So this fic is officially over 150k words. Amazing, yo. This is longer than a couple of the Harry Potter books! Anyway, I decided to do the dramatic thing in this act (holy fuck).

Many thanks to FanficFinatic2, CatastrophicAquarius, Wolfen Artist of Hetalia, obsessed01616, BlooKisses, Bitblondetoday, and SlytherinUnicorns for your reviews to the last act!


Rose woke up slowly, her alarm blaring in her ears. She was disoriented, but she got the vague feeling she needed to be somewhere. Her eyes fluttered open, but it seemed to be a typical Friday morning. With a groan, she rolled out of bed and silenced her alarm. After a moment, she glanced at her attire and suddenly, with a wave of guilt, realized what happened.

She was still in her Halloween costume. It was Friday morning, and she'd napped all through Halloween.

Actually, it hadn't been a nap so much as an extended fall hibernation period. She felt like she'd slept for twelve or thirteen hours. Still, as Jaspers came over and rubbed against her ankles, she felt awful. She picked him up and buried her face in his fur. "Why did you let me sleep so long, huh? I bet Kanaya's angry with me, and it's all your fault." She was kidding—she knew if Kanaya was upset, Rose had only herself to blame for messing it up. Still, Jaspers meowed at her in confusion, so Rose set him down and slunk out of her bedroom to feed him.

Roxy and her mother didn't seem to be up and about, but that was typical. Roxy didn't work until after noon on Friday and her mother was frankly nearly always home, unless she was out on a booze run (and even then, she sometimes had one of the household staff go out and pick up something they'd run low on). The fact that she was the only one stirring shouldn't have surprised her, but somehow, she'd expected that her family would like the opportunity to gloat over the one fuckup she'd made.

Jaspers barely stopped weaving in between her feet as Rose poured his food into his bowl, but the moment she set it down, he began feasting and completely ignoring her.

She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and ran her fingers through her hair. If she concentrated and thought back to last night, she seemed to recall being woken once or twice and feeling vaguely annoyed. She must have insisted on going back to sleep since whoever it was—probably Kanaya, she realized with another pang of guilt—had left her alone after that. She wondered what time Kanaya had left last night and if she'd just gone ahead and met with Aradia and the others or if she'd been too late to join them.

She went back to her room to plug in and check her phone. Surely someone would have called her...? But, no, she had a few new emails from stores she frequented, but nothing of import, and no new calls or text messages. Not even from Kanaya, which worried her. If Kanaya was angry, Rose wouldn't blame her in the slightest. She had to think of something to do to make up for last night.

Hey, Kanaya, what's up? She sent the text to her girlfriend and set the phone down. She only had two hours before she had to be at school, so she set about getting ready for a shower.

When she finally got back into her room, toweling off her hair, she was disappointed to see that Kanaya hadn't responded. She tried to reassure herself that it was no big deal, she was probably busy, but Rose had a feeling Kanaya was giving her the silent treatment.

She quickly dressed for school, scarfed down a quick breakfast of instant oatmeal that they inexplicably had (her family was not the most healthy group of eaters), and headed to school to do damage control and, hopefully, think of some way to apologize to Kanaya.


Vriska yawned and stretched, not wanting to wake up. She was sure she'd had a good dream the night before—not that she could remember it. She typically couldn't remember her dreams, anyway. Still, it left her with such a feeling of contentedness that there was no way it couldn't have been good.

Finally, though, she silenced her alarm and rolled out of bed, groping for her glasses and eye patch but only putting on the patch and not the glasses. "Morning, Marquise," she mumbled, not really looking into her tarantula's tank. She went to the bathroom to pee and came back feeling much more awake than she had a few minutes before, sliding her glasses onto her face.

That was when she got a good look into Marquise Mindfang's tank and screamed.

Devastation, horror, and fury all battled for dominance in her mind, but she fell to her knees and let out a sob. The Marquise was dead, but it was obviously not a natural death—not if the wooden skewers through her head, thorax, and abdomen were any indication. It was grotesque, seeing her beloved pet frozen in place, her eight legs limp and dangling an inch or two above the bottom of the tank, some dark fluid that might have been the tarantula's blood or blood equivalent oozing down the skewers. She barely registered the piece of foam the skewers were embedded in on the bottom, keeping The Marquise upright in a ghastly caricature of her natural pose—all she knew was that her pet had been murdered, and she had a pretty good fucking idea who'd done it, too.

She tried to summon rage to the surface, but she was too distraught. She wanted desperately to reach out and cradle The Marquise, but it wouldn't do any good. She was gone—sometime last night, someone had slipped into her room, killed her tarantula, and left her on such garish display. There was nothing she could do but accept her pet's death, and possibly seek her revenge.

"I hate you," she breathed to the invisible, lurking presence of her sister in the room. Aranea had killed The Marquise—there was no doubt in Vriska's mind. "I hate you so much."

