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EB: anyhow, just figured i’d check in!
EB: i mean, i knew you’d be able to stay on top of things, it’s just…
GG: its just…???
EB: she can be a little… well…
GG: :/
EB: ok, not even a little. she’s basically a lot nuts.
GG: john!!!
EB: when it comes down to it, i don’t really get why she decided to go with you instead of staying to pester the rest of us.
EB: i mean like it’s obviously the sensible thing to avoid terezi and the others rather than get in their faces a lot? but she’s not exactly what i’d call sensible!
GG: lol look whos talking!
EB: so basically, as your brother, i am kinda worried.
EB: vriska’s the queen of mayhem and shitty decisions, it is her.
GG: omg whats this ~as your brother~ john???
GG: i am the older sibling by five months, in case you have forgotten!
GG: and anyway dont you think youre being a little bit uncharitable?
EB: uncharitable, she says.
EB: we are talking about an alien girl our age who has mind controlled hundreds of ghosts to rope them into her schemes, and killed one of her own friends, and convinced herself that at least one of these things was ok.
EB: in case you’ve forgotten.
GG: well………
GG: yes thats very true!
GG: she has done very bad things, and just that she did some of those things in the name of some greater good doesnt make what shes done go away!
GG: but i am pretty sure that she did not elect to come with me because she has more irons in the fire
EB: i am not sure why you are sure, but jade, vriska’s crazy.
GG: john!!!!
GG: omg there is being justifiably wary and then theres being a jerk
EB: jade!!!
EB: earth to jade, we are all jerks.
GG: >:/
EB: and like i said, i am worried! give vriska an inch and she will take a mile, jade. you cannot let your guard down around her.
GG: okay john you know i love you and everything but sometimes you can just be SO DENSE
EB: bluh bluh.
GG: have some faith in me, jeez!!!!!!!!!
GG: i promise you that everything will be fine!!!!!!!! :) :) :)
For the first month, most of what Jade sees of Vriska is a tight coil of alien girl atop a mound of pillows and dirty clothes. Some of it is that trolls are nocturnal. Some of it is—Jade knows from conversations with all the others who came from the dream bubbles into the new world with them—that the sudden snap of growth from thirteen to sixteen hurts, and that sleeping is a way to escape. Some of it is probably that there are other things Vriska is trying to escape from.
Jade decides to let her be for the time being: After all, there is still so much that needs doing. There are no longer platoons of blue iguanas to maintain her tower, and Jade is three years out of practice; there is the garden to tend to, and a whole new universe that is not quite like anything in hers or the trolls’ or the game’s. It’s maybe a good thing that there’s so much to measure and examine just from home that Jade almost doesn’t know what to do with herself, because this way there is no temptation to pack up and make week-long explorations in the name of science. She shook off John’s worries with smiley faces and fierce reprimands, but even she knows that it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave Vriska to her own devices for too long.
Sometimes it’s a bit of a shock, climbing the stairs and seeing a near-stranger sleeping on a makeshift pile (Jade is backsliding to her early days, when the tower was the private domain of herself and Bec, a little). Other times, when she sets up her laptop and her notes at a table nearby, it’s kind of nice, if distracting. She has not really gotten the chance to examine trolls at rest, before.
Vriska sleeps like she is carved out of stone, making her body into an angry fist. Her eyes move underneath the lids when she is dreaming, and sometimes her muscles tense, but she does not toss and turn like John or sleepwalk like Dave, barely even twitches. Some of the other trolls relaxed in their sleep, but not this restrained disaster of a girl. Her hair is dull, and more matted every day. Her lipstick is chapped and bitten, dark black creases showing through the blue where she might bend her mouth when awake and underneath her protruding eyeteeth. Her eyeshadow is starting to clump and flake, and her nail polish is shot through with cracked patterns like the wiring in a computer’s guts. Her clothes, always identical black tee-shirts and tattered-ankle jeans, are uniformly rumpled.
(When Jade slept on the battleship and visited the dream bubbles, sometimes she caught glimpses of Vriskas from other timelines. All of them but the God Tiers, she remembers, wore jackets and trenchcoats, blue and black and gray. Her Vriska, alpha Vriska, does not: And Jade files that away to think on at a later date.)
At first Jade left notes for her, explaining the floors of the tower, the location of the bathroom and the fridge and so on. She is busy all the nights she wasn’t asleep, after all, perched atop her rebuilt and re-connected room and observatory to chart the stars. (Once when she was headed down the stairs for a snack, she glimpsed Vriska squinting at a note while she held it at arm’s length, face scrunched up in irritation; now when she leaves labels on Tupperware containers of leftovers, she writes in bigger letters.)
