread served a literal structural purpose in keeping the thing together, right? I worked on that boat for two weeks. Every time I went to the galley to wash my hands I looked death in the face and told it to go fuck itself.”
“So, what, once every three days?” Terezi retorts, grinning. “You’re not half as tough as you front! You’d fold the second they tried to make you crush a live crab between your teeth or something absurd like that.”
“My hands are so clean!” you snap, folding your arms and tucking one beneath each of your biceps, so in case they aren’t she can’t make a clear judgement.
“The nose doesn’t lie, Serket, but you do. Constantly.”
“Oh, bite me, Pyrope, I’ve been at sea for a wholeass week and this is the ‘welcome back’ I get? Rude! Typical, but rude!”
“I’ll wait on that until you finish with your disgusting deck forms, thanks,” she sighs. “You smell like the inside of a dead fish, and your paperwork defies all fundamental laws of reality and somehow reeks even worse.”
“Wowwwwwwww, that must be so hard for you specifically and no one else! I’m tooooooootally not self conscious or uncomfortable about that at all, thanks for bringing it up so delicately though!”
To be fair, you have spread your shit out over a solid half of the bar. Your room at the Earthsea isn’t ready, yet, so you’ve set up in the lounge, and you’re finishing up all the data entry you didn’t do on your last trip. Only fourteen salmon, so getting that in was easy, but you’ll get a call from Cal in the next hour or two if you don’t submit the rest of it over the encrypted connection pre-loaded in your dinosaur of a work laptop soon.
Luckily, Terezi was working day shift, and she was kind enough to let you get your shit together and crunch some numbers in the empty sort-of-bar after only a few minutes of elaborate verbal riposte, which you would have done anyway, so no loss there. As a result of your brilliant machinations and connection-leveraging, you’ve now got eighteen deck sheets of varying levels of goriness, dampness, and time spent marinating in your baskets all scattered like leaves as you pull counts and weights from the raw data and plug it into the archaic software, cursing occasionally when the shitty keys of your shitty computer make you mistype something stupid or tab to the wrong entry form too soon.
At first, she seemed to be observing you with mild interest, but the deck sheets smell like a fucking slaughterhouse, even to you, and it only gets worse as you sit around, letting them like… percolate. Look, you hate this part of the job too.
“I’m going to bleach the bar once you leave,” she finally says, retreating slightly further away with the glass she’s meticulously drying. “Obviously I do that every time you exit this establishment, so the stains don’t set, but I’m making a specific point of it this time.”
“Aw, does that mean you’re giving back my clearly unwanted flannel?” you ask innocently, smiling up at her.
It was a nice one, too. You stayed out late after your first date - well, not that late, but when the sun sets at four, seven in the evening feels really fucking late. She was cold. Not that she’d say it, but you could tell! Plus, she was totally underdressed for the weather, in actual nice clothes, for some reason. On or off-duty, you usually only see her in moderately-grimey bartender’s duds, so it was kind of cool, of course, and you totally pointed out how weird it was to realize she had shoulders after two years of doubtful speculation.
She looked better in your overshirt, and you almost got the nerve to say something about it, but you didn’t. Fine, yeah, pathetic on your part, happens to the best of people! But she kept it, and she really… really seemed to like it.
“You know damn well that I haven’t had time to wash it yet,” she argues, but you’re getting better at actually reading her, now, and even from a distance.
“Look at me. I mean - fuck, just inhale. Get a load of the way I live! Do you really think I give a shit about whether or not it’s been through a spin cycle?”
Ugh. You’re not making any progress on your actual work, but what the hell is Cal going to do to you over it? Call you a slur and hang up? Let him. Your salmon data is fucking in, that’s all that really matters in any immediate timeframe.
No, you don’t want this hanging over your head. Several different season openers are approaching, and there’ll be a glut of observers in town soon. You want to make the most of this time, not vaguely agonize about transcribing pollock sex lengths for the next day and a half.
“Look at you? Now you’ve really hurt my feelings. I should kick you out of the bar for that,” she retorts. “I can’t be expected to tolerate your casual ableism in my own establishment.”
“Try it, Pyrope. Bluh. It’s no big deal about the flannel, obviously, one less thing to carry around, you’re probably buying me a year before I wind up with a herniated disc or some shit,” you sigh. “But the sooner I get this done, the sooner I can pack these gross-ass forms in the bottom of my duffel where they belong.”
“So eager to leave?” she says. “Ha, no, seriously, if I never have to encounter one of your deck forms again, it’ll be too damn soon. I’ve got some things to clean in the back, do you want me to put some coffee on for you?”
“I will die for you,” you inform her gravely. “Can you put, like, a load of milk in it? I seriously hate coffee, but I’m about to pass out on the counter right now.”
“Gross. Don’t even think about it. I’d have to burn the place to the ground and start fresh. But yeah, you got it, babe.”
Babe!
You put your head down and get back to work, reopening your laptop. It doesn’t take as long as you anticipated. Most of your baseline calculations are already done, and you just have to get them entered. It gets easier with time and experience, much as you’re loath to admit it. You’re actually, sincerely, really good at this, when you try.
Before she gets back from whatever ‘cleaning things’ entails, you’ve got the spinny wheel of ‘eventually this transmission will go through to Seattle’ rolling on your desktop, and you’ve sent your data entry confirmation text, and Cal’s just going to have to bitch someone else out, this morning, because you’re a certified Good Observer. Ha! Take that, employer! You wave your deck sheets around to dry them off a bit further, collate them into a stack, and dig through your duffle, tucked conveniently under the bar, until you find the stack of old ones and binder-clip them all together for Future Vriska to deal with.
For all your boasting, you actually hate the grosser boats, so you bring out a roll of disinfectant wipes that you travel with, disregarding the space they take up, to see what you can do.
Lemon-scented.
The combination of ‘excruciatingly dead fish’ and ‘citrusy disinfectant wipes’ is about as horrible as anything could ever feasibly be, but you’ve made an at-least-partially-sincere effort to get the bar clean by the time Terezi reemerges with a cup of hot, opaque, off-white beverage that could charitably be called coffee and sets it down in front of you.
“My hero,” she announces, though she wrinkles her nose at the fresh, novel awfulness of the new aroma. “Still bleaching that, though.”
You flush, and she grins like she can tell. You’re pretty sure, at this point, that she’s just an ungodly good guesser, but you can’t be completely certain. In lieu of a response, you clear your throat uncomfortably.
“So, what’s new with you?” you ask.
“Hm. It’s been a week since you last darkened my doorstep, so I can confidently say: nothing. Oh, no, wait ‘till you hear this one. So this cute observer walks into my bar, right, and she’s got this armload of filthy papers -”
“Fuck off, do you gossip about me like this with all your patrons? This is how rumors get spread, y’know. Like, this is how libel cases get started. Guess you haven’t covered those in lawyer-school yet, so FYI, shut the fuck up.”
