Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/379844.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      Multi
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Sollux_Captor/Karkat_Vantas, Gamzee_Makara/Karkat_Vantas, Sollux_Captor/
      Aradia_Megido, Sollux_Captor/Rose_Lalonde, Kanaya_Maryam/Karkat_Vantas,
      Terezi_Pyrope/Dave_Strider
  Character:
      Sollux_Captor, Karkat_Vantas, Kanaya_Maryam, Gamzee_Makara, Terezi
      Pyrope, Rose_Lalonde, Dave_Strider
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Canon_Divergence, Grief/Mourning, Major_Character
      Injury, Medical_Inaccuracies, Pale_Romance_|_Moirallegiance, Flushed
      Romance_|_Matesprits, Implied_Relationships, Xeno, Hurt/Comfort, Quadrant
      Confusion, Casual_Pale_Cuddling, Ashen_Romance_|_Auspistice, Polyamory
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-04-10 Completed: 2012-04-28 Chapters: 2/2 Words: 20872
****** By Ways I Have Not Known ******
by Megan
Summary
     You're bleeding, broken, blind, and bereaved. Now what?
Notes
     The sole point of AU is that Sollux didn't half-kill himself when he
     threw the asteroid, and thus he was not issued a ticket to the corpse
     party.
     Any references to troll biology presume that Karkat's mutation is
     cosmetic and only effects his blood color; thus his core body
     temperature, lifespan, (lack of) psychic abilities, etc. are all in
     line with that of a non-mutant limeblood troll.
***** Chapter 1 *****
"We should take care of Sollux," Kanaya is saying, and you can practically hear
the Capital Letters of Importance in her words. She's moved further away from
you; she isn't speaking from right next to your auricular sponge clots anymore.
"I am afraid we may still lose him if we do not."
You can't come with me because you're not dead, Aradia had told you. Which is
stupid, because you're pretty sure that in a contest between the two of you
you've died more times than she has. Apparently shenanigans involving multiple
dreamselves don't count, not that you'd know anymore; all you know now is that
you're all still going to die (except maybe Aradia and probably Kanaya, since
they've both already died in ways you're pretty sure count) and now there isn't
going to be any warning swell of voices in your head, getting louder and louder
and telling you it's someone's time. It's kind of comforting, really; you'd
rather be caught unawares than giving everyone a useless prophecy they won't
believe (or won't believe the right way) and have to deal with the fact that
you'd told them so but it still isn't enough.
You bite your tongue before you can say I'm fine, KN because fuck, you aren't
fine at all; you're bleeding from your empty ocular sockets and it's pooling in
your borrowed goggles, you're bleeding from your face gash where your teeth
were knocked out, and you're not entirely sure but you think maybe you're
bleeding from your near-vestigial remains of a probiscial organ from the strain
of the best bit of psionics you've ever pulled off. Then again, the migraine is
nearly always there (so much so that you weren't the slightest bit surprised
when your planet had been full of brains and fire, one of them always goes
along with the other) and there's definitely blood from under your goggles
running down your face, so maybe you do have one hole in your face that isn't
bleeding.
"Anybody here know any first aid that doesn't involve amputating limbs and
replacing them with robot pieces?" Strider asks, and you can't really place
where he is in the room by the sound of his voice. It makes you more than a
little nervous that you can't. "Because as on board with making you all a race
of cyborg bugs as I am, I have yet to see you all break out a set of robot
eyes."
"I'll take care of this, coolkid." Terezi is closer to you than you'd thought;
in fact, she's so close to you that you can practically feel the vibration of
her voice in your horns. Of course she knows how to treat injuries; she'd grown
up without a lusus, hadn't she? "You're way too tall for me to be your crutch,
appleberry blast, so I sure hope you can walk."
"Perhaps someone who can see what they are doing without licking and thus
introducing infection to the open wounds leading straight to his brain matter
should accompany you to assist." Have you ever mentioned Kanaya is your
favorite troll? Kanaya is your favorite troll. She should be the leader, so
much is she the best troll left in existence. Fuck Strider and his unfunny
jokes about robot eyes, Kanaya is leader now. Fuck, you sound stupid right now;
how much blood have you lost?
"I'll go." Karkat worms his way under your other arm, because of course the
second-shortest troll here would help the shortest troll here drag your overly
tall sack of damaged protein fibers and scrambled neurons into the ablution
block. Then again, you're not sure how badly you want Kanaya right next to your
bleeding face, and you are definitely very sure you do not want Gamzee anywhere
near your face in any condition.
"Up you go, appleberry," Terezi says, and with that you're somehow putting one
foot in front of the other again. Every step jars your brain a little more in
its damaged housing, as if all your thermal jelly has melted and your bees are
swarming search of a more temperate hive. You feel like that's what may have
actually happened in throwing this entire asteroid straight across the Furthest
Ring, as if it's a simple matter of overclocking you and your mainframe-bee
neurons.
You hunch over low because your helpers are so much shorter than you are, and
that jars something heavy and sore in your thoracic cavity that makes you choke
up what tastes like blood.
"Fuck, Sollux, you're going to be okay. You're going to be fine." Karkat has a
particularly horrible balance of comfort and insult that nobody else can really
duplicate, and it's so familiar you can almost believe him.
Step, step, step, cough. Whatever blood clot or piece of an internal organ
walking has knocked loose inside of you, it feels like it's trying to claw its
way up through your windtube.
"Come on, we're here now." Karkat is already wiping the blood off your mouth,
even before they've completely maneuvered you into the ablution block. "We've
got you, it's okay."
You flail a little bit when Terezi sets you down on the side of the ablution
trap, because the thought of scouring slime searing in your burned-out, raw
ocular sockets is enough to overcome even your desperate, instinctive urge to
curl up into a ball and die. She's not having any of it, though, and you're so
weak at this point you can't even slap her hands away effectively when she
takes your goggles off and blood spills out of them to slide down your face in
a rapidly-coagulating slurry.
"TZ, don't," you manage to choke out. "Please, don't—"
"Shhh." It's Karkat who answers you, not Terezi. Shouldn't he be off making
sure Gamzee isn't holding a corpse party down in the lab? Not that you're going
to complain, because Karkat— who's got enough pity in his stupid little
bloodpusher to shoosh all of you at once, seriously, what kind of pale stud can
do that in real life?— is really, really good at shooshpapping. You are talking
stupid good at it; you can't help but stop slapping vaguely in the direction of
Terezi's hands and slump down in shooshed defeat. "Shhhh, it's just water."
He's not lying, but it still burns and you can hear yourself screaming. Your
voice echoes up into your thinkpan and makes that ever-present headache of
yours (so much so that you could almost declare it your kismesis) get louder
like feedback from a microphone. Karkat still has one hand on the back of your
neck, petting; the other must be the one pouring fiery saltwater torture onto
your face, because you can feel Terezi's spidery little hands holding your arms
down so tightly her claws puncture your skin. If anyone else is in there
watching, they're being quiet enough about it you can't hear them over the
sound of your own choking and sobbing.
"Shoosh, you're going to get an infection if we don't clean this out." Karkat's
stubbly little claws are scritching at your hairline like you're a grub and
he's some bizarre kind of lusus, his knuckles kneading over places that have
been tense for so long you've forgotten they're not supposed to be like that.
You're crying, which is just making more of a mess they're going to have to
clean out but you can't help it.
"Please, KK." You almost don't recognize your own voice, wheezing and thin and
able to hiss out the s in please, and Karkat might as well not recognize it,
either, for all the good it does you. "It hurts— I'd rather die, fuck, please
stop."
"I might be of some help," Lalonde says from somewhere in the void past Terezi,
outside the little bubble where you can tell exactly where everyone is because
their hands are all over you. "Provided vodka is not innately toxic to your
species, it might make an effective sedative."
"Allow me to take a look at this sedative of yours." That's Kanaya— how many
people are crowding into this tiny torture chamber of an ablution block and
watching you cry like a wriggler? You should be charging admission to all of
these kinky idiots, twenty boondollars to come in and see the Sollux Captor Wet
and Messy Pity Extravaganza. So far it seems like Gamzee and Strider are the
only ones with anything better to do. "I will stand to be harmed the least if
it is dangerous, I think."
Karkat is murmuring pitiful nonsense about how it's almost over in your ear,
too quietly for anyone besides maybe Terezi to overhear, and rubbing at your
shoulders. You can't even get mad at him for getting all pale all over you,
because without it you're pretty sure everyone in the room would be buried
under a pile of rubble. Now that you're in the receiving end of it, you can see
how he managed to talk down Gamzee with petting. He’s really, really good at
petting.
"This is fifty percent ethyl alcohol diluted in water, albeit a formulation
that is strangely magnetized. We will have to be careful, but if there was ever
a time for such a thing this is it." Kanaya sounds like she's scandalized,
which is to say she sounds like she's head over heels flushed because Kanaya
Maryam loves scandal like she loves heaving bosoms and purple prose.
"What the hell," Terezi says, and jerks her head up so hard it shakes you.
"That is so, so illegal. If the dismembouncers caught you with that they'd cull
you on the spot."
"I find myself more and more in admiration of your society every moment,"
Lalonde murmurs. "What percentage alcohol is normally in the solution your
people take recreationally?"
"Oh fuck no, you are not giving that garbage to Sollux." Does Karkat have to be
so loud when he's right next to your face? Okay, now you know you're dying of
blood loss, because of course he has to be that loud. And if he doesn't stop
it, his voice is about to become your migraine's matesprit and join it in
trolling the sanity right out of your thinkpan.
"I do not know," Kanaya says, as if she didn't just hear Karkat shout the
remaining blood right out of your head. "But I would be extremely cautious, as
he has lost a great deal of his blood. I am afraid that is partly my fault, as
I had little choice but to feed on his blood."
Wait, when had she bitten you? Admittedly, everything is a little bit hazy—
okay, a lot hazy— after having your ocular apparatus seared right out of your
face and your maybe sort-of almost a potential matesprit killed in front of you
and wait, when did Kanaya come back from the dead, anyway? Maybe she did bite
you, and you're bleeding out of holes in your neck, too; it's not like you can
differentiate much between all the different knives stabbing through your skin
and lighting your nervous system on fire at the same time.
You take it back. Kanaya can't be the leader, because it's completely unfair
that she gets to be dead but stay here with everyone but you have to be alive
but can't go back with Aradia. Karkat gets to be your favorite troll now, even
though you can never tell him this because he'll either make fun of you forever
or he'll say something really embarrassing and you'll have to pretend not to be
his friend for two whole hours.
"What the hell, it's just vodka." Strider is there too, laughing at your
misfortune, and you groan in pain and defeat; now literally everyone alive
besides Gamzee can see you as an eyeless, blood-drenched mess who can't even
stand up on his own.
"You don't have to take it if you don't want to." For once in his life, Karkat
speaks softly, so quiet that you can barely hear him. "We won't let them make
you." And you can feel Terezi's nod of agreement against your shoulder.
"No, I'll do it." Your answer makes Terezi stiffen; Karkat just skates his
claws up the back of your thinkpan to scritch down between your horns. That
makes things hurt just a little bit less, but not enough to change your mind
about this. "I hurt so much I want to die already, and it's either going to
kill me or make me feel better."
There's a bit of shuffling and the sound of a heavy object hitting the floor
and rolling, and then someone is holding a cup to your lips.
"I'm afraid this is going to burn," Lalonde warns you, and tips the cup so you
can drink. She isn't lying to you-- it's two mouthfuls of fire, and it stings
where your fangs were knocked out almost as much as it burns your raw throat.
"It will, however, help disinfect the damage in your mouth in addition to
sedating you."
You don't manage more than a voiceless little rasp in return; the fire she's
just fed you has burned out your voice. At least, that's what it feels like for
the next few minutes, and between that and the rest of it you've been reduced
to muffled sobbing as they finish washing out your injuries. By then, you're
pretty sure the pleasant haze that's started to descend over everything is the
weird human sedative at work. But at least it does work; you calm down and feel
sort of disconnected from everything.
Everything sort of tilts after that; Terezi stops holding you down and starts
holding you up. She and Karkat are putting something in your ocular sockets
that makes them feel dry and tight, and you're not really sure it's an
improvement over weeping blood. At least you've got a distraction from how much
it hurts, because you're pretty sure without those bulge-out insane drugs
Lalonde (and you really like her name, it's got a ring to it— La-londe, you can
call her LL) has been carrying with her for no apparent reason whatsoever,
you'd be screaming again. As it is, though, you're just kind of drifting away
from everything. You'll have to thank her for bringing her scary culling-
offense drugs with her when you can figure out how to speak something besides
Alternian again.
