Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/528308. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Homestuck Relationship: Gamzee_Makara/Kurloz_Makara Character: Gamzee_Makara, Kurloz_Makara Additional Tags: Alien_Biology Stats: Published: 2012-10-04 Words: 2802 ****** Emissary and Bard ****** by May Summary It's obvious that you need to oblige the bard - he's going forth and working in His name, after all. Notes It's an attempt at the Makarax2 relationship, little though we know about it. See the end of the work for more notes You’ve been around for so long. You’ve spent sweeps carving out a labyrinth in the depths of the bubbles. Not sweeps marked by any turn of the world, just detached time that exists only in your pan. It has been enough time to start doing what needs to be done. You’ve been successful in covering everything up, although it is less difficult when your silence is a given, and when nobody fights to be around you, it is not hard to hide the progress that you’ve made. Only Meulin might have been a risk, and so you at once made her complicit and made her forget. She doesn’t know that she understands, but she does. Your body is only a reflection of your physical self, and it’s as physical as you want it to be. You know that, and so your mouth is empty behind your stitches – no gunk and blood sour on the wound your tongue left behind. You don’t sleep, and eating is just an option. You can’t remember when you met him, exactly, but you felt the sweeps behind you, then. He is so young and alive, so there is no chance of him being another ghost with a youth’s body and an ageless mind. There is a sensation – like an echo from the call that had caused you to deafen your Meulin – something snapping through from a different world. Something with hard lines and solid sounds and a definite pulse in the centre. It almost hurts, but not like it had when you’d woken up, screaming, before. And you feel like it should sit there, inside your dead pan. He’s shorter than you, and slighter, his shoulders narrow. There are three fresh cuts across his face, still glistening. You notice that he’s a highblood like you, too – his sign is the same as your sign and his blood is the same purple as yours. His paint is smeared and you can see shadows round his yellow eyes, which are large and filled with a dully bright life. He’s tired, but it’s obvious how young he is. If he’s of your blood, then you guess that he’s around six sweeps. Your first urge is to kill him, and that would at least send him back to where he came from, and hopefully render him too frightened to come back. The fact that he’s so familiar gives you pause, however and, in between remembering that your world is dead and remembering that it’s unusual for any troll to meet an exact bloodlink, especially a highblood, you know who he is. On Beforus, he was the high priest under the benevolent empress. Only later did you realise that what he preached was but a thin veneer over what you understood to be the true religion of the mirthful messiahs. This boy is from after – his life based in the true righteous cruelty of what you now believe. You’ve been linked to him, before. Your blood and his blood aligned in the true purpose of the messiahs. He has helped you become a pure vessel for His coming, no longer held back by the trappings of life. Being dead has only aided you. Discarding your mortal voice has meant that you have honed your voodoos to perfection. You can speak to him, directly. “Bard of Rage,” you say, “You have come, and we can truly get this shit-” “Quiet!” he hisses. The thin growl of his voice almost affronts you, “we ain’t got time for that motherfucking noise.” It’s broken, you realise. The full potential of his being crammed into a small, half-grown form. He snarls at you, his teeth sharp and off-white. Teeth meant for tearing flesh from the bone to gain a thing as base as sustenance. “We got shit to be doing, now,” he says, “I’ll need you to motherfucking up and tell me all your fucking wicked scriptures, which is what you’re probably all calling ‘em. But now I need your ghostly self to get working for me.” You smile, and you almost think that you can feel your stitches stretch, but that’s just a memory. “Whatever you fucking say, my mage and my heir are on hand,” you pulse. It feels good having holy words scored like that into your mind. You’d prefer it if he could do the same for you, and if you’re working together for the greater good then, later, you’ll get to chance to help him relinquish his mortal voice and communicate solely through his chucklevoodoos. You know he can do that, even now, but you refrain from asking to feel the clean jaggedness of a voice of a true envoy. “Heheh,” he laughs and it, almost blasphemously, is mirthless, “go easy on your bros, bro; they’ll get their understanding on, soon enough.” His speaking voice is only half developed but his words are certain, so you don’t protest. His blood leaks viscously from the scratches on his face, and you are sure that it was an effort to feel His presence through pain. Self- mutilation was a staple of the Alternian Subjugglators, after all. “You getting all interested in my fucking face slices,” he said, “Kitties