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There are dragons down in the gorge.
Dozens of them, in piles, still as rocks. But not stone grey; even in the pale gloom of midnight, they gleam and shine, like their own fire has made the colours of their scales run thick with heat, and set in ripples and waves that catch moonbeams. Those on the edges are ivory, pale as teeth knocked clean from skulls, and Vriska recognises these as blind dragons.
Able to face the sun, they sleep throughout the night. All the better for her. Unlike Terezi's lusus, they'll show her no quarter. Pyralsnout may lower her eyelids and keep her gaze on the ground, in Vriska's presence, but these are wild beasts, and would glare straight into her one remaining eye. And the dragons in the centre, catching the light and recreating glimmers of the hemospectrum, are resting, having hunted for the night. Were she closer, she might see them blink, see their chests swell and sag with breath.
Were she closer, they could make ashes of her in mere moments.
Vriska takes a step back. In order to convince herself that she isn't retreating, she shrugs off her jacket. It might be the second winter, but it'll be stifling, down in the gorge. The dragons will have warmed the rocks with their breath before settling for the night. She doesn't need sweat stacked as a disadvantage against her, slick against her nape, her ribs, making her her shirt cling to her. They might smell the salt on her skin and mistake it for fear.
The jacket, like all of her clothing, is filthy. Dirt has settled into the fabric, like cloth draped across the furniture of abandoned blocks, swamp water making it sodden, and then stiff. She is dirty in a quiet way, a muted way, as if she blends into the ground she's been sleeping on. There's a skeleton of a tree bowed over the edge of gorge, as dead and dried out as the rest of the landscape, and Vriska hangs her jacket there, like a flag.
There's no obvious way down. The dragons fly in, so no roads are worn into the sheer cliff walls, and Vriska squats, feeling her way over the edge. The dry earth crumbles and her fingers slip into a fist, dirt sprinkling hundreds of feet below; lost to the wind before it can disturb the dragons, no matter how her heart slams in her chest.
Eventually, she finds a root, as thick as her throat, and wraps her hands around it, fingers and thumbs coming together to form a noose. She smiles at the thought, catches herself, and frowns.
She lowers herself, slowly. It reminds her of dead hair twisted together, caked in dirt, and she clings so as to whiten her knuckles, feeling her way with outstretched toes. When the root ends, the rock face becomes more defined, a mess of sharp angles, carved, it seems, for her to hook her fingers around.
At the bottom of the gorge, she grins, as if there was nothing to it. As if she's already conquered the real difficulty. But even Vriska Serket cannot dismiss dragons so easily. Best to move quickly, carefully, she thinks, best not to kick up any loose rocks, best not to trip. It's an in and out job, nothing more than a few minutes of work.
Now that she's on the same level as the dragons, she can see that they aren't all what she initially assumed. There are molts scattered around their circle, and they look to her more like ghosts than husks. She shudders, once, but won't allow herself to do it again.
On the way past the molts, she crouches to peer at the scales, but these are no good; she could pry one free, but it might shatter and splinter in the process. Besides, it's not what she's looking for. What she's looking for is another matter altogether, and she'll know what it is when she finds it.
When she draws closer, slinking between two blind dragons, a third stirs. This one has its sight; pale green eyes fix on her, and its lip curls, at one corner. Black fangs hidden beneath black scales. Vriska holds its gaze, stands with her back straight, shoulders pushed out. She doesn't want the dragon's attention to linger on her for too long, but she doesn't want to insult it, either.
It breathes in deeply, and under the dirt and grime and the scent of stagnant water idly rung out between her hands, Vriska must reek of Pyralsnout. She doesn't know whether this will help her or not: either the dragon will think her worthy of moving among them because of it, or it will snap its teeth and snarl, disgusted, thinking the lusus a traitor, tamed in turn by raising a troll.
The dragon is huge. Vriska could scoop its brain out and make a nest inside. It snarls once, holds her gaze, and lowers its head back down onto its front paws. She takes a step to the side, moving slowly, and the dragon follows her with its eyes. She gathers all the breath she can in her lungs, moving swiftly, because she recognises that look.
She's felt it on her own face before, when she's been sat at the table in the nourishblock, chair rocking on its back two legs, stomach full. There'd be a beetle of some sort scurrying beneath the window, and Vriska would stare at it, knowing how easily she could crush it beneath her thumb, and then wipe it off against her tongue. But her stomach would be full, and reaching for it would mean clamping down on all four legs, stretching across the table, fingers scrambling along the sill.
So she would stare at it, in order to let it know: I could eat you, I could eat you. But I won't.