"We should keep the goggles off, for now. Exposure to fresh air is important to
wound healing." Kanaya says from wherever out there in the dark she is. She
hasn't come closer this whole time, the only one of them who hasn't gotten up
in his personal space at some point. "Or so I have read."
"Rainbow drinker novels are not docu— no, never mind, I can't even say that
now." Karkat grumbles as he wraps bandages around your head to keep the weird
itch inside your empty sockets, and he sounds like an angry little grub, all
grrr bzzz click behind his words. It's so funny that you don't bother not to
laugh at him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm hilarious, you nooklicking moron. Just remember
that when you aren't so high we're about to lose you into low-Alternian orbit."
"You still make grub noises when you're mad." You try to reach out and pap him
on the cheek (because two can play at moirallegiance cluckbeast, which happens
to be a game you will probably be awesome at), but your hand misses and you
almost lose your balance all over Terezi.
"Pretty sure he just landed on a moon, Karkles." Terezi loops an arm around
your chest, slinking under your own arms because she's not tall enough to hold
you higher up. You always feel kind of weird about that, since bluebloods are
supposed to be big but she's the smallest of all of you. "Let's get you to bed,
appleberry blast."
"I'm not, anymore." You're not mad about it, not really. You're pretty sure you
might be later, when you try to do something and fail at it because you can't
see, but until that time comes you're okay. It's not even Lalonde's magnetic
drug trip telling you that, either, because you'd been okay with it before
that, too. "Nasty mustard, I guess that's what you have to call me now."
"Nope!" Everything lurches as she lets go of you long enough to stand up on
tiptoe and lick your face, but rights itself again when someone— Karkat, of
course, because he's barely bigger than Terezi— comes up and supports your
other side. "You taste too bubbly to be mustard right now. Suck it up,
appleberry."
"I presume you have a working alchemeiter, or else you would have all starved
to death." Lalonde is far away again, her task of delivering hard drugs to you
complete. "I have a few items that might be of use in creating a suitable pile
for him to sleep in, if one of you would be so kind as to show me where it is."
"Somebody should probably watch him," Strider says from whatever safe vantage
point he's been using to watch this entire mess without your knowing. "Shit,
have you ever seen a Youtube video of drunk bees? Because that is seriously
what this guy reminds me of."
"Bzzzz," you say, both because he's talking about bees and because you're still
making fun of Karkat for losing all control of his tone like that earlier. You
would laugh more than you do, but moving it that much really hurts your face
right now and you've done such a good job of forgetting about everything that's
on fire you don't want to remember it. "Should have gotten some mind honey, I'd
have sent ED right into space. Pchoooo, no more scarf-chewing asshole."
"…I'm telling you, wasted like Youtube bees." You can hear Strider shaking his
head. You know you can. It's easier to understand than his human words, even.
"I'll stay," Karkat says. Shit, you're supposed to be playing moirallegiance
cluckbeast, aren't you? If you keep forgetting that, he's going to win and
that's just not on. So you lean to one side and rest your cheek on top of his
head.
"Thanks, KK," you tell him, and you actually kind of mean it. He makes an odd,
soft noise that sounds like he thinks this is an entirely different sort of
cluckbeast game (and you realize sort of dimly that if you were thinking
clearly you might prefer this one; losing a new flirtation does hurt less than
being abandoned by your sweeps-long moirail, so you have fewer bruises for
soft, affectionate matesprit chirps to poke unwanted claws into), and reaches
up to pet at the back of your neck again.
"You are not allowed to die and leave me here with these freaks, do you hear
me?" Even his angry orders are softer right now, as if the sight of you is
making pity hemorrhage through even the worst of whatever it is that fuels his
rage.
"Bzzzz." You give him another humming, giddy sort of buzz, which you mean to be
a vague sort of affirmative, and angle your head so that one of your longer
outer horns touches one of his. You can feel him shiver against you; you're
going to win matesprit cluckbeast, too.
"Stop those idiot bee noises, too," he says, but he rubs his horn against yours
right back. "And Terezi's right, you're already way out in space. Come on, time
to drag your mangled, drunk sack of chitin to whatever pile the humans put
together."
The walk to whatever room they're putting you in-- your own respiteblock, as it
turns out-- isn't long, but you keep stumbling over your own legs. You haven't
been using for much more than a storage space, since Karkat's banned sleeping
and it's too cold to keep your mainframe in and the terminals in the main
computer room make keeping one in your respiteblock a redundancy.
"Shouldn't you be keeping track of GZ?" You ask, because the last thing anyone
needs is Gamzee snapping again without his moirail there to make out with him
until he forgets the definition of the word murder. Even dizzy with Lalonde's
bizarre metallic burn, you know that much.
"Kanaya is keeping an eye on him. She's so pissed off at him right now I'm
almost into her in a black kind of way." Terezi answers for him before he can
say anything, but you can't feel any twitching or scowling or anything like
that. And Karkat has a tendency to make such big gestures and facial
expressions that you would know, even without being able to see.
"Now come on, into the stupid looking pile Lalonde made you. It looks like one
for a wriggler just out of the cocoon, all pillows and shit." He pulls you
forward and sends you stumbling into-- well, exactly what he'd said it was.
It's so soft you're practically swimming in it, and there's a thermal tarp with
it-- another thing for wrigglers too tiny for a proper recuperacoon. You
immediately wrap it around yourself and sink down into the pile; between your
high and the plush suspension of the pile, you feel pleasantly weightless.
Karkat settles down next to you and goes back to the lovely light scratching
between your horns.
You finally fall asleep like that.
You wake up with your face still throbbing, your mouth dry and your nutrition-
retaining digestive sack roiling. It's like your headache has spread downward
to your guts, but hasn't lost any potency despite its divided force. The pile
they made for you is much, much too soft; you're more used to either the
comforting buoyancy of the sopor or the sharp, startling edges of the horn
pile. It reminds you of glubbing in the brain pile with Feferi, just a little
bit, except that had been slimy (a little more like sopor) in a way Lalonde's
alchemized pillow pile isn't. You shift a little, trying to find a stable
position in the too-forgiving squish surrounding you, and your arm hits someone
sharing the pile with you. Oh, right, Karkat had been with you when you fell
asleep.
"Watch your hand, brother," Gamzee says in his rough voice, and you jerk you
claws back like he's just tried to bite them off. He laughs. "Chill out,
motherfucker, I'm just here because my best palebro is asleep here on your
pile. Felt like getting my cuddle on with him while he isn't all a talking
spikebeast, you dig?"
That… well, that's pretty fucking creepy, actually, that he's climbed onto the
pile and is nonconsensually getting his pale on instead of doing it while his
moirail is competent to consent. Not that you think Karkat doesn't want to
sleep next to his moirail— just the opposite, it's exactly the sort of
traditional, quadrant-normative thing that totally gets Karkat off. It's just
that the way it's happening here is making your skin crawl.
"…okay," you finally manage, because at least he's not trying to subjugglate
you for sleeping all over his moirail before he did. It's one of the few small
mercies the universe has ever given you.
"I ain't gonna get my paint on with you, bro." Gamzee chuckles. His voice is
already lower than yours or Karkat's, the bigger chitinous windtube of a
highblood letting the sound echo around. "If I were a motherfucker given to
being jealous over a little bit of jamming in the pile, I'd have fallen pale
for the worst motherfucker in the universe. Shooshes people like some kind of
fuckin' miracle. 'sides, I'm pretty sure your diamond's still got our righteous
red timesister's name all over it. Wouldn't have a thing to worry about
anyway."
The mention of Aradia hurts, hurts as much as any of your physical injuries do.
She'd chosen to leave you here. She's god-tier, not dead; she could have
decided to stay with you instead of consummating her status as death's number
one fangirl. Then again, it's been nearly half a sweep since you were really
moirails, first she was dead-- and no, no, you can't phrase it like that, first
you killed her no matter what Karkat or Terezi or anyone else has to say about
your culpability in the matter. First you killed her, and then she was a ghost
who didn't seem to feel anything or care about anyone, and then she was a robot
who only seemed to care about Equius when she felt anything at all. And now,
just when you thought you'd have her back, she's gone again; making friends
with the dead is more important to her than whatever shambles of your
moirallegiance you've been clinging to.
"That doesn't matter." Your voice shakes when it comes out, and you're not sure
whether it's the fact you've just realized your moirallegiance was dead long
before Aradia had done the next best thing to formally ending it or that you're
still horrified by what Gamzee is getting up to in the pile that you're pretty
sure was explicitly made for you. It shouldn't remind you of climbing into the
recuperacoon in Aradia's hiveblock, of settling in next to her and letting her
hair float around both of you almost as much as the sopor had. "I'm pretty sure
leaving me when I'm the most pitiful troll left alive means she really doesn't
have those kinds of feelings for me anymore."
"I dunno about that, bro." There's a faint rustling sound, like cloth being
pushed aside, and Karkat trills a little in his sleep. What the fuck is Gamzee
doing? "The way I see it, we all gotta make sacrifices for this fucked-up story
we got put in, you get it? I bet your palesister leaving you there was the
hardest thing she ever did, because there ain't no way she don't have some god
shit and time shit to take care of instead of partying it up in some
dreambubbles."
The heaviness under your bloodpusher has to be blood and swelling in your air
sacs, capillaries burst with the forces you'd commanded with no regard for what
your frail goldblood body could handle; there's no good scientific reason why
the thought of Aradia being as distraught as you are should cause a physical
ache in you.
"I think I'd rather have her dump me, though," you find yourself saying, all
that misery spilling over into your words. "I don't want her to feel as
horrible as I do right now."
"That's because you're the second-best moirail I ever saw." Gamzee makes a
sound low in his throat, and Karkat gives him a sleepy, answering murmur in
return. It sounds like something you shouldn't be overhearing in the first
place, but it's still nice in a squirming, guilty sort of way; you might be
grieving for your own moirail right now, but you still get a secondhand warmth
from hearing Gamzee and Karkat in the first flush of a new moirallegiance.
"Mmm," Karkat hums, and the pillow pile shifts. He must be sitting up and
stretching. "Gamzee?"
"Right here, best friend," Gamzee assures him; the inflection he gives to the
words best friend proving that they're not just best friends. They're stupid
pale for each other.
"Shit, Sollux?" There's a sudden panic in Karkat's voice, as if he's just
awakened enough to realize they aren't alone. "Are you okay?"
"No," you answer, too tired for anything but honesty now. "I hurt everywhere,
AA dumped me, FF is dead, I can't fucking see, I think I damaged myself
internally when I threw this entire asteroid across paradox space, and I woke
up to GZ getting his pale on with you in your sleep. I am in a state exactly
opposite of okay right now, KK. How could I be anything else?"
There's another shifting to the pillows, and then Karkat is right up in your
face.
"You think you damaged-- fuck, Sollux, how bad are you hurt? I thought you were
choking up blood you swallowed when your fangs got knocked out! Were you
actually coughing up blood?"
"Yes." You shrink down on yourself and wrap the thermal tarp around your
shoulders like you're a shitty hipster with a shitty cape. "And my thorax hurts
like I'm going to do it some more."
Last night-- fresh from the loss of the defining relationship of your life and
a new infatuation at the same time, sick and exhausted and in so much pain you
were ready to die, ready for nothing more for your moirail to pull you away
with her and shoosh you right into the afterlife. Things aren't much better
now, except that you've just realized you don't want to die. You want things to
stop hurting, yes, but you also want to get into slapfights with Karkat and to
get poked with Terezi's cane and maybe to punch Strider more than a little bit.
"I don't want to die, KK." You reach out to where you think you'll find his
arm, and you miss. He gets what you're trying to do, though, and takes your
grasping appendage in his.
"I told you, you're not allowed to leave me here with the hulled ground-nut
collection." His voice breaks to a chirrup of distress in the middle, but he
holds his ground and keeps on talking instead of breaking down completely.
"I'll make a new memo about it, if I have to-- the Sollux Captor Is A Shitty
Friend If He Dies On Me, And He's Not Allowed To Do That room."
"Your memos are so stupid, KK," you half-sob on him. "Never stop making them,
they're the only funny thing I have left in my life."
