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As Terezi tapped her cane along the gravel path, artfully lined with sculpted evergreen topiary bushes, she couldn’t keep a suspicious idea off of her mind. “You know, Human Valentine’s Day is still a week away.”
“I know,” Aradia answered, patting Terezi’s hand on her arm.
“This kind of feels like we’re doing something special.”
“This is Rose and Kanaya’s dinner soiree and garden party. Not Human Valentine’s Day.”
“But you have this habit of trying to surprise me on holidays, and I keep figuring out your plans, and then the surprise is ruined. I’ve been trying to not do that, but I don’t think you want me to dumb myself down for you.”
“Of course not! But I can promise, this is a dinner soiree and garden party held by two of our friends. Just like it says on the nutrition cylinder label.”
Terezi pursed her lips at Aradia. Something still didn’t add up, but pressing too much harder onto the point might cast doubt on whether she trusted her matesprit. “Well, when you’re dressed up like a delectable present, how can I not think it’s a Human Valentine’s Day gift?”
Araida laughed, her white crescent smile and dark flush cheeks smelling sweeter than Kanaya’s gardening. The suspicion cycled to the backseat of her brain to be examined and either acted on or laughed about later. For now, she’d enjoy her own snazzy power suit and Aradia’s lovely poofed and sparkled dress. Terezi thanked this new and wonderful world for still having a concept of ‘power lawyers’ from the previous incarnations of Earth. Wearing a dark blazer and pants made her feel like a legislacerator mixed with a ‘ninja,’ like someone who could deliver justice in the blink of an eye and disappear in a plume of smoke after. Occasions for formal attire were rare (and three-fourths of the time created by the Mrs. Lalonde-Maryams, like tonight) but Terezi loved how they dazzled her nose.
The Lalonde-Maryam manor had an eccentric style to it, with lots of symbols of grandiose architecture meshed together in ways intended to please the ladies of the house with little regard for who else it pleased. They had arches and columns and waterfalls and drapes, huge windows and little windows and an honest-to-jegus tower looming over it all. Terezi loved it just fine, since it reminded her of the tree hive where she grew up, but more wealthily ostentatious. Either way, the colors stood out from each other clearly and made getting around on her own enjoyable.
When they reached the front terrace, Rose swung open the enormous door before they could even knock and ushered them inside. The foyer stretched deeper into the mansion, with a sweeping staircase serving as a centerpiece.
“How lovely of you to join us,” Rose greeted.
“Are we first?” Aradia asked.
“No, a few others are here, in the primary parlor.”
“Is that one to the right or left? I forget.”
“It’s where you’ll hear the sounds of a completely unholy ruckus.”
“Say no more,” Terezi answered with a wide smile. “Though since you could be describing any number of our goober friends, I’ll have to start licking to decide who you’re talking about.”
Kanaya’s voice drifted from upstairs: “Rose? Who’s at the door?”
“Come see for yourself,” Rose replied.
And Terezi sniffed at the top step Kanaya Maryam in a new, incredible creation of high fashion and too many dark romance novels. The smells of her design choices reached the bottom of the stairs: glitter and a huge bell skirt and a ribbed collar like a dragon’s wing swooping behind her head. Beside her, Aradia said a simple “Wow.”
“Another stunning entrance,” Rose commented as Kanaya’s shoes carefully tapped down the stairs, closer and closer until she was in hugging distance. Even with three dozen petticoats forming a perimeter around Kanaya’s form, Terezi could get close enough to give her a welcoming hug.
“I don’t create couture for the approval,” Kanaya commented to her wife.
“Oh, my mistake. So you’ve been ascending the stairs again and again to wait for new arrivals as part of an exercise regimen? Because that explains a lot.”
“I also don’t create couture to let it wilt in my wardrobifier after making only a measly handful of first impressions,” Kanaya retorted while giving Aradia a hug.
Terezi snickered. “Or you could wear the same dress to more than one event.”