Handfuls of scales have been shed as the dragons have shook, and Vriska finds the one she's looking for by accident. Her shoe scuffs against it, and the moonlights do just enough to lift the surface of the scale from the ground. There are a hundred colours that shift and slink away when she kneels to pick it up; a thousand more, that Terezi will be able to taste.
She holds it between her hands, feeling out the natural cracks. It's the size of a heart, or a spleen, some other pulpy organ she's never cradled in her palms before.
*
Five nights earlier, she walks out on her lusus.
It isn't as simple as all that, or as quiet, or as calm. Vriska slings a final corpse before the spider, mustard blood staining grey stone black, and announces in an uneven voice that it's the last she'll be bringing back here. Her voice trembles in her throat, it trembles in her fingers, and she tries to pull it taut and level by making fist of her hands. But they still shake.
Her lusus rises up on its back four legs, shrieking, clattering, clicking. Disappointed, infuriated. Vriska steps back, into the doorway, heel knocking against the first step. She lifts her arms as she screams up at her that she is a brute of a creature, strong enough to hunt and scavenge and spin webs to trap pray in, all by herself; she keeps herself in the canyon beneath the castle, trapped there by nothing but her own idleness; Vriska doesn't need her anymore, never truly needed her in a way that became reality as a wiggler, and her lusus is the only thing that stands between the draughty castle halls and freedom.
For both of them.
Vriska's voice fractures. The words singe her lips, boil in her throat, until they swish and sway uselessly in a sea of silence.
And so she climbs the stairs for the last time, leaving the castle behind. It was never hers in a way that counted, there was no throne to sit upon, but she glances back at it more times than she cares to admit to.
In the languid light of dawn, she takes refuge in the courtblock. Her skin, now more washed-out than wan under the flickering fluorescent lights of the lobby, itches from the brief exposure, a lick of sunlight like sandpaper. Or she imagines it, the itch, the burn, the nagging ache beneath her skin that she can't quite quell with her nails as she waits for Terezi Pyrope to emerge from the trial she proceeds over.
Other trolls, scattered and waiting for reasons other than her own, shoot her wary looks. None of them are bold in their brief stares, and there is nothing shameless about the way they scrutinise her; her reputation holds strong, especially in the court of law. They know of her as the blue blood with an insatiable lusus to feed, and Vriska does nothing to correct this assumption; stranger still, they know of her as the blue blood with a mutation that manifests in the mind, and makes itself known through manipulation. Perhaps she forces them to look her way.
But beyond her own reputation, watery tales of piracy spun in portside taverns, like slosh against a ship's hull, they know her as High Legislacerator Pyrope's matesprit. Or something close enough to it. The respect they have for Terezi is kindled from her loyalty to the law, her dedication to her role, but is strengthened by fear. They stand to attention when she enters a block, but only because they have steel rods slid up their spines.
The higher ups in the courtblock keep their eyes trained on Terezi. Vriska knows they do, and so does Terezi, though she always denies being a victim of any surveillance. While she is versed in the laws they themselves have written into Alternia's history, and though she may live by them, they have always been too eager to tip the scales in their own favour; to uphold the laws, that they might break them.
She is too stern for them. Too severe, too sharp.
When Terezi finally leaves the trial, lowbloods exiting through the back doors, the smell of blood follows her, though it doesn't cling to her clothing, her skin. Even Vriska can smell it, but in her excitement, can't even curl her lip and feign a choked Eurgh, gross.
“Listen, Pyrope. Terezi, listen—” Vriska hisses, trying to keep her words from the ears of all trolls other than Terezi. Terezi prickles at the volume of her voice, hand on Vriska's elbow, and leads her into her officeblock before she listens to anything. But Vriska carries on as they walk. “I've done it. I'm free now! We can do whatever we want, because I won't have to keep disappearing, off to sea or wherever the fuck I usually have to go.”
Terezi's heard it all before. Vriska doesn't remember having said it in the past, and she's certain she'd remember, because right now it feels as if she's spilling her guts out and across the tiled marble floor, but Terezi shows frustration. She sighs, her shoulders rise and then fall like a guillotine, and she plucks the glasses from the bridge of her nose, wiping red lenses against the red of her vest.
“What did you do? What is it?” Terezi asks, and for all hours and days of interrogations she's held, she already sounds exhausted by this line of questioning.
She's made up her mind about whatever Vriska has to say, long before she's said it. With judgement already cast, Vriska takes her time, only then seeming bothered by the dark of the office. There's a lamp on Terezi's desk, hardly for her own benefit, shaped at the base like a dragon's tail, two wings folding together to make a circle for the shade. It's a tacky thing, cheap plastic coloured like an orange peel, and when Vriska pulls the switch, the light bleeds out mauve.
