(Had your daily dose of Sadstuck yet? No? HERE LET ME FIX THAT FOR YOU. TW for talk of suicide)
...Let me make one thing very clear to anyone stupid enough to be reading this piece of shit: I don't do things on a whim, ever. I like I plan my stupid stunts out, so that if something fucks up at least I can say I thought I knew what I was doing instead of making up bullshit as I went. Whenever it came to her, though, it was different. She was always different. She just had to glance my way and I'd do anything she asked me because I was just such a god damn pathetic love-struck idiot that pride meant nothing to me when it involved the great Terezi Pyrope, top of the class valedictorian and resident blind girl.
That's why I couldn't say no when she asked me to help her find her friend's killer.
It was early March when Vriska committed suicide, or at least that was what the newspapers said. After the initial discovery Terezi locked herself in her room. She missed the funeral. She missed her classes. She missed every pathetically desperate phone call I made. Her fuck ass of a douchebag best friend was the only reason I knew she was still alive. I caught him slipping out of her room one day, resulting in a quick argument and more than a few bruises.
“Look, she's sleeping, so tone down the yelling Mr. I-Have-Volume-Control-Issues. Just leave her alone, dude,” he murmured angrily. His lip bled from the fight and a bruise was blossoming on his cheek. “She’ll come out when she wants to.”
I argued, hissed that she may be dead by then.
“Nah man, TZ wouldn’t do that.” He shoved me for emphasis before walking off.
For the only time in my life I prayed he was right. Dave Strider was nothing but a jerkass hipster with an obsession with fucking up the definition of irony, but he was also the only one who kept open connection with Terezi during that week. As much as I hated it, I had to trust that he was right, no matter how badly I wanted to punch his face in.
She called me up on the eighth of March. I remember the moment vividly. It was a Sunday, nearly ten at night. My dormmate was blaring National Treasure for the tenth time that week. John himself was draped over the couch, alternating between cramming for some important chemistry test and swooning over Nic Cage’s rugged good looks. (His words, not mine.) Abandoning any hope of getting work done while shitty films were playing in the background, I’d just started ripping into him about the historical inaccuracies of the film when my phone went off.
I didn’t even check the number. I just grabbed it off my desk and hit talk before John could bug me about my ringtone being “Call Me Maybe”. “What nooksucker calls at ten pm on a school night?” I snapped, aggravated.
She laughed. I used to like her laugh, but now it sounded slightly crazed and bitter. Crazier than normal, I guess I should specify, because Terezi was always not quite there. “Karkat, I need you to come to my room.”
“Terezi, what the fucking hell? You can’t just vanish off the god damn face of the Earth and then call me up all like ‘oh yeah, here let me just drop everything, no questions asked, never mind that I’ve been sitting here thinking you’re dead!‘” I was angry because I was relieved, because I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her voice cutting through every dull discussion in Comparative Politics.
(Fuck, I'll just admit it - I missed her.)
“Mmm. I’ll see you in five.” She hangs up before I can get another word in.
I was on her doorstep in two. I’d never run that fast in my entire life. The door to my dorm was left hanging, and I nearly injured myself stumbling down the stairs. The quad between the girl’s dorm and the boy’s dorm was suddenly … I can’t even think of an appropriately shitty metaphor to explain how I felt running across the quad.
I knocked louder than I meant to. The sound echoed down the hallway, but all I heard was the sound of the lock and the tiny crack as she opened the door. It opened no wider, but I knew an invitation when I saw one. I barged in without even asking.
I wish I could say I noticed the painfully obvious out of place things first – the newspaper clippings, pictures, maps of the campus, pages and pages of notes not in her handwriting scattered on her desk and walls – but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything but her tense smile and pale face and how tired and gorgeous she looked in the lamplight. She sat in front of her desk; between her teeth was a pen riddled in teeth marks. She raised one hand in weak greeting, waggling her fingers in my general direction.
“Hey,” she addressed the wall a little to my left.
I swallowed, my mouth feeling like sandpaper. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She could follow my voice well enough to look right at me once I'd talked. “Here.” She waved an arm at the area around her, narrowly missing her desk lamp. It was then that I focused in on the wall. A thousand eyes of Vriska’s stared me down from the clippings. Headlines jumped out at me – “Vriska Serket, 19, Found Dead In Her Dorm” and every variation of it. I felt sick. I’d never liked Vriska, but I wouldn’t wish her fate on my worst enemy.
“I’ve been working with Dave,” Terezi spoke while I took it all in. “He’s been doing some undercover work retracing her steps.”
