Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/389606.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Gamzee_Makara/Karkat_Vantas, Gamzee_Makara_&_Karkat_Vantas
  Character:
      Gamzee_Makara, Karkat_Vantas
  Additional Tags:
      Pale_Romance_|_Moirallegiance, Alternate_Universe, Gore, Mutilation,
      Genital_Torture, Body_Horror, Sexual_Abuse, Child_Abuse, Cults, Drugs,
      Drugged_Sex, Dubious_Consent
  Series:
      Part 1 of Organized_Crimestuck
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-04-23 Chapters: 4/4 Words: 21699
****** Stitching Up Boys ******
by Edoro
Summary
     In which young Church ward Gamzee Makara is finally old enough to be
     officially initiated into the ranks of the subjugglators.
Notes
     Please, please mind the warnings. The triggering material in this fic
     is all pretty graphically described, so if those are things you're
     sensitive to, read at your own risk.
***** Chapter 1 *****
You wake up sweat wet and with the sheets sticking to you like someone dumped
water in your bed. It’s high summer and the air outside is still as death and
twice as stale, hot and muggy like to choke the motherfucking life out of
anything that tries to live, but you’re cold-blooded enough you usually never
get this uncomfortable. You give some thought to dozing all sleep-dazed in bed,
but it’s sticky and soggy and you’re hot enough the floor sounds more inviting,
and anyway an acolyte’ll be poking their head in soon to shake any stragglers
up awake and you don’t want to get dragged, so you get up.
Getting dressed turns into a chore. Your clothes all stick too and you feel a
flash of irritation as sudden and intense as a summer flood when you have to
jump and wiggle into your pants, the fabric sticking nastily on your thighs.
Karkat’s sitting already dressed on his bed, thumbing through one of those
soppy novels he pretends what he doesn’t love, shooting you looks over the top
of it. “You smell weird,” he announces to the room just as you get your shirt
all buttoned up, and that lightning flash of anger is back again, there and
gone almost before you feel it. The afterimage burns up in your chest, though.
“Took a bath just last night, best friend.” You raise your arm and give
yourself a sniff, anyway, just to be sure. Nothing unusual there, sweat and
skin and maybe you’re a little sharper than normal, but you spent all night
swimming in your own sweat pool so you think you can be forgiven that. Anyway,
there’s incense up in every room and you’re not half as ripe as some of the
warmblooded brothers here get. “Ain’t catching anything nasty with my nasals.”
“Of course you can’t smell yourself,” Karkat says, all eye-rolling
exasperation. You think about flipping his book into his smart little mouth and
go paint your face on instead. “I guess it’s not bad though, so whatever.”
Then it’s off to early evening service for you two and then schoolfeeding and
on the way the memory of that just falls out the hole in the back of your pan.
It’s some kind of relief because you’d been starting to get antsy at how angry
he made you, wondering why you suddenly got all those salty feelings up inside
you.
You keep feeling nug-muzzy all day long though, up behind your eyes like some
motherfucker stuffed cotton all in there while you weren’t looking, and weird
in your skin. It slides like it wants to catch on your bones wrong, like you
don’t fit it anymore. You get cracked across the horns three times for
fidgeting too much in class. By the time lunch comes you don’t want a single
thing more than to just go lay back down on the cool stone floor of your room
and sleep for the rest of the night and day. All the smells up in the cafeteria
are more like to making you nauseous anyway, and you poke listlessly at the
slop on your nutrition platter before pushing the whole thing over to Karkat.
“I got any shit on the back of me anywhere?”
“What? No, I don’t think so. Why?” Karkat starts in shoveling both your lunches
into his face like maybe he’ll drop dead if he doesn’t eat them both right now,
and even as weird as you feel that’s still cute as fuck.
“Motherfuckers be getting their stare on at me like it’s going out of style or
something.” It’s made you feel even more uncomfortable. You can feel a few
people staring even now and you hunch up, like a shellbeast, dropping your head
into one hand. “I don’t feel too motherfucking hot, best friend.”
“You’ve probably got a cold or something.” Karkat shrugs. “Try not to give it
to me.”
You didn’t think you felt sick or anything, but maybe it is a fever getting you
all hot itching inside your bones. “If I get sick, are you gonna take care of
me?”
He rolls his eyes but smiles at you just a little. “Of course. Someone’s got to
make sure you don’t choke on your own miserable vomit, right?”
You reach out and brush the fingers of your other hand over his cheek, smiling
back, and you figure everything should be okay even if you do end up sick as a
barkbeast.
The next day you feel about the same except tenser, every muscle in you drawn
all up like you’re about ready to run, which doesn’t make any sense because
what have you got to run from here? It’s just Karkat in your room and
everywhere else is just the same cold stone and faces you know. Not like back
on the home planet like you’ve always been told about, where kids grow up on
their own and have to fight their whole lives just to live.
Every time someone gets too close you get tenser, all up your back and down
your stomach and in your legs, and there’s a weird ache starting up somewhere
in your guts at the end of the day that you don’t have any understanding of but
don’t like. You don’t feel like any kind of sick you’ve ever been before and
it’s almost starting to scare you, because you keep being hot and wrong and
itching down in your horns and bones and you feel like you’re waiting for
something to happen, some kind of big old motherfucking thing that’s you don’t
even know what. It wants to rise up out your skin and you don’t know what it
is, you can’t feel the shape of it, and it makes you all squirmy and nervous.