It's the stupidest thing you've ever said, and you mean every unironic syllable
of it.
"My memos are not stupid, and you sound like you can't breathe," Karkat says,
his alarm completely subsuming any potential affront at the insult. "Gamzee,
get Terezi in here, fuck, I hope she knows what to do. Because I sure as hell
don't."
"Sure thing, best friend." Gamzee rises with a force that knocks a couple of
pillows loose, and leans in close for a second. He's probably dropping one last
pet on Karkat's head, or something, before he leaves to find Terezi.
"You're not going to die, you horrible, horrible asshole," Karkat reiterates
after Gamzee leaves, and he lays one of his grasping appendages palm-down on
your forehead. It's cool against your soft chitinous exoskeleton layer, a small
relief against the sparking fever-heat in you. "I'll fight."
That brings to mind the sudden, horrible mental picture of Karkat and Aradia
slapfighting each other over who gets to keep you. Aradia would insist you're
invited to her corpse party and Karkat would start shrieking about how you're
the only bastion of sanity left on the asteroid and like hell she's having a
stupid corpse party anyway. It's exactly the kind of thing they would have done
when you were all half a sweep younger and a lot more stupid, sitting around
your hiveblock some evening Aradia didn't have her FLARP game--
You can't help it, you really are crying into Karkat's sweater now. He doesn't
shoosh you; instead he lets you keep going, stroking at your back occasionally
to let you know that he's still there but not doing anything but listening.
It's an oddly ashen way to deal with someone's pain, to sit there a silent
witness instead of actively comforting them. And you'd bet all the boondollars
on this asteroid that Karkat is not in any way, shape, or form ashen for you,
but he must know that anything else would just upset you more.
"What's wrong?" Terezi doesn't cackle or shriek or make any jokes when she
approaches the pile, which is just as scary as Karkat trying desperately to
bargain you into staying alive or Gamzee getting a feelings jam on with you.
They're all afraid you're going to die, too.
"Please tell me you know what to do," Karkat says, desperately.
Terezi, as it turns out, does not have the faintest idea of what to do. She
also brings Lalonde, Strider, and Kanaya with her, because it's apparently time
for the sequel to last night's watch a desperate pale slut beg for it live
action porno.
"I don't think you're dying, but you shouldn't move around too much. You could
dislodge a blood clot." Terezi has poked her cold, sharp fingers just about
everywhere that's decent by the time she declares her (lack of a) diagnosis.
"We should get you some water and hot nutrient slurry before you go back to
sleep. You'll need that to heal properly."
She's as perfunctory about medicine as she is about the law, and that's
actually sort of comforting right now. Even if you're really desperately hoping
you don't have some kind of blood clot in there, because you don't have any
more of a clue about the proper treatment for that than anyone else here seems
to.
It's a cycle: you get drugged, you go back to sleep, you wake up sick and
horrible, and you get drugged again. This time when you wake up, though you're
clear-headed. Everything still hurts— a hundred different raw places are all
torn open and burned and bleeding, all doing their best to protest the fact
you've survived at all. Your body does a pretty good job of calling for your
doom all on its own, no supernatural powers required, and if this is the kind
of misery you're going to have to live with then you kind of want to listen to
it.
"I'm sorry," someone— Kanaya, that's Kanaya— says, and brushes your hair back
from your face. "I am afraid we cannot sedate you again for the time being; it
was starting to make you ill. We are attempting to alchemize a more effective
substitute for sopor slime, but it is difficult and we cannot be careless with
our grist."
The thought of a recuperacoon is simultaneously comforting and horrifying right
now; while floating in a sleepy haze is such a wonderful thought you almost
shiver in the anticipation of it, that would mean sopor slime getting in your
wounds and probably burning, not to mention what getting it literally inside
your thinkpan might do to your brain. It would probably make Gamzee's sopor-
addled mind look sharp as one on mind honey.
"How are you feeling?" Kanaya asks, and her breath on your face is warm as
death.
"Like I want you to cull me." Maybe she'll bite you again. You'd been downright
prescient when you'd guessed before that being okay with everything had been
temporary, and ephemeral thing that gives way to the too-familiar weight of
your own traitor brain.
"I am afraid I cannot do that." She sits down on the pile next to you, a
shockingly pale gesture.
"Karkat has already made a memorandum promising unending torment to anyone who
kills anyone else, and Rose has given it her leaderly approval. As I do not
wish to be on the receiving end of what is sure to be a dangerously loud
lecture, I will have to abstain."
She puts a hand on your head, soft and hesitant, and when you don't pull away
she digs her claws in between your horns. You've never been a touchy-feely
type; even with Feferi, you had been more about talking than you had been
touching.
"Am I so irresistibly pitiful now that you can't keep your hands off me?" You
ask her, but can't help pushing your head up into the touch. It thrums through
you, the instinctive reaction to being scratched between your horns relaxing
the muscles at your temples and in your neck and easing, just a little, the
headache that never really goes away.
"Yes," she says in a quiet, embarrassed voice. "But I am honestly not pale for
you, not really. You simply look like you could use a friend with benefits
right now, as neither of us has a moirail— oh, this is embarrassing, I'm
sorry."
You're heartsick and diamondsick and lonely; everything hurts and you feel
fuzzy and thirsty. You've never been pale for Kanaya— you could have easily
been Karkat's moirail, if Aradia hadn't been there first, and you spent part of
the game with a brief, ashamed pale crush on Terezi that had only evaporated
after how much more competent than you and utterly not pitiful or in need of a
moirail she is became obvious. But Kanaya has not ever crossed your mind in
relation to any quadrant before, not even ashen— but that actually makes this
less awkward than it would be otherwise, less of a betrayal to someone who
doesn't even want you anymore.
"Thank you," is all you have the energy to say, and you press your face to her
shoulder and let her stroke your head. You're too dry and wrung-out to cry, but
you can feel yourself shaking in a way that would probably be sobbing if you
had the moisture in your body right now for tears. She doesn't shoosh you, kiss
you, or do anything else crass or overly pale; she just pets you and gives you
a place to lose it on in a way that could actually really be platonic, albeit
in a modern, quadrant-liberated kind of way. It's unnatural for any troll to be
so warm, much less someone higher-blooded than you are, but she feels nice
against your skin.
"It's too cold in here for you," she says finally, after you finally stop
shaking. "It is making you worse. I myself found it slightly uncomfortable here
before my… change, so I cannot imagine it is healthy for you. I suppose that is
what we get when we allow Terezi to control the ambient temperature."
That had been a compromise, so that you and Tavros didn't freeze to death but
Eridan and Feferi didn't overheat. Maybe you can re-negotiate now that nobody
here needs it quite so cold; Gamzee doesn't quite have icewater for blood.
"The humans are most comfortable at a temperature I believe you would find
favorable." Kanaya puts her free arm around your waist, holding you to her.
"Rose has offered to let you keep your pile in the sitting room she's put
together, at least until you recover somewhat and can better handle the lower
temperature."
Then comes the bad news.
"We have been changing the dressings on your face while you were drugged, to
spare you the pain. I am afraid it will be necessary to take them off at least
this one last time, though if they appear healed enough we may be able to leave
you with just your goggles." Kanaya keeps you pinned into place with the
unnatural strength of her stupid dead arms, and all your flailing doesn't get
you away from her and the torture session that's about to follow. "We still are
not sure how I will react if your wounds are open, and Karkat and Terezi are
both otherwise occupied. Rose will be taking care of this for you, since she
seems a better choice than either Gamzee or Dave."
The truth is that none of them would have let you slip away; Kanaya holds you
with brute force, Karkat would scream until you'd forgotten what you were
trying to do in the first place, Terezi would just drub you across any
available body part when you tried to get past her, Gamzee is... just no,
Strider could just go back in time and keep you from leaving, and Lalonde is-
- from what you can gather-- completely and totally omniscient.
"Come on, then," Lalonde says out of completely fucking nowhere, and how long
has she been there listening? "I would like to get this taken care of as
quickly as possible, which I think is something you might also appreciate."
You're finally well enough to walk around, evidently, even if you're weak and
off-balance from being on pile-rest for so long. Terezi hasn't swooped down out
of the sky to berate you and drag you back to the pile with promises of so many
drubbings the second you're well enough to take them, at any rate, which has to
mean something. You hang on to Lalonde's proffered arm just because you're not
used to navigating without your eyes yet, especially not when two new people on
the asteroid probably means new treasure chests and new piles of stuff and all
kinds of other new things to potentially trip over and knock the rest of your
teeth out with. At least it's not far to the nearest ablution block.
Given her lack of claws and surfeit of manual dexterity, you have to wonder why
giving her this job hasn't occurred to anyone before; she doesn't scratch when
she takes hold of the bandages and starts to unwrap them, which is such a
miracle (and fuck Gamzee, you can use that word when something honestly
qualifies) you almost can't believe it.
"Do you want to talk about what's happened? I'm given to understand that it was
worse for you than it was for anyone else." The question comes out of
absolutely fucking nowhere; you’re gaping at her audacity, which seems to clue
her in to just how culturally insensitive it was. "I am not proposing a
feelings jam with you, as the others would call it. Humans often find it
cathartic to share their thoughts and troubles with an impartial third party
whose job is to help them work through their issues. I was merely offering
myself as a sounding board, should you desire such an outlet for your
emotions."
The lengths humans go to in order to fulfill their emotional needs in a society
without quadrants will never stop being stupid-- professional substitutes for
moirails, really? Pale prostitution isn't really rare, since there's no chance
of getting culled for not filling your conciliatory quadrants, but it sounds
like it's actually normative to the humans. Lalonde sees nothing wrong with
propositioning you for such an arrangement, and you barely know her.
"At any rate, your wounds are healing nicely. I think we can skip washing them
again, and leave them to dry out." She is suddenly the best person on the
asteroid, bizarre fetish for clinical feelings jams or no, because she isn't
going to slough a layer of dead tissue out of your tenderest, most pain-wracked
places without an anesthetic. "I do not believe the sopor substitute we've
managed to alchemize should get into your eyes, however. No one has attempted
to ingest it, for obvious reasons, but I cannot imagine it could be beneficial
to directly inject into your brain. Do you still have your goggles?"
"They're not mine," you say, and your mouth is full of ashes. "They're FF's."
"Do you think she would want you to have them?" Lalonde asks, as if she can't
see the damn answer for herself. Maybe she's not looking, out of respect for
your privacy.
"Probably." She'd switched your glasses and hers once, proclaiming that you
looked glubbing ador--able! and that seeing everything in red-and-blue was so--
ooo tentacool! It had been one of the stupidest fish puns she had ever made,
and you had thought it was cute.
Remembering Feferi doesn't hurt nearly so deeply as thinking about Aradia does-
- she had been nice and pretty and dangerous, and you had really, really liked
her. You think you could have pitied her more than anyone in the world if you'd
only had more time; you'd spent bare days considering each other as potential
matesprits. It hurts like losing a good friend, not like losing a pity-mate-
- it's awful and you miss her, but she hasn't left a gaping wound in your
bloodpusher the way Aradia has. The sick rush of guilt you get whenever anyone
here paps your head or tells you that you're getting better in the small
gestures of casual pity you've gotten used to doesn't come when you consider
that Karkat appears to have the world's most incompetent flushcrush on you.
Trust him to fall headlong into romantic pity for someone just because he loses
his sight and ruptures what had felt like seven different organs saving
everyone from Jack Noir and the Green Sun.
"Then they are yours now," Lalonde says. She leans forward to take a closer
look at your eyes; you can tell because you can feel her breath on your face,
warm as Kanaya's and somehow even more menacing in that way peculiar to the two
of them. It's an elegant, delicate proclamation of fire and doom. (Sometimes
you think you miss the prophecies, at times like this. Then you remember that
the ones you'd heard weren't like this; they had been messy things that were
haunting for how they ripped you raw, not for how they could have been
beautiful.)
"I-- they're in my respiteblock." You're probably not ever going to think of
them as yours; they're borrowed from a girl who had been a good friend, a girl
who had laughed all the time but was deadly serious when she told you she
wouldn't eel-ver let them make you a helmsman!
"Well, you don't need to wear them all the time-- in humans, at least, oxygen
is supposed to be important for healing. So I would only recommend wearing them
in your recuperacoon." She moves back, away from such close proximity to your
face. "I think we're finished, for now."
