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tehstripe · 7 days ago

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and then some on the rhododendrons

Link to this fic on AO3. Words: 20768 Date posted: May 4, 2025 Summary:

Sometimes, Jade really had to marinate on the definition of evil.

I wrote this as a treat for @tehstripe following the @homestuck-fanauthor-coalition's Gift Exchange. You can read the fic from that event here, and check out the other treats here. (Although many of them are about to go up on here, lol.)

Sometimes, Jade really had to marinate on the definition of evil.

Ectobiology hadn’t always been her dream. She had always had a fascination with science. As long as she could remember, she was taking things apart and putting them back together with an unrivaled curiosity for how the world worked. Her grandfather used to laugh and say she had such an adventurous spirit.

It was a lifetime of loss that had brought Jade to specialize in what amounted to a combination of cloning, gene splicing, and creating new life—the most controversial science of her generation. It wasn’t that she wanted to actually use it to make up for all of those losses she had suffered. As much as Jade would love to have one last conversation with her grandfather, or to cuddle in bed with her childhood dog one last time, it had been so long since she suffered those losses that she was pretty sure it would just hurt more at this point.

But if she could prevent someone else from having to go through that? If she could let some other little girl ask her grandpa to read her favorite bedtime story one more time, or spare some other college student from having to make the difficult decision to put down her elderly dog before she started grad school and didn’t have time to take care of him anymore?

If she could make sure no one ever had to be as lonely as she was? Of course she wanted to do that.

Jade had only felt a little bad accepting the job offer from Skaianet when she finished her doctorate. She’d heard the whispered accusations of nepotism, and she couldn’t exactly refute them no matter how hard she worked to prove herself. But the advancement of science was more important than having a good reputation—especially when she was working with a company that was actually trying to make superheroes.

Nobody really understood where superpowers came from. There were a few running theories, and like all good things in academia, many of them were inherently contradictory. It was purely genetic. It was purely environmental. It was a combination of both. Superpowers came from weird lab accidents and interventions from gods Jade wasn’t sure people really believed in these days. Superpowers came from trauma unlocking some strange potential within the body. Superpowers were completely random.

Skaianet had dedicated themselves to mapping out the genome of every extant species and seeing what could fit in with what—particularly, what could fit in with people. Their goal was to create superheroes in a lab. If they couldn’t discover what normally caused people to develop superpowers, then they could at least manufacture some. Jade wasn’t completely sure what they planned to do with the whole manufactured superpowers thing once they cracked it. It seemed unlikely to her that they were just going to pop out some new League of a dozen heroes and then be on their merry way. She didn’t really care.

Her motivations were much more selfish than that.

It was hard, though, sitting through dozens of rounds of dead birds, failed experiments from some of the rarest species on the planet. Not that the rarity really mattered. She had a soft spot for them. Well, he had a soft spot for them. She had chosen to specialize in ectobiology as a teenager, but she had chosen to specialize in avian ectobiology after…

“What are you doing tonight?” Jade jumped at John’s voice in the doorway to her lab, and she rolled her eyes as he snickered at her.

“Pulling another late night, I think!”

“Another one? You know they’re not going to pay you extra if you stay until midnight every single night.”

She rolled her eyes again. “I know that, John. Believe it or not, I do this job because it’s important and I like it.”

“You do this job because Rose would make fun of you if you quit.” He’d made it to her side by that point, and he slung an arm over her shoulders—as best he could, anyway, when she was almost a head taller than him. “Come on. We should hang out, like in college. Rose and I were talking about doing a movie night.”

They couldn’t hang out like in college. John knew exactly why she tried to avoid those kinds of movie nights, and she was sure the fact that the anniversary was coming up was a or perhaps even the reason he was asking her. It wasn’t like she never hung out with both John and Rose or anything, but it was… harder, sometimes. Some things were harder.

She offered him a tight smile and used it as an excuse to squeeze her eyes shut. “I’m really close to a breakthrough, John. I’ve gotta stay late.”

“Oh dang, really?” he said, sounding legitimately interested. When she opened her eyes again, he had that enchanted look he always used to get in their college classes. John had always been the one who wanted to go into ectobiology, before… Before. “Well, do you want me to stay late with you then? I could help! I could call Rose and—”

“It’s fine, John,” she cut in, still wearing that tight smile. “Go do your movie night. I’ll text you if anything interesting happens.”

He visibly hesitated for a second, and she wasn’t entirely sure if it was because he wanted to stay or because he wanted her to leave with him. Probably some combination of both. Eventually, though, his shoulders slumped just slightly and he nodded. “Yeah, okay. And text me when you get home safe too, okay?”

Even as he didn’t say why, Jade’s chest squeezed. “Yeah, I will,” she breathed, turning away from him to peer down stubbornly at her lab notes from yesterday.

When John had left, Jade settled into her usual late night routine, for when she was at the lab after hours and there was no one there but her. She turned on the news for the background noise, and even though she was barely listening, the anxiety from John’s request still lingered over her head and in her chest. As if she actually believed it would make it go away, she forced herself to look up at the screen.

Tyche was some new supervillain who had started breaking into labs all around the county, and she was working her way closer and closer to their city. Nobody knew what she was looking for or why, just that she would ransack the place and usually take important research materials. It wasn’t necessarily that Jade was afraid of her, although maybe she should have been, given her line of work. It just… brought up bad memories. She turned off the TV.

“Okay, pretty boy,” she murmured to one of her sun conures, scooping him up from his cage where he’d been cuddled up with his mate. “You guys are really cute, but I’ve gotta run some tests on you.” He gave an affronted squawk that made Jade laugh, but he didn’t bite her or scream like they were so known for doing, so she would call that one a win.

“Ohh, so brave, so brave,” she praised as she took a clipping off of his nail and caught the little droplet of blood on her blood card. He preened almost indignantly, and Jade couldn’t help laughing a little bit. She slid the card into the first slot of the computer, and man, she really hoped they upgraded to one of those fancy computers that was able to scan the DNA without hurting anything soon, the kind she would have been building in another life. “Let’s see… who do we wanna breed you with?”

As if he actually understood her, he gave another, slightly louder squawk of protest, bobbing his head in the vague direction of the cage he shared with his mate. Jade laughed again. “You can do that all by yourself! Come on, I have lots of other friends for you to choose from.” She stroked her finger against his head as she carried him toward the other, still covered cages, until she coaxed him to settle onto her shoulder. “Let’s see if you’re awake… You usually are, you little weirdo,” she murmured affectionately as she lifted the cover from one of the cages.

Most of Jade’s birds were endangered species. Those were sort of the priority for ectobiology; if they could introduce more specimens and more genetic diversity into those species, it could potentially improve their chances at survival in ways that regular cloning just couldn’t. While Skaianet’s experiments had to do with interspecies hybridization, the genetic sequencing required still made it a goldmine for conservation research—that was part of how Jade could justify to herself that she was doing a good thing, even if it turned out later that Skaianet was one of those evil science corporations who always played the bad guys in all of John’s favorite movies. And really, selfishly, she was thrilled, because it meant she got to see all kinds of rare birds that some people had never even heard of.

But none of those would ever hold a candle to the simple American crow—especially her American crow, who seemed to stay up at all hours of the day that she was around, offering her little trinkets that he usually stole from the other scientists.

“What do you think?” she asked the conure, who did not look very impressed. She snorted. “You’re probably right. You guys don’t even have the same number of chromosomes, it could result in something disastrous.” She wasn’t sure she had another dead bird in her tonight. But her pretty little crow straightened up and preened, and she softened a little. “Well. We should figure that issue out eventually, right? The poor kākāpō only has 26, and she might need our help more than anybody else here.” As if she was listening in, the kākāpō grunted from across the room, sounding a little disgruntled. “See? We have to help our friends, pretty boy.”

Of course, he didn’t really have to do anything, and she made sure he was nice and settled in with his mate for the night before she even attempted to get the crow out. She didn’t have to scoop him up or worry about biting like she did with the conures. He fluttered right out and settled on her shoulder. “Pretty,” he mimicked into her hair, and she laughed.

“Yes! Good boy. So smart,” she praised, bringing a finger up to stroke his head, which he pressed right into. When she got back to the computer, he dutifully hopped down to the desk and held out a foot, and she offered him a bright grin. “If only everybody was as easy as you, I would never have to stay this late. Then maybe you wouldn’t be up all night, huh?” As if that was really the reason Jade was staying so late.

The crow hardly even protested or jerked when she clipped his nail, and she let him sit on her shoulder after she pressed the blood card into the second slot on the computer and started typing. He watched her diligently, as if ectobiology was the most fascinating thing in the world to a crow. She made a few familiar, manual corrections to the genome sequences as they popped up, the sorts of things only years of experience could possibly have allowed her to memorize.

“Pretty,” he cawed into her ear again, and she laughed. She knew what he was looking for, and she reached into the drawer of her desk to offer him a peanut, which he crunched on happily.

“Don’t tell John,” she murmured, as though the knowledge that the peanuts were there was the thing that would trigger an allergic reaction.

“Don’t tell John,” he mimicked, and she rewarded him with another peanut.

When she was done with all the typing and it was time for the waiting, she sunk in her chair a little bit. This was definitely the worst part of her job. Even with a crow talking to her and crunching happily on peanuts, she hated having to just sit around and wait for the appearifier (which was the affectionate nickname she and John had given the machine with the significantly more technical name) to spit out its results.

She wasn’t sure when she dozed off. What she woke up to was an incredulous, “Harley, you’re still here?”

Jade wanted to sink out of her chair and into a puddle on the floor. She would rather get all of her fingers bitten by the sun conures than deal with the owner of that particular voice. She pasted on a bright smile as she turned around. “Yep! Still here!”

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Go hoooooooome, dork.”

Jade had first met Vriska Serket in her sophomore year of college, and she hated her instantly. Apparently, they were in the same biology program. Apparently, they had had two classes together in their second semester and Jade just hadn’t noticed. Apparently, John had noticed, because she did not meet Vriska as a fellow biology student, but as John’s girlfriend.

Vriska had no shortage of mean jokes to make at everyone else’s expense, and the only thing more annoying than her haughty attitude in their shared classes in sophomore year (and at every study session John had invited her to without asking) was the fact that she’d completely earned it. She and Jade were constantly competing for top of their classes, a trend which continued through the rest of undergrad. Vriska had teased her about how she would at least be able to get into the mediocre grad program with her boyfriend, and Jade had seethed. As if being second in her class would have made her that much less eligible as a grad program candidate.

She and John finally broke up near the end of their senior year, and Jade had been celebrating ever since. When Vriska managed to catch her in a really foul mood, she’d crack a joke about it—something like, At least I didn’t have to follow my ex-boyfriend like a lost puppy to get a job. Usually, Vriska would say something like, Right, you were born with those sorts of connections, or, Your ex-boyfriend isn’t exactly working, and Jade would think about hitting her.

“I’ll go home soon!” she chirped instead. She wasn’t in the mood for an argument tonight—especially not about Dave. “I’m just waiting on the results from my last test, and then I am outta here.”

Vriska raised an eyebrow and shuffled into the room, which was just about the last thing that Jade wanted. “What are you working on?”

As if Vriska actually cared at all about what she was working on. No, she wanted an opportunity to make some stupid joke about her birds again. She’d heard it a thousand times already. “I mean, y’know. Bird stuff.”

“Wow. It’s so boring you can’t even try to tell me about it?”

Jade’s smile grew a little tighter, and her grip on the arm of her chair got a little tighter, too. “I just think it’d go over your head is all! I know you and John are doing some really tough work with the human side of things, and birds are so different. Sun conures have, like, three times the chromosomes that we do.”