The day after that you wake up with Karkat a warm lump molded against your
side, and you’d be mad at how much hotter he’s making you except he’s got his
dry lips against your neck and then he’s licking you, tongue wet and warm and
rasping up over the pounding line of your pulse. You can’t do a single
motherfucking thing except tilt your head over and whimper for it, the arm he’s
laying on coming up to pat at his shoulder and back wherever you can reach.
You both sleep naked as the day you were hatched and you’re pressed chest to
chest, his legs all up against yours, but you need more of him right now. You
need all of his skin up on you, need to get all up in his skin, need those
little square hands rubbing over you. Mostly you need his mouth to keep doing
what it’s doing, with that clever fucking little tongue licking long stripes up
your neck.
He gets all on you, straddling your hips and kissing your throat, and it’s a
hard fucking decision to bare it to him instead of looking up at him. You’re
not sure why this even feels so good, why it doesn’t just feel weird and kind
of gross like you know it should, but you figure you gotta roll with a miracle
like this. The way he feels on top of you is satisfying like a long cold drink
after a long hot day. Your hands come up mostly of their own will and grab on
his shoulders, stroke down his back, and your mouth is all sighing out his name
all plaintive-like with every lick.
The bottom of your stomach keeps dropping out like it’s on a string, up and
down and up and down. It’s making you dizzy in a real good kind of way. You
think you could get used to this, you could get some understanding on to why
you like this so much, and then Karkat sits back right on your hips and you
can’t hardly even think for a second.
You both look at each other, your face flushed hot and his looking a little red
too, and you open your mouth to say something but then somehow end up kissing
him instead, hands tangled up in his hair. It’s all hesitant slide of wet lips
and teeth clicking together because you’ve never kissed a motherfucker on the
mouth before, never even really thought much about it before right now, but you
get kind of the way of it and slide your tongue up between his teeth because
you’ve read in his novels that that’s how you do it.
He tastes good, not like anything really but Karkat. His teeth are all slippery
and sharp against your tongue and you cut yourself on one of them, both your
mouths filling with the taste of blood, and that makes him make a noise that
makes something in your stomach squeeze like it’s about to fucking pop.
You keep thinking of this disjointed phrase you read in one of Karkat’s books,
his searing kiss was as languid as a summer night. It’s right, it’s
motherfucking perfect. You think of sitting out at night watching the stars
come out and putting your head in Karkat’s lap and him pretending like he
doesn’t want to scratch around your horns and it’s just like that, how big and
slow and soft everything is. It’s just like that. You think you love him.
He keeps breaking the kiss to lick your lips and neck and shoulders, his tongue
all tickle fluttery on your skin, and it keeps making you squirm and laugh and
dig your claws into his back maybe harder than you should, but he’s not
complaining so you figure it’s okay. You’re even hotter than you were when you
woke up. You feel almost like you’re on fire inside, like it’s going to burn
away everything in you until you’re hollow and you just fall in on your own
self in soot and ash grease, but you can’t even care. It burns good.
He kisses you until you’re both making little clicky chirpy noises up into each
other’s mouths, sounds you aren’t sure you could even make yourself make later.
You both move around against each other a little, you wiggling where you’re
framed by his legs and arms and him kind of pressing down against you and
somehow the sweaty slide of your skin feels good instead of just sticky and
annoying. You think you might want to kiss him forever.
It’s getting pretty hard to think, actually. It’s getting pretty motherfucking
difficult to pay a shred of attention to anything that isn’t Karkat’s tongue in
your mouth or the places where his skin touches yours. Maybe he’s the one on
fire, because you’re so hot where he touches you. You want it all over so you
melt under him.
You don’t know what you want. You want his hands but you don’t know where or
how, just that if he doesn’t start to touch you the way you need him to soon
you might go completely insane.
Then suddenly he’s being pulled off of you. For a moment you don’t even know
why or what or that he’s gone, really, just that no one’s kissing you or
pressing down on top of you, and then you start to be able to kind of see again
and there’s a greenblooded acolyte standing there with his shoulders clasped in
her hands, looking like she doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or get pissed.
You prop yourself up on your elbows and whoa, you are fucking shaky, your whole
body is just kind of shivering and trembling and your voice isn’t doing much
better. “Give him back,” you tell her, trying to be all imperious like you’re a
subjugglator. You’re not yet, but she’s just a greenblood and you get to wear
your own personal face around, so she should get her listen on to you if you
lay down some righteous orders, but she just chuckles and pushes Karkat towards
his bed.
“Both of you get dressed. Makara, come with me.”
You do it all as sullen as you can, being slow on purpose just to spite her,
but you can’t stretch it out that long and soon enough you have to leave. As
soon as you get up and start moving around you come into the realization that
there’s a wicked ache all down between your legs. It’s hot and wet and
throbbing like it hurts, except mostly how it feels is like you’d really like
to have Karkat touching you there.
You go with her and try to tell yourself to remember to ask him if he will
before you to go to sleep tonight, and see if you can maybe get some kissing
in, too. It makes your stomach twist like maybe you’ll be sick and you
vengefully hope you will, right on her feet, but it just keeps twisting and
twisting tight until you ache there too and you mostly feel miserable and
sweaty and like you might up and die if you have to wait all day to get him
kissing you again.