She doesn't pet you, she doesn't push you to do anything, and she doesn't tell
you how much she pities you with the tone of her voice. You're pretty sure the
feeling low in your gut is gratitude for that, that she's treating you like she
does everyone else.
You still spend most of your time outside the recuperacoon resting,
interspersed with visits from the others. Karkat tells you to get the fuck
better, you can't leave me alone with these people and snarls and spits until
you tell him to stop interrupting your pity sleep with his nonsense, which
makes him sputter and yell even more. Terezi comes by to try and teach you to
taste the world like she does, but it turns out teaching someone when you can't
telepathically impart the instructions is so much harder you privately think
you'll never be able to do it. The one time you make this thought heard, it
gets you a drubbing right across your knuckles.
"Nobody is going to hit each other with sticks in here," Lalonde says crisply
after the cane leaves a stinging stripe across your skin. The clicking that
always accompanies her words never stops. "Dave may find it endlessly
fascinating when you act like a ravening barbarian, but I do not. You may
refrain from administering cane drubbings for a few moments of your
fantastically violent life, or you may excuse yourself from my parlor."
That just makes Terezi snarly and contrary, which ends the lesson for the day.
She leaves with a grumble about how Lady Lavenderlocks is going on trial in Can
Town for being a bluh bluh huge bitch. You don't even want to know.
Lalonde is still clicking, even though she isn't talking. Maybe it's not part
of her voice like you've thought this whole time, after all. You hadn't heard
it that time she'd earned her place as your favorite human, so it must not be.
Humans are so strange, not even having a tonal quirk to their voices.
"What is that?" You finally ask her; the two-beat rhythm is one of the most
comforting things you've heard in a long time. "I thought it was your voice,
but now I don't think it is."
"Knitting," Lalonde says. "And before you ask, I believe the troll equivalent
would be 'fabric pattern creation via an analog binary needle system with
output intended to be worn by sentient beings.' Or something close enough to
that to give you an idea."
That… actually does make a surprising amount of sense. And since 'binary' and
'pattern creation' are two things that never fail to light up your programmer's
brain, you reach out for the cane— no concealed weapons inside, because you
still don't need to waste your time with that nonsense— Terezi had gifted you
with when you were first well enough to hobble around a little bit, and stand
up.
"That rule against drubbings applies to you, too," Lalonde says.
Clickclickclickclick, her analog binary needle apparatus says in counterpoint.
"I just want to see your analog binary pattern creation apparatus in action,"
you tell her, and fuck, you're whining. "The only entertainment I get anymore
is KK melting down and TZ drubbing me when I don't lick things enthusiastically
enough, and what you're doing actually sounds kind of interesting."
"Very well," she says, and the clicking slows but doesn't stop. "You'll have to
come and sit down; it's a very small apparatus."
Knitting, as it turns out, is fascinating. It's got a comforting similarity to
programming at its most basic level: put raw material in, apply binary-powered
engine, and watch useful output come out at the end. You can feel the patterns
in the fabric under your fingers, as exact and perfect as anything a machine
could put out, and that makes you feel a little bit better about everything.
That fascinated distraction for a new hobby—even one you can only partake in by
proxy-- lasts for all of a perigee, until the newest interpersonal disaster
decides to show up, introduce itself to everyone, and sit the fuck down in your
life and refuse to leave.
"Hell fucking no," Karkat is yelling at everyone and no one when you feel your
way into what used to be the computer room. Tap-tap-tap-fwoosh, you've hit yet
another pillow pile. Lalonde and Kanaya are worse with those than Gamzee is
with those stupid horns, and you're pretty sure they get up to things Gamzee
doesn't even have a quadrant for on some of them. "I am not taking that
garbage, it is not oh yes, let's poison Karkat because dead is better than not
sleeping day up in here!"
"Stop being such a dramannihilator, Karkles. Even I have to admit it's not
going to kill you-- it didn't kill Sollux, and he was even suffering from blood
loss the first time." Terezi sounds more annoyed than you've heard her since
back when her kismessitude that wasn't was still a thing with Vriska.
"Oh my god," is all you can say when you realize what they're talking about.
"Are you still not sleeping?"
"Shitty sopor substitute doesn't work right." He sounds petulant, like he's
going to do like always does and dig his claws in. Stubborn fucking crab.
"Look, we're all really impressed by your dedication to dying from sleep
deprivation, and by that I mean just saying that has made today spontaneously
transform into opposite day. Take the fucking vodka and chill on that pillow
pile you're always making googly eyes at Captor from so the rest of us can have
a couple of quiet hours before your next thousand hour speed bender, or however
it is you stay the fuck awake." It's Strider, of all people. "And speak of the
devil and he shall appear, your-- no, never mind, neither one of you is the
better half. You're both the fucking worst half. Captor, make him take a shot
of metalloid moonshine and put on Titanic or some shit so he can cry all this
out, because I am done."
You are honestly sorry you can't see what's going on in front of you for the
first time since this happened-- oh, you've been sad, upset, and angry, but
never really sorry. But right now you would give mad caegars to see exactly
what's going on in front of you. It sounds like Terezi is drubbing Karkat and
Strider is possibly holding him down (and if they think their blackrom is some
kind of secret, well, someone should probably clue them in that it's sure as
hell not) and you aren't really sure which one of them is dosing him with the
liquor. You just know that it's happened, because pretty soon Karkat has
stopped yelling at everything and started acting like, as Strider had so
disgustingly put it, he was making googly eyes at you.
Karkat has settled in next to you in the absurdly squishy pile, a surprisingly
cool weight against your side. Everyone's just sort of assumed he's a rust
blood who's been hiding it for as long as he can so as to have some semblance
of deniability for the highbloods who had barely tolerated his leadership as it
was, but now that you're up close and personal with him you're not so sure
that's true. No, scratch that, you are absolutely sure it's not true, because
he would feel warm to the touch if that were the case. He feels, well... cool
isn't quite the word you're looking for. Tepid, maybe, like water just cool
enough to be unpleasant to bathe in but just warm enough to be unpleasant to
drink. He has to be higher on the hemospectrum than you, but not by much.
It actually feels nicer than your stupid mental metaphor makes it sound, since
the ambient temperature in here is actually a little bit high for you. It's the
kind of warmth Aradia would have liked in her hiveblock, and that feeling is a
little bit less painful with Karkat a mess of an entirely different sort of
pity--
--oh hell, he really is. He's as stupid high as you'd been that first night,
which means he's not even trying to hide his flush. He even chirps at you when
you pull the thermal tarp aside (it's way too warm in here right now to need
it), a clean, affectionate little sound that speaks entire volumes' worth of
pity.
"You are so high right now, KK," you tell him with a sigh. It's not that you've
never considered the possibility of a red quadrant with him before-- back when
you'd realize the two of you were a callous disregard for Aradia away from
having an undeclared moirallegiance, you'd considered flipping it rather than
keeping it strictly friendship. Now that you're both older and he's a pitiful
disaster and you're a declared catastrophe of pathetic and he's realized
Terezi's cane drubbings are entirely platonic now that the Knight of
Douchebaggery has touched down on the asteroid, maybe it's something to think
about.
"Not as high as you were, with your bzzzzzz." He can't really make the same
sound you had, and his rasping attempt at it is ridiculous.
"Funny, I wasn't crawling all over you for adulterous pale touching when they
drugged me," you tell him, and he headbutts you. Horns right to the chest, even
if it lacks any kind of force. That pretty well clinches the fact that this
isn't pale, because that's ridiculously red.
"Not pale," Karkat grumbles, as if it's necessary after that blatant display of
flushed horn-touching, and settles back down against you. "Thought I was being
obvious."
"You're seriously so high you don't know what you're doing." You know that
because you know how it fucked you up the first time; you'd been practically
giggling from it, dissociated from how painful everything was and floating on
the haze of it. And yeah, this is something Karkat wants-- you've seen perigees
of his badly-hidden crush on you since you threw this piece of rock between
universes, and considered reciprocating it for a little while now. Even without
that, you doubt being high would trip flushed pheromones like that (oh hell, he
smells good right now) without some kind of underlying attraction. But you
remember how little control you'd had over anything you did, and maybe this is
something he'll regret when he sobers up. "I'll make out with you when you're
sober."
That doesn't dissuade him from trying, wrapping around you like some kind of
undersea inkbeast and digging his horns in under your chin just hard enough to
feel really nice. He falls asleep like that, as if he's afraid you'll leave if
he doesn't lock all his limbs around yours to keep you where you are.
Unfortunately for him, his drunk brain seems to have forgotten that you have
telekinesis; it's not hard to hold his limbs in place while you slip away. It's
not that you don't want to stay-- it's that you don't want to wake up tomorrow
with him looking horrified and asking frantically if you're still friends, and
that means putting on Feferi's goggles and climbing into your recuperacoon for
the night.
You wake up with your bulge wrapped around your hand and a soft, inviting
matesprit trill in your throat. This is just another culling fork of Troll
Damocles finally falling on your head, because you're a lowblood and after so
many years of selection for it low-blooded trolls are built to pail brutally
early and almost as brutally often. Aradia had already been hitting things in
frustration by the time she'd died, and you're fairly certain Tavros's sudden
bravery in the face of Vriska had been caused by the same. Now it's your turn;
whether it was the near-death experience telling your genes they need to
propagate right the hell now, spending so much time in a pile with a chirruping
bundle of sleepy, pitiful noises and flushed pheromones, or just nature finally
deciding that it's time, your body is ready to start hoarding genetic material
for the first encounter with the drones your base instincts are still sure
you'll have.
You lean your forehead against the keratinized inner shell of your recuperacoon
and groan. This is going to be the longest couple of perigees of your life.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
     In which there is a lot of porn, almost as much shameless pale
     snuggling, and a dash of ashen dirty talk (because Dave Strider is
     positively indecent), as well as scandalous polymoirallegiance,
     ironic knitting, and a surfeit of feelings.
     (I cannot get AO3 to mark this as complete, but it is.)
You sit down in front of your computer for the first time since it happened,
mostly because you're simultaneously sober enough to work the keyboard and not
in too much pain to sit up in a chair for the first time since it happened.
You've got your headset on, and it's set up to accept voice commands and read
the text to you-- not that you figure you're going to need the voice commands,
since you haven't actually looked at your keyboard to type since you were three
and a half sweeps old and just learning ~ATH. It's the voice feedback you'll
need, since for all that Terezi's tried to teach you her weird way of seeing
things you can't taste anything but glass and the faintest tinge of honey when
you lick your screen.
Honey. Fuck.
Listening to Terezi is officially always a bad idea now, because you've just
licked the mind honey. You can feel it, your bloodpusher kicking up into
overdrive and everything getting sharper and clearer around you. Mind honey is,
well-- not a hallucinogen, precisely. You had already been climbing to a manic
peak when you'd been forced to eat it before; now that you're not anywhere near
that, a tiny trace of it half-dried and rapidly losing potency for it just
makes the world move a little bit faster around you. Sounds are louder, smells
are sharper-- you almost think that this might help you learn a little better
from Terezi, just because of that. (You're not going to do that. Regardless of
the different effect now, you do not eat the mind honey. You'll run into walls
walking everywhere before you'll get hooked on that shit.)
At least it's not enough honey to make your brain go into overdrive and
slaughter every living thing on the asteroid, not without the voices telling
you who's about to die and beating your brain with their metaphorical fists
until it's one aching pulp and you can't hold onto your powers anymore.
Actually-- and you cannot believe you're thinking this, it's practically
blasphemy against everything you've ever been told-- it's kind of pleasant in
such a tiny dose; it magnifies everything, from the sound of your keystrokes to
the vibration that runs through the mainframe whenever you compile something.
Command accepted is one vibration pattern, unknown syntax error is a much
angrier one, and input superuser password to continue makes them go shithive
maggots because unlike you, they respect and fear root privileges.
"Thanks for the lecture, KK," you mutter in their general direction, and your
headset sasses you back with unknown syntax error because it thinks you were
giving it a voice command. Until it's not on your head anymore; now it's in
pieces on the floor, the first and hopefully only casualty of your miniature
mind honey rampage.
