asgardmeridiem

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Who: Nepeta Leijon and Terezi Pyrope
What: Two roleplay buddies reuniting!
When: Shortly after this.
Where: Freya's district
Rating: PG (for PURRING and GROWLING. Here be dragons!)

Nepeta has decided to wait for Terezi in as conspicuous a place as she can find - and so she's out in the middle of a square, her plushies (courtesy of Equius and his drawing power) spread out around her, all the better for Terezi to get s whiff of and find her, as she busily draws on the pavement with chalk - another sure Terezi-bait!

She's incredibly excited to get to see her again. So many awful things had happened during the game that she just wants to shut out recent events from her mind and enjoy the company of her friends in a place that's relatively safe and easy for them to have fun in. And if Terezi is anything, she's fun!

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"Why wouldn't he be?" Nepeta asks her as she looks up, a puzzled expression on her face. "I haven't seen you in a very long time and I thought I never would see you again."

She flops over, looking defeated. "Besides, Equius doesn't approve of giving me too many scritches at once! So it's not like you're doing anything that he would be doing instead." Really, it's only here with his strength reduced that he's been able to touch Nepeta at all, and even that tends to be limited to hugs or picking her up to carry her somewhere. After so much time not touching, he still seemed unsure whether physical affection between moirails was appropriate! (Nepeta is busy teaching him that yes, yes it is.)

Scratchy palms press into Nepeta's shoulders, rubbing down and massaging soothingly. "Equius doesn't approve of most things," she says conclusively, the corner of her inky black lips quirking to the side. Convinced, she flexes her claws back into Nepeta's skin, pressing through the fabric of her coat to draw light circles with the tips of her nails against her shoulderblades.

"What do you want to do later?" Terezi asks, understanding with her superior troll intellect and once-possessed powers of sight to determine that Nepeta is not going to let her up any time soon. "We could draw pictures of Alternia on the walls."

"He's a sillypants about things sometimes," Nepeta agrees readily, but with unmistakeable fondness in her voice. "He doesn't really disapprove of half as many things as he pretends to!"

She rolls back and forth on her Terezi-pile, giggling and purring at all the attention, every inch a kitty in need of love and affection and right now please and yes, just behind her ear like that! Terezi is very astute is recognizing that she won't be getting up any time soon.

"Hmmm, maybe. Not on these walls, though. It's a new life here! I don't mind remembering the old one, but not in here. I want to look furward!"

Nodding, she reluctantly agrees. Terezi doesn't have quite the same perspective. More than anything, she just wants to go home, and the patches of trees she's found around the city have made a nice substitute for her forest back home. Sleeping on a tree branch is not too different from sleeping on a pile, even if she misses sleeping in a recuperacoon terribly. It's been years since she's well and truly slept comfortably.

All she really wants is for things to go back. Vriska could be alive, they could all be back home, and they could forget all the pain and death they've been forced to endure by the stupid game. Sometimes, she feels better being in Asgard, away from the psychological pressure of the game's mission; others, she gets angry. Angry that for all that pain and effort they've been snatched away, stolen from their timeline, and nothing even matters anymore because they never get to go back. Everything she wanted--comfort, a new universe, safety of her friends--is all right here, and it's nothing like the way she wanted it to be.

Her claws tighten in the folds of Nepeta's jacket unintentionally.

"Terezi?" Nepeta stops playing the kitten for a moment, sensing her friend's change in mood. She's not sure what just happened, but she guesses it must be something she said, and that worries her. She'd only meant that she was trying to make the best of things, make a new life for herself here.

She hadn't thought of what it must be like, the chance of going back and having to go on with so many friends dead, so many things changed forever and no certainty and barely any hope for the future.

She wraps her arms around her, hugging her tight. "What's wrong?"

"It's just kind of strange being here, sometimes," Terezi says, haltingly. "I wish none of this had ever happened!

"We spent so long and so many of us hurt and died to save our old universe... and now it's completely pointless! Why couldn't they have taken us before all this happened? Or after we either died out or succeeded?

"It's unfair," she finishes with a flourish, hissing through her teeth as her hands clutch against Nep's back.

