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Your name is Terezi Pyrope, you are stuck on a meteor hurtling through paradox space, and you have a problem.
Your problem is one Vriska Serket, your wrigglerhood best friend turned enemy turned moirail, and you have absolutely no idea what to do about it. You’re going to have to figure it out fast, though, because your problem is currently standing in your respiteblock in the middle of the day -- well, what you’re calling the middle of the day, as there’s really no way to differentiate between day and night in the vast blackness of space -- looking like an absolute wreck. It’s been about five minutes since she showed up in your doorway, and you are waiting expectantly for her to say something.
“Hi,” she says finally. You can smell that her hair, which hasn’t been washed in god knows how long, is half knotted into an absolute rat’s nest. You’re also pretty sure the eyeliner Rose did for her the night before is smeared across her face, and yet your pusher still beats a little faster now that she's in your presence. Shit. That’s your problem right there.
“Hey,” you reply tentatively, trying to remember the right way to show pale affection. You never quite understood the quadrants, if you’re being honest, not the way Karkat did with all of his movies and charts and long-winded rants. “Do you uh -- do you need something?”
Great, Terezi, really great, you think. Make her feel like she’s bothering you, that’s sure to move things in the right direction. She laughs, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think she sounds nervous.
“I dunno,” she says, scuffing the toes of her trademark red sneakers across the floor. “I just, uh. Didn’t want to be alone?” When you are silent, she presses on: “We’re supposed to be pale for each other, you know, so it just made sense to come here!”
“In the middle of the day?”
“Shut up, you know there’s no such thing as day or night here--”
“Yeah, but from what I can tell you clearly just woke up--”
“Hey, how do you know this isn’t a carefully curated look?! I could have spent hours trying to achieve this level of disheveled perfection. You don’t know!!!!!!!!”
You smile despite yourself, and she relaxes a little.
“Okay fine, yes, I just woke up from a particularly shitty daymare, and I wanted some company. Are you happy????????” she asks, and you can hear the eight question marks in the way her voice rises at the end of her sentence. Your smile gets a little wider.
“Fuck you, Pyrope, stop grinning at me like that. It’s embarrassing enough that I dragged myself to your respiteblock after having a bad fucking dream like i’m some kind of wriggler, the least you can do is be sympathetic. Isn’t that what moirails are for?”
You honestly don’t know what moirails are for -- sure, you know in theory, but you’ve never had one before. Neither has Vriska, really, unless you count the brief pale-red mess she was in with Kanaya before everything went to shit. It’s becoming abundantly clear that neither of you really know what you’re doing, and you’re starting to wish you had paid a bit more attention to Karkat’s endless sermons about the nuances of the pale quadrant. You aren’t quite sure what to say, so you settle for stepping a bit closer to her.
“I just thought it might help to see you,” she mumbles after a moment, still dragging the toe of her shoe back and forth across the floor. Her voice is softer than usual, and you can sense her discomfort, smell the fear and sadness that she thinks she hides so expertly. You think she should know that she’s never been able to hide from you. “I can go if you want, though, it’s fine, stupid even--”
“Shut up,” you say again, and pull her into a hug. She is all hard edges where you are soft lines, and she smells like she hasn’t bathed in a sweep, but you don’t care. You hold her close and feel her relax under your touch, and tentatively reach a hand up to stroke her hair. She sighs and you keep running your fingers through the tangled mess, feeling her sag against you in relief. You pull back to look at her, and you can tell that she’s looking right into your eyes -- she’s the only one who does that, who doesn’t shy away from your blank gaze, and you wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that she is the one who did this to you -- and then you stop thinking and decide to do something astronomically stupid.
You start by bringing your face towards hers and lightly kissing her cheek. She freezes for a second, but then relaxes further, and you move to kiss the other side. You kiss her nose, her forehead, her cheeks again, and you don’t know what you’re doing but you don’t want to stop, and it doesn’t seem like she wants you to, either. You hesitate before pressing the softest kiss to her lips, just for a second, and then pull back, waiting for her to say something. She just stares and stares at you.
