Archive of Our Own

Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you have had some strange conversations in your life. It’s not as if you’ve gone looking for them or anything, rather they seem to actively seek you out. There was obviously no escaping them, and so, faced with the slings and arrows of outrageous discourse, you took arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing learned to enjoy them.

Your undergraduate program at the University of Bizarre Interactions was proctored by Dave Strider, with his uncanny ability to always find a way to dig himself deeper into whatever Freudian hole he currently occupied. From there you went on to an inspired course of study with Kanaya Maryam. Your thesis, An Explanation of the Concept of Sarcasm to a Literal Alien, was very well received by the department.

However, despite this sterling intellectual background, you found yourself at a loss for how, exactly, to proceed with the little chat currently bearing down on you like a jackknifing tractor trailer, its brakes locked and its horn blaring a warning too late to matter.

“You want me to explain how to... be nice?” you said, faltering slightly as you evaluated your escape options and found them all to be slamming shut one after the next.

“No, dammit! I know how to be nice, Rose. That’s not the problem.” Vriska was in a state of high agitation, storming from one end of the common room to the other as she talked. Obviously, she liked the situation even less than you.

“You hide it well.”

“Wow, unnecessary.”

“On the contrary, it’s practically my duty to take openings like that when they’re presented to me.”

“Ok, look.” Vriska held up her hands in mock defeat. “I get it. You think I’m a bitch. That’s fair, because personally I think you’re a pill. We ain’t gonna bury this hatchet overday, but can we set it down for a second? I feel like I’m kinda in a serious bind here and I’m short on options when it comes to people to go to about it.”

You shifted uncomfortably in your seat. “A good start might be describing your bind without cutting yourself off to punch the wall and curse.”

“Alright, alright, fine.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and blew it out slowly. “Pyrope’s all fucked up about something and it’s freaking me out.”

“Fucked up in what way? Every time I’ve seen her, she seems to be more or less the same as she’s ever been.”

“Yeah, I know! As long as she’s got you, or Kanaya, or Dave, or Karkat to play off she’s fine.” She stalked over to the table and leaned in close to you, like she was letting you in on a conspiracy. “But when it’s just us two? Sometimes it’s like something in her just... goes away.”

“Yes, yes that’s concerning.” You drummed your fingers on the table and wished you could still drink.

“I haven’t gotten to the concerning part yet, Lalonde.” She leaned in even closer. “Sometimes, I hear her crying when she thinks I’m asleep.”

Vriska let the statement hang for a moment, twisting gently in the stale air of the meteor.

“I know I got this... reputation, okay, for being a heartless fucking monster that gets off on destroying people. And I’m not gonna insult your intelligence by pretending that there ain’t some basis for that in reality. But, man...” Her words failed her. She looked like she was about to return to her angry pacing for a moment, but settled on hauling a chair around next to you and throwing herself down on it. “If someone was hurting her, I got ways of handling that. But this? I don’t even know where to begin. So what I’m asking you, Rose, is how do I make this stop?”

Ah, so that’s what she had been driving at with her earlier hissy-fit. Vriska Serket, all omnidirectional malice and casual violence, had been trying to communicate that she was worried about her only real friend. A telephone rang somewhere deep in the bowels of the Academic Journal of Strange Conversations. Yes, hello, editor? Rose Lalonde has a real firecracker she’s getting ready to light off here — Unpacking Mental Illness for the Benefit of a Mass-Murdering Teenaged Bug-Person. Why, as it happens, she does accept payment in sweaty fistfuls of cash.

You were definitely way, waaaay too sober for this. It was late, everyone else had long since retired. Even Kanaya’s erratic sleep schedule rarely saw her up and about at that time. Who would know?

“Vriska,” you said, in as level a voice as possible. “I’m going to pour myself a drink, and if you even start to harangue me about it I will trepan you with a knitting needle.”

She scoffed. “Whatever. Right now if you told me you wanted to knock back a sopor pie, I’d go pull Makara out of his hole to find out what temperature to bake it at.”

Surpressing a shudder at the idea of hot slime confections, you got up and walked over to the coffee machine. Kanaya had made you pour most of your stash down the sink but a few scattered bottles still remained. It’s not that you were hiding them from her, per se... well, yes, actually, you were. But let’s not go crazy here, you’d been on your best behavior. This would be your first lapse in nearly six months and you felt that circumstances warranted a small indiscretion.

