You Are Just, Vriska Serket

"Hey. Blue chick who's not me. What're you doing in my dream bubble?"

"I thought I'd drop by for a visit."

"No one visits me."

"There's always a first."

Vriska flapped her wings once and delicately flew up to a rock outcropping close to the ground to sit. "Never a first for me," she said with a shrug, "I've got this whole bubble to myself! Why'd you have to go ruining it?" She leaned back against the rock and looked up to where her house stood, towering over the cliff like an old angry hag.

"A friend of mine had a bubble all to herself, too," the visitor, Aranea, said, "She had it for eons, actually. It seemed awful to me to be that alone for that long."

Vriska rolled her eyes. "Well you didn't even give me a fighting chance for the record, did you? Why don't you go back to your own dream bubble or something since you look dead as a door nail."

Aranea took a few steps toward the cliff face and said, "I wouldn't want to leave you alone to handle that. If you're anything like me—which is to say most definitely, as we both come from the same ectobiological material and therefore have many similarities—I wouldn't want you going off on your own like my friend did. It wouldn't suit you at all, from what I know about myself. I'd miss being around my friends—"

"Oh my god you talk way too much," Vriska groaned from her perch, "If you crashed my bubble just to lecture me about your time problems you can leave however you came. What do you even look like," she added under her breath, sitting up to take a look at Aranea before retreating back onto her ledge while grumbling something about a better chest size.

"Unfortunately, I'll likely be doing just that soon," Aranea said, not trying to hide the regret in her voice, "Our bubbles are only crossing in a brief moment in time, though I told everyone to keep to themselves this time."

"Everyone…? Like there's more of you freaky alternate guys around?"

Aranea nodded, even though Vriska wasn't looking. "Yes, all twelve of us, actually. We pass through the bubbles of your friends and meet them occasionally as well, though that time is limited to when they are asleep. We have all the time in the world now that we are all dead."

"So you're some alternate version of the Marquise, yeah?" Vriska sat up again and scooted out to the edge to take a more careful look. After a moment she sighed and lay down on the edge of the rock, watching her hand trace patterns in the crevices. "You're nothing like her."

"I know. Is that… disappointing?"

"Yeah, kinda."

Aranea scrunched her eyes up for a moment to hide how much that stung.

Vriska didn't notice. "I… know I am not similar to her in most ways," she said, "I'm not the richest, or the most cunning, and I have not had a quadrant filled in eons but I really do share many traits with her." Vriska didn't move, so Aranea conceded, "To be honest, you are not what I was expecting, either. Though I'm not sure what I was, really, ancestors did not play as much of a personal role on Beforus."

A tiny smile crept onto Vriska's lips. "You talk like someone I know," she said distantly.

"I do?"

"Yeah… she probably hates me now, though. I had a chance to talk to her before I died and I blew it. That's pretty much been my life for the past couple sweeps, actually. I had a lot of friends and I picked them off, one by one, until there wasn't anyone left."

"No one at all? That can't be true."

Vriska thought for a second, her eyebrows knit together. Then she said carefully, "I had… one friend left. But I guess she ended up betraying me, because I was going to betray all of them if she didn't. Or something."

"That's… I'm sorry."

"It's not a big deal," Vriska said suddenly, pushing herself up to sitting again and looking up at the red and yellow sky, "I wasn't going anywhere, anyway. I gained all the levels but I wasn't going anywhere big on Alternia with those crappy mind manipulation powers."

Aranea frowned. "Mind manipulation powers?"

Vriska shrugged and said, "Yeah, like I used to get to make lowbloods do whatever I wanted—well, most of 'em—and I could get the humans to fall asleep sometimes."

Aranea crossed her arms and looked down at the ground, thinking. Vriska watched her for a second then called, "Hey! Chatterbox! What's the hold up?"

"Ah, I'm just puzzled," Aranea said, "You said you have mind manipulation powers, but that doesn't align with my powers. All ancestral and descendant pairs I have seen so far have comparable powers, but manipulation is the opposite of my ability, which is empathy."

"Empathy? Isn't that like just when you feel what another troll is feeling?" Vriska asked, "That sounds fucking awful."

"It can be," Aranea conceded, "Though that's only scratching the surface. In addition to sensing and being able to take on emotions of others, I can push emotions back onto them—being able to manipulate their emotions, basically. Before I died I had developed and fine-tuned my skills so much that I had gained the ability to read the thoughts of those around me! It was likely increased by my god tier status toward the end, though that does not discount the potential for the ability."

"Wow way to brag," Vriska grumbled, "I only got as far as making a guy kill his girlfriend, making a guy run off a cliff and blinding someone else."

"All remarkable feats in your world," Aranea said with something Vriska quickly attributed to admiration, it had been a long time since she had had any of that. Then the older troll went back to staring at the ground again.

Vriska waited very patiently for a few whole seconds before letting out an exasperated sigh and flying down to the ground to stand in front of Aranea. She waved a hand in front of her face and shouted, "Alternia to blue chick! Who are you, anyway?!"

Aranea looked up and smiled. God, she even had glasses. Mindfang never wore glasses, she hadn't mentioned them once in her journal. "I'm Aranea Serket, a pleasure to meet you!" she said, extending a hand in greeting, "Your name is…?"

Vriska paused a moment before taking the hand and shaking it, remembering seeing John do a similar greeting before. "Vriska Serket," she said.

"What a nice name!" Aranea said, "Alright, about what I was saying before about the psychic powers we posses. I'm thinking that we do indeed have the same powers, actually."

"What?! No way am I some pansy empath, that's fucking boring!"