Vriska narrowed her eyes at Jade, and then glanced over at her computer, which was, thankfully, running the last of its numbers. She could escape soon. “Human stuff is way cooler and harder than bird stuff,” Vriska eventually murmured, clearly unable to think of a better retort, and Jade would take the victory where she could get it.

There was a ding from the appearifier, and Jade straightened up.

“Alright,” Vriska said. “Since it’s soooooooo interesting that you couldn’t even tell me about it, let’s see your precious results.”

Jade grimaced. In all likelihood, she was about to find a very sad, very dead bird with some extremely weird mutation, and then she’d have to spend all night writing a report about it and filling out paperwork on yet another unviable pair. She wasn’t about to tell Vriska that, though. “Sure!”

Her crow, who she had almost forgotten was there, fluttered after them, landing on top of the machine. Unlike the bigger, fancier one they used in John and Vriska’s lab, Jade’s appearifier was small, and she had to lift a little metal cover to retrieve the results. It was a safety measure, so that a brand new and very valuable bird surviving against the odds couldn’t fly right out in a panic and kill itself with a ceiling fan or something. It certainly added to the suspense as Jade slowly, carefully lifted up the cover.

“Pretty,” the crow said. Jade gaped.

For all intents and purposes, the bird in the little chamber looked very much like a crow. It had the same narrow head and pointed beak as the American crow, the same long, skinny little legs. It had iridescent black feathers all over its body—except right around its eyes, where there was the distinct orange-ish reddish bandit mask-shaped cluster of feathers distinct to the sun conure.

“Holy shit, Harley,” Vriska said, managing to actually sound impressed.

“Pretty,” the crow repeated, a little more insistently. Jade offered him another peanut.

Unlike whatever John and Vriska did with the humans that Jade couldn’t really begin to wrap her head around, the birds Jade made, when she successfully made them anyway, came out as fully grown adults. This was not a small bird by any means, but she scooped him up in her hands so delicately anyway, like he would fall apart at the barest hint of touch if she didn’t.

“Hello, pretty boy,” she breathed, brushing a finger against the top of his head.

“What are you going to name it?” Vriska asked. For a blessed moment, Jade had managed to forget she was there, and she couldn’t entirely stop herself from glaring over at her then.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Okay, you don’t have to be a bitch,” she said, rolling her eyes again. Jade hoped she did it so much she got dizzy. “Maybe you could name it after Dave.”

Jade’s heart lurched at the mention of his name, even if Vriska hadn’t said it in a mocking way this time. She didn’t want to hear his name on Vriska Serket of all people’s lips, and especially not with the anniversary of his death only a week away. “Get out,” she said, voice low and venomous. Vriska just sort of stared at her for a second, eyebrows furrowed like Jade was a crazy person. “Get out!” she repeated, much louder. She was promptly followed by a chorus of squawks and screams from the birds, woken up from their slumber or else just disturbed from their peaceful downtime.

Perhaps to respect Jade’s wishes or perhaps simply haunted by the sound of a dozen screaming birds, Vriska did get out, and Jade was left with her crow and this new bird, still cradled in her hands like something precious.

“What’s your name?” she mumbled, as if he would answer.

“Dave,” he replied promptly, and her heart lurched again. He was just echoing Vriska, she knew, but something about it still made her feel like she’d been struck by lightning.

“Okay, Dave,” she breathed, and she gestured with her head for the crow to hop onto her shoulder. “Let’s get you settled in for the night then, huh?”

For now, she put him in the cage with the crow. She would have to find another place for him later, but it was getting late enough that there was a serious threat she’d fall asleep behind the wheel if she didn’t head home now. “Be good!” she called to the birds as she left, and she was met with a chorus of various Be goods back at her that made her smile.

At the apartment, Jade drifted through her bedtime routine the way she always did. She hadn’t enjoyed coming home since grad school.

She checked her phone once she was settled into bed, sending a quick text to John and Rose to let them know she’d made it home alright. Somehow, she wound up gravitating to her gallery and the little folder of pictures she still kept of Dave, no matter how much they made her heart hurt.

The last picture she and Dave had ever taken together had been at their college graduation. They’d both been holding up their diplomas, though his was blurry and hers was half-offscreen. She’d leaned down to press a kiss against his cheek, and he was mid-laugh, his nose all crinkled up. They were supposed to start grad school together that fall, although Dave had chosen to study paleontology rather than going into ectobiology with her and John. Despite what Vriska might have said, Dave had gotten into a good program, and he never even got to go to it.

There had been a string of supervillain attacks that summer. Jade hadn’t worried about it, because their city had a local superhero back then. Only it had turned out Dave was the local superhero, and he wasn’t equipped to handle all of the new villains. He’d shown up at their apartment one night, in-costume, practically bleeding out. Jade hadn’t been able to save him.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she was woken up in the morning by her phone ringing. The only people who were set to ring through her phone’s persistent Do Not Disturb mode were John and Rose, so she picked it up even though she was sure her voice was still groggy. “Hello?”

“Jaaade!” John’s voice. She winced, pulling the phone away from her ear a little bit as he yelled, “I just heard about what you did! We have to celebrate, you have to let us take you out!”

Us, it turned out, was not just John and Rose. Us, it turned out, was John and Rose and Vriska. Right that precise moment, Jade hated us.

The first words out of Vriska’s mouth were, “Wow, Harley, you look dead.” Jade shot John and Rose a dull look, as though to say, You really brought her? Rose gave an apologetic sort of shrug, but John just beamed. Of course.

“I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, on account of the whole baby bird thing. Well—not literally a baby. Duh. But you know what I mean.”

“Will I be getting an exclusive interview with the scientist who finally managed to perfect avian ectobiology?” Rose asked, and Jade couldn’t help a laugh.

“I don’t know that I perfected it—”

“You totally did!” John cut in, still beaming that thousand-megawatt Egbert smile. “Oh my gosh, Jade, you’re like the coolest person we know now! Dave would have been so proud of you!”

John couldn’t possibly have known how much those words stabbed a dagger directly through her heart. Or maybe he could. He was always a lot less subtle than Rose was about prodding at the open wound of Dave’s passing.

“I’m right on the verge of a big breakthrough too, y’know,” Vriska cut in, and Jade only barely managed not to roll her eyes. Right. As if Vriska and John didn’t work in the same lab and he wouldn’t have told Jade if they were on the verge of a big breakthrough.

“Wow, Vriska, I didn’t know that!” John said, immediately confirming Jade’s suspicions. She couldn’t stifle the amused grin at that.

“That’s because you’re dumb and you don’t pay enough attention,” Vriska teased, and Jade had to grit her teeth even though John laughed like it had been a funny joke and not absolutely awful. He was always like that with Vriska, and it drove Jade crazy.

“Tell us about this breakthrough,” Rose said with raised eyebrows, and her tone was so carefully neutral Jade couldn’t tell if Rose was as skeptical as she was or not. Rose always preferred a more subtle approach to placing doubts. It was probably the journalist in her.

“Oh, not yet! It’s a very special surprise,” Vriska said, and Jade swore she winked at her.

The next day, Jade checked on Dave the Bird again. He and the crow were snuggled up together, sleeping, but they both perked up as soon as she lifted the cover. She laughed. “Good morning, boys,” she cooed affectionately. “Sorry to interrupt, but Dave, we’ve got some tests to run and some paperwork to fill out. I know, I know, I don’t wanna do it either.” He made a groaning sort of noise as she pulled him out of the cage.

Dave the Bird, it turned out, had 76 chromosomes and was, as she had suspected, male. Coming from the combined genes of two ZZ birds, it would have been difficult, though not impossible, for him to mutate in such a way that he wasn’t. That was exactly the sort of weird side effect she would expect from ectobiology, though. After some contemplation, she decided to file his paperwork as a new species of corvid, even though he was probably most accurately something entirely new. “Corvus strideres,” she said, shooting Dave the Bird a smile as though they were sharing in an inside joke. “Do you think you could scream for me, pretty boy?” He chirped, tilting his head, and she laughed.

“Harley, you have got to make real friends,” Vriska said from the doorway to her lab, and Jade’s face fell.

“I don’t think it’s fair to make me be nice to you three days in a row,” Jade said, spinning her chair around to face her.

Vriska scoffed. “You were being nice to me? And here I thought the mean, sexy banter was the defining characteristic of our relationship.”

Jade rolled her eyes. “What do you want?”

“Sheesh, you’re in a bad mood. You’d think you’d be happier, inventing a new bird and all that.”

“Vriska, I promise I will never, ever be happy to see you.”

Vriska laughed, as if Jade was joking, even though she was sure they both knew she was not. “I was just checking on you. We’re friends, right?” Jade wasn’t sure she would use the word friends, exactly. “The anniversary is in a few days, isn’t it?”

Jade tensed. She absolutely did not want to talk about this with Vriska, but rushing her out again at this point would just earn even worse mockery. “Yeah,” she breathed. “Five.”

Vriska whistled, as if this was some especially impressive number. “I can’t believe it’s been almost eight years. But hey, eight’s my lucky number.” Jade wasn’t sure she saw the connection, and she sent Vriska a flat look. “Oh, Harley. Don’t worry. You’ll get it when you’re older,” she teased. “Oh! That reminds me. You wanna come see what we’re working on?”

Jade did not really want to see what they were working on. While she was always happy to listen to John ramble about their work in their much larger and better-funded lab, she didn’t usually find it the most pleasant place to visit. Human ectobiology was a little more well-understood than avian, but it wasn’t perfect, and if dead birds were hard, she didn’t want to think about babies.

She also did not get the impression that Vriska was really going to give her much of a choice, though. If she wanted to get rid of her, it would just be easier to agree and follow her, so she nodded. Dave the Bird was still perched on her shoulder, and he made a noise of what Jade guessed was probably curiosity as they entered the much larger human portion of the lab.

Where Jade might as well have been crammed into a storage closet for all the space she had, the majority of Skaianet’s resources were devoted to human research. John and Vriska worked in a sprawling facility with a dozen other people, some of whom waved cheerily at Jade as they passed or else gawked at Dave the Bird on her shoulder. He cawed at every one of those people, and Jade could barely stifle her laughter by the time they finally made it to the little corner Vriska’s work station was in.

Said work station currently had several buckets of green sludge. Jade stared.

“Uh… I’m not exactly the expert here or anything, but I’m not sure that’s a human,” she said slowly, raising her eyebrows.

Vriska rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s not a human, dummy. Not a successful one anyway.”

“A successful one?”

Vriska shuffled over to her computer and pressed a few buttons, and Jade watched a recording of some random person’s birthday party. Jade didn’t recognize them, but evidently it didn’t matter, because Vriska didn’t say anything to explain before she pressed a few buttons, locked in a target on one of the adults supervising the table, and then pressed enter.

The appearifier behind them groaned to life, and then Jade whipped around in time to see one of four large glass containers fill with more green sludge. Jade balked, all of the gears turning in her mind at full speed until there might as well have been smoke pouring out of her ears.

“I still don’t understand.”

“Jeez, Harley, for such a smart girl sometimes you can be so stuuuuuuuupid.” Vriska shuffled over to tap on the glass. “This is genetic material, but it’s incomplete. Normally, we combine a couple of these suckers to get all the genes right and then spit a stupid, wrinkly little baby out of it. Sometimes we can add an extra gene or two here or there to try to crack the superheroes thing. But that’s going to take forever.” Vriska said forever extra dramatically, and Jade had to bite her lip to keep from snickering. “John and I think that we can jumpstart some of this process by trying to make adults right out the gate. But when we try to do that they tend to come out a little… fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?”

“Fucked up like braindead. I guess they need the time to develop properly since they don’t have any time baking in the womb or… something.”

“Or something? Do you actually know what you’re talking about?”