You wondered briefly, as you pulled the bottle of unspeakably shitty alchemized liquor from its hiding place behind the coffee machine, how many times your mother had told herself she would commit just one tiny, insignificant indiscretion today.

Your hand paused above the mugs on the drying rack. “I don’t suppose you want one?” you asked over your shoulder.

“You offering to share?” Vriska looked uncertain.

“Yes. You could probably use it. Although, I must confess, I’m not sure how it would affect your alien physiology.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see ‘poisoned by human soporifics’ counting as just or heroic, so what the hell. Why not?”

You poured two stiff pulls of the liquor, a disgusting bastard child of vodka and gin that lacked the redeeming virtues of either, into a pair of mugs. In a feat of Herculean self-control, you then tipped the rest of the bottle down the sink drain. Never let it be said that you couldn’t learn from past mistakes.

“Fair warning,” you said as you set one of the mugs on the table in front of Vriska. “If you do anything particularly amusing, it will be recorded for posterity.”

“What, you mean like rambling about apples and how they’re,” she put on a passable imitation of your voice, “‘irrereducibl-ble cosmic constnants.’”

“I doubt you have the philosophical capacity to appreciate the concept of an apple for what it is. I was thinking more along the lines of you trying to dance on the table and falling on your narrow ass.”

“Whoops, you caught me. Turns out I don’t waste much time stroking my chin about fruit.” She took a sip from the mug and immediately doubled over coughing. “Fuck! Fuuuuuuuuck!”

“It does have a bit of an edge to it, doesn’t it?” To your credit, you managed not to snicker too much as you drank from your own mug.

Eventually, Vriska caught her breath, a deep cerulean flush spreading over her cheeks. Whether it was from the coughing or from her just being a total lightweight, you couldn’t say.

“You drink this crap for fun? The hell is wrong with you?” she said, panting.

“First question: yes, but also for the purposes of self-medication. It’s an incredibly healthy coping mechanism, right up there with sudden religious conversion and abandoning your family to start a new life as a vagabond in a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off. Second question: a great many things, which I’m beginning to suspect is a prerequisite for being a hero of Light.” Okay, you were rambling already. Maybe this had been a mistake.

Vriska, apparently not prepared to let you get away with being better than her at something, made another try at the liquor. She limited herself to pulling an awful, gurning face this time. Very little coughing. Well done. You awarded her efforts a gentleman’s C. Still room for improvement, but acceptable.

“Great. You’re a headcase, I’m a headcase. Let’s all have a big headcase party.” She was speaking very deliberately, as though she had to be specific in how the words came out. “Glad we got that established. Now flash some five caegar words at me about how I can deal with this.”

“Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. There are any number of possible causes at the root of Terezi’s problems. Guilt, longstanding emotional trauma, an imbalance of chemicals in her brain. Her pan. Whatever you care to call it. The point is that this is not something that you can make go away. This is a life-long condition that will need to be managed.”

“So what you’re saying is I can’t fix it.”

“In all likelihood, no. I’m sorry Vriska.”

She slammed her fist against the table, the suddenness of the action made you jump. “Bullshit. Fucking bullshit. I just have to accept this?”

“The best you can hope to do is ameliorate the symptoms, to help her find her way out of whatever dark places she ends up in. There is no switch you can flip to make it all better, no magical combination of words you can say that will rewire her.”

“So what am I supposed to do, huh? I’m bad at this kind of thing, Rose!”

“Be there for her. It’s all you can do. She has no control over what she’s experiencing, but ultimately she is the only one who can work through it. When the day comes that she feels prepared to begin recovering, she’ll need your help. I wish I had a more satisfying answer for you, but the inner workings of the sentient mind are more complicated and frequently bizarre than very nearly anything else in existence. Humanity dedicated untold amounts of time and money to attempting to understand this sort of issue, and despite all our efforts, the best we could manage in many situations was a gallic shrug.”

“Why?” There was something very intense in her eyes. It made you uncomfortable.

“Why what?”

“Why understand it? It’s weakness. It’s a liability. Where we come from, you wear that on your sleeve, you die and you probably have it coming.”