“Can’t help it. You’re the only interesting thing that ever happens around here,” she says, smiling fondly in your general direction, not quite connecting with your gaze, but, well. You tip back your still-steaming coffee cup and just pour the damn thing down your throat to distract yourself.
“There’s got to be a couple of observers getting shuffled through,” you argue. “C’mon, any news from anyone I’d give a shit about?”
“Nope. Not a whiff of your spicy-sweet poblano pal. Uh, I told you that Feferi was back in the field, right? Meenah broke her ankle on her way back from the harborside tavern and she won’t be re-deployed for a few months, from what I’ve heard from the local coordinator, when she comes in. It’s mostly old timers like you, and I figure you know them all already.”
You sigh dramatically, flopping back into a deeply uncomfortable lounging position across the available seats.
“Well, that’s lame as shit.”
In truth, you don’t know absolutely everybody. It’s kind of ridiculous, how a rotating cast of maybe thirty people can get shuffled through the same ten ports for nearly three years and not have everybody intersect at one point or another, but, well, you didn’t actually meet Feferi until your last deployment, along with a whole laundry list of shitty newbies you categorically don’t care about.
And maybe a few that are okay. Maybe. On a good day.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far. I don’t actually mind having you to myself, for once.”
If she can fucking smell it when you blush, she’s sure as hell smelling it now. You put your head down on your forearms in a futile effort to hide. You just need like eight seconds to pull your shit together before you look back up.
“When do you get off tonight?” you ask.
“Miss Serket, there are things a lady keeps to herself,” Terezi retorts, and fucking hell, she’s just messing with you at this point, and it’s working. You have no idea how you’re going to win this one, you’re exhausted from the last trip and the post-boat need for social comfort is kicking your ass.
You settle for a snort of recognition and largely not responding. Bitch move. But you’re running too critically low on HP for basically any other type of move.
Ideally, you’d get your ass in a shower, sooner rather than later. Put your laundry in the wash. It’s a… Saturday, you checked, it’s a Saturday, which means the dinky little theater a few blocks from the hotel will be showing some late-release movie. Invite her out, make a whole production out of it. Maybe you should nap first, so you don’t fall asleep on her in a cozy dark room, in cozy fresh clothes, but phone alarms have no power over this kind of exhaustion, and it’s not like you have a roommate to kick you awake on time. Aranea told you when you sent your land text this morning that you were the only one in port right now.
That actually sounds like a great idea, falling asleep on her bony shoulder. You think she’d probably be cool with it, and she’d definitely just nudge you awake and probably spear you through the chest with one of those pointy-ass elbows she’s packing if she wasn’t cool with it.
You like that about her. Both the elbows and the fact that she doesn’t let you get away with shit she doesn’t appreciate. There’s never any second guessing with Terezi. That’s the most important kind of trust there is.
“Somehow, after that, I’m still willing to be seen in public with you,” you tell her. “What’s at the theater? I’ve literally lost track of linear time and contemporary media release cycles. Had to dump all that useless brainspace for more fish facts.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, here. It’s Cats. No wiggling out of this commitment now, you’re taking me to Cats. There will be no negotiations and no talk of any other movie.”
“I’m going to fall asleep,” you warn her.
“I couldn’t care less what you do!” she says, which you’re pretty sure isn’t completely true. Pretty sure. “One way or another, I’m getting the dulcet tones of some technicolor CGI catfreaks beamed directly into my auricular canals tonight. No one else will go with me.”
“Geez, Pyrope, way to make a girl feel special!”
Her grin in response is undeniably sharklike, and any thought of further resistance is quickly disintegrated by the way her nose wrinkles when she smiles with her whole face, the way it shifts the position of her glasses. Her expressions are always so overwhelming, and how would she know?
Honestly, you’d stick pins in your thigh to stay awake if it meant you could watch her lose her shit at the comedic stylings of Idris Elba in a catsuit. You’re fucking hopeless. You’re pathetic. You’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
The double-doors to the bar swing open, ringing a handful of bells that hang from the handle, and you just about jolt out of your seat. It’s ten in the morning, the place is only technically open. You’d been expecting some level of privacy, like an idiot, and now you’re paying the price, straightening your back, setting down your coffee-ish drink, and scowling at the interloper.
It’s a guy in his mid-twenties, probably younger than you, though it’s hard to tell anything about him when he’s absolutely wrapped up in gear. You clock him as an observer in about 0.8 seconds. Something about the thirty-dollar canvas duffel from Amazon that basically everyone gets, since it’s cheap as shit and not too bad to sleep on, and the scales and blood caked on his Xtratuff boots.
“Hey, Pyrope. They don’t have a room for me yet. Can I set up shop here for an hour or two?” he announces, tossing his duffel down under a stool and stripping off his backpack first, then a truly atrocious Skaicorp Cannery-branded baseball cap, which was hiding an impressive head of bleached-blond curls from the gore it’s clearly soaked in.
He doesn’t bother taking off his triangle-shaped sunglasses, and somehow that’s the most offensive part of all of this. You give Terezi a look, like, are you seeing this shit? But she’s hardly looking at you anymore, preoccupied with the task of digging around in the fridge beneath the bar for a bottle of orange soda, which she slides over to him on a coaster without so much as a second thought.
With a second jolt in as many minutes, you realize she knows this loser.
“Don’t tell me I’m about to have a second round of grody deck forms on my bar,” she sighs, evidently not noticing your horrified look of recognition.
“Nope. Just my grody self. I finished my data entry on the steam back to port. That’s regulation,” the guy says, shrugging. “Logged it before my offload started.”
“Oh. Interesting!” Terezi declares, crossing her arms and frowning emotively, though at least this is directed at you. “Somehow, I’d never heard that before. I wonder why.”
Awesome, now you have an actual reason to hate this dude. Snitches get stitches. You’re almost completely sure that, whoever he is, he’s the only one who’s ever done it that way. The manual is supposed to be aspirational in that regard. It’s a nice fantasy, having any space in a ship’s galley to do what you just did in Terezi’s bar without getting your ass kicked for getting blood on somebody’s gaming console or corndog or whatever the shit. But it’s exactly that - a fantasy.
You think for a long second about just peacing out and checking on the status of your room at the front desk, but ultimately you decide, nobly, that you’re not leaving Terezi alone with this douchebag, for all he seems content to sip at his orange soda and pull a battered personal laptop from his backpack.
“Is there a problem?” he asks, glancing up at you from behind his stupid sunglasses, which are stupid.
“I dunno, is there?” you retort, feeling a flush rise to your face.
“Seems like you want there to be. I’m being completely unproblematic.”
“Unproblematic?” you scoff.
“Okay, both of you, I swear to fuck, if you’re going to fight, do it in the McDonald’s parking lot like civilized people and not in my bar,” Terezi interrupts. “And get someone to film it for me.”
He snorts, setting his drink down and swiveling on his stool to actually face you, clearly looking you over. You cross your arms and fix him with the steeliest-eyed glare you can muster up. There’s a long pause, as Terezi presumably wonders what the fuck is going on. Good question, imaginary Terezi!
