Fic: Troubled Waters

[wintersday]

Title: Troubled Waters
Fandom: Homestuck (Fallen London fusion)
Major Characters/Pairings: Aradia/Vriska
Wordcount: Eight 100 word drabbles
Rating: Teen
POV: Second Person
Summary: Vriska has strange dreams, unbeatable luck, and one last job to do.
Notes: If anyone is wondering, the full message stamped on the Justificande coins in Fallen London is ONE DAY, YOU WILL FORGIVE.




1. A dream of candles.

You dream of zailing through a forest of stalagmites, taller and narrower than those surrounding Gaider’s Mourn, each crowned with a flickering light that doesn’t reach the shadows below. A girl with dusty moth wings sits at the prow, tossing your devilbone dice in one hand. She’s bandaged. Beneath the bandages, she’s burned.

“These are dangerous waters,” she says. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

“Just as I like it,” you say, grinning. The zee always welcomed you.

Southwest, distant, a new light dawns and builds, until the shadows and all your little flames are washed to white nothingness.


2. A message.

You wake lonely in your narrow bunk to find that frost moths have eaten your candle in the night. Your dice are on your bedside table. You don’t remember leaving them there.

“You’re dead,” you say, but that means nothing here. “The Admiralty – ”

You didn’t know what you were aiding. Now you do. You’re not sure it’s possible to sabotage the god they’re building.

“I’m not sorry,” you say, and feel or imagine something like cobwebs or moth wings brushing your face. You reach for your dice: smooth bone, unaccountably warm. Haunted.

You know what she’d want you to do.


3. A memory of dust.

What you remember, steaming east from the Corsair’s Forest, is the Forgotten Quarter and the thing you unearthed there, all wheels in wheels wrought in intricate brass and steel, damaged but whole enough to repair.

“Do you realize,” you asked, “how much they’d pay for something like this?”

“It’s not for them,” she said, and you were pacified by that, and by her teasing mouth, her calloused hands. It was for you and her, like everything else. But still, your thoughts turned toward big plans, big dreams, a bigger score.

Why be a candle, when you could be the sun?


4. A dream of silk.

It’s webs you dream of, when you sleep again, pale sticky rope that drapes the world and binds you as you struggle. A ghost you know saunters across the endless chessboard floor, uncaught. She touches a tall tallow candle to the silk at each of your wrists; the blaze catches quickly and spreads.

You burn and burn, and then you’re free, and you wake screaming. Wherever it is, the eye you gave to the Tree of Ages no longer aches. Yesterday, you could see futures through the emptiness remaining, but all you see now is the dark of the unknown.


5. A gift.

You’re not a Liberationist, but you’ve got contacts in every port.

This one meets you in Khan’s Shadow. She wears a red dress, and as the candlelight falls across her face, you’re struck by a resemblance: older, meaner, no more or less defiant. You used to wonder, as an urchin brat, but she never did.

Your contact hands you the latched box, with its payload of irrigo and gant and stranger colors still, and tells you what to do with it. It’s not a bomb, exactly. Close enough.

Back on board, you spin the wheel, laughing, and turn toward the west.


6. A memory of light.

How it happens, in the past and irrevocable:

There’s a Green-garbed Doctor, who speaks of the great things you’ll do with the Light to guide you. There’s the mechanism, and a sale to make.

She moves to stop you, whip in hand. You retreat, grasping for – anything. A mirrorcatch box, filled with smuggled sunlight.

“Give it up,” you say. The whip flashes. Misses.

You’re too lucky to die once. She’s died and died again, dredging the River for secrets. There’s the scent of seared flesh, ash, and the box clatters empty to the floor.

You’ve won. You always do.


7. A dream of heat.

You’re in the forest of stone candles again, light above you and dark water below, scaling the tallest stalagmite. As you near the top, you slip. A hand lifts you to safety.

She’s there. Her grip is warm and strong. Her bandages come loose when you unwind them, until there’s nothing but crumbling linens and her sun-scarred skin unconcealed. She kisses you then, full of heat and anger; you don’t know what she’s been transfigured into, but the way she kisses hasn’t changed.

What you remember of that dream: moth wings, blood, cleansing pleasure-pain.

Above, the light burns on, unclaimed.


8. A chance.

Mornings pass. This might be the last of them. You stand on deck, looking west toward your journey’s end.

There’s a heavy coin in your hand, picked up in Irem, a Justificande bearing its heavy message: one day. But she never liked to be commanded. You flip it overboard and feel lighter.

Radiant Dreadnauts converge around you, but the Spinneret can outrun any boat in the Neath. She’ll need to. You’re sailing an Unclear Device into the heart of the Dawn Machine. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll survive. If not, there are new waters waiting.

Maybe you’ll find her there.