“Because while much of humanity may have lived in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong did as they pleased and the weak did as they must, our race, unlike yours, at least could conceive of the idea that this was not the way things should be. Are you suggesting that Terezi is now unfit to live?”

She slumped over the table with a moan. “No, nononono. I’m not saying that. I would never, never, ever say that.”

“That’s what it sounded like to me.”

“Noooooooo...”

“Well then what the hell are you saying, Vriska?”

She was across the table in a blink, her hand locked around your wrist, her lips twisted in an expression somewhere between plaintive and angry. “Terezi is not fucking weak. This does not fucking happen to people like her. This is not how things are supposed to fucking work.” She retreated, looking very lost. “She’s... she’s... I don’t know. I don’t get it.”

“You’re afraid for her.” You said.

She was silent for a good while.

“I was gonna fight Jack, Lalonde,” she said at last. “Y’know, Jack? Omnipotent dog-headed asshole? Blew up the universe? Kill me if I blinked wrong? That Jack. I was nervous. I knew that I could real easily end up dead for keeps. But not once, not even for a second, did I feel like this.”

She looked at you again, and you realized that intensity you were seeing in her eyes inspired unease in you because it was something that you yourself had felt once, not so very long ago. White hot anger at the unfairness of it all, at the audacity of the universe, or Paradox Space. or whatever unmoved mover governed creation. Anger at having something you were not prepared for inflicted upon you. Anger at having something you had taken for granted removed.

“I don’t like feeling like this,” Vriska said. “Makes me feel like there’s a big hole opening up that any old jackass can waltz through and take my guts out.”

“Surprising though this may be, I know what you mean. Just, speaking in terms of the sensation of being... open to attack by letting oneself feel certain... things for others.”

“Man, I don’t even know if it’s that.” She glared into her mug, challenging it to produce an explanation for being empty. “We used to be partners. The fucking Scourge Sisters, that was us. She took people apart like nobody’s business. Didn’t even have to get her hands dirty. And now, seeing her like this...”

“You realize that someone you took to be unassailable is in fact a fallible individual like the rest of us. You realize that there is no greater plan and that we’re all damaged in our own special ways. And in realizing that you’re left, well, vulnerable. ”

She nodded slowly. “Maybe. Could be. Thing is, it ain’t even serious stuff that seems to get to her. Like, remember when Strider wandered into her little pretend courtblock and freaked out about all the scalemates she had strung up?”

You snorted despite yourself. “No, but I could see how that might disturb him, given his brother’s proclivities.”

“His guardian was into that kind of shit?”

“Oh my, among other things. I should show you his website some time.”

“Weird. Anyway, she spent forever dwelling on that. She thought he was afraid of her.”

“I was under the impression she enjoyed being feared.”

“Yeah, by the bad guys. Dave’s not the bad guys. And I tried to cheer her up, god did I try. ‘Hey Terezi, the cool kid’s just kind of a wiener. He’ll get over it. Hell, I spooked him once by smiling real hard. It’s no big deal!’”

“But it was a big deal.”

“Fuck yes. Huge deal. She even got pissed at me. Blah blah blah, just because you don’t mind everyone hating you doesn’t mean that I don’t, blah blah blah.” She sighed and slouched in her chair. “I think that’s what’s bugging me the most. None of this stuff is really even worth getting upset over, but she takes it seriously.”

“What seems insignificant to one person can take on outsized importance to another.”

Vriska was eyeballing you again. You had to admit, she could eyeball with the best of them. “Y’know, for someone who plays it so aloof, you got some insight into this stuff.”

“I may have experience with this sort of thing.” You realized your hands were fidgeting with your mug against your wishes. Good thing you weren’t in the habit of playing poker; your tell would be visible from space.

“Spill.”

“Excuse me?”

“Lets have some reciprocity, Lalonde. You’ve gotten more out of me than my own damn moirail, I wanna hear about the Seer of Light and her travelparcels.”

You slapped a hand across your mouth to quell a giggle. “Travelparcels,” you said through your fingers. “Let’s see, that would be... baggage? Yes, that’s just cumbersome enough to make sense.”

“Are you trying to say something about the way we talk?”

“Piffle. I would never dare mouthslander your speaktype.”

Vriska leaned back in her chair, dropping one inexplicable alien Chuck Taylor on the table. “You’re being really culturally insensitive right now.”