“Make it the combination Taco Bell-KFC parking lot and you have yourself a deal,” he announces. “I like to keep it a little classier. What the fuck do any of us have, if not our dignity?”
“Vriska doesn’t even have that,” Terezi offers, and you roll your eyes dramatically.
“Smart. Should’ve got mine surgically removed ages ago. Gives me nothing but grief,” he sighs. “Anyway, I don’t actually want to get off on the wrong foot, here. Not with the legendary Vriska Serket. Terezi never shuts up about you, so I figure you’ve got to be somethin’ special, or else she’s being literal about the guillotine in her back yard with your name on it. In which case that’s the most badass thing I’ve ever heard of and I’ve really got to shake your hand.”
“Forward much?” you retort, though you can’t entirely bite back a smile. You’re going soft, getting used to Terezi’s company, where you can sort of get away with this shit! He politely turns to retrieve his soda, ignoring your apocalyptic failure to chill.
“Can’t say I’ve never heard it before,” he says, shrugging. “Anyway, only us two in town, probably not gonna get too much of a reprieve before assignments roll in. I’m Dirk. Nice to meet you.”
You do know of the guy, after all. His name’s been on email chains and the company website, and rumors spread fast between observers. Not a lot about Dirk Strider in particular. He sets the standard for dealing with Cal, or so you’ve heard. Rumor has it that he once asked for a ten-cent hourly raise and actually got it, though no one can say how.
Goody-two-shoes motherfucker. There’s one mystery solved.
Ugh. At least you probably won’t have to be stuck in the motel with him for too long, a consequence of your abnormal willingness to deploy during an understaffed time period. Usually, this port is practically crawling with observers, half the rooms at the Earthsea propped open with Xtratuff boots, every night on land spent dicking around in some bar or another. In fairness, you are currently dicking around at a bar. It’s just not the same.
It’d be better, actually, just you and Terezi and hopefully not this dude for too much longer, if you had any guarantee you weren’t going to get shipped off within the next few hours. But you’re willing to bet you texted your arrival time and the completion of your offload before this blond-mop-looking douchebag, so you don’t even have him as a buffer to a new assignment.
You’re first on the chopping block, and the weight of your phone feels like a hand grenade in the chest pocket of your second-nicest flannel, and you still really, really need a shower.
“I might go look pathetic near the front desk and see if they’ll fit me in somewhere,” you sigh. “Dibs on the first room.”
“Fair. Given we’re not gonna have too long to cool our heels in here, if you need laundry, I can run a doubled-up load. Don’t have a lot of stuff to wash, but might as well be efficient about -”
Your ringtone sounds.
“Shit, fuck!” you growl, flipping your company-issued cell open with practiced ease. Aranea. Fuck you, fuck your plans, fuck everything, you guess. “Hey, what do you got for me?”
She’s soooo sorry, she knows you haven’t had an uninterrupted land day in about two weeks, but there are hardly any observers in the field, and longliners are bumping up their trips in droves, and would you please, please be willing to take an assignment, they’re waiting at the small boat harbor, hopefully you haven’t unpacked yet…
Aranea actually lives in this port, not that you run into her all that often. Even if she didn’t, you’re pretty sure your grimace could be seen from space. She has to know what bullshit this is.
You remind yourself that your next paycheck is going to be enormous. You remind yourself that odds are good you’ll be back here in a few days. You remind yourself that Cats is definitely a shitty movie, anyway.
“My data’s already submitted from my last boat. Text me the captain’s number, I’ll be there,” you sigh, hanging up and shoving your phone unceremoniously back into your pocket.
Terezi, at least, has the decency to look disappointed. Your new buddy Strider makes the shittiest mask of faux-sympathy you’ve literally ever witnessed, and you wonder if his shades would break if you clocked him. They look cheap.
“It’s exactly what it sounds like,” you say, your tone sour.
“Bad luck,” Dirk suggests.
You don’t have bad luck. That’s bullshit. You’re about to open your mouth and tell him just how bullshit it is when his phone starts to ring as well. The same tone as yours. No doubles, ew. It’s jarring enough that your reach for your cell again, just in case it’s Aranea apologizing and calling the whole thing off, but… nope.
His face falls as he checks the caller ID. You don’t have to lean over to get a good look to know that he’s getting tossed back out to sea on the next CV-Something-Or-Other, just as sure as you are.
You do, however, have to sit back languidly on your stool and flip him off.
‘Bad luck’ indeed. If you’re going down, at least you’re taking his smug ass with you.
...
It’s not the worst boat. You bunk in a stateroom with the captain, who never seems to sleep, which is fitting, because you hardly do, either. Despite the small crew, the ship has an auto-baiter, which means they can set lines and haul in lines with few breaks in between for handling the hooks, since the machines do it for them. Your days are perpetually four hours on, two hours off, until it gets too dark to see the whales.
Fishermen aren’t the only ones who got word of the favorable conditions for halibut, apparently. After a solid first day, the crew pulls up haul after haul of chewed-up lips and heads, and you actually run out of marine mammal interaction forms by the fourth day. As the engine is set to idle and the line begins to run over the roller, you watch dark, distant shapes in the choppy water surface, blow, and dive. Assiduously note the coordinates, the number, the species. Always sperm whales, always hungry as fuck.
All things considered, it could be way shittier. At least, if you weren’t fucking itching to get back to shore, the ‘weeklong’ timeline - utter bullshit - winding up extended by three days in an effort to make up for lost catch. By now, the stupid Cats movie definitely won’t be in the theater anymore. You wonder if Terezi went alone. Fuck, if she wanted, she could’ve snapped her fingers on a Saturday night and had half a dozen deckhands and three members of the Coast Guard fighting to escort her to any CGI shitfest she wanted.
Between hauls, you sit glumly on top of the wheelhouse, legs dangling over the side, coat buttoned up to your neck, and watch the whales circle in anticipation of their next meal. At least someone is having a good time.
This is what you’re here for, obviously, the actual work. How is anyone supposed to save the whales if they don’t know where the whales are? You like fishing, the captain is chill enough, even if his taste in after-dinner movies is shit, and he spends about an hour explaining how sonar works when you join him inside the wheelhouse to ask whether he’s planning on extending the trip and to set up your notebook for daily log entries. Which, like, you fucking know how sonar works, you’ve been doing this for nearly three years and you have an MS in oceanography to match your marine biology degree, but it beats his occasional morose feelings-vomit about his divorce and you try to reinforce the more tolerable monologue-fodder by acting interested.
Maybe it’s a little interesting. Everyone runs their boat a little differently, and you actually like to learn. He proceeds to wreck whatever vague sense of companionliness you were fostering by forcing everyone to watch ‘Joker’ over microwaved burritos and canned green beans that night. They talk a healthy amount of shit about other observers they’ve had, so if you ever had a shot in hell of forgetting the level of scrutiny you’re under, you’d be snapped out of that delusion pretty quickly. One vaped in the wheelhouse and ‘thought he was hot shit’ - Eridan, you’d bet anything - another baked them cookies in the galley whenever she finished her data collection early, and all of them politely wish they’d gotten her instead of you, which, well, fair.