Vriska glared up at her, and for once Jade was kind of thrilled to be cresting six feet. “It’s not like anybody really talked about breeding adults with ectobiology before, Harley. We can clone adults, or we can make babies. The two processes don’t really mix. If John and I figure this out, it’ll be revolutionary.”

Jade couldn’t help but to snort and say, “How revolutionary could it be?” Vriska stared at her like she was stupid, or like she hadn’t really been listening to her at all, so she added, “My birds always come out as fully grown adults, no neurodevelopmental issues in sight. Granted, our process is a little less refined than what you guys have going on in here, but a lot of that has to do with variations in chromosome counts and things like that. I’m pretty sure if I was just taking, like, my sun conures, they’d probably mix together just fine to spit out a perfectly healthy new specimen.”

“Right, so you can make a hundred dead grownup birds. Congratulations, Harley.”

“You can’t make anything alive, Serket. That goop? I hate to tell you, but it’s not exactly a person!”

“Obviously it’s not a person, dumbass! I never said it was a person. Do you ever listen to anybody, or are you always just lost in space, occasionally lucking into an advanced scientific discovery?”

Jade gritted her teeth. “Why do you always have to be such a—”

“Woah, what’s going on over here!” John interrupted, holding his hands up like he was approaching two fighting dogs.

Jade took a deep breath and then offered him a tight smile. “Nothing. It’s fine. I was just telling Vriska that the machine I use in the avian lab spits out fully grown adults. We don’t have these tubes or anything. Not sure if that helps anything.”

John’s eyes went wide, and then he smacked a hand against his forehead. “Duh! Jeez, I am so stupid, how did I not think of that?”

“Probably because it’s a teeny tiny machine that probably couldn’t even fit a squirming infant, let alone a fully grown adult?” Vriska offered.

“But they have bigger ones, don’t they?” John asked, looking to Jade. She hesitated a moment, looking between them. For some reason she couldn’t identify, something just felt off in that moment.

“Yeah,” she answered anyway, though it came out slow and cautious. “Our equipment is a little bit older, I think. All these fancy tubes and stuff that you guys use came later, when they started trying to splice the genes of more than two different things at a time. Most of them are pretty small, since the human research advanced kind of rapidly, but I know there are a couple of labs that have bigger ones. They might be able to fit a human; I’ve never seen one in person.”

“Which ones have them?” Vriska asked, a little more insistent than Jade expected, and her eyes widened a little bit.

“Uh. I don’t really know off the top of my head, but I can go back to my lab to do some digging and get you a list? Probably by the end of the week?”

Vriska scoffed. “It can’t be the end of the day?”

Jade glared at her, pursing her lips. “I do have actual work to do, you know. I still have to fill out most of the paperwork for this guy, and—”

“It’s fine!” John cut in. He was always so conflict avoidant, and Jade still didn’t understand how he managed to date Vriska for that long. “Whenever you can get it would be great. Keep us posted.”

She nodded and turned to leave, glancing over at Dave the Bird. “Is it just me, or was she acting crazy?”

“Crazy,” he repeated, and she laughed and offered him a peanut as soon as they made it back to the lab.

It took two days for Jade to compile the list of labs in the country that had access to the larger appearifiers they were talking about. It wasn’t that there were a lot of them—it was just that these particular appearifiers were so old that lots of the listings online were outdated, and Jade had to personally reach out to the labs to verify whether they had access to the equipment or not.

That was the nice thing about her name, though. Other scientists went out of their way to talk to her, even though they didn’t usually like her very much.

Three days before the anniversary, John and Rose showed up at Jade’s apartment without asking. Generally speaking, Jade didn’t really mind surprise guests, but the closer they got to the anniversary, the more paranoid she started to get about people in her house—even when they were invited, let alone when they weren’t.

She opened the door to a knock very shortly after she’d gotten home from work on time for once and found her two best friends with big brown paper takeout bags. “What’s all of this?” she asked, startled.

“It’s to say thank you!” John said cheerily, grinning at her. When she just furrowed her eyebrows, he added, “For the list of machines.”

Jade couldn’t help grimacing. “Does that mean Vriska is on her way too?”

Rose shook her head. “I believe she said she was going to draft proposals to the labs to loan her their equipment. It’s just the two of us tonight. May we come in?”

Jade hesitated for a moment. She had been looking forward to yet another night of curling up in bed in her pajamas and scrolling through her phone being sad about Dave. Somehow, she didn’t think telling them about those plans would be very convincing in getting them to leave her apartment, though, so she just stepped aside. Plus, without Vriska there, it might actually be nice getting to catch up with John and Rose again.

“So what’s been going on at your work lately?” Jade asked, looking at Rose as she bit a forkful of butter chicken.

Rose hummed around her own mouthful of rice, and when she had deemed it polite enough to speak, she said, “I’m researching the new supervillain.”

Jade’s heart sank. If there was one thing that could make her feel worse than surprise guests right now, it was talking about the new supervillain. “Uh huh,” she said, sounding far off, because this was still Rose’s job and she wanted to be supportive. She was the one who asked, after all.

“I suspect that she’s not a new supervillain at all,” Rose elaborated, and Jade felt her appetite rapidly fading, her stomach turning. “Her purported abilities actually align rather neatly with a couple of different small-time villains who have operated in this area before. She’ll run a few heists, usually targeting some sort of scientific or academic facility for motives that remain unclear, and then disappear for a couple of years. And then a new villain with very similar powers and the same modus operandi will show up. It seems like a suspicious pattern to me, and it seems all the more suspicious that no one has ever put it together before.”

“Wow,” John said, leaning forward in his seat a little bit. “So how long has this been going on?”

“That’s the part I’m still trying to figure out. Whoever Tyche is, she’s had several different identities, and there’s no clear reason why she suddenly stops and starts again. She’s never been arrested, never been caught committing a major crime, and as far as I can tell, fully reaped the spoils of every single one of her jobs.”

“Sorry, could we talk about something else?” Jade blurted, throat feeling tight and chest feeling tighter. John and Rose both looked at her a little wide-eyed, and she shrunk in on herself. “Sorry. I know I’m the one who brought it up. You should be allowed to talk about your work. I just… I’m… Sorry.” She trailed off into murmurs, pulling her legs up onto the couch to try to make herself as compact as possible. Maybe if she was lucky she would just turn invisible completely.

Rose reached a hand over to rest on her shoulder, and Jade was proud of herself for managing not to flinch away from the touch. “You don’t have to apologize,” Rose said, voice soft. “It’s a touchy subject for you. I should have been more considerate.”

Jade shook her head meekly, but she couldn’t make any of the arguments spinning in her brain come out of her mouth—about how she was a shitty friend if she couldn’t even listen to one of her best and oldest friends talk about her job for ten minutes, and really they should just leave her. “What do you want to talk about?” John added, obviously trying to be helpful, and Jade just felt herself freeze up more.

She didn’t want to talk about anything. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be alone in her room, crying over pictures of her dead boyfriend. She wanted to be gone. Maybe not dead, but not here, all by herself, dealing with all of this. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that he left her.

John and Rose stared at her some more, and it slowly dawned on her that she’d said all of that out loud. She usually had better self-control than that, a stronger iron grip on her emotions. She wasn’t supposed to let them spill all over the place. They’d never done that, not unless it was with each other, and Dave wasn’t here anymore, so Jade wasn’t supposed to do it at all anymore.

She stumbled up onto her feet. “Sorry. I… need to be alone.” She didn’t wait for them to leave her apartment. She just rushed back to her bedroom like a frightened prey animal fleeing from predators, closed the door behind her, and practically threw herself into her bed. She never wanted to leave her bed again. It didn’t matter that it felt like this every year, it didn’t matter that Dave wouldn’t want her to throw her whole life away—nothing mattered. He was gone, and she was still here. That was the only thing she cared about right now, and it was so unfair.

John and Rose were often the sort of friends to push her boundaries. Usually, she needed them to. Tonight, though, she just needed some time to wallow, and they seemed to read that, because they didn’t come knocking on her bedroom door after she ran away. She laid in bed for what must have been hours, just staring at the ceiling.

No one had ever told Jade that grief could feel like a phantom limb. She had spent her life processing loss after loss—and while, of course, there would always be a dull sort of heartache over her grandfather and Bec’s deaths, it didn’t feel anything like her grief over Dave. The thing that hurt the most was the way it still felt like he should be there. It had been the better part of a decade, and she still hadn’t stopped rolling over some nights to show him a meme on her phone or to ask him to go answer the door because she didn’t want to.

Much like that night.

It had been hours since John and Rose left, but someone was knocking on Jade’s front door, loudly and insistently enough that she could hear it from her bedroom. She considered ignoring it anyway. How important could it be if no one was calling or texting her?

She forced herself out of bed anyway. She wasn’t really sure why—it just felt like she should. She regretted it the second she opened the door.

“Finally,” Vriska huffed, arms crossed over her chest like Jade had done something to legitimately affront her somehow. As if she wasn’t the one stopping in on Jade with no warning when they both knew they hated each other.

“Why are you here, Vriska?” Jade asked, trying not to sound as exhausted as she felt, or at least to make her exhaustion sound more like annoyance.

“Oh please. You know getting to banter with me is the highlight of your entire night.”

“It really is not.”

“Yes, it is! You know, you act like you hate me, but I think you’re too much of a softie to hate anyone. I mean, here I am, showing up at your apartment with no warning in the middle of the night, and here you are, not slamming the door in my face! That’s not exactly the behavior of someone who hates someone else.”

Vriska made a compelling argument, and Jade seriously considered slamming the door in her face. Honestly, that probably would be the highlight of her night.

But if Vriska was goading her about it, then for some reason, that was what she wanted. Jade wanted to give Vriska what she wanted even less than she wanted to deal with her at all. “Vriska, it’s late. I’m tired. Why are you here?”

Vriska’s eyes narrowed for just a moment, and then, before Jade could entirely process what was happening, she leaned forward to close the distance between them. Jade had a good four inches on Vriska at least, which meant she had to lean down a little to let the kiss happen. She didn’t know why she leaned down.

Jade came to her senses a second later, shoving Vriska away with an outraged yell of, “What the fuck is wrong with you?! Did you show up at my apartment in the middle of the night to confess you’ve been in love with me this whole time or something?”

Vriska rolled her eyes, as if Jade was the one acting insane. “Harley, if I was in love with you, you’d have known by now. No, I hate you as much as always.”

“Then why did you just kiss me?”

“Why did you kiss me back?”

Jade groaned and pushed her hands through her hair. “Jesus Christ, did you come to my apartment in the middle of the night to test some fucked up hypothesis about whether I was somehow in love with you? I don’t know why I kissed you back, Vriska. You’re like, the worst! I didn’t even really know what was happening. It’s been a really long night in a whole series of really long nights, and it’s almost the anniversary, so—”

“Oh will you shut up about the stupid anniversary?” Vriska snapped, throwing her hands up in the air dramatically. “You poor baby! Your boyfriend died! How sad! You are so whiny and pathetic. As much as I hate you, at least I normally respect you. Dave has been dead for eight years, Jade. It’s time to go back to normal!”

Jade should have slammed the door in her face then. She thought about kissing her again, too. Anything to make her shut up, to keep Dave’s name out of her awful mouth.

She felt frozen, though. Through some combination of shock and rage, it was like her brain had shut down and was still in the middle of rebooting. There was the familiar sense of numb dissociation, like her body and all of the feelings in it were very far away. She knew that she swallowed down a surge of nausea, but she didn’t really feel it.

“Dave is dead, Vriska. I’m never going to be normal again.”

For a second, Vriska just stood there staring at her. Her face wore the same non-expression Jade was sure she must have been wearing, her eyebrows just slightly pinched together in what might have been anger or confusion or concern or any number of things. She snapped out of it faster than Jade had, though. She rolled her eyes and waved her hands dismissively through the air, and then she just turned and left.