“Fine. Fine. I’m very nearly buzzed enough to think that this is a good idea.” You raised a finger. “Not quite though. I’ll be back.”

You were almost out the door before Vriska interrupted you. “I think you’re using me as an excuse to get hammered, Lalonde.”

You turned on your heel, affecting a look of outrage. “Calumny. I’m also trying to get you drunk.”

“That’s pretty messed up.”

“My intentions are pure, I assure you. I merely want to see what falls out of your mouth.”

“Is this subterfuge I’m sensing? Careful, I might start liking you.”

“Perish the thought.”

Part of you had the decency to feel a little bit guilty about everything as you fairly skipped down the hall to break into another one of your secret caches. Still, this was novel, exciting. It had been years since you’d gotten a new brain to pick.

Good lord, look at yourself. Eager to talk to Vriska Serket. You must be desperate.

Shush! It’s not all that bad. She’s atrocious, certainly, but you can only write someone off for so long when you’re one of six people able to interact with each other for literal lightyears in any given direction.

Are you actually going to tell her anything?

Why not? She’s somehow even more paranoid than you about letting people see the gaps in her armor, and she was willing to be candid. If you’re all going to have a fight on your hands when you arrive in the new session, trust will be essential. And what breeds trust better than reciprocity?

She’s also far more stupidly, pointlessly vicious than you. Anything you tell her is ammunition for her to use later.

Oh, you see what’s going on here. You get it now. You’re trying to undercut yourself again. Trying to see threats that aren’t there.

You want her to engage with you, don’t you? You think that she might be able to understand the things that go on in your own miswired brain. Because Light somehow just naturally knows Light.

Maybe it does. You saw the anger in her. Has Dave ever felt that kind of thing before? Has Kanaya? Karkat might pretend to, but you doubt it’s ever been that acute.

You slowed to a walk, hand tracing the wall as old wounds opened in your chest and old sensations best forgotten loomed large in your memory. Unspeakable hatred and the desire to grind a foe into dust, every fiber of your being drawn taught, singing in the speech of the abyssal darkness. He murdered them. Your mother, John’s father. He took trophies from them. He cut John down in a heartbeat. And then he toyed with you.

You’re being ridiculous.

No, you’re being ridiculous. You can’t wall yourself off forever. If it was up to you, you’d still be awkwardly tiptoeing around the obvious with Kanaya, carefully avoiding certain avenues of discussion and blushing furiously whenever your hands brushed.

But, honestly, Vriska?

Yes, Vriska. Why not Vriska? It pains you to say it, but there’s a reason you share an aspect. Kanaya saw something similar in the two of you. She admitted as much when she nervously, laughingly, suggested that she might have a ‘type’. Face it, Rosie, you’re dangerous. You’ve got rage deep inside you, just like her. She would have gone looking for a fight with Jack, just like you. And there’s no one else left alive who you can say the same about.

So yes, you decided, you were going to engage the fuck out of her, and there was nothing you could do about it. Deal with it. You scooped the liquor out of its hiding place in the bathroom trash can, pausing to give yourself a chiding look in the mirror. No more of your nonsense now, understood? You were going to slip back down to the common room, nice and quiet.

Nice and quiet, anyway, until you almost plowed into Dave as he was rounding a corner.

“Hey Rose, wha—” You could feel his eyes behind his shades sliding down to the bottle in your hand and back up to your face. “Aw, seriously?”

“I understand how this looks, Dave,” you said, perhaps too quickly. “But I have a really good excuse.”

“Oh yeah, like what? You tryin’ to crack the secret of apples again?” He looked and sounded more disappointed than anything. You wished he was angry.

“No, I think we established that was an intellectual dead-end. Instead, I’ve found myself mired in some extremely serious shit with none other than Vriska Serket, and social lubricant is proving essential.”

“Uh, for real? What kind of serious shit? Like, Charlie in the trees serious?”

You laid a hand on his shoulder. “Charlie is coming out of tunnels all over the LZ, Dave. We are entrenched, for better or for worse, and I’m calling in for close air support.”

“That’s serious alright.” He gave you another once over. “Not that I’m suspicious or anything, but you do know she can control minds, right? Ink-blay ice-tway if-ay I’m alkting-tay o-tay ose-Ray.”

