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It's early December, and the snow is coming down in soft powdery handfuls, collecting on the stark branches of the trees and piling in the streets. This late, the light pollution reflects off the snow and makes the whole world look a sort of purple-orange, strange and alien, and you can't stop looking at it. Like if you just keep staring long enough, the rest of the world will change without your gaze on it, and you won't have to go back home in the morning.
It wasn't supposed to be a sleepover, but the snow changed that too. Karkat was worrying about it as soon as everyone got here- "YOU GUYS, LOOK OUTSIDE, IT'S GOING TO GET BAD OUT THERE"- but he worried about everything and anything, so no one paid much attention to that. And what did he want anyways, for everyone, him included, to leave as soon as they got there? Like you were going to walk back home that soon!
He shut up pretty quickly as soon as Meenah got there with the wine coolers and the six packs of beer, anyways. Pussywhipped, you think now, remembering it, but as soon as the words cross your mind you have to shy away from them for the sheer hypocrisy, and the jealousy too.
He was right in the end anyways. The weather got bad enough eventually that everyone decided to stay here instead of risking the roads, so heavy at one point that no one could see outside but for the flurried bursts of snowfall. Looking out, you'd had the strange feeling of being trapped inside a snowglobe, watching the world outside as it shook and shook and shook.
Now, your friends sprawl across the house in various stages of sleep and comfort- Eridan in his bed upstairs, alone after having tried to convince Feferi to share, Feferi in the guest bedroom with Nepeta, Equius and Gamzee on the big sectional, the only thing long enough for Equius to sleep on. There are people sprawled out on the floor or in chairs, heaped upon with piles of blankets and curled into sleeping bags as Friday turns over into Saturday. Sollux sleeps like a mummy on the hardwood in the kitchen, entirely uncovered. Directly across from you, Terezi and Karkat snore on identical recliners, swaddled in layers of itchy wool and soft sherpa.
The only people in this house still left awake are you and Meenah.
Meenah, who stands by the window, open just a crack as she finishes her cigarette. It glows a burnt orange at the tip, flaring and dying with each sucking breath she takes before she blows the smoke back out into the cold night. It should be awkward, the silence settled between the two of you, but it isn't.
"Do you want a smoke?" Meenah says at last. Your stomach jumps.
"Sure," you say, standing to join her at the windowsill. The air coming in is sharp, bitter; it bites at your skin, leaves goosebumps on your arm. Or that could just be from the way you shiver when Meenah's fingers slide their way up to touch your hand, their gentle correction. She has to fight with her lighter to get it to produce a flame, but when she leans over and lights the cigarette for you, you feel grown-up in a way that you've felt before. In the backs of cars with your top off trying not to think about the planes of your chest. Sitting at your desk as the webcam blinks on your shitty laptop in your mother's ill-fitting clothing. Texting back and forth with a stranger in white text that you hide from your grandmother and your friends in turn. A hot, shivering sort of maturity.
But you don't want to think about that. Your whole body is fluttery and warm, flushed with excitement, and when you breathe in the first inhale of smoke you hold it inside you as long as you can, that added heat, until you have to cough. At which point you hack it out the window, trying to seem cool and failing miserably. Meenah laughs, but she rubs your back while you do it, so you take it as a victory.
The two of you switch back and forth, passing the cigarette between the two of you. She leaves lipstick marks when she takes a drag, and when you take the cigarette back you feel yourself blushing. An indirect kiss, which is the most babyish thing you could possibly be thinking right now. You blush anyways.
"How's school going for you?" she asks betweeen drags, and there's genuine interest in her voice. You perk up- you always do, when she asks you a question. When it seems like she really does want to know the answer. "You're a freshman, aren't you?"
"S'alright," you say, and you're trying and mostly failing to sound tough. "And yeah. I mean, none of it really matters anyways! As soon as I finish high school I'm out of this stupid town."
The sigh Meenah lets out is wistful. "You remind me so much of me when I was your age," she tells you. "I wanted to do the exact same thing. Was gonna get my master's, too- I went pre-med, you know that? I could've done it, I was always smart enough- they let me skip a couple grades in school when I was your age- but..." she shrugs, as if to say, look at how obvious it is that that didn't work out.
You think of the Peixes house, to which you have been a few times at house parties like this one- certainly never on your own- and its sprawling grounds. You think of the rose gardens and each bush coaxed round a white trellis, the huge pool in the backyard. Inside- the shining kitchens filled with marble countertops, their polished surfaces, the flatscreen TVs in every bedroom and the empty, waxed hardwood of the floors. Your home, tiny and perpetually crowded with trashbags and clutter, had never been so empty.
The last time you were there you remember sitting on the deck in the summer heat, sweating through your jeans, exchanging tight-jawed glances at Sollux in a hoodie and swim shorts in the air-conditioned house. Out of the corner of your eye you could see Kanaya's artful placement of her towelskirt and the tightness of her knuckles on its edge as she sunned herself. You were eating ice cream, then, out of glass bowls with designs etched into their surface, so shiny they might as well have been crystal. You could see your face unwarped in the gleam of that silver spoon.
The skepticism on your face must show, because Meenah laughs. "God, I sound like a fucking asshole saying that. No, I'm not tryna say it was cause of money, I just wanted to... do different shit," she tells you, looking out the window. One of the streetlamps is flickering, casting her face in and out of stark relief every few seconds. "Didn't wanna leave here. Leave all my friends behind. But look how that worked out for me, huh, Serket twin?"
