Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/3356948.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      Other
  Fandom:
      Homestuck, Hiveswap
  Relationship:
      Reader/Imperial_Drone, John_Egbert/Roxy_Lalonde, (IMPLIED)
  Character:
      Joey_(Hiveswap), Strideer, imperial_drones, Nora_Valkyrie, (implied)_-
      Character
  Additional Tags:
      Sexy_Times, RWBY_sorta, I_mean_come_on, Nora_is_literally_John_and_Roxy's
      daughter, I_don't_want_to_hear_it, Ambiguous_Genders, the_person_is_you,
      you_like_the_weird_stuff, I_don't_judge, you_naughty_girl, girl/boy/
      androgyne_that_is, Explosions, Culling
  Series:
      Part 4 of Polymit's_February_Writeoff!
  Stats:
      Published: 2015-02-15 Words: 3174
****** Love in a Time of Mutants ******
by mitspeiler, polyfandrous
Summary
     Week 2's installment in the Polymit write-off! Out prompt today was
     short but sweet and weird as fuck. Suggested by mitspeiler: reader/
     imperial drone.
     And now here it is, submitted for your approval. Don't forget to heap
     your love and praise upon the winner!
Notes
See the end of the work for notes
You wipe a single tear from your eye.  He loved their brownish bluish greenish
color.  He loved everything about you, from your paleish tannish skin to your
shortish longish darkish hair, and now he’s gone.
You step through the dark mulch along the roadside; the pink leaves don’t
crunch underneath because it rained last night, they just smush into paste
under your sneakers, and you wonder why they only make roads for vehicles
despite that fact that most Alternians walk.
You aren’t wearing your fake horns; it’s daytime.  The red sun is angry and
hot, but not that bad, all things considered.  You wrapped your head in a wrap
made of grey cloth, and the grey paint acts as a surprisingly good sunscreen. 
You figured trolls were just overly sensitive to radiation.
You hoped you were right.
 
When you arrived on this strange planet, you felt like a reverse John Carter. 
The stargate-like thing in the attic, with its eerie carven serpents and
skeletal angel engravings called to you, like the ocean calls to sailors and
the stars call to astronauts.  It promised to take you farther away than any
human had ever been or ever would be, and to send you back with tales of your
travels, like the prophet Ezekiel.  You touched it and then there was a light
like a brilliant lance, red and green together, one going up, beyond the
reaches of the universe, the other going down.  For just an instant, you could
swear you saw someone else, going your way, and wondered how an alien would
experience your world, and hoped they had as good a time as you did.
You were found in a field by a beautiful alien boy.  He had sad eyes and horns
like an aurochs; in the light of the twin moons they gleamed like a third,
crescent moon.  He was kind to you, and hid you in his hive, a charming little
farm where he raised bees (“for computers, you know?” he said; you did not, but
nodded and smiled) and milled his own flour (from the bones of woofbeasts) in a
windmill (whose sails were made from the wings of monstrous insects).
Everything was strange and different and wonderful, but you were no John
Carter.  All the local people were strong enough to tear you in half.  There
would be no rescue of princesses and becoming monarch of Helium for you, no
sir/madame/Mx.  You and your one friend were just going to hide your existence
for as long as possible and try to find another way home.
He let a few people in on your secret, people he thought he could trust.  Most
of them thought you were so exotically beautiful, with the brown and white
tones in your impossibly soft skin, your strangely hornless head, your
casteless eyes with their white sclerae, flat little teeth, like some kind of
fairy who could do no harm.  You felt empowered like you never had back on
Earth.  It’s not that you had bad self-esteem, no.  You were quite content with
yourself as a person and with your appearance, and you thought that that was
all you’d ever needed.  Your sister Nora, now she was beautiful and strong and
all kinds of things you thought you never could be, with her blazing hair and
her rockethammer.  She was fire like Mom, but also wind like Pop.  And you were
fine with that.  Really.  Here though, on Alternia, you were not just liked but
beloved, by your small circle of secret keepers at least.  You felt like the
prettiest boy/girl/androgyne at school.