“You know her powers don’t work like that.”

“Prove it. Say something she wouldn’t know to say.”

You sighed, pinching the bridge of your nose. “Let’s revisit the phallic connotations of your brother’s puppets.”

“Okay! ‘Sall good here as far as I’m concerned! No need to chase that line of thought!”

“Anything else? Perhaps I can regale you with the life and times of John’s birthday rabbit?”

“Pass. It was confusing enough the first time.” He cocked an eyebrow at you. “Also, ‘social lubricant?'”

“To turn a phrase. You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”

“Nah, what kinda guy would I be to harsh his own sister’s hustle?”

“Than— wait, excuse me?”

Goddamnit did he just wink at you? “Don’t worry. Go get your ‘lubrication’ on. Just do me a favor and leave me out of the weird alien hate-marriage arrangements. I’m not emotionally prepared to hand my own flesh and blood off to the spiderbitch.”

“Dave!”

“But hey, tell ya what. Since I’m such a magnanimous dude, I will absolutely be the godfather of your half-troll spitebabies.”

“We are just talking! Nothing more!” Heat was creeping up your neck, embarrassment joining booze flush to turn you solid pink.

“Yeeeah, I’ve seen some movies. That’s how it starts. Next thing you know, pow,” he pounded a fist into his palm, “cue the cycle of mutual antagonism and bitter rivalry. You’re textbook as balls, Rose. I just want you to know, I accept your choices and respect them.”

“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Karkat.”

He laughed, the prick, and slid his shades down to look you in the eyes. “Lemme have this one moment, okay? Think of it as payin’ rent on the plot you staked out in the fuck-up center of my brain.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“I learned from the best. This is a one-time deal, right? Not gonna make her your on-the-DL drinking buddy?”

You held a hand up and drew an X over your heart with the neck of your bottle. “Strictly a unique occurence, I promise.”

“I didn’t see shit, then. Go do whatever it is you’re gonna do. Just, like, don’t give me a reason to regret this.”

“I won’t.”

He pointed at his eyes and then at you. “I’m holding you to that.”

Dave disappeared around the corner, heading to the bathroom, his rendition of the dulcet strains of Nate Dogg’s finest stylings marking his departure:

If you smoke like I smoke,

then you high like everyday,

and if your ass is a buster

213 will regulate.

“Took you long enough,” Vriska said the exact instant you set foot back in the common area without turning her attention from the dogeared RPG rulebook she was idly flipping through.

“My apologies. I had to ditch a hot pursuit. Gunfire was exchanged; lives were lost. More tragic movements were writ in chalk and pavement for the danse macabre we are all fated to one day join.”

“Sucks to be them.”

You thumped the bottle down on the table. “Regardless of the cost, I return victorious. Though I fear that many more such victories will be my undoing.”

She glanced up at you. “Okay, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I ran into Dave. The price of his silence was getting to serve me a line of my own snarky horseshit.”

Vriska cringed. “Ouch. Wrecked by the cool kid.”

“My pride may never recover.” You poured another brace of drinks, raising yours in a toast. “To breaking solemn oaths.”

The stuff was still vile upon drinking, but by now you were feeling very warm and pleasantly distant from yourself. You fancied that you could hear the neurons in charge of your higher cognitive functions dying with little screams. Served them right. Vriska pulled another pained grimace, bless her withered heart-analog but she tried so hard, and you giggled idiotically. There was going to be hell to pay tomorrow, however for the moment you were almost enjoying yourself.

“You know, this isn’t a competition. You don’t have to match me drink for drink.”

“Get bent, Lalonde. I don’t come in second.” She was turning bright blue.

A sudden realization made you snort. “You look like Violet Beauregard.”

“That supposed to mean something to me?”

“Token spoiled rich brat character from a children’s morality tale. Turns into a giant blueberry because she can’t follow basic instructions. The take-away is meant to be that you should always listen to authority figures, even when they demonstrate the kind of questionable judgement that leads to leaving dangerous products within easy reach of grade schoolers. However, I always read it as saying that you shouldn’t follow strange, top-hatted men into the depths of a mysterious factory with whimsical safety measures.”

“You’re so fucking weird.”

