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You pace under twin moons on a lonely midnight. Your husktop is unplugged, your room is a mess. You might as well be a hurricane, a broken, one-armed, one-eyed hurricane with a death wish. You poison everything you touch, and this is your destiny, destiny, destiny. The word tastes sour in your mouth. It's your fault, your destiny . There's blood of all colors on your hands. The best part? Not a single one of them deserved it. You, though? You deserve it. You deserve whatever is coming to you as surely as a second pumpbeat, alien outside your own thorax.
Right strut. Left strut. You should be put down. Kanaya says you're dangerous and she's right – she's right she's right – you're a feral lusus, no better than the stock you were chosen to serve. It's ten steps across your block, staggered, the numbers warp until it's eight eight eight. An angel number. You're cursed by it, haunted by the eights foretelling of shriveled mammalian beasts to drag you up into the cleansing sun. You deserve to rot. You deserve –
– She knocks four times, then once, then thrice more, the numbers of the blind prophets. Her knock echoes through empty hall upon empty hall, up an endless staircase through a spiraling turret to your innermost sanctum on the outer limits of your stupid fucking hive. It's the last time, there's a weight to it that makes you absolutely certain. You realize you expected her. Your pump drops down into your shoes.
Why should you even bother? You're sorry , why does nobody understand that you're sorry and that that hurts to say, like hornscrews shoved deep into your endoskeleton! Like you're flaying yourself open just for them to spit into whatever is exposed! Like being eaten alive by a rabid fucking cholerbear! Your blood is curdling, you might as well throw yourself out of one of your windows like the robots from next door. You scream and hurl your last black oracle from your desk onto the ground, where it cracks neatly down the seam. Blue stains the floor, the color of your blood. "Outlook not so good", reads the die.
You almost – not quite – run down the stairs. Running implies desperation. You’re not desperate at all. You don’t want to see her. You don’t need to see her. You don’t need her.
And yet. Through the portal, you can see her plain as day, though with one eye only. She takes your breath away until it’s ragged and hot and you bite your lip in your clumsy confusion and your mouth floods with a metallic taste. Her eyes are red. You’re hit with a wave of guilt and grief so strong you stagger, organic palm tacky against solid stone. She’s patient and still. She doesn’t know that you’re watching her warped visage through the pinhole, but still, her mouth is moving, she’s repeating herself. When you look closer, you realize that her fingers are tapping on the dragon head of the cane she never needed until now. She’s alive. You almost wish you’d killed her.
You take in a deep breath that fills you up until your posture is good enough to fool her (you could never fool her). The door makes no sound, but her unseeing eyes snap to you in an instant, mouth going slack and then tense. She flicks out her tongue, gapes, and then purses those lips of hers into something sour. You realize you’re watching her mouth. A wave of vertigo washes over you.
"What do you want," you ask, crossing your arms and tapping your foot, drawing out the stress on the word "you" – like she’s disgusting and beneath you and she’s sticking to your shoe like a squashed grub.
That seems to trip her into motion. "What do I want?" – a perfect mirror to your enunciation – "I want to know: are you happy?" – pushing past you into the most convenient opening chamber of your hive. "You got your goddamn revenge , you ruined our friends’ lives , you fucking blinded me – are you happy? Are you happy ?"
The words match the way her lips were moving through the window in rehearsal as she spins around to face you. You track her movements, her shoes clicking sharply against the flagstone with each overly deliberate step. Your mouth tastes wrong . You feel your lips twist into a rueful grin.
"You know what? Yeah! I’m reaaaaaaaally happy, why wouldn’t I be?" In two long strides, you close the distance between you. You lean in very, very close to her. Through her glasses, there’s nothing left of her pupils, nothing left of her familiar egg-yolk yellow sclera, nothing left of her stupid promises and bargains. She said she’d stay with you. She said you were sisters .
She laughs right in your face and shoves you a step back. You stagger, still off balance with the new weight of Equius’s handiwork, and then right yourself. Now that it’s there, you just can’t seem to swallow your smile, it's a rictus mask on your face, frozen fucking solid.