"She says she's planning on coming home soon," you say, and immediately hate yourself for it, because you know the way the two of them talk about each other- you've seen the photos, the camera's capture of affection, and you don't want to hear the scraps of it in Meenah's mouth.
And more than that, you remember all the promises she's made and not kept. "And she's not my twin, either."
A shrug. Meenah taps ash on the windowsill and rolls her shoulders back, but she doesn't speak for a long moment. The snow is coming down harder, and you want to touch her, you want to move closer, you want to go back a minute and shut yourself up. Always, always running your big mouth.
For a stretch of seconds you think she's shutting the conversation down now, that you've ruined it, that she's going to tell you to get back to bed.
She doesn't. At long last, she says, "I just wanted everything to stay the same." Her eyes cut at yours, big and wide and such a beautiful shade of dark brown. "You ever wanted that?"
How are you supposed to answer that? Most of your life so far is moments you'd rather not think about, let alone hold on to. Your mother, your grandmother, the dimly lit bathroom, your rotting bed and wet thighs, hands wrapped around yourself like they could take it all back. Tavros's face staring up at you from the street, the relief of his cracked bones shuddering up your spine; you'd done it, you'd ended it, the dread was over. You'd committed the terrible act, you didn't have to wait for it anymore. Even three years past it, with your eye and hand both disfigured in recompense and you only tentatively reintegrated into the handful of friends you'd lost, it hadn't gone away. You could feel that same urge in you now, the one that only the doctor had been able to name. Blow it up, start over.
Still. Weren't there moments you thought of and wanted to keep even as you'd destroyed that very possibility?
(Terezi's hand in yours in the woods, before you were a girl, nascent but still greedy in your grasping at what you wanted more than anything on Earth. The first time you wore your mother's hand-me-down clothes, the first time someone called you by your name- your true name, even when no one else would. The days with Terezi, Aradia, Tavros, before you set it all aflame. And even beyond those stolen moments of joy, the simplicity of the days where being a half-closeted creature afforded you some awkward plausible deniability instead of a dulled knife. If you could keep those moments, without the sourness of everything else tainting them...)
Yes. Yes, you've wanted that. You nod, and Meenah's searching eyes go a little bit softer at the edges.
"It should've been different," she sighs, twirling the cigarette between her fingers. "And now what do I do, huh? Work at some shitty diner where men twice my age say weird shit about me. While all of my friends that I can stand being around for more than an hour live scattered cross the fucking map." She shrugs, takes one last drag. "You gotta cherish the time that you've got, Vriska."
It's so rare you hear your name in her mouth, you think, and lean forward. In anyone's mouth, but hers most of all.
How many years was it, of her passing in and out of your life, ruffling your hair as winter and summer breaks came and went? In those days she was tall and beautiful and cool, self-assured and confident in early womanhood, before Aranea took the car and went west with only a promise to remember her by. She was the kind of girl you couldn't know to want, in either way- couldn't bear to, because of what it would cost you, so you stole it online, in Aranea's clothes, in the back of the doctor's car. Until the day you woke up and realized that it was going to kill you if you didn't do something, and you were too scared to die then. So you made yourself live instead.
What was happening to her, in those years? She paints a lonely picture. The diner, that house which you are beginning to think must be lonely in its largesse, even with Feferi there too. Aranea gone, and the other friends spread across the country, the friends whose names you have only memorized through your mother's handpressed diaries, the ones she left for you. The mother which she speaks of only sparingly. In the old photographs, Meenah has jumbo braids, dyed pink and blonde and blue, and she throws her arm around your mother's shoulder like it belongs there. The edges are cracked and torn, but she could not more obviously be overjoyed. You don't think you've ever seen her look quite so happy outside of a picture frame.
"I'm trying," you tell her, and it's true, but she looks at you with visible surprise anyways. Did she cherish that moment, when it happened, or only in retrospect? Here, now, standing in the dark, is she cherishing this one?
What does she see, when you lean toward her in your mother's borrowed blouse? You have spent hours pouring over your mother's keepsakes, comparing your face to the one in old Polaroids in the back of the closet, the one who did not raise you but rather set you at her own mother's breast and left you there. The one who was- you know- Meenah Peixes's best friend. Who left you both, and who you can only try now to become.
You wonder if Meenah sees Aranea in your face, if you might be beautiful to her in the way your mother was. If you are now enough of a girl that you resemble her- the teenage girl she was, who Meenah might still be looking for.
And you, you think, you might be the only one who can know this about her. The last hold to Aranea, the last hold to whatever it is she's lost. You don't know all of it- how could you?- but you've read the diaries, you know enough. Karkat can flirt and she can flirt back, but you're exactly what she's looked for, the better version. Your whole life, trying to live up to your mother's towering legacy, and now you can do it better. Be the woman she couldn't. Be hers.
Your cheeks are hot, and you're breathing shallow, too fast. Can she see the want on your face?
Meenah drops the cigarette to the floor, grinds it under one slippered foot until it's nothing but ash and paper on the wood. Then she reaches for you, puts a hand under your chin to tilt your face up to hers, and you know the answer to every question you've wondered of her tonight.
Everyone in the house is asleep. None of them see it when Meenah kisses you, snow blowing in through the window and embers smoldering beneath your feet. They don't see you clinging to her, hear the way her breath rattles in your mouth. They don't see the way you throw yourself into it, your fingers tight on her shoulders, her hips- they don't see her clutch you back, the way she pulls you closer.
Good. This belongs to you, and her, and no one else, doesn't it? All yours, this moment- a small and infinite universe belonging to the both of you.