got some sharp claws.” You’re not sure what he means by that, but it makes you feel a little uncertain. Uncertainty, for a ghost, is hollowly unpleasant. “You have branded yourself with the most fucking wicked of cuts, Bard,” you say, solemnly. He laughs that little chuckle, again. “Looks like you’ve got some goddamn bitchtits stitches of your own, bro,” he says, “all silenced and shit. Through the maw, anyways.” “It’s motherfucking miniscule compared to your great sacrifice, Bard,” you say, “because you come from the dark planet motherfucking rend asunder by the word of the Angel of Double Death, himself.” He grimaces at you, “Yes, we got that all down, now,” he says, “motherfucking touch ‘em if you wanna look closely.” You reach forward, uncertain, and cup the sides of his face. His cheeks are still a little soft from wigglerhood and his skin is smooth and cool. Then you run one of your thumbs across one of the slashes in his face, and it’s a strange juxtaposition. The blood is gelid and sticky, and you see him twitch as you smear it. It is a burst of rapture for one who has mutilated himself in the name of the Messiahs. He is solid and pulsing with a heartbeat, and it may only be a projection of his sleeping form, but the living can’t ever truly detach themselves, so he carries everything of his physical self with him. He is breathing and you realise, suddenly, that you haven’t touched anything alive for a long time. He is your living vector. You slip your hands up into his hair and it’s a little oily from an apparent lack of care. He glowers, this time. “I’m all wanting to get moving with this,” he mutters. You remove your hands, but he’s not ready, yet. It’s the restraints of his body, and perhaps you’ll get the chance to release him from his cage of flesh when it has served its purpose. The sacrifice of a true indigoblooded follower was always most holy. For now, you must indulge him as much as you can, so that he can walk out and on with the word to help Caliborn, himself. You put your hands against his middle, his ribs hard between your fingers. The tightness of his core flexes as he squirms a little in irritation. “Take them off,” he says. So you do; you don’t want to upset him. You take one of his hands, instead, and he doesn’t resist, although it’s rigid between your own palms. “Let me help you motherfucking relax, Bard,” you say, sliding the words into his pan as easily as you can. Perhaps your fingers brush the back of his hand, ever so slightly in persuasion. He needs to be as fortified as possible for the task at hand. He tilts his head and looks up at you, furrows his brow and smirks. He looks like paradox space has told him the greatest joke that he’s ever heard but the punchline is grim. You should be so lucky. He clicks his tongue and slowly releases his hand from yours. He then reaches it up to place it on your shoulder. “Go down,” he says. Eager to indulge him, you do. You can hear the beginnings of a rumble in his thin chest, but you aren’t sure whether it’s a growl or a purr. It’s a signal - a quiet one. You remain still and you aren’t quite sure what he’s going to do. Perhaps he plans to kneel with you in prayer, and finally communicate with you with his chucklevoodoos. You wait for him to initiate this. He watches you for a moment, his eyes roaming over your face, focusing on your stitches. His eyes are narrowed, but the rumbling hitches in his throat. His hands drift to the hem of his shirt, slowly. He pauses, and then quickly pulls it up and over his head, as if he’s ripping off a sticky bandage. It gets caught on his horns, but he tugs it free before you allow yourself to stand and help him. He’s thin, with very little soft fat, and a wiry, adolescent muscularity. Your bard is small for an envoy of Lord English, but an envoy of Lord English he is, so you will think no more about that. He kicks off his shoes and hooks his hands in the waistline on his pants to push them down. It occurs to you that his clothes are loose and casual. They carry the print of the messiahs, though. You can admire that, at least. His seedflap is directly in your line of sight - he’s angling his hips towards you. He’s not aroused, so his bulge is sheathed and just a purplish nub at the apex of the split. It’s slick and about the size of your thumb. His rumbling is strange, however, now he’s closer, like he’s trying to growl and purr at the same time. “You can get your care on with my motherfucking nook,” he says, angling his legs so that they spread a little wider. You can see the curve of his globes and, beyond that, the neat, slightly convex line of his nook. You peel off your gloves and obligingly place your hand on the inside of his thigh. It’s not the care that you expected, but you will do what you can. If you were less numb in death, you might be more surprised. You feel his muscles contract a little and, when you trace the entrance to his nook, he chirps raggedly through his rumbling. The noise makes you pause for a moment; you’ve long become accustomed to the emptiness of being dead and it only serves to make you a better vessel, but something squirms. It feels like something you’ve ignored that’s taking some advantage of the moment. “I said. Get your