Author's Notes: It's hard to come up with these things when I'm writing the story in advance. Who would have thought it?

Behind Blue Lies – Part 14

All Vriska could do at first was sit there, staring up in shock at the fuchsia blooded troll. Veruna, at least, seemed to enjoy the shocked silence, because she stood there, toying with her hair and radiating pleasure with herself. What she was so pleased with Vriska couldn't quite tell. For Veruna there was nothing more desirable than getting the Empress and her Heiress out of the way. For the hierarchists, there might be nothing more dangerous to their cause, with the repercussions that would come of it. For Vriska... it would be fatal. Surely Veruna wasn't being serious. And yet, everything in Vriska's gift screamed that she was. Deadly so.

"There's not enough time," Vriska protested, hoping that something, anything would stop this idea.

"It is. What you have here is the bassis of the plan you'll use. The fin details need changed, but we can work with this. There's enough time. But we must start now."

Now? Veruna wanted her to just drop everything and spend the night planning the assassination of one of the two most carefully protected trolls in the world? That... That wasn't how this was supposed to work. She was supposed to have time. Time to deal with Sollux and informing the Empress. Time to spend her last nights with Kanaya, find some way to make her understand that she loved her and hadn't meant all of this. Time to...

What did it matter. It wasn't like she was going to get the time she wanted. But maybe, just maybe, she could get the time she needed. That was all she could hope for now. Hope she could find a way to let Sollux know, so he could warn the Web and set their plans into motion. Have the time to at least leave Kanaya the necklace, for all that she'd probably throw it away.

"Forgive me for saying this, my Lady, but I..."

"What is it? Spit it out, Serket. I don't have time for your delaying."

"I have a matesprit."

That managed to give Veruna pause. Not that she didn't know, of course. Veruna knew all about Vriska's quadrants, it was no shock at all. Yet something about Vriska's bringing it up now, maybe something in her voice, was making Veruna interested.

"And what aboat that, gill? You want to warn your matesprit? Not acceptable. Pity or not, she may not be trustworthy."

"I'm not stupid enough to tell her," Vriska snapped. "What do you think I am? She's a damn good girl, but she wouldn't understand. I'm doing this as much for her as I am for anything else. But, after this... I won't be able to go back to her until we've won. Please, my Lady, I want to see her one more time before we start this. I'll be back in enough time to arrange all of this for you."

There was silence for a while, a thoughtful air around Veruna, but what she was deciding, Vriska couldn't even begin to know. Not that she couldn't read Veruna more easily than most. No, it was that Veruna was, somehow, thinking about Vriska's proposal completely logically. There was no emotions around her to reveal even the slightest bit of what arguments Veruna was making in her pan. Meanwhile Vriska was rushing through argument after argument that she could use to win the boon from Veruna. It was the only chance she had, Sollux had, hell, the only chance the Empress had, to get through what was coming.

"How long does it take you to reach your hive from here?"

"Three hours, if I'm rushing."

"You have thirty hours. If you are not back by then, I will find you, and your jadeblood, and paint my skin with your blood."

"I know, my Lady. Trust me. I know."

Turned out if she really rushed, Vriska could make it back to the hive in two and a half hours, not three. Still, that only gave her somewhere around twenty-four hours to accomplish everything that had to be done. How was she supposed to do everything in that amount of time? How was she supposed to do anything in that amount of time? And yet, do it she must. The other choice was to fail, doom them all. Why couldn't anything ever be easy?

The hive was abandoned when Vriska arrived, not that she had expected much else. Kanaya had already left for her day at work, and in the end it was probably better not to even try to speak to her. If she said goodbye, Kanaya would try to stop her. If she tried to explain, thing would go wrong. It was better that she didn't see her matesprit before the end, no matter what she'd told Veruna. She would leave her Fussyfangs a letter. A letter and the necklace. They were all she would have to give.

Once she was back in the safety of her hive, the husktop came out. There was too much to do, too many irons, and one of them demanded that she get into contact with Sollux now. Unfortunately the encryption subroutines he's put in place were strong, and would take a while for her husktop to process. The only thing she could do was start now. With her husktop on, Vriska logged in and started to activate certain programs and files in a specific order that she could only barely remember. If this worked the way it was supposed to, the husktop would start to run items that Vriska could only guess at to get her back in contact with Sollux and the Web. They were necessary now.

But there was only so much she could do while the programs were busy with their thing. She'd have faith in Sollux's skills, they were the only thing she could fall back on right now. And one of them was something that was just better to get out of the way sooner rather than later.

It was slow going getting the secret drawer free, but then again, she'd never really meant for it to be easy. Quickly accessed hiding spots meant that they were too easily discovered by another person. The ones that were harder to get into, harder to find, meant you might have to leave something behind, but the items were far more secure. Soon enough, though, Vriska had the drawer open, slipping out the crushed velvet box. For a few minutes it was all she could do to stroke the box, committing the feel of the box to her pan. She'd never see it again. Never see Kanaya, never see how beautiful her matesprit would look in the construction.

Finding the paper in the hive was a lot harder than Vriska had expected it to be. After exhausting any possible hiding places in the food preparation block, the entertainment block, the respite block and the office, Vriska was forced to go searching more the only place she normally didn't go: Kanaya's fabrication block.

