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You have met Vriska Serket on three separate occasions and there was not a single one of those occasions where you felt like she was a person you would ever like to see again. She was loud and obnoxious, would instigate a power struggle with anybody she felt like. She would show off her mind control whenever and wherever, she would regale all with tales about how she lost her arm and her eye and the story would change each time, and she refused to wear shirts with reasonable necklines (she also refused to wear bras). Above all else, she often brags about her drug use, even points out the needle marks on her arm. “Dare yah to find a vein that ain’t rock hard!”
Vriska is a bad person that you never want to associate with.
Kanaya, as always, has different plans.
*
“I do not see your reasons for being so standoffish about this and your petulant attitude toward such a simple request makes you come across as childish and oh, now, you know I don’t mean to say that I am annoyed with you—on any other day, you prove yourself to be quite a reasonable person—but your sudden lack of cooperation is leaving me frustrated.”
“Sorry, hun, but could you repeat that? I tuned out there…” You trap your cellphone between ear and shoulder so your hands can be free to dig through the nail-polish box. What color this week?
“See? This is what I mean! You never before have acted so insolent to my wishes, you have even agreed to humor my more unreasonable suggestions previously and you did so without any complaint but now here you are, being sardonic and snarky and…and…”
“Generally full of horseshit?” Ah, you forgot you had this one! Opalescent pink it is, then.
“Yes!”
“I am relieved that I could fill in your blanks for this intriguing game of—” The cap is stuck on tight; time to whip out the elbow grease.
“Rose, I am stopping you right there because I am far away from being in the mood for your pointless metaphors that aren’t even all that smart; really, you should stop keeping company with Strider for I am loathe to say the truth but I do suspect he is rubbing off on you.”
“You know, this is a cardinal sign of an abusive relationship, the whole monitoring who I do and do not get to see.” Almost open…just a little harder…
“You are being preposterous and I demand that you stop this instant. I am not monitoring who you do and do not visit either, I am simply making an observation that it might be better for you to avoid Dave if you would like to further enjoy high levels of dignity, and IQ for that matter. It is a mere suggestion that you are blowing absurdly out of proportion which is eerily reminiscent of how you were treating the earlier part of this conversation as well.”
“Fuck.” Yeah, you got the nail-polish open, but might have used just a little too much force and now your jeans are dribbling with mercurial pink.
“What is your cause for such sudden profanity?”
“Nothing, nothing.” A towel, where’s a towel?
“Well since you sound so incredibly convincing I think I shall believe you.”
“That isn’t how sarcasm works, Kanaya; I thought I’d taught you better.” Or a napkin will due…an old sock even. Anything! You don’t want it to stain; you just got these jeans, for Chist's sake.
“Oh shush you are avoiding the topic once more and this is not something I will allow so now we are getting back on track and I am going to ask you my initial question again: will you please, please, please check on Vriska while I am away?”
“No.”
“But I even said please three times over.”
“No.”
“Is there any other number of times you would like me to say please that could possibly change your mind?”
“You have no idea how much fun I could have with that one, but no.” Shit. You can feel the polish seeping into your skin now. You drop to your knees in desperation and smear the nice cream carpet with polish. It’s only a tiny spot, and you can probably buy a decorative table or whatever to cover it up before anybody notices.
“Rose.”
“Kanaya.” A table in the middle of the room? No, that’s called conspicuous.
“You are being very silly over this whole matter.”
“From my perspective, I’m just telling you what I would not like to do. Why would I ever think that you’d respect my boundaries?” Maybe…a rug? But it’s on the carpet. It’d be redundant to put a rug on a carpet.
“I expect you to think I would respect your boundaries because I do, and I am. What I am asking is not anything that should put you out of comfort zone, it is just checking in on a close friend of mine whose judgment I do not have a particularly strong sense of faith in, unless of course Vriska makes you uncomfortable in which case I could probably find somebody else to do this who is not made uncomfortable by somebody who does nothing but sit around her apartment all day and yell at prepubescent children over the internet; oh dear, did that come across as passive-aggressive at all? I sure hope not because I know how you feel about such matters and as I said before I am here to respect every last one of your boundaries.”
