A/N: It's like three in the morning and I'm getting too old for this shit. I think I've already rebooted my sleep schedule to wake me at noon and stay up until four.
Yeah so here's an idea that struck me suddenly, as good ideas do, when you're low on laptop battery and feeling all pretentiously poetic.
Enjoy, folks. Do people still read this? Maybe not. I don't know. You should review if you like it. I try not to beg for reviews, but I'm giving in right now a little bit.
Soteriophobia and Snark
part fifteen: love has rough edges
They do have an always.
But not the always you think of as lovers ride off into the sunset.
"You'll always fix me up, right, Kan?" Vriska asks, squinting glasseslessly down at the blur of a girl wrapping an ace bandage around her ankle, rubbing ointment on her cuts, tutting over her bruises. There's worry in Vriska's tone today. There has always been worry in her tone. It doesn't sound significant at all, but Vriska asks this every time she gets in a fight and crawls home to Kanaya with her mouth half full of blood and her head completely full of poison.
"Always," is the smooth answer, coming unblinkingly from her matesprit. Always.
They have beauty as well.
But not the type of beauty glossed with lamination in modeling magazines.
"Why do you like to watch me sew?"
Kanaya's voice drifts calmly over Vriska's head, carrying even over the clacking of the embroidery machine. Vriska, who is sprawled gracelessly on the couch with her chin in her hands, shrugs her shoulders and feels truth in her mouth. She doesn't spit it back out in disgust like she usually does, and so she doesn't sound hostile when she answers.
"'Cuz you're so close to danger, you know? Your fingers could be cut off at any moment."
Kanaya does not make a remark about morbidity or Vriska's fascination with unusual wounds. Instead, she continues embroidering, feeling deep in her heart that Vriska has said something akin to a lovely compliment. Indeed, Vriska is thinking about moths like sewing fingers, flitting away and back towards the light of a single buzzing porch lamp, dodging danger with art, delicate and fragile in their beauty.
Their relationship is filled with passion.
But not always the kind of passion infused with lust and sexual desire.
Kanaya worries about FLARPing.
She doesn't like the danger in it, nor the violence. And she doesn't like when Vriska goes on planning campaign.
The worst time, Vriska had been awake for three straight days, powered only by energy; a glaze in her eyes seemed to coat her entire being.
She had been crouched at the table, talking to herself in mad delirium, papers spread everywhere. She had not changed her clothes or accepted food in thirty-six hours. She wasn't responding to Kanaya.
Kanaya had locked herself in her bedroom and wondered at the self-abusive nature Vriska showed and she had tried not to cry. And then she had heard a shout of victory as Vriska had figured out something important and she couldn't take it anymore. She had marched out of her room and grabbed the books and papers and hurled them straight out her window. Into the gorge.
Vriska had screamed and cursed a blue streak and called Kanaya a 8itch and when she finally had calmed down enough to speak in a normal voice she had looked at Kanaya and said she was never going to talk to her again and then all of a sudden had burst out crying.
Kanaya of course had rushed to her side and Vriska had croaked that there was no need for Kanaya to apologize and she was too obsessed and passionate about that stupid game anyway and Kanaya had made her hot cocoa and she had fallen asleep in Kanaya's lap.
They have intimacy.
But you won't see this messy incarnation of it in any rom-com.
"Cuddle?"
Vriska has downed four glasses of wine and now she's pressing her face into Kanaya's neck, biting sloppily and kissing and licking. Kanaya pulls away but gives a quiet sigh of pleasure, which only fuels the fire more.
"Vriska, cuddling isn't pailing," Kanaya reminds her, as Vriska begins marking her with dark bruises. Vriska pouts, twirling her long dark hair around her fingers, and spreads out on Kanaya's knees, bony back pressed against the other girl's thighs.
"...fuck... Sleep?"
They sleep on the floor sometimes, when it's hot. They bury themselves in Kanaya's many pillows and Vriska pulls her shirt off, moaning that it's too warm for clothing. And then there's inevitably a lot of pushing and shoving between them as they try to find a position that works for both of them; which is usually Vriska entwining herself around Kanaya and claiming the whole area. When they finally settle into a fairly still embrace, Vriska more often than not murmurs nonsensical stories, usually about admirals named Dualscar who don't shut up, to help lull Kanaya into drowsiness.
Kanaya has never mentioned she is actually kept awake by this because she enjoys the adventurous and exciting tales and more than anything she enjoys Vriska's storytelling voice, low and then high, lilting with upturns and downturns like the gentle-rough-gentle waves of the salty sea.
And they have love.
But not saccharine powdery fluff found in the bindings of cheap dollar novels.
The first time Vriska said it first, they were sitting on Kanaya's floor. Kanaya was reading. Vriska was drawing a map. A simple moment.
The Alternian sun had just begun to crest over the landscape and light had inched doubtfully onto Kanaya's back through the open window and Vriska had thought about saying it and didn't. And then she had broken a pencil and Kanaya had gotten up to get her a new one and in the middle of Kan's goddamn speech about pencils she had blurted it out, totally out of context, totally out of the blue.
"I'm pretty damn flushed for you, Maryam."
Kanaya had put the pencils on the ground and folded up one of Vriska's errant jackets on the ground that the latter had cast off less than a minute ago, and then she looked up to meet Vriska's eyes and Vriska didn't think she could feel any more red for any troll as long as she lived. She couldn't take it anymore and she had kissed Kanaya hard and long and Kanaya had not said We're matesprits already Vriska, why are you telling me this now? or Doesn't that go without saying? or I was talking about pencils and you sidetracked me. She had only kissed back with dreamy abandon, her lips gentle and tender, and Vriska had known right then and there that Kanaya understood everything and always had understood, since the very day they met.
la fin
