The air thinned as Rose moved, ducking and crawling through the walls and crawlspaces of the lab. It thinned and took on the sharp taste of treated air: sterile, chemical. The metal wall and grew cold as well, the walls and pipes and ladders. Rose was forced to slip on the thick, lavender-highlighted gloves Kanaya had made for her out of some of Equius' things, and pressed on. After ten aggravating minutes of crawling (aggravating, but still faster than trying the long route through Gamzee's quarters), Rose saw light greeting her up ahead. When she reached the source, she found a dozen gore-holes that sprouted through the wall about ankle level. The splayed, burst metal lay in rows of three. One, stuck with red gore, had struck so hard it buckled the metal in a thin white line between the holes. Rose pressed on, until she found the source of the cold, past a massive gash that cut through the next hall, slag pelted against the pipes and beams. At the opposite end of the hall was a burst machine that pumped light gray smoke into the crawlspace and through the gash. The closer Rose came to the cloud, the colder it got: whatever the machine had refrigerated, it had done so to extremes. Below the gas lay a liquid stain in the slag.
"I'm starting to get the impression that I should have taken the long route..." Rose muttered. Her path blocked by the cloud, she glanced toward the gap and into a falling abyss that went down, down despite blinding lights into a black shadow below. There was a platform, near enough for a Sburb player to jump, which was good. The closest landing from there was down at least five storeys of fall. Rose weighted her options.
"Here's an idea!" came Eridan's voice from the gap below. "How about you stop flapping your protein chute or I'll shut it for you?"
"Oh, like you could."
"wwatch me"
Rose wore a mask of calm, calm from her face to her soul. "Fine," she said to the indignant world. "Fine."
She took to the gap at a quick run and jumped, though her feet slipped on a melted patch of floor on her final push: she cleared the distance but hit the platform flat on her side.
"Lesson learned. Level 76," Rose muttered to the room, hearing an immediate echo. The broken machine had nearly turned the room to winter, and she could see her breath. "Good for two feet of jumping... still not good for landing." She was still rubbing her shoulder when she finally took in the room.
She was in the Dungeon. That was what Dave called it, at least. While the entire lab was a maze of twisty passages, all alike, the Dungeon alone served no alternate purpose. It was a land of platforms and stairs which floating without limited visible support in the darkness. The whole place seemed to exist only to delay players en route to the heart of the lab: a Dungeon for the them to overcome. It was Terezi's home, bordered Vriska's, and by the sounds of things, Tavros' as well. Vriska and Eridan's voices echoed up infinitely, off of all four walls.
"I hope I'm right about this being the fastest route," Rose muttered, realizing that paths could go on for hours in the Dungeon, defying Space and Time. And Light. The room was lit without source: no beams or bulbs or flourescent growths. Rose's limited powers were well aware of it; her common sense hated it. It unnerved her.
The eerie light lit the scene dim or bright at random, but well enough to see. The ratlings had picked apart most of the bodily evidence, but the metal and brick had seen stress no army of pests could undo in two months. Burns and further gashes slashed the walls beyond the platform, like the tunnel she had just left. Dents struck the wall at random, and one of the gashes had cut across and removed a corner of the square platform entirely, a ten-foot slice. Silvery cuts lined the floor here and there. A vicious series of them hashed back and forth along a path to an edge, where Rose could make out the holes she had seen before. Strangest of all, Rose could see an encrypted captcha card embedded in the edge, next to the only set of stairs. When Rose went to check it, curious if she could get a sign of what it contained, it teetered away from her and fell spinning into the air below. Rose never heard it hit ground.
As her Seer powers went, Rose's domain was fate and the future. As a result she could not get a perfect look at the events that had taken place in the past, but she could piece them together with a little thought. She could see Sollux, firing at will with mind blasts and telekinetically propelled captcha cards at any number of flying opponents. Feferi had fought their foes on the ground, and had driven a particularly stubborn opponent back with spinning, warding blows of her trident against the floor to kick up noise. Finally, she had backed it against the pit. When it continued to hold his balance, she stuck it through and against the wall, and then let it drop.
As Rose took in the scene, she was jarred from her daze as an encrypted captcha card slammed into the opposite side of the platform. It had fallen from above, but it was all so suspicious that Rose turned back to the spot where she had pushed the other. No... Couldn't be... She decided to leave the platform in a hurry, either way.