On second thought, nah, that stain can stay in the carpet, uncovered. Let Kanaya deal with it—God, she can be vicious if she really wants something. And then have the gall to fake naïvety. “I do not wish to check up on Vriska because I find her to be an intolerable slob who takes risks for attention and makes my blood pressure spike in unhealthy ways. You don’t want me to get an aneurysm over her, do you?”
Kanaya gives you a very histrionic sigh that crackles with phone lines and distance. She starts talking again a minute later, much calmer and much sadder. “Listen. If you truly do not wish to keep an eye on Vriska for me, then I will not force you to and instead find some other trustworthy person who will. Please think it over and I will call you when my plane lands, as I am about to board and shortly will have no service on this silly phone, you should really see the sort that we have on Alternia, such better connection.”
“Alright. I’ll mull it over.”
“I will speak to you again in about four hours.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it, m’lady.”
“I love you, you flightiest of broads.” You have no idea how she manages to be so cheesy and yet stay in your good graces, but it just is how things are.
“Love you too.”
Beep.
*
Kanaya calls you back, four hours later, as you peruse the selection of a very highbrow Oriental rug outlet. You need one in mellow colors, to match the carpet.
“I’ll babysit her.”
“It isn’t babysitting, don’t sound so scornful about it, you are simply making sure she remembers to eat and sleep and that she doesn’t die.”
“On Earth, we call that babysitting.”
She makes an angry noise into the receiver. You smile.
“So. How’s Morocco so far?”
“I have not yet left the airport but Rabat appears to be quite similar to most any other large metropolitan area.”
“Have you found Karkat yet?”
“Not yet; he will doubtlessly take a while to track down seeing as he seems to be generally three inches shorter than the rest of Earth’s population and given to wearing dark dreary colors that really do not look good on him at all but I can most likely just follow the sounds of shouting and various offensive jibes and I should find him without too much of an effort, hopefully before security is called upon to shut him up.”
“You better get to it then.”
*
After you bring back your prize and situate it in the middle of the living room floor, conveniently covering the stain with pretty gold and dust-brown patterns, you check the clock. Half past five the evening. If you check on Vriska now, you could probably justify avoiding her tomorrow, so you might as well.
It just so happens that the address Kanaya gave you sends you to the opposite side of the city, down by the greasy docks. That’s a good forty-five minute drive. Forty-five minutes of your life you could spend doing…something else and not driving to make sure somebody you don’t care about hasn’t burned her apartment down.
Vriska lives in what you could generously describe as a shit-hole, a one-room apartment in even sorrier of a state than yours was when you were fresh out of university, going three days without sleep in attempts to meet deadlines and letting your dirty laundry become one with the couch. You have to walk down a flight of moss-covered cement steps, narrow and uneven as most politicians’ minds, to get to her place. It’s part of a larger complex, all looking to be trashy apartments, with direct access to a scummy little strip of ocean. The stench of tepid saltwater and dead fish forces you to breathe through your mouth.
You knock on the door with a dingy plastic 8 tacked onto it, both the door and the number stripped colorless by exposure.
“What?” Vriska yells from within.
“Would you kindly open the door?”
“Do I know you?” There are shuffling sounds, then a thud and a string of curses. Finally, you hear hooked claws scrabbling at the doorknob, yanking hard, and the door pops open. Vriska is a mess: six feet and two inches, not even one hundred and thirty pounds probably, the sleepless rings around her eyes so pronounced that you’d think she’d recently had her nose broken. Worst of all, she is only wearing a pair of boxers. There is a single depressing noodle crusted onto them, the remnants of an Easy Mac imbibement long past.
Vriska’s pupils go microscopic when the sun hits her. Most trolls have come to relish Earth’s sunlight, so much gentler than Alternia’s, but it seems you have found an outlier. “Can’t see a fucking thing in this light. Goddammit. Does that thing have, like, an off switch?” She scoops you into her apartment, something you immediately wish had never happened. The fish corpse and old water smell outside is preferable to the stench in here: you detect the not-so-subtle odors of milk long past its due date, trash that hasn’t been emptied in months, what is most likely a rare breed of toxic mold, all with this undertone of sweat and mania.
The entire apartment is a single room, with a dinky bathroom attached as an afterthought. In one corner is a pile of clothes and blankets that you guess doubles as a closet and a bed; she doesn’t even have the incentive to get a proper recuperacoon. The kitchenette, or more appropriately, the cupboard secured to the wall by some sort of As Seen on TV wonder-glue and the microwave on top of it, seems utterly devoid of nutrients. A laptop that appears to be the only source of heat in the room, a dead cactus on the bathroom sink (how do you even kill a cactus?), a single bare bulb in the middle of the cracked ceiling, an unsettling amount of empty pill bottles.
