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Marquise Lightweb, Vriska Serket to her wigglerhood friends, makes people nervous.
Vriska makes Tavros nervous, too, but he's used to it by now. At this point, there is very, very little left that she could do to him that she hasn't already, and honestly, he doesn't really believe her creative enough to come up with those few new indignities that he can think of. And his is a practiced, almost weary sort of nervousness.
The other rebels aren't so used to it, and most of them haven't quite decided what to make of the overbearing, piratical young highblood. Tavros doesn't blame them; it's taken him half his life to figure out what to do with Vriska, and for that matter he'd be a little put out if any of the others hit on the same solution as he has.
Heh. If you'd told Tavros at six sweeps that he'd be feeling possessive over Vriska Serket, he probably would have stared blankly at you and informed you as politely as possible that you were stark raving mad.
Tonight it doesn't take too much to track her down; all he requires is a gentle sweep of the bestial minds in the area to locate her shying rocks at nut creatures a little way from the rebel base. He thinks maybe he should feel a little guilty at relying on the anger and fear of the little animals to find her, but honestly he's just relieved that it's just stones and not dice she's throwing. The place is probably only a few minutes' hike away for Vriska - less, if she flew - but the uneven ground along the bottom of the ravine is slow going in the four-wheel device.
When he finds her, she's sitting perched at one end of the oddly-shaped construct of tarps and artfully arranged foliage that disguises the hiding place of the gunship she hijacked a few perigees ago. Ever so briefly, he feels the odd inside-out pressure of her mental touch, spiking from the middle of his forehead to the bases of his horns and back again, and he more than half expects for a moment to be turned around and sent back to camp, but Vriska's manipulation is gone as quickly as it appeared - a warning, a reminder? Or maybe simply a greeting.
Besides the quick mental contact, Vriska proceeds to totally ignore his presence for a long moment. An unusually bold nut creature skitters from tree to scrubby tree, dodging the rocks Vriska flings at her and chittering angrily at the trollish invader of her territory. Eventually, Tavros reaches out to commune with the creature: yES, yOU'RE VERY BRAVE, aND CLEVER, i KNOW THE TROLL'S A PROBLEM, i'LL TAKE CARE OF HER,
After the nut creature has chattered off a last censure and scampered away, Vriska heaves a loud sigh and looks down at him, sitting with her legs crossed and her hands braced against her knees. It gives her an almost boxy silhouette against the twitching, shimmering spread of her wings: study of a petulant fairy. "What do you even want, Nitram?"
He shrugs, arching one thick eyebrow as he looks up at her. "I was kind of hoping, that maybe you'd want to talk, and not just terrorize animals a small fraction of your size."
"Wow! Look at that! You're wrong again!" she snaps, wings fanning a bit broader and faster - not enough to even come close to lifting her airborn, but showy. Vriska's good at showy, almost as good as she is at abrasive and snappish.
"I was also hoping, that you'd be, uh, slightly less of a bitch, than you usually are, about whatever it was that happened this evening, back at camp," he adds.
Vriska's wings droop as she puffs her cheeks out; this has the disconcerting effect of making her look like some kind of fluid-filled stress-toy bulging out under a squeezing hand. Tavros is Not Impressed, and makes a point of looking Not Impressed. Vriska seems to be Not Impressed by Tavros being Not Impressed, and he wonders for a moment just how long they can sit there being nonplussed at each other.
"It's not even that big of a deal!" Vriska finally says, her voice cracking pitchy in that way that means that, were she typing, she'd probably be breaking out the eights in force. "Whoever told you it was a big deal was blowing it way out of proportion. Waaaaaaaay out of proportion!"
Tavros sighs, and resists the urge to rub at his temples. "I'm sure that's probably the case, to some degree, but the fact that you're currently, uh, hiding in the woods might indicate, that there's some substance to the uproar."
"I'm not hiding."
"You shoved the rebellion's only trained medic into a wall, and ran away," Tavros points out, crossing his arms.
"So?"
"And she's one of the ones who actually kind of, well, more than tolerates you," Tavros continues. And then, because there doesn't seem to be a lot of point to pretending not to know what Vriska's outburst was about, "You know, no one's going to blame you, if, uh, if the helmswoman doesn't wake up."
"Shut up," Vriska snaps, folding in on herself, pulling her knees to her chest. "Shut up! What do you know? You can't even commune with anything that can properly think."
That's a distinction that Tavros could argue but this doesn't really seem like the time. "I can, actually, listen to people," he points out. "Vriska, pretty much no one who knows anything about pilot mechanics, so, uh, basically the more morbid psionics but anyway, no one actually expected her to survive being pulled out of that rig at all. The ship's records showed that she'd been in there, longer than we've been alive."
There's no response from Vriska for a long moment. Tavros shoves a hand through his hair, leaving his mohawk sticking out at odd angles, and adds, "I know what, uh, you not caring about something looks like, Vriska. This isn't it."
Again, the silence stretches between them, and this time it's Vriska who breaks it, her voice uncharacteristically small. "You're not going to come up here, huh?"
In spite of himself, Tavros chuckles nervously. "Yeah, that's not a thing that's going to be able to happen, not in the forseeable future," he points out, and is taken a little by surprise as she descends, a movement equal parts climbing, sliding, and flying down from her perch on the hidden space ship. Once she starts coming in, though, he has no trouble anticipating her continuing to move toward him, coming to sit on the ground in front of him, her head and folded arms in his lap.
There are words the two of them don't use by mutual unspoken agreement, as if by not saying "pale," or "love" or "pity," by not calling each other moirail, they might escape the censure of friends who are still more than a little uncomfortable with the amount of time that Tavros spends with his sometime tormentor. And it doesn't really work that way in practice, of course; Karkat still makes snide comments tinged with concern, Nepeta keeps an eye on them as if they were a sort of rare bird and she's studying them in their natural environment. Gamzee doesn't say much on the subject of Vriska during their too-infrequent chats, but from what little he does say, it's obvious he worries for Tavros.
And Tavros kind of has to wonder, as he brushes Vriska's unruly hair down over her shoulder and away from the base of the delicate blue wings that sprout at her shoulderblades, if it isn't in some part pride on Vriska's part, not to say what they are - she's chased him red and black, after all, and there was their short-lived ashen thing with Aradia. After all that, to be settling into the pale quadrant instead... and sometimes he wonders if he's just reading her wrong, anyway, and she's just being Vriska and not meaning anything by it.
She speaks, breaking through his musing, although the way that she mutters into his knee he almost doesn't catch her words: "I decided to read Pupa Pan while I was away."
"Yeah?" he prompts, not sure what brought this revelation on.
"I didn't exactly do my homework for that cosplay stunt I pulled when we were kids, huh?" she muses.
Tavros rather has to agree; Pupa's flushed interest in the book is Wendie. If one takes seriously the claim that the story of Pupa Pan is an allegory for the Summoner's uprising, she's probably even meant to be a parody of Marquise Mindfang.
The fairy, on the other hand...
"Well, maybe I wasn't so far off," she adds after a moment.
The fairy girl was Pupa Pan's moirail. Tavros has to smile, just a little. It's as close to a confession as either of them dares step for the moment.