Rose headed down the stairs, free of rails, the echoing voices of her charges getting louder as she went. She was almost at the base of the stairs, which branched off to another set in one direction, and the hallway in another. Curious about the other platform, Rose turned back, and immediately wished she had not. Her eyes had met with something so horrible she did not believe it, cast in weird shadows by the game's lights-without-source. Rose balked at letting them be her only guide. Muttering, she reached deep inside of herself to the flame she knew lay within, built like a slow-turning sun.
It was easier than it had been, but the others still seemed to reach their power with an intimate ease. Rose's powers and intelligence still fought those days. She had not spent much time in the game as the Seer of Light, and too much as a Servant of Terrors, and there was still a disconnect in her mind. Rose touched on the fire and slowly filled an arm with its heat. The heat cast out from her hand by the tips of her fingers and spun carefully into an orb in her grip. The heat clashed against the distinct chill of the air as Rose approached the edge of the stairs. There could be no denying what she saw. There, against one of the walls, lay a severed column of what had once been an Ogre.
In its size it had been knocked back against the wall in life without falling from the platform, though whether this had been to its benefit or loss, Rose could not decide. After a lucky shot from Sollux, the Ogre had been caught in the gushing liquid cold that had sprayed from the machine in the wall above. Those parts of its body that had been caught in the spray had been frozen through, to the walls and floor. Its arms were now gone, as were most of its left leg and, thankfully in the opposite direction, half of its head. The ratlings and the pit had taken the rest, if it had not rotted into grist for all Rose knew. What remained told an awful story all its own. The tip of lance the size of a tree trunk still remained in its gut: black chequered, it had affixed the Ogre to the wall and a scream on its face. About the lance were four hideous, deep wounds cut with a random savagery; the cold preserved the cuts from the clean-picking teeth of scavengers. Rose realized with a wrenched affinity that they were broad cuts from a chainsaw.
What remained of the legs stood as a final brutality. They were covered in burns and what Rose thought were bruises until she took a look around for the rest of the platform. She saw footprints and wheel tracks, which cut through the battlefield pell-mell in a thin layer of dust. Rose motioned with her arm as though to toss the orb and it dutifully floated out from her, bound by a soft thread of heat. Rose guided it toward the floor with a few gentle motions, all of which it overshot in her inexperience. The orb jittered about in the air when Rose told it to bring it to a stop, but she could see the area below well enough despite the fidgeting. In the tracks, Rose could see the soft tile that lined the Dungeon's floors had been consumed and reduced to blue ash. Blue ash, blue, bruise-like burns. Rose had never seen them in full action, but she heard more than enough about the Flourite Octet. Rose slowly closed her hand, as much in submission as in command: the orb flickered out and the game's trick lighting was left alone. She sighed. Vriska. There was nothing quite like the aftermath of one fight to remind you of the next.
The rest of her walk was quick. She passed by several suspiciously clean tubes of fluid, not unlike the one John had used to tend to Gamzee, but that was the end of her tour. At the end of the hall she found a doorway, which opened into Tavros' cramped domain and let out all the noise.
"Oh dear," Rose said. "Oh... oh dear."
Eridan and Vriska were roaring at one another. Eridan said something about how adult Trolls, and they both began to call each other wigglers over and over until the term lost all meaning. Rose advanced and was about to shut the door behind her when an adrenaline rush hit her and she slammed it instead. The fighting paused momentarily at the sound, before picking up again.
"What was that?" Rose asked her own hand. She shook her head and continued down the hall in a slight daze. The voices only got louder. She reached a t-junction, and heard them almost at full force to the left, probably in Tavros' computer room.
Eridan shouted: "if you had the slightest idea wwhat you wwere talkin about-"
"Oh, hey, here's an id8a! I was the one who-"
Step. Rose froze, and turned back. She had just rounded a corner, and it was impossible to see beyond. She turned back, and the sounds repeated. Step. Step. In her pause, the sounds had gained, definitely footsteps. Someone was coming close on two feet. A lich, she thought, probably one of the stray underlings that they kept finding in the Underlab. Liches were certainly subtle enough, compared to their fellows. Worse, they had skills approximating the player who had provided their prototypes. Rose barely understood her own powers, and was far less prepared to put up with any combination of twelve others. She casually brought a hand up in front of her to extract both needlewands from her syllabus.
"-think a8out it, that makes me the one who should 8e calling the shots!"
"you aren't evven fuckin listenin to me"
"Hisssssssss-p..."
Rose rounded to face her opponent, one arm raised in a guard, but no blow came. The hall was empty. Rose kept her eye on nearest corner, checking behind her only once to make sure there was space to retreat. She began to back off.