The office is crisp and clean, everything kept in its proper place. Unlike Terezi's hive. But the walls are gaudy, each painted a different colour. There are red and teal surfaces, naturally, a hot pink wall where the door's built in, but the one that Vriska is certain used to be blue has been painted grass green. She imagines the coat of paint to be so fresh that she could reach out and smear it, but she looks to Terezi, and doesn't.
Because here is Terezi in the life she's chosen, the life she's built, paperwork sorted neatly into a filing cabinet, commendations lined up on a shelf behind her desk. Her uniform is clean, and it clings to her frame without a drop of blood on it, despite the trial she's just prosecuted, and Vriska looks down at her feet, at herself. Shoes scarred by the path she's walked, white tips turned black, dirt and sweat and someone else's blood on the knees of her pants.
“I left that bitch of a lusus behind! Finally. Because she's big and strong enough to fend for herself, and I'm twelve, Pyrope. I told you I wouldn't be stuck there forever, and now I can't go back to the castle anyway, hah, because she probably wants to eat me up in one bite, because I guess I must be so fucking ungrateful to—”
To abandon her, she thinks. She trails off, picturing, in her mind, as if her vision eightfold is still intact, and she can see through every wall and hill between this office and her hive, her lusus curled in on itself, a shield of eight legs, writhing with hunger. Alone, terrified, sottish with its own inertia, waited on for twelve sweeps and counting no more. Vriska's skin comes up in goosebumps, a flash of consequences lighting up the darkest reaches of her mind, doused by a giddy sort of delight.
“Serket,” Terezi says, sounding out her name like she's announcing a sentence. She doesn't say it with familiar, playful contempt, as if they're sisters, making rivalry for sport, but as if they're strangers. “You shouldn't be here.”
Terezi breathes in air like it's evidence, but her lack of faith in Vriska is all consuming; she doesn't even make an effort to inhale as deep as she needs to, in order to taste whether there's any truth in the matter.
All at once, Vriska doesn't know why she was so excited to tell Terezi what she'd done, the step she'd taken. Things were turbulent between them for sweeps, emotions flaring and spiking in a jagged sort of way that kept them both on their toes, but something between them changed too suddenly for Vriska to tell what was falling to pieces. It was as if a greased key had been slipped into a lock, too slick to make a sound, even as it was turned; and by the time that door was opened, finally, it was too late to throw her shoulder against it and lock everything back up inside.
She'd done this for herself, true. But she'd done it for Terezi, too, because surely once she'd freed herself from the servitude of a spider bigger than most blocks, once Vriska could stop pretending to make games of her hunts, then they could be together in the way Terezi wanted them to.
But apparently not. Too little, too late. Vriska could pull a blade from her boot and use it to paint all four of the walls teal, the ceiling too, but what point would she be trying to prove in that? No one would learn anything from such a lesson, except, perhaps, for regret.
Her hand, free of a knife but gripping tight, finds Terezi's shoulder. Terezi doesn't start, could never be made to flinch so easily, but she does bow her head forward, breath catching as if she's doing all she can not to lean against Vriska. Or so Vriska likes to imagine.
Terezi, with her skin pulled taut across her bones as if there isn't enough of it to hold fast what makes her her, doesn't meet Vriska's gaze. It wouldn't be anything to her, to look up with blind eyes. But there she is, like one of her leather bound books: too many pages, too much ink seeping into them, accounts of chances she's given Vriska over and over again, records of revenge, irreversible, unfulfilled, unsatisfactory. Just.
She's kind of a bitch. Kind of crazy. Anyone would have to be, to serve an institution like this one; a justice system that would have a hulking black-blooded monster that knows of nothing beyond snarling, eating and shitting, pulled from its nest in dim, dank caverns, and attach the title of Honourable to it.
Even the other legislacerators, the subjugglators, think her unsteady. They say she's too devoted, fanatical in her means, but Vriska thinks that there's nothing wrong with her, not a goddamn thing. She's just Terezi Pyrope, a ridiculous wiggler who rolls around in dragon capes, when she's in her own hive, and anyone who thinks otherwise should promptly choke on a lowblood's bulge.
“It's bright outside,” Vriska offers up weakly.
There are ways she could prove her point to Terezi, but now, all she can think to do is burn her office down, medals and trophies sweating off the precious metals they're probably not even made from, paperwork becoming ash, past victories forgotten. It would be easy, to take hold of every mind in the courtblock and turn it against Terezi, against His Honourable Tyranny; but it would be the exact sort of thing Terezi has come to expect from Vriska.