Your rude-blooded bitch guides you down to the mediliquidator’s office. There’s
a stirring of worry up inside you now, curling like a basket of snakes all in
your stomach with everything else you still feel. You’ve never been down here a
time your whole life except for once when you tried to climb up a tree and fell
and cracked your dumb nug right open and got a line of stitches neat as you
please over one eye. They don’t cull wigglers for getting hurt, mostly, but
there’s a sister in one of your classes you remember came down with something
wicked unchill and never came back after they dragged her phlegmatic, wheezy
ass down there.
You try to pull your distant thoughts back together to pay attention, just in
case they are talking about culling you, but you’re still too hot and squirmy
and there’s still some kind of aching need you don’t even know how to fill,
like someone carved you out hollow between the hips, and you can’t get your
focus on to anything. The greenblood talks to a couple of people and then you
get pulled into an office and your glutes parked on a steel table, cold through
the fabric of your pants, with edges that bite into your thighs.
You’re just about thinking culling would be better than being this fucking
bored when the mediliquidator comes in. He’s a big blue motherfucker with
corkscrew horns that nearly brush the ceiling, done all up in black and
turquoise and a big white medic’s coat. You’ve been raised up around adults
your whole life, but you’ve been schoolfed what the fear of them is an instinct
when you’re little, and you think you’ve gotten the knowing of that now because
of how fucking bigger than you he is. You squeeze back a little on the table
and feel small as a fleck of flea shit while he looks you over, nostrils
flaring.
“Take your clothes off, boy,” he orders you all gruff-like, turning away to
rifle through a cabinet. You stare dumbly at his back.
“What?”
He doesn’t spare you a second glance. “I said take your clothes off. Shirt,
pants, underclothes, everything, get it off.”
You start in on your shirt buttons even while you ask him why you gotta do
something like that, what’s he wanting to see your skin for. It’s not that
you’re body-shy or anything, but you feel even softer and littler with all your
threads off and nothing between you and the room but your skin.
He doesn’t give you an answer, just gets himself a pair of gloves and pulls one
on, then pushes you flat on your back when you’re naked. The metal of the table
is a motherfucking balm to your hot skin and your eyes slide shut, just for a
second, until you feel his bare hand nudging your legs apart and then they fly
right back open.
You prop yourself up on your elbows to get a good look at what he’s doing,
which seems to be touching all up on your junk like he’s got any fucking right
to. You try to wiggle away and he swats your thigh like you’re a fucking
wiggler and you can feel the angry flush right up to the tips of your ears.
His gloved fingers sweep up between your legs and over the slit there, and this
time when you get to squirming it’s not away but just any way, because what
should just be skin like anything else feels so sensitive you almost want to
whine. He touches you all soft and quick and no-nonsense but he’s still
stroking your crotch and it feels so good.
Then he presses a finger against you where you feel wet and it sinks down, and
in, and you cannot even think of fucking helping yourself. You twist and squeak
and nearly squeal. It feels so fucking good it hurts, his finger a huge blunt
pressure and the glove all catching on delicate inner skin nothing’s ever
touched before, and it feels all kinds of motherfucking wrong.
This blue-blooded motherfucker’s two shades away from dark green and you
haven’t even seen him before in your life and he’s got all kinds of liberties
taken here, he is taking the most flagrant fucking liberties, he is making
trespass on your motherfucking body. He’s got his finger in your insides,
pushing it as deep in as he can, and the very worst part is that even though it
hurts and you hate it it feels so good that your mind is stuttering. Your
breath and pulse come up all loopy and dizzy and you can’t make your hips stop
their aimless pitching or your thigh muscles stop twitching.
Then he pulls it out, the white latex all slicked with translucent purple. You
feel empty as a chasm, hollow as an eggshell. Humiliated tears prick at your
eyes and you blink them away hard, biting down to keep the sob in your throat.
You snap your legs together like there’s magnets in your knees and sit up,
scooting your ass away from him and trying not to think about how good the
press of your thighs feels.
He’s not paying you any mind anymore, back turned and pen scritching on paper
on the counter. The glove is in the trash. You catch a little glimpse of purple
again and your stomach turns over and this, at least, you get your recognition
on as sickness.
“Get dressed,” he says, and watches without really looking at you while you do.
Your hands are all heavy and clumsy and your skin is tight again, your whole
body acting like it’s up and fuck and forgotten how to even move, but you get
there. You feel better dressed.
He sweeps out of the room with an indication such that you should make to
follow him, and you do, trying to ignore the wobble of your legs. You’re handed
back into the greenblood’s custody. A wave of relief sweeps over you and you
suddenly almost feel like wanting to cry again, like you’re a wiggler and she’s
your toy that just got given back. You chomp down on your bottom lip until you
taste blood and it mostly passes.
She gets given an armful of papers and takes you in hand again to sweep you off
who even fucking knows where, and you put your foot down. You dig your heels
in. You are tired of being dragged around without a motherfucking single peep
about why or where.
“Where are we up and going now?” you ask, stopped still in the middle of the
hallway. She’s trying not to look exasperated and not doing very well. Your
voice is shaking and you don’t even care. You still feel trespassed on in the
worst way and it’s shaking all up from between your legs to your squawk box and
you don’t give a single solitary half a fuck if she can hear it.