Afterward, there wasn’t so much to do. When Jade was still trying to get back into the swing of life, she had dug up her old containers of hair elastics and put cerulean blue reminders on her little finger—make extra dinner so that there will be leftovers to share, remember to wash Vriska’s laundry too—but it felt too strange, after three years of not using the things, and she adapted to the extra tasks quickly enough.
Since Vriska announced her intent to move in, making it sound like a definitive statement but adding eight question marks in the way she’d tilted her body towards Jade and made a face, they have had precisely one conversation (“Why in the fuck is the bathroom so far downstairs? Talk about inconvenient!” Vriska had said, flinging her arms into the air, all melodramatics and vive. “I know, right?” said Jade, who almost always teleported the distance whenever it occurred to her that she had to go).
Jade lets her be. She learned patience as a tiny girl, remembered it in the three years it took to flee one crumbling universe for one with a chance, and if John is right about anything it’s that Vriska probably hasn’t got the stamina to beat her in a patience-off. Vriska will get up when she is ready, or at least when her body decides it has stockpiled enough sleep to cancel out any foreseeable future debt. Jade has more than enough things to do to occupy herself until the time comes.
There are not aliens in the new world, at least not yet. It’s a pretty big universe, and it is also very new; most of the stars and planets that they did not specifically bring along with them when they completed the game are still developing.
It is all very cool, and Jade charts things from the roof with a telescope every night. It would be especially nice if she could go check it all out firsthand, but everyone has decided to just stay planetside for the first few years or so. It doesn’t help that nobody’s quite experimented with what aspects of game powers are still in play. Jade is banking on all of them—everything in creation is governed by the game, they’re still inside the body of a healthy Genesis Frog and all—but teleporting through space would be a fine time to learn that, say, God Tiers can’t survive without air anymore.
It is something of a relief to have breathing space again. The whole three years on the battleship were nonstop her and Davesprite and John not being able to get any personal space at all, and then once they’d made their way into the Alpha session everything was too chaotic to get a chance to breathe.
Jade loves her friends. But she also loves not having to look at some of them and feel guilty, and having time alone with her thoughts, and being able to set her own schedule without anybody nagging. Three years of constantly being in each other’s hair, bookended by two drama-filled sessions, were a bit of an overdose on human proximity for a girl who lived alone on an island.
Vriska is there, but she still spends something like twenty hours out of every twenty-four asleep. That is okay by Jade. She thinks, too, that having two people on the island wouldn’t be that overwhelmingly different from being alone. There are still plenty of places they can avoid each other, when it comes down to that.
It only takes a little longer than a week, really. When Jade is coming up from tinkering with the generator, making sure it’s not going to break down all of a sudden, out of the bathroom comes Vriska: Pants unzipped, hair dripping all over the floor, towel draped unceremoniously over her shoulders and hiding her chest. (Jade is, privately, a little disappointed—but there will be time to examine troll anatomy later.)
Their eyes meet. Vriska freezes mid-step.
“So, uh, I think I probably just used all the hot water? Like, how was I supposed to know that you were doing sweaty gross work though. Your schedule is inscrutable.” She shrugs. She turns away and scratches at the back of her head. “Uh, sorry?”
“No, it’s cool,” says Jade. “The generator and plumbing here are pretty great, it is basically impossible to run out of hot water.”
“Well, good, then,” says Vriska.
And it is cool. When Jade sits down at the table to type up a layman’s report of her star findings for the week so that the others can argue about it on their memos, Vriska sits on the couch fixing her makeup. After that, Jade makes dinner, which Vriska watches in fascination, proclaiming that human cooking makes no sense.
“Troll cooking makes no sense,” Jade says. “Like, everything that’s not raw meat is made out of dead babies.”
“Human cooking makes even less sense than troll cooking,” Vriska says. “What makes the least sense of all is how it somehow tastes okay! God, you aliens are bizarre.”
“What do you expect?” Jade says, and wrinkles up her nose. “We are aliens!”
They watch the pot on the stove for a while, and Jade snickers.
“Also, how great is it to not have shouty Vantases pop up and yell at us for being culturally insensitive?”
Vriska snorts. “It is so great. Do not even talk to me about shouty Vantases, you haven’t had to occupy dream bubbles with them. It’s like they just magically appear out of thin air, summoned by the opportunity of giving people big dumb lectures!”
It is a little less awkward after that.
