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Vriska groaned, then winced at the ache in her chest, like an elephant had trampled over it while she was out. What an utter crock of shit, to be in so much pain, not even moving, unable to remember what had caused it. The dark blur of her memory was, admittedly, frightening deep down, but she wasn’t in the habit of admitting to those kinds of feelings, anything that might make her appear weak or vulnerable. That was something she’d never had the luxury to be.
So, trying to ignore the pain, which wasn’t confined to her chest but seemed to spread virtually everywhere, all the way down to the nonexistent fingertips of her missing arm, she clawed herself into a sitting position on the hard, damp ground. Dirt clumped up under her nails and she swore viciously, though she knew it was probably the least of her concerns.
Before she could so much as think about standing, or really even get a good look at her surroundings, a wide, grinning face filled her field of vision. A girl around her age, probably, with long, curly black hair and bright red lipstick. She was smiling so fervidly that it struck Vriska as vaguely psychotic, but then again, her head was throbbing violently, the vision in her one good eye blurry despite her glasses.
“You’re awake! I’ve been waiting,” the stranger said, clapping her hands together in apparent delight. The sound hurt, and Vriska groaned again, hoping she sounded more annoyed than in pain.
“And just who the hell are you? What are you doing looming over me in the middle of the night like some kind of creep?” She scowled viciously and sat up straighter, trying to pull herself up to her feet. The stranger’s eyebrows furrowed in concern, but rather than trying to stop her, she offered her arm for support, clasping Vriska’s wrist. She tried to swat at her with her other hand, the prosthetic one, missed, and promptly gave up.
“I’m Aradia,” the stranger answered, only letting go of her arm once she seemed satisfied that Vriska wasn’t going to immediately careen over into the dirt again. As if she would. She wasn’t helpless, not like Tavros or so many of the other losers back home. “And I just raised you from the dead. I’m a necromancer.” She tipped her head to the side slightly, curls cascading down past her shoulders, and seemed to do a quick up and down scan of Vriska’s body.
“I’m sorry, you fucking what?”
“Resurrected you, yes. I was taking a walk to gather some herbs and happened to find you out here. I didn’t see what happened, but you’d been stabbed right through the heart from what I could tell, lying in a pool of blood. Lucky for you I came across you when I did! I can’t imagine you could’ve been dead for more than an hour or two, so it wasn’t much effort. Proper resurrection gets trickier the longer you wait.” Aradia rambled on like it was the most natural thing in the world to discuss, and looked incredibly animated while doing so, nothing like the stereotype of a necromancer Vriska would have imagined, if she had the faintest idea they were a real thing to begin with.
She choked out a painful laugh, fully prepared to rant and rave about what a fakey fake bullshit story that was, but in the sparse light the moon and stars provided, she realized when she looked down at herself that her clothes really were soaked through with dried blood. Definitely not something she remembered being there. She couldn’t remember what she was doing out there at all, nothing after making vague plans to go out with Terezi.
“And why did you bother? You make a habit of raising every corpse you come across out of the goodness of your heart?”
Aradia wrinkled her nose at that, crossing her arms. She seemed to be losing patience with Vriska already. Good. Let her stupid preconceptions about her burn, whatever they may have been.
“No,” Aradia said. “Not all of them. As I said, the longer they are dead, the more difficult they are to retrieve. And, believe it or not, there are many people out there ready to die. Those who’ve made peace with it. I wouldn’t dare tear them back from their afterlives. Someone like you though? Young and meeting a violent end, in a way I could fix up easily? Sure. No harm in doing a good deed once in a while, right?”
“You’ll expect something in return,” Vriska blustered, because picking a fight with this mysterious, attractive stranger was far more appealing than confronting the idea that she might really have been dead. “Out with it. What do you want?”
Aradia flashed her another smile, more subdued than the one she’d first been greeted with. Less axe murderer, more flirtation. “If you insist on repaying the favor, I could use an herb gathering partner. Once you’re feeling better. I imagine you’re going to be feeling pretty rough for a while yet. I can take you home if you’d like, give you my number. Try not to need my services again any time soon though, huh?”
Vriska, smarting with embarrassed anger but too dazed to protest, not to mention terribly intrigued by this Aradia, grunted her consent and accepted the offered coat, pulling it on and clumsily buttoning it all the way up to hide the bloodstains.
“I want to hear about everything you did,” she insisted on the way to Aradia’s car, absolutely for sure not leaning against the shorter woman for support. “In detail. Got it?”
“Bossy, aren’t we? Alright then, I don’t mind. Just don’t blame me if you get squeamish.”