"Being an empath is no easy task, Vriska, and from what I'm guessing, you have first hand experience with that. Can I ask how you go about sending out your commands?"

Vriska thought for a second. "It's been a while," she said, "but when I was killing those people—the people you referred to as my friends earlier, haha, oops—I was really angry. I wanted them to be angry, too, and to be angry with me. I wanted them to do bad things to each other or themselves to make up for me being so angry. Or I wanted to be scary and powerful and have them prove they were afraid of me."

Aranea smiled and said, "That's a lot of deep thinking for a troll your age! I died when I was nine sweeps and still hadn't figured much out. Eons helped me sort things out."

"I've been dead for like a sweep, I think? Being by yourself in a dream for a sweep gets you thinking, I guess. It sucks."

"It gets easier as time goes on," Aranea said with another, more pitying smile, "But yes, those methods sound similar to mine when I was just figuring out my powers."

Vriska looked down at her hands, then ran them through her thick hair. "So, like… I'm an empath? Just like that?" Aranea nodded. Vriska turned away to look up at her house again, and for a moment it was dead silent. She started floating away toward the far side of the cliff face as god tiers tend to do. Aranea almost called for her to slow down, but sighed and changed into her god tier form as well to follow her.

The two Heroes of Light arrived in the shadowy side of the cliff face, where a jagged crater yawned between the rock where Vriska's house stood and another rock formation that held up a separate house. Pieces of a gigantic arachnid skeleton lay scattered around the hole. "This is where I crushed my lusus," Vriska said matter-of-factly, "Even now I'm not sure if I did it on purpose or not. I mean, it was an accident, but I'm not sure how much of an accident."

Aranea floated next to her descendant (ancestor?) and stared at the carnage. "…I'm sorry," she said.

"You know, being an empath makes sense, I guess," Vriska said, still watching the bones, "But now what? This doesn't even help me at all now that I'm dead. How much of the emotion I felt in my life was even… my emotions? Like, now that I know all this kind of stuff is weird with me, how do I know I wasn't fucking up or getting fucked up without knowing?"

"That kind of thing gets easier when you grow up," Aranea said softly.

"A lot of stuff sounds like it does, at least on your planet," Vriska said, "It's still pretty shitty for everyone on Alternia in some way or another."

"I know," Aranea said, "The thing to know is that no, you can't really know for sure this early on, but you can tell when it's obvious. Like you knew when you were thinking thoughts meant for you or you were 'sending' thoughts to other trolls."

"So even when I was feeding my spidermom, when all those trolls and grubs were bawling their gross eyes out or shaking because they were so afraid of my lusus or when they'd throw down and beg for me to let them go, I won't know if it was real, when I felt scared of my lusus during those times?"

"You'll have to use your judgment," Aranea said, "Like I said, we share the exact same ectobiological material between us, which means that you are also quite smart."

They floated in space and shadow for a few minutes more, watching the old bones. Vriska vaguely wondered how many trolls she'd fed to her lusus, then realized she had absolutely no idea. She shoved the back of a fist angrily at her eyes when they started to sting. "Let's go," Aranea said mercifully, "My time in this bubble is ending soon."

They were on their quiet way back to the lighter side of the cliff face when Vriska lagged behind a bit, stopping in midair. Aranea turned around to ask what was wrong. It could be difficult to sort out one's feelings if you were questioning the reality of them in the first place.

"…My best friend killed me."

"My best friend killed everyone."

Vriska looked up at Aranea and, after a moment, grinned. "Your friend sounds awesome," she said.

"You'd get along very well with her, I think," Aranea said, smiling again, "As for your friend… you said she betrayed you in the end?"

"Yeah, I guess," Vriska said.

"You guess? Betrayal is a big deal!"

Vriska rolled her eyes and continued, "I guess I was betrayed because, well, I was on my way to fight our session's biggest foe, but he wasn't even our session's creation, but—augh! Anyway, I was going to go off and fight him, but she knew I'd accidentally lead him back to our hideout and everyone would die. So she stabbed me through the back and I died."

"She sounds like a Seer of Mind," Aranea said.

"Yeah, that's exactly what she was."

Aranea smirked and said, "A classic Pyrope move in my opinion."

Vriska leaned back in the air like a hammock and watched the lazy warm colors of the sky swirl every which way. "You know something? It's weird to think about since I didn't know I was an empath and all this stuff then, but when I was about to take off after she'd thrown the coin toss, I knew she was going to kill me. We both knew she was going to kill me no matter what happened, but I could sense something wasn't right. She was hesitating, like she didn't want to kill me, which is crazy because getting to kill a higher blood caste, while you'd have to be fucking crazy to do it, is a big fucking deal and like you go for it if you can do it. But she couldn't do it, so I started thinking at her to make her get up the guts to stab me. I knew I was gonna die, I didn't want my killer hesitating. That's a lame way to go."

They had reached their original spot again, but Aranea was starting to fade. "Looks like my time is up," Aranea said, "I'm so glad I got to meet you, Vriska! Maybe we'll meet again down the road!"

"Yeah, maybe," Vriska said. Then she almost shouted in Aranea's face, "What about me on Beforus?! What did I do as your ancestor?!"

Aranea was almost completely gone but managed to get some words out before their dream bubbles drifted apart: "You were a magnificent storyteller! You wrote tomes and tomes of some of the best adventures I've ever read, full of romance and danger and drama. You were the most famous storyteller in the history of Beforus, everyone loved you…"

I had feelings regarding trolls that aren't even in this fanfiction and this happened. I really love how different the Serkets are from one another, I think even more so than a lot of alpha/beta pairs, and I wanted to write a piece examining that. Hope you enjoyed!