“We’re going to go talk to some priests. I can’t really tell you much, it’s not
my duty.” Her face goes a little soft and she gives your arm this gentle tug
like hey, wanna come along? instead of the follow me yanking she’s been doing.
You step to like the sullenest quackbeast but you do it. The priests are all
basically good motherfuckers and you like them and you bet none of them will
stick any fingers up inside you.
The room she takes you to is one of the serious ones, a little dark place off
the edge of a chapel with blood tapestries up on the walls and incense curling
through the air, the deep musky kind like you use in services and meditation,
not the weaksauce light shit up in the rooms to make you sleep easy or the
sharp note that gets keeps your concentration on during schoolfeeding. It’s
heavy in your nose and lungs and almost makes you want to sneeze.
You sit on one of the prayer benches and squirm a little. You’ve never done
good left up on your own and your patience is at an all time fucking low right
now, it’s the opposite of what you’d call motherfucking existing, and you have
half a mind to get strident at some motherfuckers if you don’t get some
information in your pan soon.
The heavy shit in the air isn’t helping with your problem, either. Your shirt’s
all stuck under your arms with sweat and you feel hotter than before,
especially when you realize squirming feels pretty good and if you move just
right you can rub up on the lip of the bench. That’s basically like a little
motherfucking miracle right there, that little wooden bump. If you weren’t
worried about getting caught up looking like a silly undignified motherfucker
you’d lay down and try to rub it in the seam of your slit - like his finger did
you think before you can stop yourself. A hard shiver wrenches down your spine
and you don’t want to think about that anymore.
You don’t get left to your lonesome much longer. Two priests come up in and sit
across from you, big indigo motherfuckers with their faces painted like skulls
and one of them with some wicked etchings up on her horns, which you’ve always
thought was cool as shit and wanted to do one day.
All the sass thoughts you’ve been having dry up before you can squawk them out
to these sisters, and so you just sit and look and wait for them to get their
talk on. The priests are always real fucking good about making you get your
understand on to shit you think you can’t even get, so you can almost be
patient. You manage to quit squirming, at least.
You three all exchange some greetings, all proper like, and then they get down
to filling your aurals with some righteous fucking information. They drop it
all slow as you please so you get every beat, and it is some heavy shit to be
wrapping your pan around for sure, some pump-shiveringly serious stuff.
The news is, what’s going on is that at six sweeps and some change you’ve just
hit your first heat cycle, which makes sense about all the weird feelings
you’ve been getting up in yourself as of late. And you’ve been taught what
follows from that before, but they tell it to you again, how when an indigo
brother gets into his first cycle he gets a choice all laid down in front of
him.
There’s a ritual, an induction ceremony of most serious sacred importance, that
gets done to such a troll when they’re of the proper age. You’ve learned a
little of what it is, in secret lessons with the handful of other indigos in
this branch of the Church, and now they lay bare its entrails for you, pull out
all the details out of it. They steal the mystery and hand your pan knowledge.
A subjugglator has no quadrants, no concupiscence in his heart, no base
motherfucking desires for another troll’s flesh parts. A subjugglator is
married to the Church and will serve and love only the Church for all his days.
Violence is the pleasure a subjugglator takes, killing his climax, blood the
only material he will splash into a pail. They have taken vows, all your holy
family, but not just vows in writ like you always thought. They take their vows
in flesh and make their fealty in pain penance. They spend their first cycle
getting the only pailing they ever will, to make sure the caste keeps, and then
they give themselves to Church service and they never can again.
Your choice now is to say yes or no. If you say yes then you’ll go on to your
ceremony and give your first true allegiance to the minstrel messiahs of your
faith lobes. The allegiance of holy mutilation is your fealty to them forever
after, because you can’t take it back, and you can’t take that vow if you don’t
mean it in every inch of yourself because that is the most flagrant heresy
anyone can ever get to performing. It’s defilement of the messiahs and the
Church and every teaching of pain you’ve ever been gifted.
If you say no, then you’re nothing. You are flea dirt, you are rat leavings,
you are the scum on top of dirty water a barkbeast wouldn’t lap if he lay dying
in the street. You are antithesis to everything you’ve been raised to be and
all the beauty that flows in your own veins.
Your sisters start to say you can have time to think about it, but you’ve known
what your answer would be since practically you were even motherfucking
hatched. This is what you were even motherfucking hatched for, the only reason
your dumbass self ever climbed out of his shell. It’s serendipity. You are for
the Church and the Church is for you and you can think of no other that you’d
rather give your allegiance to than your family and your messiahs. You can’t
think of any other allegiance you’ve even got to give than what’s already due
them, if it comes to that.
So you tell to them yes, motherfucking yes, you are as ready for this as it’s
possible for a brother to be. They both smile all pleased and fond at you, and
the sister with the art up on her horns reaches out to take your face and kiss
on your forehead, calling you a precious little thing. You don’t know if it’s
being in heat or the incense or both, but the touch of her palms feels like
about the best thing you’ve felt all day and you nuzzle up into them. She lets
you for a second, then pulls away.