"Liches don't hiss," she whispered in reminder. They growled, not unlike a hollow Gregorian chant. The hiss was bad. If the lich was clever enough to sneak up on her, even if it was cat-prototyped it wouldn't have hissed. That meant it had friends - stupid ones, but friends - waiting in ambush. Briefly, Rose considered ducking down the hall toward the others, but her visibility would be shot. She certainly was not going to go around the corner to meet them.
"fuckin bitch"
"Jackass!"
"Eridan!" Rose called instead. "John! Jade! Vriska!" Her foot hit the back wall, and she took a quick glance to find that the branch of the junction ended at a dead end, save an abandoned to one side. No one heard her, not over the fighting. Rose banged on the wall, instead. She still had fairly vivid memories of her last few encounters with the Trolls' high-level underlings and did not like her odds.
"if i had my way, vris, i'd show you right off that-"
Step.
A shout escaped Rose's lips and she once again tried to wheel, and banged her wrist against the back wall. It took a moment for her rational senses to return. The step had come from behind her, and this time it had been worse. She had felt a hand reach out to brush her arm. But there was nowhere behind her. Her sore wrist was a testament to that. It took her a moment longer to put together the pieces, and when she did she discarded her wands into her inventory and set off toward Vriska and Eridan at a doubled pace, biting her tongue to keep from screaming bloody murder.
Rose found John in the doorway leading to Gamzee's room, head hung and grimacing. When he saw her, he tried to put on a smile, revealing his teeth locked in a grind.
"They're doing it again!" Rose shouted at once. She pointed to the computer room. "Why is it happening again? I thought we had gotten used to it, or... or something!" As she slowed to talk to him, Rose twitched, elbowing back at the spectral presence grasping at her sides. "Why is it worse?"
"I dunno, Rose," he said. "We've been wondering for a while, too. It was always a hiss, sometimes I heard them, but now it's..."
"Argh!" Jade shouted from inside of the room.
Rose angled to look, before stopping cold. John seemed to recognize her concern. "Gamzee's sleeping," he said, and demonstrated, using his hands like a pillow before quickly returning them to his ears.
Rose nodded an embarrassed thanks and looked in. Sure enough, Gamzee was sleeping through the storm, even chuckling to himself in his dream. His stump was just visible over the surface of the sopor; to Rose it looked like nothing more than a twisted and tied mass of gray and indigo. Jade stood in one side of the room, near the small office kitchen setup that dominated one wall of the room. She had her back decidedly against the wall and her hands were in the exact pose she would use if she were going to summon her rifle. Rose also saw an unexpected sight in the room: Kanaya, who sat with an indigo, woollen bundle in her lap, which she was adjusting. A short examination told her it was some sort of one-armed sweater. Kanaya met her eyes and took on a look of disbelief, before she angrily shooed Rose in the direction of the fight. Rose went at once.
John followed. "I was wondering if it was happening again because they're so mad," he said. "Like, maybe it's supposed to happen when they're mad, and it was only happening before because their voices were, maybe, breaking?" His voice did him a disservice by breaking on its own as he spoke. "You?"
"The Trolls had never really seemed to be aware of their vocal undercurrent," Rose said, "but you may be right. You know the Troll's vocal tones? Jade can mimic some of their tones quite well, so they're not biological, they're a sort of cultural inflection. But isn't it strange that they tend to use the tone when they're emotional, just like the hiss? Perhaps it's not a coincidence." She looked over for a response, but John had not heard her. The fight was simply too loud. Eridan shouted in disgust at something Vriska had said, so enraged that both Rose and John half-rounded on the same invisible pursuer. Rose's put her arm around John's back to push him forward until they had reached the door.
The scene in the room was actually quite tidy, for Tavros. There was nothing torn down and dumped to the floor, there were no fiduspawn-slime footprints or fresh broken 8-balls. The occupants were disruptive enough on their own. Vriska had edged Eridan against a shelf cluttered with Tavros' leftover quest items. They were shouting only a pace apart. Tavros was still in his computer chair, the computer open to an abandoned word processor. His heavy feet were still stuck to the floor, but Tavros had otherwise curled up in to a tiny ball as he watched the fight: a tiny, tiny ball with giant horns sprouting in each direction.
Vriska saw them enter. Her expression on seeing Rose was inscrutable, but with John it snapped back to rage.
"Well, we're all here, aren't we?" She stepped up and away from Eridan. "Well then we can just get this party started, huh?"
