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The sink was the first sign of trouble.
Dave brought it to everyone’s attention, hey so which one of you heinous barbarians has been murdering innocent bathroom fixtures?, and you all wandered over to have a look at the scene of the crime. Sure enough, the death toll clocked in at: one (1) sink ripped away from the wall of the meteor’s large communal ablution block, hanging at an angle by its pipe.
“Did we have one of our little moments, Karkat?” Rose said with a wry grin.
“Oh ha ha, very funny. As if I would waste my carefully cultivated fury on an inanimate object.” He replied.
“Well I certainly didn’t do it. Kanaya, perhaps this is some extremely avante-garde redecorating on your part?”
She smelled offended at the allegation. “Do you really think that my tastes run towards the... terminally distressed mode of-”
“Chill fussyfangs. She’s kidding.” Vriska said as she elbowed her way in to get a better look at the dearly departed. “Daaaaaaaamn. Hey inspector Pyrope, I got an evaluation for you here.”
You were hanging back, grinning to yourself and making everyone vaguely uncomfortable. Disconcerting looming was pretty much the only amusement available to you at the time that didn’t involve ostentatiously obnoxious court block roleplay, humoring Vriska with her endless rotation of incredibly shitty action flicks, or scribbling on the walls.
“Speak, Serket.” You said.
“It’s all fucked up.”
“Thank you, my dear filthy assistant. I was unable to determine that much at first sniff. You are truly an asset to this investigation.”
“Anytime, chief.
“So, TZ, you’re gonna take charge of this deal, right? This is some big time in-the-first-degree noise right here.” Dave said. “Dunno if I’m gonna be able to sleep at night knowin’ theres a killer on the loose. The fuckin’ community is shocked; it used to be such a nice neighborhood.”
“Strider, it’s one god damned sink.” Karkat gestured to encompass the room. “There’s five more of them in here.”
“To say nothing of the entire other ablution block in the lower levels.” Kanaya added.
“Man ya’ll are on some serious Kitty Genovese shit. The only thing necessary for evil to win is for good men — and, uh, trolls too I guess — to do nothing. That’s Mark Twain. You’re not gonna win an argument with Mark Twain.”
“Actually,” Vriska said as she waggled the sink back and forth by the pipe in an experimental manner, presumably trying to see if she could break it even more, “you stole that from The Boondock Saints.”
“Ew, Dave, really?” Rose cocked an eyebrow.
“What? The murderdork twins over there have been watching it once a week for the past two months and I think I’m starting to develop an unironic appreciation for it out of some kind of fucked up Stockholm Syndrome thing.”
“I suppose there comes a time in every man’s life when he must come to grips with his fondness for frustrated suburbanite power fantasies. In any case, I continue to be horrified by the cultural exchange occurring between our races.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. They get into it, Rose. It’s creepy. One day we’re all gonna end up tied to chairs with Vriska and Terezi wearing peacoats and holding guns to our heads while they recite that stupid liturgy.”
“Oh dear. I’ll be sure to keep my affairs in order in anticipation of my brutal gangland-style execution.”
“I have to say for primitive human ‘cinema’ that puts me in mind of a cave dweller smearing his own shit on the walls and hooting, the depiction of pale romance between the protagonists is surprisingly competent.”
Rose sighed. “Karkat, they’re supposed to be brothers.”
“Oh my fucking god, do your quaint”, massive finger-quotes, “‘familial’ structures really have you so intellectually hamstrung that you can’t appreciate—”
Kanaya held up a hand to shush him. “For what it is worth, Rose, I do not believe there is anything saying that human, er, sibling-relations cannot experience an analog of moirallegiance.”
“Fussyfangs are you seriously trying to mediate an argument about a movie right now?”
“Hey, lets all shut the hell up for a second and stop talking about everyone’s terrible taste in cinema. Getting back to the topic at hand: the fucking sink. What are we going to do about this?” Dave said.
You clapped a hand on his shoulder and gave him a reassuring little shake. “Relax, cool kid. Your concerns have been noted and filed away for future reference during your interrogation.”
