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[FIC] your possessions will possess you

My ladystuck fic for @prospitian-monarch, a remix of their fic don’t need no halloween. Homestuck, ~3k words, Terezi/Vriska. warnings: implied/referenced child abuse.

A ghost story is the past nipping at the heels of the present. Or sometimes, gnawing. Your name is Vriska Serket, and you are Terezi Pyrope's own personal ghost story.

[AO3]

The past isn't dead. It's not even past.

— Mary Shelley

You are absolutely certain Mary Shelley said that.

A ghost story is the past nipping at the heels of the present. Or sometimes, gnawing. Your name is Vriska Serket, and you are Terezi Pyrope's own personal ghost story.

At first glance, Terezi and her mother remind you of you and yours, once upon a time. A single mother and a little girl, moving into the same house, separated only by time. But Terezi's mother's shark smile softens when she looks at her daughter, while your mother's would grow sharper, when it didn't twist into a scowl. And even at six, Terezi sits and reads while you, you ran wild.

You are unmoored from the present; as a ghost you are only past. So you remember when you, too, were six. Your smile wasn't as sharp and your hair wasn't as tangled and you wanted fervently to be a pirate. You remember it, and you make it so. You are six again, and some part of you even believes it. You are a shadow of the past, lingering in the present, lingering in Terezi's bedroom. In your bedroom.

This house that opened wide, this bedroom that held you safe. They are yours as much as hers, aren't they? More so, even. The shelves have Terezi's books instead of your toys, but you belong to this house, and so it belongs to you.

Terezi lives in this house, the present tense to your past. In a way, you conclude later, she belongs to you, too.

But first, first there is childhood. It is not what you expect: you expect to lurk in the shadows, but Terezi calls you into the light. She is eager for truth, eager for justice, even as a child. (Not that you really think of her as a child, when you yourself are one too. The present is past is past.)

She is straight and to the point, seeking truth like an arrow seeks its mark. On the third day after she moves into the house, she says, deliberately, "I know you're here."

"You can see me?" you say, stepping into the light. Reaching for her mind with yours, creating the bond that lets you solidify before her. It is easy - her mind is open to possibility, open to you. It has never been easy before.

"It's rude to hide," says Terezi, matter-of-factly, and from then on you are friends.

You talk and play together, when Terezi is not at school. She says you are her best friend. She is your best friend too, of course, but that doesn't mean as much given that you have no other friends. Not that you want any others.

You bask in the light, but only for Terezi. You are hers alone. One day Terezi invites home a friend from school, Aradia. This house is no place for her, an interloper. Aradia does not get to see you. She gets you tugging on her hair, knocking over her cup. She gets a message: You are not welcome here.

Terezi glares at you when you do this, having somehow developed the knack of seeing you even when you are not visible. What Terezi does not understand is: Aradia does not belong here, no matter how interested in ghosts she may be. This place is for you, and for Terezi, and (you suppose) Terezi's mother. Not Aradia. You are pleased when she leaves.

You mean to stay out of sight for longer afterwards, to teach Terezi a lesson, but that night you end up sitting on the ceiling above Terezi's bed: the specter of the past looming over the present. She wakes, if briefly, and sees you, blinking twice in acknowledgement. She does not seem particularly concerned that you hang in the air above her like a spider from a web, and goes back to sleep.

The next day, you divulge some information about your life, or at least about your possessions, which is more or less the same thing. Casually, you point out the magic 8-ball, which Terezi found in her first week here but has otherwise gone unremarked.

You say, "I got that for my eighth birthday," never mind that as far as either of you are concerned right now you are six. "My mother took me to the toy store and let me pick it out. It was my favorite."

What you don't say is: it was your eighth birthday and it was a magic 8-ball and you thought that meant something, thought it might have the answers. Countless times you nearly smashed it for its uselessness, but always you held back. You knew your mother wouldn't buy you another one, and besides it was a tangible reminder of better days.

It is yours; of all the people and things in this house, it is perhaps the most yours. But as with all physical objects, interacting with it is difficult; it is more useless to you now then it ever was, meaningful only as a memory. (You, too, are a memory.)

You say, magnanimously, "But I'm letting you have it, because I'm soooooooo nice."

"Objection!" says Terezi, because everything has to be about the law with her. "You aren't even 'so nice' with one o, not to mention eight. I hold you in contempt of the court."

But she takes your hand, warmer than you could ever dream of being, and you hold the magic 8-ball together.