“Is this something moirails do?” She finally asks, almost breathlessly. She’s looking at you reverently, and her voice is soft, softer than you’ve ever heard it. And then she’s holding your waist and pulling you closer, until you can smell the cerulean blush on her cheeks and hear her breathing, ragged and nervous and hopeful.
“No,” you say, and you kiss her again.
It isn’t pale, not even close, the way your hands tangle in her hair and your teeth scrape at her lip hard enough to draw the smallest taste of blueberry blood. It’s not quite red or black either, at once too soft and not soft enough, but you don’t care. You don’t care what you two are, and you think she mustn’t either, because she’s kissing you and touching you and you’re falling falling falling —
You hold each other after, Vriska wrapping her long arms around you and pulling you close to her chest. She makes soft sounds, sleepy sounds, the vulnerable kind that you’d never thought you’d hear from her. It occurs to you that you are the only person who has ever seen Vriska like this. It’s a simple fact, an objective truth, and there’s no reason for it to make your bloodpusher swell and beat just a bit faster than is strictly normal. No reason at all.
You fall asleep like that, tangled up in each other, your head resting on her chest so you can feel the rise and fall of her breath. You feel sleep tugging at your eyelids, heavy and inviting, but you do not succumb -- on nights like these, you just want to hear her breathing. Some ugly, twisted part of you reminds you that in another universe you killed her, in another timeline you listened to her take her final breath at your hand, and you can’t fall asleep. You need to be sure she’s breathing. you need to remember that in this timeline, she’s here and alive and somehow, in some way, she’s yours.
—
Your name is Vriska Serket, and you have just woken up in Terezi Pyrope’s arms.
You take a second to process this before you open your eyes, drinking in the feeling of her hair tickling your face and the slight warmth of her skin on yours. You have not let yourself dream of this for so long — sweeps ago you had thought about it, but you had pushed the desire down, reminding yourself of the ever present and awful truth: you do not deserve her. You still don’t think you do, if you’re being honest with yourself, but you’ve always been selfish, and if she wants to give herself to you you are not going to stop her. You are a miserable mess of a girl, and you have done terrible things, and yet Terezi, Terezi who is good and just and kind, is holding you. Terezi, who has always been your better half, who makes you elated and furious and everything in between all at once, kissed you.
It almost doesn’t feel real.
You open your eyes slightly so you can look at her, and her face is closer to yours than it has ever been. From this distance you can see the intricate patterns of the spindly scars that line her eyes, sprawling across her cheeks and up her eyelids like the legs of a spider. She is beautiful, no matter what, but you hate that you did this to her, no matter how much she insists that her blindness has been a blessing in disguise. You reach a hand out slowly, tentatively, to feel the raised bumps of skin just below her eyelashes, and as soon as you make contact her eyes flutter open. They are red red red, as searing and bright as the Alternian sun itself, and you know some people find it unsettling but you cannot imagine a world in which Terezi Pyrope is not the most breathtaking girl you have ever seen.
“Hi,” she whispers, and oh god, you feel like you might cry. You swallow hard and wait a second to make sure your voice will come out steady, filling the time by continuing to brush your fingers over her face, trying to memorize every inch of her.
“Hey,” you finally say, and if your voice wavers a little bit she is courteous enough not to point it out. She leans in closer and presses a kiss to your nose, all sleepy and contented, and your bloodpusher feels like it’s going to jump out of your chest. This kiss feels pale, but the way she kissed you last night definitely wasn’t, and you aren’t sure what any of it means. You think you might be about to freak out a little, but then she shifts and pulls you closer and you let yourself forget. With her you are not a villain, you are not a hero, you are not the spider8itch or the Thief or any of it. You are Vriska Serket, and she is Terezi Pyrope, and you think that she is the only person who will ever truly know you.
Since you are Vriska Serket, however, you do not say any of this. Instead you move your hands to her waist, basking in the small sigh that escapes from her lips before you tickle her ruthlessly. she screams and pushes you off, but her smile is the biggest you’ve ever seen it and her laugh is the best sound you’ve ever heard and god, you just want to make her laugh like that forever. She takes advantage of your distraction and gets you right back, and you feel like a wriggler again as you tussle with her on the floor of your respiteblock. Eventually you are both out of breath, and you let your head fall onto her chest this time. You lie there in silence for a moment, feeling the rise and fall of her breath against your body, reminding you in out in out in out that she is here, she is here, she is yours.