Whenever your new friends gathered around to worship you though, your host
always held back.  He was so cute, and yet so sad, always tense.  “Joey,” he
would say, only very rarely—you savored the sound of your name on his lips—“Why
do you let them…ogle you like that?”
“Because it’s new and different,” you would say with a little giggle.  You
couldn’t truly express in words all the things you knew, or begin to explain
about Nora and Mom and Pop.  And then he would grumble and go tend his bees. 
You didn’t like that.
One day you followed him.  You were angrier than usual.  Was he just jealous
that they all seemed to like you better than him?  Because that was ridiculous,
he was the only one out of all of them who saw you as a person as opposed to
some kind of exotic alien pet.  You went and gave him an earful, and he started
getting all up in your face about how he didn’t want you in the black, and just
what the hell did that mean?  Was “black” some kind of insult?  It sounded, the
way he said it, the same way a douchebag piece of shit boy back home once
called Nora a slut, and you were not gonna take it gracefully like she did! 
You would show him, talking about you like that and right to your face!  You
shoved him to the ground and started hitting him, just little sissy slaps
because fighting never came easy to you; you supposed a family of warriors must
eventually breed some kind of über-pacifist who can’t even be taught to throw a
punch by their god-father who happened to be the greatest martial-artist and
film director alive, and then suddenly you were kissing, and rolling around in
the moonlight—rightthere in the moonlight, trolls were nocturnal any passerby
would’ve been able to see—all the sounds you were making were muffled by the
sounds of the bees, buzzing in time to the electromagnetic emissions of the
planet itself, and thanks to the tall grass no one saw your host push up your
skirt and touch—
Whatever it is you have down there; a boy/girl/androgyne needs to have his/her/
their secrets after all.  Regardless of who put what bits in where (and you
were both very confused by each other’s respective equipments but you managed),
and how much of a mess he made (how does that much of anything come out of a
person’s whatever-he-called-it?) there was no way to dispute the fact that what
you two “made” that night was “love”.
He carried you back inside for another go in his bedroom—respiteblock you
remind yourself; you keep forgetting the lingo—and this one’s even better,
except for the fact that at the end he gets up and finishes into a bucket,
which is super gross, and leaves it by the door, right there where anyone could
see, which is even worse.  A little panel lights up behind it, activated by the
weight, and you have no clue what to make of that.  But you forget about that
when he builds up a blanket pile in the middle of the floor and you cuddle.  He
asks if this means you aren’t black after all and this time you punch him in
his beautiful hunter’s moon horns because you know those things are sensitive
as shit, and demand that he explain that word.
And then he explains the intricacies of troll romance to you in such a way that
your brain hurts.  He had arrogantly assumed that all romance in the multiverse
worked the exact was as it did on Alternia, though to be fair you’d arrogantly
assumed that it worked the same way everywhere as it did on Earth, so really
you were both culturally incompetent assholes who deserved each other, but
before you pass out from confusion layered on top of afterglow, you shake him
and say that the two of you are firmly in the red.
 
You two spend the next day in newly flushed bliss and your host hangs a sign on
the door that translates into something like “if the hive be boppin’, don’t you
be knockin’.”
Someone comes by while you were teaching your host exactly what to do with
certain of your parts that he seemed to be having trouble with, and he shoves
you down into the blanket pile and hurries to get dressed, muttering a steady
stream of “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT,” as he runs to answer the door.
Something big comes in side, just rams the door down, and you cover your mouth
to avoid being discovered.
He talks to the visitor, just plain small talk, but all it does is let out a
stream of burbling growls, as if it didn’t really have a proper mouth or vocal
chords or anything of the like.  Then there is a metallic scraping and a
sloshing of thick liquid, and it leaves, heavy steps pounding the dirt outside.
You ask your lover what that was and he explains.  An imperial drone, a
strange, monstrous cousin to the troll race that serves the mother grubs and by
extension the empress.  Whenever trolls mate they’re required to leave their
mixed genetic materials in a bucket to be collected by the drones and used to
fertilize the mother grubs’ eggs.  He’d foolishly left the bucket on the
collection plate, even though it was really only his DNA in there.  There might
be trace amounts of your own, he said, but certainly not enough to get him in
trouble, considering how little genetic material humans produce (he’d been a
bit disappointed the first time and wondered why you hadn’t…ahem).
