Chapter Text
Kanaya thinks, at first, that Vriska is flushed for the girl.
It’s painted all over her, bright as rust. Tucked in the way her lips soften the syllables in Terezi, the distant, angry melancholy in her eyes. The way she never talks about the things they do together, like their history is a secret and a treasure shared between them and them alone; the tremor in her hand when she reaches for her FLARP gear amidst folds of red and teal silk. The way she says, when Kanaya asks about it, “She’s just some asshole I used to know,” in a way that makes it sound like an invocation of prayer. The way that Vriska’s never been big on physical contact, and bats away even a gentle shooshpap with an anger that doesn’t make sense. “Stop that shit,” she says. “I’m not fucking glass.” Like they’re not moirails, like it’s not Kanaya’s job to keep the glass parts of her safe and whole — and Kanaya doesn’t want it to be her job, either, but somebody needs to do it, because otherwise somebody’s going to come along who doesn’t care about being gentle and Vriska will just — break.
Sometimes Kanaya thinks about what that would look like, and imagines a ship far out at sea, slipping beneath the waves. From a distance, you can’t hear the screaming, the snapping of the mast like bone, the crumple of architecture under a force of nature. From a distance, it looks peaceful. She imagines that Vriska would fall like that. Silently, and all at once. Kanaya hates thinking about these things but she does, anyway. Call it a taste for the macabre.
Then she meets Terezi Pyrope, and she understands everything.
The girl’s sharp. Diamond-hard. Has a cruel tongue and a mean swing, sticks her fingers into people’s brains and wrenches them around to see what happens. She’s a kismesis’ wet dream, with her hands on all the right buttons to push and a sense for just how to nudge someone too far. Sharp elbows and wide hips. Teeth too sharp, horns too sharp, eyes too sharp for someone so young.
She shows up on Vriska’s doorstep in the middle of a date with a wry, “I left Redglare’s outfit here,” and Kanaya thinks for a second that Vriska’s going to lunge for the jugular vein. There’s wildness in the spidergirl’s taut muscles, the flexing vein in her neck.
But Vriska just says, “Well, fine,” and lets Terezi in. And then, when Terezi’s trotting up the stairs, cane tucked under her arm because she’s got the house mapped in her mind, “Be quick, though. I’m kind of busy.”
Terezi turns and only then seems to notice Kanaya, awkwardly curled in an armchair with a cup of tea balanced on one knee. “Hi,” Kanaya offers, feeling very warm and very much like a stranger.
“Hi,” Terezi says, grinning, and leans against the wall, arms folded. “Who’re you?”
“Kanaya Maryam. I’m Vriska’s moirail.” Vriska breathes in, out, stares out the window with a tense haughtiness that screams panic. “You?”
It’s not a lie, but rather a deliberate obfuscation of the facts, to suggest that she doesn’t know who Terezi is. That she didn’t know from the moment the girl swaggered in, glasses perched judiciously on the edge of her nose like Troll Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who she was.
“Terezi Pyrope,” she says, and leaps forward, stabbing her hand out. “Vriska’s ex-FLARP partner. Maybe she’s complained about me before?” She never stops smiling.
That’s the moment when Kanaya marks their relationship for black — Vriska, fuming in the doorway, and Terezi, oozing with charm — and she relaxes, a little bit.
“A few times.”
“Lovely.” She shakes Kanaya’s hand. Her skin is dry and her nails are pointed. “Anyway, I’ll leave you be. Don’t let me disturb your pale party.”
She salutes lazily in Vriska’s direction and skips up the stairs, cane clacking against the walls. Vriska stares at her shoes as its arrhythmic knocking fades into the hallways of the castle, and Kanaya takes a sip of tea, feeling not unlike a musclebeast on a thin sheet of ice.
“So,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Kanaya looks at her moirail and something in the back of her throat aches. The girl’s profile is outlined against the window, backlit by effervescent with moonlight. Her hands are shoved in her pockets, her chin jutting up, one knee cocked, so careful; like a model, her, desperately trying to pull off a pose she’d seen in a magazine once. She razes the lawn before her castle with cruel eyes, angry eyes, and Kanaya looks at her and feels a tug behind her bloodpusher, a knot in the center of her chest that craves and craves and craves.
Kanaya knows that the art of being selfless is not the failure to want things, but to want things and not take them. She knows, too, that Vriska is not thinking of her, outlined all beautiful and furious against the frail window. So she wants in silence.
Terezi comes tromping back down the stairs with a heap of clothes slung across one arm. “You haven’t moved the closets,” she remarks airily, and Vriska flinches.
“Why would I?”
“Variety? I don’t know. Seems like with this many rooms you’d lose stuff. Anyway.” Terezi spins on her heel and tosses Kanaya an amiable, two-fingered wave. “It was a pleasure, Ms. Minty Fresh. Maybe I’ll see you around.” Her lips curl back gleefully over her teeth. “But the odds don’t really suggest it.”
“You’re not funny,” Vriska spits. Kanaya flinches.
“Fuck you. I’m brilliant.” Terezi claps Vriska on the shoulder and the latter girl sways like a willow bending to a breeze, choking on her own spittle. “See you later, Serket.”
Vriska doesn’t say anything, but when Terezi pulls her hand away she bends toward her for a moment. Desire writes itself in the open lines of her body. Her nails bite her palms. Vriska watches Terezi the way Kanaya watches her — desperately, and only when she’s not looking.
“So,” Kanaya says. “Are you two —”
“Nope.” Vriska tosses herself onto an armchair and busies herself by twirling a gold coin, produced from her pocket, between her fingers. “Not important.”
“I was only going to ask if the relationship between the two of you was —”
“Fussyfangs. No.”
“Concupiscent,” Kanaya finishes, quietly, and then folds her hands in her lap. “What else do you want to talk about, then?”
“Eridan,” Vriska says firmly. “Let’s talk about him. What a dipshit. Hate him to death.”
Kanaya’s fairly sure that Vriska’s feelings for Eridan have all the depth and complexity of a sheet of cardboard, but she acquiesces. In retrospect, this is the first sign that they’d have never worked, pale. A good moirail would’ve pressed. Maybe Kanaya isn’t selfless, after all, anyway.
Later, Rose folds her fingers around the base of her horns and combs her fingers through the wiry knots of her hair, and says, “I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not, really, given that she doesn’t strike me as the kind to share. And I’m a jealous woman.”
“Your sympathies are noted,” Kanaya says drily, but can’t work up the energy to come up with anything more eloquent. “Wrong quadrant. For you, and her, anyway.”
“You’re being opaque, dear,” Rose says fondly. Kanaya hums a lazy assent. She remembers the ache in her neck — long gone, scabbed over, replaced by Rose, Rose with her soft human skin and clever human tongue — and Kanaya rubs her jugular mindlessly. She wonders where Vriska felt her loss. Rose doesn’t let her keep the thought in her head for long