Jade stood there staring after her for a long time. The entire interaction felt so surreal Jade couldn’t help but question if she had somehow made it up. Maybe she would wake up in bed in a minute and find that the whole thing had been a crazy dream. Maybe she would wake up in bed and find that all of the last eight years had been a crazy dream, and Dave would be right next to her. That familiar thought was enough to finally push her back into the apartment.

Jade couldn’t remember climbing back into bed or going to sleep, but she was woken in the morning by her phone ringing. Her glasses were still on her face, so she didn’t have to squint at the caller ID as much as usual. John again.

She didn’t have time to grumble a tired Hello? before John’s voice came through, sounding a little panicked: “You need to get to the lab right away.”

That got Jade’s heart racing immediately.

She spent the drive to the lab trying to force herself to imagine all of the good things John could have been calling her about rather than the horrible things. She didn’t think about the lab catching fire mysteriously in the middle of the night and the whole building crumbling to the ground. She thought that maybe John had finally made a real superhero.

She was very briefly reassured when she got to the building and found it exactly the same as she’d left it. That only made it ten times worse when she got to her lab.

The place was in ruins. All of the drawers were pulled out of her desk—not just opened, but physically pulled out of the desk, as if she might have been hiding something in some secret compartment or something. There weren’t papers everywhere, but that was only because there weren’t papers anywhere. All of her notes were gone. Her appearifier was gone, too, and with it all of the data she had gathered over the last year of research. That, at least, was backed up to a database—any computer in the system could access that.

But her birds weren’t backed up.

All of her birds, the sun conures and the kākāpō and her beloved crow and Dave the Bird—they were all gone.

Jade couldn’t breathe. Every time she tried to inhale, she choked, her chest squeezing down on her heart and lungs like it was guided by the hand of some invisible giant. The building might as well have been on fire, with smoke filling her lungs. Her head was spinning, and she honestly wasn’t sure if it was from the sudden rush of emotions or the lack of air.

“Jade!”

She whipped around like she thought she was about to be attacked, even bringing her hands up defensively in the way Dave had taught her to do half as a joke over a decade ago. Somehow, it only hurt worse that that was still ingrained in her muscle memory, like it was prodding at the open wound of her most recent loss to have to think about the last one.

She wasn’t attacked, though. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. John wrapped her up in a hug so tight she was pretty sure he was the invisible giant from a minute ago no matter how much shorter than her he was, and they were both lucky that she was able to snap out of that fight or flight response before she actually hit him. She still couldn’t bring herself to move enough to hug him back, but she sank against him, caving in on herself so much that she was actually able to bury her face in his shoulder.

Somebody was keening. It took Jade a minute to realize it was her. The sobs tore through her like they were physical beings, like all of her birds had shrunk down and found a home in her chest and they were using their talons and beaks to rip their way out of her again. She would have been grateful for that; at least it would have meant she knew where they were. They were probably all lost in the city, and most of them wouldn’t be able to survive it. They didn’t know what cars were, or how to avoid stray cats and dogs, or what kinds of trash were safe to eat.

There was a hand against her back, and Jade knew without looking that it was Rose. Jade knew the delicate touch of her fingers when she wasn’t sure what to say to make something better, and the way they were always so freezing cold you could feel it through your shirt.

They worked together to move her into her lab, even though it was just about the last place she wanted to be. John gently lowered her into her desk chair. Tears and snot smeared on his shirt as her face was dragged from his shoulder to his stomach before he pulled away and she was forced to lean back in the chair just so she didn’t fall on the floor.

“None of the other labs were attacked,” John eventually murmured, and Jade stared at him with wide, watery eyes.

“Attacked?”

They both grimaced, and Rose was the one who answered, “It seems very likely that this was Tyche’s work.”

Jade’s stomach lurched, and for a moment, she was sure she was going to throw up. Tyche? The supervillain. The one who was attacking labs. She felt like an idiot, suddenly. It was such an obvious Chekhov’s gun, the sort of narrative irony that happened in one’s life and made them question if they were living in a novel.

She hadn’t read about what sorts of labs Tyche was breaking into. It was too painful to think about a supervillain for that long. She should have paid more attention.

“There was nothing you could have done to prevent this,” Rose said, once again reading Jade’s thoughts. This time, it wasn’t infuriating to be known so well and to have her own thoughts voiced aloud without her permission. It was comforting, and Jade sucked in a shaky gasp as she looked up at her. “It’s been years since there was a real caped presence in town. Businesses have been slacking on protections. Skaianet of all places should have been more secure, what with the highly touted superhero project they receive all those grants for. You were perfectly within reason to believe your work would be safe here, and even if you weren’t, there wasn’t anything you could have done to make your lab more secure. You did everything that you could.”

With another sniffling deep breath, Jade gave a jerky nod. She was so glad that John and Rose were there—that it was just John and Rose. Vriska would have tormented her about this forever.

“John, can you stay with her? I have to go work,” Rose said, and Jade felt a brief surge of panic. She didn’t want either of them to leave. John leaned down to wrap an arm around her shoulders, though.

“Yeah, I can hang out.” He leaned down to brush a kiss against the top of Jade’s head, and then murmured, “C’mon, let’s get you home, okay?”

John spent the rest of the day in Jade’s apartment with her, most of which was spent curled up in a tight ball of too many limbs on her couch. With how much she had been avoiding them lately because of the impending anniversary, she had forgotten how comforting it actually was to be with her best friends.

She didn’t go into the lab the next day. She couldn’t bring herself to, and she didn’t think anybody blamed her—not even Vriska, who, as far as Jade knew, was still AWOL. Jade briefly thought about calling her, but then she realized that was the most insane idea she had ever had. What could Vriska possibly do in this situation to make her feel better?

The last thing she really wanted to do was get out of bed for even a moment, but she recognized that she had been spending too much time in bed lately. Plus, she needed to eat something or John and Rose were going to get mad at her. Well, not mad, not really. But they were going to look at her all sad and quietly disappointed and make her something, and she didn’t want that. Rose had already promised (threatened) to stop by that night, and Jade didn’t need to give her more of a reason to fuss.

Luckily, she still had the leftovers from the Indian food John and Rose had brought her. She threw it in the microwave. The machine’s soft hum made her brain go unfocused and her mind feel all static-y, like suddenly that noise was the only thing her mind could hold onto.

There was a tap on her window.

Jade’s eyebrows furrowed. For a moment, she thought she must have made it up, but then it tapped again, slightly more insistently.

The curtains were closed, which meant she had to cross the room to open them. It made her feel distinctly like she was in a horror movie. Then again, everything had already gone wrong in her life, so why did she really need to worry about whatever else could happen to her in a horror movie? Maybe that would be better than this, honestly.

When the curtains were open, she stared.

The tapping grew a little more insistent once he saw her, but it was only the microwave beeping behind her that snapped Jade out of the latest stupor. She was starting to enter too many of those. She rolled open the window, and Dave the Bird ducked his little head under it to hop into her apartment like he belonged there, squawking at her angrily for leaving him out. She couldn’t help but laugh a little bit at the imagery.

“Hey, little guy,” she breathed, smiling for the first time in days. It wasn’t big, but it still felt like it hurt her face. She held out a hand, and he seemed to forgive her enough to hop up and perch on her wrist, his talons wrapping securely around the thin bones. She carried him with her to the kitchen and murmured as she went, “How did you find me, Dave?”

“Dave,” he repeated, and she breathed another laugh.

“Alright then. Keep your secrets,” she said, only to realize no one else was around to laugh at her reference. She thought the little chirp Dave the Bird gave her in response sounded vaguely amused, though.

He kept up contact with her somewhere as she went about the process of getting her food and settling on the couch to eat, and she thought they both needed it. He perched on her shoulder when she took the first bite, tilting his head curiously. “Sorry, buddy. I’m pretty sure butter chicken has garlic in it,” she laughed. She didn’t really know, but she wasn’t about to risk it—not with something so precious.

She had completely forgotten about Rose’s promise to stop by until she was putting her bowl in the sink and there was a knock on the door. She also completely forgot that there wasn’t supposed to be a bird in her apartment until she opened the door and Rose raised her eyebrows at him.

“Hello there,” Rose greeted, sounding not nearly as startled as she probably should have been, like Jade having a random bird in her apartment was to be expected. Which, to be fair, it probably should have been.

“Hello,” Dave the Bird repeated, tilting his head curiously at Rose.

Jade laughed, and Rose looked more startled by that than the bird. “Rose, this is Dave the Bird,” she said, and then cringed a little. “The name was Vriska’s idea.”

Again, the raised eyebrows. “You’re taking name suggestions from Vriska?”

“I’m not taking anything from Vriska, considering no one has heard from her in days—not that I’m complaining about it. She picked a weird time to disappear, but it’s kind of relieving not having to deal with her on top of everything else.”

Rose just hummed and shuffled past Jade into the apartment. She glanced around for a moment, like she was assessing that there wasn’t anything else amiss in the apartment, and then asked, “Have you eaten anything?”

Jade rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

“Yes,” Dave the Bird dutifully repeated, and Jade smiled again.

“If I had known a pet bird would make you smile so much, I would have purchased you one earlier.”

“Well, it’s not my fault you never came to visit me at the lab!”

Rose hummed again. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay very long tonight. I have some work to do. But I have informed John that he is on-call for the night, and I will be available by phone if you urgently need me.”

Jade rolled her eyes again. “Rose, I’m not a hospital patient, you guys don’t have to be on-call to monitor me or anything.”

“Not a hospital patient, no. But a flight risk, I fear.”

“Was that a pun?”

“Perhaps.” Rose offered her an amused smirk, and Jade laughed. Then Rose’s smile softened. “I am glad that you seem to be feeling a little bit better. I know that this time of year is… hard for you. I’m sorry I’ve never figured out the best way to support you.”

Jade had to try not to wince. If this was Rose’s latest method of trying to make her feel better, she definitely needed to workshop it some more. “Well, y’know, we’ve got the rest of our lives to figure it out,” Jade murmured.

“Perhaps,” Rose said again.

“Perhaps,” Dave the Bird repeated.

For the next few days, Jade kept hiding out in her apartment, unable to push through the stabbing heartache the thought of going back to the lab caused—especially not with Dave the Bird in the apartment with her. She couldn’t just bring him back to the lab all by himself, where all of her equipment was gone and all of his friends were gone. She couldn’t leave him alone in the apartment all day, either.

On the night before the anniversary, she had assured John and Rose as they were leaving that she was fine, and they were surprisingly understanding when she asked them if she could be alone for the day. She was sure they would still be checking in via text message, and that was fine, but she just didn’t want to deal with the whole We are getting out of bed today spiel on the worst day of the year.

The hardest thing for Jade was that no one else realized it was the worst day of the year. To everyone else, it was just a random Friday near the end of July. But to Jade, it was the day her entire world had ended.

The first year after, there had been a memorial—not for Dave Strider, but for Pulse, the hero who had sacrificed his life for their city. Of course, he hadn’t died publicly, but civilians had seen the rough state he’d left his fight with Lydia in and drawn conclusions when he never showed up again. Only Jade knew what really happened.

Sometimes she swore she still saw the blood all over the bathroom. She didn’t live in the apartment that she used to share with Dave anymore. She couldn’t bear feeling like she was living with a ghost. That didn’t change the fact that she could still see the blood everywhere, all over her hands and clothes and the bathtub as she tried desperately to apply enough pressure to just make it stop.

Her stomach lurched, and she buried herself a little further in bed. “Jade,” Dave the Bird squawked from his perch on her dresser. He learned to say her name to get her attention from John and Rose, she guessed, but even that wasn’t enough to make her come out. Not this time.