“Wait back up, you think that I—”
“No one is above suspicion, Dave. No one.” You flashed a smile in his general direction. “Okay, everyone but my filthy assistant needs to beat it. This crime scene is closed to the public. Scram. Last one out the door gets a drubbing. Vriska, stop screwing with that or I’ll have you done for tampering with evidence.”
And so they left, Karkat bringing up the rear and catching a light tap from your cane between the horns that, of course, set him off complaining loudly into the distance.
“Are you really gonna make a big deal out of this?” Vriska asked, propping herself up against the wall between the sinks with her arms crossed.
You scratched your chin with the head of your cane. “Nah. Don’t really care. Pretty victimless crime as far as I can tell. I’ll scatter some scalemates around and string some caution tape up and call it good.”
“Probably just the clown dicking around after we’re all asleep anyway."
A small shudder ran up your spine. The idea of Makara prowling the halls causing trouble left a bad taste in your mouth. “Ugh. Have you seen him lately?”
“He’s tucked away somewhere deep, if he knows what’s good for him.” She scowled up at the ceiling, as if trying to peer through it in search of skulking clowns. “Told him what would happen if I heard you even caught a whiff of him on the breeze.”
“Vriska, while I appreciate the thought, I don’t need you to protect me. I’m a big girl, I can handle one greasepainted jackass.”
“Yeah, I know. But, man...” She sneered and you could smell the anger sleeting off her, hot and blue. “You’re lucky you couldn’t see the way he looked at you. Made my skin crawl.”
“I cannot endorse you maiming someone over an unrequited black—”
“It wasn’t black, Terezi. Not this time. I’ve seen black, fuck I dated Eridan. But that shit Makara was beaming at you...” She seemed to curl in on herself. “It reminded me of how I felt when Tavros... when that happened. Point being, bad things go down when looks like that start getting thrown around.”
Well, that conversation certainly took an unpleasant turn. You suddenly didn’t want to hang around the ablution block any longer than necessary. Vriska meant well, but something about the tone of her voice rubbed you the wrong way. She didn’t sound like herself. Genuine concern was not something you were used to hearing from her, even after so long together. Which was not to say that she was a bad partner! Perish the thought. But moreso that your impression of her still skewed heavily towards the cackling, manic FLARPer from your past. Vriska Serket goes out and crushes her problems under her heel and then regales you with the tale of her victory later. Vriska Serket does not worry.
Ah, the magic of moirallegiance.
“Jeez I’m all worked up now.” She pulled herself away from the wall and stretched. “You’re gonna be the death of me, Pyrope.”
You cringed. “Not funny.”
“Huh? Oh, haha, yeah. That. Riiiiiiiight. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“So, uh... you wanna, like, go hassle Lalonde or something? Maybe steal some of her beardy wizardfics and read them at her in silly voices?”
“Only if I can do Zazzerpan.”
She closed the ablution block door behind you as the two of you left. “You actually remember their names? What the hell?”
---
The following days passed uneventfully. The nefarious sink-killer did not strike again, and many a local cool kid slept easier for his absence. You, on the other hand, did not. Chalk it up to nerves, or just restlessness. Something was nagging at you, and you couldn’t quite put a finger on what exactly. So you spent a lot of time after unofficial lights out puttering around aimlessly in the common area or tap-tap-tapping your way down the gloomy halls.
It was about a week into your involuntary night watch detail that you heard the scream. Your blood instantly ran cold and you dropped into a low crouch, straining every sense to pick up further sounds or movement. Your hands, of their own volition, twisted your cane in half to expose your blades.
Silence. Not even an errant honk in the distance. You were just beginning to relax when another scream came, this time with what sounded like words in it.
“Get away from me!”
Vriska. The clown was trying to get at her because he couldn’t get at you. You could not have been any more certain of it. He was going to pay for this.
You darted down the hall as quickly and as quietly as possible, hugging every corner and checking through every intersection. A legislacerator’s duty must at times be understood to include covert actions, and you liked to think you’d have taken to the job like a natural. You were just glad that you’d managed to convince Vriska to relocate herself to a room that wasn’t on the far side of a destroyed walkway. That could have complicated things.