It takes her a year to ask how you died, one night while she lies in her bed (your bed) with her garish teal and red comforter pulled up to her neck. You are seven now, perched at the foot of her bed, and you dodge the question with ease.

"Were you murdered?" she asks. In the stories you'd read when you were alive, ghosts were always the spirits of people who were murdered. Whether or not this is always true, it is true for you. She continues, "Because my mom's a lawyer and so am I. Or at least, I will be when I grow up, so you should tell me who did it, and I'll be sure to put them safe behind bars!"

You were murdered, but you don't linger here for lack of justice. Your murderer is already 'safe behind bars.' You're just a remnant. You're just the past.

Dodge. "I know you're going to be a lawyer," you say, rolling your eyes. "You only tell me every other hour. You're only a lawyer every time we play pretend."

Terezi moves with the current, accepting the subject change. "Nope! I'm a dragon lawyer when we play pretend. You can't own dragons in real life, which is why it's pretend. The lawyer part's real though." But the question lingers in her mind, and you know she won't forget.

One day, you tell Terezi, very casually, that it's easier to make Terezi see you than anyone else. You think it's probably because Terezi is so open to truth, open to you, although you don't say that. There are, probably, other people with similarly open minds. But you've never met any of them, and besides none of them are Terezi.

Here's another reason Terezi belongs to you: you take just a little bit of her, all the time, and so she can see you, hear you, touch you. At one point, you tell Terezi this - not the part about belonging, but the part about taking. If you you were really good, an actually good person, you'd let go, and let Terezi have all of herself back. Instead, you tell her; in essence leaving the decision to her: if she took offense to you taking a bit of her, she could clam up her mind, slam it closed, and leave you in the dark.

Instead, she says, "I don't mind," tilting her head slightly. This is, of course, the outcome you'd hoped for, because you are selfish.

Ever since dying the senses have been crossed for you. Colors have tastes, smells, ideas. When Terezi is nine and paints her nails in ridiculous, clashing stripes of teal and red, you inform her of three things: it looks awful, it smells awful, but the colors are nice enough by themselves. "The red tastes like cherries," you tell her.

Terezi laughs, but not at your crossed senses. "Can you do better?"

"Maybe if my fingers didn't sometimes disappear? On second thought, I still might be able to do better."

When you were alive you painted your nails a single color: cerulean blue. It was also the color of your lipstick, and your eyeshadow. You didn't always bother with makeup, but all the same that color was the one you claimed as yours.

You are the past, you are a bundle of memory and thought; you are a girl named Vriska, who used to be alive and now you simply are. Hanging in the air like a spider, wrapped up in your past. This house is filled with a web of memories. Your memories; your house; your 8-ball; your Terezi. You are, magnanimously, willing to admit these things belong to Terezi too, just as you do.

Terezi is sharp, like an arrow or a sword or a smile. She is confident, determined, alive.

Some nights, she is too awake, too alive, wired, wound up. On these nights, you and your disappearing fingers brush Terezi's hair. You soothe her; you settle her; you drain her, just enough for her to sleep.

Some moment, unremarked upon by Terezi but intimately familiar to you, you stop growing. Thirteen again, and twice as angry.

You can't follow Terezi to school, never have been able to. At first, this was just more time alone, waiting for her to come back. But over the years school even intrudes into her life at home. Terezi is more dedicated to her schoolwork than you ever bothered to be, completing her homework diligently and on time.

You can't help her; can't follow her; can only distract her, when she is studying. Gone are the days when she would come home from school, make a PB&J sandwich, lie on the living room floor and talk to you. Now she comes home, grabs an apple, and works on her assignments. She doesn't tell you to leave, but school takes her from you all the same, taking more and more of the time that was once yours.

When she's fourteen, you rip up her homework one day while she's eating dinner. She is leaving you bit by bit, she's being pulled away. Doesn't she understand you belong to each other? "You don't need that junk anyways," you tell her, but she only frowns.

For her fifteenth birthday party, Terezi invites two of her friends from school. Aradia again, and a new boy, Tavros. They don't get to see you; they have no right.

You grudgingly tolerate their presence in your house, you allow their attachment to Terezi even though she is not theirs, but several hours in Tavros picks up the magic 8-ball from its shelf by the stairs and somehow that is

the last straw

and you cannot stand this anymore, cannot stand your house and Terezi and 8-ball to be taken away from you.

"Stop!" you call, but Tavros can barely hear you.

"Did you hear something, Aradia?" he asks.

You give them another chance. "Put it down!" you demand.

"Is someone else in the house?" Tavros asks.