The undercurrent sensation again draped about Rose's back, and for the first time she could make it out Vriska-shaped speaking her words. They were the same height, the grasping fingers were claw-tipped, and Rose could even feel Vriska's long, loose hair tickling the back of her neck as a predator's teeth hovered above the back of her neck. Rose could even smell Vriska - lingering sopor and some sort of mild Troll body wash - but she hoped that was just the fact that Vriska had been in the room for going on half the day. Stuck on weird Troll things, Rose noted that Vriska's fingernails had changed. Where her teeth were still some sort of off-metal, her fingernails were glimmered off-orange in the light, like her horns. Rose was not sure when they had changed colour, but it was hardly her immediate concern.
Rose had not really thought about how to pick apart the fight when she had been en route. She now realized that that had been a critical mistake, but she was not sure any plan would have survived contact with the incident in the hallway. "What is wrong with you two?" she hissed. "The very fact that you've been going on as long as it took me to get here is bad enough!"
Eridan slammed his hands on the shelf to draw attention back to him. "this psycho-bitch's been tryin to call me out for nothin but exactly what i was supposed to do, vris!"
"Stop shouting!" Rose winced as her mind tried to comprehend both spectral Vriska and spectral Eridan crowded her at once. Their position in the real world was slightly impacting the position of the ghosts, but not much. Her pet peeve with the game's lights seemed stupid compared to the two ghosts sharing the same Space. She understood just why Jade was on the brink of arming herself.
Vriska flipped her hair away. "Oh, go crawling to the auspistice, Dualscar! Like a heeeeeeeero!"
"Oh that is it!" Eridan said, and shoved her. Luckily for everyone, this seemed to only make Vriska laugh. In the background, Rose could make out Tavros trying to caution his matesprit down with his hands, but no words managed to squeak out of his mouth. "You're just a fuckin cowward vris!" Rose's mind squirmed. It refused to accept this new threat like it had force-swallowed Kanaya's simple hiss and echo, the day Rose had been possessed. Eridan kept on shouting. "You know you can't fight me so you're just going to play mind games!"
"Oh, can't I?" Vriska's smile faded. "...Come see." Her muscles primed. She had not replaced her jacket and her bare arms showed the impact of her still-progressing false moult more than ever. Vriska's muscle definition was very clear, where Tavros and Eridan had lost theirs behind their armoured skin. Rose felt no one would be stupid enough to outright charge her.
No one but Eridan Ampora. Eridan took one step forward and Rose practically jumped, but she was too slow. Vriska snapped out with her hand and grabbed his scarf, using it to slam his gut into her rising knee. For a moment, Eridan was nothing but a mass of cape that Rose could not attempt to pull away, but he rose with a fist to Vriska's hip. That gave him room to stand, and he accidentally snagged her chin with his horn, making her wince and giving Rose an opening. She pushed herself in between them and shoved them apart, twice.
Rose tried to stand firm, or at least to hold her arms firm as her body screamed protest. Rose was perfectly happy to buy John's theory now. Once Eridan had charged, once their bodies were primed for the attack, the undercurrent threw off its pretence and reclaimed its trademark hiss, furious and piercing. It was coming with even the slightest grunts and groans. Where Kanaya, with all her built-up trust, had accidentally sent Rose to a panic, Eridan and Vriska all but destroyed her ability to think straight at all. They both thrashed against her, but diving in between the two of them had swapped Rose's instinct from flight to fight, and she gave them both a final shove in opposite directions. She followed Eridan.
Eridan struggled to fix his cape, and Rose slapped his hand aside. "'Come. See'? She says 'Come see' and you walk in?" Eridan looked confused, as though her admonition was the first and only trickle of an idea telling him he had made a mistake. Rose shoved him off to John. Her friendleader jumped when Eridan bumped into him. He practically had to catch him, which he did with some hesitation. Clearly John had taken a hit from the hiss as well.
"Let's get something straight!" Rose said, surprised to find that she was shouting. Vriska brushed her hair away nonchalantly, a small gash on her chin bleeding openly and ignored, her hand on Tavros' shoulder. "I don't care what you two do in your private time. I would like to have some idea so I can actually be an auspistice. But really, I don't care if you spend your time throttling each other, or destroying each other emotionally, or whatever you want to do. In fact: I wouldn't much care if you slipped out of here to Vriska's and made a bucket out of the whole place!" That got their attention. Eridan went numb in John's arms and Rose heard Vriska's gasp of air. Tavros' reaction was less related to the subject, as Vriska's wince had dug her claws into his shoulder.
"uH,,," he said. "uHH,,,"
"Oh!" she said suddenly. "Sorry, wiener." She lifted her hand, paused, and then patted the shoulder twice before settling back, as though that made it all better.
