If someone were to write me the story where telekinetic Aradia grudgingly helms Vriska’s junker of a smuggling ship while they snipe and fight across several solar systems, I would be very happy.
It could have domestic moments like when Vriska stumbles into the helmsblock all bloody and triumphant and Aradia chooses that moment to jump to light speed so that Vriska falls right on her smug face. And the time the electricity goes down and they’re both terrified but Aradia has just enough power left in her to pipe in cheerful music and replace all the lyrics with “fuck y0u Vriska, y0u screwed up again!” The time Aradia gets stir-crazy and rips an arm out of the biotech and Vriska tenderly patches it back up, but botches it all because she’s terrible at maintaining anything but her own robotics and she knows this and Aradia knows she knows this. The time that Vriska decides to use manual controls to blast through an asteroid belt 8ecause the other way is 8oring!!!!!!!! and almost gets them killed, and Aradia turns off the hot water for a week.
Eventually they get completely fed up with the system (and Aradia gets fed up with Vriska’s hypocrisy) and they get increasingly more rebellious and get increasingly closer to getting completely blown up each time and HOW DOES EVERYONE NOT WANT THESE TWO LADIES TO BE GAY HATE-MARRIED IN SPACE, COME ON.
Maroonbloods made the shittiest helmsmen: ate you out of hive and hearth, burned through the cybernetics like wildfire, too sensitive, too short-lived, and too fucking precious for their own good. Captain Serket, the uplink is chafing me today. No, it’s fine, I don’t really care! Don’t go out of your way. Really. Really.
Vriska won her at an auction in the heart of a meteor that had been methodically scrubbed from the empire’s star charts, and the sellers had waited until she was half a parsec out to mention that Aradia Megido came without the telepathic leash that would keep her from tearing the ship to shreds.
“You could always just kill me,” Aradia had said. “Or do nothing and wait for me to kill you. Or we could go back and blow them up?”
“I like the way you think,” Vriska said, and the ship did a lazy roll and dumped her on her ass.
It’d taken them three systems to come to some kind of accord. Vriska didn’t remember most of those weeks—multiple concussions will do that—but she’d cauterized the organic access to the air supply just in time to stop the neurotoxin and she’d restored the third auxiliary power supply after Aradia had incinerated auxiliaries one and two and she’d laughed so hard when Aradia took two clean chunks out of the auctionblock that she’d gotten an extra, complimentary concussion, on the house. She’d also stocked up on meat. Aradia hated meat.
It was after Aradia dodged the smugglers while Vriska was busy fixing the previously mentioned power supply that Vriska figured it out. “Ohhhhhhhh,” she said. “It was a bluff.”
“It wasn’t a bluff,” Aradia said, serenely. “You really could kill me.”
“Yeah, but you don’t like being dead,” Vriska said, triumphantly. It was her first, and only, experience of successful empathy and she wanted to cue a round of applause. Aradia did apparently have a round of applause in her soundbank. She played it at 160 decibels and Vriska went deaf for an additional week.