Welcome to Chateau Serket.
“Rose, right?” She squints at you, pupils now blown huge from reintroduction to her cave. Yours must be as well.
“Yes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You seem to be missing your shirt.”
She shrugs. “Wasn’t expecting any visitors.”
This place makes your skin crawl. Vriska only amplifies the feeling.
“I’ll be going now.”
“Fussyfangs sent you, didn’t she?”
Oh, and that’s one more endearing quirk of Vriska’s: her obsessive need to shuck ridiculous nicknames off on everyone. “Yes.”
“She’s, like, going to India or something, right? Helping the angry midget out with some sort of wedding bullshit, isn’t she?” She sneers out the word wedding, one of those trolls that are revolted by any aspect of human culture, and doubly disgusted if a fellow troll dabbles in it.
“Morocco.”
“What the fuck even is Morocco? Like, seriously, what does it do? It’s in Russia, right?”
“Russia is a country and Morocco is in northern Africa.”
“Ugh, whatever. Your stupid Earth geography is so complicated. God. Why can’t you guys be simple like us? On Alternia, there was one land mass, everybody lived there, then end. So fucking simple.”
“Earth, obviously, has several different landmasses, and several different governments, so—”
“That’s the other thing! Where’s the unity here, huh? Everybody’s off doing their own thing, speaking, like, fifty different languages and shit, so who even does a thing like that? Seriously. You guys are all such dumbasses. On Alternia, we all spoke the same thing; there were a few different dialects, sure, but one language, okay?”
“What a fascinating cultural exchange this has been but I seemed to have left my will to live back in my car and I should probably be returning to it. It is dwindling at an alarming rate.” You wade through the Twinkie wrappers and troll porn magazines to the door.
“See you around.” Vriska calls after you.
You dart up the stairs so fast you almost slip on the moss.
*
Once back in your house, you check the calendar. Today is March 24th. Kanaya returns on April 15th, if she doesn’t extend her stay. You are going to have to visit Vriska nearly every one of those days.
And Kanaya says she loves you. This isn’t love, it’s extortion and inhumane and something you do not have to deal with. When Kanaya gets back, she’ll find that you have checked yourself into the county psychiatric hospital with only a single cryptic word by means of explanation for your sudden decline in mental health: Serket.
*
On your second day alone, Dave calls you, congratulating you on ditching the girlfriend and inviting you out for a night of bonding over too-strong alcohol and strippers. You assure him that his offer is quite enticing, but that Kanaya took the key to your chastity belt with her and thus, you are left high and dry. Though you’d certainly agree to going out for lunch with him.
“Hooters?”
“No, Dave, not Hooters.”
He calls you out on being a killjoy and a preemptive cockblock. You console him with the fact that he can pick your venue, as long as it doesn’t have a reputation for serving everything with a side of gratuitous cleavage.
Naturally, he picks the shittiest Phở house he can find. The kind that serves all of its broth sweet and has its menu laminated onto the tabletop. You ask for chrysanthemum tea and what they give you is half liquid, half dregs, and tastes like a combination of urine and painter thinner. Dave seeks revenge on their shoddy lack of quality by using the traditional Vietnamese names for the dishes you order, painstakingly enunciating each syllable in what must be a horrendously incorrect pronunciation. Every time he thinks he has messed something up, he insists on going back over it. By the end, your poor waiter is developing a nervous tick in his right eyelid.
“So, any plans now that the lady has left town?” He arches his eyebrows at you obscenely.
“I’ve already told you: not all of us possess the raw talent to immediately collect a posse of bitches at their heels the moment the one person whom the have sworn loyalty to leaves. Please, Strider, teach me the ways of the polyamorous lifestyle.”
“Wait; I smell a trap…”
“Oh, you’re good. By polyamorous, I meant rotten, cheating manwhore who gets off on committing adultery, breaking the hearts and betraying the trust of all those who once considered themselves an object of his capricious affections.”
“That’s more like it. Whaddya say?”