Vriska still sleeps an awful lot, but Jade sees her around the tower more and more often: Sprawled on her front in the arboretum, head cocked over her grandfather’s collection of bleached salon photos, and at one point doing stretches on one of the lower floors with no shirt on.
Sometimes she watches with eyes narrowed from a doorway or a windowsill as Jade works outside, annotating the chemical composition of flora that she does not recognize from Earth or LOFAF. It very much brings to mind memories of being little and standing on the beach at the island, toes dug into the sand a few inches away from the waves, bent over and glaring into the tide but too suspicious—not brave enough—to step into the water.
Jade thinks that Vriska is probably the most transparent person she has ever met.
If Vriska is still sleeping an awful lot, then a nagging voice at the back of Jade’s mind points out that Jade herself is sleeping less and less.
Maybe that is true! But there’s so much to do, really, it should be all right if she stays up two hours extra or so to get a handle on things.
Besides, Jade doesn’t like sleeping so much, now that they aren’t in the game. From the time she overcame her childhood insomnia onward, there was Prospit, and then after she sacrificed her dreamself to save John’s, there were the dream bubbles. But there are no dream bubbles anymore now that Lord English is gone—the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors doesn’t need bait to distract any predators, and has stopped maintaining them. The ghosts—all the products of offshoot timelines, all the alpha-timeline people who didn’t choose life again—have moved on, to whatever happens to the dead when they don’t get sent express to old memories in the eldritch depths. Maybe they have gone to a fluffy cloud heaven, or maybe their recycled atoms are circulating around this new universe.
Whichever, when Jade dreams nowadays her dreams are nonsense, weird fretful things where fragments of memory merge with old Squiddles episodes and something out of a perspective artist’s crack sketchbooks. Sometimes huge blue dolls wander through the hallways of her randomly firing neurons, which is ridiculous and a specter Jade buried as a kid besides.
All in all, she would rather spend her time on chores and science.
“You never seem to use the computer anymore,” Jade says, looking over her knees at Vriska, who is dancing around the blessedly-Typheus-minion-trophy-less ground floor like a rabbit doing shadow boxing. She is barefoot, and all ten of her toenails are painted the same blue as her fingernails and lips.
Vriska launches into a handstand and balances shakily, legs flopping over backwards and hair curling wildly along the floor, before replying in a strained voice: “Who would I even use it to talk to, Harley? You are like the only person who is still willing to give me the time of day.”
“That’s not true,” Jade says.
“No shit it’s true,” Vriska says back. She gives up and flips her hips so that her legs lean the right way to touch down, and there’s a little flash of gray stomach that makes Jade’s ears stand up before she pulls her shirt down. “I’m the huge bitch, remember? I could’ve saved the whole world without anybody’s help and they’d still hate me.”
So she at least realizes by now that heroic deeds aren’t the cure. Jade had theorized as much, but the confirmation is heartening. “John doesn’t hate you,” she says out loud.
“John thinks I am grubfuck insane,” Vriska says, and looks away. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore, remember?”
“Well, ok, I know that John has maybe said some stuff? But I am pretty sure he doesn’t actually think you’re crazy. And if he did I’d punch him in the face,” she adds helpfully. “I do think that you scare him a little sometimes though.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all,” Vriska says, tossing her hair. She is probably rolling her eyes over-dramatically.
Jade chews her fingernail thoughtfully and types ok i will check in with you guys later!!! to Roxy and Jake on the memo, closing out of Pesterchum and folding her lunchtop shut. The mini-holo display played against her thighs disappears.
She watches Vriska bounce around the room like something caged, five feet five inches of nervous energy, and she sits up and folds her legs into a pretzel.
“You should come with me when I do maintenance and take care of the garden and stuff,” Jade says. “I can teach you. It’ll be great.”
Vriska stops and stares, her face scrunched into a scowl. “Universe to Harley,” she says, raking her masses of hair back with both hands, “in case nobody has seen fit to inform your dumb barkbeast butt, I am a great big fuckup! The biggest fuckup of them all! The only things I am good for are killing stuff and manipulating stuff. Even you, with your freaky Egbert-Harley charity, cannot honestly want me dicking up your weird Earth vegetables and crap.”
“Wow, excuse you, there is nothing dumb about my butt,” Jade says.
Vriska rolls her eyes again, this time lifting her shoulders a bit for emphasis. Jade wonders a little if she has worn anything but the same identical pairs of ratty jeans and scorpio tee-shirt since she decided to come stay. Probably not. That is actually somewhat sad.