It’s really not a bad setup, despite the rising tension as the catch continues to be minuscule and whale-mangled. The deck boss offers to lend you his satellite phone to call home if you want to. You don’t have a home to call. Terezi doesn’t pick up unknown numbers, and who the fuck else would you actually want to talk to?
He nods knowingly when you tell him so and spends the next hour unloading about his piece of shit dad who disowned him when he was fourteen. Something about the emptiness of the open ocean, the quiet of sitting with someone on deck, and smoking through half a pack of cigarettes before the next haulback really gets people to open up, even to you. You nod through it and try to tune him out, since it’s kind of weird, in general but especially for you, to play therapist to a middle-aged dude, but it’s actually kind of fucked-upedly difficult to do. Hits just a little too close to where home would be, if you had one other than shitty rentals between deployments.
When he’s done, he shoves the cigarette box into his sweats, recollects himself, and tells you, unprompted, that he has a lesbian aunt, and he thinks she’s great, and lesbians are great, as are transsexuals, and he voted for Hillary, which… fuck, he’s got the spirit, you guess? You’ve said maybe ten words over the course of the conversation, which tends to increase your likability.
You’re not going to wreck this now, not two hundred miles from land in the middle of winter, and you find an excuse to go sit alone at the stern and drown out everything but the hum of the engine behind a pair of headphones until the next haulback.
The predicted storm blows in after a few days, and both the setting and the retrieval of lines grinds to a halt as the ship shelters in a bay formed by a few uninhabited islands. The captain lends you the sight of his rifle, which you are not unpacking or thinking about, and you watch feral cows graze on lichens and long grasses as the wind howls past, sweeping up sheafs of spray from the surface of the ocean and drenching the deck. It’s a welcome reprieve from the punishing haul schedule, and that’s all you really give a shit about.
You’re knocked out of your bunk one night when the seas get really high, and you bruise the shit out of your side and elbow, but what really sucks is that they scrap plans to sail back to the port they left from. Instead, you’re bound further southeast, to evade the storm and get a higher price on the few halibut you actually managed to catch.
Well, there's a conclusive 'fuck you' from mother nature if you've ever heard one.
You cave and accept the satellite phone, just in case, and dial Terezi’s number. The connection cuts out before you can leave a message, and the deck boss makes a few sympathetic noises and then launches into a story about his divorce, jesus fuck, are all of these people divorced? You can fucking guess why!
But you don’t say that. When it comes down to it, you can keep your mouth shut, and just because you’re confirmedly headed to nowheresville doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with the crew for the rest of the trip.
So you do. You deal. You can deal with anything.
You would totally win Fear Factor. Terezi is full of it!
…
The major upside of traveling on longliners is that, while the day-to-day intensity makes trawlers look like a walk in the park, all you have to do is verify the start time of the offload, drag your gear and your duffel off the boat, and call a cab.
Usually.
You check with Aranea as soon as you’re in normal-cell range. There are no cabs. Why would there be cabs, in a tiny cannery town with a population that would fit in a decently sized four bedroom house? You wind up on the dock, waving goodbye to the crew as they hoist up a notably-light pallet of halibut, with a hundred pounds of sampling equipment rolling shakily behind you, your duffel and your backpack hanging from your shoulders, and a deep sense of existential malaise clinging to your heart.
Poetic fucking way to say you really, really don’t want to walk a mile to the bed and breakfast where you’ll be staying. Aranea offered to send another observer down to help with your shit, but the odds of that happening are… low, to say the least. It’s cold, and it’s windy enough that, once you leave the protected area of the dock, it’s hard to stand up straight. As for the icing on top: it’s three in the morning.
Luckily, you’ve been to this port before, so you aren’t totally lost.
Unluckily, you’ve been to this port before, so you know, with bitter certainty, that there’s nowhere you could feasibly get lost, because there is exactly one paved road, one company store, one bed and breakfast, and one ramshackle bar. And judging by what you heard on the captain’s radio on the way in, the storm is only going to get worse. He’s planning on waiting it out in the harbor, and shrugged when you asked for how long. A week, two weeks? He thinks he might be able to leave for another trip through some hypothetical pinhole, a theoretical ‘calm period’ in the middle of the cataclysm. For captains, this is shorthand for ‘definitely two weeks, at least, and also, I’m a fucking liar’.
You’re never getting out of here.
The bar closes at two, so there wouldn’t even be anyone awake or sober to take Aranea’s call. At least you’re not about to drop; it’s been days since you’ve had to do anything more than take coordinates and log ‘no gear in the water’, and your sleeping schedule is fucked, anyway. So you set off on the long walk from the small boat harbor to the road, over a winding gravel path and across a tiny, rickety footbridge over an inlet swollen with the tide. There are hardly any lights, and definitely no streetlights, because there isn’t a street.
“Ahoy there!” someone calls, from the docks you just left, shrouded in shadow, shit.
You pull your vichy knife off your belt and prepare to commit a murder in self defense. It always puts you on edge, lurking around shipyards at night, for some reason.
Wait. Who the fuck says ‘ahoy’? Even the corniest old captains don’t fucking say ahoy.
“Jake English,” you reply, your voice nearly lost on the wind. “If that’s you sneaking up on me, I’m gutting you like the world’s beefiest halibut and selling you to the cannery.”
“So it is you!” he replies, his relief audible, picking up his pace as you shove your knife away and try to retrieve your baskets full of gear. “Hold on, now, I promised Aranea I’d lend you a hand!”
You could have protested the offer more, you suppose. If you’re going to drag this shit all the way to the bed and breakfast, you’re kind of going to need all the help you can get. Doesn’t mean you have to like it.
“Aren’t you getting off your own boat?” you complain, abandoning your efforts with your baskets and crossing your arms in annoyance. “Where’s your shit?”
“I’m assigned on the same vessel for my next trip, just taking a pause here for the storm, so all my work gear is still aboard! Let me take your backpack, at least, won’t you?”
Lucky bastard. Several sections of pollock opened while you were on your longliner, and pollock vessels often have observers on for two or three trips in a row. It’s less common with longliners, which tend to make longer trips and fewer of them. You sigh, but hand over your backpack as he bounds up cheerfully.
“Good to see you,” you say curtly, sighing before you add, “thanks.”
“Oh, you have no idea how glad I am to lay eyes on you!” he replies. “Or will be, once we get somewhere I can actually see past the damned bridge of my nose, heh. Where the fucking dickens are we supposed to be going? I’m terrible with verbal directions, and my phone’s as good as a brick out here.”
“Yeah, that’ll be the southeast for you,” you sigh. “The bed and breakfast has wifi, but it’s slow as hell. Takes ages to get your data sent.”