“I say how about after we savor every last drop of this delicatessen you have selected for today’s lunch, we can go out and do something fun that would not involve me being unfaithful.”
“There go all of my suggestions. Down the drain, just like that. Lalonde, you’re repressing my creative, sensitive side. I thought you liked to encourage shit like this.”
“This ‘creative, sensitive side’ that you mention: does it ever have to do with such things as tight clothing, genitalia, and loose morals?”
“Damn, secret’s out.”
“Dave. It was never a secret.”
“Oh shit, you mean you guys have been judging me this entire time, knowing my greatest addiction and saying nothing?”
“Most definitely.”
“Even Egbert?”
“Especially Egbert.”
“Welp, I’m just gonna go die of shame now.” He shrugs in resignation as your waiter returns, tight-lipped, and gives you two bowls of generic limp noodles with oily broth. “Or, you know, food poisoning. Whichever catches me first.”
*
Regardless of his protests, you do not go to a stripclub after lunch. Not even a burlesque, which Dave swears are an art form and that Kanaya would totally understand. You take him to the park instead and you sit on the edge of a fountain. You drag him from the fiery pits of perversion and into quasi-normal conversation. Things like Karkat’s and Terezi’s Mediterranean wedding that is fast approaching, or how you’ll survive on your own, reverted back to a near bachelor state, Dave promising he’ll be there for you while squeezing your hand and completely straight-faced. You are so happy that you’re the only two in the park.
Eventually, the topic of Vriska comes up. You can’t help but start bitching over the whole debacle. Dave finds it all very hilarious.
“And then she actually asked if Morocco was in Russia. Russia, Dave, she thought Morocco was in Russia!” You all but wail. Nothing on this planet gets you overly emotional faster than ranting about the stupid people in your life.
“Wait, you mean it isn’t?”
“I can only appreciate sarcasm to a certain extent, Dave, and you are toeing that line.”
“Am I?”
“I will give you one last warning…”
“For what?”
With that, you push him backward into the fountain. Of course he saw this coming; you don’t know somebody for upwards of fifteen years without have a sixth sense for when they’re about to do unsavory things to you. He grabs you around the waist and you both end up floating on your backs in the fountain, feet still on the edge.
You open your mouth to gripe, but Dave shushes you.
“No words, Lalonde, only deep soul bonding now.”
“Oh my G—”
“Shush-shush-shush. Soul bonding.”
You dunk him under and climb out of the fountain, wiping the algae off of your palms.
*
The next time you deign to visit Vriska, you have to open the door yourself. She is sitting on the floor, holding her hands in front of her face and staring at them so intently, shaking all over. When you kneel down in front of her, you see pale blue tears dripping out of her bloodshot eyes.
You are having a hard time accepting the fact that you are not being paid to do this.
Slowly, you reach up and curl her fingers into a fist, but leave her pointer and middle finger out. She must have been like this for a while; when you move her hand, her joints pop. You press the tips to the place under your jaw where your pulse hides. Then you do the same with her other hand, but place it over her own pulse this time.
This is enough to shock her back to reality. She gasps and curls into herself, muttering in her home language. You sit back and watch her slowly find her way back inside her head, all the while hating how you know what to do in these situations (three months rooming with Sollux taught you more than you needed to learn; the guy was a fucking nut, but he constructed entire revolutions while high, so more often than not you would return from a lecture and he’d have repainted the entire living room with algorithms and Bible verses. And, of course, that one memorable time you found Dave in his bathroom, begging you not to touch him because he could feel his fingernails spinning, that he was just a fractal…when he came down you screamed yourself hoarse at him, the first time you have ever raised your voice at anybody.)
*
“Rose, help me.” Kanaya begs.
“Mm-hmm?”
“Terezi is insisting on wearing a teal dress with her pair of red sneakers that she has been using almost every day without fail for the past three years to the wedding and Karkat doesn’t care enough to help me dissuade her from doing so and I can’t let this happen, Rose, I can’t let them ruin everything because Terezi says this improvised ensemble is too scrumptious to pass up but everybody with eyes which means everybody else there will be able to see that abomination she insists on donning.”
“Breathe, Kanaya.”
“No! No, you do not get it. This is a very critical situation. They are getting married in two months so I do not have much time to change her mind and I even found the prettiest mermaid-tail gown for her that I really think would flatter her nearly nonexistent curves and the beading on it is just so…so…perfect that I cannot see how anybody would pass it up.”