“Beyond a doubt. I was being serious when I suggested that you and I were selected for our aspect based on our dysfunctions more than anything else. But maybe that’s just how the game works. It would make sense, given what else we know about its methodology. Abduct adolescents, strip them of their homes and their loved ones, then sort them into arbitrary classes and elements based on their neuroses.” You poured out another drink for yourself. “How wonderful and wise our absentee puppetmaster must be.”

Vriska scoffed, insistently holding her mug out. You cheerfully filled it. “Don’t see what’s so bad about it. Best thing that ever happened to me, getting me off that shithole planet.”

“I wouldn’t say I was fond of my life at the time, but in retrospect I believe I may have been a touch ungrateful for what I had.”

“Oh, here we go,” Vriska sat forward, grinning broadly, “the good part.”

“Yes, my parcelwhatsits on full display.”

“Travelparcels.”

“You know what I mean.”

You took a deep breath, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then plunged boldly onward.

“I think the moment where I realized that I had been wrong all along, about everything really, was when Jack killed my mother.”

“I saw that. He got John’s guardian too.” She sounded almost sad.

“Yes. I was not eased into the revelation, not granted any time to prepare for the possibility that she was even killable, let alone dead. She was, for all I knew, there one moment and gone the next.”

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

Vriska made a vague, frustrated gesture. “For your... I’m sorry for your loss okay? It sucks when people who actually liked their lusii or ectobiological human relations, or what the fuck ever, lose them.”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t know that I did like her very much. I miss her, and I wish I’d gotten to know her better and understand her outside of the fabricated webs of passive-aggressive oneupmanship that never really existed outside my mind. But, the basic truth of the matter is she shouldn’t have been anywhere near the duty of raising a child. And I worry that, by recognizing that fact, I’m somehow spitting on her grave.”

You laughed, soft and unhappy. “It bothers me sometimes that I can’t remember if I ever told her I loved her or cared about her, but I can recount every single time I ever called her a shrew to her face. Does that make me a bad person?”

“Are you seriously asking me?” she said, incredulous.

“It isn’t as if you’re the first. Dave’s already heard all this, but you know how he is — he evades, prevaricates, trips over his own shoelaces. I could use a blunt, up-or-down take.”

“Well if that’s what you want, Karkat—”

“I want blunt, Vriska, not a half-hour diatribe.”

“Man, I dunno.” She leaned her chair back on two legs. “Humans got such low standards for what makes you bad. You’re all so soft and delicate. Personally, I don’t think being conflicted about your guardian makes you bad. But, uh, consider who that’s coming from over here.”

“I certainly feel like a bad person, sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, the good news is eventually you stop noticing.”

“How reassuring, to know that being at peace with myself is as simple as becoming inured to my own awfulness.”

“Jegus, Rose, you ain’t awful. Why’s everyone on this rock think they suck? If we’d put half the effort we spend on moping around into winning the game, we’d never have gotten into this mess in the first place.”

Vriska sucked her teeth for a moment. “Here’s what I think, take it or leave it. I think that nothing says you can’t care for someone without liking their ass very much. I know I straight-up hated my lusus for as long as I could remember. But when everything hit the ceiling oscillator and she was helpless and dying... I couldn’t just let her suffer.”

You cocked an eyebrow. “You had to put your guardian down?”

“Yep. Thought it would be, like, liberating or something. But, and don’t get me wrong, my lusus was a pain in the ass—”

“So I’ve heard. Thousands and thousands of children.”

“Don’t remind me. But when she was dead, before she got put into the sprite anyway — and lemme tell ya, that was super. Now she can talk, too! Greeeeeeeeat, just what I always wanted. Anyway, when she was dead, and I was supposed to be free of this weight around my neck, I just ended up feeling bad.”

“Because despite everything, you cared for her.”

Vriska threw her hands up. “I guess! She fucked my life up pretty hard, but it’s not like she was bright enough to be anything other than a big, stupid, hungry spider.” She glowered into her cup. “Can’t believe I’m talking about this with you of all people.”

“A few hours ago, I would have agreed with you.”

“Maybe you’re right, Lalonde, maybe there’s some kinda shared thing we got going on here. Like we’re, I dunno, screwed up in some compatible way that makes communication easier or something.” She got down a mouthful of liquor, somehow without looking like she was on the verge of death. “Which is funny, ‘cuz I’m pretty sure I got next to nothin’ in common with you.”