You change your command, and with every keystroke you correct the bees get a
little bit less audibly angry. They sound downright docile by the time you get
a command accepted, welcome administrator SOLLUX CAPTOR from your speakers for
your trouble. Their contented buzz thrums through your keyboard hard enough to
vibrate against your claws like a purr, telling you as surely as the synthetic
voice that you've done this correctly. If you can figure out how to read them
properly, the bees will make a better feedback system than the voice
accessibility; if nothing else, it can tell you immediately if you've mistyped
something (rare, but it happens once a perigee or so) rather than having to
wait for the command to execute and error out before you'd have to delete and
redo the entire thing because there would be no good way to find the bad bit of
code.
For the first time since you'd thrown the asteroid, you feel like maybe you're
doing something useful. You're not just sitting around in the pile getting
petted and pitied by anyone who walks by you; you're actually figuring out what
the hell you're going to do from now on. Maybe soon you'll be good enough to
get the network back in order (it's got to be in shambles right now, because
you know what happens when Karkat attempts server upkeep and you can't imagine
the humans have had much time for it). Now if only your personal life would
resolve itself so neatly. Karkat's been pretending the whole drunken flush
confession thing never happened, and between that and your genetic imperative
to contribute to the hypothetical future of trollkind waking the fuck up you're
not sure whether you want to kiss him or fling him right off the asteroid.
"Hide me," Karkat hisses from the direction of the door, and you have to wonder
whether your doom voices haven't taken on some entirely new prophetic
iteration. That would actually be a legitimately useful power here, knowing
where and when your crippling personal problems are going to show up because
you'll think about them first. Either that, you you've somehow managed to
summon him by thinking, which would be a really shitty power. Especially since
he still smells stupid flushed for you, which would be distracting even without
your senses jumped up on mind honey.
"What the hell?" You yank your headphones off-- with your hands and not your
psionics, so they end up on your desk and not shattered on the floor. You spin
your chair around out of pure reflex, since it's not like it makes any
difference to the conversation when you can't see his face.
 
"Kanaya and Gamzee," he says, and you've had enough misery in the past few
perigees to recognize it heavy and sour in his voice. "I swear they're doing
their best to make me flip ashen for both of them."
So that's it, then-- his terrifyingly inappropriate relationship drama with
Gamzee and Kanaya, which at the best of times seems condensed into some giant
double moirallegiance ashen reacharound wherein Karkat is mediating between the
two of them by shooshing both of them, is why he's here. He's still not going
to talk about your own stupid quadrant-confused relationship mess, unless you
make him.
You're going to make him if you have to write sudo pkill -kk yelling on his
forehead to do it.
"KK, if you're out to pick up yet another moirail for whatever drama you and KN
and GZ have then get out of here right now," you say miserably, because you
cannot handle this. Between pretending his stupid drugged confession hadn't
happened and the fact he seems to flip red to pale back to red twice a perigee
you just can't handle it. Sure, everything they schoolfeed you says that young
trolls should expect their quadrants to come and go, and to flip themselves.
The flushed-pale and flushed-caliginous axes in particular are given to
swapping themselves several times, even in a steady relationship. Your
quadrants will not steady themselves until you are anywhere from seven sweeps
(for maroon bloods) to twelve sweeps (for seadwellers), but they don't tell you
how hard that actually is.
"Another— oh fuck, I literally cannot believe you are this stupid." Karkat
punches something— the wall, probably, because it vibrates and that agitates
the bees and makes your processor fans kick on. "For somebody who's the
craziest apeshit bananas programmer in this entire universe, you have literally
no functioning brain cells inside of your thinkpan. I am so fucking flushed for
you that my skull almost falls off from pity every time I see your stupid face.
And of course you think I want you to be my moirail because you've already gone
through two matesprits, one of them died and the other one dumped you for
corpses and horrorterrors so why would you be trying again— what the ever-
loving fuck are you doing?"
You've been pushing your chair forward the whole time he's been ranting, and
now he's caught you getting one foot right behind his knee for leverage.
"Requiting your flushcrush, you epic failure," you tell him, and finish hooking
your leg around his knees to pull him into your chair with you. It's not hard;
he weighs less than some of your smaller apicultures. "Trying to shoosh the
entire universe so hard is so pathetic I keep thinking it has to be some kind
of joke. Especially since you can't even recognize moirallegiance in other
people when it's not some stupid movie plot, because AA and I were pale for
each other. And I don't want to talk about her right now, okay?"
You have to wonder how Karkat could be so stupid as to think you were enough of
a stud to juggle two flushed crushes at once. Three, if you count this stupid
weird thing you have for him now.
"…yeah, okay." The weirdest part is that you know he understands, even though
he hasn't lost anyone in his quadrants unless you count the weird, improbably
red flirtation he'd had going with Terezi for awhile. Not that it had gone
anywhere, except straight into other people's red quadrants. "Sorry. That was
pretty horrible, even for me." His hands settle on your shoulders, claws
catching in the thin fabric of your shirt.
"If the word shoosh comes out of your facegash, I'm going to tip this chair
over," you whisper into the shell of his auricular canal in your best attempt
at a sexy voice. Evidently it's not as good as you'd hoped, because Karkat
laughs.
"Oh, yeah, keep talking dirty like that. I don't know how I kept my bulge away
from you for so long." You know Karkat has to be making that face, the one
where he rolls his ocular bulbs up so he's looking upwards disdainfully; it's
the same face he always makes when he sounds deadpan like that. You hate that
stupid face.
So you shift your weight and tip the chair over.
"What the fuck, Sollux," he gasps out against the side of your face, the breath
knocked right out of him from hitting the floor under your weight. "In what
fucked-up universe was that some kind of shooshing?"
It's completely unfair that his thin, winded voice is sexy pitiful, the kind
that twists around inside of you until it finally ties itself into a knot a lot
lower than your bloodpusher. Maybe it's the faint rasp behind his words, air
scraping past the chitin lattice inside his windtube with a friction you can
hear; maybe it's the fact you can feel him heaving to push air back into his
body. It's like a test: do you want to push down and feel him try and fail to
breathe, or do you want to just listen, to feel him catch his breath all
through your own chest? Are you more black for the stupid annoying things he
does, or are you more red for everything else?
It's not even a difficult question. You lay your head down on his chest and
listen, feeling it in your skin and your horns when he takes in a rattling
breath against all the resistance his empty air-sacs are putting up.
"I didn't say I wouldn't knock it over if you didn't shoosh me." You nibble at
the soft skin just over his collar, barely a pinprick of teeth. It's easier to
control now that you've got fewer teeth to worry about, no oversized set of
extra fangs hanging over your lower lip and getting in the way anymore. You can
feel a hundred little motions all through him: his breath finally filling his
chest in one long, relieved rush, his claws snagging in the back of your shirt
but staying clear of your skin, the vibration that starts deep in his throat as
he lets out a sound that's trying to be a growl but is more like a weird,
halfassed purr.
"So what is this?" He asks, and you press your forehead down against his.
"Well, KK, I'm pretty sure I'm trying to make out with you." You smile when he
growls a small, disgruntled noise that's way more pitiful than it is
threatening.
"I know that, douchelord, and you know I fucking know that. I meant-- what is
this?" He doesn't move-- from his posture, he's just looking at you, until he
realizes staring romantically into your eyes isn't really effective when you
don't have any eyes-- until he reaches up and paps you on the face. He leaves
his hand there, light on the hot flush of your cheek.
"We're on the floor making out and you want to talk about your feelings?"
Admittedly, that's a pretty Karkat thing to do, and you probably should have
expected a flushed feelings jam before your teeth got anywhere near his skin.
Still, wow you sound whiny when you ask him that.
"I most certainly fucking do, because some people are not emotionally stunted
nerds who think with their bulges." For being someone who ostensibly isn't an
emotionally stunted nerd thinking with his bulge, Karkat seems awfully fond of
licking the pheromone-sweetness off your skin.
"KK, I have had the worst goddamn half a sweep ever. I died, came back, and
almost died again, FF died, AA died, came back, died, came back, and then
dumped me, we got stuck on this asteroid, I can't see, I almost died yet again
sending this rock into paradox space, my stupid pailing instincts have taken my
long succession of near-death experiences as an imperative to get my genetics
into the nonexistent slurry, and now you want to interrogate me about my
feelings in some kind of stupid pale-flushed reacharound? What this is is me
wanting to make out with you because you're cute and flushed and almost as
pathetic as I am right now."
If he thinks you're declaring undying matespritship at seven sweeps old, he is
both stupid and confusing you with Kanaya.
"Fine," he huffs against your skin. "This was a stupid idea, anyway. I don't
know what I was thinking."
"Oh, for fuck's sake." You drop your forehead to thunk down against his
thoracic bone ridges, so that your horns brush against either side of his chin.
"Making out right now is not a stupid idea. It's a great idea. I just have no
idea whether or not I want to declare undying flush for you, and I'm pretty
sure that's okay when we're seven sweeps old."
"Right, that's me, ruining everything with my emotional inadequacy like the
goddamn fool I always am." He starts to squirm under you like he's going to try
and roll you off him, and when he opens his mouth to spit out more bile about
himself and his future self and especially his past self you press your mouth
down onto his to stop it.
It's like kissing him flips some switch; the tension starts to ebb from him,
little by little, and while he's still squirming under you it's the kind that
means exactly the opposite of wanting to get away. His teeth prick at your lip
(he doesn't have fangs so much as he does a row of evenly-pointed little teeth
you'd always sort of envied compared to your double set of snaggly fangs) and
then he's licking at you, getting the makeout to sloppy territory almost before
it starts. Not that you're complaining about that, or about him throwing his
weight over with a sudden purpose so you both end up rolling over and he's on
top of you. In fact, you are whatever the opposite of complaining is; you can
taste your own flush in his mouth, and that shouldn't be as dizzyingly hot as
it is.
He purrs when you reach up under his sweater and trace over his grubleg scars,
claws scraping ever so slightly against the sensitive skin there until his
purling, contented growl vibrates all through you. His own claws are prickling
into your hips—it’s him holding onto you that makes you realize you’ve been
hitching them up, your bulge practically squirming its way right out of your
clothes of its own accord. Fuck, your face must be bright yellow right now;
accidentally unsheathing yourself like that is on the top five most
embarrassing things you can imagine happening while making out. He stops
kissing you and lifts his face up from yours, and you’re sure he’s going to say
something stupid, that he’s going to leave.
“You weren’t lying about pailing instincts, were you.” He presses his forehead
down onto yours, so close you can feel the echo of his voice thrumming in your
horns. What he’s not doing is freaking out on you at all; in fact, one of his
hands stays firm on your hip and the other slides over to rest on the
sawtoothed clothing fastener of your pants. “I don’t really want to pail yet. I
mean—fuck, that came out wrong. I do want to, but I can’t yet, okay? But I
could help you. If you want.”
“You don’t sound like you want to.” You bite your lip at how petulant that
comes out; who the hell do you think you are, getting upset because someone
might not want to touch you? You’re the worst. It’s you.
“Look, it’s humiliating that I’ve got you here and we’re making out and it’s
awesome but I can’t actually do anything else, okay?” His words come out in one
angry rush of air, a run-on sentence you can hear the lack of punctuation in.
“I feel like shit, because this is probably making you feel worse.”
“You feel like shit?” You can’t help but laugh, a hysterical, bubbling buzz
whining its way up out of your windtube. “I’m the one who can’t even keep his
bulge inside for five minutes. That’s not your fault.”
“Oh my god, we’re both such stupid assholes.” He stops talking and kisses you
instead, and he uses your dizzied moment of shock—Karkat, actually kissing you
to shut you up about feelings—to yank down the sawtooth fastener and carefully
slip his hand inside your clothes.
Your bulge isn’t so fond of his caution, and it wraps around his fingers so
enthusiastically you’re almost afraid his claws are going to catch on the thin,
delicate skin. You’re making the stupidest noises into his mouth and you don’t
even care, because this is amazing. If there’s an intergalactic award for
bulge-touching, everyone else can go home: it now belongs to Karkat Vantas.
You’re twisting around him, winding between his knuckles and up his wrist until
you can’t figure out where your bulge stops and his hand starts. And somehow
even the temporary half-relief you get when you shudder under his hand (in no
time at all, it seems like) is more satisfying than it is when you’re touching
yourself in your recuperacoon.
“How do you feel?” Karkat asks while you’re catching your breath.
“Like I want to cut you open and curl up inside,” you tell him. Pheromones and
hormones and instincts are all making you stupid, millions of years of
evolution conspiring to take away all your conscious brainpower. He smiles
against your skin.