“I am being serious here,” Vriska says. “If I tell you that I do not fucking know my thinkpan from my waste chute when it comes to something, I really mean it! Like, I am objectively pretty good at the things that I actually can do! So I am warning you out of the kindness of my blood-pumping circulation nexus, here.”
“It’s normal to not know what you’re doing if you’ve never tried something before,” Jade says back. “I appreciate the honesty, though! It is okay. I will show you the ropes and you will learn in no time. You’ll probably pick it up faster than me, I know Karkat and Kanaya said that you work harder than anybody else when you’ve got your mind set on stuff.”
Vriska’s eyes pop. Her pupils narrow down to points, all eight of them, irises wide and lovely, a color like concentrated cornflower petals in the orange sea of her sclera. Her face comes up a little bluish, and Jade can practically see her thinking Karkat and Kanaya said that about ME???????? and has to rub her mouth with a hand to hide that she wants to smile.
But Vriska doesn’t say so out loud. She hunches her shoulders and folds her arms underneath her breasts, narrowing her eyes deliberately. (Wow, she is ridiculous; it is actually kind of cute.) “When did I ever say I wanted to?”
Jade looks at her. “Well, that’s why you decided to stay with me instead of anybody else, right? You wanted a chance to try out some measurably productive human stuff in a place nobody would make fun of you, and pretty much everybody besides me is still living in big packs. I’ve got no room to criticize anybody, so you don’t need to worry about getting teased if you mess up.”
Vriska opens her mouth. Closes it. She is so awkward, caught and defensive and with no place to run. Jade wonders when she is going to figure out that it is totally pointless to keep up a front, and that there is nothing to be embarrassed about, really.
This is maybe a hopeless endeavor, because Vriska is approximately as okay with wearing her uncertainty plainly as Karkat is, which is to say she is not okay with it at all. Jade supposes that living in a society like the trolls’ old one will do that to you, but she is a natural scientist-slash-physicist and not an anthropologist and that seems speciesist, just a little.
Besides, blustering and awkward and bone-deep defensive, there is a kindness in Vriska Serket that peeps out here and there like the flowers on LOFAF from beneath their initial layer of snow. (Not niceness, no; you could never accuse any of the trolls of being nice, except for maybe Nepeta—Vriska simply ranks much higher than most on the completely awful deeds scale. Though not—and Jade wrinkles her nose to think it—highest. She will not forget the ancient troll empress any time soon.)
Jade thawed the snow on her planet when that seemed like it would be impossible; it seems like she should be able to exert some positive influence here, too. Behavior is, after all, absorbed by osmosis.
“Okay, whatever,” Vriska says at last. “But like, if you are planning to teach me all the dumb sweaty things, you need to show me how the wardrobifier works? I refuse to do menial labor without a bra that fits. I’d borrow one of yours, only I don’t think they’d fit me.”
Jade regards this information with interest. “Have you just been going around without one mostly then?”
Vriska turns her head away a few degrees, just enough to give Jade a kind of sly, sidelong look. Her blue raspberry lips part in a long thin grin, fangs poking out just enough to be totally adorable; her cheek dimples. “Harley, did you just make a pass at me?”
“Maaaaaaaaybe,” Jade hedges, grinning back in answer. “Also, do not think it slipped by me that you just totally dodged that question!”
“It’s a sekrit,” Vriska says wisely, only the effect is kind of ruined by the fact that she is grinning and starting to laugh, the bridge of her nose all scrunched up.
It takes a while to get the wardrobifier to calibrate for someone who isn’t Jade; perhaps it is disgruntled with having been bashed up in explosions and crashes and the elements. Jade fiddles with it for a few minutes while Vriska picks at her eclectic bass, and she ends up messaging Dirk so that they can troubleshoot together, which will go faster. (While she and Dirk communicate over speakerphone, Vriska picks up a mostly-useless garden thermometer and a ruler and plays air marimba, grooving her hips side to side in a distracting manner. Jade has to turn her back to keep herself from ogling Vriska’s chest area for any potential jiggling. Wow, she is actually unfairly dorky and cute.)
But Jade manages to fix it in the end, and so when she and Vriska head back downstairs for a field notation for dummies lesson, it is with Vriska in stripy leggings and a tee-shirt with a big star in it and a hair scrunchie, all bright bubblegum colors (“You humans and your weird obsession with bright colors!” “I dunno, I think it goes with your lipstick pretty well!”).
And because Jade has an intuitive knowledge and understanding of space—it is kind of in her job description—she definitely notices that Vriska is now sporting perkier boobs. This probably means any chance of jiggles has disappeared, but it is a fair trade-off, Jade thinks. It is also probably a lot more comfortable.