Aradia approaches him, looking curious. "Maybe it's that ghost Terezi used to say lived in her house when we were kids," she offers.

Used to say...

"We still are kids," says Tavros, but he and Aradia and Terezi are already two years older than you ever got to be and they are taking her away, they are taking what is yours.

You reach out with your mind, you reach for the bond between you and Terezi and take; you take Aradia's will and she begins to scream, even as you take her hands and give Tavros a harsh shove, watching in satisfaction as he tumbles down the stairs.

Aradia collapses afterward, but you pay her no mind. You pay no one any mind and let go of everything, hanging there like a storm hangs in the sky. The rage dissipates slowly, and as it washes away it leaves behind nothing but a terrible knowledge: look at what you've done. What you've become.

The house is quiet, a yawning silence. Downstairs, in the very kitchen that swallowed you whole, Terezi lies on the floor in a jumbled heap. (You have taken too much.) In that quiet, you force yourself into corporeality, you pick up the phone and you dial 911, clutching the receiver until it falls through your hands, clattering to the floor.

She is gone for weeks, hospitalized, and even once she is back, for two days you do not appear to her, because that would require taking a little bit of her and you have already taken so much. She is legally blind now, with a brand new cane to match: white at the top, cherry red at the end.

You are selfish, Vriska Serket. On the third day you reveal yourself to her. "It was lonely without you," you say, because you don't know how to say anything else. You barely know how to say even that: your voice is blank, bleak. Empty.

"I know."

That summer, as Terezi makes up her schoolwork, sitting beneath a tree in her backyard and studying, you take to fading into view. A message: I am here. I am always here. You take to flickering. You take as little of her as you can: as much as it takes to appear to her, and never more. You pretend that taking less of her now makes up for what you did then.

Terezi tells you, "I don't think I'll go back to school."

Once, this would have sparked excitement, a hope you could not name. What you feel now is the barest flicker of that hope. "I didn't take you for a dropout, Pyrope," you say.

"No, I mean, I think I'm going to ask my mom about homeschooling. Maybe that way I can even finish high school early."

"And then... college?" you guess, unsteadily. Crushing that barest, selfish flicker of hope because what about your actions would make her want to stay?

"Yes," she says. Laughs. "I still want to be a lawyer, you know. If you had doubts for a moment."

Silence falls for a moment; you feel like you have been sentenced. Two or three years; then Terezi will leave this house, leave you, and there is not even an objection you can make, not now. Finally, you say, "I know you'll get accepted somewhere nice. Maybe the best, even."

After a while, Terezi says, "You can talk to me more often, if you like."

"I still have to take the energy to form from you," you say. A reminder. An admission. A confession.

"I don't mind," she says. An echo.

The next Saturday, Terezi buys two orange creamsicles, one for her and one for you, like she did years ago, when at least one of you was innocent. She eats hers sitting on the back stoop; you sit next to her and hold your creamsicle, staring out into the backyard. "It smells like stars," you tell her, and she agrees.

That night, Terezi lets you brush her hair again; you are more gentle than you have ever been, alive or dead. "Sorry," you whisper, in that liminal time right before she falls asleep.

One day that summer, Terezi returns from an outing and says to you, "Serket is a nice name."

You tilt your head up, fixing your gaze on the ceiling, flickering in and out of sight. "If you say so."

She never did ask again how you died, but she must have remained curious all this time, and now she knows. Knows how your mother, in one of her rages, stabbed you with a kitchen knife, over and over. You tried to cling to life, and when that failed you clung twice as hard to presence, an endless battle not to be swallowed up by nothingness like this house swallowed you whole.

Finally -

"Have you been happy?" Terezi asks you, sitting by your side in the attic loft, feet dangling off the edge.

You blink, startled. "Of course," you say, because that is all there is to say. Anger and guilt aside, with Terezi you are not alone, and you have always been so, so lonely.

Terezi takes your hand, warm as always. Her lips are warm, too, when she kisses you. She tastes of textbooks and determination and hope and sadness and life, and orange creamsicles, and love.

She pulls away after a moment. "Goodbye," she says, quietly.

The sentence has come to pass. "Okay," you say, and press your forehead against Terezi's. Surrender. Letting go. "Okay."

In the end she doesn't close off her mind like a door slamming shut, or even like a clam closing. Instead she reaches for the bond, the string between you and her, and unwinds it from her mind, letting it go. Slowly you fade away, and she is alone.

if you are not very careful your possessions will possess you —Marina and the Diamonds, "Oh No!"

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