"You've only just got here though," Nepeta points out, patting Terezi's shoulder reassuringly. "Maybe you just need some time to get used to it? It isn't fair but a lot of things about Alternia, and about the game, weren't fair at all either."

She sighs and lets Terezi squish her tightly, not really minding. "I just think that maybe we'll be happy here."

After Nepeta speaks, Terezi falls silent, and stays that way for perhaps a bit longer than she should. She purrs faintly in her chest in an attempt to comfort herself as she pets Nep's back, ruffles her hair, strokes the soft surface of her horns. Could they be happy here? That's the winning question, isn't it. And the problem is that Terezi actually thinks that they could be happy in Asgard, but that simultaneously makes her angrier. Why did they have to be ripped out of their task in order to be happy? Why did they have to leave other versions of themselves behind to suffer in the same impossible task they themselves had been fighting for perigees?

It's too convenient. It makes everything else they've survived feels useless, and that makes her want to tear apart the stupid universe tree they've living on with her claws and rearrange it until it makes something akin to sense.

She sighs. "Do you think if someone had gone back in time and told us all--back when we were young, before Sgrub and everything--that all this would happen that we would have been different? Tried to be different?" Not been so ready to murder each other. Terezi tries not to think about that, but Vriska's face has been painted in her subconscious in indelible blue ink, blue as the blood she'd cried over while she cleaned it off her sword.

Nepeta thinks about that for a while, and then slowly shakes her head. "I don't know. Maybe we would have been. Or maybe things were just meant to turn out this way. But what I do know is that we can't let ourselves think like that. I'd never stop wondering if I could have saved Equius if I did! But all the time I wasted thinking about changing things would be time I'd be missing out on actually spending with him, now that we're still together here. We just have to take what we've been dealt and move onwards with it, don't we? We're trolls, we can adapt to anything!"

"I guess," she agrees weakly, her hands going still. Lost in thought, she muses over Nepeta's words, over her own inner demons, over the deeper meanings of these things.

Finally, she takes a deep breath, and asks: "Do you know I killed Vriska?"

Nepeta had still been busy trying to comfort Terezi with pettings and gentle pats, even if her words weren't the most comforting - she was well aware of that. She simply thought they were the truth, and more helpful than any amount of empty platitudes.

But she goes still as well at that. "You killed Vriska?" she asks, knowing what she'd heard but finding it rather difficult to believe.

Nep's shock hits her like a punch to the nose, but Terezi ignores the spasms in her bloodpusher and continues talking, trying to keep her voice calm, even though she's shaking all over. "I made a bet with her, knowing I'd lose. When she turned to leave, I stabbed her in the back." It feels so heavy to say, bitter and final on her tongue. She wants to spit it out, swallow the words and lock them up in the bone cage of her chest where they can't escape again, but she can't unsay it; can't unlive the truth.

"It was the only option," she insists quietly, feeling the need to defend herself. "If I hadn't stopped her she would have gotten everyone killed. I saw it, and I couldn't let it happen.

"So I killed her." And spent the rest of the sweep suffocating under the guilt and regret.

Nepeta nods, slowly, quietly resuming her comforting of her friend, her hand rubbing her back this time. She's not sure if it's more of a shock or simply a surprise to find all this out - no, definitely a shock, and yet if someone could ever get rid of one of the scourge sisters, it would have to be the other, wouldn't it?

She knows how badly things had broken down between them, and yet she doesn't doubt that Terezi really did think that what she'd done, she'd done for the best. She'd never have killed Vriska for anything less. "You couldn't let it happen," she agrees. "But...it still must have hurt you a lot," is the guess she makes.

Her hands are shaking against Nepeta's back; she nods jerkily. "Yes," she grinds out past the convulsing muscles in her cheeks then presses her face into her friend's chest, arms winding tightly around her shoulders to pull her closer, effectively concealing the hot trails of tears smearing over her face. Her glasses crunch against her nose but Terezi doesn't care.

"Yes," she answers again, her voice fractured and raw.

