Archive of Our Own ^beta

It takes Vriska Serket two weeks to realize what she's done and when she does, she comes for you, screaming.

Her eyes are on fire, her hands flashing with light and dice, she's prepared herself for the strife of the century, still wearing the spoils of her last doomed conquest - a thin gold ring, no one would notice it but you - on a chain around her neck.

"Where is everyone?" she shrieks when she finds you, on the roof of one of the meteor's innumerable buildings. "Where the fuck did everyone go?"

Your smile stretches slowly, and it does not reach your eyes. "I'm afraid you've created a doomed timeline," you say. "You weren't meant to kill Jack, and -"

She's shoved you into a wall, and her hand's around your throat. Well. You expected as much. "Where the fuck is everyone? Why can't I find anyone? Where's John?"

"Dead," you say, and she squeezes her fingers around your neck.

---

---

You spend most of your time in the past. Not that Vriska could manage to kill you, any more than she could manage to kill herself, though she seems to be trying. She hasn't appeared to eat in days, and the brief moments you spend in her chronological present show a Veil torn asunder by her rage, little more than heaped piles of aggression-torn scrap.

No, you don't spend a lot of time in the Veil. You wish you could stay away forever, just live in the past. But the timeline's deteriorating and so's the sweeps you remember, unraveling like the poorly made shirts you used to wear, back when you were the lowest of the low.

But one day, before you can manage to flash off, she grabs ahold of your arm.

Her hair hangs around her head in lank lumps. Her skirt's torn, half her shirt's drenched in her own blood. You can see the sharp jut of her wristbone. Her back is an empty parenthesis. It tears at you in a delicate way, to see her like this.

"I want to see the bodies," she says. "Don't you fucking dare leave. I want to see the bodies."

Vriska's voice is wavering. So are her fingers.

You want to hate her.

Oh, you want to hate her.

For so many things. For Tavros, for Sollux, Terezi, never mind you, the way she fucked up this session, her arrogance and foolishness, her singlehanded belief in herself and her methods, narcissism, disregard for others. You want to try her as Terezi might have (would have, were she not -) and find her wanting.

You want to push her over the side of a building and watch her body fall and lay twisted and know it is just.

But her voice wavers when she talks to you and she has this wild panic around her eyes.

So you take her to the bodies.

---

Or rather, what's left of them.

"I didn't think it was exactly nice to leave them out and about," you say. "Or just under some sheets. I alchemized some coffins."

She's going to look inside. She's going to look inside one and she's not going to like what she's about to see.

You've carved their symbols into the top of each coffin. She walks down the row, touches each one briefly.

When she reaches Terezi's, she slumps down and begins to cry, her shoulders shaking in front of the huge grey slab of rock that is all that is left of that girl, brilliant and blind and ruthless as Vriska, and you can hear her thoughts, pouring out so hard that they're spilling into your mind, I could've stopped it I could've stopped it.

But you steel yourself. You're not going to do the quadrant tango with he. She's wrecked your universe, she'll pay for that.

"This is all your fault, you know," you say, summoning up your robot coldness, leaning against Sollux's coffin.

You expect her to scream at you, to try and kill you again, to break your body and break her own and shove her dice down your throat. But what Vriska does is much, much worse.

She curls her arms around her knees, and leans into Terezi's coffin. "I know," she whispers, her hair splayed over most of her face, her shoulders shaking. "I know."

You can't stand this any more. Your fingernails are cutting so much into your palms that blood is beginning to well up, hot and dark, around your fingers. You don't know how much longer you can go without running over to her, smoothing her hair. She's so pitiful, she's so pitiful and you can't pity her, you can't.

So instead you punch her, right in her tear-stained face. You lift her up by her collar and throw her onto the coffin. She looks surprised by that, sprawled out on the stone tablet all akimbo.

"Don't you dare cry for them," you say. Your voice is wavering. "Don't you fucking dare." 

She flails for your shirt and knees you in the groin. You clutch your stomach and end up on top of her, and she's sinking her teeth into your shoulder. She's drawing blood. You get your hands around her throat and tip her chin up and you make her look at you.

"Don't you fucking dare."

It's less of a kiss and more of a collision, all frantic nips and insistent tongue. She works a hand under your shirt and scores lines into your back, but you catch her wrists and hold them so tight you know they'll bruise. 

When you bite her neck she gasps. You press your thumbs on the spot where her pulse jumps, and you bite harder, and you feel her squirm underneath you.  Vriska moans, and that's when you realize what the fuck you're doing. 

You wipe your mouth and stumble backwards. She's propped up on her elbows, breathing heavily. 

You lose. You walk away first. 

---

This is your favorite memory, and you want to visit it now. It'll be gone soon, you know. Everything's washing out to sea here in your past, and you've not a lot of time.

Ahaha insert time puns etc. here. 

(The sad thing is you really are the life of the part on the meteor. You don't mind death that much, and this disease called remorse is alien to Vriska.)

Never mind all that. 

You watch from the window as your five sweeps old self leans over Sollux's shoulder, watching as he ratatattats on his keyboard. He's entrancing when he's like this, all sparks and frantic energy. You love watching him.

"What're you making?" your younger self asks. "Aw, Sollux, not another doomsday thingy! You're so overdramatic about that sort of stuff."

