Chapter Text
Prologue
The night Vriska was currently pulling through was a prime example of break dancing in a swimming pool of molasses. With hands clenching the white bedspread beneath her sweat dampened torso, she was beside herself in the kind of personal lamentation that could have only been brought on by years of inexorable self-loathing. When she tried to convince herself she wasn’t the cause of more than one person’s failed dreams, she found herself sinking through the cracks of her stability and further into the kind of personal hell only Dante Alighieri could have fathomed. She had long ago accepted the world above her as a mythological epic spun by the words her friends fed to her through a plastic tube, and it hurt. It stung in the kind of way that brought her to her feet and had her fighting the urge to take down every inanimate object within her reach.
“You’re being such a baby, Tavros. Don’t you want to know how fun it is? Terezi and I do it all the time, and she’s blind. That’s seriously pathetic. You’re always so pathetic.”
There was a muffled screech of fury, and she couldn’t tell if it was her or the memory of railroad tracks and bones ripping from ligaments beneath weighty steel. Either way, her fingers latched onto the nightstand, and with a single lurch of the arm, the piece of furniture collided with previously abused drywall. She didn’t have any more posters, so when she woke up in the morning, there would be the reminder of how annihilated she had allowed her brain to become. She was not herself, and God knew she hadn’t been for months, maybe even years. When had the indifference stopped, she wondered. When had it morphed into an animalistic painting of bullshit where, like a braying donkey, she let everyone know how much she didn’t care? Everything was so picturesque in the fake kind of way that made even the most seasoned politician nod in approval, and it was eroding everything.
As she mopped up tears she hadn’t even realized were streaming down her flushed skin, she couldn’t breathe. It was her fault, and she knew it. She knew to a point where she couldn’t even believe herself, which was how she had adapted such a strong coping mechanism for her own faults. The people she considered her closest friends were the best kind of victims, and she abused the privilege of knowing such an eclectic assortment of individuals over and over again because she had to. There wasn’t a set in stone explanation for why their heads made such nice toppers for the spikes on her yard’s gate, but they did. They were scenic with disconnected spines and eyes meant for maggots, so she continued. Deep down there was a theory she was living habitually, but the thought was more terrifying than being alone. It was much worse.
There was a knock on her door, and without thinking, Vriska grabbed her closest bottle of perfume and chucked it at the door. “Stay the fuck out! Stay the fuck out, Kanaya, or I’ll fucking destroy you! Just stay the fuck out!”
Her voice cracked from how overexerted the last sentence had been, and before she knew it, she was sitting on her mattress. Leaned over her knees with a damp face cradled in open palms, Vriska let out a mournful wail before dissolving into a state of blubbering. She kept telling herself everyone needed to stay out, but she wanted that door to open. Vriska wanted Kanaya to unlock the knob with a bobby pin and sleep beside her the way she usually did because her roommate just knew. Kanaya had always known, and the thought of not being able to convince everyone with her rampant cruelty ripped another sob out of the back of her throat. Nothing made sense, and she wanted to know why. She wanted to know why everything around her had gone down the drain and into the winding rivers of her city’s sewer system. Somewhere along the line she had looked away, but she wasn’t sure when. There was no place to pinpoint.
“You’re such a loser, Tavros. You mess everything up.” Her fingers wrapped around the railing of a hospital bed, and the sound of nurses rushing past the open door forced her to pause. “They don’t let people like you into the air force. Bet you didn’t know that.”
Again, the want to scream crept up the back of her neck and rang in her ears, but instead, she tore back the blankets to her bed and began making her way beneath them. Too tired to care anymore, she decided she was done with thinking. No more thinking, she told herself over and over again. There was a pillow covering her face, and without realizing it, she was chanting those words into cottony fabric through broken sobbing. It wasn’t long before the demand was turning into desperate pleading because her mind wouldn’t calm down. Nothing would calm down, and her chest was quaking with each inhale. Vriska was doing her best to be quiet so Kanaya wouldn’t knock again, but the effort was futile. It always was.
That was why she didn’t say anything when the sound of quiet clicking infiltrated her sporadic inhales. That was why she didn’t say anything when the handle turned and hinges creaked. That was why, when the mattress dipped, not another word fell from her tongue and teeth.
“I purchased a collector’s edition of a Next print that would look exceptional in here.”
And, like always, it would be there in the morning.