"The only thing I care about is that you don't kill each other doing it, but if you're going to shout so loud you disrupt the rest of the building, I'm going to toss you into this looping room I just found outside! Now," Rose growled, "we're going to talk, and you're going to tell me what happened." They both immediately began to talk at once, trying to overcome the other after only three words. Rose pinched at the bridge of her nose for a moment. Thinking back to her conversation with John, she reached inside of herself and tried to pull out her inner Karkat. "Quiet!" she tried. Nothing. Her tone was all wrong. She sighed aloud and tried something a little closer to home. "Oh, go on. By all means, it's not like the rest of the lab is trying to sleep."
When that did not work, she imitated Eridan and slammed a hand down on the shelf, which did. "Now here's what we're going to do:" Rose said, and she tried to work out exactly what that was. She had to pick one of them to tell their story while seeming impartial, and without Vriska's luck becoming a factor. While Tavros would be neutral, she did not want to put him on the spot. Her mind whirled. Draw straws. Dice. Spin a needlewand. Eeny, meeny, miny...
As she focused, if only for a second before, she again stumbled over the flame in her heart that represented her powers. It flared with energy, between her adrenaline rushes and her use of it in the Dungeon. Touching it, she thought up an answer.
"I'm thinking a number from one to five thousand," she said.
"Twelve-oh-four," Vriska said before Rose had even finished. Dammit! said her brain. But her heart was not finished.
Eridan sputtered. "Uh... uh... six-twelve?"
Rose shook her head, letting her Seer's heart guide her, if only for lack of anything else. "Thanks for interrupting, Vriska. Furthest wins."
Vriska gasped, covering a laugh. "You're a che8er!" To Rose's relief, Vriska's anger seemed to have faded, and the use of tone went by without incident.
"Hey, why does she away with it?" Eridan had freed himself from John at last.
Rose coughed, just slightly but always loud enough, a trick she had learned from her mother. "You're on the clock, Mr. Ampora, I suggest you start talking." She conjured up a note pad to complete the illusion. The two items that had been pinned below it on her tree dropped to the floor, including the book of introductory Troll Law she had been studying, and but no one seemed to notice.
"Well, you were there," Eridan said. "This morning. Vris challenges me to go grab some coat from, uh..." He looked back at John.
"Oh, uh... I already know!" John said. "...except you never actually brought it up or anything!"
"Exactly!" Vriska said, as though this proved her case, but Rose silenced her with another cough.
Eridan continued: "So I start thinking how I'm going to ask him for his coat-thing and then I think... 'Wait a sec, he doesn't have to know at all!'"
"This is how you know he's lying just a little," Vriska said. "He's never thought something through in his life!"
"Hey!" Tavros said.
"Oh, I'm just kidding, Tavroooooooos! You know th8t."
Eridan glared at her, but continued. "I made a backup plan to get Jon to take off his clothes on his own. I carefully arranged for him to upset his drink all over his shirt, which would force him to-"
"Oh yeah!" John interrupted. "He bumped into me at dinner, just a little."
Eridan scowled. "that wwas a carefully planned strategy ingrate" John shrugged. "Anyway, he went up to change and a few hours later I went to get his stuff!"
"Hm," Rose thought allowed. "So that was you in the hallway." She wondered where Dave had gotten to if that was the case.
"What it means is that he's a serious cheater! GU1LTY!" Vriska's impression of her Scourge Sister was impeccable. Rose was a little jealous. "By the way, John..." She tossed him his stolen clothes. "They don't fit me either."
Rose kept her eyes on her pad as she made a few notes. "What a shame there's no one in this lab that's a good enough seamstress to refit your clothes." Vriska growled at her, but Rose was already half way to changing the subject. "What about you, Vriska? Don't tell me this whole fight is about him winning your bet. I'm not in the bookie business so you'll have to excuse me if I need to spend the next part of the month studying up."
"Tsk," was all Vriska had to say at first. "Listen, Lalonde, this isn't about Numbfins winning the bet! I don't mind that! Vriska Serket pays her debts! This is about him being a cheating... cheat... cheater!" Her theatrical tone had evaporated in the end, and she took an angry step in his direction. "And bigger than that: he didn't actually do the bet! He was supposed to do it in front of Karkat! Maybe I'd go with it if he was a good manipu8tor, but all he is is a shill! You didn't pull it off, I don't have to do a thing!"
Rose raised an eyebrow just so. "So this whole fight has less to do with your relationship... and more to do with whether or not this is a legitimate business transaction?"
"Aww, that's not fair, Rose," John said. "Think about it! Anything can be romantic if you do it together!"