Jade opens the door and steps out into the sunshine, instantly revitalized by the reminder of whole new universe to explore omg, but Vriska seems to get stuck in the doorway.
When Jade looks back at her she is bent in kind of a shallow parenthesis shape, lower jaw jutting out a little bit, perfect black eyebrows drawn down over her eyes. Jade is, again, reminded strongly of Past Jade on the beach.
“The sun’s not going to hurt you or anything,” Jade says helpfully. “It has been confirmed troll-safe by all troll parties that have ventured out under its rays! It’s too bad that I never got the chance to really study what Alternia’s sun was like, and if it was the intensity or if stars in your universe had different properties than ours.”
“Save the science talk for people who give a flying fuck,” says Vriska. (“Rude!” Jade rallies gamely.) “It’s just—it’s fucking bright, okay.”
“You will be fine,” Jade says, and beams. “I promise!”
She holds out a hand. Vriska swats it away halfheartedly and steps outside.
Jade is true to her word, and does not make fun—even when Vriska gets bored fifteen minutes into scientific observation time, even when she sweats bullets like Equius at the thought of burning really easy cooking, even when she starts swearing at the heat generator, even when she winds up watering the floor instead of the tomato plants. She swallows any and all desire to laugh because Vriska apparently still clings to delusions of dignity at this late date, and also because despite everything Jade is pretty sure that a lot of her motivation comes from wanting approval.
If Vriska is going to run up against the same wall again, then the least Jade can do is make sure that she has better tools this time. At least she hopes Vriska knows that with some of their friends, being liked is probably a lost cause.
“It can’t be harder than having to learn to kill people,” Jade says helpfully, or, “You mind controlled a whole army! That’s got to be harder than putting an engine together.”
“I had help with all that stuff, and it was not a whole army,” Vriska snaps back.
“You have help now too,” Jade points out. “That cable doesn’t go there.”
Vriska swears a lot and whines even more, but she never pauses in her ungainly efforts to achieve her mandatory Life Skills badges long enough that Jade can reproach her on the self-pity.
It is nicer than Jade had imagined it would be once Vriska has picked up enough of individual chores to take over them completely (“There is nothing to do besides chores and science here, anyway! I’m just helping out ‘cause it’s a little less boring this way!”)—she gets to focus more and more exclusively on recording the world around her, and sending records of her finds to Dirk and Roxy and Rose and Kanaya.
She comes down from the observatory one night to find Vriska gutting fish on the cutting board, and barely have her eyebrows launched upwards and her face formed a perfect :O than Vriska is loftily tossing her head so that her messy hair flies through the air behind her.
“You know, Harley, you are actually pretty cool,” she says, “and since you are pretty cool I think you deserve the star treatment every now and again. Kick back and relax once in a while! Killing things is kinda my specialty. I’m no Leijon when it comes to hunting animals, but I at least know better than to stab myself in the hand.”
“Goober,” says Jade, and picks at the brightly-colored band-aid from when her attention wandered and she cut her finger the previous night. “But yeah, this is actually a pretty big help, thanks Vriska!”
“You need to, like, eat and sleep more,” Vriska scolds, not really looking at Jade. The carving knife goes snick snick snick, smooth and effortless as she peels the fish apart. “Just because I am willing to cook you dinner all special does not mean that I care to play nursassin if you fall on your dumb brown monkey face from overwork!”
“Why, Miss Serket, what gentlemanly concern! A girl could get the idea that you’re setting out to woo her!” Jade pulls out a chair and sits at the table, face propped in her hands. “Also, humans are more closely related to apes than monkeys.”
“If you don’t shut up about biology right now, all attempts at wooing are going to stop like yesterday,” Vriska says.
Jade stays up for sunrises and thinks, there is no way that anyone could want to sleep through something as amazing as this, as light from a star turning the atmosphere all kinds of incredible colors with the miracle of refraction. Not knowing like she does that all of this is happening in part because of her.
It becomes habit, and Jade alchemizes gum in ten flavors to get rid of coffee breath in case today is a day for smooching. She also gets wicked black circles under her eyes, but Rose and the Internet taught her a little bit about makeup and so she can cover those up easy enough with a little dab of creamy foundation the color of the Velveteen Rabbit in her childhood picture books. If Vriska notices anything, she doesn’t say so.
Jade thinks that it’s pretty nice having someone around who can respect a girl’s need to protect her pride.
