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They were thick as thieves, so close it was like they shared one mind. They were always a single unit, VriskaandTerezi, but the rest of the school was terrified of them. And for good reason.
Vriska Serket was obvious. She was considered by the general population to be a complete terror and maybe more than a little out of her mind, with her venomous smile and her left eye’s mutation, the pupil looking more like a broken egg yolk than a part of an eye, her scarred arm (an accident, the details of which nobody was quite certain), the way she manipulated those around her and played them like puppets, her terrifying laugh and twisted sense of humor. She was obsessed with spiders, and about as reliable and trustworthy as one. Almost everyone avoided her when they could.
Terezi Pyrope was a little harder. At first, she seemed like a mostly-normal girl, kind of short, redheaded, almost completely blind, with a creepy laugh. But really, she was as dangerous as Vriska. If she thought someone was in the wrong (which she often did), then they were doomed. As Terezi always said, justice will prevail. And Terezi’s justice was something to be feared just as much as Vriska’s backstabbing, manipulative tendencies.
Two completely different girls, but the moment they met, something clicked. They were far more similar than they might have seemed at first glance, and somehow, despite how everyone expected Vriska to destroy the blind girl and Terezi to judge the spider a criminal and take her down, they became best friends.
The Scourge Sisters. They were bad in elementary school, wild in middle school, and lost it completely once they were in high school. Vriska’s cruelty was legendary, and Terezi had only refined her sense of right and wrong (and everyone was wrong besides her) as well as her methods of punishment.
The school lived in fear of them, yes, but it was expected. Nobody was ever surprised when Vriska was called to the principal’s office or when news of Terezi’s latest “criminal” getting punished got around. It was normal.
But neither of the Scourge Sisters excluded the other from their ways, and that was probably where the trouble started. Rose said that if they had been a united front against the rest of the world, both would probably have been a lot more stable (Scourge psychology was a topic she could go on about for hours). But they weren’t. Vriska would try to play Terezi in her webs, and Terezi would find Vriska guilty of her many crimes. And fighting within such a close relationship could only end badly.
Surprisingly, they made it through freshman year mostly intact. It was during the Scourge Sisters’ sophomore year that real trouble struck.
Nobody was quite sure what happened in the beginning, or which Sister started it. All they knew was that one day they were the Scourge Sisters, and the next they were fighting in the hallways, Vriska lashing out with what looked like dangerously deadly intention and Terezi wielding her famous red cane as if it was a sword, the whole thing teeth and claws and vicious hissing and blood everywhere. It took three teachers to pull them apart, and by then Vriska had a blackening bruise around her mutated eye and a split lip, and Terezi had to lean heavily on her battered cane to keep weight off her right ankle, her nose dripping blood.
And that was only the beginning. By the end of the week, the rest of the school was holding its breath in terror, and some of the more daring had begun to place bets on which Sister would kill the other first.
The rift went beyond the Scourge Sisters themselves. The rest of the school began to split apart, taking the side of the Spider or the Dragon and arguing and fighting with those on the other team.
John Egbert and Dave Strider had it some of the worst. John was one of Vriska’s few friends besides Terezi (well, not anymore), and Dave had been close to Terezi for years. He was close to John, too, but the Sisters’ split began to fray their friendship, until it was rare to see them walking the halls together. They certainly didn’t eat lunch together anymore.
Rose Lalonde has associations with both, but she was Rose and pulled away from the whole thing easily enough. She was one of maybe a handful of people in the school who were truly on neither side.
Even Equius Zahhak and Nepeta Leijon, the entire school’s BroTP, struggled. Equius was Vriska’s neighbor and had known her for longer even than Terezi, and Nepeta frequently roleplayed with Terezi and often hung out with her. Everyone had thought that they would be the one pair unbroken by the Fight, but more than once people saw them shouting at each other, often ending with Nepeta fleeing in tears and Equius breaking a lot of things until the teachers stopped him.
Karkat Vantas stayed where he had always been, on Terezi’s side, but he became even more wary and paranoid than he usually was, rarely leaving Gamzee Makara’s side. As for Gamzee, the clown probably never even noticed that anything was going on.
Aradia Megido seemed not to take sides so much as be very very very anti-Vriska. That was to be expected, of course, with their history (not much of which was known to the rest of the school in detail, but theories suggested that the accident that shattered Vriska’s arm and the accident that left Aradia’s personality so changed and marred her chest with a massive sunburst of scars were one and the same. The two clashed often, although Aradia was more subtle than the Spider in taking her revenge and making the other girl pay.
Tavros Nitram became very hard to find after the fight, probably because he feared that Vriska would use him as a hostage or something, which was actually pretty likely. A student known to be pro-Serket once asked where he was and nearly got his head ripped off by Aradia. People quickly stopped questioning the boy’s whereabouts.
Sollux Captor reportedly blew up Vriska’s computer, although at that point, nobody was really sure what was truth and what wasn’t. It was believable, given his skills and Vriska’s history with Aradia, as well as the fact that he and Terezi had become remarkably close in the last few years and he was the type to do something like that.
Even the teachers seemed at a loss about what to do. Once, one called the cops on the girls, and the next day her house caught fire. Electrical, the firemen said, and most of the building was fine, but she soon went on vacation, and none of the other teachers tried to interfere again.
It got to the point where there wasn’t a single person in the school who knew which way to turn. Two girls having a fight and turning the entire school against itself seemed impossible and completely exaggerated, but really, it was Vriska and Terezi. With the Scourge Sisters, this was almost to be expected. One could only fear what they would be like in college, if they lived that long at all.
And then, suddenly, it was over. Vriska and Terezi entered the school together, eight minutes late the way Vriska always tried to do although Terezi liked to be on time. Vriska’s scratches were healed or bandaged, Terezi’s bruises had faded or were neatly covered. The Sisters – because they were Sisters, once again – strode through the halls arm in arm like nothing had ever happened.
When questioned, the girls laughed (wicked throaty rasp mingled with wild cackle in the way only the true Scourge Sisters could do), saying, Oh, that. Even best friends fight sometimes, you know? We’ve kissed and made up, it’s all in the past.
For a few days, everyone was on a knife’s edge, wondering if it could be possible – was it over? Were they safe?
Well. Relatively safe. This was still the Scourge Sisters, after all.
Yes. They had told the truth (perhaps for the first time, in Vriska’s case), and the fight was over. The girls didn’t ever even mention it, just went back to how they had been before, wild and brilliant and completely, entirely, wholly crazy, leaving the rest of the student body (and most of the teachers) to patch up relationships spilt apart by the Fight.
In the end, most things went back to the way they had been before. John and Dave made up, Equius and Nepeta were the Meowrails once again, and Tavros came back to school with only his normal amount of fear (he was still in the same school as Vriska, after all), Karkat went back to his normal levels of paranoia, Sollux stopped blowing up technology, Aradia was still as anti-Vriska as ever but that was, as always, to be expected, and Rose settled back to watch the interactions of the Spider and the Dragon once again.
Things were back to normal, but now there would always be that undercurrent, the knowledge that if the sophomore-year Sisters had caused this much damage, a fight like that in senior year would likely end up with the school in a nuclear war zone.
But that was normal, too. This was the school of the Scourge Sisters, after all. This was what life looked like when you went to school with a Spider and a Dragon. This was what life looked like with the Scourge Sisters, and this was what it would always be.
At least it would never be boring.