 
He was entirely wrong, as was proven the next night when the imperial drone
came for him again.  It tore through the wall this time, and your lover barely
had enough time to shove you under the blanket pile before the creature saw
you.  You saw it this time though.  It was like the monster from Alienif it was
three times as large, and had traded in its tail for more spikes and more
muscles.  Its heavy, burbling breath sent chills up your spine.  Your lover
assumed his fate with dignity.  Before the drone took him, he said, “goodbye,
um, bees.  I’ll always love you.”
 
You were, naturally, inconsolable.  Your host’s friends took you in after that,
shuffling you around from house to house every few nights in no set pattern. 
It seemed more like they did it out of a sense of obligation to your assuredly
dead lover than out of affection for you.  “They’re gonna cull him,” said one,
the orangeblood with the antlers.  “It’s not really your fault,” he said,
though his tone made you think it really was, “it’s his for leaving the damn
bucket out.  Never was that smart.”  You smack him, and ask if they aren’t
gonna test him at the facility or prison or whatever to make sure your DNA in
the bucket wasn’t just a fluke.  He shrugs.  “Even if they did, they never
uncull someone.  Best case scenario, they find out he’s pure and then render
him down into mother grub food.”
Something snapped inside of you, like once upon a time when you were so pissing
angry at Nora (you don’t even remember why), and you felt a little something
pop way deep down inside your head, as gently as a bubble, and then blood
started gushing out of your nose.  It was like that, but purely emotional, and
what gushed out of you was conviction (though it was just as hot, metallic and
unexpected as the blood had been all those years ago).
 
Which is what led you to today.  You’d never been a fighter, but you inherited
Mom’s gift for science and Pop’s luck with tinkering.  The only thing you’d
brought to this world was a flashlight, a cell phone, and weird pink cylinder
of Mom’s that ran on batteries (special, Skaianet Laboratories™ guaranteed-safe
uranium batteries) and you didn’t know what it was for, but with them, and a
few other things you’d asked your hosts to procure, you’d made a little
something special.
You approach the culling facility, a low, factory-looking building on a rocky
hill, built over the mouth of one of the smaller brooding caverns, so that any
suitably “pure” material could be sluiced down to the mother grubs while still
fresh.  Instead of smokestacks, there were massive multicolored pipes jutting
out from the sides and into the chasms in the earth.  The gates are flimsy,
guarded only by a few imperial drones.  No one would ever want to come here,
most trolls were too inculcated to the idea that anyone who was culled deserved
it, and the drones deterred everyone else.  You gulp at the sight of them
though.  These two are even bigger than the bucket hauler that had taken your
lover, and their hide is as thick as plate armor.  You wonder if you can really
get him out, if he’s even still alive.  But then you see that each drone is
wearing an almost opaque visor, and that the armor-thick hides were actually
armor, and any bit of exposed skin looks highly irritated.  They were just as
vulnerable to sunlight as any troll, you realize, maybe more so.
“Tally-ho,” you whisper under your breath, and throw one of your improvised
weapons.  It’s a little disc with twitching insect legs, some kind of cell-
phone analogue that they used here.  You’d stripped most of its insides and
replaced them with a potent explosive, and a few other things.
The little legs take tight hold of the drone’s arm, sharp points burrowing into
its skin.  It grunts and tries to smack it off as if it was no worse than a
mosquito, and that’s just when it explodes.  The disc shapes the blast inwards,
towards the drone’s body, and propels a dozen glass marbles, carefully chosen
for their light refractive properties, each imbedded with a uranium powered UV
light.  The imperial drone screams as its blood boiled from the inside, thick
black goop hemorrhaging from its wound.
The other roars as a fragment strikes its visor, cracking it in half.  It turns
wildly, eyes trying to scan for you, blinded almost entirely by the daylight. 