She stared at a picture of Dave on her phone. He used to steal it all of the time to take selfies when she wasn’t paying attention, and it meant she had a sprawling library to choose from. His shades were off in this one, with the lights in their apartment dimmed down. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and she could see the little scars littering his body. She’d always known he had a rough childhood, but it wasn’t until after he died that she put together it must have been superhero-related. She still hadn’t been able to figure out if his brother—the one she’d never met at Dave’s insistence—was also a superhero and Dave was some kind of child sidekick, or if he’d been more like her bosses at Skaianet, determined to produce a viable superhero at all costs.

“It’s not fair,” she mumbled, not entirely sure what she was even talking about. She didn’t really feel the need to specify. None of it was fair.

“Not fair,” Dave the Bird repeated, and then, “Jade.”

She peeked out of her blanket nest at him. He had moved from her dresser over to her nightstand and was presently threatening to knock over a lamp. Any other night, it would have made her laugh. As it stood, she just held out an arm for him and let him find a new perch on her bony wrist.

“I wish you could have met him,” she said. “We never planned to have kids, since we were gonna be so busy changing the world with all of our cool science, but we used to joke that if we ever had a son we’d have to name them after him. Well, I used to joke about that. Dave hated the thought of a Dave Jr., but the face he used to make was so funny. Here, I bet I have a picture, I’ll show you…”

When Jade picked her phone up again, she saw that it was ringing with an unsaved number. Her eyebrows pinched together, and it only made her heart pound when Dave the Bird chose that moment to squawk, “Dave.”

Maybe that was what pushed her to answer. It wasn’t like she really expected Dave to be on the other end of the line, but it felt like some sort of push from the universe anyway. Or at least, a push from a bird. “Hello?”

“Oh hiiiiiiii Harley. I didn’t think you were actually going to pick up! Here I was preparing to spam your phone until you couldn’t ignore it anymore.” Jade froze as her stomach turned. As far as she knew, no one had heard from Vriska since the lab had been broken into. A million questions popped into her mind at once.

“Vriska, it’s the middle of the night,” she said instead of asking any of them.

“Pretty much! It’s midnight,” Vriska said, and Jade already had a sinking feeling of unease. Midnight meant… “It’s the anniversary of your boytoy’s death!”

Her whole body freezing again was probably the only thing that stopped her from immediately hanging up the phone. How did Vriska always manage to find the worst thing to say?

“I really don’t feel like—”

“Oh, I’m sure you don’t feel like much of anything! We’ve been doing this song and dance for soooooooo long, Harley, I know exactly how mopey and miserable you are right now. Let me guess: You’re all curled up in bed in sweatpants with one of Dave’s old shirts on, huh?” The feeling of unease did not get any lighter. “Your silence tells me I’m right! Jeez, talk about predictable. Does grieving have to be boring?”

“It probably does!” Jade said, bordering on snapped. “So unless you need something, I’m going to go back to being sooo booored.”

Jade could practically hear Vriska rolling her eyes on the other end of the line—or maybe she just knew her well enough to know that was what she was doing. “Relaaaaaaaax. I’m not calling just to bother you.” Jade didn’t love the way that implied that bothering her was part of the reason she called. “I have a surprise for you at the lab!”

She looked to Dave the Bird with an eyebrow raised skeptically, which was probably the most she had emoted all night. Yeah, she had a really bad gut feeling about all of this. “The lab is just about the last place I want to be right now.”

“Aw, is mama bird upset all of her babies flew away from the nest?”

Jade clenched her jaw. “Goodnight, Vriska.”

“Goodnight, mama bird! I’ll see you soon,” Vriska crooned, sounding completely self-satisfied, and Jade thought hard about launching her phone across the room. That was probably the most she’d felt anything other than depressed all night, too.

“I cannot believe her,” Jade huffed to Dave the Bird. It had become a simple comfort in the last few days to rant to him like he was really listening—like she would have to Dave, back in the day. “She is the most insensitive, self-centered asshole on the planet! I’m grieving and all she can do is crack jokes about it. And now, what? She wants me to come to the lab to see what she probably believes is some huge breakthrough? As if Vriska Serket’s scientific process is the highlight of my life! Ohhh yes Vriska that’s very cool! Wooow tell me about how you made the drooling baby sit up a couple of weeks ahead of schedule! Fascinating! She probably wants to try to make out with me some more. I mean seriously, what does she think she could possibly have that would interest me right now?”

“Dave,” he squawked simply.

Well, it was hard to argue with that.

It felt ridiculous to drive to the lab in her sweatpants and shirt that really toed the line between t-shirt and crop top. It definitely wasn’t work appropriate, but in her defense, neither was going to the lab at midnight in the first place. When she first pulled up to the building, all of the lights were off, and Jade felt a brief surge of annoyance. Had Vriska called her out here just to waste her time? Was this her way of trying to make Jade get out of the apartment?

Well, it worked.

But when she squinted closer, she was pretty sure she could see lights deeper in the building, in one of the rooms that didn’t have any windows but wasn’t so far from the entrance that you couldn’t see the glow in one of the windowed corridors.

She sighed and climbed out of the car, practically slamming the door behind her. She wasn’t mad, not really, but it still felt good.

Apparently, the light was coming from her lab, and Jade’s stomach turned again. The feeling of unease she’d had earlier? It was back tenfold now, and she had to take a second to take a deep breath and prepare herself for what she was going to find in her lab. Maybe Vriska had decided to take it for herself, for her stupid All Growed Up project. She couldn’t imagine Skaianet would have Vriska be the one to deliver the news that she’d lost her job, but maybe Vriska had heard through the grapevine and wanted to get the jump on being the first person to tell her. Maybe that was why she was calling her here at midnight.

Vriska was not the one waiting for her in the lab.

All of the papers and equipment were still cleared out of the lab, leaving it an empty shell of itself. But in the middle of all the nothing was him. Dave.

He sat on the floor, wrapped up in a thick blanket and shivering, so pale he looked like a ghost from a made-for-TV movie. Though everything was covered, Jade could see that he wasn’t wearing anything other than his shades.

When he saw her, he jumped up to his feet. The blanket fell away, and Jade couldn’t help but stare—not at his nakedness, but at the big black wings on his back.

She recognized them as crow’s wings. Most people probably couldn’t identify crow wings by sight, but Jade would know the elliptical shape anywhere, the iridescent black feathers, and, as he stretched them out behind him like he wasn’t even thinking about it, the wide spread of the feathers, like they were fingers reaching out for her. He reached out for her with his actual hands, too, but he didn’t say anything.

When she looked closer at his face, she could see the distinct orange-red bandit mask around his eyes, and her breath caught in her chest. These were Dave the Bird’s features—Dave the Bird who was currently sitting all alone in her apartment. Maybe he really had been trying to tell her about Dave being back, being here, in the limited way he knew how.

“Do you remember who I am?” she said, voice barely above a whisper.

It took Dave a long moment to put together an answer, and then all he managed to croak was, “Pretty.” A sob bubbled up in her chest, and then Dave’s eyebrows furrowed and he took a step toward her, wobbling just a little bit on his feet. She stepped forward, too, as if to catch him. “Jade, don’t cry,” he said. He sounded so much like she remembered him sounding that she had to fight not to collapse into him and bury herself there and never leave.

“Yes, don’t cry, Harley. This is a good thing!”

Jade flinched, head whipping around to find the source of the voice, and there she was: Tyche. Vriska. There weren’t really dark corners in Jade’s lab, especially not with all of the equipment cleared out, but Vriska had managed to find one anyway, stepping around the empty cage the sun conures had lived in. Dave took another wobbly step to put himself between them.

Jade hadn’t seen many pictures of Tyche in the news. She had kind of avoided them. But John had shown her one when he was first warning her about the possibility that Skaianet could be a target. Jade recognized the rustic white costume, like she had stolen the fabric directly from an ancient Greek statue’s dress and sewn it into something better-suited to a life of crime. A mural crown sat atop her head, from which she had gotten her name, but the veil that she usually wore to hide her face, which always looked to Jade like spider web, was nowhere in sight. This left no question as to her identity—as if Jade couldn’t identify Vriska Serket by voice anyway.

“Oh my gosh, you should see your face!” Vriska laughed, actually pointing at Jade like some mean girl in a high school movie. “Aw, are you going to cry? I guess now you fiiiiiiiinally have to admit that I’m the better scientist!”

That managed to snap Jade out of her stupor, eyebrows pinching together. “Vriska, what did you do?”

“What does it look like I did, Harley? I had my big breakthrough!” She held her arms out to the sides in a sweeping gesture, and Jade looked around the lab like she expected to find something she’d missed before. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t anything—it was just the same empty room it had been when Jade left it.

“Of course, I’ll admit that you did have some contributions to the discovery. Without you, I probably wouldn’t have thought about your old, lame fractal helipod. I mean, how much data can that thing even store? Sheesh! I’m pretty sure the one I took is probably kaput from having to store all of Dave’s DNA I copied over—and I didn’t even have the whole thing!”

Jade gaped. “What?”

“Oh, right. Well, the guy’s been dead for eight years, it wasn’t like I could get my hands on allllllll of his DNA! I had to use your pretty new bird to patch some of the missing pieces—for some reason, he just seemed the most compatible! I hope he didn’t lose too much, though. I don’t think Skaianet will want a broken superhero.”

“I—how did you get any of Dave’s DNA?”

For a moment, Vriska actually managed to look a little uncomfortable. She recovered quickly, though. “I just got lucky!” Jade glared, pursing her lips, and Vriska’s cocky grin curdled into something a little more displeased. “Look, I’ve always had it, okay? I’m the one who killed him, and I knew there would be a good reason to hold onto all that blood!” Suddenly, Jade felt like she was going to throw up. She had never liked Vriska, but she didn’t think she was a murderer. And suddenly the way Vriska had taunted her about Dave for all those years carried chilling new connotations. “But I didn’t know at the time that Mr. Goody Two-Shoes was Dave!” Vriska added after a second, as if this was somehow a valid defense. “I didn’t mean to kill Dave. That was just an unfortunate coincidence!”

Jade’s mind was running a thousand miles a minute. She looked at Dave, but she couldn’t read his face, which was terrifying in its own way.

A second later, he was lunging at Vriska.

“Oh please,” Vriska scoffed as she dodged out of the way. “We’ve done this before, pretty boy. Remember how it went? Time doesn’t beat fate, dummy!”

If Dave was listening, he didn’t seem to care. He lunged at her again, and this time he was met with a kick directly to his chest. He stumbled back a step, but recovered quickly—too quickly, like he’d done it before. “Oh good! So you do still have your powers,” Vriska said. She had a manic grin as she dodged another hit from Dave, only for him to surprise her with a well-timed swipe of his leg under her new spot.

Jade watched in horror as they traded blows. They were both too good at this, and Jade didn’t want to think about why. She didn’t want to think about the fact that the love of her life was back from the dead and throwing himself right back into the very same fight that had killed him last time. She didn’t want to think about the fact that her rival of a decade was also a supervillain and a murderer. She couldn’t stand there and watch this.

“Stop!” she finally yelled as Vriska spat out a mouthful of blood and stumbled away a step. Dave’s head snapped to Jade, and she couldn’t see his eyes, but from the way he was breathing, she could imagine the frenzied look in them. She took a single step closer, holding out a hand like she was approaching a rabid dog. “Let’s just go home,” she said, keeping her voice as soft as she could despite her own rising panic. “I just got you back. I can’t watch you die again.”

In the moment of hesitation that followed, Vriska seemed to just disappear again, slipping away through means Jade couldn’t even identify. Then Jade saw Dave’s shoulders slump slightly, and she took that as her cue to all-but run over to him, wrapping her arms around him. His weight sagged against her immediately. “I’ve got you,” she breathed, pulling him as tight against her chest as she could physically manage and tucking her chin on top of his head. She was never going to let him go again.