“If you’d said that in the first place when I asked, I wouldn’t have freaked
out like that.” He loosens his hand as your bulge starts to untwine itself and
retract; it’s still half-awake and squirming a little even when you’ve got it
all the way inside, because your aching genetic material gland is still telling
it to stand at attention and get another troll inside of your nook as soon as
possible.
“You would have found something to fly off the handle about.” You let yourself
relax into a boneless puddle of troll, all melted chitin and temporary satiety,
and you hook a leg around his waist to keep him there. “Now shut up, I know
this has to be your favorite part.”
As it turns out, you’re right; cuddling is Karkat’s favorite part, even if
you’re doing it tangled up on the floor. You aren’t going to regret a second of
the inevitable sore back this is going to give you, not with Karkat’s claws
tracing the lines of your own grubleg scars like you’d done for him earlier and
a deeper, more contented purr than you’re used to hearing from him rumbling
through both of you.
That honeymoon doesn’t last long. The entire asteroid has basically turned into
one giant relationship mess that not even Karkat can think is acceptable,
because he's not insane. Yet. Yet is an important word to append to that,
because sometimes he sounds like he's inching closer every day to snapping
under the weight of keeping everyone else functional. It doesn't help that
Gamzee keeps disappearing to somewhere Lalonde can't see, which makes Karkat
flip paler for Kanaya until the inevitable moment when Gamzee comes back and
he's wracked with guilt for being a horrible, awful person. Which means that
you, by default, get to listen to all of his inadequacies regarding this
precisely because you're not in his pale quadrant. You shut him up with kissing
a lot, because you're not his moirail. You're wired to want to throw him over
your shoulder and take him back to your hive when he's in trouble, not to want
to talk him through it. That's the difference between the two quadrants he
can't seem to get right, not anything to do with pailing-- especially since you
still haven't gotten any closer to that than hands on bulges, and it's still
driving you shithive insane.
"--and my feelings are completely inappropriate," Kanaya is saying when you
enter the communal recreation block in hopes of finding something to distract
yourself from everyone’s horrible relationship problems. Evidently the universe
hates you, since from the sound of it you’ve just walked into another one.
"Especially as it will seem to be an extension of my enmity for his moirail,
which is not true."
"Have you discussed this with him?" Lalonde asks her. "Since you are so adamant
that you cannot such discuss such things with me without flipping our quadrant,
I can only suggest that you do so."
"Girl, I'm about ready to get between you and the juggalo," Strider says. What
is this, some kind of bizarre polyamorous inter-quadrant feelings jam with
added human incest? "I'm sick of Rose and the fruity rumpus asshole king both
swandiving off the handle when the two of you are in the same room."
"I do not swandive off any room furnishings, Dave." Lalonde has that warning
tone to her voice that means something decidedly unpleasant is going to happen
unless the conversation rapidly changes direction in the next few words. You
know, the tone that means absolutely nothing at all to Strider because he has
no survival instinct.
"You so do, and I'm serious. I'm an American white boy with no real role models
and a taste for shitty rap, so I'm a few degrees of latitude removed from being
at-risk for juggalodom myself. I know how to handle him." Strider pushes his
chair out from the table-- you can hear the scrape against the un-carpeted part
of the floor-- and stands up. "We are going to lay down some laws, T-Py style,
and if either of you break them I'm gonna borrow her cane and drub the shit out
of both of you. She'll let me, too, because at the risk of giving you too much
information because I seriously don't fucking care at this point, tasting me
drubbing lawbreakers with her cane will probably turn her crank in every
conceivable way."
"You are a disgusting human being, Dave." Lalonde sounds less than thrilled,
even though she has some moments of being a disgusting human (you're not sure
how many of those are related to being a human and how many of them are unique
to Lalonde and Strider, though) herself. "I am going to leave this horrifying
conversation before it gets any further, though I certainly encourage you in
your endeavor to terrorize them out of hating each other. I don't suppose you'd
mind conversing with me elsewhere, Sollux?"
"--dude, when did you get here?" Strider asks. "Since when are you capable of
juggalo-level ninja shit, anyway?"
"I was tapping my cane the whole way in, idiot," you tell him. "You were just
so busy coming up with stupid plans and stupid names for TZ that you didn't
hear me. Let's go, LL."
"Thank you for that rescue," she says when you're both in the hallway. "I
apologize if you had anything pressing to do in there. I just-- I'm tired of
them all arguing."
"I didn't realize he was waxing ashen for them." You really hadn't; sure, it's
been kind of obvious that Kanaya and Gamzee are having some kind of terrifying
monster killer contest, but it hadn't seemed romantic. Terezi and Gamzee, now,
that was a blackrom you could see happening.
"Dave is-- well, he can handle people, when he wants to. It's just that he
generally finds it more amusing to goad them until they snap, like he did with
Karkat." She starts walking without so much as a by-your-leave, which leaves
you the choice of either letting go or strutting down the hall arm in arm like
a couple of bluebloods on promenade.
You make a shitty blueblood, incidentally, since you're pretty sure they aren't
supposed to be skinny, gangly, and blind. She doesn't seem to care that you're
the opposite of elegant or fancy, though.
"As long as he doesn't make GZ snap again." Your stupid caliginous crush on him
had entirely evaporated the second Karkat had cuddled the murderous rampage
right out of him; the flip your digestive sac does at the thought of him
stalking the hallways again is purely platonic.
"If he does, he and Kanaya are more than capable of containing Gamzee long
enough for Karkat to talk him down again." She can see everything, of fucking
course. Why even talk to her about things like this? It would have been like
someone coming up to the old you and asking I'm going to die, right?, because
of fucking course it's true and you know about it. "But I doubt it will come to
that. We have all told him how imperative it is he not antagonize Gamzee. I
believe Karkat drew him a diagram."
You're in the alchemeiter room; you can tell by the way your footsteps echo on
the metal floor. It's cavernous at best and downright ominous at worst, like
someone took the worst parts of Lalonde's grimdark knowledge and your doom
voices and made them into a room. But it's got the alchemeiter and Rose's
particular pillow pile, and nobody else really goes there unless they're
specifically looking to alchemize something with Strider and Terezi's ill-
gotten grist supply. When you stop, she's rearranging things in her sylladex so
she can take out her needles, swapping items around into proper pairs on the
tree. It's the most beautiful thing you've ever heard, the click as matched
sets slide into place together.
"I would have killed someone for that fetch modus a sweep ago," you tell
Lalonde (sure, you could call her Rose like everyone else does, but that
doesn't have the same ring to it and doesn't shorten nicely to LL besides),
when you realize what she's using for a fetch modus. Why hasn't anyone on
Alternia invented something so simple and completely awesome as a binary tree
modus? Why didn't you invent it, stupid? "You are the best human."
"That isn't hard when my competition, as much as I love them all, consists of
Dave Strider, the Prank Master, and the girl who turned herself into half a
dog." She sounds flattered despite herself, though. "I must admit, I find you
one of the more engaging trolls, after Kanaya. You largely lack the personality
flaws of the others, though Kanaya tells me that this is only the case because
I met you after your near-death experience."
"Yeah, knowing who's going to live and who's going to die makes you an
asshole," you agree readily. "Even I think I'm more fun now. Pretty sure the
only one who's upset is TZ, and that's just because I'm not appleberry blast or
whatever, anymore."
"Sollux," Karkat says from out of fucking nowhere. Is being a ninjarauder
contagious on this asteroid, or something? Did he catch it from Gamzee? "I need
to talk to you. Outside. Now."
You let him drag you out of the room, because it's the path of least resistance
as compared to starting a shouting match with him.
"The fuck," Karkat says, in the long-suffering voice of someone who has just
discovered his matesprit has bizarre romantic proclivities— which is because
this is exactly the situation he's in right now. "Do you have some kind of
uncontrollable urge to shove any purple woman with a squid fetish you meet into
your empty quadrants?"
"Shut up, you idiot," you hiss right back at him, because fuck, you know your
stupid rebound palecrush on a human who deadpans in the face of Karkat's best
rage fits and has the most perfectly-crafted sylladex you've ever seen (or
rather, ever heard or felt, given that you've never actually seen it) and whose
well-balanced name shortens down to LL is just that: a stupid rebound palecrush
because she reminds you of so many of your favorite things. But then again— not
your favorite people, you suddenly realize. You don't have a crush on her
because she reminds you of someone else, because she isn't a damn thing like
Aradia at all.
It's a revelation rather uncomfortably like having a conversation about romance
with Karkat, except that one half of your own brain is interrogating the other
half to get there. She's not anything like Feferi, either, except for the whole
purple ladies of an eldritch cephalopod persuasion thing that Karkat has so
helpfully hung a light source dampener on. Or anything like Karkat, for that
matter, which is good because quite frankly you don't think you could handle
two of him. Even if the thought is just a little bit interesting because, well,
two.
"Oh, my— it's not even that, is it? You actually like her tentacle fetish and
her boner for elegant coding, and the more of these words that come out of my
mouth about this the less surprised I actually am about any of it. You are not
exempt from the no interspecies makeouts rule, Sollux Captor. I don't care how
many times Terezi says it's an unjust law that she is civilly disobeying out of
cultural sensitivity to human traditions. So you can just stop looking at
Lalonde with those sad, empty sockets that just scream how much you want her
grasping appendages all over your face, because no."
He stops to take a breath, because even Karkat has to breathe sometime. This is
unfortunate, because in that pause to shove more air down his windtube he
realizes you're wearing a scarf; you can tell, because his flailing little
hands reach out and take hold of the ends. "Oh, fuck, where did you get that?
She knitted that, didn't she! This has already gone too far— as if we need to
have another scarf-wearing asshole around here! It must be a rule, that we have
to have one on this shitty asteroid all the fucking time! Hey, maybe soon we'll
have enough scarves I can hang myself with a tasteless rope of pure hipster
magic!"
You're about to tell him that it's completely fucking obvious he's got some
kind of blackrom going on with Strider and it has been obvious since oh, about
a perigee after you woke up from your induced almost-coma when someone shushes
him for you.
"Shhh, bro," Gamzee says from somewhere behind you, having appeared there out
of nowhere and without a sound to herald his arrival. He's like some kind of
terrifying ninjarauder, which is quite frankly something the universe should
have never allowed to happen in a subjugglator ever. "Calm yourself the fuck
down, best friend, or I'm not gonna be able to keep my hands off your pitiful,
tantrum-throwing self."
"Oh, fuck you, you shambling nonsensical horror, like you wouldn't be all over
Strider's bulge if I didn't make you follow the rules like a good troll—" and
then his yelling abruptly cuts off, replaced with a muffled attempt at a shout,
and Gamzee is making a weird, rumbling noise until the volume goes down and
then quiets entirely. It's probably more of a function of the fact that you
never really went outside and socialized with other trolls in person before now
than your new attention to everything you hear, but you're only just now
noticing the huge range of tones underlying your friends' voices: from Gamzee's
rasping to the clockwork whir in Terezi's and the clicking chirrup underlying
Karkat's. Only Kanaya and Lalonde seem to have completely smooth voices.
Strider's is mostly smooth, too, but he occasionally chirps almost like a red-
blooded troll. He and Lalonde claim that's temporary, a stage of human
maturation. You think it's fucking hilarious and needs to never stop.
"Shhh, you ain't even right about it," Gamzee croons. You shouldn't be here;
this is absolutely filthy even to listen to. But you can't quite bring yourself
to leave, mostly because Gamzee is between you and the door and hitting him
with your cane trying to find your way would not be a good idea. "No humans
anywhere up in my quadrants, bro, you're my whole motherfucking diamond and
then some, and you know I've got a righteous dragon lady all up in my business
all the time and two steps away from running right onto my spade. Besides,
you're the one with the human in that quadrant, and I ain't about to wreck that
for you. That's it, shoosh your poor head about it and relax."
His voices goes lower still, rumbling into a purr like a piece of rusty
machinery springing to life again after too many sweeps out of commission.
Karkat answers that with a quiet not-quite-chirp, a rough purl out of his
throat that's higher than Gamzee's (what isn't?) but a little bit lower than
your own. You've even noticed the difference in your own voice, a higher-
pitched cousin to the whirr behind Terezi's that comes out a buzzing whine like
a very small, very quiet engine.
"I'm going to leave now," you say, loud and careful and so nasal you cringe a
little bit at the sound of it. You tap the cane against the floor very loudly
as you walk, and you manage to get past their moirallegiance makeout session
without running into them or hitting them or anything.