“Is it white?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think Terezi is going to wear something so bland and colorless anywhere, let alone to her own wedding?”
“But…but it’s traditional! If she respects your culture enough to take part in such a serious and life-altering custom then she should follow through with it entirely. Can you not be more indignant over how she refuses to adhere to the most sacred of ceremonies for your people?”
“I’m sorry, but a lot of women wear colored dresses these days.”
“I cannot do this anymore, I simply cannot do this. Farewell, Rose, and I hope you have a nice time siding with the enemy like that. The feeling you are currently experiencing is best described as Faustian.”
“Dear me, have I just cut out your prim and proper heart, holding it above my head with bloodied hands?”
“Not only that, but you are stomping on it. You are stomping on my heart as you bear it aloft.”
“This is getting ridiculous and wildly out of hand.”
“Precisely; let’s not stop.”
*
Vriska explains to you that she honestly has no idea what she’s taking most of the time. A friend of hers will mix her a synthetic cocktail in a plastic white bottle and then she’ll work her way through it, one bouquet of mystery drugs at a time. Sometimes it’s really great, sometimes it results in what you found her like the other day.
“How are you still alive?”
“I have all the luck, duh!” She’s playing Beastie Boys from her laptop. You thought that there was very little worse than the Beastie Boys out there, but it turns out anything played through shot speakers immediately becomes terrible.
“At least tell me you’ve overdosed.”
“Only twice, and both times it was intentional.” She doesn’t stop smiling.
You decide that while in public Vriska is mostly annoying, in private she just gets morose.
“Do you have any food money?” You demand.
“Eh…” She paws through her pockets, checks a couple pairs of pants she has on the floor, and fishes out three dollar bills and a Chuck E. Cheese token.
“Let’s go to the store; you can get nine packs of ramen with that.”
“I don’t have any bowls, numbnuts.”
“You’ll eat it on a plate.”
“How do I cook it, then?”
“You can’t.” You tug her out of her door and into the sunlight. She recoils a little.
“Okay, okay, jeeeeez!”
*
Every so often, you will open Vriska’s door and she’ll be waiting for you with a lot of information you never wanted to know.
“I bet I know something that you don’t.” She jeers at you, her voice high and desperate. There are scratches on her arms and she can’t stay still. An open bottle of pills is on the counter. Red, blue, yellow, white.
“Is that so?” You mildly take the bait.
“Yeah! Yeah, I do!” She pushes you against the wall, her forearm lying across your clavicle. Her lips are chapped and her fangs are yellowed and cracking. “I do know something you fucking don’t, you goddamn shrink.”
“Should I find that clever jab at my high-paying profession offensive?”
She slaps you. “Kanaya gets out of work at six o’clock every day.”
“She gets out at seven.”
The grin on Vriska’s face makes you feel sick. “Ah-ah-ah!” She waggles her finger at you, her entire hand jolting involuntarily. “She leaves work at six, and then she comes over here to see me. Every day. I bet she didn’t tell you that, did she?”
“I was not previously aware of this, and that could very well be because it is a complete fabrication.” Kanaya is an open book and a lousy liar. You, after six years of higher education and a five year residency at none other than Bellevue Hospital, should be able to detect if a horrible liar is lying. Kanaya has told you she leaves work at seven every evening. You believe her. Vriska is a near-sociopathic attention whore. You do not believe her.
“Ha! You wanna know what we do?” She presses her sharp nose at your cheek. You shut down completely. “You wanna know what Kanaya the moral-brandishing prude would lie to you about? Well, I ain’t telling! You can ask her yourself.”
*
You ask Kanaya for any information she has as to why Vriska is what she is.
“Well,” she sucks in a deep breath and lets it out through her nose. You brace yourself. “On Alternia, there is nothing that you would be able to call a good childhood because our culture is based on beliefs of killing and other equally horrible things. I grew up in the middle of a desert and spent my time battling armies of the undead with no other company than my lusus and had I not immigrated to Earth, I would have been fated to spend my life tending to the Mother Grub in the brooding caverns which do not get me wrong is a perfectly fine way to spend one’s life but it never held much appeal to me or at least not as much as other things did. Compared to others, though, I had the perfect childhood. We are raised to believe in destiny, and Vriska’s was to kill other children from an early age to feed to her lusus. I met her when she was two sweeps old and she was already a professional murderer and even to a race as hateful as ours I guess that just does things to your mind that you can’t get rid of.
