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In the middle of the night she pounds relentlessly on your door. It's hard to say how she made the trip but it must have been important. You know it's Vriska because she knocks exactly eight times and pauses for approximately two seconds (if you're lucky) before pounding eight times again. You know she's upset because the sound reverberates through your entire hive. Vriska is often upset about things, but you worry for the condition of your front door and climb out of your recuperacoon and stifle a yawn. You take a moment to clean yourself up before you pad down the stairs from your tower in your red silk pajamas. When you reach the door you can hear the wood splitting under her fist. You wait and count, five... six... seven... eight... and open the door on her pause.
Your eyes are still adjusting to the dark when you look at her. She's maybe an inch or two taller than you, a wide-eyed animal made of teeth and anger and tangled hair silhouetted on a dusky-violet skyline. Her blue blood drips from her knuckles and pools on your step. She bristles when you open the door, muscles tightening to snap. She manages to fight off the urge to lunge forward and rake her nails across your jugular, and the idea makes you shiver.
"Yes?"
"Fuck, Maryam," Vriska snaps, pumping her fist in anger and drawing a streak of blue across the ground. "Let me in!"
You move to the side, opening the door for your moirail, who skitters in on long skinny legs, back hunched and teeth grinding. You close the door quietly behind her as she paces, muscles tight and fists clenched, a dotted line of blue tracing her path in the dark. She's a dangerous, murderous creature and it excites you, but you remind yourself that she came here for a reason. "Let me see your hand," you instruct, and hold out your palm for her.
Vriska's response is to snarl at you, bright orange eyes staring you down. A blush rises to your face but you don't move. "You came here for a reason," you remind her, your voice loud in the oppressive silence of the dark. "You want someone to stop you."
She hisses and her jaw shifts, the sound of grinding teeth running up and down your spine. She regards you, standing still, a small pool of blood forming on the floor under her hand. Her fist opens and closes, increasing the blood flow.
You move forward, daring to reach forward and take Vriska's right hand. You see her tense, shoulders lifting defensively as you take her fist in your palm, slick with blood. Her knuckles have been broken open but her nails have also torn the skin of her palm. You cradle her fist between your hands, marveling a moment at how dainty her fingers are. Her huge, burning spirit (and maybe also her large mop of hair) work hard to hide her dainty frame and her fragile heart.
"Let's go upstairs," you say, and guide her by the hand.
Vriska growls low in the back of her throat as you guide her up the stairs by her wrist, your own hand soaked in her blue blood and the other on the handrail. She follows, hunched, like some sort of tamed subjuggulator, but you know her well enough to see her unwinding. It's in the subtle relaxing of her muscles, and that she's letting you guide her at all.
You weave her in silence through the hallways to your respiteblock, alight with stars. You glance back at Vriska, her bangs falling in her eyes and chin lowering toward her chest. You release her wrist and she glances up to watch you as you cross the room, and you feel the red glow of seven eyes on your back.
You walk to your sewing table and after a moment of peering you find a strip of scrap white cotton. You raise it gingerly between your clean left forefinger and thumb and turn, taking Vriska's trembling wrist and guiding her to the refreshment block.
Your entire hive has large and plentiful windows that let the night in, including the refreshment block. Vriska has remarked in the past that yours is also larger than most, but she makes no comment now as you place the scrap cloth on the counter next to the ablution basin. The counter is decorated with potpourri and fluffy towels, their bright colours washed out in the dark. You turn the water on and wash Vriska's blood from your hands, watching as it runs day-blue down the sink. You reach to the pile of towels and select a small face cloth, twist the water warm, and run the cloth under it. You turn to Vriska, who grinds her teeth audibly, and reach to take her clenched hand in yours. You try to work your fingers under hers to splay her hands, but all it earns you is a bit of blood of your own. Instead you rest her fist in your palm and raise it, touching the cloth to the broken skin on her knuckles.
Vriska hisses and lashes out with her left hand, hitting you in the jaw with her open palm, causing you to bite down painfully on the inside of your lip. You respond by yanking at her wrist. She growls and lurches forward, but her feet remain square. You sigh, and with the hand holding the cloth you extend your little finger and brush Vriska's too-long bangs out of her eyes, and a spare lock of hair behind her sloping shoulder. Her eyes widen, just a little bit. "We can get this over with quickly if you stay still," you tell her, "open your hand."
She waits a while, as you look her in the eyes before tentatively opening her hand to you. You give her a little smile and take her outstretched fingers under your own as though giving her a manicure; which you note might be something fun to do later. You dab at her broken knuckles again, and she tenses and hisses and occasionally re-clenches her fists while you poke at your broken lip with your tongue and say "tell me what happened."
"Dualscar!" Vriska cries, and being reminded of the event makes her clench her fists again until you tilt her wrist back a bit - just enough to pinch a little. "Ouch! I mean, fuck!" She grinds her teeth. "You're supposed to be helping me, not snapping my limbs!"