“I see you’ve lost interest in the continuing moirallegiance drama of those
three as well,” Lalonde says when you settle back down in the impromptu second
lab that’s sprung up around the alchemeiter. “I can hardly blame you for that.”
Kanaya is nowhere to be seen, actually, which is kind of weird because she
hadn’t been hanging around Karkat and Gamzee. At least, you’re pretty sure she
hadn’t been; she hadn’t been making any noise of she had, and Kanaya isn’t
really the type to creep around without making a sound. She’s very polite about
making sure you have enough noise to register her presence whenever she’s in
the same room as you are, actually, and everyone else could learn a thing or
twelve about that from her.
“I believe that my ectobiological brother and his real-life manic pixie dream
girl— and I cannot believe I am using a TV Tropes term in real life, honestly—
are off with her right now. Dave may or may not be continuing his awful attempt
to auspisticize between her and Gamzee, as bizarre and inadvisable as him
mediating for anyone, much less someone he so thoroughly traumatized, is to
those of us with any sense for the unnatural.” You can hear a faint metallic
clicking, which means she’s knitting. “You can sit down, if you’d like. I don’t
know why you persist in hovering like that; believe me, if I was affronted at
your presence here I would make that fact very much known.”
You’re very careful to tap your steps out with your cane, because people are
always leaving shit all over the floor here. It’s even worse than the other
lab, despite having fewer people throwing things everywhere and a higher
proportion of those people being incredible neat freaks (Lalonde, Karkat,
Kanaya), mostly because people keep justifying it to themselves by saying they
don’t want to captchalogue anything that they’re going to need to alchemize
later and it will be hard to get out and take up too much space. Which is an
okay excuse for you (well, okay, not anymore; now it’s Karkat’s excuse to go
with your switched modii), since you’d been dealing with a limited buffer. The
others can pick up their shit once in awhile; you’d never think that there were
two blind people and two diurnal aliens on a nearly-lightless asteroid. or
anything like that. Nope, it’s like Karkat, Kanaya, and Gamzee are the only
people here and thus everyone has the ability to see what’s under their feet in
here.
You manage to get to the pillow pile that’s sprouted up in Lalonde’s knitting
corner— because who else is going to watch nobody does anything stupid with the
alchemeiter, and actually manage to effectively dissuade them from it?— without
falling on your face, though it’s a close call a few times. Why is the one-
wheeled device in here? You’re pretty sure that’s what you very nearly trip
over, and it’s stupid.
“I’ve found that allowing Gamzee to leave things where he will is a more
effective strategy to keep the peace than arguing with him. Especially if we
ever wish to speak with Karkat, seeing as the inverse would mean he would spend
all of his time shushing the juggalo.” She drops several soft objects in your
lap— balls of yarn, you realize. “So long as you’re here, you might as well be
useful. These keep rolling around.”
They're light and soft in your lap, and when you brush your fingers over one
you're rewarded with a brief shock like you've just touched your claws to a
live wire. This is one of her bizarre yarns, alchemized with wizard
paraphernalia to have sketchy magic powers that mostly amount to weird tingly
feelings or—- so you've been told by a rapturous Terezi—- change colors
periodically.
"You won't want to wear that one," she says, her voice as matter-of-fact as
ever. "It's conductive, so I imagine it would ruin your equipment. It was
something of a failed experiment in attempting to create a phosphorescent
thread, to help spread the burden of lighting the hallways from Kanaya. I think
you might be interested in the one I'm working on now, though."
She stops and then she's looping the fabric around your neck; it's warm, not
the residual warmth of something that's been in someone's hands but actually
actively warm. It's like having Aradia's arm around your shoulders, all her
lower-blooded warmth soaking into your skin. Lower-blooded trolls run warmer,
it's true, but you also feel it even more keenly when it's cold. Your bodies
are used to a hotter ambient temperature than highbloods, their genetic code's
direction telling them they're acclimated to the cold sea and its temperature
and pressure not so far removed or even still active, in the case of
seadwellers. You and Karkat have both been reduced to wracking shivers in
temperatures here that don't seem to make Terezi more than slightly
uncomfortable and that Gamzee actually finds pleasant. Strider and Lalonde seem
immune to the elements in a way that serves as an insidious, constant reminder
that you're on an asteroid with a pair of gods incarnate, and Kanaya seems
similarly unbothered by fluctuations in temperature. Must be a creature of the
morning kind of thing, like something you'd seen in a weird old film where an
ancient undead creature would crash down to Alternia in the burned-out remains
of a spaceship.
"This is awesome," you tell her with complete sincerity, and she unwinds it
from around you.
"You can have it when it's finished," she says. "It's striped. Yellow and
black, so I apologize in advance that Dave will never stop cackling about bee
videos from internet sites that have long since stopped existing."
"It's okay. I like bees." This is so awkward, and you know she can hear it,
too, because her needles don't start clicking again just yet.
"Are you all right?" You're usually pretty sure when Lalonde is asking people
how they feel because she is honestly curious and wants them to get better
(which is to say, when she asks Kanaya and about half the time when she talks
to Dave) and when she's asking out of her own morbid need to analyze people
(which is to say, when she asks Karkat, Gamzee, or Terezi, and the other half
of the time when she talks to Dave). What you're not sure is which way she
means it now.
You stroke the squishy, piezoelectric ball of yarn in your hands, and it's the
little jolt you get that spurs you into talking honestly instead of curling up
on yourself and letting the rhythmic click-click of the knitting needles lull
you into forgetting.
"I don't know," you tell her. "I'm sorry, I'm being really, really awkward, and
who do I think I am, KK? I have never been this awkward talking to another
sentient being in my entire life, and considering I've been a shut-in computer
nerd for that life that says a lot. I really like you, okay? I am totally,
ridiculously in pale with you and I'm sorry, I thought it was a stupid rebound
thing from AA but it's not, I just want to sit in this pile and knit scarves
with you and I am so stupid, why would you be interested in someone who's
already run off his moirail—"
"The only stupid thing here is the speed at which you are condemning yourself
to be, as Dave would so eloquently put it, foreveralone." She drapes that
delightfully warm scarf over your neck again, and pulls it down so she can knot
it. It must be close to done, if it's long enough to tie like that. "Perhaps
you should give me time to answer before you decide for me and on the
consequences to yourself contained therein."
"I'm sorry, I'm the most awkward thing in two universes," you can't help but
babble on, even though the rational part of your brain knows full well that
there are, in fact, people more awkward than you are. Which is to say, Karkat;
he's way more awkward than you are right now, even by your most self-loathing
standards.
"Shush, you maddening little troglodyte," she finally says, and puts her hand
over your mouth. You've never actually seen her in person, but you can tell
from her hands that she's probably small, hovering somewhere around Terezi in
size. Her hands are warm, like the scarf she's put around you. "I am, in fact,
well aware of the heights of awkwardness here, largely due to the dramatic
production you are attempting to make out of this. You have more of a need for
a therapist than any other troll here barring the one who's already got
someone, inept as he may be, and it happens that I am the person here best
suited to work through your problems with you. For my part, I find you to be
incredibly pleasant company, certainly moreso than anyone else on this
asteroid; I would be hard pressed to say who I would rather spend my time with,
you or Kanaya, save that I have very different preoccupations with the two of
you. In fact, she has already asked me on three different occasions whether you
and I have made our pale intentions evident to each other, because they are,
and I quote, So Obvious That Karkat Could See Them And Let Us Face It He Is
Awful At Seeing Pale Feelings Between Other Trolls Because His Own Are So All
Encompassing."
She actually does a really accurate impersonation of Kanaya. It's uncanny.
"KK did finally notice," you say, a half-hysterical bit of laughter buzzing up
out of you. "He told me that he was going to hang himself with a shitty rope
made out of pure hipster magic."
"Yes, well, he also hisses and strokes that bucket John threw at him when he
thinks no one is looking, so I am quite comfortable being the object of his
derision. But I will not badmouth him further, because I know the two of you
are… well, I'm not entirely sure, but you're something." She takes her hand
away from your mouth in a meandering path that takes it over your cheek and to
where she can tuck your hair behind your auricular sponge cloth's cartilaginous
shell. It feels nice enough that you barely manage to suppress a buzzing purr
of approval.
Soon enough, the two of you are leaning on each other in the ridiculously
ostentatious pillow pile; you can tell just from how it feels that it's
pretentious, all tassels and tantalizingly soft fabric that catches at the pads
of your fingers but doesn't shred under your claws.
"I do have things I worry about," she says finally, softer than you've ever
heard her. Not in volume— Lalonde doesn't speak loudly— but in tone. She
doesn't sound like she's judging, for once. "Specifically, what is going to
happen when we reach the new session. I've done some research, and it looks…
grim."
"Try me, I spent six and a half sweeps hearing prophecies of doom about
everyone I know, none of which actually helped me save them." You can't ever be
too upset that you can't see, because every time you start to feel that way you
remember what it had been like when you could-- all the voices, always
whispering to you about who would live and who would die; it was a never-ending
noise hissing through your thinkpan all the time, awake and dreaming and in
Prospit and in Derse, facing the horrorterrors and fighting Jack.
Things are better after that, in a lot of different ways. Gamzee still
disappears for days or weeks at a time and refuses to say where he’s gone,
which distresses both Karkat (who is at least able to cry it out on Kanaya now
without starting some kind of horrible quadrant vacillation mess) and Lalonde
(who mutters something about void and how it shouldn’t be possible for anyone
to enter the new session, and she asks you one day how much you know about his
chucklevoodoos—which happens to be nothing). But it doesn’t cause the same
problems it did before, now that Strider has somehow managed to stamp out the
platonic hatred between Kanaya and Gamzee into a mutual romantic conciliatory
hatred for his ironic shenanigans, which in turn makes Karkat less of a nervous
wreck.
Karkat being less of a nervous wreck also means that you’ve started talking
about moving forward from hands on bulges while making out to honest to god
pailing territory.
Actually pailing is a pretty big step, considering that you just admitted to
each other a couple of perigees ago that you'd maybe like to try being
matesprits. Even taking into account that you've been pretending this hasn't
been a thing for awhile before that, you're moving really, really fast. The
thing is, though, you're not sure you can help it. You don't have a kismesis
and this is the first time your flushed quadrant has gotten this far, but your
body doesn't care about that. So far as it's concerned, you're over seven
sweeps old and it's imperative you start spilling genetic material all over the
place. And nobody else has to deal with this yet, because you're going to be
off this stupid rock by the time Terezi or Gamzee feels the same imperative,
Kanaya's undead, and fuck if you even know Karkat's blood color. You've given
up using size to guess, considering you're freakishly tall and Terezi is
freakishly short, and how warm he runs under your hands now doesn't tell you
anything except that he's somewhere between yellow and teal. Since he's never
shown you any psychic powers— and so far as you know, Vriska's never made him
do anything to hurt himself or anyone else— that means he's got to be some kind
of greenblood. Which makes sense, because he's physically a little bit stronger
than you are but not blueblood crazy.
It also means that he still may not want to get concupiscent yet, despite the
fact you’re making out all the fucking time now. If he's closer to your blood
color he might, but if he's closer to Kanaya's or Terezi's then he's probably
got perigees or even a whole sweep until he even starts feeling the same ache
that you've had low in your gut almost the entire time you’ve been awake and
lucid on the asteroid. By then you'll be going even crazier than you already
are, and that says a lot; you can feel the slickness starting to trickle out of
you as your bulge starts to swell and unsheathe itself. And that's just at
being here in the pile in your respiteblock, on top of him and biting at him
affectionately.
"KK." He's kissing just behind your jaw, the flushed kind that's all tongue and
sucking but not much in the way of teeth. It's hard to concentrate on talking
while he does that. "Stop for a second and listen, okay? This is important,
really important. I'm not going to be able to stop if you go much further, I'm
lower-blooded than you are, my stupid body's been ready to start pailing for
perigees now. You know that."
"Lower-blooded— what the fuck makes you think that?" Karkat asks, suddenly
hissing like he's threatened instead of letting out that nice, purling growl.
"Because it's completely obvious that you're a greenblood, you oblivious
moron." You lay still, hands to either side of his head; touching him any more
than you already are is just going to make you crazy. "You're not psychic, but
you're not apeshit fucking bananas. Thus: you have to be some kind of arsenic-
blooded asshole. I dunno why you're hiding it anymore, it's not like there are
any bluebloods left besides TZ and GZ around anymore. And TZ barely counts,
anyway. But whatever, if hiding that is still what gets you off, I'll go along
with it. I just need to know if you want to keep going, or if we need to stop."
