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Because Vriska couldn't help herself, this was neither a good day nor a bad day. Nor was it, as she kept telling Terezi, a quiet one. It didn't count as quiet if Vriska kept remarking on how much noise she wasn't making in an attempt to elicit guilt, or to spend all the dickishness she had stockpiled during her absence. Not even death had the power to affect Vriska into silence, though it clearly had other lesser powers over her mortal frame, all of them obscure and displeasing to think about.
Vriska had revived somewhere called France in some city called Versailles, a place where Terezi was allergic to literally everything, and nothing could make it stop, not Rose's anesthetizing nasal sprays, nor the ferocious consumption of local plants and wildlife, nor the occasional chucking of flowerpots at Vriska's blurry head. Now Vriska insisted on taking her and Kanaya to gardens. They appealed to Kanaya's aesthetics--or did they? In the white sun it was hard to tell if Kanaya remained with them, or if she had flounced off in a glowing huff again. Even with her eyes watering and nose congested, Terezi was certain that Kanaya had already left, and wondered if there was a point in doing this; but it seemed to appeal to Vriska's need to be good in her third, and maybe final, life. So on they went.
"Surprise," said Vriska, appearing before her with jarring clarity. Terezi took a miserable sniff. Vriska's long, lanky frame was swollen in the middle with dainty, fragrant colors. When they had found her in the new world, she was stealing chickens from the marketplace. Terezi had expected to sense palpable greed from her the whole time, but Vriska instead took pleasure in theatrical generosity. Now she and Rose were engaged in a battle of gifting, one that Rose had won before they even started. It was not difficult to beat Vriska at these, not when her idea of a gift were the fried brains of a cow, or coins stolen from a purse.
Well, Rose had said, prodding at the brains, she was trying, at least. For whatever that meant. Terezi did not believe in awarding points for 'try.'
"Flowers," Terezi said. "Stolen from the gardens! I should have your hand cut off."
"Like you'd even be able to find me," she sneered. Terezi whacked Vriska's knee with her cane. "Argh!"
“Humans would have cut your hand off with a knife,” Terezi said. The symbol of justice in this country was the guillotine. A little bit of amputation went hand-in-hand. Or hand-to-stump, as it were. “Now surrender your arm to the law, Serket!”
“Yeah, sure. See if I ever give you a present again. After all I've done for you—"
"Done to," said Terezi, but to the hedges. She realized belatedly that the cloud of jasmines and roses had moved, and now circled around her. Or were they tulips and gardenias? She ran her tongue over her lip, and couldn’t decide.
"—maybe you'd try being grateful for the effort I'm making, instead of yapping on about how nothing I do is good enough for you."
The air trembled. Terezi realized her slowness too late, and was showered in decapitated floral heads and pollen. She sneezed, and then sneezed again. Vriska shrieked with delighted laughter, and sprinted away. When Terezi didn't follow, she stopped, and came back, breaths shallow and fast.
"What's wrong?" Vriska said, giving Terezi a shove. Terezi gripped her cane more tightly, though her balance was in truth fine, both feet on the ground, head over her shoulders, balanced everywhere except her nose and her pan. "Are you in there?"
"I'm allergic," Terezi declared gravely.
Vriska threw more flowers in her face. "Sorry," she said while Terezi was still wheezing. "You were asking for it, though."
"Just like you're asking for this!" Terezi said, and this time smacked Vriska over the head. The cloud of flowers broke, and scattered around them. She smelled nothing but smears of strawberries and lemons against the green, and the castle in the distance, with its bloody, kingly halls and black-iron gates. They had become a bad comedy duo without meaning to, without the game to fuel old antagonism, and too much forgiveness between them to make sense of anything more complicated than this absurdist farce. Vriska wrestled her down next to the fountain, and pinned her thighs with her bony, plate-sized knees. She pressed a thorny stem into Terezi’s chest and let a little bit of green fiber pierce through the cotton.
“It’s like all the life’s been sucked out of you,” Vriska said, spinning the stem between her thumb and index finger. Vriska smelled dark against the sun, like a saint or one of Eridan’s angels. “Dead, dead, dead.”
Flecks of water tickled Terezi’s brow. She said, “I need a tissue.” She reached for Vriska’s shirt, and Vriska let her. After, she felt an intense need to apologize. They were both owed so many of those. How could they start anew when there were still this many accounts to be drawn and forgiven, when they were still paying the debts of the last life? Vriska had come much more easily into the idea of restorative forgetfulness. But, like Vriska was so fond of reminding her, she had been dead, and the only thing she was guilty of killing now were chickens, and maybe some mice.
She wiped her nose, sniveling, on the bare stretch of her forearm. Those goddamned flowers! All of those guilty colors. She hit Vriska over the head again.
“Ow!”
“Now let me up,” she said, raining down more abuse on Vriska’s head. “Get up!”
“Crazy bitch,” Vriska said, burying her face in Terezi’s shoulder; all this meant was that now the cane fell across the length of her shoulders instead of her head.
“Nothing more than you deserve,” Terezi said, but slowed, until she was clutching her cane and Vriska’s head in one hand, and laying her other between Vriska’s shoulder blades. Her back was flushed with injured blue heat and warm through her shirt. When Terezi breathed through her mouth, the heat was colorless and new, and nothing like blood.