Fooling around with Vriska is actually pretty awesome. It was only awkward the first time or two, when Vriska didn’t know how to suggest sloppy makeouts as an activity and Jade was not quite adept at navigating Vriska’s dentition. It is every bit as awesome as making out with Davesprite, and maybe even more awesome than that because Vriska does not tend to come out of nice long snogs wanting to rap sadly about memento mori. She in fact tends to come out of nice long snogs wanting another nice long snog. She is also very bold with her tongue, which it turns out is like a heat-seeking guided missile for the little spots along the roof of Jade’s mouth and the inside of her cheeks and the underside of her tongue that make fireworks happen in her brain and get her hot and bothered.
The first time things got to the nervy and exciting stage of mutually navigating each other’s clothing, they stopped arm’s length apart and scrutinized each other’s faces for the go sign, Vriska squinting a little from farsightedness. She looked so goofy and cute doing it that Jade’s ears were starting to quiver from standing to attention so sharply.
“So, I don’t know anything about weird alien junk,” Vriska said.
“That’s okay, I don’t know anything about weird alien junk either,” said Jade. “We will just have to figure it out together! It will be like exploring, or a game of Tell Me If I’m Hot Or Cold. It’ll be fun, you’ll see.”
It was fun, and continues to be fun. Jade especially likes having a chance to examine troll biology up close and personal. Too, Vriska is loud and enthusiastic and a lot more willing to go along with Jade’s drive to experiment than she felt like letting on at the start.
Jade already knows from trying things out with Davesprite on the Yellow Yard that while she can pretty much change her own body around however she wants, courtesy of cool space powers—his sprite body had posed an interesting challenge for some things they’d wanted to try—anything but girl bits or dog bits starts to feel wrong after a while in horrible ways that she can’t put words to but which make her want to tear her skin off, claw her body apart until she comes back together right.
This does not dissuade her from wanting to try out troll bits, and sometimes even when they’re not doing sexy stuff she’ll rely on her instincts and rearrange her whole body into a Jade-colored troll: She can understand the biology better if it’s under her own skin, and maybe it will be useful for medical things someday.
In the meantime, Jade decides that troll junk is pretty cool, though she likes it best on Vriska rather than herself. Vriska seems to think that human bits and dog bits are both okay with her, and has actually expressed disappointment that all humans can’t alternate between a “nook” and a “bulge” at will if they usually only get one of the two (Jade has tried explaining that this is not what they are called on humans, but so far it has gone in one ear and out the other).
Vriska is a work of geometric beauty pinned back across a bed or a sofa or a pile, sharp gawky limbs and the column of her throat when her head is tilted back, the tip of a horn just visible amidst the tangle of gray, the grit of her teeth that bespeaks pleasure bordering on pain. Jade nuzzles her jawline and props her skinny gray legs up over Jade’s shoulders and studies how the roll and clash of their bodies moves Vriska’s hair and her breasts.
And it’s so nice, getting Vriska to hold her down, having their bodies speak so loudly that there’s no room for thoughts.
Vriska usually conks right out after, and Jade allows herself an hour, maybe two to lie next to her and space out. Recharge time, precious and self-indulgent, when there is so much to be done.
“I think that maybe John is right and I am shithive maggots,” Vriska says once, sleepy.
“Omg, don’t bring up my brother right when we just had sex, you are going to ruin my afterglow,” Jade says, and laughs.
“Don’t say ‘omg’ out loud, that’s for babies and wigglers and it is shitting all over my afterglow, thanks Harley,” Vriska proclaims. “I am definitely shithive maggots for letting you fuck me with that weapon of a bulge you’re packing.” She pauses to yawn, showing every one of her teeth like a cat. “And it’s no wonder you never seem to go to sleep after if that’s what it takes to lay a human out.”
“I just don’t fall asleep after sex,” says Jade, and she stretches. “Don’t feel bad because your junk is different from my junk. I love your junk. Sex with you is the best sex I’ve ever had.”
“Well, I am just the best, so you better get used to that,” says Vriska, and she looks genuinely pleased even though she sounds smug. “But it is kind of sucky that you can’t, like, chill out and take a nap or something with me. When do you even sleep?”
Jade wrinkles her nose. “I sleep fine,” she says. “Don’t even bother staying awake, you are not making any sense.”
Vriska flips her off and rolls over, uncaring.
The next night, checking on the turnips in the arboretum, Jade notices her fingers shaking and the muscle spasm in the back of her hand.
Vriska is right, I should sleep more, she thinks.
After I’m done mapping these constellations.
Anyhow, I can’t cut down my daily sleep hours any more, I’ll crash and lose more work time than I would gain.