Rose would honestly rather not, and was glad that the others had not overhead John. Eridan had gone into a rant about intent versus law, while Vriska chanted "No one cares. No one cares. No one cares," through the whole monologue. Even Tavros seemed put off by that point. The sad look on his face looked deep enough to etch there permanently. Rose turned over to Eridan and stepped close enough to whisper.
"...What are you doing?" she asked.
Eridan huffed at her. "I'm pointing out that she's a lying backstabber is what I'm doing."
"Is going for a swim really this important to you? Or whatever else you're trying to get out this?" Rose checked back at Vriska, who was behaving, if only by miming jokes about Eridan to John and Tavros. "Because if you and Feferi weren't still awkward, she would have taken your 'swimming' idea and turned it into a mandatory pool party the second Gamzee is back on his feet." Eridan took this in, and then continued to take it in. "Stop thinking about everyone in their bathing suits."
"ww-wwhat?" Eridan coughed. "Roz! Tav and Vris are right there." Rose crossed her arms. "...besides, that's not really private, is it?"
"Eridan," Rose said, "if you're aiming for intimacy, I'd try an angle that doesn't make her want to gut you."
Eridan harrumphed and slicked back his purple spike of hair. "Just givin' the lady what she doesn't want, babe."
Rose backed off, apprehensive. "...Flirt later," she instructed, and turned to her other charge. "Vriska!"
Vriska was trying her best to suppress a laughing smile into a smooth, and she leaned one arm against Tavros' chair. "...Yeah, babe?" she said.
Rose turned a sharper shade of red. "I don't see what you see in him at times like these," she admitted.
"Then you do see what I see in him!" Clearly this was meant as a joke, but Rose did not follow. Vriska groaned. "Ugh, you Humans!" She squashed her fingers into a rough spade. "But seriously, yeah, times like these he can just go jump off a cli- ...sorry, Tavros."
Rose was not sure what she found more surprising: that Vriska was apologizing, at all, or how Tavros reacted. "No..." he said, "it's okay, Vriska. We can be attracted to different parts of his personality." He did not even look up when he said it, or fall into his usual chocolate malaise. He was so focused, and put out, by the fight that he was no longer paying attention to anything at all.
Rose tried to turn back to the subject at hand, if only because it was Vriska and focus was paramount. "Look, first things first: are you actually opposed to doing the swimming thing?"
Vriska paused for a moment, not to consider the answer so much as to decide if Rose deserved the information. "...Nah. It's not so bad a plan. Swimming's fun. We relive a few childhood memories, he gets and eyeful, I get an eyeful, I hold his head underwater until he stops struggling... it could be fun!" Rose had tried to maintain a stoic, neutral expression, but it must have cracked, because Vriska looked at her funny and then added: "...Gills."
"Right!" Rose said, before she could hide her surprise. She tried to regain her composure. "...Point two. Why not give him this one?"
Vriska twitched, and then smiled. "Rose, I knew you'd ask that! That's why I took my valuable time to prepare this answer." Vriska grabbed Rose by the arms and shook her. "What?"
Rose knocked her away. "Give him this one, so that he doesn't lose interest in these games you're so fond of. So fond of rigging, might I point out, so he's not exactly going to win those either. What do you lose?"
"Oh, Rose," Vriska said, with a roll of her eyes. "You're not thinking like a planner. Throw a few more layers into your stupid plan there! See, with your plan, all he has to do is keep cheating! And he's going to keep cheating if I let him get away with this one!"
Rose lowered her voice to a whisper. "But you're cheating! I know this might be alien to you, Vriska, but when you play a game, someone's going to lose, and if you change the rules-"
"Don't you lecture me!" Vriska said, ignoring Rose's change in volume. "You don't know the half of it!"
"What, the half of your 'layers'?" Rose leaned in closer. "If this isn't about the bet, then this is just you trying to humiliate him!"
"Of course I'm trying to humiliate him!" Vriska had suddenly dropped to match Rose's whisper. "What about this don't you get? That's even what I said! In front of him! And Feferi and Sollux! His ex, his black crush, how public does it have to be?"
"...but not Tavros."
Vriska pulled slowly back from Rose, perhaps having not even noticed that she had dropped volume as soon as she mentioned humiliating Eridan. "...Tavros knows the deal."
Rose allowed Vriska to take a step further away from Tavros, who was either still hiding in his own little world, or was pretending he was not listening. "Does he really?"