"No," he says, tersely. "Itth a prethent." 

"Ooh," you say. "For who?" 

"You," he grumbles.

You remember with perfect clarity how your blood pusher had started beating harder in your chest. You remember how you wanted to hold this boy and make him cups of tea and watch him sleep, and you remember how you didn't really understand any of that, because you were so very young. 

"Oh," you say. Your cheeks are a little red. "Thank you."

He keeps tapping away at the keyboard, his shoulders hunched even more. You can feel your younger self resisting the urge to play with the straggles of hair that brush against his neck. "What is it?" 

He turns around. "What?"

"My present," you say. Your hand's still on his shoulder. "What is it?"

"Ith a thurprithe," he says. 

Poor baby. He looks so bashful. 

"Oh, okay," your younger self says. 

But he doesn't turn back around to work. His hands are in his lap, he's picking at his nails like he always did when he was nervous.  

"Hey AA?"

"Yeah, Sollux?" 

"I really like you."

He can't see it but your ears are a monstrously deep red under your cloud of hair. You remember how this felt, how your hands and feet tingled, how you tried to hide your smile. 

"I really like you too, Sollux." 

He darts out of his chair and kisses you, just for an instant. Then you both turn away from each other, blushing. 

"Thhit, thorry. That wath thtupid of me. Really thtupid." 

He bangs his head against the desk, and you put a cautious hand on the crown of his head, right between his horns. "No it wasn't, silly. You need to be less hard on yourself."

"But I'm thuch a contemptible grubmunching idiot," he says. 

"Well, do it for me, okay?"

"Okay," he grumbles, and pulls his head off the desk. Hands back on the keyboard, he gives you another shy glance. "Anything for you, AA."

---

When you return to the veil, she's still by the coffins.

Still. How long has it been? A day, at least.

Vriska's slumped over Tavros's memorial, running her fingers over the symbol carved on it over and over again, humming a little. She doesn't even look up when you appear. "He told the best stories, you know," she says. "And he always made me the hero."

"Did you deserve it?" you ask.

She looks up at you then, yellow eyes blue-tinged with crying, glasses askew. "No, of course I fucking didn't. Did any of us?"

You think you know what she means. From here, you can see the endless expanse of the veil stretching around you, no stars just black. You're gods, the both of you, and this is your Valhalla, and you don't deserve such glory and you don't deserve such pain. Everything would have been easier if you could have remained what you were: two small girls on a planet that doesn't exist any more.

"You should leave here," you say, not unkindly. "It's not good for you to dwell like this."

"What?" she spits. "Isn't that you wanted?"

You don't know any more.

---

---

It takes you two hours but you manage to drag Vriska, kicking and screaming, back into the lab. You lay her in an ad-hoc pile of whatever soft things you could find scattered around and watch her until she finally drifts off.

She looks younger when she sleeps. All the tension and the anger bleed out of her body, her hands curled under her head, mouth slack, eyelashes fluttering.

Vriska is so young.

---

"Do you want to die?" you ask her. She hasn't moved for hours.

"I don't know."

Her head lulls to the side. Her eyes are glassy. "Probably."

The life's been burned out of her, the light. You know that blanked-out stare, you know it precisely. You know that hollow careless pit, and it's worse than grief, somehow, worse than despair. It goes beyond depression.

You itch. You burn. Why?

You guess you never wanted to see anyone in the same state as you again.

Vriska's body slumps languid and pale when you bend over her. "Stand up," you say.

"Why," she asks.

You're not going to wait for her to gain some sort of resolve This is too important. You yank her to her feet, and she doesn't even try to claw at your hands, tear your hair, break your kneecaps and scar your arms and that's how you know there's nothing left of her.

You cup her head in your hands, rub her cheek with your thumb. Finally, there's something in her eyes. Distaste, maybe. Confusion. You can work with that.

You kiss that girl. You make her pay.

She doesn't respond at first, not to the insistent press of your hands or the bite at her lips. But then her fingers tug at your hair and she's practically yanking you up into her mouth. Something inside of you goes free then, when Vriska Serket runs her tongue across your teeth. You feel inexplicably glad. This is nothing like that other kiss, it's all yielding and flowing together. You're not clashing like two ships in a storm. She fits against you perfectly, melts into you. 

You shudder when she licks the roof of your mouth. It takes a good five minutes for the two of you to pull apart.

"I'd rather you live, if that's ok with you."

She's tight-lipped again, but there's a spark in her now. "Yeah well, we'll see Megido."

---

There are ten coffins on a roof on a meteor in the middle of nowhere.

And there are two girls. There are two gods. There are two furious blazing battling flames of light that will burn you, they will burn you so very bad.

"I wonder how big of a rocket I can make," says Vriska.

"Looking to do a tour of the Veil?"

"Might as well," she says.

You grab her hand and squeeze it tight. She's looking off into nowhere like she can see for forever.

"I know," you say. "I can't sugarcoat it for you, I know. It's horrible."

"There's a way out," she says. "There's always a way out."

You kiss the spot right under her ear. There's a little scar there, you wonder if anyone else in all of existence has ever known that about Vriska Serket.

"I always win," she says.

She won't, you know. But here in this space there is just you and Vriska, and you'd like it to stay that way, if only for a little while longer, before you have to go and join the others.