claws up in my fucking nook,” the shaking growl of his voice seems to pull everything back as it should be, and for this you are grateful. He squirms on your splayed fingers a little. Obligingly, you push them in up to the first knuckle, pass the soft outer folds and into the tight passage, beyond. He’s narrow and it occurs to you that you will need to work harder to fully satisfy him. You pointedly don’t wonder why he needs your assistance at all when he does not seem to be in any physical need of it. It isn’t your place to question that, at the moment. You think you might know the answer, but it’s stuck somewhere, in the mire of things you don’t really remember. And there is no reason for you to. There was a low keen as you pressed into him and, with your fingers pressing against his inner walls, he’s breathing, heavily. You push your fingers up another inch and he makes a noise that’s halfway between a whine of pain and a trill of pleasure. You pause to allow him to adjust, but all he does is snarl down at you. You look up to see his sharp teeth bared and his untinted eyes narrowed. You feel a sharp reverberation of blank noise, and there’s no reason to assume that it was anything but deliberate. You flex your fingers a little and he twists on you. You then feel his hand on your head, twining in your hair. He pulls and strokes, alternately. You’ve since lost the inclination to form any sort of impulsive signal, and there’s no reason to drudge anything up, now. His movements don’t fit any particular rhythm, so you don’t know what your response should be. There should be no response from you. This is to help ease him into his place, after all. You’re able to move more easily inside him, now, and the sounds he’s making have levelled out to a low, bubbling trill over a rolling purr. He grabs onto your horns and is leaning over you. This time, he alternates between pulling them and running his fingers up and down them. Of course, you can hardly feel any of this at all, other than a dull pressure when he pulls. His bulge is unsheathing, you notice, and you catch it in your free hand, letting it wind around your fingers as it extracts itself. He whines and you run your thumb along the ridged underside, press gently against fluid pores and let the flicked tip slide up against the pad of the thumb. He wails and drops almost into your lap. Almost, because he’s still impaled on your hand, with his own hands still gripped around your horns. Your face is aligned with the flat planes of his chest, his hollow collarbones and his angular, wiry shoulders. You can almost press your forehead against him, and feel the rumble of his purr, which is beginning to hitch. You can see how his skin is so slippery with sweat, now. You hardly need to move your own fingers, now, as he’s moving enough that his swollen entrance catches and slides around the bases of your fingers, and his bulge is still twining around your other hand. He’s open enough, now, that it does not feel so tight inside him. He’s crouched on the balls of his feet, his legs angled too wide for his knees to grip your sides. It would be precarious, if he wasn’t anchored by your horns and your hands. He moans and slides down further onto your hand, in a bid to fill himself up, now that he’s opened wider. There’s a jittering sound of frustration, so you assist him by pressing your hand in, further. He presses himself closer against you, so that your face is locked into the crook of his neck. His pulse is beating, there, and you almost distract yourself in listening to its subtle throb. He yelps, all of a sudden, and lets go of your horns to grip your shoulders, his claws digging through your suit into the ghost of your flesh. You almost pick up an instinctive sign, but he releases and lays his palms flat and circles the edge of your own collar bone with his right thumb. Something in your pan writhes, again, but it doesn’t surface. He arches his spine, then, and leans forward to lock his horns with yours, tangling and insistent. He growls, low and tightly, and you can feel it run through him. Everything he does, you know what to do with – you know where Meulin would categorise them in her charts – but it all conflicts. It doesn’t matter, though, because you have long risen above it. He bucks and shudders, then, and you feel his fluid drip down your wrist from his nook and smear onto the front of your suit from the pores in his bulge. It soaks, but it will be gone in a moment. There’s no need for it to last, here. It doesn’t mean anything, and so will fade. There’s no mother grub in the bubbles. He collapses against you and is almost curled up for a moment. Then he pulls himself to his feet, rising like a gangly puppet, before pulling on his clothes. He turns to look at you one more time, at where you haven’t moved from your kneeling position. “Get me that motherfucking codpiece,” he says, evenly. You make no move but you both know that it’s understood. He leaves, all slouching angles in the black light glow of the bubble surface. You note, vaguely, that he only so much as pads when he walks. End Notes It's also an excuse to get to grips with troll biology, as it were. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!