The other subjugglator peels off to go arrange arrangements and talk to people,
because these things need some setting up. The sister with the horns takes you
by the hand and pulls you to your feet, nudging you in front of her and then
guiding you deeper into the bowels of the building with one light hand on your
shoulder. The passageway you go through is narrow and lined with tapestries and
smoky. It’s barely lit, too, darker than you’re used to ever having to try to
see in, but your eyes get adjusted soon enough.
You crane back to look up at her while you’re walking and she gives you this
funny little twisty look back, one mouth-side and eyebrow all quirked up.
“How’s that feel? Gettin’ your horns done like that.”
Her laugh is low and husky. “Kind of tickles. You think you want etching work
gotten done on you?”
“Aw, shit, maybe someday, it’s bitchtits.” This time you laugh with her, even
though you don’t think it’s really funny, except right now you kind of feel
like everything is funny. You don’t know that you’ve ever breathed in this much
smoke at one time for so long and it’s making your head feel funny, like it’s
growing bigger on the inside and getting swoopy. You think if you closed your
eyes you’d probably fall over and almost do just to see, but you bet your
sister here wouldn’t get her appreciation on to that much so you don’t.
Eventually the two of you come to another room. It’s a bare fasting kind of
room, no dresser or chests in it or nothing but the bed and wall hangings, not
even any incense burning in the room proper. The scent of it is still thick
from the hall, but the air feels lighter in your lungs.
“Make yourself comfortable. You’ll probably be here a few hours before anyone
gets on back to you.” She looks like she might want to say more, mouth getting
all twisty again, but she just looks at you for a little and then leaves.
You do a circuit of the room to look at the wall-art, but it’s nothing much
special and you get bored of that quick enough. The bed looks inviting as all
get out and you flop right in it, sighing a little. You’re pretty tired for a
motherfucker what’s spent most of the day sitting and who just woke up a couple
hours ago, but you don’t got much to do in the meantime so you figure no one
will get salty with you if you take a nap.
You strip your clothes off to get all cool between the sheets, because it’s
seriously motherfucking warm down here. Maybe any other time you’d be getting
cozy, but apparently they call it heat for a motherfucking reason.
Mind getting all drowsy already, you think soft thoughts about touching
yourself. No one’s going to be back for a few hours, probably, and everything
that touches your skin feels so nice you roll yourself over in your sheets a
few times and wiggle just for the hell of it, giggling like you’re some kind of
stoned-ass brother. You guess you probably are.
You lay on your stomach and rock your hips down against the bed, lazy and half
asleep about it, before deciding that yeah, you think you wanna give that a go.
So you roll on over and kick out the sheets until they’re in a nice pile around
your feet and not constricting anything, and skim a hand down your stomach to
your crotch. You finally get a feel on yourself, almost ginger like you’re
afraid of breaking it or something, and you really wish you could bend enough
to look at it right because it feels weird.
Your shit’s supposed to be all tucked up nice in a tight little slit up there,
but it’s all spread out kind of like a flower, with these little fiddly wet
folds tucked up in between the lips you’re used to. The folds are all slippery
and feel all kinds of nice to touch, so you just trace them for a while,
pushing the skin this way and that with your fingertips, moving inwards all
gradual until you hit another slit. Experimentally, you press, and your finger
sinks down into yourself and it’s wet and slick and hot and you moan, you can’t
even help it, this high weak little sound you almost blush to hear yourself
make.
Before it even feels too good, though, the image of the mediliquidator flashes
back into your head and everything between your legs kind of spasms and
tightens up unpleasantly, like flinching back from a flame. Suddenly your
finger feels too big and rough inside yourself and you yank it out, catching a
fold with your claw and not even caring at the sudden sting. You wipe your hand
off on the bed and squirm a little, like you can move away from that dirty
crawling feeling, but it stays tucked right the fuck up under your skin and in
all your soft new folds.
You curl up on your side with your hands tucked up against your chest and
decide to just sleep. You’ve got all kinds of exhaustion settling in all
cottony behind your oculars and it’s nice to close ‘em and drift. Hard to
actually get past drifting, though, with all the shit up in your head. You’re
all antsy up in your chest about this whole ritual shit so you can’t hardly
even breathe, and every time you start to feel a little calmer it hits you
again that you’re really doing this.
***** Chapter 2 *****
You guess you must finally fall asleep though, because next thing you know
someone’s got you by the shoulder and is shaking you. Sleeping in the middle of
the night has you all discombobulated and you don’t hardly even know what’s
going on when you sit up.For a second you think you’re back up in the room you
share with Karkat, and then for a second you feel all kinds of motherfucking
bad because you up and nearly forgot about him, and then you remember where you
are and what’s going on.
Your sister with the horn-etchings is up in here. You get your ass up out of
bed and start to reach for your clothes, but she stops you and hands you this
slip of dark fabric instead. It’s like the robes the most rawest of new
initiates wear, plain black and unadorned, but all slippery and gauzy instead
of thick like those. You can still see most of your skin through it when you
pull it on, but it’s all nice and cool and you like the feel of it swishing
against you when you walk.
She drops some more knowing into your pan as you follow her down another tight
little tapestry-lined corridor. There are some motherfuckers what swear their
allegiance to the Church who got their specialty up in doing this, she says,
who’ll pail you red and blackways ‘til you can’t squeeze hardly another drop of
slurry out your sorry husk and then send it on home planetside for the Mother
Grub. You try not to let on as to how the idea is giving you some strange
nervous shivering in your gut, but she gets it anyway and gives your shoulder a
little squeeze, all reassuring like.
