Work Text:
It’s very possible that you’ve made a mistake, but you know what, you’re just going to go with it. Really, what’s the worst that could happen? So Vriska’s plan is fatally flawed in certain key areas, but that’s not your problem!
She wants to hatedate you to make Tavros jealous. You could tell her that Tavros is going to react to this plan like he’s been given a stay of execution, but Vriska isn’t capable of noticing her own flaws if they danced all over her vision eightfold. It’ll be funny to watch, anyway. The thought of watching Vriska crash and burn gives you happy tingles in all the right places, and if that makes this “fake hatedate” plan all the more complicated, even better. You like complicated.
The thing is, you think, as you sit cross-legged on the kitchen table of your human apartment and lick strawberry jam off a spoon, it’s pathetic to hate-pine after someone who is fixated on someone else. Vriska is a freight train and no matter how much you shake your angular rear, she’s not going to derail from her goal. But since she’s the one who approached you, maybe you’ve got a chance to turn her head. With a good, old-fashioned slap, if it comes to that. Ooh, there are those happy tingles again.
So maybe it’s a mistake, but you’ll deal with that when you get to it.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] started pestering gallowsCalibrator [GC] --
EB: she told you this is just a plan to make tavros jealous, right?
John’s blueberry text pops up on your husktop screen. You give it a happy lick. Your relationship with him hasn’t been that great since that time you led him to his death, and even though it happened in a doomed timeline, he still seems a little edgy. Vriska got her stakes in him pretty good, anyway.
GC: OF COURS3! NOT L1K3 1 WOULDNT H4V3 F1GUR3D 1T OUT 4NYW4Y.
GC: BUT WHY T3LL M3?
EB: i thought it might be kind of mean if she didn’t tell you.
EB: dave told me that he thinks you really like her.
EB: i mean, you know, hate-like her.
GC: TH4T 1S 4N 3GR3G1OUS BR34CH OF MO1RA1L CONF1DENT14L1TY.
GC: 1 MUST D34L W1TH H1M S3V3R3LY.
EB: oh.
EB: whoops
EB: he told me not to tell you he said that.
EB: so if you could not tell him i told you he said that, um.
GC: TOO L4T3! TH3 WH33LS OF R3TR1BUT1ON 4R3 4LR34DY TURN1NG.
GC: YOU W1LL B3 SUPO3N43D FORTHW1TH 4S 4 W1TN3SS FOR TH3 PROS3CUT1ON.
EB: you could just tell me something embarrassing about dave as punishment.
GC: HMMMM.
GC: 4N 3Y3 FOR 4N 3Y3?
GC: 1 L1K3 TH3 W4Y YOU TH1NK.
GC: MR STR4WB3RRY J4M H4S SOM3 JU1CY R3D F33L1NGS FOR 4 C3RT41N MR CHOCOL4T3 FONDU3.
EB: whoa
EB: wait
EB: tavros?
-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] ceased pestering ectoBiologist [EB] --
The morning Vriska knocks frantically on your apartment door, you’re pretty much convinced she’s going to cancel this whole plan. She looks pissed off and jittery and frustrated. So you do what you’ve been wanting to do for years—no, not punch her in the face. The other thing.
You taste the satisfying blue of her blood on your lips, and she licks it off, and there are a few dizzying moments of give and take before she flees again. Maybe “flees” isn’t a word you normally associate with Vriska, but this time you can practically smell her poleaxed confusion. That, you think, is what it looks like when you derail a train.
Except.
Vriska disappears.
Not literally, obviously. You know where she is. She hunkers down with Karkat and Eridan, of all people, doing some weird romance movie marathon. Karkat sends you a couple confused texts at first that mostly sound like WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EVEN DO TO HER and PLEASE TELL ME THIS ISN’T GOING TO BE PERMANENT, but then that subsides and there’s just silence from her end.
Here, finally, you can see your mistake.
Because of course, your attempt to get under her skin pretty much guaranteed that she’d get under yours. Sure, you felt black for her before, but there’s a difference between feeling black for someone who doesn’t pay much attention to you versus feeling black for someone who clung to you like she was afraid you’d stop biting. How were you to know that it would drive her away? Maybe you were stupid. Maybe you never truly understood that this was all just a game to get Tavros jealous. You’d thought that once she was paying attention to you, even if it was just a ruse, that she’d see what she was missing.
She did. And then she ran.
It hurts your pride most of all.
You knock on her door at an ungodly hour just as one last ‘fuck you’. It almost makes you nostalgic. When she answers, you can tell she was expecting you. She doesn’t say anything as she leads you into the apartment. The kitchen is dark and smells like old take-out. You both stand awkwardly for a moment. You hug yourself and try to look unconcerned, but you can’t fake a smile.
“Let’s just drop this now, okay?” you say.
She doesn’t even have the grace to respond.
You go home again and lay on your couch, flat on your back. You should text Dave. He probably hasn’t even gone to bed yet. It’s still so early. But no, you don’t have the energy to get your phone from your sylladex. You think you’ll just lay here and pity yourself for a while.
You’re over her, you think viciously. You’ll never think of her again. Who gives a fuck about her and her stupid plans and her ridiculous crush on Tavros? She’s dead to you now.
You’ll tell Karkat to set you up with someone nice and hateful. Someone who gets poppy seeds stuck in their teeth. Someone who thinks Troll Fifty Shades of Grey was a remarkable work of literature. Someone who you can really, truly hate.
You just keep thinking about kissing her.
Someone knocks on your door.