“Weeeeeeell now, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” You split the last drops from the bottle between the two of you. “There, I did that thing you do, to facilitate communication.”

“No, that was only seven.”

“Oh really now, you expect me to believe that you can hear the difference between seven and eight ‘e’s.”

“Of course you can’t, with your pathetic ears. Its amazing your race survived long enough to get wiped out by meteors.”

“Truly remarkable that we ever got off the savannah without being able to detect the precise number of letters in an elongated vowel sound. What other useless evolutionary adaptations do trolls have?”

“Ain’t useless. It's very important for not looking like an asshole in front of me. And that is the most important thing anything can evolve.”

“A primitive chordate shuffles back to the ocean shore and tells his friends that they should pack it in because Vriska Serket said they aren’t cut out for the whole ‘breathing oxygen’ thing. Another lackluster phylum nipped in the bud.”

“Okay seriously, what do you think we got in common.”

“Mommy issues!” you crowed triumphantly, spilling a bit from your cup with an overenthusiastic gesture. Vriska’s look of incomprehension sent you into convulsions of body-shaking laughter.

“Also, also, hang on,” you wiped a tear from your eye, doing your best to put on a serious face. “Issues with trust, issues with showing affection, issues with accepting the bullshit we’re dealt... yes, I think our shared classpect is in actuality, the Weirdos of Insecurity.”

“Fuck you, I ain’t insecure.” She crossed her arms and glared.

“Oh pfffft, like hell you aren’t. I have your number, Serket. Don’t think I don’t see my own kind of chicanery when I know it. We build our prickly little shells up and up and up until we disappear within them and are gone. Poof! Where did we go? What ever became of us? The world may neeeeeeeever knoooooooow! Did I get it right that time?”

Vriska wasn’t glaring anymore. “Yeah, you’re golden.”

“And we can’t stop, can we? There’s always a teeny, tiny, treacherous little voice in our heads,” you waggled a finger behind your ear as a visual aid, “that won’t ever let us forget the risks we run if we don’t keep building that shell. You want to help Terezi, because it causes you pain to see her unhappy. But you didn’t go to her and tell her your fears and say the things you said to me to her, because you can’t. You could only say them to me because you were desperate.”

“You didn’t used to get this scary when you were drunk. You feeling okay?”

“I should have warned you that I intended to unload this whole ugly mess at your feet. Whoops! Silly old wetbrain Rose strikes again! When will she learn? The studio audience can’t get enough of her. And you know what the really, really, really funny thing is, Vriska? If you hadn’t been here to raise a stink and be such an... such an incredible bitch about everything, I don’t know if anyone else here would have been prepared to help me do anything about my drinking problem.”

“Come on, I’m pretty great but I’m sure Kanaya would—”

“I love Kanaya dearly, but she doesn’t understand a lot of things about me or humans in general. And given the confluence of all the things I was just talking about, I don’t know if there is any way I could ever find it in myself to walk up to her of my own volition and say ‘Kanaya, I have a problem and I need your help’. Is this making any sense to you?”

“I think so. How long you been sitting on this?”

“Oh, years I think. Which brings me to the biggest concern I’ve been wanting to get off my chest, and the one thing that I’m beyond certain that you are the only person I can say it to and expect to get anything other than a blank stare.”

“Lay it on me.”

“We’re both very angry people, aren’t we Vriska? I don’t mean in a Karkat way, I mean in a way where something feels like its trying to tear its way out of us.”

She considered your words for a moment. “What makes you so sure I get like that?”

“Talking about Terezi, the way you phrased things, the way you looked. It’s all very familiar to me. You said that if it were a case of someone else hurting her, you could handle that. If there’s one thing I know about you for certain, it’s that your skills run towards killing people and breaking things. You want to work violence upon whatever it is that’s hurting your moirail. The fact that you can’t, that you can only watch as it happens, enrages you.”

There was a spark of recognition in her eye now, a kind of relief in her face. “You feel shit like that too? Yeah, it does burn me up pretty bad. Give me a face to break, give me anything but having to hear her cry in the dark.”