"That is not what is going on and you know it," you tell her, trying not to smirk. A talking Vriska is a happy Vriska. You give her palm one final, gentle squeeze before tossing the cloth in the sink, and you fetch the cotton strip. While she speaks, you wrap her wounds.
Vriska growls. "He backstabbed me, that filthy backstabber! Fuck Maryam, that hurts!"
"You will be just fine," you say, tying the cloth into a bow over her knuckles. "Stay right here." You turn and go back to your respiteblock and Vriska continues to yell after you.
"We had a deal," she yells, and something crashes to the floor in your refreshment block. "And he took it all for himself! I can't face spidermom now or she'll eat me alive!" Her voice trembles with fury. There's a thud followed by loud and angry gibberish that might be Vriska swearing while biting on her hands and when you return with your sewing chair you discover that is exactly what is happening. Her teeth dig in to the skin of the knuckles on her left hand, and you reach over to slap it away. She turns to growl at you, tensing.
You just point to the chair. "Sit down."
She stares at you a while before she does it. You're her moirail after all. She doesn't always like to do what you ask but she came here for you. For you to know what was best. So she frowns, and she sits, dropping in the chair so you know she's not very happy about it. She crosses her arms over her chest and swivels to follow you as you collect some bottles from where you've perched them around the ablution trap and set them up on the counter behind her.
"I shouldn't have expected better from a stuck-up highblood like that guy," she hisses as you spin her chair around, facing away from the counter. Her nails dig into the skin of her arms. You watch the blue spring up through punctures in her jacket and sigh. "I had to get out of there, I was going to just freak out!"
Vriska's breath hitches on her words as you pull her hair back from behind her head and over her shoulders. You tilt the chair back as best you can and pull Vriska's long, long, tangled mess of hair back to the ablution basin and run the water. The basin is deep so you don't have to worry about overflow. You wet your hands and pull back her bangs, dampening the hair at the back of her head as you go. She closes her eyes and heaves a large sigh, her anger vanishing under your hands. You dare to slip off her glasses from around her ears and she lets you, arms still crossed, and waits.
Vriska has a lot of hair and it takes you a long time to make sure it's all wet. You take it in your hands and spread it out, fanning the tangles apart as best you can with an occasional irritated grunt from your moirail. With time and attention, her hair will turn from a thick uncontrollable mop to a long, slick of fabric.
You twist the water off and turn to your bottles on the counter. Vriska enjoys flowery smells about half the time, but you know she's too aggressively indecisive to be consulted on the matter. You settle on a high-quality citrus-cented shampoo for tangles. You need it for yourself sometimes.
You squeeze a handful of the shampoo out onto your hand and place the bottle back on the counter before spreading the soap across both of your hands. You massage a bit of it into the hair at her scalp before moving back and starting with care from the bottom. You lather her hair in a large mess, spreading her locks with your fingers to undo the tangles - you can already see them coming free - before you move back to Vriska's scalp. You scratch her lightly with your nails, easing the soap right down to the root of that tangled mess, around her horns, and she sighs. Her blue eyelashes rest against her cheek. A hot feeling grows in your chest.
You turn the water back on to rinse her hair in much the same way as before, spreading it little bits at a time and letting the water run through, working your way from the bottom and toward Vriska. When you get to her you have to slide her closer to the basin, and take her head in your hands and guide her under the tap, careful not to clip her horns on anything. You take water in your palm to wash the line of hair on her forehead, to keep any from getting in her eyes. She glances at you, a little nervous, until it's over, but she practically purrs in your hands when you rinse and scratch at the back of her scalp. You bite gingerly on your lip.
Conditioner doesn't lather, so you use much more of that, folding it through her thick hair to coat as much as you can, going back for a little bit more several times. You press the ends of her hair together in your fingers, and weave it in through her horns on your nails. Her shoulders drift back, relaxed, and her chest rises and falls with another sigh as she unwinds under your hands. The conditioner, with your guidance, pulls apart the rest of the tangles and when you rinse it feels like silk. You're quite sure that you're the only one Vriska will let wash her hair. She's always too preoccupied to do it herself.
You take a towel and dry her hair as best you can, squeezing it between the towel and running it lengthwise. She seems content to sit there while you fuss over her, rubbing the water out. There's a lot of it to dry and you take your time. Having her lay herself out to you with trust like this makes your stomach twist with pity.
You take a towel and wrap it around her shoulders. Vriska peers up at you with one eye and squawks when you roll her in the chair back into your respiteblock. "A little warning next time, fussyfangs!" she barks, clenching the arms of the chair until you stop, rolling it and her back to your sewing table. You open one of the drawers and pull out a brush - a large one, from when you kept your hair long - that you now keep for Vriska.