"I'm not— look, I want to." Karkat isn't hissing anymore, at least. "But I
don't know if I could fill a bucket yet. It's— you have to know, you've gone
through this already. I want to, I've tried, even, but there isn't anything
there to actually come out yet. I think maybe in a couple of perigees, when
I've got enough genetic material— it's just a matter of letting it build up.
Maybe even faster than that, if we mess around in the meantime."
Your bloodpusher had sunk a little bit at the words I don't know if I could
fill a bucket yet; you've been going crazy, sore with the genetic material
gathering in you (because you'd have to ask someone for a bucket, because you
can't work the alchemeiter by touch no matter how much Lalonde tries to add
some kind of haptic interface so you can, and even with that obstacle
surmounted you'd have to ask someone to make you something to use inside, since
you'd need pressure there and you don't want to shred your own nook open with
your claws). But it lifts again at if we mess around in the meantime, because
maybe—
"You're probably way too embarrassed to ask anyone to alchemize that kind of
shit for you, and I guess I can't blame you. I sure as hell made sure nobody
else was around when I was making freaky shit with the alchemeiter, as does
everyone else who isn't Terezi."
The thought of Karkat making that, the thought of Karkat using it— sprawled out
on a pile, legs spread wide so he could push the artificial pleasure apparatus
into his nook— is what finally makes your bulge unsheathe, squirming against
the front of your pants in a desperate attempt to touch him. His fingers would
be at his seedflap, trying to coax his bulge out as the barest hint of light
green trickled out of him; eventually it would slip out, slick and green, and
wrap softly around his fingers. He would chirp out then, hips hitching up in a
desperate little circle as he tried to hit the spot that would trigger his
genetic material gland; as much as he wanted it, though, his body was still
trying to hold all his genetic material in reserve for his first drone visit.
"Are you trying to kill me?" You ask him— he must be trying to make your head
explode, telling you about the pity-inducing things he's done to himself.
"Because if you are, it's working. Now all I can think of is you pailing
yourself."
"It's not like I was very good at it," Karkat mutters, and you can feel the
blush rising under his skin.
"Exactly," you say with a sharp, indrawn breath. "So fucking pitiful, KK. I
remember how I was a couple of perigees ago, I wanted it so badly and I
couldn't fucking finish it. I bet you cried." He cries more than any other
troll you've met, and now you can't get rid of the image of his face being
almost as green-streaked as his thighs.
Karkat lets out a throbbing little chirrup, low in his throat.
"You— stop making me sound like some kind of flushed porn star." And oh, he
does look like one in the picture you've got in your head, like someone from a
barely-legal blueblood fetish porn. Not that he could be, for that kind of
scene— even if you weren't both part of a dead race, you would both long since
be fully concupiscent by the time you'd left Alternia and come anywhere near
adults, porn-filming or otherwise.
"Then stop telling me all the pornographic things you do in your free time,"
you tell him, and that's when he throws himself hard enough to roll you both
over and land on top of you. That seems to be a thing with him, ending up on
top like that.
"Shut up," is what he finally says when he stops ghosting almost-bites along
the bone ridge under your throat. One of his hands comes up and takes the
goggles off your face so that the black pits where you used to be able to see
are bared for the entire multiverse to feel sorry for, as if he doesn't mind
sharing you with every subatomic particle making up the thin radioactive slurry
that flows between universes. And maybe he really doesn't, maybe he's as
generous with his flushed quadrant as he is with all of his others.
"Don't look," you tell him, and reach toward where you think you heard the
goggles hit the floor. "Don't, KK, why would you want to—"
He kisses the bottom edge of an empty socket, soft and dry, and the feel of his
mouth against the sore skin there makes you warble despite yourself. It's a
rush of stupid grub noise, but Karkat doesn't laugh; instead, he moves on to
the other side, the same not-quite-pale brush of lips against barely-healed
skin.
"If you can get off on me crying, I can get off on your stupid scars," he says,
but he stops paying attention to your soft, battered edges and kisses the flush
of your cheeks instead. It's still soft, gentle, the palest red you think
probably exists without flipping your quadrant over sideways. Until he makes
his way down to your mouth and you catch his lip in between your teeth to keep
him there, anyway; he opens his mouth in surprise and you slip your tongue
inside to color the kiss so red Terezi can probably taste it from the other
side of the asteroid. It's messy and you're both making noise and this involves
hardly any teeth, and it has you arching your hips up so your bulge presses
against him through your clothes.
You can't feel his bulge against you, but he growls and gets you by the wrists.
That effectively ends your search for your goggles, especially after he lays
his hands on top of yours and laces your claws together. His are shorter than
yours, but broader in the bones and heavy over your long, glass-spun lines.
They're every so slightly cool against you, but not in a strange or unpleasant
way.
"Oh my god," you say in between breaths, mouths finally far enough apart for
air to come between you. "You really are completely into the idea of this being
some kind of magical red-quadrant moment from one of those shitty novels
everybody knows you and Kanaya borrow from each other."
"You sure know how to fucking ruin a moment, Captor." He drops his forehead to
rest against yours.
"Lies, I don't ruin anything." You smile against his cheek.
That's when you feel his bulge stir for the first time, and when you press the
heel of your hand against it Karkat sighs and rolls his hips down into it. You
take that as your cue to start undressing him-- it's not like he hasn't peeled
various items of your clothing off during your various makeouts, albeit usually
at your own suggestion. His are more difficult than yours-- tight jeans, tight
sweater-- but eventually you're both naked, clothes discarded in random
directions, and Karkat is certainly capable of something concupiscent. The
first thing his bulge does when you're both settled back on the pile is twine
up with yours, slick and writhing and reducing both of you to weak-kneed, half-
trilling desperation.
"So how are we going to do this?" The logistics of it really are confusing— he
could pail you from behind, maybe, so your bulge wouldn't instinctively go for
him and possibly make things even worse.
"We're going to do this properly," he says, and climbs onto your lap, knees to
either side of your thighs. He's almost as wet as you are, and his bulge is
already untwining from yours in anticipation of getting into your nook. He's
seriously overestimating the amount of time it's going to take him to be ready
to really pail, if your memory of your own experience is anything close to
correct.
"That's not going to be very good for you, is it?" You put a hand over the
small of his back, light with the claws and fingers splayed wide, to keep him
balanced on you.
"Newsflash, you nookstain, there are reasons for wanting you like this that
have nothing to do with getting off." His bulge strokes around yours almost
possessively, one long slick swipe that leaves you breathless. "I'm not pailing
you from behind like some kind of goddamn kismesis the first time we do this.
Yes, it's true, I absolutely need this to be some perfect romance novel scene
where neither one of us knows what we're doing but we wind up climbing each
other like fucking trees and there's kissing and horn-rubbing the whole time
and it's fucking beautiful. You can make fun of— ah!"
Good to know: licking one of Karkat's horns makes him gasp; taking the whole
thing into your mouth and sucking makes him trill like a porn star.
"I think that sounds nice," you tell him after you release his horn with one
last lick. Between your newly chilled outlook and the fact that you've got your
naked matesprit on your equally naked lap and you're about to pail, fucking
finally, you would probably have said that no matter what he'd suggested. But
you're not lying; it really does sound nice.
Karkat shifts on your lap, rising up onto his knees and spreading his thighs.
You follow him, your body instinctively rising to meet his and your legs
falling open; it's almost involuntary, the optimal position for pailing written
into your genetic memory like it's a copy of the Troll Kama Sutra. He closes
the gap between you, shimmying forward until you're chest to chest again; your
bulge has the same idea, and untwines from his except for the very first coil
that lets you slip around each other. You can feel his bulge pressing up
against your nook, teasing and probing at the wet opening.
"Stop teasing, KK," you purr in his ear, and as you roll your hips forward the
tip of your bulge starts to press into him.
"Fuck," he groans, and the sudden lukewarm slickness on your bulge is enough
for it to slip reflexively up into his nook. His curse turns into a moan as you
slide all the way in; your bulge is thinner than what you think is probably
normal, but it's long; besides, Karkat doesn't sound like he minds the lack of
girth one bit. "Fuck, Sollux, how the hell long are you?"
You thrash a little inside of him in response to both the (probably
unintentional) flattering dirty talk and the press of him inside of you. He's
short, but thick, big enough around that the stretching stimulates the nerve
clusters in your nook all on its own. When you do, he arches in your arms,
bowed so far he's almost pulled away, and his claws dig into your shoulders.
"Oh my god," he half-chirrups, words almost but not quite failing him.
You realize that your weird, long, skinny bulge has probably just bumped his
genetic material gland directly, instead of stimulating it indirectly. That's
the kind of thing you've only heard of in really out-there porn, and you've
just accidentally done it to Karkat. And, by the sound of it, he likes it a
hell of a lot.
The two of you fall into... well, it's not a rhythm, not in any meaning of the
word; there's nothing repetitive about the desperate way you're both moving,
squirming in pleasure and trying to kiss but mostly missing each other's
mouths. One of your hands is still on his back, and the other is stroking one
of his horns with featherlight fingers; he's digging his claws into your
shoulders and hanging on as best he can.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck--" and then Karkat isn't even capable of saying his favorite
word in the universe anymore; he just moans and chirrups and tries to force air
down his windtube when he's not trying to land a kiss on you and failing. You
can hear it all from your perfect Karkat-observing vantage point, every hitch
and wheeze when he remembers that oxygen is almost as important as you are
right now. Then he lifts one of his hands and fumbles it over the crown of your
head, until his fingers close around one of your smaller set of horns and you
forget how to talk. The bigger ones are just barely long enough not to make you
shiver when something brushes up against them, but the smaller ones are even
tinier than Karkat's and have just as many exposed nerves under his fingers as
his do under yours.
"KK, oh fuck," and then you're not doing anything but trilling, as incoherent
as he is. Neither of you manage anything that counts as an actual word after
that, until one particular curl of his bulge inside of you hits your swollen,
sore genetic material gland in just the right way and you know you can't hold
on much longer. "KK, the bucket--"
He gets the bucket-- plucked from his sylladex after a frantic one-handed
search that had taken long enough you're keening desperately by the time he
finds it-- and shoves it between his knees and yours just in time. The
blackness around you whites out and you howl, and it feels like the entire
world is shaking around you; you don't realize it actually is shaking until you
hear something hit the floor with a crash. You don't give a single fuck what it
is, as long as it's not your main terminal and it's not the bucket shoved
against your shaking legs; everything else can just go and break under the
strain of your out of control telekinetic backlash for all you care now.
"Come on, KK," you whine once you've got enough breath to; his bulge is swollen
inside of you, thick enough most of your genetic material is still inside of
your nook rather than in the pail, and it's pressing up against places suddenly
oversensitive in an uncomfortable way as it squirms.
"Sollux, I can't," he says, breathless—which is ridiculous, because any other
words he might have been trying to say get lost in the sudden piercing trill he
makes as he clenches around you, shaking so hard you’re glad he doesn’t have
any telekinesis to lose his control over. He buries his face in your neck,
horns to either side of your chin, as you both try to remember how to breathe;
your bulges start to retract, slipping back into their sheaths, and there’s a
corresponding sound of liquid hitting metal as your mingled genetic material is
finally free to hit the pail.
That sound makes Karkat startle, and as soon as you’re both as finished as
you’re going to be (you suddenly really want to soak in the ablution trap for
awhile, or else you’re going to be dripping your own genetic material
everywhere for hours and quite frankly, that’s disgusting) he takes the bucket
and captchalogues it.
“Need a souvenir, KK?” You ask him, and he growls as best someone who’s just
orgasmed his brain out can. You reach out and pull him back on top of you, so
that you’re both reclining in the pile again. These pillows must be completely
fucking ruined, and you don’t care. At least, you don’t care for about five
minutes, at which time someone (predictably) feels the need to completely ruin
the moment.
"How about you two keep your pants on until Captor learns how to not knock the
asteroid off course when he comes?" Strider asks from outside the door.
"I'm going to kill him," Karkat says, suddenly scenting sharp and black, and
you flop down on his back to try and pin him down with your weight.
"Shut up, KK." You bite at his shoulder, and he actually lets out a huffing
little laugh.
You really are going to be okay.
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