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You’re four sweeps, both of you wearing the outfits of your characters. Frog-marching a few captured FLARP opponents, eyes deadened by mind control. The thrill and grins of victory are starting to wear off. No longer possessed by the adrenaline of a battle trance, Vriska is starting to kick at rocks and drag her feet as she walks.
In conversation that’s rapidly becoming forced, she’s biting her claws. It’s always like this when you win, and you always win. Your game, your presence, your characters and their dorky roleplay have helped her put it out of her mind, what she has to do. But the knowledge always comes back on the walk to feed the losers to her lusus. By the time you’ve walked through the imposing doors of her huge, drafty castle and are following her downstairs, to the pit where that nightmarish creature lives, she’s a wreck.
After they’re devoured, buying her some surcease of the psychic screaming and insults in her head, she’s prone on the ground in a too-cluttered block, staring at the wall with eyes wide open, trembling just enough for you to notice. You do not touch her. Once, when she did this, you placed a reassuring hand on her back. But she flinched, made an uncharacteristically little non-word sound, and leaned away. You did not ever try again. You watch over her every time she does this. The two of you have never discussed it. She never cries, so you don’t, either.
You’re six sweeps, ready to put your sword in her back. Nobody saves her. You don’t touch her, even then. You watch her on the ground and wish she’d twitch. Sweeps blur in intoxication, guilt, sorrow, deaths. You draw an outline in blue so you can smell her color one last time, but not before you make sure John saves her. This time, you talk. This time, you put your hand on her back, and she puts hers on yours. You will figure this out together.
You become moirails, because neither of you know quite how to put into quadrants what you mean to each other, and this one gives you the least nervewracking way to be close to her. You talk, really talk, laying side-by-side on the human-carapacian style beds on the meteor — none of you have yet figured out how to conjure a cupe out of the alchemiter. When you get to speaking of the spiral of death, vengeance and rage that scarred her life, she doesn’t spiral off, curling up and disappearing. You can tell it’s not easy for her to do it, but she looks to you and you smell pleading in her eyes, a request for you to bring your hands to her face and pull her close. You do it, and you feel like your heart will catch fire and burn up from the weight of feeling that passes through you when she settles against your chest.
You’re seven sweeps. You try not to think that this may be the last time you ever touch the girl who shaped your life, who understood the emptiness inside you. You spill your heart to her in messages. You remem8er. You fight, and you win. You walk through the door without her.
She’s still seven sweeps in your head. Gangly and loud, tangled up in knots she finally held still long enough to let you try and work out. For a time.
This girl, as long as you can remember, was a whirlwind. She raged and burned and scarred the landscape where she passed.
You’re ten sweeps, planetside — a rarity in your postgame life of wandering, searching the void. You’re having one of the vague surreal dreams that are all you get now, bubbles that didn’t get sucked into the singularity all dissolved. Accustomed to the waking world having little to offer you of late, you cling to sleep and focus on the half-lucid world of the dream. You cling to the back of the dragon and soar through the night, wind whipping across your face as you smell the starlight, circling over a great congregation of buildings in organic shapes, scouting the streets below for your quarry.
As you dip down and feel the acid-tract-turning thrill of descent as huge wings beat to your side, you are jolted awake by a sudden sound. Before you can think, you lurch to your feet, springing up into a threatening stance and inhaling deeply to try and get a sense of your surroundings in the heady rush. Your mind catches up to the waking world like a scuttle getting into gear. You retroactively recognize that the sound that sent you springing to a combat stance was the door to your own ablutionblock closing. A woman stands there, leaning back in surprise at your sudden awakening. She’s taller, much taller. Sharper. But it can’t be.
“Sorry,” the voice of Vriska Serket says, and you finally breathe out, memory and awareness flooding back to you. You remember the concerted effort to bring her back, the surreal feeling of seeing her in the flesh after so long turning her over in your memories, pulling her away from the reunions to collapse, exhausted, into a pile with her, both nearly silent with wonder after what felt like eons apart. You relax and let your hands fall to your side, offering up your own matching apology. “I’m not used to the company,” you say, “it’s been…” She half-smiles wistfully, fangs perfectly resting on her lips, looking at you.
After all the lonely days, Vriska Serket is alive and smirking at you, loose long-sleeved shirt and boxers giving her an appearance that’s jarringly casual for how earth-shattering this feels. “You know,” she says, still standing some distance from you in the mostly-dark respiteblock, “I thought.” She stops, blinking a bit, and scrunches up her face in a look you recognize as her fighting all her defense mechanisms and trying to be sincere. “I thought you’d’ve found someone who didn’t disappear on some shithive suicide mission.”