Her room was in disarray. Which, to be honest, was fairly par for the course. The girl really took the floordrobe to the next level. No Vriska, though, and no obvious signs of forced entry or a struggle. The nest of pillows, linens and occasional pilfered scalemate that served her as a sleeping area was damp with perspiration. If it weren’t for the screaming, you’d assume she was just having a rough night and had decided to step out for a moment. But she had definitely been screaming at someone; there was real fear in her voice.
You rolled the words around on your tongue and decided that Vriska and afraid didn’t make much sense when put side by side. You liked the situation less and less with each passing moment.
Back in the corridor, if you took a deep, deep whiff you could just barely pick up the fading blueberry left in Vriska’s passing. It wasn’t much to go on, though, and getting weaker by the second. You followed for as long as you could, deeper into the meteor away from the common area and respite blocks, but eventually found the trail grown cold. Where the hell could she have gone? You were starting to think that Gamzee wasn’t involved. On his best days he could be described as “pungent”, and there hadn’t been so much as a sneeze’s worth of his funk to be found. Perhaps you had rushed to judgment. Again.
But still, something was definitely amiss and—
“Terezi?”
You just about leapt out of your skin, spinning on your heel to level your sword between the eyes of a concerned-looking Kanaya. Jegus but the girl was proper stealthy since becoming a rainbow drinker.
“Goddamn it Kanaya, don’t do that!”
“Apologies. I did not mean to frighten you.”
“What the hell are you doing sneaking around out here?”
“Oh, you know. Taking the air?”
“With your lights off?”
The smile on her face couldn’t have been any faker as she willed her soft phosphorescence back on. “To avoid waking anyone up?”
“With your chainsaw?”
“Ah, yes. That. Well.” She looked at the implement in her hands as if she had been unaware of it until now. “Would you believe... taking it for a walk?”
“You were walking your chainsaw.”
“Yes.”
You sighed heavily and massaged the bridge of your nose. “Karkat said no clown hunting, Kanaya.” As if you hadn’t just been doing that.
“I was not—! Well then, Terezi Pyrope, what the hell are you doing sneaking around out here?”
“Looking for Vriska. I think something’s wrong.”
She snapped her fingers, glad for a change of subject. “I did see her not too long ago, as a matter of fact.”
Finally, a lead. “Did she look okay?”
“She was unharmed, if that is what you are asking. Not terribly happy to see me though. I think that she has been having a bad night.”
“Yeah, I was thinking something like that too. I’m kinda worried about her.”
“Well she was most likely heading to the lower ablution block. I cannot imagine why else she would be going to that part of the meteor. Although...” She pulled a face, like she was fighting some powerful internal urge to meddle and losing. “I do not think she is in the mood to have a feelings jam. So maybe you should wait until tomorrow?”
“No offense, Maryam, but I’ll moirail as I see fit. Thanks for the tip.”
“My pleasure.”
“Seriously though, no clown hunting.”
“Oh for... What, are you going to tattle on me?”
“No, precedents concerning this situation were roundly established in Snitches v. Stitches. But I’ll be quietly disappointed in you if I have to sit through a Vantrum to the tune of 'why does no one fucking listen when I say no more killing each other'.”
“Fine.” She turned to leave. “Not planning on killing him anyway... just, scaring him... and maybe roughing him up a bit.” Her glow disappeared around a corner, leaving you alone again in the gloom.
---
“You make me sick.”
You were approaching the lower ablution block, still stepping softly and carefully, when you heard her voice. It sounded like she was talking to someone inside and not really enjoying the encounter.
“Pathetic.”
Sliding up against the wall you slowly, slooowllly, edged closer to the open door. There came the sound of a faucet running, water being splashed around, and then nothing for a long time but heavy, deliberate breathing. Peeking carefully around the door you saw Vriska leaning over a sink, her face wet with water and her undershirt plastered to her rangy frame with sweat, staring into the mirror.
“So, what?” She said, addressing her reflection. “This how its gonna be, huh? You stupid bitch.” She lifted the front of her shirt to dry her face and returned to staring herself down. “Man, if only everyone could see you now. They’d love this shit. Vriska Serket, afraid of the fucking dark like a wiggler.”
Another long pause, during which you could practically hear her leaving fingerprints in the metal of the sink.