“What? Why?” I asked, squinting at the red tacks littering the map and the hastily drawn, squiggly red lines that hardly looked like any sort of coherent route.
“Come on, Karkat, surely you aren’t that dense? This smells of foul play,” she hissed, baring her teeth. She spins in the chair to face the desk, spreading out her arms as if to embrace the wall – no – the mural to her dead friend. This time she does hit the lamp and I have to jolt to catch it, carefully replacing it where it belonged.
Terezi continues as if nothing happened. “Don’t you see? It’s there, we’ve just got to find it.”
I think I would have felt better if she had looked and sounded like her usual self. This wasn't the girl I was used to seeing, all sharp smiles and wicked words when no one else could hear. I didn’t like the furrow between her brow and the tight line of her lips when she wasn’t sneering. Her passion for criminal justice had turned to a fury I had never seen in her. She truly believed Vriska had been murdered, and at the time I didn’t know how to tell her otherwise.
“The police –“
“The police are incompetent.” She squints, more for effect than any sort of usefulness. “Teen suicide is up, you know. They saw her swinging and assumed the obvious – they didn’t even do a thorough autopsy, for crying out loud! Amateurs.”
She abruptly stands up, and suddenly she’s right up in my face. “I know Vriska,” she said, and I could feel her breath across my face, “and I know there’s no way she would have killed herself. She didn’t do this. There’s something missing.”
“Tez-”
“Do you believe me or not?” She pushed me, proving surprisingly strong for a crazy blind chick who missed meals and spent most of her time hunched over legal documents. “I need you to believe me, Karkat. Dave thinks I’ve taken this too far. He calls it all a delusion, but it’s not. I’m going to hunt down her killer and I need you to help me.”
Years later, looking back on it all, maybe I should have turned around and walked out. In the long run, it would have saved me a lot of trouble, stress, and pounding migraines. When Terezi looked at me, though, I couldn’t say no. Call me a sucker, but I was in too deep. She was too. Terezi Pyrope, the woman who would become the most famous legislator ever, wouldn’t rest until she had solved what I thought was a made up crime.
Meanwhile I, soon to be lovesick dunce for the rest of this stupid investigation, couldn't rest without her either. I'd stop when she stopped. On a complete god damn whim, I was going to let her drag me down with her, and I was going to be completely okay with it.
FILL: TEAM dave♠karkat♥terezi♥dave
...Let me make one thing very clear to anyone stupid enough to be reading this piece of shit: I don't do things on a whim, ever. I like I plan my stupid stunts out, so that if something fucks up at least I can say I thought I knew what I was doing instead of making up bullshit as I went. Whenever it came to her, though, it was different. She was always different. She just had to glance my way and I'd do anything she asked me because I was just such a god damn pathetic love-struck idiot that pride meant nothing to me when it involved the great Terezi Pyrope, top of the class valedictorian and resident blind girl.
That's why I couldn't say no when she asked me to help her find her friend's killer.
It was early March when Vriska committed suicide, or at least that was what the newspapers said. After the initial discovery Terezi locked herself in her room. She missed the funeral. She missed her classes. She missed every pathetically desperate phone call I made. Her fuck ass of a douchebag best friend was the only reason I knew she was still alive. I caught him slipping out of her room one day, resulting in a quick argument and more than a few bruises.
“Look, she's sleeping, so tone down the yelling Mr. I-Have-Volume-Control-Issues. Just leave her alone, dude,” he murmured angrily. His lip bled from the fight and a bruise was blossoming on his cheek. “She’ll come out when she wants to.”
I argued, hissed that she may be dead by then.
“Nah man, TZ wouldn’t do that.” He shoved me for emphasis before walking off.
For the only time in my life I prayed he was right. Dave Strider was nothing but a jerkass hipster with an obsession with fucking up the definition of irony, but he was also the only one who kept open connection with Terezi during that week. As much as I hated it, I had to trust that he was right, no matter how badly I wanted to punch his face in.
She called me up on the eighth of March. I remember the moment vividly. It was a Sunday, nearly ten at night. My dormmate was blaring National Treasure for the tenth time that week. John himself was draped over the couch, alternating between cramming for some important chemistry test and swooning over Nic Cage’s rugged good looks. (His words, not mine.) Abandoning any hope of getting work done while shitty films were playing in the background, I’d just started ripping into him about the historical inaccuracies of the film when my phone went off.
I didn’t even check the number. I just grabbed it off my desk and hit talk before John could bug me about my ringtone being “Call Me Maybe”. “What nooksucker calls at ten pm on a school night?” I snapped, aggravated.