She looks down at her friend sadly, feeling the way the tealblood is shaking, and she's terribly unhappy to see how she's curling herself up so small, until she almost seems smaller than Nepeta herself. She can only imagine what it had cost her to kill Vriska, because even if they'd fought, she'd still meant a lot to her for the longest time.

She pets her hair, and lets her cry and cling without commenting on either of those things, and finally just whispers, "Thank you...thank you for trying to save all of us."

"Most of you were already dead at that point," she croaks, words muffled against Nep's shirt. "Vriska was going to fight Noir, and he would have followed her trail back to the meteor. He killed everyone, but I saw--

"Karkat was--" She closes her mouth. She doesn't need to explain it, she thinks. Even with the complicated turn her dealings with Karkat had turned, she'd had strong romantic feelings for him. Nepeta also lost a boy she loved; she would understand. Terezi's cheek presses against a warm, damp spot on Nepeta's chest, but she doesn't mind; mostly she's embarrassed, flushed and shy. Loudly, she sniffs.

"Shh. You did what you had to. If it was the only way..." Vriska didn't think things through, Nepeta knew that all too well. And Gamzee had killed her and Equius - no, if she'd seen the future and been given the chance to change things, wouldn't she have too?

She just keeps on petting her hair, comforting her the only way she really knows how, making small hushing noises. And no, it's not pale, she doesn't pity Terezi, she simply doesn't want to see her so unhappy.

"I'm sorry," Terezi says abruptly, sitting them up and sliding out from underneath Nepeta. Her cheeks are flushed teal and she scrubs a fist against her eyes, then re-adjusts her glasses on her nose. She avoids sniffing in Nepeta's direction. "We were supposed to be having fun, and I got upset and made everything uncomfortable." Squirming, she slides to the edge of the pile, wondering if she should go.

"Don't apologize for that!" No, no, where does she think she's going? If Terezi thinks that Nepeta will allow her to just slide away after all of that, she has another thing coming. She grabs an armful of plushies and launches herself at her like a giant, plushie-padded cannonball.

She falls back again with a substantial "oof!", buried under a mountain of plush animals and a not-so-plush kitty-troll. "Nepeta!" she fake growls, not really upset but playing at offense anyway.

Terezi writhes free of the swarm of plushies and launches herself forward, tackling Nep backwards.

Hey, she objects! She is very plush and cuddly. "Terezi!" she pretends to complain when she's tackled in returned, but she's laughing the whole time. She seems to have startled Terezi out of her unhappiness, at least for the moment, and to have got her to stay. It's all she wants for now.

Letting out a loud, exaggerated roar, Terezi settles herself across Nepeta's thighs and shoves her shirt up with one hand, then presses her face into her soft belly and scrubs her forehead against it vigorously, snickering through the volume of her fearsome growling.

"Rrrrr, the hungry dragon growls! I'm going to devour your delicious warm insides and then leave the rest of you out for the winged scavengebeasts, and then all of your priceless paintings will be mine!"

Nepeta squeals and flails about, laughing nearly hysterically. "Noooo! No, spurr me! I will draw you magnificent paintings all your own! And we can share my next hunt if you're hungry! Don't eat meeee!"

She laughs harder as her tummy is nuzzled, getting her fingers into Terezi's hair and fluffing it up into a gigantic mess.

It's too late! Terezi is poising her fangs over Nepeta's belly, and then she bites down, growling as she does, nipping all over her stomach while rumbling low in her throat and making a horrible show of devouring her!

"The mighty dragon is not appeased! She proceeds to tear into her helpless prey."

And then her claws appear, flanking each of Nepeta's sides, and Terezi starts at tickling her furiously.

Unfortunately, it is a tiny bit too much for an ever-sharp troll to take. When teeth are bared and even the slightest amount of biting happens there's the small beginnings of a growl, at first quiet enough to ignore, but then claws appear at her sides and the tickling is met with the ferocious and quite in earnest pounce of a kittytroll urge on by her instincts to go into full-defense mode.

Whoops.

Sorry, Terezi. She may find herself pinned to the carpet if she doesn't manage to react in time.

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