Your first instinct is to make a deflecting joke. Who among us hasn’t been on one of those, at this point? It would be so easy for you to settle into that banter. To not address why you’d never filled that gulf, why you’d ceaselessly searched for her. To stay strong and funny and comfortably, safely pale, settle back into the relaxation of the pile of cushions and catch her up on the lives she’s missed being a part of, content yourself with the occasional chance to hold her.
But the moment is too big for that. You can’t hold it in. You dragged this girl back from the ragged edges of unreality.
Something breaks in you, someting that always threatened to between the two of you, when hands wandered or faces were close at the end of the long night, brief kisses just on the edge of pale and...something else. Something scarier. Something that blurred the lines, like the fiery relationships you watch Kanaya and Karkat fall into the spell of in your time together. Even with no Empire to cull you for it, it still scared the both of you then. But you burned the Condesce’s body and her laws with it. You will let yourself have this. You step up to her, full of intent, and respond to her inaccurate assumption with the only thing you can: the truth.
“Who could come after you?” And you are on her, pushing her by her sleepshirt-clad shoulders gently into the wall and pressing up close, taking a big breath with your mouth hanging open to taste every bit of this. She knows what you’re doing and she grins and you almost shudder just from how that makes you feel. She leans in a bit, closing the gap between your faces, and then she closes her eyes and tilts her head and you realize that she’s thought about this moment just as many times as you have. You give in and press into her lips and you have the most paradoxical urge to cry. She gives a little shudder when you press in with tongue and bring a hand to her tangle of hair, the other slipping to the small of her back, and all you want to do is weep for the profound improbability of it all, that you found her and she wants you.
You can see in your mind how simple it could be if you’d push that feeling down, too, maintaining your usual vice grip on your emotions and letting the kiss transport you, falling into it like a character in a novel. But you can’t. Blame the arduous day, the sweeps of separation or, perhaps, the inescapable fact that this will never be simple for you. You feel teardrops slipping over the scars that ring your eyes — the scars that, for seemingly endless perigees, were the only proof you carried that you’d ever met Vriska Serket. You pull back from the kiss and take a shuddering breath, and you almost can’t take the look on her face as it goes from eyes-closed contentment to realization at your tears to crestfallen concern.
Your senses start to blur as you sniff, and she’s pulling you, her back sliding down the wall, bringing you to sit beside her on the ground and lean onto her shoulder with a gentleness that surprises you. It pains you to feel fragile or seem weak in her eyes, and the embarrassment is compounded by the abject hash you’ve just made of an extremely important kiss.
Her hands are wrapped around you, one brushing near the base of your horn, claws in your scalp giving you just enough sensation to stay grounded and compose yourself, nuzzling up to her neck. As you do, though, you feel a drop on the top of your head and pull back to see Vriska, too, who goes to wipe a tear away from the edge of her eye. You look at her, sprawled out on the carpet, with the little warbling smile that indicates she’s choking back further tears.
The smile gets a little bigger, and with a joking (if slightly wobbly) whisper asks, “Was the kiss really that bad?” She laughs a bit under her breath and then you are, too, feeling that incomparable cathartic pain, both shedding a few more tears while cracking up, and then she conspicuously takes your hand in hers and holds it, looking down at it.
“Everyone thought you died,” you whisper back, still feeling for all the world that you were acting out some fantasy you long deprived yourself from, “but I didn’t…couldn’t. I kept looking.” And you feel like a teenager again, unable to spit out how you really feel while sitting here with the blueberry-and-wormwood smell of her and the feel of her thumb running over the dry skin at the tips of your knuckles. “I had to be dragged back here for Kanaya’s human wedding.”
She perks up with inqiusitiveness when she hears the last detail. If you stood in a courtblock and testified that you weren’t at all jealous of that, you’d be guilty of perjury.
“Kanaya’s what?”
“It was sickeningly saccharine, you would’ve hated it,” you say, summoning back a toothy grin.
“I’m just shocked they kept it together without me looking out for them,” she says, and shoots you that little conspiratorial face she gets and it’s like you’re back on the meteor, gossiping about your friends, and the ease with which you slip back into it makes the ache of how much you longed for her burn even more.
She shifts a bit, and keeps talking, still quiet, a careful tone of voice you’ve only heard her take with you, “I missed you so fucking much. It was a stupid risk. I just,” she squeezes your hand tighter, “I had to. There was something I could do and I thought, maybe. Maybe I could finally be a hero,” and the effort it’s taking her to put aside brashness and open up shows in how tight she’s squeezing your hand now, “not just this freak to be contained or avoided. I tried my whole life to be exactly what I was supposed to be on that hell world, and then when we finally get away and play the game everyone still hated me for what I had to do to survive!!!!!!!!”