“Never! Besides, tonight is a special occasion!”
One eyebrow quirked up before Terezi could stop it. “Is it now?”
“Oh—um, I mean—”
“It’s for Calliope,” Rose jumped in. “She never had a birthday of her own, so we’ve chosen this date, but it’s a surprise, so don’t tell her.”
“Shouldn’t she have a wriggling day too, since cherubs hatch?” Aradia asked.
“My mistake, I was a little anthropocentric there, but I’ll happily update my nomenclature to her preferred terminology. Now, why don’t you continue to the parlor?”
Aradia pulled Terezi forward while Terezi’s mind sparked, neurons firing and connecting at the speed of thought. Already Aradia’s insistence this event had nothing to do with Terezi looked shaky. Then again, the announcement of Callie’s new assigned larval awakening day had surprised Aradia. So she hadn’t been informed? But that would be an advantageous strategy if she delegated some of the surprise planning to Rose and Kanaya, in order to give herself plausible deniability—
Aradia leaned over and kissed Terezi’s temple. “I can hear your brain buzzing.”
“Sorry.”
“Not a critique, just a reminder. This is a nice night out with friends. And since it’s Callie’s wriggling day, there’ll be cake!”
“I’ll save my excitement until I know what flavor it is.”
“If you can find it in yourself to relax, I’ll let you lick frosting off my cheek.”
“Just your cheek?”
Aradia gave her a little shove, and Terezi cackled. But she knew what Aradia was getting at; just about every flavor tasted amazing when Terezi licked it off her matesprit.
Arriving in the parlor, Terezi did hear an unholy ruckus. In the middle of a comfortable ring of cushy sofas and inviting lounge chairs, three people surrounded the coffee table, excitedly stacking everything they could find: first coasters at the base, then some candlesticks, and then decorative spheres and a few books.
“Hey, why aren’t you using the books as a foundation?” Aradia asked them.
“Because that’s less of a challenge!” Jade answered. “Also, hi! I’d hug you but I’m busy.”
“What next?” Jake asked his two co-builders. “I still think we should make use of the snuffboxes.”
“What the hell even is a snuffbox?” Dave counter-queried. “It sounds like an old-timey euphemism for a coffin.”
“It’s just a really fancy little box, not big enough for anything but looking pretty. Perfect for stacking!”
“Whatever, just so long as none of you are cheating with Space or Hope.”
“Never!”
“Scout’s honor!”
Terezi felt Aradia’s hair shift as she turned her head. “Karkat, you’re not playing?”
“Of course the fuck not, it’s juvenile and stupid,” Karkat answered. “And when this game started up, Rose said Dave was going to break something, and I don’t want to be involved when some treasured possession of Rose’s shatters into a bazillion pieces. It’s going to be Strider’s fault and Strider’s alone.”
Karkat’s tone tasted too bitter for someone in the throes of a flushed romance, but Terezi had figured he and Dave always had at least a little pitch tension running through their relationship. Someone as ornery as Karkat wouldn’t be satisfied with anything else.
But…
No, now wasn’t a time for buts. This wasn’t weird for Karkat to be mad at Dave. This was Callie’s surprise wriggling day and Rose and Kanaya’s soiree and garden party and Terezi was here to have fun. Aradia said so.
But…!
With Aradia urging again, Terezi found a plush couch and sat down, sniffing around for small changes to the room while Aradia asked questions: how’s everyone been, what are they up to, little things. SkaiaNet was going great, exploring the deep reaches of space was
super
great, and Dave just wrapped up a comic arc of his, though he was considering doing a multimedia epilogue of some kind, if he could just decide on a social media platform for it. The conversation slowed down their construction efforts, which just gave Terezi more time to appreciate the intricate design of their house of everything-but-cards. Still, Rose and the Light were so rarely wrong; that thing was going to tumble and something beautiful was going to shatter.