"Yeah, sure," she shakes her nug, but she, too, is smiling, with the glee of an executioner. You watch her fluidly unsheath her sword from her cane, you hear the click of the button being released. The metal whispers like an exhale. With pin-point precision, she holds the tip of the sword to the center of your chest, and all your senses zero in on the intrusion to your space like a singularity. You are hyper-aware of every beat of your pump throbbing against the metal, every breath, filling and releasing. You have seen her drive the blade into bluer bloods than you. You have seen the twist of her joy, the harsh utilitarian efficiency with which she culls, a perfect foil to your mask of bloodlust. You’re so focused on the possibility of being stabbed that you almost jump when she tells you, "You’re being played."
The spell is broken. Time unpauses and you put some serious distance between the two of you. Lady luck is not in your favor nowadays, especially right now, when you’re so angry you want to see what she looks like from the inside.
"Yeah, right ," fuck her! You would never let yourself get played . Not again. You draw yourself up to your full height as she sheaths her saber. Doesn’t she know you’re dangerous? "Played? Ha! Do you even know who I am? I’ll tell you! I’m Vriska fucking Serket! I don’t get played, I’m the fucking dungeon master! I’m the master Clouder! I’m the last face you’ll ever goddamn see! Nobody plays me, Pyrope, nobody ," eights punctuate your clumsy, grandiose words like bee stings. It hurts terribly.
"I know you," she says simply. You see red as you surge forwards with a yell, talons outstretched. You want to hurt her, you want to rip her apart, you want to see her bleed and test the limits of your new hardware. She sidesteps easily, holding out a frond to trip you up. You’re almost all the way to the ground before your reflexes catch you. The landing is hard, but only on your organic joints. You recover quickly and pivot from the ground in the span of a breath, flying back at her. This time she doesn’t manage to get out of your way, and you both topple over onto the tiling with your momentum. For one long second, you’re suspended like that; your upper fronds are touching, and she’s warm compared to you, reminding you of your higher caste. Your breaths are rising and falling out of sync, and you can’t quash the voice that tells you that you’re always out of sync nowadays.
Somewhere inside her is her blood pusher, forcing teal sludge through unfurling veins and arteries, into every single clotted mass of cells, into the tips of her prongs and her strutnuggets and that big, smug thinkpan of hers. In that moment, you hate her with such clarity that it steals your breath. You can almost see it: Terezi from the inside out. The very makeup of her smallest parts. The convergence of blood and the culmination of all the sacrifice you have mustered up over the sweeps, a deeper pitch than you could ever muster for Eridan’s prissiness or Kanaya’s nagging or Tavros, bless his poor, pathetic heart. Then she sits up carefully, rights her glasses, and hoists herself up using her cane.
"I know you," she repeats. All the pitch rushes out of you as quickly as it came, and you’re empty. Almost. There’s something rattling loose among your own organs like spare change. You feel bruised on the inside, you can’t stop the rise and fall of your thoracic plate as your breaths come faster and faster and –
– the sound of the door closing. You scramble to your strutpods and give her chase down the path.
"Wait!" you yell. Your voice tears off at the end. "Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you! " you scream, grabbing onto the back of her shirt. You’re hot with shame. She reaches back and slams her cane down on your forefrond without even looking at you.
This is the last time.
"I’m sorry," it hurts. It’s sticky-hot and shameful and you want to die. You want to be swallowed up into the ground. You’re so fucking pathetic if your goddamn lusus could hear you – Terezi Pyrope doesn’t even acknowledge you.
You scream at her until she reaches the perimeter of your land, past the scrubby scraggle of organic chloroleeches and the rocks beneath them and your dismal canyon where your lusus resides – the lusus she helped you feed for sweeps – she doesn’t react once.
You have one last card left to play before she can open the gate that separates your property from that of Her Imperious Condescension. One last trick up your sleeve before she can scuttle away in a buggy to someplace far, far away from you. Drawing on all the spades you’ve ever felt for her, you shriek out from the very bottom of your thump tortoise, "I hate you Terezi," you don’t even stress the eight. That’s for her . "I hate you, okay?" She’s an eclipse, blocking out the sun entirely. She’s the scraping irritation of a misplaced belonging. She’s the wrath of a million vengeful angels. She’s every kind of burn, bruise, and malady. You would write her poetry if she would only turn to acknowledge you.
"Terezi, please," she’s the flame to your fire. You would – no, you have – killed for her. "I’ll be your rabid barkbeast. You can hold the fucking leash if you need to –" just stay, stay, stay . You watch her draw a stuttering breath. When she faces you, there’s so much pity in her sightless gaze that you feel ill. Even without sight, you know she can see too fucking much.
To her, you must be lower than dirt.