It’s sensible. Jade nods to herself, finds a green rubber band to snap around her middle finger as a reminder just in case, and pours herself another cup of coffee. She is still within her limits.
She is working on the roof, taking notes, and she blinks for a moment and the next thing she feels is the jolting falling sensation that comes from the brain giving the heart a kick if its rate slows down too much during sleep, one of the beauties of human biology—
She opens her eyes and realizes that her pen and notebook are no longer in her hands, and her butt is sliding forward down the curve of the globe. The only thing keeping her from going down after her materials is a strong hand bunched up on the back of her shirt.
Jade cranes her head back. Vriska is hovering above her, an orange punch in the eye, draped in her gaudy God Tier outfit with gauzy wings buzzing like a fly’s.
“What the fuck,” says Vriska, “was that.”
“Oops,” says Jade.
“Okay, clearly I am too dumb of a flighty broad to get what is going on, but you need to sleep more. You need to sleep like right now. I am taking your coffee away and you are not allowed to get up until you have slept.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little unreasonable?” Jade says.
“You were like three seconds away from becoming a Harley pancake!!!!!!!!” Vriska flings her arms up in the air. Jade can hear all eight exclamation points. “I will not hear any ifs, ands, or buts! What if you had turned into a Harley pancake and the arbitrary rulers of God Tier resurrections decided that you deserved dying because you were being a gigantic dumbshit? What then.”
Jade frowns. “Okay, rude, but I guess that is fair.”
She lies down in her bed.
She rolls over one way.
She rolls over the other way.
She tries everything she can think of, but even though she just nodded off on top of the tower, she must be too full of adrenaline still—she can’t get to sleep for the life of her.
“Fuck all this for a lark,” says Jade. She had always wanted to try that expression, and now that it’s come down to it, it is not as fun as she had hoped it would be.
I can handle this myself, Jade reasons.
But it would be the most sensible thing to do, says her own voice in the back of her head.
Maybe? But I don’t really want to! Jade argues with herself.
That is fair, says back-of-her-head Jade. But how much of not wanting to comes from pride, and how much comes from being brainwashed to be evil?
Jade plucks her glasses off the bedside table and stares at the clock. It has been three hours since she went to bed.
She groans, gets out of bed, and walks over to the door.
“VRISKA!!!” she yells. “I NEED A FAVOR!”
“Uh, what?” Vriska says. “Back up. Like, are you really really actually sure you are okay with this? You’re not just saying you’re okay with this because it’s common sense?”
“To be honest, it isn’t really my first choice!” says Jade. “But it’s been three hours and I can’t sleep, so I think maybe I am running out of options. Staying up too late without at least some naps can make you crazy. Or even worse, I’ll just morph into Karkat. I am feeling grumpy and shouty already.”
“But are you actually really sure?”
“Omg, I am not going to hate you in the morning,” Jade says, maybe a little more snappy than she means it, but if this can put a sock in Vriska’s totally un-Vriska-like hesitance she doesn’t really care. “I am saying yes, yes, yes instead of no. You’re right that I need to sleep, I just need a little help.”
Vriska gives her a very dubious look in the way that only people with eight pupils can do dubious. She has not changed out of her God Tier clothes, and her hair is frizzing in the back from having been pushed underneath the hood. Light from the window paints the bridge of her nose and her cheekbones sterling silver, bringing out spots of gloss on her lips and fangs.
“Okay, but you are not allowed to get mad afterward,” Vriska says. “Take off your glasses so you don’t break them.”
“I’ve been falling asleep in these since I was tiny, they’re pretty much indestructible,” Jade says just to prove a point, but she takes them off and lies back down, crossing her arms.
Vriska bites her lip and slowly raises her hands to her forehead.
When Jade comes to it is already getting dark, and she feels much better. She stretches, puts her glasses on, and gets out of bed.
After a few minutes of fruitless searching, Jade sighs and scans the tower with her space powers. Vriska is hiding on the front steps. Walking all that way would be just as annoying as having to climb up and down multiple flights of stairs for a bathroom break, and so she warps herself down matter-of-factly.
Vriska jumps.
“Gog, don’t scare me like that!”
“Sorry,” Jade says. They both sit down.
Because Vriska is hugging her knees and eyeing Jade kind of like a puppy that knows it’s been bad, Jade smiles even though she is still annoyed by her inability to fall asleep on her own and says, “Thanks for helping me get to sleep. That was a lot more efficient than waiting until it happened all by itself.”
Silence.
Then:
“What, that’s it?” Vriska says. The words sort of burst out as if she was trying to hold them in, and Jade looks on with mild fascination. “You’re not gonna, I don’t know, kick me out for judicious use of mind powers?”
