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The washed-up ex-gamblignant washed ashore the broadside bay, pulled in by the gravity well, tossed aside with reckless indifference like the latest swill. A sword propped her up, connected to a hand, connected to her wrist, and from there, the rest of her body. Rusted cybernetics creaked their last gasps of breath, locking up while her windsacs ground and whirred and clicked, just as used as the rest of her. A scurrybeast's nest of tangled locks buried her face in so much interstellar grime, pockmarks of long-passed neutrino rays like freckles burnt through her skin.
Vriska Serket was not having a good sweep.
Yes, it was not the best tactic to use your sole remaining weapon besides your natural strength and mostly burnt out psionics as a walking stick, but with legs the way hers were, one didn't have much of a choice, did she? She was given a wide berth by the fancy dressers of the ship, in their fuchsia-and-blood-and-black bodysuits, while she was regaled with the regal, ratty, retired robes she wrapped herself within. Scum, the lot of them. So high and mighty, the way they avoided her, the brownblooded janitors wiping up the streaks of blue she left behind. Olive mechanics doubtlessly disassembling her sloop for spare parts. Violetblooded commanders considering her beneath their notice. She reviled them.
Scum. Scum. Scum. Click. Click. Click.
It was okay. They were all servants of the system that lead to her ruin, and would doubtlessly receive their justice in due time. There was really only one person she was here after, one person worth deliberately crashing your ship into an imperial vessel for.
Karkat Vantas. The hemononymous High Threshecutioner.
She would pick his brain apart, by sword or by speech. Her body groaned in protest, pushed beyond its breaking point. Her Imperious Condescension was, likely, not on this ship. If she was, then she was Vriska's next target. But Karkat first, the so-called general. Somewhere in her rage-addled brain stirred a synaptic connection dozens of sweeps old - didn't she know a Vantas, back on Alternia, back before deployment, back before she tried to change everything? But if there was something there, it was gone now, a flash in the thinkpan.
Radiating waves of leftover psionic energy created a bubble of space around Vriska, where the occasional rustie that approached her felt physically repelled, unable to touch, to offer their token kindnesses to the beaten blueblood. Spare her. Nobody could stop her - either they didn't consider her enough of a threat, or something about her aura was too repellent to approach, and she easily passed the threshold into the command room unmolested.
"Karkat VANTAS!" She roared, putting her index and middle finger against her temple and leaning hard against her sword. She felt it chip and buckle under her weight, but no matter. A violetblood approached her and then violently wrenched herself backwards, her joints creaking ominously against their owner. No, she was no burn out. She had plenty of fuel left. When you burnt through wood, you created charcoal.
She had plenty left.
The door hissed shut behind her, as the fire in her head flared up, roaring back to life with a strength she hadn't felt for sweeps. She was out of practice, but who needed finesse when you were going for area of effect? She leaned against the wall, gestured forward with her sword to the captain's chair, and barked a single command to the empty heavens. "Away!"
They stayed. Everyone, from every slice of the hemospectrum, they backed away, whether by choice or by force, it didn't really matter. Some of them stepped on their ankles wrong, falling down, breaking limbs in a way that would've been hilarious to a younger, more sadistic Vriska. Now, it was just sad. Sad and enraging. Obstacles to her final goal. "You. Here. Everyone else, nap time!"
She beckoned Karkat forward with her sword, and even the highly guarded, the famous High Threshecutioner, the Spotless, couldn't resist the call of her dying furnace. With the rest of the command room forced to collapse onto the ground, possibly even the rest of the ship if she put enough of her back into it, there was nobody awake anymore but her and Karkat.
And when his chin met the tip of her sword, the pain snapped him out of it. Before she could blink, before she could think, he had hooked her blade in one of his sickles and snapped it in half, bringing the other one back underneath her chin. "You've got a very fucking strange way of flirting, Serket." He hissed through his upper cords, a raspy, throaty yell completely unlike Vriska's diaphragmatic chest screams. "What are you doing on my fucking ship?"
"How do you know my name!?" She hissed back, two serpents spitting venom in each other's direction, missing by inches. Karkat's face twisted up into concern, and then the sort of unnamed aggravation only behest by people who suffered fools lightly, but regularly.
"It's in my best interest to never forget a face. Evidently, you haven't taken nearly as much care. No wonder you're a failure."
"Don't you dare condescend to me." Vriska growled, her knife rammed deep into Karkat's gut. "Karkat... Karkat... I remember you. Barely. You runt. You fucking worm. How you made it this far without being culled I'll never understand."
Karkat's face contorted into paroxysms of rage - not at the spite, but at the blade inside of him. He pushed forward, reeling his headback and smacking his forehead into Vriska's with a crak, just hard enough to bounce her head against the metal wall. Then, a scythe pinning to her throat, drawing tiny rivulets of cerulean to leak into her overcoat. "What are you doing... on my fucking ship?"
Vriska spit in his face. "Blackmail material." She whispered, withdrawing her blade from Karkat and kneeing him in the bulge, still dizzy and reeling from having her head smacked into the wall. She let out a wordless scream of fury, not enough to disarm a prepared threshecutioner like Karkat, but enough to stun him, block his awareness for long enough that she could flick his first scythe out of his hand, and then pin the second one against the hilt of her knife. She kicked her sword up, still shattered in half but still carrying a blunt edge, and pressed it underneath his chin from the flat up.
She glanced at her blade.
"I didn't know they gave fleet positions to mutants." She spoke, confirming her suspicions out loud. The Empress's High Threshecutioner. A mutant. Oh, the scandal!
Karkat spat back in her face, saliva clearing the air and landing squarely on her eyepatch. "I thought you realized by now, they give fleet positions to people who've earned them."
"Is that so, Spotless? Am I the first to draw a drop of this disgusting candy from your veins?" Vriska taunted, lifting her blade up. Karkat's wrist struggled and strained to push Vriska's knife-wielding arm back down, drips of blood splattering down against the floor.
"What do you want, Vriska?" Karkat growled, his muscles straining against her servos.
"I want to win, damnit." She spat back, kicking against the wall to press him backwards another couple of steps. With a grunt of effort, she caught the tines on the edge of her knife's hilt against the blade of Karkat's sickle, and a rightward, full-body twist ripped the second sickle loose, sending it skittering across the floor. "Don't worry, I'll help clean up this swill. Your secret's safe with me."
"And in return?" Karkat quietly asked. He wasn't an idiot. He hadn't made it this far by blindly rushing into every conflict. He would bide his time, and then, when necessary, slit her throat so that his secret would remain safe.
"Like I said. In return, you help me win." Vriska repeated, sheathing her sword and reaching a blood stained mechanical arm out towards him. After a moment of thought, he reached back out.