Aranea had always told her that you could only trust your family—any friends you thought you had were either using you or pawns for you to use. But she knew Jade would never, ever hurt a hair on The Marquise's abdomen, and Aranea had killed the tarantula. Aranea had shown in one singular, horrifying spectacle, who could be trusted and who couldn't. Aranea was wrong about everyone and everything—it was your friends, people who chose to be with you despite everything, who would always be there for you. Your family was obligated to care, but the water of the womb only went so far. Aranea had used their familial bond to manipulate her, and Vriska couldn't believe how long it had taken her to see that.

Last night—and this terrible discovery this morning—had just proven that. And maybe she couldn't bring back The Marquise, but she could hit Aranea right where it hurt.

Vriska pulled herself to her feet and fumbled for her phone. She wanted photographic evidence of this in case it needed to be used later against Aranea. Once she convinced herself she'd thoroughly documented the grisly scene, she gingerly reached into Marquise Mindfang's tank to gently pry her free of the skewers and scoop her out. "I'm so sorry she did this to you, baby," she murmured, cradling her tarantula's lifeless body. She partly blamed herself—she was a notoriously sound sleeper. A freight train running through her room probably wouldn't wake her up once she hit REM. "I wish I could have saved you. You didn't deserve what she did to you. But I promise on your grave and the graves of the two Marquises who came before you that I will make her pay." She ran a forefinger down The Marquise's body, shuddering as her fingertip brushed past the holes the skewers had made. "I hate her so much. I hate her."

She stuffed her feet into her closest pair of sneakers. Still clad in her pajamas, she went to the garage to locate her mother's gardening tools. There was a hand shovel and a tiny rake hanging up next to the watering can and her mother's gloves, so she took those, still holding The Marquise as carefully as possible, and went to the backyard to dig a new grave beneath the same tree the other two Marquises were buried under. It was a painstaking process and the knees of her pajama bottoms were covered in dirt by the time she finished, but she finally deposited the third Marquise Spinneret Mindfang into her grave and covered her up.

She sniffled and set the hand shovel aside. "I'm sorry, girls," she whispered to the deceased tarantulas. "She joined you far too soon. It wasn't her time. But..." She reached out and pressed her palm to the spot where she knew the first Marquise Mindfang was buried. She had exhumed the first tarantula's remains the day after she buried them and saved them in a Tupperware container to bring her to their new house and re-bury her there. (Her mother had then thrown away the container.) Vriska had memorized the exact locations of all of these graves long ago. But now that she thought on it, she wasn't convinced that the first Marquise's death had been natural, either. After all, Vriska had discovered The Marquise's death after Aranea had locked herself in their room for nearly two hours in a rage. It had been about the right age for a tarantula, but Vriska had taken really good care of her and she'd never shown signs of being sick or close to death. And the second Marquise... well, Vriska had thought later that the tarantula's tank smelled suspiciously like bleach, and that was right around the time Vriska had rekindled her romance with Tavros Nitram, telling Aranea that she thought she was in love with him (he was so much nicer than Eridan Ampora, after all).

And then last night, she had introduced Jade to her family. It wouldn't surprise her at all, now that she thought on it, to discover that Aranea was behind every single death of her tarantulas.

But this had been different. The first two had been meant to look like natural deaths. The third one had obviously been to send a message, and that message was, If you stay friends with Jade, this is how she'll end up. Vriska highly doubted Aranea would resort to murder, but it was a metaphor. Aranea would emotionally destroy Jade.

Vriska couldn't let that happen. Aranea had taught her to be emotionally manipulative, but it was time for the protégè to turn that power back on the master. She already had an idea of how to get Aranea out of her hair for a good, long while.

Now that she had a plan in mind, she took a deep breath, stood up, brushed off the knees of her pajama pants, and returned her mother's gardening tools to their appropriate locations. She had to hurry to school to intercept Jade before her first class—there wasn't a whole lot of time.

If she'd expected anyone in the house to come running at her scream, she would have been sorely mistaken. Both her mother and her sister had already left for the day, though, and she knew it. She also knew that she should have probably called her mother to rat Aranea out right away, but it was imperative to her plan that her mother not know what was going on. It would be better to tell her later, but for now, Vriska had to pretend that everything was normal and fine.

She brushed out the tangles in her hair, casting a sad glance into the now-empty tarantula tank and wondering if her sister really had killed all of her pets. She tried not to think about it for long, though—she had to keep her mind occupied, or else she'd break down. She had to keep going, keep pushing on. Revenge would be the only thing to ease the aching in her chest.

The revelation of the true nature of Aranea's betrayal made her feel terrible, though. All this time, she'd been so convinced that Aranea was right, that people who were not her family were only meant to be used, but now she saw that she was wrong. She thought back to the people she'd hurt—Eridan, Tavros, John, Kanaya—and wondered how deep those scars ran. She wondered about the extent of the damage she'd done to them.

Maybe, one day, she'd find them all and apologize. But for now, she had to find Jade and warn her about the impending Serket storm.


BOOM! DRAMA BOMB, PART 2!

See you all on Friday! (Or maybe Saturday, depending on how tired I am when I get home on Friday.)