You offer her your hand, but she knows how this goes, and stands herself. She wiggles out of her long-sleeved shirt, arms streaked with blue blood from her restless anger. While she readjusts the towel on her shoulders, her uncontrollable hair now damp, long, and straight, you grab some more spare cotton strips. Vriska lets out an irritated sort of sigh and holds out her arms so you can wrap them up for her. "Ouch!"
"I find it fascinating that you can break your hand on my door, but it is only when I take care of the wounds that you complain," you tell her, walking to the refreshment block to get a fresh cloth.
"Yeah? Well!" Vriska yells after you, but loses her pithy comeback, if she ever had one. When you return her lip is protruding just slightly, an unconscious pout as she rubs her arm where she clawed herself. You take her wrist in your hand and maneuver her gently, running the cloth up from her fingers, over her wrist and clean first the left arm, and then the right. She just... watches you.
"Can I stay here?" She asks quietly, and then adds in her usual announcing tone, "I don't want to deal with that spidermonster right now! Thanks to that filthy backstabber! You can send me out if you want, I guess. If you want me to get eaten! And then who would you have to fuss and meddle over, huh? Nobody, that's who!"
"Oh dear," you say, putting down the cloth and picking up the brush again. Keeping your hand on her wrist you guide her over to the pile of pillows. "Then I guess I will just have to submit to your callous demands and fuss over you for the rest of the evening." You take a seat and turn her around so she sits down in the pile in front of you.
"I'm glad you came around!" Vriska announces, settling down into the pile of pillows and glancing back at you as you take her hair in your hand. "Disobeying me could be dangerous, you know? Being your moirail and all."
A smile quirks at your lips as you run the brush through her still-damp hair. It catches on a few tangles here and there that Vriska shouts over when it tugs her head back. You go through it a bit more carefully, reminding her "it might not tangle so much if you brushed it more often."
"Whateverrrrrrrr," she drawls, tilting her head to the side as you brush it along her scalp between her horns. It's deep dark grey, almost black, and it separates between the brush teeth like unwoven threads. The citrus smell of the shampoo you used pools around her with every stroke. You entertain the thought that she uses it as an excuse to come to you. You don't care if it's true, but your heart twists at the thought. You brush the hair from the sides of her head over her shoulder and pull it through your fingers, soft and damp.
Vriska's head lolls back, eyes closed and lips parted just enough for her incisors to flick out over her lips. She has her back to you, but you've seen that face before. Her guard drops like her shoulders and her chest raises slowly, carefully. If she really didn't trust you she would never let you get away with such a thing.
You put the brush down and roll her shining hair over the back of your hand and it traces the motion like a waterfall and curl it around your fingers. It falls from you, soft and slippery. You think of growing your own hair long but you know she probably wouldn't do the same. This one-sided false moirailegiance is okay with you, with the hope that it might one day become something else.
You pull her hair back from over her ears, threading it through your fingers and letting it slide through smoothly. A little sigh escapes her and she leans her head forward, chin against her chest. Little drying threads of her bangs are beginning to fall back into place, dangling over her nose as you curl her long locks around your palm.
"Do you mind?" You ask, shifting your weight so you're sitting on your legs, a little bit taller than her with the help of the pillows beneath you.
"Yeah whatever," she says, forceful like she's not putty in your hands.
So you divide her hair into three as evenly as you can, using the brush again to draw it out, fold out the little tangles that form when you move it around. You take one clump of hair in your left hand and one in your right, the third held between your ring and pinky fingers of your right hand. You've practiced braiding cloth, but hair is a different experience. It slips out of form, goes astray, two or three little strands lost each time you weave. One from the left, one from the right. It slips between your fingers like silk. Her hair is so thick you make exactly eight weaves of the braid down her back, and smile at your handiwork.
You curl the end of her braid between your fingers as you lean to a box of sewing materials you keep nearby. You snap it open with one hand and pull out a small spool of deep blue ribbon - you bought it because it reminded you of her.
You put the tuft of hair at the end of her braid between your lips, and it bends slightly at the pressure. You can feel each strand shifting against others as you unwind the ribbon with your free hands and reach for a pair of scissors to snip a length of it. You wrap it once, twice around the end of Vriska's braid before tying it tightly into a small bow. If only Vriska would let you dress her up in an outfit to match.
You take the braid out of your mouth to tighten the bow at the end and admire your handiwork. Braid complete and bloodthirst shoosh-brushed away, you lean forward and roll the braid over Vriska's shoulder for her to see. She only glances at your work before leaning back and dropping into your chest, pushing you down into your pillows and folding her hands on top of her belly. You drop onto your back with a quiet "oh."
"You're not bad, fussyfangs," Vriska announces, eyes closed and a little bit of sleep in her voice.
You reach down and brush her bangs from her face with a finger, drawing it back over her ear and pressing your palm against her cheek. She sighs. Your stomach knots.