You’re not looking forward to that, or anything, though at least the storm promises you’ll have plenty of time to handle your deck sheets, and there’s no urgent salmon-count after a longlining trip. You have a day or two to relax before someone’ll be up your ass about your data, and then a week or two to do some quality navel-gazing and wish you were anywhere else.
Well. Not anywhere. One particular where.
It’s a little easier to redistribute the weight with just your duffel balanced on your wheeled baskets and your backpack on a different back. You start over again, pushing it over the ramshackle bridge, which is really going to fall down and fucking kill someone someday. Unfortunately, it stays standing, and you live to see the other side, painfully hoisting your five scum-encrusted gear baskets into the weeds and then, slowly, up to the road.
No sidewalks, but also barely any cars.
Jake trails after you like a lost puppy. He isn’t doing his typical motormouth routine, and it seems like getting out his initial halfhearted foray at conversation has left him exhausted and deflated. You figure he’s had a tough boat and leave the issue, and him, alone. If he goes for it, you’ll let him have the first shower, but you’re not going to offer.
“Okay, the fucked up part,” you announce, when you’ve been walking for over half a mile, slowed by the fact that you’re legitimately pushing your own bodyweight along with you, “is going to be getting up this slope.”
You stop at the foot of a bare dirt incline, interspersed with slick rocks, bundles of waterlogged vegetation, and pools of muddy slush. It’s been raining here, but thank fuck it isn’t right this moment, because that’d just fucking kill you.
There’s a sizable piece of construction equipment parked square in the center of the path.
Jake sets down his bags on the damp pavement, putting his hands on his hips and taking in the challenge, his furrowed brow visible in the orange light of a few salt lamps decorating the nearby company store.
“Uh, is this really the only way up?” he asks, gazing up longingly at the cottage perched atop the incline.
“There’s a gravel road, too, but it’s another mile winding up around the hill. Look, I can do this myself if you can’t hack it,” you sigh.
He furs up at the sheer thought, like you sort of knew he would.
“Excuse me, Vriska, just what kind of man do you think I am?”
“Shot in the dark, a tired one. Look, I’ve done this alone before, it’s no big deal!”
“I would sooner crawl up this damned thing on my hands and knees than leave you alone out here in the middle of the night,” he insists. “How about you leave your baskets, we take the rest up, get it to the… the place where we’re supposed to go, wherever in sam hill that is, and then we… flip ‘em turnways, cart them up, once we’ve figured out the footing?”
Two trips. Ugh. The last time you did this on your own, you neglect to mention, you crushed one of your fingernails and nearly broke your leg, but that was carting them down, not up. When you arrive during daylight hours, the host usually brings his truck out to help, but the coordinators can’t be assed to bug the proprietors of the only place on the entire godforsaken rock renting out rooms to do a fetch quest for a couple of bedraggled observers in the middle of the night.
“Fine,” you say, hefting your duffel onto your shoulder. “Give me back my backpack, fair’s fair.”
He will not give you back your backpack. You vividly remember hating him the first time you met him, sigh, and mentally muscle yourself into letting the slight go. Now that you can actually see his face, after all, he looks like he’s been awake for about a week straight. It’s enough to knock the sharp edge off his dumb ‘weirdly ruggedly handsome’ deal, which, under normal circumstances, you would call a win. In lamplight, in the middle of the night, knowing where you both are coming from, it’s aaaaaaaalmost kind of worrying.
“Hup we go, then,” he declares, taking three steps up the slope, slipping on a patch of mud, and falling flat on his ass.
“Fucking hell,” you swear. “You have too much on your back, dipshit, it’s throwing your balance off, just let me have my stuff, holy shit.”
But you stop midway through wrestling your backpack away from him - you can’t help him up with thirty extra pounds weighing him down! - when you realize his shoulders are shaking with barely suppressed sobs.
God fuck, you’re really going to do this here, aren’t you. Okay. Fine. Fine fine fine fine fine fine fine!
“Tell me what’s wrong and then I’ll help you up,” you announce, crossing your arms decisively, abandoning efforts to assist him, and tapping your foot on a conveniently placed rock.
He looks up at you with big, sad eyes, and instantly begins to blubber like the world’s most gratingly modelesque toddler.
“I’m so thirsty and I’m so tired and - and they didn’t have any food at all, there was one loaf of bread and some fucking lunch meat and they… they ran out after two days, so I had nothing to eat at all, and then they ran out of bottled water, and the stuff in the taps was all brown, and I thought I was going to die there, and I… I went to the captain to ask if there was anything to drink, and all they had was Red Bull, so I had Red Bull, and that was all, and I’m pretty sure that’s the osmotic equivalent of actually drinking urine, but my mouth was so dry, and I haven’t slept in days, and then I had the world’s worst offload, I’ve been standing around freezing my ass off for six goddamn hours, and I almost quit when Aranea called me, really, I was so close to quitting, and I can’t get back on that ship, Vriska, I won’t get back on that godforsaken ship! I will simply die here! Right here on the ground! I don’t think I can get up! You will have to go on without me! I can’t even cry about it properly because there’s not a drop of fucking moisture in my whole body to spare!”
You blink down at him. Well, that’s a lot.
Uh.
“Hey, look. Drop your bags. All of them. Just fucking listen to me, okay? Put them down. Just walk up the stupid hill. That’s all you have to do. Just go.”
He makes a halfhearted choking noise, but complies, letting the bags down gently at the foot of the incline and slowly re-finding his feet. You click your tongue encouragingly, which you’re pretty sure is usually standard protocol when you’re dealing with, like, a dog, or a horse, but look. You’re not a naturally comforting person. Or a naturally helpful person. You feel completely ridiculous, setting down your own bag, taking out your phone, and using the flashlight to carefully find footholds on rocks and steadier-looking places in the muck. He doesn’t say a word, keeps his head down and steps where you step, though you can still hear him hyperventilating.
The top floor apartment of the two-story house is easily accessible by a sort of wooden deck that wraps around the structure, and you urge him up and to the door. No normal observer would leave it locked. Nobody fucking lives out here!
It’s locked.
Cursing, you lead him back down to the first floor, which actually is unlocked, wend your way in, take your mud-coated boots off, scrounge around for the key and the note the host left, and go through all the fucking motions again to get the two of you back to the top floor, which is perennially reserved for itinerant members of your profession.
This time, it works. The living room is empty, but there are two bedrooms, each with two single beds, tucked around the corner, an open kitchen, and a bathroom. It’s basically the goddamn Ritz Carlton after any prolonged period of time at sea, and you don’t waste a second hanging around. The kitchen is stocked, and you force a glass of water into his hands and make him lay down on one of the couches.
“Sit. Stay,” you tell him. “If you get up, take a fucking shower and then lay back down. I’m gonna handle the rest of the shit.”
“Vriska, I can’t possibly -”
“Shut up,” you snap, already irritated at the prospect of spending the next half hour figuring out logistics, which you hate doing. “Call it even for the salmon shit from last time. You can buy me a drink tomorrow. Okay? It’s fair.”
