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It’s raining. It’s always raining, Eridan thinks. He knows that isn’t true – it was sunny yesterday – but it always feels like it’s raining.
He shifts in his seat. The chairs in this coffeeshop are uncomfortable, and the coffee is kind of gross, but he’s got work to do and it’s not like he has anywhere better to be. Or anything better to do than try desperately to not fail every single one of his shitty classes at his shitty college.
He has read the same sentence three times and still not understood a word when the little bell on the door rings again. It rings a lot, the coffeeshop is nowhere near empty, but he looks up anyway. Anything to distract him from math.
Distractions are all well and good, but Eridan Ampora is wholly unprepared for who walks in.
She’s a world apart from who she had been last time he had seen her, but really, so is he – who is Eridan Ampora to judge someone’s fall from grace? Just look at him.
He is a sight to see, but right now, he is looking at her.
Her hair, which used to be either blonde or blue depending on her mood, has reverted to its natural black, just as wild but with no trace of its former color.
But her hair is nothing in comparison to her face. Scars spread across her skin, radiating from the left side, and her left eye looks fractured, broken. Her ragged denim jacket hangs too-big on her bony frame, the left sleeve swinging emptily.
Eridan feels a little sick. That is Vriska Serket, no doubt, but she’s nearly unrecognizable. Her remaining eye still glitters with that wild light, but it’s different. She is not the same cruel, powerful, burning girl that he had known in high school – that he had hated in high school.
Then again, Eridan isn’t much like he used to be, either. He’s fallen a long way from his former position of popularity. No longer the prince of anything, he’s attending the community college and is failing all his classes. He has no friends and hasn’t had a real conversation with someone in months. The purple hair streak is gone (he had gotten it to combat Vriska’s brilliant blue, wow was he a douche back then), and so are the hipster glasses, replaced by cheap reading glasses – his eyes had always been shit. The scarf is still there, but it’s old and worn and doesn’t look nearly as stuck-up as it used to.
Vriska Serket looks like hell, but so does he. Apparently, a lot happened in those two years since high school.
For a moment, he considers just sitting very still and letting the Spider8itch pass him by, but then he realizes that he’s tired of people passing him by, of letting people pass him by.
“Hey, Serket!”
He sees the instant that her entire body tenses like a tripwire, doesn’t miss the way her right hand – her only hand – makes a move towards the inside of her jacket as if reaching for a weapon. He watches his former enemy turn around and meets her eyes – eye – and it’s just as brilliant a blue as he remembers.
He watches that impossible blue eye change from narrowed confusion to wide-eyed recognition. “Eridan Ampora?” she asks, and her voice is rough, raspy, far more than it used to be. She sounds like razor wire.
He stands. “Um. Hi.” He hasn’t thought through their encounter this far, or anywhere beyond just getting her to see him.
A little half-smile appears on her face, but it lacks the malice it used to carry. The left side of her face doesn’t move as much as the right does, making it look lopsided. “You look like shit.”
Eridan huffs. “Me? Look at you! You look like you got hit by a train!”
She laughs. It’s quieter than it used to be, lacking some of that mania. “Close. But I was the bad girl, remember? I’m allowed to look like this. You’re Mister Fancyfins, you can’t be seen running around looking like some hobo.”
“I do not –”
Another laugh, this one sounding a little closer to the old Vriska. “Some things just don’t change, huh?”
He growls, but there is no real aggression in it. He’s missed this; missed talking and sniping and just being around people.
He’s been alone a lot lately.
Uninvited, she sits down across from him. He glares, but again, he doesn’t really want to drive her off, so it’s an empty threat. And she knows it.
She leans across the table, putting her weight on her arm. “Whatcha readin’, fishboy?”
He slams the book shut. “Nothing.”
She sits back, laughing. “Never pictured you as the study type. Why here, anyways? It’s a shit place with shit coffee. Why aren’t you home at Daddy’s house, drinking fancy special imported shit coffee instead?”
“Not at home anymore.”
“What? Where, then? College? Which one? I didn’t know there were any fancy-ass colleges around here.”
“There aren’t.”
