Chapter Text
Thursday, November 14th
The glass smashes against the wall, shattering and littering jagged shards across the floor. The ceralun blooded troll lets her hand grip the mouth of the, now broken bottle, tightly as she steps carefully on the creaky wood planks of her floor. She survived her mother for several years, she sure as hell wasn’t going to be killed by an ambush in her own hive. There are sounds of movement around the corner of her hallway, footsteps too fast and frantic to belong to one of those things; but she held the bottle in a stabbing stance nonetheless. She is getting closer to them, and she is sure with how the volume of the steps increases. When she is at the end of the hall her arm is already raised, moving to strike.
“Holy shit! It’s me! Fuck, I’m not a brain eater!”
The panicked voice of Dave Strider reaches Vriska before she can go in for a second stabbing. Her eyes scan over his defensive stance, one of his raised hands was slashed from the bottle and bleeding from a gash.
“Jegus Dave, why the fuck are you in my hive?” Vriska lowers her stance but her guard is still up, but when was it never. She lets a hand rest on her hip as she looks at the cowering man, fixes his stance and takes the time to properly react to his wound, hissing from the burning sting before answering her.
“Supplies? Canned beans are a fucking gold nugget these days.” He replies, his tone suggesting it was an obvious guess, which of course it was but not for, Vriska ‘i’m going to fuck with you because I feel like it’ Serket.
“What makes you think I’m going to have anything other than disgusting troll delicacies?” She counters with an arm cross. Dave gave her a stone faced look that suggested an unspoken “really?” He, of course, has witnessed her chug down a disgusting amount of sweetened condensed milk to know she was very fond of ‘human food.’ She only smirks at him before pushing past him with a shoulder brush.
“I don’t think it’s safe to be running around in a binder.” She calls back from a different room. “If you’re going to be on my team you can’t be fainting because of your sad shriveled lungs.”
Dave only rolls his eyes even though she was frustratingly right. It is only seconds and Vriska is back in the hall holding a white box shape. She throws it at him like she’s pitching a baseball and Dave can hardly register it before it hits his chest.
“You’ll need to work on your instincts too.” She harps on before disappearing again. Dave grumbles and picks up the box. With the bright red cross against the white he gathers it's a first aid kit. He walks off to the living room and sits on Vriska's busted up couch, clicking open the metal box in his lap. He carelessly wipes the wound on his hand with an alcohol wipe and tightly wraps it with gauze. He has done this many times, there's a sense of muscle memory in his bones.
Vriska makes her way into the room holding two handguns. She tosses one to Dave, and he's finally on edge enough to know to catch it.
“I'm fucking scarce on food so we're going to have to scavenge wimpy Strider.” She explains while pulling her hair back with a rubber band.
“Who says I'm grouping up with you?” He asks in a weak attempt of defiance. Vriska only laughs at him and pats his shoulder.
“Gear up Strider, we're going brain smashing.”
Dave recalls a memory from two weeks ago, before society completely crumbled. He was on the couch with his long term boyfriend Claire, watching some cheap zombie flick to pass the time.
He remembers making an off handed comment about the logistics of taxidermy one of those things. Claire had given a raised eyebrow at the query but ultimately humored him with a long pointless debate.
Now that he's in the reality his mind was further away from taxidermy, but it was overflowing with Claire. Where was he? When the outbreak spread horribly they reported it on the news before the lines went down. Dave had been home and Claire had gone out to pick up take out. He had held off on his own, waiting for Claire to come back, but unfortunately his necessities were dwindling.
His neighborhood was in disarray, and the town was dry of everything, he decided to carjack and travel to the next town over. He hoped he would run into Claire, but turns out the only people left was a manic troll girl who was foaming at the mouth at the opportunity of bossing someone around.
She took more charge with the aforementioned 'brain smashing' while he stuffed whatever he could into his backpack. It wasn't like he was trying to shove off the labor, Vriska was just objectively better at it than he was. Besides, he had learned the art of shoving away as much food as you could in inconvenient small spaces long ago.
Dave continues his scavenge in the abandoned house, prioritizing canned goods but not scoffing at the food that could spoil. Most of it was still fresh and edible, though that wouldn't be the case for very long. He didn't stop until his backpack was heavy and hard to zip. He walked out of the kitchen and saw Vriska at the door swinging around a machete.
"I think I'll ditch the gun." She says more to herself rather than Dave. "My aim kind of sucks anyway, I'll be waaaaaaaay deadlier with this."
"Awesome. We should get going nothing else is fitting in here anyways." Dave walks past her and out the door. A unanticipated hand touches him followed by a wet gurgling sound. He freezes up, dropping his backpack, as the stench of death fills his nose.
They say when you die your life flashes before your eyes, but Dave had enough near death experiences to know that was all bullshit. You saw nothing but blackness, and felt nothing but sheer panic and defiance as all your instincts fought against the inevitable.
This was still true now, however, among the internal demands for survival one name rang louder and clearer above it all. His mind, his body, his soul, it all screamed for Claire.
The walking corpse leaned closer to his face, opening its maw, but was abruptly interrupted with a slash to the skull before it could start munching on Dave's face. He closes his eyes as brains and fluids splatter on his face and coat his shades. The infected drops to its knees, no longer with a brain to function in whatever nature defying way it did, which Dave jumps back before it could collapse on him.
Vriska, still in a stance and panting heavily, allows a prideful smile to beam on her face.
"See? more deadly."