“If someone’s breaking in, can you please kill me and get it over with?” a voice interrupts, and you look up, fully ready to rip anyone a new asshole. It’s your old not-quite-acquaintance, that stick-up-his-ass fuckface Strider, though at least he’s fully dressed, un-shaded, and not coated in boat grime, which you definitely are.
“Not today. You’ve got two options,” you tell him. “Play nursemaid or help me haul luggage.”
He glances nervously over at Jake, hunched over his glass of water, looking like he may start to cry again at any moment, and starts to put his boots on without a second’s hesitation.
“Lead the way,” he says, sighing deeply.
…
It doesn’t take half an hour. Between the two of you, you get most of the shit up the hill and either stowed in the shed or piled up in the living room in maybe ten minutes. Your fingernails, this time, remain intact, your legs conclusively unbroken. When it’s over with, you actually thank him, and he asks you not to mention it before turning in.
You sure as fuck won’t be doing anything of the sort.
Jake is out cold on the couch by the time you reenter the apartment, and you jostle him awake, despite the fact that you would definitely rather be asleep yourself. He’ll get chewed out if he doesn’t at least get his salmon count in, and you dig through his bag, find a deck sheet with a species tally on it, make him verify that it’s the right one and unlock his computer. Three chinook, one chum. Only takes a second to punch the numbers, a few minutes after that to go through the shitty connection to the database, and then you turn off his laptop.
Poor dumbass. You make him drink another glass of water, tear the duvet off one of the beds from the empty room, take a quick shower, and pass out in the other bed yourself.
Roomies again.
Joy of all motherfucking joys.
…
You wake up to the slow realization that you can smell something other than salt, fish blood, and the comforting-but-weirdly-chemical scent of the inside of your own sleeping bag. The fancy shampoo you unceremoniously appropriated when you showered the previous night, and something cooking in the distance. You didn’t have dinner on your boat after the offload, and now the skipped meal is catching up with you.
Worst comes to worst, the kitchen has a pantry typically stocked with the nonperishable leftovers from whatever observers passed through previously. You shuffle out of bed, knot your hair up on top of your head, and head out into the late-morning light streaming into the living room.
The duvet is folded innocently on the couch, and Jake is so focused on whatever he’s doing in the kitchen that he doesn’t notice you’re awake until you cough loudly and wave. The sun through the harbor-facing window catches a cloud of steam billowing around him, and he smiles over at you, freshly showered and clean-cut, like nothing ever happened.
“Morning, m’friend! What do you like in your omelette? Er, well, sort of scrambled eggs, I can’t really do an omelette reliably, but… it’s the nutritional value that counts!”
“Everything you’ve got,” you grumble. “Coffee?”
“Mostly milk and sugar, just how you like it,” he says brightly, pouring a cup and sliding it across the table.
You usually at least go through the motions of pretending otherwise, since you have a reputation to uphold, but he’s caught you in a moment of weakness before. By all accounts, you should be a black-coffee-only kind of badass. The fact that you aren’t is private knowledge. Bastard.
It’s pretty good, though anything is good relative to boat coffee. You tell him so, and he beams, luminescent as the sunlit white lace curtains in the kitchen window.
The story as to how he got ahold of the ingredients is its own kettle of worms. Apparently he’s been downstairs and met the hosts, charmed them thoroughly by adopting the persona of the diligent early riser, and cleaned out their kitchen of his desired cooking supplies. They’re an older couple, decent but a bit nosy, and if you’re actually going to be here for two weeks, you’re pretty sure he’ll have their social security numbers and be in both their wills by the end of this. You can respect the power move, even if you’re already planning to mock him mercilessly for being the world’s biggest suckup.
Everything, from the asynchronously good weather to the breakfast to the several solid nights of sleep you’ve had to his completely normal demeanor, literally all of it has you doubting your own mind. Since there’s no way everything was that fucked up last night, right?
You glance over by the door. Three pairs of deck boots, all caked in dried-up mud. No, definitely not a weird fever dream.
“So, what the fuck happened on your boat?” you ask, super casually getting straight to the point.
He laughs.
“Nothing, really! They were a perfectly lovely crew, just all rather young, I suppose. Didn’t exactly stock up before the trip, and… I was just being a little ridiculous last night, I’m obviously fine, three days without food and a day without water is perfectly survivable, it turns out, though it does put a fellow a bit out of sorts. And I’m hydrating and all! Just got somewhat peely-wally what with the whole… all of it.”
You narrow your eyes.
“That’s bullshit. They can’t do that to you.”
“I beg to differ! They can, and they did, and I sure didn’t complain, so… there you have it!”
“Do you actually buy that, for like, a second? Can you hear yourself, when you talk? Fucking hell,” you sigh, as he passes you the plate of scrambled eggs, still smiling placidly.
“Clear as a bell,” he says warmly. “Really, Vriska, what’s the harm in toughing it out?”
Well, the specific harm is in the fact that he clearly didn’t tough it out, he got his ass kicked by the situation, and he’s going to go right back into it and get his ass kicked again, in exactly the same way, and you’re not going to be around to clean up after him. What the fuck would he have even done if you weren’t around last night? Just sat there and had a panic attack in the mud until a dock worker tripped over him on their commute and probably walked off with all his shit?
The eggs are good, though. You haven’t had a non-canned vegetable in ages, and there’s salsa and fresh jalapenos and onions and some good cheese going on in this breakfast-y thing. In spite of everything, you’re feeling too content and way too pleased with yourself for being Actual Hero Vriska Serket, Savior Of Newbies And Eater Of Breakfast to really get upset.
Aaaaaaaand that’s totally on purpose. His smile is completely self congratulatory. He knows he can get away with this, won’t have to hold anyone accountable for anything, and he can bat those stupidly long eyelashes and everything will be fine by morning.
“You’re a fucking snake,” you sigh, then go back to your plate. “But this is delicious.”
“Ah, thank you!” he replies. “And I know. And I know you know. So do I still owe you a drink?”
“Two drinks.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Vriska. Two, but the coffee counts for one.”
“Three drinks. Don’t fuck with me.”
He tuts castigatingly, but makes another scrambled egg for you without being asked, so you figure it evens out. As you eat, flipping on the television for some much-needed background noise, the sound of the shower cuts out, and the both of you exchange looks. Oh, right, the third musketeer. You have no idea how to interpret the eye-conversation Jake is trying to have with you, so you give up and shrug exaggeratedly until the bathroom door swings open and Dirk sweeps into the kitchen, lavishly draped in three fluffy towels, entirely shrouded in white terrycloth.
Jake is almost done with another plate of eggs, and he offers them with a flourish. Dirk frowns.
“Both of you assholes stole my shampoo,” he announces, by way of greeting. “Smells like a honeysuckle orgy out here.”
You can’t help it; you laugh out loud. “Beats the alternative, doesn’t it?”