"Of course he does! ...Look," Vriska leaned back in. "I might not want to be 'the jerk messing with his boyfriend,' but I'm still the jerk messing with mine! Tavros understands that! The only one who doesn't understand that is you four!" Vriska threw up her arms. "Besides, say I do ruin Eridan's day in front of everyone! Tavros will just listen to the mighty Orphaner Dualscar's whining for an hour and then coddle him like one of his chow mein monsters, or... or him."
Vriska waved an arm toward the door, and Rose looked involuntarily. There she saw Jade standing between her and John, looking incredibly guilty. Just past her friend, Rose caught sight of a pair of legs in black and white-spotted pants.
"EHhHhHheHe," came a familiar chuckle, followed by the sound of Gamzee smacking his lips twice. "wHaT's Up, DoC?"
Rose caught sight of Kanaya in the hallway, not meeting her eyes and leaving Gamzee to his jarring free will. Jade and John was more direct.
"Uh, everything's fine, Gamzee!" John said.
"Yeah, uh, but maybe John should give you a look in the other room!" Jade said.
Gamzee, who had been using John as a perch, wobbled and slipped forward. He shouted "Fuck!" and fell into Jade's arms, and she and John struggled to right him. They managed it, apparently to his drowsy amusement, but there he caught sight of Rose. His eyes locked on her, and his smile vanished. Though she had seen him, asleep, he had not seen her in a week and a half. "...hey Rosie."
"...Hi," Rose said. She tried to look him back, and shook out her hands as if to assure that they were empty. After a moment, Gamzee simply and slowly nodded and turned to the others, nodding to Eridan and Vriska as though obliged.
Suddenly, almost forgotten, Tavros took to his feet behind Rose with a soft whirr of machinery. "Hey bro," he said, his voice still dreamy but without his usual lack of confidence. "If you're up to it maybe we can get you to, uh, a wash, you know?"
"Fuuuck," Gamzee said. "I must be fuckin' rank." He raised his stump to sniff his armpit, and began to giggle at the results. "Alright, my man, we'll see how well I can do this without dragging your poor self into it."
Tavros raised one leg and then the other, the machinery spinning in a diagnostic test Equius had installed weeks prior. "I have, uh, all the confidence in you, bro. All of it." Vriska rolled her eyes. When Tavros was satisfied with the results, he crossed the room.
"Thank you," Rose whispered, no more able to meet his eyes than Gamzee's. Tavros barely nodded in response, and spent only a moment longer to squeeze Eridan's hand in passing before helping his moirail out of the room.
"Tavros!" Vriska called. "We keep writing when you get back?"
"Uh... yeah, I guess so, Vriska." Tavros took Gamzee's good arm over his back and they headed out. John and Jade stayed behind, as did Kanaya in the hall. She sighed as Gamzee passed and pretended to return to her work.
Vriska could not help but notice. "So this is how we're doing things now?" she said in the direction of her ex. "Karkat rants at us about 'Troll Pride' but we shove everyone who's fighting to opposite ends of the compound?"
Kanaya closed her eyes. Rose could understand her disappointment in her. To be stuck with a matesprit that could not even own up to her own mistakes... Rose wished she could talk to Gamzee. She wished, and the shame pushed her well beyond the final straw Vriska had already laid on her back. Rose cut in front of Vriska. "Shut up. You have no right-"
Vriska laughed. "I'm concerned for the wellbeing of my auspistice!"
"Well here's my concern for you!" Rose stuck a finger in Vriska's face. "You tried to pull one over Eridan, he pulled one over you. Guess what! That means you lost."
Eridan burst out laughing, and all Vriska could manage was "W- No!"
"Aw, that was classic, Roz!" He slapped his knees. "Just shut her right the fuck down, that's the way to do it."
"Quiet," Rose snaooed.
Vriska came closer to Rose's feelings with a solid "Fuck you!" to Eridan, and an attempt to get to him. Rose cut her off. "Out of my way," Vriska growled. Rose felt too crowded between Vriska and her sensory double to move out of the way even if she had wanted, even if they did both protest. She did not either way. "You have no say in this!" Vriska said.
"I have every right to step in on this unbalanced relationship! If you don't want me to do the job any more, say so!" Rose gave her a pause in which to do so, and even Eridan stopped laughing, as if worried Vriska would immediately take Rose up on the offer. When Vriska said nothing, Rose was not reassured: her charge looked more ready to dice her than break up with her. "I don't care if you go swimming or don't, but frankly, between all the punishment you've doled out, breaking his bones and all the humiliation, I think you do owe him. Now, I'm not your referee. But if you're going to make it personal, I just thought I'd throw it in there that you obviously lost!"