“What are you gonna do when you get to the new session and shit really gets real, huh? You gonna cry? You gonna curl up in a little ball and cry then too? You worthless piece of shit. You disgusting garbage.” Her voice was steadily rising, teeth audibly grinding between insults. “You’re weak.”
With a sense of dawning horror, you watched her pull a fist back.
“Weak.” The mirror rattled under the blow.
“Weak!” A crack appeared in its surface.
“WEAK!” The mirror shattered and the sickly smell of metallic blueberry flooded your nose. Ok then, it was officially way past time to step in. She was already readying herself for another punch.
“Vriska, stop it!”
She whirled around to see you standing in the door, suddenly tense and upright, face all fight-or-flight. “Terezi? How... how long have you been standing there?
“Long enough.”
“I guess you heard all that then.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes flicked around the room like a cornered animal looking for an escape. “I’m not crazy."
“I never said you were.”
“Good, because I’m not. I’m just...” She faltered. “There’s basically no way for this not to look really bad, is there?”
“Vriska, I’m going to come closer to you now. Is that okay?” You spoke very levelly and slowly, in the kind of voice you might use to talk someone down off a ledge.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m not, hah, I’m not dangerous, Terezi.”
“I’m not worried for myself right now.”
“Well then stop talking to me like I’m a fucking rabid barkbeast!”
You raised your hands in a conciliatory manner. “I just want you to know I’m not upset, I’m not angry. I just want to make sure you’re okay.” She’d let you close to within a few feet of her, despite every twitch of her body betraying her desire to flee. “Now let me see your hand.”
“My hand? Why?”
“Because you’re bleeding.”
“What?” She glanced down at the deep laceration across her knuckles currently dripping all over the floor. “Oh. Oh shit."
She let you take her hand. Didn’t take much of a sniff to tell that it would require stitches. You hoped Kanaya would be willing to keep a secret. “Okay. We’re going to clean this up and then get you back upstairs. Is that alright?”
“Do I really get a say in the matter?”
“No.”
“Guess it’s alright by me, then.”
Availing yourself of the paper towel dispenser, you made a shabby little compress for her hand and did your best get all the smears of blue off the floor and sink. Not exactly forensic caliber work, but you somehow doubted that Karkat or Rose was going to come down here with an ultraviolet light to give it a going-over. And fortunately for you, you ran into Kanaya still walking her chainsaw on the way back.
“Found her. Had a little bit of an accident, though.” You said in a voice that communicated the tacit message of don’t ask questions, Maryam.
“Oh, Vriska.” Kanaya said in the long-suffering voice of someone who at one point had been in the unenviable position of caring for Vriska Serket. “Yes, that will need to be sewn up.” She gave you a sidelong glance. “I suppose she snitched then?”
You both giggled. Vriska just looked confused.
“The hell are you broads snickering at?”
You waved her off. “Case law. High level stuff. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.”
To her credit, Kanaya managed to get all the way back to the common area in the presence of a leaking Serket without salivating too much. And, torturous though it may have been, she got Vriska’s wound stitched up in a jiffy. But if she thought you didn’t notice her licking the needle clean afterwards, she was very much mistaken. Rainbow drinkers, what can you say really?
---
Once safely ensconced in a chair in the common area with a cup of moderately tolerable coffee from the machine, you settled in for the long haul of figuring out what the precise hell was going on with your moirail.
“I assume it was you that broke the sink.” You said.
She raised a hand. “Guilty as charged, your honor.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Wow, now there’s a conversation. Heeeeeeeey, Tez. How ya doin’? Me? I’m good. Bee-tee-dubs, I had a little ‘incident’ last night and tore a sink off the wall in a fit of rage because looking at myself made me want to fucking destroy things.” She took a pull from her coffee. “Tell me that’s not awkward as globes.”
“It would have been better than lying to me.”
That comment perhaps cut a little deeper than you intended it to. She fiddled with her mug for a bit before replying in a small voice. “I was embarrassed, alright? And technically, I only said it was ‘probably’ Gamzee.”
“Vriska, how often does this happen?”
“Dunno. Occasionally.”
“And how often is occasionally?”
“Man, why’re you grilling me like this?”
“Because I'm trying to help you, and you're being difficult.”
“Why?! Why do you care?!”
You rose to your feet and leaned across the table at her. “Why do you care how Gamzee looks at me?”