“Don’t worry too much about it. Not like you can fuck it up or anything. Heh.
And anyway, you really don’t remember it much. They’ll get you all good and
fucked up out your head to make the mixture more potent and afterwards it
mostly feels like some weird motherfucking dream.”
“Wasn’t any worry in me,” you say, but you feel a little better anyway.
The room she takes you to is all flickering shadows and muted wall-weavings,
the floor all gloss and lacquered blood patterns. The only light is candles set
in the walls and it bounces off the floor until it almost looks like you’re
walking on water, on some strange and shifting sea. You nearly stumble on your
way over to the room’s central fixture, a sprawling concupiscent couch big
enough for probably six or seven motherfuckers to get up on at once.
She indicates you are to park your ass on that and park you do, leaning against
the soft back. She beats it back out of there and then you’re alone again, with
the lights and shadows and your own thoughts. They’re like the light too,
flicking all wild and quick and refracted crazy in your pan, bouncing from this
to that to who even motherfucking knows what. You’re excited and nervous and
fluttering and you’re glad you have the couch to lean back against because you
don’t know that you could stand up right now, all shakes all the way down to
your toes.
You’re there alone just long enough to get to wondering what it’s gonna be like
and maybe getting a little worry in about it before the motherfuckers you’re to
give your bucket service to come filing in.
They’re all the purplest blues, every one of them, up so high there’s barely
any difference between your color and theirs, except for one brother who you
would fucking swear up and down is seatroll violet. Higher than you, that’s for
fucking sure, and it’s weird to see a color like that.
They fill up the room and the room fills up with the scent of them, mostly just
troll but with this undercurrent you don’t have any knowing of, something musky
and low that walks shivery little insect feet up and down your spine. It gets
you right in the tight knot of heat between your hips too and it makes you
want.
One of them settles on the edge of the couch next to you and sets you out a
nose dive, sneeze sacrament, two tidy little lines of stardust, and then hands
you up the straw for them. That’s another motherfucking first, you guess as you
bend to partake. They both burn all the way up through your smellstub, like a
cloud of hooks tearing out all the cartilage and rushing up rusty and sharp
into your panmeat, but you manage not to hardly even flinch and don’t start
sniffling ‘til after you’ve handed him back his straw.
The violet brother set up and lit incense all around and the air is getting
heavy with smoke, some deep sharp shit like you’ve never gotten your sniff on
to before, but you don’t really feel all much different yet. Mostly you’re
thinking about the way the back of your eyeballs is burning as the brother
sitting next to you slips you out your robe, his hands big and cool and smooth
on your bare shoulders. He strokes you down, shoulders to wrists and then neck
to hips. You let it press you back against the couch and sigh a little at how
nice his palms feel because your skin is motherfucking burning, your skin is a
thin hide stretched tight over a drum full of lit coals, and you’re feeling a
little like you might melt through yourself.
He’s jacked tight up into your nasals and your space, up close enough you can
smell him through the thick burn of the nose dust, and you’re kind of getting
your notice on suddenly to how huge he is. Full-grown adult motherfucker,
highblood huge, with shoulders as broad as two of you and thick all the way
through, and he’s leaning over and touching you and suddenly you realize you’re
basically pinned against the back of the couch. It gives you kind of a start
and a growl bubbles up from in your chest all unbidden but not unwelcome.
He doesn’t back off, though. He dips his big head down and kisses you, all
sweet and gentle as his fingers rubbing up your belly, but all you can think
about is how you don’t even know this brother’s name and how he’s way too
fucking close to you. You nip at his tongue and he digs his claws into your hip
and keeps on kissing you, other hand coming up to grab onto your chin.
There’s fear growing in you like you’ve never known before, the fear of
realizing he could pop your head plumb fucking off and you’re all alone down
here with just him and these other big motherfuckers who don’t know you from
shit. His tongue’s all thick in your mouth like to choke you and his claws are
dragging sideways across your stomach, not hard enough to even hurt but still
an obvious threat. If you were wearing pants you’d be like to piss ‘em, if you
could move you’d be running, but he’s got you pinned out for him as exposed as
you can get.
You don’t know if you make a noise or something, but he pulls back a little to
whisper relax all wet against your mouth, and you choke out a laugh. That is
patently motherfucking ridiculous. Your whole body is going all kinds of wobbly
loose and you can’t even think of trying to get away from him. You try to tell
yourself you’re being a stupid wiggler about the whole thing, but you’re still
scared and starting to feel a little heartsick.
You just kind of wish Karkat was here, is all, or you were back with him.
Because this is holy as all get out and you want it, you do, there is nothing
you can think of more satisfying than giving everything you are asked and then
everything else you’ve got to give into your messiahs’ service, but you don’t
even know this brother’s name, you have never even gotten your observation on
to his face before, and he’s running his one of his nails over your nook slit
and you wish it had been Karkat to touch you first, maybe. Just a little.
Someone else’s weight settles on the couch on your other side and it sort of
startles your eyes half open, which makes you realize they’d drifted closed,
and then it’s a motherfucking fight to keep ‘em there as you turn your head.