“A lot of other trolls have the same problem, that is to say they have a large and demanding lusus who requires them to kill others for food. The vast majority, however, is told that doing this is fine, that doing this is normal, and they believe it and they kill without questioning. Vriska…for all of her faults, she is probably the most human troll I have ever met in that she was never okay with killing the innocent and she only pretended to think it okay and forced down her natural disgust with her life in order to meet the societal standard. I am not entirely sure why, but she has long since convinced herself that she is not worthy of pity or love or compassion and if you try to exhibit such emotions she will lash out in attempts of alienation. She pretends to be okay with a lot of things, and to like a lot of things, but please, Rose, never take her at face value or you’ll end up killing her.”
*
Dave snaps his fingers in your face.
“Yo. Lalonde. I know my articulate dissections of the philosophy of irony are way over your muddled little head, but you could at least stay awake and pretend to be taking in this shit.”
You look down and realize your nose was perilously close to dipping into your glass of water. “Sorry for interruptions, good Professor Strider, carry on.”
“Nah, I think I’ve divulged plenty of trade secrets for today. I can’t carry on with such an unappreciative audience.”
“You know I cling to your every word with even more vivacity than the average tin-hat wearer clings to the fact that the deliverance will be upon us. It is just that in my current sleep-deprived state I am not thinking right and have mixed up my priorities: I have put my own wellbeing before your timeless lessons in the exquisite Art of Douchebaggery. My I kiss your toes and plead for forgiveness?”
He makes a condescending motion with his hand. “Your request will be processed and we’ll see what the jury decides.”
“Thank you, o merciful one.”
Dave leans forward and pokes the bags under your eyes. “Seriously, what’s going on with this shit? Sleeping alone too much for you to handle? Because if it is…”
“It’s Vriska.”
“Oh. Everything makes sense.” He settles back into his seat. “Saddest part is: I’m being serious.”
You run your fingers through your hair. You do not have heart-to-hearts with anybody, and especially not with Dave, but if you let yourself begin talking about Vriska then you’ll be the one sitting on the couch for once. Not even a couch, actually, but a hard chair in Starbucks. You could tell him how you’re actually worried about her now, that you care about her, that when you walk in and she’s facedown in her pile of clothes/bed your heart jumps and doesn’t stop until you are able to wake her up. Or how she throws up even though she has nothing to give, and you crouch by the toilet with her, one hand keeping her hair out of her face and the other pressed to her stomach. You can feel each of her rigid muscles against your palm. Or even when she corners you and does something to your neck that could be a kiss except she uses more teeth than lips, and it leaves marks; it’s almost getting too warm to justify wearing a scarf.
Instead you stand up and stretch.
“Yes. She is quite the handful. But I’ve dealt with worse.” You smile a little. He stands up too and loops an arm around you, tugging you up against his side in good humor.
“You know those words you just said?” He smirks as you walk out the door together. “That was all total bullshit, but far be it for me to pry.” Still smirking, suddenly making you want to punch him in the nose, he bends down and pecks you on the lips.
*
You meet Vriska’s dealer on April 5th. He arrives at your door, Vriska thoroughly unconscious in his arms, at four in the morning. As it turns out, he is one of those people who rings the doorbell nonstop until you do something about it other than shout at him to bug off. So you stumble out of the bedroom, adjusting your bathrobe so that nothing shows, and open the door for him.
He’s a troll, even skinnier than he is tall, and has that sort of hair that grows up and out instead of down. Vriska is smashed against his chest with a little smear of drool on her mouth. “Hey sister, I’m all sorry for bothering yah so early into this fine-ass day, but she was up and saying she couldn’t go home and just gave me this address.” He shuffles in, having to duck a little so he doesn’t hit his head on the door frame. Vriska is soon dropped on your couch without your consent. You stare at her in horror; how did she know your address? Kanaya, doubtlessly.
“Been driving around looking for yah since, like…like two hours, sis, it’s been crazy. All these street signs, all blinking and bright, like shit! How’d they even do that? It’s night, somebody should tell those silly motherfuckers to go to sleep!” He laughs.