"Personal?" Vriska barred her teeth. "The 'other sides of the compound' thing was a fucking joke! Gog! I thought you were supposed to be the calm one!"
"If everyone else gets to shout, so do I!" Rose felt a sting at her eyes. Vriska was right, Gamzee had flipped her completely out of her calm, and that hurt her personally. Instead of checking for tears, she had an ugly thought and pinched the skin on her arm. Nothing. Rose supposed that was good, but only to a point. Though she could still imagine a certain tentacled nothing getting a good laugh out of her situation, Rose was forced to admit that this was a situation of her own poor devising.
"Alright," Rose said, and coughed as her voice broke. "I just want this to play out fair for everyone."
"Like hell." Vriska again tried to push past Rose, hard enough that Rose did not attempt to block her. She made for the door, but caught Eridan smirking at her as she went to pass. "What do you want?" she asked him.
He grinned. "Just waiting to see when you and Roz are gonna wrap up so we can go for a swim, you know?"
"Now?" Vriska looked back toward Tavros' chair. "We're writing. I was just going to cool off!"
"Oh come on," Eridan said. "He's giving Gamz a bath and shit. By the time he gets up he'll be dead on his feet, probably want to go straight to the 'coon. But we've still got time for a night-time swim, I think."
Vriska almost shook with rage. "You do not cut into my time with Tavros, Eridan. That was the deal!" Over her shoulder, she repeated: "That was the deal!" to inform Rose. To Eridan she added, almost genuinely despite holding up a fist: "It's not fair."
Rose sniffed. "Oh, so now it's important what's fair."
Vriska whirled back to Rose and Rose's guard went up. She felt the phantom presence behind her and saw Vriska's arm pulled, as though for a punch but with the fingers loosely splayed, claws ready. But some last measure of self-control stopped Vriska. She grabbed the nearby shelf and dug her claws into it instead. Once Rose was sure she had pulled her attack, she dropped her defence and reached up, hoping to pull Vriska away from Eridan. Vriska shook her off, and Rose gestured Eridan away instead.
"Listen, Vriska," she whispered. "We talked about this. If you've got feelings for Tavros-"
"This isn't about Tavros!" Vriska snapped, though her tone was as much hurt as angry. She pointed to Eridan. "All that Tavros matters in this is that he doesn't deserve him. This is about you! And your nosey, nosey-nose habit of trying to pick my brain and break my plans! I did not bring you into this just so you could stamp on my feet or... or sneak around in my secrets!"
"...All right," Rose said. "But you also didn't bring me in here just to let your relationship fall apart. He's not going to stay with you under your boot, Vriska. And I don't think either of us want it to reach the point where I have to really intercede, if he decides he can hate someone easier to deal with day-to-day! I will not believe you wanted to bring me here to sit aside."
Vriska sputtered. "I didn't- Didn't bri-" She continued to ramble and spit, a train derailed and smashing about. Rose did not like to see it as much as she wanted to be far from it, from it and Gamzee and Kanaya's disapproving look. When Vriska had recovered her countenance, there was ice in her breath. "You know nothing about me," she spat. "Nothing at all. You'll see."
Where she could not meet Gamzee's eyes, or Kanaya's, Rose could meet Vriska's, and they shot daggers at her until Vriska turned about to speak to Eridan. "I am not swimming tonight, Eridan!" She snapped up an eight ball that lay on the desk. "I'm getting some notes and I'll be back in an hour, and I expect you gone." Eridan grunted a laugh. Vriska snarled at him, but then turned to the door. "John?" she asked, and pointed to the cut on her chin. John shook his head: though it was still stained, it had stopped bleeding some time ago. "Good," she said. "See you later."
And then she turned, grabbed Eridan by the back of the neck and kissed him. Her other hand grabbed his scarf as if to keep him from breaking away, but after a moment of panic it was clear it would never have entered his mind. When she released him, she swatted the scarf end back toward him and thumped him in the chest. She then left without another word. The four of them watched her leave, and only Jade said anything, if volumes, with a barked "Hah!" Eridan looked at Rose and half-smiled.
"...I'm going to bed," Rose said. Deep in the back of her mind was her promise to talk to Eridan about their relationship, but at the moment the very idea made her feel woozy. She felt half obliged to pinch her arm again, which only served to remind her: "...I'm going to bed the long way."
Jade and John gave her sympathetic pats as she went. Kanaya had disappeared.
Well, folks, you are now officially caught up to the rest of the sites I've posted this on! That means you have to wait for new updates the old fashioned way. Sorry to hoist that on you, folks. I'll see you in a few weeks.