She breaks the silence first, angling her head down to look at you and giving you her trademark Terezi shit-eating grin.
“So how long have you been harboring secret red feelings for me, my dear sweet moirail?” When you freeze slightly, she adds, “Or black! I don’t want to presume.”
You roll your eyes and mumble something about quadrants being stupid and avert your eyes. The fact that she’s still calling you her moirail despite the decidedly un-moiraillike behavior you have been engaging in since the previous night is not lost on you, and you begin to worry that this isn’t what she wanted at all, that she really is just pale for you and the night before was just a stupid experiment that didn’t mean anything.
As if she can hear your thoughts, she smirks at you. You are supposed to be the psychic one, and yet somehow Terezi always seems to know exactly what you’re thinking. You could chalk it up to her Seer powers, you suppose, but you know that’s not how they work, and besides, she’s always going on and on about not being able to control them. No, she has always been able to read you, has always been able to peel away the layers of lies and self-aggrandizement you have shrouded yourself in since wrigglerhood.
“Don’t be a dumbass, Serket, if I were ‘just pale’ for you I wouldn’t have kissed you like that, come on.”
“Well, obviously!” You say, but relief courses through you and you let yourself relax against her a little bit more. “If I thought you were just pale for me, I wouldn't let you kiss me! Besides, I'm irresistible. There is no universe in which you do not harbor all the concupiscent feelings for me. Allllllll of them.”
She swats at you and laughs -- god you love her laugh -- and you wonder if she can hear the undercurrent of your thoughts that beats against your boastful exterior, repeating over and over you don’t deserve her, you don’t deserve her, you don’t deserve her.
She surprises you, then, because she’s Terezi, and she’s always finding new ways to fuck up your carefully crafted perception of her.
“I killed you, you know,” she says, and it catches you off guard because what? You know she killed you, she’s told you a thousand times, and you’ve told her a thousand times that you don’t care, that you probably deserved it, that even if you didn’t she bent the rules of space and time to fix it (and you aren’t quite sure that you were -- are? -- worthy of that, but you keep your mouth shut).
“I stabbed you through the back. I don’t remember it, but I remember that I was going to do it, and I know in some other timeline it happened. I killed you,” she says, urgently, desperately, and you aren’t quite sure what she’s trying to get at.
“So???????? I already know all of this! You’ve told me about a million times how bad you feel about it!” Annoyance is creeping into your voice, and some distant part of you thinks you should make an effort to curb it, but you’re continuing before you can stop yourself. You press further. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again! You didn’t do anything wrong, I was going to get us all killed, I deserved it--”
“No!” she interrupts, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think her voice was shaking. She takes a breath in a concentrated effort to begin her next sentence more calmly than the last. “You didn’t. You didn’t deserve it. You were stupid and brash and yes, you were going to get us all killed in your stupid attempt to be a hero, but that doesn’t mean you deserved to die.” She pauses, but you can tell that she has more to say, and for once in your life you are silent.
“I was the one who made that choice,” she says, and her voice is almost a whisper. “I was so blinded --” (and it’s a sign of the seriousness of the situation that neither you nor she even crack a smile at the obvious joke opportunity) “-- by my stupid idea of what justice was supposed to be that I thought my only option to set things right was to kill my best friend.” She sighs and rubs at her eyes. “It took everyone dying, including myself, for me to realize that I could have done things differently. I'm a goddamn Seer of Mind and I convinced myself that I didn't have a choice. I didn’t even consider -- fuck.” She takes a deep shaky breath and then continues. “I didn’t even consider that just knocking you out was an option. as if that wasn’t the most obvious and sane and logical course of action to take! Sometimes --” and she pauses, like she isn’t sure whether to continue, before finally saying, “Sometimes I think I was just looking for an excuse to kill you. Because then I wouldn't have had to think anymore about what you had done. What we had done. I could tell myself I brought you to justice once and for all and forget about the role I played in all of it.”