“Company store’s a two minute walk,” he complains. “Didn’t sign up to be the Mother fucking Theresa of Pantene products. I’m not running a charity, here, legitimately, I -”
“Neither am I, but won’t you have some breakfast with us?” Jake interjects, smooth as anything, setting the plate down and pulling out a chair, upping the ante as Dirk fails to pick up on the subtle offer. “Coffee, orange juice, both, neither? I’m entirely at your disposal.”
Dirk’s mouth snaps shut mid-riff. Without the dumb sunglasses, he can’t hide his surprise at that turn of events. He takes in your plate of delicious food with a dawning lack of comprehension as to what the fuck he’s walked into. Joke’s on him! He may have slithered in and conned Terezi into thinking there’s literally anything interesting about him, but you’re also capable of unexpected friendships with people who are cooler than him. Anyone is cooler than him, in your professional opinion.
Game, set, match, Strider, you arrogant piece of shit.
With exaggerated politeness, Jake pretends not to notice any of the agonized revelations being bandied about, busying himself with the coffee machine. You pretend no such fucking thing, raising an eyebrow surreptitiously between bites.
“You two know each other?” you ask, like the queen of subtlety and tact that you are.
“Not really,” Dirk begins.
“You wound me!” Jake laughs, turning on his heel with a cup of black coffee in hand. “We met briefly in Seattle when you stopped by the bunkhouse before deploying while my class was still in training. I suppose I didn’t make much of an impression, with my head buried in my manual?”
“It’s comin’ back to me,” he says. “Glad you stuck around. More priors in the field is better for everybody. Second deployment?”
“Sure as anything! It’s funny, I still feel like a bit of a newbie, but I’ve heard it takes a few trips around the block, or around the Gulf of Alaska, as it were, to really get the hang of it. About how long have you been in the business?”
He accepts the coffee, waving away the gestured offer of milk and sugar, the mug still visibly steaming as he tries to drink it, winces as he burns his mouth, and keeps sipping anyway.
Oh, this is fucking rich. This poor asshole. He’s absolutely bought in, hook, line, and sinker. One of those massive industrial halibut hooks, too. Not bending any time soon. With any luck, someone’ll gaff him and release his ass before he hits the crucifier.
Jake doesn’t strike you as that kind of conscientious.
“Little under two years since my first deployment,” Dirk explains, once he’s done pouring boiling liquid into his face to avoid answering the question. “Takes some getting used to, definitely. So, uh. How do you and Serket know each other?”
“Miss Serket is really the best there is out here,” he says, with a wink in your direction that you absolutely don’t know how to interpret. Like, he’s right, you’re awesome, but it doesn’t actually need to be said! You say it often enough. “We were roommates for a week back in D season.”
“Shit, that monsoon that came in from Japan and shut everything down?”
“The very same! Y’know, the sort of situation where you either slit each others’ throats in the dead of night in a fit of cabin-fever-pique rather than endure them another day or else emerge the best of friends. Sort of what we all seem to be gearing up to go through, not that you’d guess it from the lovely morning we’ve been having!”
Weather in a port often has very little to do with how fucked over the fishing grounds are. You heard forty-five to fifty foot seas; that’s sure not nothing, but the weather system stirring it up might be slow to hit shore. At the moment, what little you can see of the harbor is even more serene than it was the previous night.
Dirk nods acknowledgement, regarding you with some - gag - increased level of interest. On Animal Planet, which continues to play quietly in the background, a guinea pig completes an obstacle course. You shovel the last of your breakfast down.
“Wellllllll, not to interrupt this whole sparkling conversation you guys have going on, but I actually do need to buy soap and shit, and we could definitely afford to stock up on some food before it’s data entry hell time,” you announce.
“I’ll come with!” Jake chimes in, near-instantly. “It’d do me good to see a little of the place in the daylight.”
“Just don’t expect to see much.” You sling your jacket on and put your plate in the sink for later as he vaguely tidies the kitchen, which is to say, puts more shit in the sink. “There isn’t much, unless you’re a big fan of rocks and eagles.”
He sighs. That’s the difference between a true newbie and someone who’s been out for longer than a few months; eagles stop being exciting after the first few times you watch a whole armada of the feathery bastards descend on a dumpster like a biblical fucking plague. Rats with wings. The fishermen love disillusioning the wide-eyed idealists as they’re introduced to actually-kind-of-meh wildlife. Weird cultish US-American eagle-worship is the first thing to go.
Even with the benefit of breakfast, you’re in a dark mood as you kick the mud and dead grass off your boots and step out into the freezing morning. What looked like a beautiful day, from the inside of the cooking-warmed kitchen, is actually profoundly windy, damp, and cold enough to have you hiking up your coat to cover as much of your face as possible, your hands shoved deep in the pockets, one clenched around your phone.
Your phone is useless out here unless you’re willing to shell out ten bucks for 500 megabytes of piddlingly slow wifi, only accessible from the tavern, the adjoining laundry facility, most of the cannery property, and loitering outside the marina office. Maybe you can find a moment to slip out and call Terezi, like a square. Your work phone, at least, works everywhere but at sea.
It’s just that you don’t really know what to say. Hey, ‘Rezi, I’m stuck on a rock a few hundred miles southeast for the foreseeable future. I’m calling because I’m pathetic and I miss hearing your voice, not because I actually have something to say, because nothing interesting has happened. And nothing interesting is going to happen, because you’re not here, because you’re smart enough to live somewhere with more than one road and have a job that doesn’t make you pack up your whole life and leave every twenty seconds. Maybe you’ll never have to deal with me again, because there’s no guarantee I’ll ever be in any port at any time. Anyway, still hopelessly into you, hope you’re staying warm with my flannel, because I’m sure freezing my ass off out here. Bye.
You sigh, leading Jake in the opposite direction from the quickest route, the mudslide-waiting-to-happen, and down a gravel path that winds through low, dead, spiny brush, around a conglomeration of cannery-affiliated housing units, down to the main road. It’s still sunny, at least, though it’s a cold, white, wintery light.
He seems in good spirits, which makes one of you.
“Didn’t expect you to come back,” you tell him, semi-conversationally. “What, D-season didn’t kick your ass hard enough, had to come back for more? I thought you were going to grad school or something.”
“In a sense,” he says, shrugging the question off breezily. “I’d say ‘or something’ is right on the money, and this sure is something. How does the company store here stack up to the one in King Cove, would you say? I’m absolutely dying for some fresh fruit.”
“Yeah, well, it’s your lucky day,” you say, not willing to chase down the deflection. “This one is pretty good, and the earlier we hit it, the better stocked it’ll be. The storm is going to keep them from getting anything new, but they have produce at the beginning of the week.”
He consults his watch. “Sunday, huh. Strange to be reminded that days of the week are a thing, isn’t it?”
You make a low agreement-adjacent noise. Days boil down to the month-date-year on top of your deck forms, while you’re at sea. Not like the fish stop swimming because it’s a Sunday.
The gravel crunches pleasantly beneath your boots, and though you have to step through a ditch, they’re made of solid neoprene and come up all the way to your knee. He follows you through the long grass and swill of freezing, murky water without hesitation. Away from the squat structures of the apartments and outside of the gorse-y shelter of the low vegetation, the wind buffets you freely and you curse, leaning into it.