“Because... because I’m afraid for you. I don’t want to think what might happen if I didn’t look out for you. It hurts to think about things like that.”
“And you think it doesn’t hurt me to see you like this? God damn it Vriska, how long have I known you?”
She laughed softly. “Forever. Since we were just kids playing with wooden swords.”
“Forever. Exactly. And I have never seen this side of you.” You settled back into your chair. “It frightens me. You said this happens ‘occasionally’. How occasionally are we talking? Once or twice a perigee?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
She stared at her coffee for a while. “I have dreams and sometimes they, like, they set me off.”
“Elaborate.”
“Just... really fucking bad dreams, okay?”
“Vriska, I am going to help you if I have to pry information about what’s eating you out of you drop by drop. Now, you can make this extremely tedious and agonizing for everyone involved or you can spill the fucking fart niblets already.”
She replied by pitching her mug against the wall. Great, another mess for you to clean up. Then the dam burst.
“Oh my god! Throw a dart at a picture of my life and it’ll probably hit something I have bad dreams about, okay? All this shit I did to our friends, all the shit I did to you! It was pretty bad before the game, then it got better, and then we started flying through these fucking bubbles and now every time I close my eyes I see something I don’t want to! Do you have any idea how many times I’ve reread that message I sent to you after I blinded you while I was bleeding to death in my hive? ‘Wow, sure was cool how you exploded my face, Pyrope! Gotcha real good though! Haha, don’t worry, I’ll mind control someone to make sure there’s bugs in your food!’ What the hell was I thinking?”
She crossed her arms on the table and laid her head face-down on top of them.
“Sometimes I’m just in my hive and I hear all the people I killed talking to me. They tell me they won’t let me forget what I did, and that they’ll be waiting for me wherever I go. I can’t take it, Terezi. I can’t fucking take it. I don’t even know if I feel bad about doing those things or if I just want to stop remembering them. Is there a difference? At least when Aradia made that happen, I was able to make her stop.” Her head shot up. “Oh! Oh! And don’t even get me started on all the Aradias I keep running into. Talk about a revolving door of delights there! Either they don’t care at all about anything or they’re blindingly pissed off at everything. Flip a coin, it’s fun either way!”
“And to make matters worse, my ghost is drifting around out there somewhere — and if I can just make a little aside here real quick, you should really not feel guilty about almost killing me because, believe me, I had it coming. I would have stabbed me in a hot second and never even thought twice about it.”
“Vriska—”
“Shut the fuck up! You wanted fart niblets, you’re getting the whole fucking can! My ghost is out there somewhere snogging some kind of kid version of the Condescension Herself, which is just the weirdest god damned sentence I think I may ever say in my life, and she doesn’t even give a shit! Nope, not in the least! Surrounded by constant reminders of our screw ups, sitting on a weapon that could mean the difference between victory and defeat, and she just. Doesn’t. Give. A. Shit. How? Fucking how?!”
She was breathing really hard by that point, eyes closed and a finger raised just to make sure you didn’t get any ideas about interrupting her comprehensive soul-vomit.
“She has an undercut, Terezi! She has tattoos! Is this me we’re talking about here? Could I become that kind of clueless dumbass, were the stars to align just right? Is she really me? This is a serious question; I can’t even be sure if I’m seeing myself when I look in the mirror because all I see is the idiot girl who ruins everything!”
You were... stunned, to be completely honest. You never would have guessed she had all this pent up inside her. You would have never guessed she was anything but the invincibly blithe girl you’d known since forever.
“So, yes, Terezi dearest. Light of my fucking life. Sometimes I wake up from very, very unhappy dreams indeed with a powerful desire to break something.” She held up her stitched hand. “And if that something happens to kind of remind me of myself, well shit, all the better.”
She looked drained, smaller somehow, like letting all that out had deflated her. Your chair banged on the floor as you stood up. You went to her. What else could you do? You thought this moirallegiance was going to be about keeping her from hurting others, and only at that moment did you realize it was going to be about protecting your moirail from herself. She fought you as you wrapped her in your arms, called you every vile thing she could think of.
“Shut up.” You whispered.
“Let go of me! Let go of me you bitch!”
“No.”