She laughed. I used to like her laugh, but now it sounded slightly crazed and bitter. Crazier than normal, I guess I should specify, because Terezi was always not quite there. “Karkat, I need you to come to my room.”
“Terezi, what the fucking hell? You can’t just vanish off the god damn face of the Earth and then call me up all like ‘oh yeah, here let me just drop everything, no questions asked, never mind that I’ve been sitting here thinking you’re dead!‘” I was angry because I was relieved, because I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her voice cutting through every dull discussion in Comparative Politics.
(Fuck, I'll just admit it - I missed her.)
“Mmm. I’ll see you in five.” She hangs up before I can get another word in.
I was on her doorstep in two. I’d never run that fast in my entire life. The door to my dorm was left hanging, and I nearly injured myself stumbling down the stairs. The quad between the girl’s dorm and the boy’s dorm was suddenly … I can’t even think of an appropriately shitty metaphor to explain how I felt running across the quad.
I knocked louder than I meant to. The sound echoed down the hallway, but all I heard was the sound of the lock and the tiny crack as she opened the door. It opened no wider, but I knew an invitation when I saw one. I barged in without even asking.
I wish I could say I noticed the painfully obvious out of place things first – the newspaper clippings, pictures, maps of the campus, pages and pages of notes not in her handwriting scattered on her desk and walls – but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything but her tense smile and pale face and how tired and gorgeous she looked in the lamplight. She sat in front of her desk; between her teeth was a pen riddled in teeth marks. She raised one hand in weak greeting, waggling her fingers in my general direction.
“Hey,” she addressed the wall a little to my left.
I swallowed, my mouth feeling like sandpaper. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She could follow my voice well enough to look right at me once I'd talked. “Here.” She waved an arm at the area around her, narrowly missing her desk lamp. It was then that I focused in on the wall. A thousand eyes of Vriska’s stared me down from the clippings. Headlines jumped out at me – “Vriska Serket, 19, Found Dead In Her Dorm” and every variation of it. I felt sick. I’d never liked Vriska, but I wouldn’t wish her fate on my worst enemy.
“I’ve been working with Dave,” Terezi spoke while I took it all in. “He’s been doing some undercover work retracing her steps.”
“What? Why?” I asked, squinting at the red tacks littering the map and the hastily drawn, squiggly red lines that hardly looked like any sort of coherent route.
“Come on, Karkat, surely you aren’t that dense? This smells of foul play,” she hissed, baring her teeth. She spins in the chair to face the desk, spreading out her arms as if to embrace the wall – no – the mural to her dead friend. This time she does hit the lamp and I have to jolt to catch it, carefully replacing it where it belonged.
Terezi continues as if nothing happened. “Don’t you see? It’s there, we’ve just got to find it.”
I think I would have felt better if she had looked and sounded like her usual self. This wasn't the girl I was used to seeing, all sharp smiles and wicked words when no one else could hear. I didn’t like the furrow between her brow and the tight line of her lips when she wasn’t sneering. Her passion for criminal justice had turned to a fury I had never seen in her. She truly believed Vriska had been murdered, and at the time I didn’t know how to tell her otherwise.
“The police –“
“The police are incompetent.” She squints, more for effect than any sort of usefulness. “Teen suicide is up, you know. They saw her swinging and assumed the obvious – they didn’t even do a thorough autopsy, for crying out loud! Amateurs.”
She abruptly stands up, and suddenly she’s right up in my face. “I know Vriska,” she said, and I could feel her breath across my face, “and I know there’s no way she would have killed herself. She didn’t do this. There’s something missing.”
“Tez-”
“Do you believe me or not?” She pushed me, proving surprisingly strong for a crazy blind chick who missed meals and spent most of her time hunched over legal documents. “I need you to believe me, Karkat. Dave thinks I’ve taken this too far. He calls it all a delusion, but it’s not. I’m going to hunt down her killer and I need you to help me.”
Years later, looking back on it all, maybe I should have turned around and walked out. In the long run, it would have saved me a lot of trouble, stress, and pounding migraines. When Terezi looked at me, though, I couldn’t say no. Call me a sucker, but I was in too deep. She was too. Terezi Pyrope, the woman who would become the most famous legislator ever, wouldn’t rest until she had solved what I thought was a made up crime.
Meanwhile I, soon to be lovesick dunce for the rest of this stupid investigation, couldn't rest without her either. I'd stop when she stopped. On a complete god damn whim, I was going to let her drag me down with her, and I was going to be completely okay with it.