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Vriska couldn’t believe what she was even hearing, and granted it was through a heated shouting match, which is what made it even more surprising. It made her feel as if her world was crashing in on itself and she was barely nineteen, so it was a pretty big deal. “You’re..kicking me out?! You can’t do that!”
Her roomate, a stunning brown-eyed, dark-skinned red head with curls that hung past her shoulders was fixing Vriska a Look. The lightly red-tinted, tiny circle glasses hanging on her freckled nose helped make her look adorable. Even now, when she was mad, she couldn’t help but think that, and that may be why it was a problem. She wouldn’t be able to take her petite friend seriously. “Yes I can! This is my house I’m letting you stay over and now I’m letting you go!”
She can’t believe this! They’ve been so close for almost forever now, and she was about to tell her that yeah, she really fucked up a lot of things, but wanted to change everything around. “Look, just because I stole from that jewelry guy, doesn’t mean I did it all for myself. I even got you a badass necklace!”
Terezi’s disapproving look turned into a fullfledged glare and now Vriska wondered what she did wrong. Oh, right-- Vriska rolls her eyes. “Come the fuck on, Pyrope, take that goddamn stick out of your ass!”
The red head said, “If I’m going to be a Senator in this state someday, if there’s one thing I’m not going to approve, it’s any laws being broken!
Ugh, Serket...I didn’t even know you did that. But that helped remind me why I’m kicking you out. Every time I turn around, you’re doing something illegal, and quite frankly, this is probably for the best. I’ve been only holding you back from probably doing great things, that don’t include you indulging in bad habits, and...”
Terezi turns away from her and mutters, “...you don’t really care about what I think anyway. We argue so much, and you disappear for days on end, only to come back smelling like booze. Not to mention, cancer; shit like that kills you Serket!
I really ought to try to get a law passed to make the stuff illegal.”
Listening to this only made Vriska more sure that her best friend was making the wrong choice. “Woah, hold up there, Pyrope! Look.. politics is some dangerous shit, and you’re going to need someone who won’t stab you in the back!
Like you know, me.
And hey, I guess you’re right. I did a lot of bad things and I feel bad! In fact, even as we speak I’m making the decision to quit smoking and drinking my fucking brains out!”
She looked unimpressed--Vriska could have pleaded forever and she wouldn’t budge. Besides, Terezi knew that sort of tone Vriska was speaking with to her, and it was the exact same tone she used every time she really wasn’t feeling repentant at all. She was just trying to come up with what was beneficial to her at the time and to get her out of a bad situation. Later on, she wouldn’t even try to fix her situation and would only continue to do what she’s done ever since she’s hit the age of eighteen. She sighs and replies, “You’re a terrible liar, Serket. Besides that’s what you said six months AGO, and look at you now! You didn’t change a thing.”
Vriska growls, and in a fit of rage, punches Terezi straight in the face, breaking those glasses in the same strike, causing her head to snap back into the wall behind her. When Terezi’s hands are trembling, raising one hand to her nose, which is now bleeding, she swears, “Fuck, I didn’t mean to--”
Terezi suddenly yells, “Get OUT! Only YOU would punch someone who’s half-blind in the fucking face!”
Vriska feels her mouth go dry and she’s pretty sure that those are tears falling down her face now. Instead, she stands there dumbly for a few minutes and says, “I’m sorry, Pyrope--I--”
This causes Terezi to scream, “You’re still here?! Get your sorry ass out of here! NOW.”
Vriska tries again. “But you’re--”
In the face of all of this, Vriska starts to think maybe she should have left, but her feet aren’t listening to her. So instead, Terezi asks her quietly to grab some tisssues for her. Sos she does and sits on her bed while the tinier woman is lying down. She hears the woman say, “Pack your stuff and leave tomorrow, Serket, or I’m calling the police.”
It feels like cold water’s been splashed onto her face, but in this case, Vriska supposes she’s done worse. Still, Vriska ends up asking, “So, why didn’t you turn me in when I told you what I did?”
She feels Terezi slap her hand against her back, and hears her say, “Because, no matter what happens, we’re sisters. But after this, I can’t go easy on you anymore.”