“That would be awfully mean and unfair of me,” Jade says, “since you only did it because I asked you to!”
Vriska does not seem to be convinced. “People hate it when I use my powers. I thought everybody had decided they were morally ambiguous and despicable and whatever just for existing.”
“No, you fuckass,” Jade says, starting to laugh. She’d thought that Vriska was starting to clue into things, but apparently some of the most obvious stuff isn’t sinking in yet. “People don’t like getting mind controlled without permission! If you talk about it beforehand and they tell you it’s okay then there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, your dancestor used her powers to help people instead of just brainjacking them for your army! You saw her do it, right?”
Vriska is quiet for a while.
“Actually I was kinda more focused on making the treasure map so we could beat Lord English,” she says. “Since he was, y’know, the main problem at hand.”
“Okay,” says Jade. “Well, at least you’ve been told in no uncertain terms now! Besides, getting brainwashed and stuff feels really gross. I’m sure if you knew what it felt like, you’d be able to understand everybody else’s point of view.”
Vriska seems to consider this for a while.
“Jade,” she says.
“Uh-huh?” Jade feels her ears prick to attention; Vriska really only uses first names when she’s being serious.
“I kinda—back before we actually knew each other, I used to practice my powers on you a lot.” Vriska looks away. “It was just putting you to sleep, but. I guess that this is… kind of a thing you should know? And that I am sorry about?”
“Oh, I actually already knew that,” Jade says.
“Oh. Okay.” Silence for a while. “Wait, what????????”
“But I’m glad that you decided to say so and apologize for it!” Jade adds.
More silence. Vriska stares at Jade for a long while. Jade stares at her back, watching her pupils dilate and contract.
“I completely and totally do not get how your brain works,” says Vriska. “When you’re not okay with having brain powers used on you without your permission, why even let me stay with you? What if I did it again?”
“Well, if you did do it again I’d just have to kick your dumb butt,” Jade says cheerfully. “It’s not like you’re an evil alien matriarch with a bunch of power amplifiers. You’d have to work really hard to keep me under control, and eventually it’d wear off!
“Besides, if your justification for using your powers in the dream bubbles is honest, then you really did use your powers only because you couldn’t figure out any other way to build an army fast enough. And you know now because of how you didn’t get a hero’s welcome back to the world of the living that people don’t like getting mind controlled, and it was totally obvious from the start that you wanted to live apart from everybody else so you could try to get your act together. Plus, you are still basically on the good guys’ side, for what it’s worth! We have had eviler people working with us than you.”
“Thanks, I think?” Vriska says.
“Well, anyway, I still don’t feel like kicking you out now,” says Jade. “You have gotten good at doing chores, and you aren’t in my face so much that I can’t work, and also you kiss pretty good too. Even if you kinda don’t get morality, I like you okay, Vriska.”
Vriska laughs a little shakily.
“I still don’t think we should tell the others about this.”
“Yeah, it’d be kinda embarrassing letting them know that I got caught up enough to fall on my face,” Jade says. “I would so never hear the end of it from John.”
“And if Kanaya ever found out that I was using my powers again at all, she’d probably chop me right in half like she did with Ampora,” Vriska says thoughtfully.
“Trolls sure are weird,” says Jade.
Vriska gives her a Look. “Uh, no, I’m pretty sure nothing will ever out-weird you multicolored monkeys. You are the champions of the universe-wide weird-off.”
“Apes,” Jade corrects.
“Yeah, whatever.”
“And don’t count your chickens—I mean, your cluckbeasts before they hatch,” Jade says. “In all likelihood, the aliens that are going to live in this new universe are gonna turn out even weirder than humans and trolls. Maybe even weirder than cherubs,” she adds. “Wow, I really can’t wait to see what they’re gonna be like!”
“Yeah, just don’t get so excited you forget to sleep again.”
“I won’t,” Jade says. “And if I do, you just have to remind me.”
“Will you even listen?” Vriska asks.
“I will if it’s you,” says Jade, and leans over to smooch her cheek. Vriska flushes bright blue, which is always satisfying no matter how many times Jade sees it. Trolls don’t seem to blush quite as easily as humans do. Something about the thickness and texture of the epidermis, though she doesn’t know just what yet.
Jade stands up and dusts her butt off.
“Well, c’mon,” she says. “Karkat’s gonna blow a fuse if I don’t show up on today’s memo, and you ought to let everybody know you haven’t killed anybody either. And also dinner isn’t going to make itself.”