As much as she wanted to stand there holding him for the rest of the night (and also the rest of forever), she could acknowledge that this was not the best place to be right now. For one thing, if anyone had spotted Tyche in the building, it was going to look really bad if Jade was there when the authorities arrived, holding a naked bird man in the middle of an empty lab. For another thing, she needed to get Dave out of there as soon as possible. It sounded like Vriska was planning to hand him in like some sort of lab project, and Jade was not going to let that happen.

She grabbed her phone and called the first person she could think of who wouldn’t ask too many questions, and without leaving space for a greeting, she said, “I need you to stop by my apartment for some of Dave’s clothes and then meet me at the lab.”

It took John all of half an hour to get there, which Jade was pretty sure had to break some kind of record and probably multiple laws. She greeted him outside and found him wild-eyed and breathless. “What happened? What’s going on?”

“So she didn’t tell you?” Jade asked, and John’s face only twisted more with concern. “Nevermind. I’ll catch you up on all of that later. Just… follow me.”

Whatever shock Jade felt when she’d first walked into the lab, she saw it on John’s face tenfold. He had always been the one who was so interested in ghosts, but now that he was actually looking at one, Jade saw all of the color drain from his face. “What… How…” He turned to her then, expression unreadable. “Jade, you didn’t.”

Jade stumbled back a step as if he had physically struck her. It felt like he had physically struck her. His words knocked the wind out of her and immediately brought a stinging feeling to her eyes, and it took her a second to recover enough to answer, “Of course I didn’t.” Her feelings about the matter were complicated, but she knew she would never have done this.

Dave, meanwhile, stared at John warily, like he wasn’t completely sure whether he was friend or foe. His posture was still defensive, and with bruises already forming, it painted a sad picture.

Whether John believed her or not, he turned away from her to face Dave instead. “Hey, buddy,” he breathed. He held up the pile of clothes in his hands, and there was a silly part of Jade that couldn’t help but think that Dave would never have put together that outfit. John was still John in a crisis. “Brought you some stuff from home. Not sure how well it’ll work with the uh…” He trailed off, grimacing.

Right. The wings.

Jade guessed that the existing superheroes with wings must have had clothes made for them by whatever heroing agencies and leagues they worked with. They couldn’t exactly have secret identities like the people with invisible powers were able to—like Dave had been able to.

Dave wouldn’t be able to have a secret identity anymore.

Jade’s stomach churned at the thought. It wasn’t like she thought everything was just going to go back to normal. She’d barely had time to think of what things were going to be like. But it was daunting to realize that her boyfriend wasn’t fully human anymore, and there was nothing she could do to fix it. And if he had to go on the run from Skaianet because they expected him to be their lab rat, it was going to be that much harder to hide him.

They would just have to cross that road when they got to it. “You can just put on the pants,” she said softly. Dave’s head snapped to her, and then he gave a mechanical nod, his face falling into that carefully protected neutrality she hadn’t seen in so long. John shuffled closer slowly, like he expected Dave to snap at him or something (maybe he was already drawing conclusions about the bruises), and then placed the clothes on the empty desk Jade used to keep her computer on. Dave approached them just as slowly, and once he had them in his hands, he gave a flap of his wings to practically flash across the room away from them.

While Dave was getting dressed, John shuffled next to her and, keeping his voice low, said, “Jade, what happened to him?”

She tore her eyes away from Dave to look at John, but she could still hear a faraway quality in her voice as she answered, “He died. How would you be doing?”

John didn’t have an answer to that. None of them said anything else as Jade wrapped the blanket around Dave again or as (to her relief) Dave let them both help him walk out to the parking lot to get into Jade’s car. She grimaced as he awkwardly tried to tuck his wings against himself to climb into it, clearly looking uncomfortable once he was stuffed into the passenger’s seat with his seatbelt on.

“Thank you,” she told John once the door was closed, because she figured she probably owed him some thanks. “I need to get him home, but… I’ll call you and Rose in the morning and explain everything, okay?”

“You’ll call me?” John asked somewhat incredulously, his eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline. “Jade, Rose and I will stop by your apartment in the morning. We’ll bring breakfast.”

Jade wasn’t sure if she was relieved or annoyed by this, so she just nodded and got into the car. Dave was silent for the drive, and she didn’t really want to try to make him talk. She wasn’t sure what they were even supposed to talk about. She had a million questions, and she didn’t really think Dave had the answers to any of them.

They were greeted at the door by Dave the Bird, who immediately ruffled his feathers and gave a few choice caws as he saw Dave the Ghost. Dave the Ghost, for his part, froze, and from where Jade stood glued to his side, she could see his eyes wide behind his shades. “It’s okay,” she breathed, sliding a hand to rest on his back between his wings. “It’s okay, Dave,” she repeated a little louder, to both of them. Dave the Bird still looked a little skeptical, but he didn’t stop them as they took a few cautious steps further into the apartment.

“Do you need anything? The kitchen is right there, I can get you something to eat. Or I can show you the bathroom, if you want a shower or anything…” She trailed off as Dave finally peeled himself away from her, only to walk straight down the hall to her bedroom. When she followed after him, she found him collapsed into her bed, face down against the pillows.

Dave had never been in this apartment before.

Jade didn’t get any sleep that night. Her mind was still racing with questions, and her body still physically ached from the relief of having her arms around him for the first time in eight years. Somehow, he still felt so much like he had before. Obviously, there were the wings, which he had stretched out a little in his sleep so one laid almost protectively over her, but everything else was familiar. The way his muscles felt, the ridges of deep scars on his back (and she didn’t want to think about what it meant that those had somehow ingrained themselves into his DNA), the way his chest rose and fell with every breath while he slept.

At some point in the night, Dave the Bird found his way into the room, and he perched on Jade’s bedside table to keep a mistrustful eye on the other Dave. She guessed it must have been surreal for him. Here he was, the only member of his species, made in her lab, and now there was this impostor in his home. “It’s okay, pretty boy,” she breathed, reaching out to stroke his head.

It was a little past dawn when there was a knock on her front door, and Dave immediately snapped awake at it, pushing himself up onto his elbows to look around frantically. “Hey, hey!” Jade said, sliding her hands up to cup his cheeks. “It’s okay! It’s okay, Dave, I’m right here. It’s just John and Rose. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

It took a second for him to calm down, especially when there was a second, slightly more urgent knock. She really hoped it was just John and Rose, because she didn’t want Dave to think she was getting into the habit of lying to him.

She let out a breath of relief when she answered the door. John and Rose each had two coffees in their hands, and John had a big brown paper bag tucked between his elbow and his body. Jade wasn’t sure how either of them had knocked, but she reached to take the bag and the coffee Rose held out for her. “He’s still a little nervous,” she warned as she let them in.

Dave had emerged from the bedroom without a sound, and even Jade barely managed not to be startled by his sudden presence. He was still shirtless, with his wings spread out behind him like he was trying to make himself look bigger.

Crows were known for being aggressively territorial. While they were often friendly toward humans because they were smart enough to recognize that people were a consistent source of food and trinkets, they faced little challenge in fighting off birds and other animals more than twice their size. Part of that was the mob mentality they were known for, though. It was difficult to find crows in the wild by themselves. They were highly social animals, and until very recently, the fact that her American crow had been solo in her lab had been her greatest source of guilt at Skaianet. All by himself, Jade couldn’t imagine how scared and defensive Dave must have felt.

“I brought coffee,” John said, holding up one of the drinks in his hands. He didn’t sound as cautious as he had last night. He sounded like he was bargaining. Typical John, immediately deciding his old friend couldn’t be a threat. She didn’t want to tell him about Vriska.

Dave looked to Jade like he was looking for her approval, so she gave him an encouraging nod. He approached John and Rose sort of like a skittish cat, like he needed to be ready to bolt at any moment. He eyed them warily as he plucked the coffee from John’s hand. “I know that caffeine is supposed to be really bad for birds, so we got you decaf,” John continued casually, as if Dave didn’t look absolutely terrified of him at all. “But other than that, it’s just how you used to like it. We even went to that place by the university you used to drag us to.”

Dave looked like he was trying to remember something, and Jade’s chest squeezed painfully. Supposedly, Vriska’s big breakthrough should have meant that Dave came out without any of the adverse mental side effects that trying to clone a human adult through ectobiology caused. He certainly wasn’t braindead like Vriska said the others had come out, but Jade couldn’t help worrying about how quiet he was being and how afraid he seemed of everything. “Thank you,” she finally said, and Dave looked at her before nodding.

Rose, Jade realized, had been silent this entire time, too, and Jade looked at her with furrowed brows. Rose stared at Dave, but it wasn’t the way that John had last night, like she was seeing a ghost. It looked like she was trying to solve some complex equation.

When Jade opened the bag and started distributing breakfast sandwiches, her heart ached to find that she still remembered all of the scrawled labels for their usual orders—and that John and Rose had remembered their usual orders at all. They hadn’t gone back to that place since Dave died. Jade wouldn’t let them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to become a regular again now, but in that moment, it almost felt like nothing had ever changed at all.

For some reason, watching Dave eat his egg and cheese sandwich made Jade grimace. “So,” John said, cutting into Jade’s thoughts, and her eyes snapped back to him. “You said you’d explain in the morning.”

Jade took a deep breath. “Honestly, I barely even understand what happened,” she sighed. “I know that all of this is going to sound crazy, but it’s everything I have, okay? After you guys left last night, I was kind of moping in bed when Vriska called me.”

“Vriska?” John said, already furrowing his eyebrows. “Vriska Serket?”

“John, don’t act like Vriska is a common name,” Jade huffed, rolling her eyes. “But yes, Vriska Serket. I don’t know why I answered, but she told me to come meet her at the lab because she had a surprise. When I got there, the surprise was Dave.”

Rose leaned forward at that, unable to keep the interest off her face or out of her voice as she said, “Vriska is the one who brought him back?”

“Yeah. She said she wasn’t able to recover all of his DNA, so I guess she spliced it with one of my birds and… well, you can see how it went. When I asked how she got ahold of his DNA, she told me…” Jade hesitated, and she wasn’t sure why. Vriska deserved every bad thing that was going to happen to her as a result of her actions.

She looked at Dave, whose sandwich was already gone. He didn’t look bothered—or at least, he didn’t look more on-edge than he already was. She reached over for one of his hands, which was a little awkward, since he was perched on a chair a couple feet away from where John, Rose, and Jade sat on her couch. He held her hand without protest, even giving it a little squeeze.

“Vriska was Lydia. She was the one who killed Dave eight years ago and disappeared without a trace.” John gaped, but Rose’s only reaction was to nod, her expression back to careful neutrality. Jade recognized it as her interview face, and her heart clenched. “Rose… did you know?”

Rose’s face didn’t change, but Jade could see that she was hesitating anyway. “No,” she eventually said. But she continued, “Not exactly. I had… suspicions, but I didn’t have anything concrete to work off of.”

Jade thought that she should have been angry, probably. This was a betrayal, wasn’t it? Rose knew who killed Dave and she didn’t tell her? What kind of a friend would do something like that? And wasn’t it Rose’s job as a journalist to expose things like that? The people would want to know who killed their beloved hero!

She wasn’t angry, though. Somehow, Rose knowing just made a strange sort of sense. “Yeah, well, she confessed. And I saw her with my own eyes—the costume and the name are different, but they’re definitely the same person!”

“They?”

“Oh. Right. She’s Tyche, too.”

“Okay, hold on,” John cut in, looking between the two of them with his eyebrows furrowed even further. “Jade, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but this is crazy. We’ve known Vriska since college! There’s no way she’s a supervillain. Maybe I could believe it if she was like, some kind of B-list petty thief.”