Aradia was in the middle of discussing how much cooler coffins would be if they were decorated like human snuffboxes when more guests arrived. Terezi smelled the stupid buckteeth of John Egbert, then Callie’s smooth green skull and lime cheek swirls, adorable as ever.
“Woah, holy shit,” John eloquently commented on the now sprawling sculpture of stacked knickknacks. “How long have you been at that?”
“Twenty minutes now, the idiots,” Karkat told him.
As John approached the table, Terezi twisted her hand to stretch out the tip of her walking cane. The extra length strategically caught John’s foot, and he pitched forward, arms swinging wildly until his face hit the floor. The
whump
rattled the stacked art—its creators screaming in panic as it threatened to fall—and Terezi retracted her cane as Callie and Karkat helped John back up.
John rounded on Terezi and accused, “You did that on purpose!”
“Who, me? How can you blame your own clumsy misfortune on a poor blind girl?”
“It was your cane, so it’s your fault!”
“No, it’s your fault—because you’re the weenie who forgot that you’re the Heir of Breath! You can fly and you still ate carpet!”
With the danger to the stack-castle over, others in the room started to see the humor in Terezi’s awesome prank. John still smelled really pissed about it, but all he said to retaliate was, “Oh, you’re
lucky
tonight, Terezi.”
She leaned over one hand and asked with false sweetness, “Why only tonight?”
Jade spoke up from the other side of the coffee table. “You’re lucky because I’m here! To tell you two to knock it off!”
“Jade, I never knew you felt that way about us!”
“I’ll feel whatever way I want to if it keeps our beautiful creation safe! Now it’s time for both of you to sit down and shut up!”
John used Callie and Karkat to follow the ‘sit down’ part of Jade’s order. Terezi was already sitting so she was ahead of the game. Aradia held Terezi’s hand and rubbed her thumb on it, tracing patterns that Terezi learned and followed, like a melody.
WIth the tripping incident resolved, Callie did most of the talking, simply by virtue of a lot of questions being directed at her. She explained Jane and Roxy would be arriving a little later, because of course Jane had baked for them.
Because this is Callie’s surprise wriggling day
. Terezi thought.
Then she thought again:
But…
Something about the setup wouldn’t leave her alone. There was more to the puzzle. There was always more to the puzzle. When it was a game or a movie, Terezi could follow those no sweat because she knew when they ended, but so much of life just felt like she was missing clues, missing keys, missing pieces of the full picture. That full picture of how she was supposed to be, full of everything she was supposed to know. Having only part of the final picture hurt.
As much as Terezi tried to keep that feeling inside, Aradia was… aware. Just having a matespritship with Aradia helped. And in some ways it was harder, because Terezi felt like she should be satisfied. She never really bought into serendipity as hard as other trolls did, but as a woman with a wonderful matesprit, an imbecile of a pitch crush, and a collection of friends who could hold a fragment of her diamond or take turns handling her club, everything should be fine. She just didn’t feel it.
Rose had teased those thoughts out of her a few month ago. When Terezi had finished talking, the other Seer nodded for a minute. Then she said, “Love doesn’t inherently have the power to fix us. But in my experience, it gives us the strength to fix ourselves.”
Then she offered to talk with Terezi again if she needed it, but since that initial conversation had definitely almost killed her, Terezi intended to never take her up on that offer. She had just gone home that night and cuddled Aradia while they watched
Indiana Jones and the Crypt of the Ancients.
She had listened to Aradia’s blood pusher instead of the played-out franchise’s seventh entry and just… thought.
She should probably get around to telling Aradia how much it meant to her that she came to the new universe. She had a pretty cushy gig in the dreambubbles after all, and Aradia did so much to help Terezi live with all the parts of herself that scared her.
Maybe later.
In the present moment’s ‘later,’ Jane and Roxy and the hosts of the night entered the parlor. Roxy promptly pounced on Callie for snuggles while Jane exclaimed over the sprawling tower of
stuff
. “Good gracious, how is all of that staying balanced!?”