She stares at him, her eye wide, and then laughs. “Eridan Ampora, community college student. Feferi was always telling you to study harder; guess she was right.”
It hurts to hear someone say it, someone who knew him when he was a king, but he also knows that that’s just Vriska – she seeks out your weaknesses and uses them. But even with such a revelation, she doesn’t seem to be gloating. Maybe it’s because she’s in a similar situation. “I don’t see you hangin’ around there. Unless some school chose to miraculously ignore your impressive criminal record, I’ll go on a limb here an’ say you aren’t at school.”
Her eye flashes a little. “No way,” she laughs, but he can hear its hollowness. “Why in eight hells would I waste my life like that? I have better things to do.”
“Like losin’ your arm.”
Now she looks cold. For an instant, he fears he’s estranged her again, that she will leave and he will be alone again. But then it’s gone, and she just has a tiny almost-sad smile on her scarred face. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “Like losing my arm.”
“Where have you been, anyway? I bet you haven’t got a job, ’cause why would you do that when you can be a criminal and make eight zillion bucks and look like you got run over by somethin’ heavy with teeth? What are you doing? Livin’ in Terezi’s basement? No, wait, she’d be at law school or something. Do you hide in her dorm room? Are lawyers allowed to have pet spiders?”
He knows he’s pushing it, knows that she very well may get up and leave and he would probably never see her again. But he can’t not do it. They were fierce and hot and hateful in high school, that kind of thing doesn’t just go away.
But miraculously, she doesn’t go. “No,” she says, quiet now, staring at the table. “I mean, yeah, Terezi’s gonna go to law school, but she…” she stops, brow furrowing as if trying to find the right words. “Supreme Court Justices can’t go around associating with criminals and thieves, so that was that.”
Eridan blinks. That was probably the one thing he thought would never end – the Dragon and the Spider. They were practically a single unit back in high school, the Scourge Sisters or whatever they called themselves, and yeah they were kind of the two sides of the coin, but nobody thought that would be enough to break them – if anything, everyone had thought it would make their bond all the stronger.
Apparently not.
Vriska shakes her head suddenly. “Why the hell am I telling you this? Jesus, I’ve gotta be more tired than I thought. So. You. Community college, studying…” she tips her head sideways to read the title of Eridan’s book, “math? Wow, Ampora, I’ve gotta say I never saw that one coming –”
“I’m not studyin’ math,” Eridan snaps. “I… well, I don’t really know what I want to do. At this rate, I won’t be doing anythin’ – you don’t get a degree when you’re failing every class.” He stops, frowning. “Now I’m the one who’s tellin’ too much.”
Vriska laughs. “Look at us, Ampora. We’re a bunch of sad sacks, aren’t we? Prince Fishface and the Spiderbitch, a college failure and a homeless criminal. How the mighty fuckin’ fall.”
Eridan has nothing to say to that. They are both quiet for a while, Eridan staring at his book and Vriska playing with the empty cuff of her jacket.
They don’t talk, but both are watching the other from the corners of their eyes. Of all the people he knew in high school, he never expected to miss Vriska. And he didn’t miss her. He didn’t miss her at all, right up until the moment when she walked into the coffeeshop with a mutilated face and a missing arm.
Once upon a time, they knew each other well. He can tell she’s thinking similar things. Vriska was a bad apple even in high school, but a lot of people thought that Eridan Ampora was going to go places, do things. And now here he sits, struggling not to fail his classes, abandoned by those he once called his friends – even Feferi is gone now, doing the big things that he always thought he’d be doing too, by her side – and he is more alone than he has ever been.
But not anymore. Now, there is a wild girl who is probably on more than one wanted list sitting across from him. Her sleeve is empty and her eye is blind, but she’s still Vriska, just like he’s still Eridan even without the purple and the glasses and the pompousness. They’re still them, even if everything else has changed.
The coffeeshop bustles around them, people coming and going and talking and laughing and meeting up with friends, while in one booth, completely ordinary, two people who once knew – once hated – each other sit in silence, but a silence that means much more than the kind they are usually in, where they had no one to be with and no one to talk to.
Eridan thinks he prefers this kind of silence.