You learn his name is Gamzee as he invites himself into your kitchen in search of something to drink. He is very disappointed at your lack of soda, but says that this peppermint tea you have looks just as good. You sit at the table with him and ask what happened.
“Oh man,” he shakes his arms out nervously. “Vriska was bothering me around midnight or some shit. She was all saying that she’d ran out but I didn’t have no more anything to give her. Just about killed me for that.” Again, he laughs. You notice the claw marks on the side of his neck. “Said she couldn’t go home and I asked ‘well then, sis, where’d yah like to be?’ and she gave me your place. She ain’t gonna be very nice now that’s she coming down.” He pauses thoughtfully, poking at your table softly enough to not scratch the shiny cherry wood. “We both get a little silly if we come down. She’s worse, obviously, she’s all being crazy and shit but me, I just get sort of…weird.” His smile stretches too wide.
“What should I do with her?”
“Fuck if I know! Just keep her away from sharp shit, keep an eye on her and all, and I’ll swing back by whenever I have something for her. Make sure and hug her a bunch too, I mean she’ll yell at yah but she really likes it.” He chugs the rest of the tea, burps, and leaves.
After he leaves, you watch Vriska on the couch. She twitches and yells in her sleep, and eventually you take pity on her; you strip her and carry her over to Kanaya’s recuperacoon. You despise that thing, but you know that it calms trolls down, and that’s obviously what Vriska needs right now. (Every night when she comes home from work upset and nervous she won’t sleep next to you, where you want her to so you can hold her, because that disgusting green slime is a more powerful crutch than you could ever be and you hate it, you hate it so much).
*
When Vriska wakes up, she rocks between inconsolable and violent. One moment she will be splattered in the bathtub, the shower running to get the slime off of her, and then she’ll suddenly be smashing your face into the wall, elbow at your back, screaming at you and blaming you for things you’ve never heard of before.
After only thirty minutes of this, you decide that while this has been a valuable experience, you have had enough of it. You take a plastic zip tie and catch her while she is lost, cuffing her to the banister. You give her a blanket and a pat on the head before going to make breakfast. She spends all day on your stairs, trapped, and wailing or screeching, occasionally throwing up a ropy line of stomach acid because you doubt she’s eaten anything in a while. She shakes, shudders, sweats. Her eye glasses over and sometimes she doesn’t move for hours on end.
“Used to use heroin. Big jump from that shit to cocktails.” She nods toward her pockmarked arms. “Not a lot, not really, but I was dating my dealer so he gave it to me cheap; it was an okay kismesis, but sometimes he’d quadrant flip three times in a day and God, it was ridiculous. Didn’t take him too long to figure out that I was only hanging around for discounts, though, and that pissed him right off. Tried to kill me, actually, it was really funny because it was easy to see he didn’t want to, not really. Oh and that’s probably another thing that Kanaya never told you: she actually ended up killing him.”
You think about how likely Kanaya would be to kill somebody for any reason at all. This will now be another of Vriska’s lies that you won’t have to deal with because she’s just aiming to get under your skin.
“We were hanging out and he just barged in. I was high as a fucking kite, don’t really know what happened or what she did and she never did tell me really, but I just remember looking at him and damn! She’d practically taken his legs off!” Vriska cackles. You wait for her to leave this state of awareness and go back to screaming the unintelligible at beings that aren’t there.
*
Gamzee comes by at about seven that night. By then, Vriska can barely keep her head up. You cut her free and she grabs the bottle out of his hands. She picks out four green pills with a yellow band around the middle and swallows them at the same time, dry.
“Come on, Gamz, take me home!” She sprawls herself over him, relieved enough to start kissing his painted face. He chuckles.
“Anything for my favorite spider sister.”
They wave goodbye to you and leave you standing in the doorway, nerves frayed and sparking. You hope the neighbors didn’t notice this.
*
That night you go over to Dave’s apartment to sleep. He doesn’t question this, just tells you he’s going to be out late tonight. He hangs around long enough to tuck you into bed (he knows better than to claim he is doing it ironically because you both know he isn’t) before going out.
Sleep comes in fits to you. You will dream, you will wake, and then you will lapse into dreams again. By the time Dave gets back, your eyes are hot and gritty and you feel a little sick. He settles down next to you in bed and holds you close, telling you that you don’t have to deal with Vriska if you don’t want to, that he’ll take care of her for the remaining time if you’d like. You tell him that no, no you can handle this, you’re fine.