She is silent again, and you wait to see if there’s more, but she seems to be spent. You don’t know what to say -- you are the reason she feels this guilt in the first place, and how could she possibly be so stupid as to blame herself for the things that you roped her into doing, to feel guilt for killing someone as worthless as you in another timeline? You close your eyes and take a breath, trying to ignore the pricking behind your eyes that definitely doesn’t mean you’re about to cry.
“Vriska?” she says hesitantly, when you do not speak. “Can you say something?”
You laugh a little, and then to your utter dismay a cerulean tear leaks out of your eye. You hope she doesn’t notice, and to her credit, she doesn’t seem to react, even though you’re sure she’s smelling blueberry. Stupid dragon senses never letting you catch a break.
“It's just funny,” you say, laughing a little harder, “that you think I didn’t deserve to die. There are a lot of things I don't deserve, but that is not one of them. Happiness? Don’t deserve that. Friendship? Hmmmmmmmm, no, wouldn’t say I deserve that either. You? I sure as hell don’t deserve you.”
It’s the most honest you’ve ever been. You are so used to lying, to covering up the hatred and guilt and fury you feel towards yourself with bravado and dramaaaaaaaatics and anything you can think of to mask the absolute shitstorm of self loathing that is constantly raging inside of you. But this is Terezi, and she has always been able to read you, and you think that if nothing else, she is entitled to your honesty. After all you’ve done to her, it’s the least you can do.
You wait for her to say something. She is silent for a bit, and then she sighs.
“You are so fucking stupid, Serket,” she says in her best exasperated tone, the one she reserves only for you. “It amazes me how utterly obtuse you are. I am not, and never was, some paragon of justice and mercy. In case you forgot, I killed those trolls with you back in our FLARP days. I blew off your arm and your eye because I thought that was what justice was. I fucking stabbed you because I was too caught up with playing legislacerator to realize that what I was doing was just as bad as any of the things you had done.”
You want to protest, to remind her that before you met her you were killing innocents, that she took your arm and your eye because you were out of control, but she shuts you down with a glare.
“Don’t you get it? We are both fucked up, like so deeply fucked up that it’s not even funny. There is no universe in which you do not deserve me, because I am just as fucking twisted and ruined as you are. I feel like shit, you feel like shit, it’s nothing new. If you’re irredeemable, I'm irredeemable, it’s as simple as that.”
You’re quiet for a moment.
“If you're irredeemable, I'm irredeemable,” you repeat slowly. “But you’re not. Irredeemable, I mean.”
“Okay, so by that logic, you are also not irredeemable! Funny how that works.”
“Fuck off,” you say, but your chest feels a little lighter. “Don’t try to corner me into admitting I'm a good person. I’m not a good person.”
“Neither am I,” she replies simply. “But I don’t think that matters very much. You can do good things without being a good person, and you can do bad things without being a bad person. Maybe we should just stop with the qualifiers here, because I really don’t think we’re getting anywhere.”
“Okay,” you agree, and you don’t exactly feel like you’ve solved anything, but it feels like a start. You press your body closer against hers and wrap your arm tightly around her waist, because for once you don’t know what to say. She runs her nails absentmindedly along your arm, and the two of you lie there like that for a while, before she speaks up again.
“So if we’re past the whole morality crisis thing -- props, by the way, Serket, I didn’t think you had it in you -- I’d like to point out that you never answered my question. This is unacceptable! The court holds you in contempt for failing to respond adequately to the prosecution’s inquiry.”
You roll your eyes at her (stupidly endearing) fake lawyer talk, and she smirks at you, because she knows you love it.
“Can you remind me of the question?” you say coyly, even though you don’t think you could forget it if you tried.
“The question, Miss Blueberry, was as follows: how long have you been nursing secret concupiscent feelings for your dear palemate?”
You roll your eyes at her, instead of answering honestly -- I’ve loved you since before I knew what it meant, I don't care in what quadrant, you are everything to me at once and always have been -- and prop yourself up so you are looking directly at her.
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” you say, and you kiss her, red and pale and black and everything beyond and in between, and you hope she understands.
When she kisses you back and whispers your name against your lips, you’re pretty sure she does.