“I do indeed feel shit like that. When my mother was killed, it was as if something that had been inside me for so long that I didn’t even notice it anymore all came rushing out at once. I went hunting for Jack, intent on destroying him or dying in the attempt. And then he killed John, right there in front of me...” you mimed stabbing something and made a visceral squelching noise with your mouth. “One shot, through the back, just like turning off a light.”

“Little bulgebiter fights dirty.”

“I can’t fault his logic. John was a god and needed to be removed from the equation. I, of course, didn’t merit that kind of consideration, being just a silly little girl with delusions of potency. But, watching John die...”

It hurt to remember. He was alive and well and everything was fine now, but the memory of watching him crumple to the ground, lifeless, still caught in your chest like a fisherman’s hook.

“I have never before or since felt the kind of powerful desire I felt in that moment to inflict pain upon another. I wanted to make him pay ten-fold for taking these people from me. I wanted to make him suffer. The frightening thing is...” You swallowed hard, fortified yourself with the last of the liquor. “The frightening thing is that it felt good.”

“Made you feel like you were in control, like you weren’t just getting jerked around at the whims of something bigger than you.”

“Exactly.”

Vriska tilted her head to one side, giving you a look with that eye of hers, as if seeing you for the first time, as if evaluating you.

“Mind if I’m blunt with you again?” she said.

“Be my guest.”

“Alright. You should be really, really grateful that you didn’t kill Jack. Because if you’re willing to kill for a good reason, then sooner or later you’ll find that you’re willing to kill for a bad reason. And once you get started down that road, it gets harder to stop.”

“Jack is a game construct. It isn’t as if I would be killing a real person.”

Vriska didn’t reply at first, head still cocked inquisitively.

“Yeah,” she said at last, “that’s how I justified things to myself too. It doesn’t count if it’s part of The Game, capital letters. And that only works right up until the moment it doesn’t anymore. You and I might have a lot in common, Lalonde, but you still got one thing I don’t. You haven’t popped that murder cherry yet. And if you’re smart, you never will.”

It was obviously intended to be a significant statement, but you found yourself nearly in tears from laughing regardless.

“Is that metaphor even copacetic with trollish anatomy?” you said between ragged gasps for breath. “No, don’t tell me. I want to preserve the mystery.”

Vriska wasn’t laughing.

“I’m serious, Lalonde, don’t lose what you have.”

“I’ve killed imps, does that put me squarely on the road to sociopathy?”

“They ain’t got personalities or goals beyond being annoying. Jacks are different. They’re lousy, backstabbing creeps, but so are lots of real people.”

“And why, pray, are you telling me this?”

“Because I respect you.”

“Should I find that worrying?”

“Flattering, if anything.”

“I remain unflattered.”

“That’s your problem.”

Silence descended, and a basal, monkey realization crept up your spine, for the first time ever in your association with the trolls, that you were dealing with an alien, as superficial as her alien characteristics may have been at first glance.

“We aren’t friends, right?” she said.

“No,” you replied.

“Good. Bad things happen to people when they’re friends with me.”

There was something in her voice that made you almost inclined towards pity.

“For what it’s worth,” you said, “I don’t hate you, either.”

Vriska stretched, arms over her head, fingers interlaced.

“Story of my life,” she said. “But I ain’t really got time or the inclination for anything black right now anyway.”

“I’m not talking about your inane romantic matrices. I’m saying that despite the extent to which you are, undeniably, an extravagant bitch, I do not dislike you.”

“I guess the feeling’s mutual.” She held out a hand. “Tolerance?”

You accepted the handshake.

“Tolerance.”

“Wonderful.”

She rose from her seat, leaning against her chair momentarily to find her balance. What a fucking cheap date.

“By the way, Lalonde,” she said, “if this turns out not to be an isolated incident, concerning your soporific habit, I’m going to kick your ass up and down the length of this meteor.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

“Need everyone at one hundred percent when we get to the new session. Can’t have people stumbling around,” and here she punctuated her words by nearly tripping over her own feet, “like a bunch of morons.”

“Agreed. There will not be a repeat performance.”

“Glad we see eye to eye on this.”

She was in the doorway, about to fumble her way out into the depths of the facility, when you spoke again.

“Vriska?”

“What?”

“Best of luck. With Terezi, I mean.”

She turned back to you, smiling like the devil.

“I got all the luck, Lalonde. But coming from another hero of Light, I guess that means a lot.”