You buried your face in her hair and breathed deep, told yourself that wasn’t a sob you just stifled. Once upon a time you had intended to kill her, to leave her cold on the floor with her blood on your sword. You had no idea how you ever worked yourself up in preparation for the deed, how you could have forgiven yourself, how you could have kept on going afterwards. It would have been “just”, for all that word meant to you anymore. She would have been weighed and found wanting by whatever intelligence decided these things. The thought made your eyes sting with hot tears. She had committed crimes, yes — she had lied and injured and betrayed and killed. But you couldn’t accept that she deserved to die. You couldn’t bring yourself to agree with her, to say that she “had it coming.” What justice was there in doing violence to someone in the name of the law that they would do to themselves in the name of self-loathing?
None that you wanted any part of.
Eventually she stopped fighting and allowed herself to be held. For lack of anything better to do the two of you ended up lying on the couch, her head in your lap and your fingers gently massaging her scalp through her unruly morass of hair, watching whatever movies were close at hand. Gradually, she seemed to be coming back into herself. Halfway through The Rock she looked up at you and, in a very serious voice in synch with the Sean Connery human onscreen, informed you that —
“Loshersh alwaysh whine about their besht, Tereshi. Winnersh go home and fuck the prom queen.”
“Well I guess the prom queen is safe from your advances then, nerd.” You replied smiling, grateful to see her cheering up.
“Dork.”
“I believe you may be plotting infidelity to Mr. Cage with the distinguished elder human. Your treachery truly knows no limits.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Nic is still number one in my books, but... goddamn, that voice."
The movie rolled on. Stanley Goodspeed informed John Mason that he was just a biochemist who drove a beige Volvo and should be cut some friggin’ slack!
“Vriska?”
“Mm?” Her voice was thick with drowsiness.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
You felt her tense slightly. “Dunno. Couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t really stand to even think about it until you caught me in the middle of doing a thing.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“Maaaaaaaan, no, Terezi. C’mon. It’s not...” She shifted uncomfortably and looked up at you again. “It’s... you and John went through all that trouble to un-fuck everyone’s situation. You wrote stuff on a scarf in your own blood—”
“That wasn’t me, though.”
“Jeez, fine, it was a you that you could have been, alright? Terezi Pyrope proved that she’s hardcore enough to do that. Point is, you did all that with John and saved everyone’s asses and... I was afraid that you’d think it wasn’t worth it. That if you found out I was actually just a broke-panned weirdo who shouts at herself in the mirror after everyone else is asleep, that you’d regret saving me.”
You didn’t have anything to say to that, really. Engaging with Vriska’s bizarre world view could be a challenge at times. You settled for making a quiet shushing noise in reply.
You were both half asleep for Goodspeed and Mason’s capture by the villains. Vriska kept twitching against your leg as she dozed, and you were blanking minute-long stretches of the film. You were only passingly aware of Goodspeed’s jail cell meltdown.
What is wrong with these people, huh? Mason? Don't you think there's a lot of, uh, a lot of anger flowing around this island? Kind of a pubescent volatility? Don't you think? A lotta angst, a lot of "I'm sixteen, I'm angry at my father" syndrome? I mean grow up! We're stuck on an island with a bunch of violence-for-pleasure-seeking psychopathic marines, SHAME! ON! THEM!
“Tez? You don’t regret it though, right?”
Your hand found hers, your fingers threaded together.
“I regret nothing.”
---
“They’re going to kill you, Dave. They’re going to wake up and see the dicks drawn all over their faces and it will be a simple matter of deduction to finger the correct culprit. Your pain will be remembered in song and fable.”
“Hey, it falls to us to uphold the proud ways of our people. I’m gettin’ hells of traditional up in this bitch.”
“I will see to it that your burial is conducted in accordance with custom.”
“Fifty dudes in the sharpest of suits laying down solemn raps over a funeral dirge. Widow all clutching my mixtape to her breast and bawling her eyes out.”
“‘Weep not, fair lady, your love’s last breath was spent true to phallus bushido.’”
“‘At least you will always have his insanely dope rhymes to remember him by.’”
“Requiescat in pace.”
“Wh-? Strider? What the hell?”
“Oh fuck. Run.”