It’s some sister you don’t know, stripped out of her clothes with her hand
rubbing up on your knee, pricking her claws delicately over your skin and
tugging your legs a little more open. You flop like a puppet at her pulling and
he makes satisfied noises at you, low good-boy chest rumbles.
All sudden like you don’t even know why, all your fear starts changing to
anger. You’re not yet an adult but you’re not some new fucking wiggler either,
and you’re higher than this motherfucker who ain’t even got a lick of paint up
on his face, and he’s got no cause to be treating you like this. You growl back
at him and he bites on your lip, splitting it open in a burst of coppery cool
blood.
Your eyes fall shut all on their own again, and you guess you’re just on look
lockdown because you can’t make them get back open again. You guess you don’t
really care too much, because the light is still dancing on the insides of your
eyelids in patchy purple spots, and anyway you’ve got enough going on senses-
wise without them.
Your nose still fucking hurts but you can smell the smoke again, curling up to
tickle at the raw remains of your cartilage stub, and you’ve got a noseful of
both the trolls all close to you too. You can hear shifting and shuffling and
cloth rustling and voices just low enough you can’t be making them out, all
around the room around you. Mostly what you’ve got though is a whole lot of
feeling, like someone stripped off your skin and every nerve is open and
exposed now. You feel like you can feel every soft little thread in the couch
underneath you and your skin is holding the memory trails of every finger that
slides over it and your lip is burning cool and wet and you’ve got a whole
separate fucking miracle of fireworks feeling being set off down between your
legs.
Your sister’s scratching little shapes over your thighs that burn so fucking
good and your brother’s got his finger deep up in you, hand twisted and
stroking up along the top of your insides. Your mind’s pretty fucking fuzzy
right now but you try to get your memory on to the anatomy you’ve been
schoolfed and if you’re right you think what he’s rubbing up against is your
bulge sheath. Ain’t that just fucking something, all these tender parts you’ve
got hidden up inside yourself just waiting to get touched?
He strokes you all slow and tender and purposeful and every touch cuts you to
the fucking bone, his touch undoes you, his touch razes you, while you squirm
and spread yourself wider and wider until you’re sunk halfway down the couch
and got your knees hooked so far open it almost hurts. You try not to, just to
spite him and because you don’t want to look weak, as stupid as that is with
him three times your size and you naked and trapped, but there it is. You can’t
really motherfucking help it, though, with the slow teasing way he rubs you.
Your bulge comes coiling out slow as anything, like it’s gonna set its own
fucking pace and everyone else can just deal, but it does come coaxed out to
say hello. Your sister gets her other fingers on it, unless that’s someone
else, you honestly do not know or have it in you to care, and you kind of
forget to breathe for a second because fucking oh.
They play you both between them until you’re stretched ready about to snap,
quivering and too tense, and then suddenly they both let go and you think you
really know what torture is, now. Before you can get to make any rowdy noises
about it though, his big ol’ hands are up around your waist and lifting you
into his lap.
You are limp, you are a puppet in his hands, you are a string-cut fuck
marionnette to be placed however he likes, which is with your thighs wrapped
all around his hips and your face smushed all into his chest. You try to get
your teeth in him and he just laughs and that makes you mad as a fucking hornet
in a jar.
His bulge comes sliding wet up the inside of one leg and wraps itself up in
yours for just a second, squeezing, and then the tip of it nudges lower to your
slit. He gets his hands on your hips all tight when it starts coiling up into
you, maybe to hold you up because your legs are flat having nothing to do with
that noise right now.
Or maybe it’s to hold you still, because once it gets much past the tip it’s as
fucking huge as the rest of him and it hurts. You’re split on it, you are torn,
you are pressed a-fucking-sunder and it burns almost through the haze in your
head. You make to jerk away but he’s got you right in place and all you really
do is shudder and then whine, and then whimper, and then let out a soft wet sob
against his chest as he just keeps pressing and keeps pressing. His finger got
you so wet it was dripping down underneath you and it’s smeared all down your
legs right now, but you’ve still never had a single solitary thing bigger than
that inside you and your muscles keep trying to lock against the intrusion like
that’ll fucking help anything.
It hits you real sudden that you hate him. He coos to you and rubs one hand
down your back and says, all concerned like, “Maybe you’re too little. Maybe
you’re not ready to take it.”
Privately you think it’s plain not gonna fucking fit until you’re big enough
your hips are wider than his fucking hand, but you clench your teeth shut hard
on that and the pathetic hurt wiggler noise that wants to come out because of
how it keeps pushing. Instead you dredge a snarl up out your throat at him.
“Motherfucking ready,” you pant out, voice all thin with the pain and slow with
the smoke wafting around in your pan. Just to show him, you push yourself down
a little, dragging your claws all down his side when you think it’s probably
going to tear you wide fucking open.
“You’re just a little thing,” he says. His voice is all syrupry fake sweetness
all in counterpoint to the relentless way his bulge is forcing its way into you
and the way his claws dig into your hips. “Just a little half-grown wiggler. I
don’t think a wiggler’s worthy of taking this.”