She sits in the awkward silence caused by her steady escalation to an angry yell, finally letting her hand stop gripping yours to run it through her tresses of hair, getting caught in the myriad tangles. It’s slightly concerning that your first thought is that you miss the pain from her claws digging into your skin. You take in this impossible girl sitting in front of you, the perpetual survivor. She’s all sharp where you’re stout, shoulders always hunched up like if she left her neck exposed someone would attack it.
You’ve spent so long imagining this moment, this seemingly unreachable moment where Vriska was here in the flesh, smell of her and sound of her breathing making you want to fill your senses with nothing but her. You prop yourself up and scoot over to her, putting your forehead up against hers. You don’t know what to say, how to tell her the pain is over now. How to sum up the pity and ardor in your bloodpusher for her. You hope she can tell as you lean into each other for another try at communicating physically.
You’re less delicate this time. There’s real urgency as you press her into the wall and forcefully kiss her like you’ll take the nights you missed back from the void with the sheer feeling of it. You worry at her lower lip with sharp teeth, eliciting a breathy ah from her that’s rocketed to the top of your list of sounds you want to hear again. Her long, spindly fingers grasp at the back of your shirt, pulling the fabric beneath into a tight bunch. How long have you both wanted this? You don’t have the spare focus to ponder on this, because her other hand has traveled down to your hip, where short but pointed claws dig into the thin fabric of your pair of goofy scalemate boxers, pricking at your skin in exquisite fashion.
The feeling is keeping you grounded in this litany of sensations that threaten to overwhelm you. The taste and smell of her that you’d missed so dearly consumes your senses as you push your tongue into her mouth, leaning into the kiss and moving closer, thighs touching.
When you bring your hand to the side of her shirt and run your palm softly over the faint feeling of her grubscars through it, she makes another pathetic ah into your mouth. The first thing you can think is how much you want to make that louder, how thrilling it is that she’s so pliant in your arms. The object of your fascination, the recipient of the strongest emotions — shining love and grim maelstrom — you’ve ever felt, gasping for your touch and pressing closer to you. You pull back from the kiss and grin a shark-toothed smile when you smell the flush on her cheeks, cerulean wells that remind you of this new planet’s daylight sky emerging from behind dark rainclouds. Her face is usually bound up like clockwork, over-expressive as a defense, eyes betraying her mind racing. Egbert called her “crazy eyes” exactly once, on an autumn walk that was one of the few social interactions for either of you over these last human years. A stern whack to the shins with your cane dissuaded that particular descriptor from being used again.
Now, though, Vriska was enraptured, waiting on your next action with literally bated breath. You’d again be lying if you denied enjoying the power you have in this moment. You don’t relish it for too long, though. There’s work to do, you think, looping your hands under her shirt and feeling her slightly cooler skin beneath your knuckles. She leaned forward and lifted her arms up, allowing you to slide the shirt up and over her head. You can see just how much of the space she takes up is just a shadow cast by a mass of hair, baggy shirts and pure posture when you have it off. It’s not that she’s not strong — her arms are wiry, all firm muscle — and she’s certainly taller than you. But seeing her without her armor is always uncanny. You think you might be the only one who ever really has.
You move in to kiss at her neck, firmly pressing lips into the spots where you can taste the flush of her blood closest to her skin. One of your hands brushes over her breast and she shudders. She’d talk to you about her body when she was at low points, how she hated her small breasts, worrying the endocrine meditech she’d made with the alchemeter wasn’t as good as the hormones manufactured on Alternia. She obsessed and raged at the reins of anything that threatened others seeing her like she wanted to be seen.
At the time, you wanted to tell her they were beautiful, that you wanted her, that you’d want to kiss every inch of her body if it didn’t threaten to ruin this brilliant moirallegiance that felt like it was filling a gap in your soul. Instead, you just told her you’d beat up anyone that ever made her feel bad about how she looked.
Now, though, you can kiss down to her collarbone and feel the cerulean nipple harden under the wet heat of your tongue. She’s gripping into your hair and looking down, watching what you’re doing to her. When you flick at the tip with the base of your tongue, she gasps a bit into your ear and you feel the ache of your own arousal. You’re at a point where if you go any further you might just pail her here on the floor, you want her so badly. And you might, one day, your thoughts already daring to hope that this isn’t the only time you’ll have her like this. But this time, you get to your feet and help her up to her own, leading her to the horizodirectional loungeplank a human would call a chaise lounge. Next to it, you slip your own shirt off, enjoying the obvious attention as you toss it aside. You fall onto the cushion (life’s too short to get into beds slowly) with a thump and shoot Vriska what you hope is a come-hither look, wearing a smirk on your face.