Vriska’s rubbing her back or attempting to and she can’t help but think that Terezi hits hard for someone so tiny--wait she’s not supposed to be thinking about that is she? “Even if I told you I really liked you?”
Terezi manages a scoff and it’s because she also recognizes what Vriska’s doing, even if what she says is the truth. It’s at the wrong place and time; an attempt to manipulate her. “Stop that. But I guess if it’s my fault you resort to a life of crime, I’ll slit my own throat for being a bad friend.”
A silence hangs in the air, which is cut through by a bout of Vriska’s laughter. “Then I guess you’d better be doing that tomorrow.”
The red head replies softly, “I guess I will.”
At that, Vriska doesn’t even think to take her that seriously, on the account that she’s probably feeling too upset (rightly so) to not say somethin dramatic. Then, there was the fact that Vriska simply didn’t want to, just in case that would mean something that she didn’t want to accept. All of this kept pointing to her in a way she couldn’t exactly ignore or brush off anymore, and to be honest, Vriska was ready to accept that sort of thing. People make mistakes all the times, and she’ll show her just how much she can change! She totally meant it this time, but she had a feeling Terezi was expecting otherwise. Which brought up the question of why she was letting her go in the first place.
Or rather, in more blunt terms, kicking her out.
Vriska decided that right now that didn’t matter and rolled her up her sleeves as she entered the kitchen. She reached into the shelves and began to dispose of every single alcohol bottle she hasn’t touched. Quickly, she disposed of her pockets of cigarettes, hurrying upstairs to dispose of the rest she left in shitty little piles in her room, which she quickly made sure to thoroughly clean, much to her inner will not to. She was preparing herself ultimately for the hellish withdrawal symptoms later. But those items were things that she could deal with living without; it was losing Terezi she couldn’t.
Quickly, she broke out the mop after sweeping almost every floor in the house. When she was done, she wiped down every window, and reluctantly went into the bathroom, with special gloves on hand. Quite literally two, in this instance.
Then, Vriska took on a quick look at the clock and saw that it was four-thirteen in the afternoon.
She can do this.
Terezi hadn’t even realized she drifted off when Vriska had decided to abruptly leave the room eight hours earlier. This is when she decided to take a peak outside and saw, with some difficulty, Vriska’s small blue car was nowhere in the driveway. Sighting to herself, she could start to hear her aunt’s words, asserting that she was right about Vriska. That she would leave immediately following a violent outburst of some sort. But to be honest, she would miss her--er the other one, although not her troublesome qualities.
Her rich aunt had set up a fiancee, who she said would be happy to support her in every way. Even if Terezi felt it was much too soon for something like that. She still needed to finish up her college classes before she took real pursuit into her political career.
Still, she couldn’t help but worry about Vriska, maybe she should...
Terezi shook her head. She’s got to learn her lesson sometime.
She hears the familiar car of said person pull up in the driveway and heads downstairs straight after when the door slams open. She’s not even all the way down the stairs when there’s flowers being shoved into her face. She takes a deep inhale and a forced look--red roses. “I know I’ve been a real handful all these years, but I thought getting these would make for a better apology for being such a...fuckup.”
Terezi takes them slowly and she hears Vriska say, “I’m not amazing or anything, and I’m sure you know since we’ve been friends all these years! We’re both in college, yet only one of us is sure what it is the fuck we’re doing, and it’s not me!
That’s right, Pyrope. It’s you.
You’re always really thinking ahead and I really hate saying this, but you have a better way with words than I do. Sometimes. There I said it, bluh.
You’re beautiful, bright, and nice, in a strange way I don’t get. You have a lovely voice, and, uh...”
For the first time in forever, Terezi watches her friend turn red in the face, and she’s not sure why, but with those large glasses atop her freckled nose, it makes her look a bit handsome. More than usual, which is something Terezi doesn’t even want to think of admitting.
Well, Vriska’s always been a bit more muscle and curvy than she has, her shoulders as well as arms look like she could break someone easily with them. Probably another result of the crowd she hangs out with. You would never guess that she’s Asian with her unsual tall height.