“You can stay here,” Terezi says, only touching Vriska to pry her fingers from her shoulder. It's not that she trusts Vriska not to do any of the things she's thinking of, but she has work to attend to. Vriska's face must light up, something in her stance must relax, because Terezi hastily adds, “It's just for today.”
“I know,” Vriska says, letting Terezi step back. Letting her leave, to attend to matters more important than her. As she steps out, back towards the heart of the courtblock, Vriska murmurs, “...thanks.”
It occurs to her then that she has a choice; that she doesn't have to succumb to her base instincts and repay rejection with destruction. There's nothing weak to be said about fighting for something that matters to her, though her head hurts from trying to ease her mind from the vicious depths her thoughts tend to wade in.
*
It takes her three solid nights to get back to civilisation.
Not a small part of that time is devoted to making her way back out of the gorge, steel fingertips strong, like drill bits. That old flesh wound is likely the only reason she gets out at all, and even when she does, she's puffing, panting, shaking from the adrenaline churning around her system, brought on by every time she didn't fall; one more thing to grudgingly thank Terezi for.
The fingertips on her right hand are grazed, thin lines of blue rising between the dirt, and the others are scratched and scraped, metal surface made dull. She's due for a replacement.
She sleeps away the days in caves, or under the thick canopy of trees, when there aren't hunting cats rushing through the long grass, howlbeasts crying out for the moons to return. It's a restless, fitful sort of sleep, and the cold makes her ache right down to the marrow. She wakes each morning feeling brittle, and only stops at all lest her skin burn and peel like the dried, dead leaves that crackle and crunch underfoot.
When Vriska reaches a hilltop, able to see the city down in the valley below, Terezi's courtblock in the very centre, as stiff and uniform as every other hiveblock down there, she takes a sharp right, heading into the forest. She leaves the gridded city streets behind, turns her back on every hive that's as grey as the last, and walks with her thumb skidding and bumping across the surface of the dragon's scale.
This forest is different from any of the other ones she's walked through. Quieter. There are sounds, naturally; there's a nut creature darting between the low-lying shrubs, having missed the memo to hibernate for the winters, chirpbeasts singing from high branches, trees evergreen, dusted with snow, letting the wind howl between them; but there's a subtle sort of stillness that comes with being the only other troll to set foot in there.
She mistakes it for silence, even when she hears her own heartbeat pound between her temples, mind like a steel drum. People know of the High Legislacerator, but more to the point, they know of her dragon and the nooses that hang hungrily from her hive, like a hunter's trap set out with only one target in mind. They wouldn't dare to take a short cut through these parts, and having the guts to march directly to Terezi's hive used to make Vriska feel brave.
Now she feels as if every step is futile, and a little sad. Like knowing the way ultimately tells her nothing about her destination at all.
But soon enough, there Terezi's hive is above her, in all its rickety, wooden glory. It's a bizarre place, elevated as it is off the ground, ladders hammered into tree trunks, staircases wrapped around them. It always seemed to Vriska that it shouldn't all fit, somehow, that it would fall to the ground, or at least slant sideways, but she's never been able to say why, exactly.
She does wonder, from time to time, if the strangeness of her hive has done its part to make Terezi strange; because Terezi is much like place, as if she too has taken root there. As Vriska climbs a ladder, taking it on with more of a strain than the sides of the gorge, she thinks of Terezi and her thin arms, her sharp jaw, bones like so many planks of wood cobbled together. She smiles where the wood warps, the knuckles of a clenched fist like knots in bark.
Terezi isn't in the livingblock, when Vriska pokes her head in through the door. She lets herself in, comforted by familiar sights; lines of chalk dragged across floorboards, across the walls – across the ceiling, at one point, though Vriska can't tell what Terezi stood on to reach that high – brightly coloured clothing draped across every surface, scalemates, still, poking out from between cushions; all of it so unlike Terezi's office.
Vriska takes slow steps through the block, careful not to touch anything, though some of it's hers. There are boots in one corner, boots she'd forgotten about, but should've taken on her latest expedition. The snow seeped in through the fabric of her red shoes, and now her toes are cold.
Pinned to one of the walls are dozens upon dozens of photographs. Vriska recognises them; she took them. There are lipstick kisses pressed to them, blooms of cobalt blue, oily prints smeared where Terezi's run her thumbs over them. Terezi doesn't care about preserving the pictures, because they're only photos of herself; she wants to feel what it is Vriska presses upon her in quieter moments, when she doesn't think she's paying attention.