She smiles back and sprawls out on the bed in front of you, and, facing the same direction to be her big nourishment ladle, you wrap an arm around her like you used to hold her. This time, though, you feel your bare skin on hers, you can lean forward and kiss her neck. She moves her hips to press her ass up against the front of your boxers, and she can surely feel your bulge stirring through the fabric.
She makes a little clicking trill you’ve never heard from her before.
You can tell her eyes are closed, squeezing with focus and feeling as you rake your teeth against the skin around her pulse point. She’s not talkative or constantly deflecting like one might expect her to be. Instead she seems…determined. Trying not to float away. Your left arm is wrapped under her neck and around her, and she grasps that hand in both of hers, and you believe for all the world that she’s trying as hard as you are to remember this moment, to keep it forever in a too-full mind. You hope.
As you tease at the waistband of her boxers, the only clothing left on her, her clicks glissando down into a slow rumble and she, still with her eyes closed lightly and breathing quick, begs, in little more than a whisper.
“Please, Terezi...”
You almost cackle with how much that delights you, but you don’t want her to think you’re laughing at her. You’re far from it, really, and your heat and longing for her have intensified to the point where the inside of your boxers are surely streaked with slick teal from your bulge writhing. Instead, you decide to lean in close to her ear and give her lobe a gentle bite as you slip your hand fully inside her waistband and immediately catch the soft ridges of her bulge between your fingers, and stroke the underside of its base with the pad of your thumb.
Vriska presses back into you with a desperate impatience, and you feel like a weight is lifting off of you as you whisper truths long-repressed into her ear, ones you thought you’d never have the courage or opportunity to say.
“I’ve never met anyone like you, and I never will,” you tell her, pumping at her in a way that elicits another lovely whimper, “and I’m not ever going to lose you again. You cut into my senses, the taste and smell and sound of you all one sharp, nh, outpouring of color,” you continue, her obvious delight at your praise interrupting it as she grinded up on your bulge. She’s slick, reacting in obscene fashion to your every touch, and you have to have her. The last of both of your clothing is kicked to the ground and few coherent words are exchanged between you from there, your mind exploding in fireworks of color as you lap up every feeling from this moment and the tangle of your bodies. You taste her come apart and it is like diving into the warm waters of some sun-soaked sea.
She lays on your chest, nestled there in the afterglow, all angles to your curves. You’re both a mess, but when have you ever not been in one way or another? Now you’re here, lying in silence, your thoughts spinning with too much to say and still addled from the rush. But you feel a bit of tension stirring up in the tight-wound girl in your arms, the twitch of a foot bouncing with nervous energy. You can always see the signs of Vriska Serket getting lost in her own mind.
You kiss one of her horns and ask her if she’s okay. She takes a while to respond — you’re used to this, the struggle she has to get words out when feelings approach.
“I don’t want you to...regret doing this,” she says, still laying on you and not looking up to meet your eyes, instead clutching you like a raft in a storm. “Does this mean we’re not moirails any more? Because I...I’m still so fucking pale for you, Terezi, I have been for all these sweeps, and I’d give this up a-and never kiss you like this again if it would let me keep that.” Her voice is trembling a bit. She can stare down kings and monsters and elder gods and anyone that could ever hurt you without breaking, but faced with uncertainty about you she stutters. The protectiveness that wells up in your heart at this would be all the answer she needs, if she could just feel it. And you realize she can. You sit up and sit her up and look into her eyes, and you can smell the worry in them. You gently bring your forehead in to touch hers and say “come in.”
It had always been unspoken between the two of you after what happened more than four sweeps ago. She hasn’t touched the inside of your mind since that fated daylight walk that took your sight. You tell her it’s okay, though, and feel the icy fang of her powers slipping into your thoughts. You hold her tight and bring every moment you can to the forefront.
She sees your hundreds of days spent in the void, pangs of hunger only matched by the bloodhound desire to find your love. She sees a sketchbook filled with awful-but-improving art, sketches of the impression from her memory ringed with diamonds, as you desperately try not to forget an inch of her face. She sees the morning after a fling and how empty you felt, the regret in your heart, feeling like you betrayed someone that wasn’t there. She sees the other you, and the other her, arm in arm before the yawning void. She feels your ardor, your protective urge, the simple truth that you’d hold her here forever and never leave your block again if you could.
She sees this new world she’s only just arrived in. A world with no drones to cull you, no high society to spurn you, no films to mock you if you blurred the lines of quadrant.
You’re home for the first time since yours was assumed into the Medium and lost. She’s home for the first time in her life.
She slips her tendrils out of your mind and you sit in each others’ embrace, nothing needing to be said. As pale as the new sun and as red as the old, a love that spans universes, your bridge, at long last, into this world you made for her.