You whip out your handy-dandy flashlight.  Of all the alterations you’d made to
your gear, this was the easiest one.  The only trouble had been acquiring a
welder’s mask and lead lined gloves to safely handle the thing, and since no
one on Alternia needs a license for anything even remotely dangerous, that was
a synch.  You flip the newly attached knob that turns up the brightness all the
way to “solar deathpocalypse” and shine it right in the cracked visor.  You and
the drone are connected by beam of blue-white light to bright to look at that
seems hard as diamond and hot as the sun.  It falls over, soundlessly, its
brain steaming out its eye-sockets.  You rush the gate, praying to god that you
don’t die of radiation poisoning (every Skaianet™ product comes with a pill
bottle of rad medicine but you’re still worried).
You slide two more spider-bombs across the floor as you run in and then duck
behind some kind of service desk.  The sound of three burly imperial drones,
completely unshielded in the dark room, fills the air as the light of your
dirty bombs turns the atmosphere an eerie purple-green color that shouldn’t
exist.  You shine your flashlight at its highest setting across the room,
stifling their cries.
Something is whimpering just behind you.  You turn on your heels and growl as
intimidatingly as you can.  There’s a troll, some middle-blooded kid about your
age.  You haul him up to his feet and shove him against the wall, lifting up
your visor to glare.  “I’m a spooky hornless demon,” you hiss, and watch as his
eyes begin to tear up, “and I’m gonna pass judgment on this whole facility, but
there’s someone I need to see first, if he’s still alive.”  You tell him the
name of your lover, with a physical description and the date he was taken on.
The troll swallows.  “He’s a mutant,” he begins, and you slam him against the
wall and tell him his sample was contaminated and he’s nothing of the kind. 
“If you say so, oh Merciful Angel of Judgment,” he says, sweatily.  “But the
point is they think he’s a mutant, and…” he trails off, looking like he’s about
to vomit.
You growl to yourself, and unsheathe your weapon.  You’re still not much of a
fighter but this thing is pretty scary looking, you think.  You made it out of
the pink tube thing, reinforcing it with metal to the point that it could
withstand the increased power you gave to its vibrating mechanism.  It rumbles
like thunder and begins to glow red-hot, a pair of diodes you fixed to the ends
emitting enough UV light to make the troll nauseous.  He talks.  “He’s on the
second floor,” he sniffles.  “Where they…make imperial drones.”
 
There he is, strapped to an operating table, yellow blood stains all around the
lower half, black tubes pumping him full of black goop, mouth slathered with
royal jelly.  He’s changed, but you can tell, it’s him.  His beautiful hunter’s
moon horns and the lines of his jaw, not yet covered with the pebbled,
chitinous plates like most of his head, are dead giveaways.  He was already
twice as big as he had been, his arms stretched to the length of his legs.  His
horns were blackening at the base, and he was sprouting several more along the
crown of his skull.  “Joey,” he mutters, voice thick and burbling.  You’re sure
that he’s going to ask you to kill him, but you tell him to go fuck himself
before he can, and you place a kiss right on his lips, damaged and hardened and
insectile, but still his, to shut him up.
Within seconds your vibrosword has cut through the straps holding him down, and
within minutes you and he are limping out of the culling facility.  Within the
hour, you both are standing on the nearest hill, watching it.  Your hostage had
called in reinforcements as soon as you left the room, of course, but since
this had never happened before it took a while to organize a response.  Two
hours later there were only a few flying pods dispensing legislacerators onto
the scene to investigate.  The sun was beginning to set; day was very short on
Alternia.  You waited for them to go inside before you pulled out the
detonator.
“Let’s do it together,” you say to your lover, the once-troll, now imperial
drone (well, partly; you wonder if he’ll ever heal to be the way he was before,
or if he’ll go full drone, or if he’ll be stuck in between forever, but that’s
for future you to worry over), and his massive hand encloses your small one,
his clawed thumb on top of your soft pinkish human thumb, and you both push the
button.
You watch together as the culling facility falls into the chasm, multicolored
fire shooting up through the blood-pipes for hours and hours afterward.
End Notes
     yeah I kinda stretched the premise a huge amount
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