Vriska manages half a smile at the photos, and brings a hand to her mouth. The blue came clean off days ago, and she runs her tongue across her lower lip, weighing up what it means to her to realise that this hive has been more of a home to her than her castle ever was.
If Terezi rejects her again, then so be it. Vriska's done a lot of stupid shit in recent sweeps, as well as not so recent sweeps, and even she'd have trouble lying enough to herself to brand herself as blameless. But it's easy to say so be it before it has occurred; before it is a moment she's living, breathing, something irreversible, sending her life in a direction it shouldn't be spiralling.
If this is to be the end of them, if her own sister is going to leave her, after she's deserted her lusus of twelve sweeps, then she'll go to sea. It's what her ancestor would've wanted.
Or at least what Mindfang would've done.
Terezi's in her respiteblock, sitting at her desk, though the husktop is off. All Vriska sees are the rows and rows of dragon scales pinned and taped to the wall behind Terezi, some iridescent, some dull as a worn blade, and all of a sudden, what Vriska has to offer up seems so small, so worthless; so easily come by. And so before she has a chance to talk herself into backing out, and before Terezi verbalises the frown lashed across her face, Vriska rushes forward, one hand in her jacket pocket, and fumbles to pass the dragon's scale from her palm to Terezi's.
As she hands it over, she thinks: it's not the right shape for a spleen. Probably.
Terezi's frown doesn't fade, even as her fingers wrap around it. Vriska watches as her brow lifts, eyes narrowing over red glasses that have slid halfway down her nose. She was distracted by something before Vriska arrived, then, and her eyes are dark, heavy, as if His Honourable Tyranny has wiped his own blood in crescents along her eye sockets. Finally, Terezi takes the scale in earnest, holding it between both hands.
She feels it first with her fingertips, and then with her nails. She scrapes them across the surface, as if it's a guiro, and brings it up to her nose, taking a tentative sniff of it, afraid she might steal the colours along with a breath. She licks it, too, which is a little gross, because it's been on the ground for a really long time; not to mention in Vriska's hand.
While she watches, Vriska doesn't say I fiiiiiiiigured you like these dumb scales or whatever, and I just so happened to stumble across this – and I don't want to carry useless crap around, so take it!, though she has to bite the urge back, as if letting it overwhelm her will cause her to swallow her tongue. There's no need to be dismissive of how much attention she really does pay, when it suits her, no need to deny the effort she's put in.
Terezi takes a slow step back, though not to draw away from Vriska. There's a soft smile tugging at the corner of her lips, and all Vriska can think about is the terrible things she'd be willing to do for this woman; and not just to keep her safe, but to keep her happy, too.
Terezi takes the scale, rips off a length of tape with a sound like her cane cutting the air, and quickly places it up among the others. If Vriska were to take her eyes off it, she'd lose it in a sea of its kin.
Terezi turns, darts across the room, and Vriska must've been expecting a punch in the gut, because she's tense as anything when Terezi presses herself against her. Racked with confusion, Vriska blinks blearily at her own hands as they wrap around Terezi, because she doesn't understand why Terezi is relenting; why any of this was enough for her.
She should've brought back a whole dragon.
Her hands find the small of Terezi's back, and Terezi's shoulders crack horribly as she stretches up, on tiptoes just to be able to wrap her arms around Vriska's neck. Forehead on her shoulder, Terezi breathes in, and Vriska feels herself drawn closer. She slouches, bending her spine in a way that makes her back ache to properly hold Terezi, staying as still as she can as Terezi jitters in her arms.
Vriska grits her teeth together, a striking heat running through every nerve, trapped between layers of skin and muscle. Because Terezi is ridiculous to have been won over this easily, is bordering on the deranged side of stupid, if she's already considering forgiveness; and the one saving grace in the situation is that Vriska manages to refrain from sabotaging herself in an effort to make Terezi look bad.
She tries to relax in her grasp. Bows her head just enough to bury her face in Terezi's hair, between her tall horns, and stares without really seeing the the rows of scales behind her, blurring together to make a skin. Terezi peeks up from her shoulder, nose bumping her cheek before pressing a kiss there, and Vriska realises: this is it, Serket. You've finally done something right.
“You smell like a week of misery and dusk, you big, dumb spider!” Terezi tells her, hands on her shoulders, easing her back. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and go get in the shower.”
But Vriska keeps her grip tight, because she's been filthy for weeks. Another moment or two isn't going to kill her, and it's hardly as if she has anywhere else she needs to be.