“Wait—that snow globe, right there—who put that in there!” Rose demanded, probably gesturing in a really accusatory way, like with finger-pointing.
“Me?” Dave said. “Look, it’s not broken, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That’s my mom’s snow globe, from actual Earth A! It was in my house that came to LOLAR and now it’s here and I don’t have many mementos of that caliber!”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“‘Oh fuck’ is right, Dave! Genetic relation doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you want with my stuff!”
“Alright, fine! I’ll get it out of there!” Dave rubbed his hands together and slowly reached out toward the structure. “Jake, Jade, now would be a good time to start cheating.”
“Wait, what? Right now?!” Jake exclaimed, apparently not used to doing the Hopey thing on command.
“Yes, right now! Before—”
Terezi only missed having sight in short moments, but this was one of them, because someone bumped the coffee table before Harley or English could decide how to cheat. The tower shook and crashed, and nearly everything that could break broke into a thousand pieces.
“
Dave!
” Rose yelled.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, but look! I saved the mom globe! Mom Globe is fine!”
“That doesn’t stop that you were reckless and irresponsible and you endangered my belongings! How would you like it if I played Jenga on your turntables!?”
“Rose, darling, everything he broke is replaceable,” Kanaya reminded her wife.
“It’s the
principle
of it!”
“Now you see what I have to live with,” Karkat snapped.
“Everyone!” Jane raised her voice, her inner CEO emerging. “This is a terrible accident, and we can fix it! There’s no reason for us to go snapping at throats now! There’s an incredible dinner prepared and I brought a cake, and do I even need to use adjectives to describe how amazing it’s going to taste?”
No one said anything.
“I thought not! So we shall all proceed out of this room, and Dave will clean everything up later, after the rest of us have had a nice time and are ready to go home!”
“I am in agreement with your proposed schedule,” Kanaya said. Terezi could smell her close to Rose and patting her wife’s back. “Shall we move to the dining room?”
The dinner party moved as instructed, out of the parlor and into a dining room, stuffed with another blend of modern, ancient, human, and trollish architectural designs. The long table at the center stretched nearly the entire length of the room.
“Terezi, can I sit beside you? The bulge-headed taintchafe in chief has gotten on my last nerve.”
Terezi hissed. “Ooh, has the coolkid run out of cool?”
“Implying he ever had cool.”
“Nice one. Anyway, if our hostesses say it’s fine, move on in! I will be double-decked in red.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem, there’s an extra chair.”
“Wait, really?” Terezi thought over the voices she had heard that night: herself and Aradia, the hosts, the Crockengliharleberts, Callie, Roxy, Karkat, Dave… “Hey, where’s Dirk?”
“Oh! Yeah, about that, terribly sorry I didn’t indicate as such on the RSVP!” Jake started up some blathering. “I think Dirk’s out having something of a personal sabbatical. Just hard to tell where his heart will be at so far in advance…”
“That’s no problem,” Rose answered. “What’s one chair and a place setting moved?”
But…
Dinner came out in three courses: a hearty, spicy soup, crisp and misty salad, and a braised and seasoned megafish new to Earth C that reminded Terezi of all the best parts of oinkbeast and aquatic claw scorpion. Needless to say, she overate the main course. The sharp words from the parlor didn’t come up either, everyone telling stories and jokes and starting discussions, with no more acknowledgement of the tension. To her side, Terezi could feel Karkat shifting in his seat a lot beside her, and halfway through the salads, a stray foot kicked hers.
“Sorry,” muttered Dave.
Are they playing footsie? They were fighting and didn’t make up…
So many weird details weren’t adding up, and those thoughts on the backburner were starting to boil over. Terezi reached to her other side and threaded her fingers between Aradia’s, waiting for the pressure of thoughts to subside.