“Such high praise for your ex-girlfriend.”

“You know what I mean, Rose! Vriska can be kind of… a lot, sometimes, but she’s not evil. And she was Dave’s friend, too! She wouldn’t have murdered him.”

“She said it was an accident,” Jade said, trying her best to sound like a neutral participant in this conversation and not a person on the verge of fight or flight. “She meant to kill Pulse, but she didn’t know that Pulse was Dave.”

John stared at Jade, and it was obvious that his mind was digging for any logical explanation that meant Vriska hadn’t killed their friend and then proceeded to hide it for almost a decade. Not even just hide it—she had practically tormented Jade about it plenty of times, and Jade knew John had seen her do it. She delighted in making snippy comments about Dave and the fact that he was gone. Killing him might have been an accident, but Jade didn’t think she felt bad about it. Even thinking back on her confession, Jade didn’t think Vriska had sounded like she felt bad about it. If anything, she mostly seemed bothered by the idea that Jade might get the wrong impression of her.

“I can’t believe it,” he eventually said, slumping back against the couch in defeat. “So she’s the one who stole all your lab equipment, too?”

“I guess so,” Jade said, grimacing. “But my machine is so tiny that I think she must have spent some time modifying it. That must have been easier than getting her hands on one of the bigger, fancier machines at the other labs.”

“Or she just wanted to make it personal,” Rose said. Jade’s stomach rolled with nausea. What did she do to make Vriska hate her so much? Was this seriously over a stupid rivalry over grades in undergrad? It wasn’t like Jade had never been petty about it since graduation, but killing her boyfriend and discreetly bragging about it for the next eight years seemed a little intense!

John’s face turned sour, and both Jade and Rose looked at him before he even said anything. “We’re going to have to report this to the lab,” he said. “If Vriska broke lab equipment, they’re gonna wanna know. And… they’ll probably want Dave back for the big superhero project.”

For the first time all day, Dave spoke up, sounding panicked as he said, “I don’t want to be a superhero.”

Jade’s brows pinched together, and she gave his hand a gentle squeeze. He squeezed back just a little too hard, but she didn’t care about that right now. “But… you already were a superhero, Dave,” she said gently. Maybe he had forgotten?

“I’m not,” he said, voice pitching a little higher with distress. “I don’t want to have to figure out how to be a superhero. I’m still… I’m still figuring out how to be Dave.”

All three of them stared at him. Jade was sure that didn’t help his obvious nerves, but she couldn’t help it, and she didn’t think John and Rose could either. Rose was the first one to say anything. “I don’t think it would be very good for Skaianet’s squeaky clean image if the first successful product of their superhero program was created by a supervillain.”

“But Skaianet doesn’t know that Vriska is a supervillain,” John pointed out. Then, a little cautiously, “Right?”

“Most likely not,” Rose agreed, and Jade saw John relax a fraction at that. “So we’ll just have to make sure Vriska gets exposed before they find out about Dave.”

“But how do we do that?” Jade asked. “She got away last night and went who knows where.”

Rose looked just a little bit amused, Jade thought, which was… kind of unsettling, honestly. “I’m an investigative journalist, Jade. I have my sources. I’ll handle finding Vriska. You and John just handle keeping Dave hidden. Alright?” Jade looked to Dave, who still looked so unsettled, picking at some of the feathers on his wings as if to preen them.

She took a deep breath. “Alright.”

John looked between the three of them with a look of utter discomfort. “I guess,” he said, and Jade guessed that had to be good enough.

John and Rose left the apartment shortly after that, and Jade shifted focus to getting Dave settled in—and getting him and Dave the Bird used to each other.

They were curled up on the couch together. Dave’s wings seemed to make it kind of uncomfortable to sit with his back against the couch, like he hadn’t fully figured out the best way to maneuver them with his otherwise human body, but Jade laid back against the arm of the couch and Dave kind of buried himself in her chest. His wings were stretched out again, and Jade stroked her fingers over his feathers.

Dave the Bird was perched on the edge of her coffee table, staring at Dave warily. Dave turned his head to look back at him, and Jade just watched them for a moment. She couldn’t entirely puzzle out the relationship between the two of them, only that…

“Do you remember being him, too?” She wasn’t sure what Vriska’s methods here were, but she said she used Dave the Bird’s memories to patch his DNA. If he had his memories from being Dave, then maybe he had Dave the Bird’s memories, too. Maybe that was why they were so weird with each other.

It took Dave a second to answer, and then he just mumbled, “Yeah.” She held her breath for a second, waiting for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. He just kept staring at Dave the Bird, and Jade couldn’t even read his face to know what he was thinking.

“What do you remember?” she asked eventually, when the silence got unbearable.

“Mostly the same stuff.” Jade raised her eyebrows, and Dave looked up at her with a coy smile. “You being really pretty and nice to me.”

Jade laughed, because it was so much like Dave, her Dave, that it startled her. She leaned down to kiss him, and he leaned up to meet her in the middle.

Being on hiding Dave duty, Jade thought that she would be staying in the apartment, peering out of all the windows in paranoia to make sure that nobody was watching them or anything. She thought she would be pretty good at that. Unfortunately, John made the reasonable point that it would be suspicious if she never went back to work, even if her lab had been destroyed. At the very least, someone would go to check on her—someone other than just John and Rose, anyway.

With Vriska still missing, John pulled some strings to let Jade use her workstation, even if there wasn’t that much she could do in it. She guessed she would start filling out the paperwork to get new birds, even though the thought made her chest squeeze painfully. She knew logically that they were just lab animals, but regardless of Vriska’s teasing, they really did feel like her babies.

While she was sitting at Vriska’s desk, though, Jade couldn’t help getting distracted.

If Vriska had been the one to ransack her lab, there was probably some amount of planning to it, right? Obviously Vriska wasn’t stupid, so she probably hadn’t left behind much evidence, but… maybe Jade could find something.

“What are you doing?” John practically hissed after a few minutes of Jade digging through the desk drawers. They were horribly disorganized, and Jade wasn’t sure how Vriska managed to find anything. Luck, something in the back of her mind supplied, and she rolled her eyes.

“I’m looking for evidence,” she whispered back. John gaped at her.

“Jade, you can’t just go through Vriska’s things no matter what she did!” he whisper-yelled back, looking around the lab like someone was going to come over to talk to her about it at any minute. “Look, it’s not like Vriska exactly has a ton of friends here, but…”

Jade shot him a smoldering glare, and he held his hands up in surrender. It wasn’t like she getting very far, anyway. She huffed as she went through the same stack of papers a third time. “Seriously, does she even know what tidying up is?” she grumbled.

“Oh, she has a system!” John said, and Jade stared at him. “She tried to explain it to me when we were dating. I think it was like…”

As John walked Jade through Vriska’s (batshit insane) organizational system, she started going through the drawers a little more slowly and efficiently. It still didn’t yield much, but eventually, she pulled out the piece of paper with the list of labs Jade had offered her a few days ago. Some of the names were crossed off, and Jade raised her eyebrows.

“Do you think this means anything?” she said, looking over at John. He shrugged, and she rolled her eyes. There wasn’t any immediately obvious pattern to how they were crossed off to Jade. When she’d made the list, they were just organized by who responded the fastest. But Vriska wasn’t crossing them out from top to bottom.

Jade decided to text Rose and ask her to meet for coffee. It didn’t feel right to share this sort of thing over text, but if anyone would know what was up with it, it would be Rose.

“They’re by distance,” Rose said once they met, barely sparing the paper a glance before taking a sip of her chai. Jade’s brows pinched together, so she added, “The labs here correspond to some minor break-ins that didn’t make it into headlines because nothing was taken. There are four here—two in our state, and two in the next state over. If I had to guess, the dates that these labs were broken into likely correspond to dates Vriska missed work. She must have had to drive for hours, unless she has some faster means of travel we’re not yet aware of.”

“So… we can use this, then?”

Rose hummed. “It’s not worth much on its own,” she said, and Jade’s shoulders slumped. “But if those dates do correspond, then it would be difficult to sell as a mere coincidence in court. It might become useful once we catch her.”

Jade let out a breath. “Is there any possibility that Vriska might go after any of the other labs on the list? The ones that aren’t crossed out yet?”

“It’s highly unlikely. Most of these labs are rather far away. It’s unlikely she would have cannibalized her own coworker’s supplies in the lab she worked at if she thought it was attainable to get to any of these other labs. Plus, Vriska knows you’re smart enough that you could have made the connection between the list you gave her and labs that were broken into if you looked into the matter further.” Rose took another drink of tea, but Jade got the impression that there was more she wanted to say, so she waited. Rose almost seemed hesitant when she added, “And I believe she got what she wanted when she brought Dave back.”

Jade stared. “And what did she want?”

Rose offered her a sad sort of smile, and they didn’t say much else for the rest of the coffee date.

The next few weeks were uneventful. Jade kept going to the lab and spending her evenings with Dave, who seemed like he was slowly adjusting to being alive again. There were some nights where she would be woken up to him thrashing in his sleep, kicking like there was someone on top of him he was trying to fight off. It reminded her of the early days of their relationship, when he would stay the night before they were living together and then avoid her for the next few days because he felt guilty when she’d wake up with bruises. No matter how much she tried to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault and that she wanted him around, he could never stand the thought of hurting her. He mostly got over the night terrors after they moved in together, and Jade didn’t remember anymore what she did to help.

She tried to ask Rose for updates about the Vriska hunt, but all of Rose’s answers were frustratingly cryptic. It was obvious that she knew more than she was telling Jade, but for some reason, she wasn’t telling her. Whenever Jade tried to ask why she was being so cagey, Rose would just tease that she would understand when she was older, and Jade was extremely tempted to point out that she was technically older than her.

She was on edge. Even though no one had seen or heard from Vriska or Tyche in weeks, it felt like she was waiting around every corner. Jade worried that she was going to break into the apartment while she was at the lab and take Dave, or that she’d somehow find something else Jade didn’t even realize she cared so much about and take that. Dave tried to make her feel better, but she didn’t think he remembered how, either.

Her heart was already hammering when she turned the keys in the lock, and she wasn’t prepared for what she found on the other side.

There was a chorus of disgruntled squawks and grunts. Jade’s apartment was filled with birds—not just birds, her birds. The pair of sun conures were perched as high as they could get on top of Jade’s kitchen cabinets. The kākāpō was doing her level best to hide under the kitchen table, nestled together with rock wrens and ground doves. Her darling crow sat next to Dave the Bird on the arm of the couch—until he saw her, anyway, at which point he hopped up and fluttered over to her, finding his favorite place on her shoulder.

Jade was overwhelmed with emotion, and when Dave emerged from the bedroom hallway looking disgruntled, Jade looked at him with watery eyes. “How did you do this?”

“This wasn’t me,” he said, and she felt her heart sink. He offered her a slip of paper the size of a business card.

Guess it’s your lucky night!

Jade knew that handwriting. It was the bane of her undergraduate existence. The bearer of the harshest comments in their “anonymous” peer review, as if they wouldn’t learn to recognize each other’s writing. The author of romantic notes left around John’s apartment that somehow always read to Jade as mocking.

There was an address scrawled underneath it—one that Jade didn’t recognize.

“I don’t think you should go,” Dave said, and Jade stared at him. He was probably right. Nothing good could come of meeting Vriska at some mysterious address. But…

“We have to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because you won’t be safe from Skaianet until Vriska is locked up. Right now you’re a viable experiment, the crowning achievement of this superhero program they’ve sunk millions of dollars into. Once she’s arrested, you can just be Dave again.”

He pursed his lips. They’d had this conversation before—well, not this conversation, but ones like it. She had found him, weeks ago, staring at one of the framed pictures of him she had around the apartment when she wanted to make herself sad, but not so sad as to wallow in bed on her phone scrolling through her gallery. I don’t remember how to be him, he’d said. I remember being him, but I’m not him. And I can’t even decide if I want to be him again.