*
You wake up at eight in the morning with a message in your head: H8y Lalonde, you b8tt8r come fiiiiiiiind me!
You scramble out of Dave’s arms and trip over your own feet on your way to the door. You just barely remember to grab your shoes. He’s running after you, demanding to know what’s wrong, but you don’t even talk to him until you’re in the driver’s seat of your car, backing out of the parking space, and he’s fumbling to get the passenger side door open. He flops down next to you, not even properly awake yet as he closes the door.
“Jesus damn, Rose, at least give a guy a head’s up before bolting like that.”
“Vriska just did something very, very stupid.”
“You’re surprised?”
“Not exactly.”
It takes entirely too long to get to her apartment. The door is locked, so you peer in the single window. She stands at her kitchen counter and is tenderly sorting out her entire bottle of pills, organizing them by color it seems. She turns and smiles at you. You try to bang on the door but you can’t move.
I thought your m8nd would be harder to g8t into! How disappointing!
You glance at Dave. He can’t move either.
Vriska works happily as she keeps you two locked up. You can feel her in your head, forcing herself into each little curlicue of your gray matter. She leaves you just enough autonomy to be able to move your eyes but everything else belongs to her now.
So as she picks up each color-coded cluster, you can only watch. She slips them onto her tongue and takes a sip of water to help them go down. There go the white ones, the blue ones, there go the rest of the green ones with a little yellow band. She’s already shaking by the time she’s halfway down the line. When she’s finished, she has to crawl to the door to let you in.
“Hey.” She says, pulling herself onto her feet with the help of the doorframe. She falls out of your mind and onto your body, white spit in the corners of her mouth and her heart going way too fast.
You and Dave drag her up the stairs and into your car. You let him drive so you can stay in the backseat and hold her hand. She’s laughing and crying at the same time.
*
She’s somehow still conscious by they time you get to the hospital and the doctors give her the option of swallowing this dark rock-looking thing instead of getting her stomach pumped. Absorbs everything, they say, much less painful, they say. She refuses to take it and so they force a tube down her esophagus, all the way to her stomach. It makes a horrible noise.
You call Kanaya while Dave puts his arm around your shoulders.
“Oh hello there Rose, what is it?” She asks cheerily. There is a lot of noise in the background and you think you can detect Terezi’s laughter.
“Vriska just tried to kill herself.”
There is a lot of disturbance on the other end; Kanaya probably dropped the phone. It takes her a while to pick it back up, and in that time the happy background noises have bled away into questions of concern. “What?”
“We’re at the hospital right now.”
“I…I…” She can’t talk. “Oh God I’m sorry but I think I’ll have to call you back in a moment.”
“Kanaya.”
She hangs up.
*
“You didn’t really want to die.” You sit at Vriska’s bedside. Her throat is too raw to speak, and if she tries all that comes out is a thin, raspy squeak. “This was just a grab for attention. If you had really wanted to die, you wouldn’t have called me over to watch. You knew you wouldn’t be able to keep me still for the entire time; at a certain point, you wouldn’t be able to control your own mind, let alone someone else’s. This was nothing more than a cry for help.”
She glares at the IV needles in her arms. It took the nurses forever to find a soft vein.
“You just about gave Kanaya a heart attack, you know. She’s flying back here right now.”
She picks at a needle and you slap her hand away.
“Hope you’re happy.”
*
You pick Kanaya up at the airport. She is wound so tightly and barely even breathes on the car ride to the hospital. Outside of Vriska’s room, she quietly asks you to give her some private time. You say you’ll be in the car, waiting.
Kanaya is in there for an hour and a half. When she comes back out, you can tell she’s been crying. You sit in the parking lot for an additional ten minutes, hugging her. You want to ask her if she really gets out of work at six, or if she’s ever killed somebody, but you don’t and you hate Vriska for planting these ideas in your head because now you don’t trust her. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but you can’t trust Kanaya even if that’s what she needs.
*
Kanaya sweet-talks Vriska into rehab.
“I’ll pay for it.”
“I’ll visit you on the weekends.”
“Please.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
*
You never do gather the strength to ask Kanaya the things you want to, but you do notice that once Vriska leaves for the rehab center on the coast, she starts getting home from work earlier.