The last plates emptied as everyone swore up and down they couldn’t eat another bite. Terezi thought they were cowards who needed to face the impending cake like grown-ups and then defeat it in single combat. Aradia had either come hungry or paced herself as she volunteered to just eat pieces people didn’t want. Terezi also remembered the suggestion that she could lick frosting off her matesprit… would Jane object if Terezi placed an order for her God-Tier frosting for such a depraved purpose?
“We actually set up the cake in the garden,” Jane informed the table.
“Shouldn’t we do the washing up first?” Callie suggested.
“Here, leave that to me!” Jade said, and Terezi smelled a flash of neon-green power, evaporating everything on the table away, likely into the kitchen.
But then why didn’t she use that power when the tower fell down? She’s smarter than Egbert, so she couldn’t have forgotten she can do that…
Aradia whispered to her, “Your thoughts are getting loud again.”
“How can they not? So much isn’t adding up. There’s something weird about tonight.”
“Can you prove what’s weird about it?”
“Can you prove it’s not weird?”
“I guess you’ll just have to wait until the party is over, when you’ll be faced with the cold, hard fact nothing weird is going on.”
Terezi stuck out her tongue at Aradia. When she pulled it back into her mouth, Aradia leaned in and kissed her lips. The deep raspberry red of her lipstick lingered on Terezi’s mouth, beautiful and delicious.
“I promise, if something weird is happening, I’m going to stand by you. But it’s just a normal-weird dinner, not a weird-weird dinner.”
Terezi nodded and rested her hand on Aradia’s again, letting her lead to the garden. Now was as good a time as any to place her faith in her matesprit and just breathe.
Of course, any garden Kanaya managed had to be magnificent. Enormous topiary statues loomed like gods over bushes and flowerbeds, marking the winding path through the land staked out for their back lawnring. They even had their own strings of street lamps illuminating the space, glimmering with soft, lemon-drop light. At the end of the path stood a large gazebo, and as they drew closer, Terezi could smell a crisp white tablecloth draped over a rolling cart, and the tangy chrome half-globe overtop of it.
“Shouldn’t the cake be lit by now?” Terezi asked Aradia.
“I bet that’s coming soon,” she said with more pats to Terezi’s arm.
And Terezi nodded, stopping herself from thinking ‘but.’
“Before we cut into it, I’d like to say a few words,” Rose started. “Just to make everyone aware of some opinions I have about everyone here, and how positive those opinions are.”
Laughing, Jade fake-heckled, “What about your opinions on cake?”
“I’m serious, and it won’t take long. I know that we’ve had the opportunity to live on this planet for a while, and it starts to feel like this life is normal. It’s easy to… forget what it took to get here. So I wanted to express pride over our accomplishments from before, and gratitude for everything we achieved since.”
Kanaya clapped her hand. “To getting here!”
“To getting here!” People echoed, including Terezi.
And then the lights in the gazebo cut out.
Terezi clung tight to Aradia’s hand, trying to use her as a fixed point as her matesprit squeezed back. Voices around her shouted, and called things like “What the fuck?!” and “What’s happening?!” Metal near the cake tray rattled until Terezi heard something hit the ground with a wet and heavy
thud
. Then sounds like footsteps running away from the gazebo reached her… but it could have been a frightened animal, she didn’t know for sure.
With a few pops and a dull electrical hum, the light to the gazebo returned… and Terezi smelled a vibrant pool of cherry red blood leaking from a dead body in the center of the room.
“Dave!” Jade screamed.
“Holy fuck—oh my holy fuck, did anyone see what happened?” Roxy pleaded with the others.
“Wait, he’s a God Tier,” Jane remembered. “He should revive any second now!”
Terezi leaned a little closer, sniffing the scene for a better idea of what had happened. That was Dave all right, bloody torso and everything, with two swords sticking out of him: one stabbed through his front, and one through his back. The sword through his front was one of his own, the legendary one with the stupid Earth Welsh name. The other was a katana. Time stretched on and Dave didn’t move. And as Terezi continued to sniff out the body, she could actually pick out corn starch in the hemoglobin.