“You can’t stay cooped up in this apartment forever,” she said, trying to keep her voice soft. Even if he didn’t want to be the Dave that she remembered anymore, he still deserved to be a person. He should at least have a choice in the matter.

“So call the cops and send them to the address. You don’t have to go and risk whatever shitty thing Lydia—” He cut himself off, or maybe choked, and then took a deep breath. “Whatever shitty thing Vriska has planned for you.”

Jade couldn’t help but soften at that. She took a step toward him, and she was relieved when he didn’t step away. She brought her hands up to cup his cheeks. “No, it has to be me. I don’t know exactly what her powers are, but I’m sure she’ll just know if I send the cops after her. The only way to keep her from running away is if I go meet her myself.”

Dave still looked unsure, but he turned his head to press a kiss against her palm. “I can’t stop you.”

“You can’t,” she agreed, trying to feel apologetic about it. It was hard to feel apologetic when Dave’s safety was the reason she was going, though.

He sighed. “I love you.”

She softened and leaned down to kiss him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. She felt his wings wrap around her, and she wondered if he even did it on purpose. “I love you too,” she said as she pulled away.

The address ended up being some abandoned warehouse, and Jade couldn’t help but think it was extremely cliche. When she stepped inside, it seemed empty, and Jade looked around with narrowed eyes. What was the angle here?

“You finally made it!” Vriska’s cheery voice bounced off of the walls and Jade jumped, head whipping around to try to find her. “Aww, Harley, are you scared of widdle ol’ me? How adorable!”

Jade gritted her teeth. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Oh, but I didn’t bring you here!” Vriska said, and she sounded closer that time, Jade was pretty sure. “You came allllllll by yourself!”

Jade’s jaw clenched. “What do you want?”

“Come on, Harley, didn’t you miss me? Aren’t you reliiiiiiiieved to see me?”

“I can’t see you,” Jade pointed out. It earned a laugh from Vriska.

“Well, I sure missed you!” she said, sidestepping Jade’s point entirely, apparently. “It was surprising, actually. I still think you’re so annoying and pathetic, but it was like there was just something missing when I didn’t have you around to make fun of! You know, I think people thought Mr. Goody Two-Shoes was my nemesis because of the whole superhero/supervillain thing, but I think it’s you!”

Jade wasn’t sure why, but her breath caught in her chest. Maybe it was the mention of Dave, with that same nickname Vriska had used to taunt her about his murder. Maybe it was the idea that a supervillain was essentially calling her a threat—she didn’t think that was likely to mean anything good for her. “Vriska, that’s ridiculous,” she said, trying to sound confident and not like she was bargaining.

“Oh, but it’s true! Don’t try to tell me you don’t feel the same way. Something about the two of us, it’s… fate.” Vriska laughed as if she’d said something very funny, and it echoed off of all of the walls to make it sound like Vriska was everywhere. It made Jade feel very small, and she wished more than ever that Vriska was directly in front of her, where she could remind herself how much bigger she was.

“Oh, did you like my surprise, by the way?”

“You mean Dave?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

Vriska laughed again. “Don’t play coy with me, Harley! You’re here, which means you got my note. I’m talking about your precious baby birds.”

“You’re the one who let them all out. Why bring them back?”

“Even with Dave back, you were acting soooooooo whiny and pathetic.” Jade’s stomach lurched. She and Vriska hadn’t seen each other since she brought Dave back… right? “He clearly wasn’t enough to make you stop acting so whiny and pathetic. I was really running out of options here, Harley. But I know you’re mama bird, so I figured I’d give it one last shot and bring your baby birds back.”

Jade still felt sick to her stomach, but she managed to say, “At least this is better than your last attempt to make me stop acting so whiny and pathetic.”

Another laugh, and then Vriska’s voice was suddenly right behind her as she said, “Oh, you mean…” Jade whipped around, and before she could even process how close Vriska suddenly was, Vriska had grabbed her by the shirt and pulled her down into a kiss.

Jade froze. Why was this happening? Why was any of this happening? What the fuck was wrong with Vriska Serket?

She didn’t get any answers to those questions. Before she could even push Vriska away, the door to the warehouse slammed open, and a stream of police officers rushed in, with John and Rose on their tail. Vriska started to pull back, so Jade grabbed her by the shirt, holding her close. Vriska glared up at her, obviously seething. “You cannot be serious.”

Jade just shrugged. She didn’t really understand what was happening, but she knew that she couldn’t let Vriska get away again. They would probably never find her again if she got away this time, and Jade couldn’t let that happen.

“Tyche, put your hands in the air!”

She was startled to realize that the shirt she was holding onto was indeed Vriska’s costume. Somehow, in the rush of the kiss and the police intrusion, she hadn’t realized. It just seemed like Vriska.

Vriska scowled and put her hands up, with Jade still holding onto her. “We could have skipped town together. I was going to ask you.”

“That never would have happened.”

As Vriska was handcuffed and carted away, John and Rose approached Jade. “How did you know where we were?”

“Rose called me. I thought you talked to her,” John said, looking at Rose with his eyebrows furrowed.

Rose took a deep breath. “It’s my superpower.” At first, Jade thought Rose was joking, and she managed a single bark of a laugh. Then, Rose continued, “Pericognition is the formal name for it. It’s a form of short-term clairvoyance. I can’t predict the far future, but I knew that Vriska was obsessed with you, and I knew that sooner or later, she would want to get the last word. I wasn’t sure when it would happen, so… I apologize for the violation of your personal privacy, Jade, but I bugged your phone.”

Jade’s stomach lurched again, and she immediately pulled her phone out of her pocket as if she could actually see whatever Rose had done to it. “Rose, that’s a crime,” John hissed.

Rose rolled her eyes. “Yes, John, of course it is.”

John shuddered. “So… does that mean you’re a supervillain, too?”

Rose looked almost sad at that. “No. I have no desire to get involved in caped business. I believe my particular talents are best used where the public can keep an eye on it. I’m just a uniquely skilled investigative journalist, and for that, one’s morals must be a little… flexible.”

John kept staring at her for a long minute, like he was trying to puzzle something out. Apparently, he gave up after a moment, because then he turned to Jade. “How did you know that we needed you to distract Vriska?”

Jade’s eyebrows furrowed for a moment as she tried to figure out what he was talking about. Then she saw the amused look on Rose’s face, and her cheeks flushed. “Um! Lucky guess…”

Dave was waiting for her when she got back to the apartment. Somehow, he’d managed to find places for all of the birds to settle that still left Jade free to collapse onto the couch, and he sat with her even with the awkward angle he had to tuck his wings against his body at. She all-but fell over into his lap, squishing her cheek against his thigh. “I need to tell you something,” she murmured. He didn’t say anything, but she could feel his fingers pause where they’d started to stroke her hair.

She looked up at him as best she could through the side of her eye, and when that started to hurt, she just closed them. “Vriska said she thought I was her nemesis and that she wanted to ask me to skip town with her. And… she kissed me.”

Dave’s fingers paused again, for longer this time. Just when she was considering opening her eyes to look up at him again, he said, “Okay.” It seemed like a very calm reaction, only then he added, “Would you have gone with her?”

Jade couldn’t help the way her face twisted up in disgust. “Dave, no. I hate Vriska more than anyone in the world.”

“Did you like the kiss?”

She hesitated for a moment. Did she like the kiss? She hadn’t pulled away, but that was just because the police got there, right? “I don’t know, Dave.”

She could feel that he was still hesitating. Then, a little quieter, he asked, “Do you love me?”

Jade swore her heart fell to the pit of her stomach, and her eyes snapped open to look at him. So much of his face was still in that carefully neutral expression he wore when he was trying not to seem too vulnerable, but his lips were pulled down into a tiny frown at the corners. This wasn’t a rhetorical question. Somehow, he was actually insecure about this.

She pushed herself up as quickly as she’d laid down, cradling his face in her hands and pressing her forehead against his. “Of course I do, Dave. Of course. I love you more than anything.” She tilted her head to kiss him. She was flooded with relief as, after another moment of clear hesitation, he kissed her back. She held it as long as she could, stroking her thumbs against his cheekbones.

Eventually, Dave pulled away just enough to mumble, “This isn’t a pass to go make out with whatever supervillains you want, for the record.”

Jade laughed, a little bit startled. “I promise I only have eyes for you,” she mumbled back, leaning in to kiss him again. She felt like it was true.

Vriska’s trial stretched on for months, and Jade watched the entire thing where it was aired live on TV. Some lawyer friend of Rose’s was the prosecuting attorney, and she gleefully introduced each new identity and all of the evidence Rose had gathered connecting her to them. Tyche. Lydia. Arachne. Cetus. Jade had trouble keeping track of them all. When the paper from Vriska’s desk with all of the labs listed was pulled out, Jade took a sick sort of pleasure in the way her eyes widened. Jade hoped Vriska knew it was her who found it.

The day that Vriska’s verdict was announced, Dave and Jade were settling into a new house. They needed one with space for all of the birds, she argued. Really, she just couldn’t stand the baggage of her old apartment. It felt like a reminder of all of the time Dave was gone.

“Dave, come watch with me,” she called, and he walked into the living room with raised eyebrows and Dave the Bird perched on his shoulder. It always made her smile when they hung out. She didn’t think they’d settled all their differences, but they at least managed to get along. That didn’t stop Dave the Bird from leaving Dave’s shoulder in favor of hers when he sat down.

“What are we watching?” he asked.

“Vriska’s trial,” she said, and he looked a little skeptical. “I’m only making you watch the good part! They’re about to announce the verdict.”

He hummed and leaned back. He’d figured out how to sit on a couch with his wings, and how to do most normal human things with his wings. It still made her smile to watch him tuck them against his body so carefully.

Even though the trial itself had taken months, the jury hardly needed minutes to reach a verdict. Jade hoped that was a good thing. “Your honor,” announced the woman standing in front of the rest of the panel. “We find the defendant guilty of all charges.”

Jade felt a flood of relief. She practically squealed as she wrapped her arms around Dave, and it echoed around the room in various ways as the birds settled in the living room with her—which, most of the time, was most of them; they always liked to be near Jade—echoed her or called back in the ways they knew how.

Not long after that, there was a knock at the door. Jade answered it, because Dave still got nervous about that (although he got nervous about Jade answering it, too). Of course, she was fairly sure she knew who it was.

She grinned at John and Rose as John held up a big brown paper bag. “We brought victory dinner,” he said, and Jade laughed and let them in.

As the four of them sat around the living room, eating a meal together like they used to do all of the time in college, Jade couldn’t help but think about how surreal it was. Even though Dave had been back for months, with the trial and everything else going on, they hadn’t been able to spend much time together like this.

Sometimes, Jade really had to marinate on the definition of evil.

Vriska Serket was a terrible person. It wasn’t just that she was a supervillain and a murderer. She had taken many of the things that had mattered most to Jade away from her, just to use them as leverage for whatever sick games she wanted to play. Beyond that, though, she was just kind of a huge bitch—and she really seemed to take delight in that fact.

But she was also the reason that this was happening. It had been eight years since John, Rose, and Jade got to have a meal with Dave, sitting around the living room and talking casually about what they had been up to lately and what they thought they were going to be doing next weekend. Jade was pretty sure she even caught Dave smiling a few times, and just like when they were teenagers, it was so rare to catch him doing that these days.

So she couldn’t be completely evil. And Jade loved her a little bit for that.

#homestuck #jade harley #dave strider #fanfic for meeeeeee #I love this so much #in part because it is catered to all of my interests but also!!#it’s just good!!!! it’s so good!!! go read it

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