Her brown hair, however, is tied into a long brown braid, since she wouldn’t take care of it elsewise. Her eyes are a cobalt blue, fitting for someone such as her. “...and all I’m just asking is for one more chance to turn it all around. Maybe for something else too.”
In the face of all of this, Terezi shakes her head. “Serket, I told you, and I’m not changing my mind. Besides, I have a fiancee, and I don’t think you’re the right one for me--I’m not even sure I swing that way. Everything would just turn out as bad as it started to get two years ago--”
She’s interrupted not with a sharp, rude yell like she expects, but a soft, yielding, “Fine, I get it, you never want to see my face again. Because you think I’m weird or unable to change. Weak.”
That’s when Terezi quickly starts, “That’s not--”
However, Vriska sees fit to say, intercepting, “--yeah, right. Whatever.” Then, she dashes right out the door and leaves Terezi standing there, biting her lip, with those flowers in her arms. As the red head watches her drive away, she feels her legs give away, and wonders if she’s really made the right choice. As tears prickled her eyes and she holds the roses closer to her chest, she continuously feels like she hasn’t.
She places her flowers on the table, before she heads upstairs.
Terezi hadn’t really considered doing this seriously, but when she drove away Vriska like that, she might as well. She had let the woman slip through the cracks of the law, did she truly deserve to live like this, or at all, without her?
The woman would obviously go on to a life of crime or whatever. Her family always kept pressuring her to make these choices and in the end she found she didn’t like any of them. Especially this one.
She asked herself what she was doing, and of her life and her choices. She admits it was a bad choice, maybe. She’s not sure of anything anymore, especially when she remembers that Vriska had at least been there for that Event, and she did care about her. Not just some facsimile of a feeling that would be enough for her to manipulate Terezi into doing whatever she wanted. Quickly her hands grab a hold of her cell phone and she impulsively dials Vriska’s number, but just as instantaneously hung up, because for fuck’s sake, she was driving.
Terezi could hear a man’s voice telling her to stop being so selfish as he managed to take every ounce of innocence left in her.
Her hands are shaking as she grips the blade she’s left on her drawer.
Then she sighs as she raises a hand to her head.
…
Vriska’s driving is as comparable to a race car in the middle of a storm--the latter of which is proving to be true given that it’s thundering and raining like no tomorrow outside. What’s not on her mind that she’s just ran three red lights, but rather that she was a failure in every sense of the word that her mom said she was going to be. She envisions when those hands beat her until she was blue and all the answers she’d receive when she was little was because it was to make her stronger. She told her that hanging out with those weak friends of hers would never enable her to survive in this world, and that--fuck.
She shouldn’t be thinking about that now, and instead about how she could show Terezi why exactly she was wrong. She missed her already, and now she’s already making this long eliptical turn to head back, going full speed, reaching back in mere minutes, skidding into the red head’s driveway. She was pretty sure that was Terezi’s ringtone playing in her cellphone right now.
It didn’t change the fact Terezi had called her.
The door was open and that’s when Vriska’s running upstairs, her feet carrying up as fast as she can, straight into Terezi’s room. Then, without another moment to spare, she tackles Terezi to the ground, and is glad to see the blade clatter to the ground, out of her hands as well as her reach.
Vriska is panting, and the woman underneath her has a dark expression. But her eyes are red and puffy. “So,” Vriska asks, “If you didn’t want me to leave that bad, why didn’t you say so?”
Terezi whispers, “I don’t know.”
But Vriska already has a good idea of why, and her thoughts turn darkly to Terezi’s prestigious family. Her aunt was super strict in every sense of the word, the rest just the same, and conservative in the bad sense. The only one who ever was any good was her super cool lawyer mom (8luh), who ended up on the wrong side of a gun when someone thought she was too good. Which was already saying a lot, but whatever, she wouldn’t let them ruin her; not if she was able to still reach the woman she loved.
Before the brunette could even think of another word, Terezi blurts out, “I really like you, Vriska. I don’t know what to do about that--”
And then Vriska interrupts, “--Then I think there’s only one thing to do.”
She leaned in and whispered what exactly into her ear, and for the first time in a while, Terezi really smiled.