“Not too much further,” you tell him, pointing down the winding gravel road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. “It’s also a gas station.”
He squints off into the distance.
“People get real economic about multi-use structures out in the boonies, don’t they.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you holding up alright, Vriska?”
“Just dreading entering two weeks of data once we get back to the bed and breakfast,” you grumble. “And two more weeks of sitting on our hands, not doing shit.”
“Hey now, there’s a bathtub and fresh water and a television that seems to work,” he says brightly. “And the majesty of nature around us! Chin up, it can’t be that bad.”
“At least when you’re on the boats, you’re making good money,” you retort. “Guess I just think it’s kinda bullshit, getting a minimum-wage per-diem to not do shit but maybe look at some rocks and watch Hoarders.”
“Really? I think that sounds kind of splendid,” he laughs. “Gosh, but I’m practically chomping at the bit to do a little nothing for a while.”
You don’t reply to that, because you get it. A tough boat will do that to you, and you actually know Jake decently well, and it’s your least favorite thing about him, the fact that he’s probably going to sincerely enjoy every minute of this, being cooped up with the storm and some poor besotted idiot piece of shit to tie in knots around his finger. You almost feel bad for Strider. Almost.
“Ah, but you’d rather be back in -”
“Shut up,” you say. “Obviously, yeah, there’s places I’d rather wait out a storm. You don’t have to say it.”
“With -”
“I said shut the fuck up.”
“You didn’t, really. The ‘fuck’ is new,” he replies, smiling broadly.
You groan and throw up your hands in surrender. “Fine, alright? You’ve missed a ton, though, for your information. We actually went out a couple of times. I was kind of about to say something. Like, I was getting around to it. Every other A-season I’ve ended up stuck in her port eternally, and I was… bluh. I had plans, okay?”
“Well, you have a phone, don’t you?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” you snap.
“Don’t I know it.”
At least he’s not bullshitting you about that. He goes kind of quiet, redirects his attention to the bleak, rocky scenery, the wind-whipped grey harbor, as you near an unimpressive brown structure with two fueling stations outside.
He buys an insane amount of frozen food. Like, legitimately, you’re not sure it’s all going to fit in the freezer. You hunt through the aisles for shampoo and a few packs of ramen and some flash-frozen vegetables for yourself, and by the time you meet up at the counter, he’s accumulated enough to feed a small army for a week.
“Can you tell I’ve recently had an intimate brush with starvation?” he announces cheerily, as you scrutinize his purchases.
“Yeah, actually.”
He tries to convince you to let him buy your items, too, though you’re having absolutely none of it. Drinks, at the shitty bar. That was the deal. Tomorrow night, since it’s apparently Sunday. He pouts impressively.
“Save the puppydog eyes for Strider,” you suggest, helping him muscle the stacks of bags and boxes out the door. “He might actually buy it.”
“Aw. You’re no fun,” he complains, then pauses mid-step. “What do you think of that fellow, anyway?”
“He’s dumb enough to fall for your little song and dance, if that’s what you’re wondering. Exactly that dumb.”
“Come off it, that’s not at all what I’m asking. I’m not actually blind, y’know. Just soliciting your professional opinion. Mano-to-womano. What do you think his deal is?”
“I’m going to forget that you just said those words in that order,” you sigh, trudging ahead. “Because I don’t want to strangle you out here and then have to hang out with him alone for two weeks! But I actually haven’t lived with the guy before, so your guess is pretty much as good as mine.”
“Huh,” Jake replies.
“He’s some kind of weird pals with Terezi,” you add. “Don’t ask me how the fuck that happened.”
“Well, who’d expect to see you and me pal-ing around, Miss Serket?”
“I don’t fucking know, I think there’d have to be head trauma involved,” you sigh.
“That’s the spirit! Look, whether or not you’re willing to seize life by the horns and have at it, figure out where you stand in relation to the people of whom you’re clearly enamored and, y’know, sweep that lovely damsel off her feet and into your capable arms, I like to have things sorted out. You don’t have to get involved in my shenanigans, it’s fine. But it might be fun, Vriska, hm?”
“What might be fun?” you demand, bristling, feeling more than a little rankled by some of the shit he’s spewing but not really cottoning on to any kind of point.
“Tomorrow, I was thinking of doing some sort of hike up those distant mountains, for the purpose of getting a better feel of the area once we’ve all got our data in and our living arrangement felt out. Ideally before the weather turns. Would you be interested in coming along?”
You blink, turning back to face him. That sounds absolutely fucking atrocious, but you know the area, and you know yourself, and you know how miserable most of the shit that airs on Mondays can be. As much as you’re looking forward to wallowing in your own misery and preferably staying in bed, where you don’t need pants, for as long as possible, you could put that off for a day.
To watch the fireworks. That is what he’s promising, if the wink is anything to go by.
“You’re not going to kill him, are you?” you clarify.
“Nothing of the sort!” he protests, hiking his bags up on his shoulder and frowning emotively. “I just think it might be fun, to all get to know each other a little better.”
Under normal circumstances, you would tell him to fuck off with that bullshit. But there’s no such thing as normal circumstances in the field, you guess, a hard-learned lesson after three years of this. And you are looking forward to a distraction, at least, which is better than the expanse of nothing to look forward to, looming in your future.
You’re really not the audience for his eyelash-fluttering bullshit, at all, but god, if Strider really is the level of ‘god’s perfect idiot’ it takes to buy what Jake English is selling, that’s probably the funniest shit you’ve ever heard. And it’d be a hilarious story to tell Terezi. A really, really good excuse.
“Fine,” you say. “I’ll walk up a mountain with you. No set quantity of drinks for barter, either, just enough to forget how much my feet hurt.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” he says, picking up the pace a little to sidle in next to you on the trail. His eyes sparkle mischievously.
“How the shit are you making your eyes do that?” you demand.
“Lots of practice,” he replies, plucking a desiccated husk of a flower from a thoroughly-dead bush and trying to set it in your hair. You shake it away immediately, like a cat splashed with cold water, and repress the urge to bare your teeth at him to complete the image. “Oh, come on, now, adventure awaits!”
“Data entry first,” you tell him.
It doesn’t dim his doofy megawatt grin even marginally.
“Ugh. What’s the smile for?”
“I’ve missed your company, Vriska, that’s all,” he says, hip-checking you as he walks, nearly toppling you into the dead shrubbery.
That’d be kind of a first. You shove him back, twice as hard, and he actually stumbles before he catches himself, laughing delightedly.
“Maybe I’ve missed you, too,” you say, breaking into a sprint as you pull ahead, almost back to the warmth and security of four walls, the wind tearing at your coat, your hair streaming behind you as you run.
You try to dash out of earshot before you have to hear him ‘aww’ at you. It doesn’t quite work, but he doesn’t have to see the corner of your mouth tug up in your own sort of smile, either, so you call it a win.