This was as much Kanaya's personal safe haven as the the office block tended to be Vriska's. It was here, amid the swaths of lovely fabrics and waves of beautiful colors that Kanaya created. Suits and gowns. Casual and dress. Simple sashes that brought an imperfect item together, and extravagant vests that transformed the wearer from some ridiculous looking clown to an almost respectable troll. From this room Kanaya made herself look like a mythical goddess, made Gamzee look competent and focused, and Vriska seem like a trustworthy troll for all of her acting like a hierarchists. This was the part of Kanaya's world that Vriska had never been able to become part of. Her stitches were uneven. Her ability to put colors together that weren't black and blue were atrocious. She didn't even know when it was appropriate to use a vest with an overcoat or not without Kanaya guiding her.

The room was the same as it was the last time Vriska had been in here for a fitting, though vastly different. The walls were still decorated with spare bits of cloth, or ones Kanaya had loved the look of but had never found a use for. Someday, Kanaya promised, she would make great things of the cloth, but Vriska would never know. After today she would never stand in this room again. With a sigh Vriska started her search, hoping to find some paper.

When she found it, Vriska found herself frozen in silence. One of Kanaya's sketchbooks had been her intended victim for paper pinching. Opening it, though, had been something Vriska hadn't been prepared for. It was all she could do to find the nearest pile of pillows to flop down on. For all that she'd expected it to be filled with dresses, there wasn't a single sketch of fashion as Vriska flipped through the pages. They were, instead of her. Of her sleeping, of her talking animatedly, of her staring off into the distance at something, or bent over her desk in the office block working on some paperwork. Every image as beautifully, pitingly sketched as the last. If she had ever doubted that her matesprit pitied her, the sketches would have destroyed all doubt in her mind. And now, now Vriska was going to have to break her heart to save her.

It wasn't fair, but life never was.

Vriska tore her eyes from the current sketch and quickly flipped to a random blank page. There was no way she could afford to spend too much time looking through the sketches. As much as she wanted to memorize her every last drawing, try to figure out just what it was about her that Kanaya pitied so red, if she didn't leave her message now, who said she'd ever be able to? So, with a blank page and one of Kanaya's colored writing tools, Vriska set about leaving behind the only message she could offer her matesprit as comfort.

Two hours and three discarded and torched drafts later, Vriska propped the open sketchbook up on the entertainment block low table, leaned the crushed velvet box against it, and left it behind for Kanaya to find upon returning to the hive. Maybe, one day, she'd see her matesprit again, the necklace gracing her neck. For a minute, Vriska had to wonder if convicts to be put out of the misery of the public for the greater good were given a chance to say goodbye to their quadrants. She also wondered if Fussyfangs would even want to see her, after everything that would come next.

But no, that wasn't a line of thinking that would get her anywhere. Leaving behind the gift and letter, Vriska returned to the office block, hoping that after this time Sollux's protections had unraveled themselves. Sure enough, even as she sat down at her desk the final program shut itself down and a new window popped up, one directing her to attach all necessary items for visual verification. Leave it to Sollux to demand a level of confirmation of who she was and that she was whole. Made twice as much sense when she thought about how this would look to him, to have her getting in touch with him so far outside of their time frame.

The video equipment was barely plugged in and picking up images before a visual chat connection accepted itself on her husktop, and she was faced with an image of Sollux. Anxiety seemed to radiate around him, in every nervous sparking of his power around his eyes. Even as he came up on the screen Vriska could see him chewing on his lip, and the faintest hint of yellow on the tips of his teeth. The idiot had made himself bleed, and for what? No, he hadn't made himself bleed, she had. Unfortunately there really hadn't been a way for her to contact him other than this one so that he wouldn't worry. And the chances were that he'd been alerted the second her husktop had connected to the web. That he'd been anxious to see the right combination to unlock everything happening right from the start. Maybe he'd been wondering if it had been luck. Maybe he'd been afraid that Veruna had managed to torture everything out of her. Either way, for all the anxiety and nerves, Sollux's expression softened as he looked at her, then started to glare when she raised her fingers in a small wave.

"What the ever living fuck is going on here?" Sollux demanded, relief obvious in his voice.

"Now now, Sollux. If you talk like that all the time people are going to think your kismesis is rubbing off on you. That would just be quite unseemly," she teased, hoping to soothe him further. Not in any kind of pale way, of course, but soothe none the less.

"Fuck propriety. What's going on. I thought you were supposed to be..."

"I was," Vriska cut in, not needing to hear the ranting now. "I met with her. Discussed the plan. Outlined everything. It went just like we wanted it to, Sollux. Except for one thing."

"What?"

"She doesn't like the target."

"What the fuck is supposed to be wrong with the target? It had everything she wanted. High concentration of low bloods and support structures of the current system. Potential for broadcast due to presence of news trolls of various media formats. Close enough to the Empress to send a decisive message, but not close enough to risk either of you. Not to mention that it suited our purposes too. Proximity to several medical institutions, while enough of a distance from enforcer headquarters to make escape easy. Enough to look flashy without causing too much pain, despite the damages. What the fuck was wrong with it?"

"It wasn't close enough to the Empress."

"You're fucking kidding me. The location was within sight of the Imperial Residence."

"Sollux... Listen to me. She doesn't want the Empress to learn about the attack. She wants the Empress to die in it."

Silence. Several moments of it, and completely awkward. Then, at last, Sollux shook his head, spending a few moments messing around with something on his computer.

"Okay. There. I think I've fixed whatever problem there was with my system. Could you run that by me again? I'll hear it right this time. Because there is no way you just said what I think you said."

"Sollux, she doesn't want the Empress surviving the attack. I'm to rework the plan to occur doing the public celebration of the wriggling day of Empress Gyliea, and I'm not to let her survive it."

"Fuck."

Her sentiments exactly.