That’s not Dave’s blood. It’s fake.
To her side, Aradia bounced a little. “I can’t believe it,” she said, more glee in her voice than grief. “This is a corpse party now!”
And with a full-body shiver, Terezi felt the pieces come together. There had been a surprise planned. That’s why people were acting strange: Kanaya’s slip about the special night, John calling her lucky, Karkat feuding with Dave verbally while they played footsie under the table, Jade’s failure to intervene when Dave broke Rose’s shit… it was to set up roles in this great big game.
The others shared grief-stricken platitudes with each other, waiting for Dave to stand up, and Terezi whispered to Aradia: “You’re responsible for this, aren’t you?”
“I got everyone to participate,” Aradia answered, her smile wide and radiant. “But they constructed the mystery, so I have no idea what’s going on. I was hoping you would have me as your lovely assistant?”
“Of course—the loveliest,” Terezi replied.
Everyone else had just reached the conclusion that Dave wasn’t about to revive—a trick Terezi would have to ask them about after she solved the case—when Karkat fell to his knees and reached for Dave.
With a long step and a swish of her cane, Terezi blocked him. “Mr. Vantas, I’m afraid I can’t allow you to interfere with the victim’s corpse!”
“Terezi, I’m not fucking around! My matesprit is dead, can you have some
sympathy
!?”
“Maybe I could, if it weren’t so clear that you and Mr. Strider were in a rough patch of your relationship! The frustrated matesprit could have committed a crime of passion!” Terezi pointed the cane back toward Aradia. “Miss Megido, begin our suspect list with Karkat Vantas!”
“Oh, a full-fledged investigation! Count me in!” Jane stepped forward.
“Not so fast, Crocker,” Terezi held out a hand for her to stop. “Could Miss Megido look underneath the cake cart for me?”
“Certainly!” Aradia’s skirt fluffed as she curtsied, before she skipped to the cake cart and lifted its white tablecloth. “There’s some padding under here, along with an empty bottle of orange soda!”
“Miss Crocker, the deceased’s brother was reported as not in attendance tonight… but you brought into the Lalonde-Maryam home an implement custom-fit for Dirk Strider to sneak into the party and strike when the lights were out! Your investigative skills are famed, but I can’t accept your help until I am certain you did not put them to use plotting Dave Strider’s murder!”
“We have two suspects already!” Aradia said with a clap of her hands.
“Not just two…” Terezi turned slowly until she could pick out the violet eyes of Rose Lalonde. “One of our esteemed hosts had problems with her dear hatchmate recently, and may have been fed up with his antics enough to
murder him
!”
Terezi smelled Rose’s smirk. “Maybe an Alternian would murder a hatchmate over a slight so small, but I assure you, a human wouldn’t.”
“Then why do you seem completely unaffected by grief? Like you knew this was going to happen?” Terezi insisted. Rose had a lot of reasons and ability to ‘know,’ but as far as building a case went, Terezi didn’t need much.
“You could stand there and accuse people all day, but what are we going to do about this?” John asked.
Terezi nodded. “Any one of you could be accessories to the crime. In this moment, everyone else should move out of the gazebo, but stay in the garden! We’ll interrogate you shortly after my assistant and I have studied the body.”
Terezi’s friends followed her order to vacate the gazebo, Terezi turned back to Aradia. “I can’t believe you got me a murder mystery for Human Valentine’s Day.”
“Were you surprised?” Aradia asked.
“This is the most surprised I’ve ever been.”
Aradia laughed. Terezi stepped closer to slip her hands around Aradia’s waist and kiss her, with a murder victim barely a few feet away. Frankly, having a matesprit willing and able to pull off a surprise like
that
was the best gift Terezi could ask for.