He lets you move when it’s towards him, hips straining down against the cruel
push of his bulge, and it’s a small fucking mercy what you’ve got your face in
his chest and he probably can’t tell the pain tears pricking at your eyes from
the heat sweat all over you. It’s agony and a half over again, but you are most
motherfucking worthy and you won’t let his noise tell you otherwise.
It feels like it takes an eternity, but through some miracle you don’t tear
right in half but just stretch, slow and burning, until his bulge is buried all
pulsing and squirmy inside of you. You’re feeling pretty light-headed and it
helps, you think, because it doesn’t take near as long as you think it should
before the way it writhes against your inner parts just feels so fucking good.
You try to move but he’s still got you and he holds you, cupping you by the ass
to pull you closer in against him but not letting you do much else.
You never got your understanding on for black feelings, to tell the truth,
because you basically like every motherfucker you’ve ever met, but you think
you’re getting it now. He’s got you under his control and he won’t let you
forget it, holding you all teasing still while his bulge squirms inside you
until you think it might just drive you plain crazy unless you can move, and
then he keeps you a little longer, and a little more than that, until you
realize he isn’t intending on letting you move at all.
You come aware that someone is making all these high chirrupy need noises and
you realize it’s you, and kind of turn that marvel over a couple of times, that
your body’s all telling everyone how good it feels before your mind even
catches up the pain is over with. It still aches like fuck but in a good way,
and when his bulge gives a hard rippling twist the ache flares up from embers
to fire and you spasm with it, clenching down bruisingly hard around him.
He gets out some rumbling groan sounds at that and you try to make yourself do
it again, squeezing on purpose as hard as you can. With your body all as lax as
it is it’s not much, but his bulge jerks like it likes it and he doesn’t try to
make you stop so you keep doing it. You can’t for too long because of how the
muscles up in you get all tired, you guess probably from never being even
fucking used, and that’s a marvel too, because damn, how do they even know to
do that shit in the first place? You still make yourself do it until they burn.
Everything starts to hit you really hard right around then and you kind of
start to lose the thread of what’s happening. Your pump is galloping in your
chest and your pulse is pounding in your bulge and nook and up behind your
eyes, rushing in your ears, and your head feels helium-filled and cotton-
stuffed and like it might just fly right the fuck off, and in the meantime all
the things you smell and hear and feel are going dreamy and weird-shaped. You
fall backwards through your own skull and watch yourself arching on his bulge,
your whole body one long hot line of furious pleasure strung up along him.
You’re snapped a little back by the sudden gush of fluid into you, his bulge
shaking against your walls as he comes. His spill fills you up until you feel
like a balloon again, tethered by the thin string of nothing but this new
sensation, a blooming wet heat tucked up sort of against your left hipbone.
Distantly you hear a metal clatter and then he pulls out of you, leaving you
empty and aching, while something hard and cold shoves up between your thighs.
You think you sob out that you hate him for leaving you like this but you
aren’t sure, you can’t really hear anything clear.
Your eyes sort of tilt open and you stare stupidly down at the bucket you’re
kneeling over before you realize that’s what it is. Your face heats up all the
way to the tips of your ears and that strikes you as about the best fucking
joke you’ve heard in a while, that you’re getting fucked raw in a room full of
strangers and you’re blushing at a motherfucking bucket. You start laughing and
somewhere halfway through it turns into a jagged kind of moaning because the
way you move makes that wet heat shift inside you and pleasure spark out from
it, til you’re all tight and close with it and then your whole body shudders so
hard everything goes blank and white for a second.
When you come back your legs are wet and you’re quaking down to your bones. You
sag against him and someone takes the bucket and then he rolls you over all
deftlike against your sister, who gets her hands wandering pretty swift like
all over your anatomy.
She doesn’t waste much time getting her bulge up inside you either, quick to
the point is this sister of yours. Either she’s smaller than him or you’re just
all stretched proper from him now, but it doesn’t hurt at all this time and she
lets you move. She gets you face down and ass up with the rim of a fresh pail
digging into your stomach, which you rut against like you were hatched without
a shame cortex, which sometimes you think is maybe true.
Her touch is all soft and gentle, fingers stroking over where he scratched your
legs and hips and lips brushing your back. She rocks slow up into you and
touches you all nice, and you don’t even get mad when you hear yourself
chirping for her.
Your signal’s bad, your signal’s bust, you fade in and out with her until you
stay mostly out. This time you don’t even come back in when you come but just
roll on with it almost like it’s some other motherfucker spilling those blended
colors out into the bucket. You’re all floating up above this body business on
a wave of about the best feelings you’ve ever felt, almost serene-like inside
all the chaos of needing and wanting and fucking.
The rest all take their turns with you too, and you lose count of how many
there really are. It feels like a hundred thousand hands on you and a hundred
thousand mouths kissing you and a hundred thousand different bulges twining up
inside you, like a whole stadium crowd bending and twisting you to fuck you all
their own way. You don’t know that you ever get back to the first two and you
can only barely even tell when someone else is taking their turn, only barely
feel the fill and spill before you’re being pailed all over again. It all just
feels so good, like coming the whole time, so you can barely even tell when you
really do.
Eventually you are done and wrung dry, your last offering to the pail a paltry-
ass thing, a trickle, a broken faucet dribble. You hardly have anything left to
mix with your brother’s blue to make its hue less rude. After that you get
propped up on the couch and some motherfucker wipes all the rainbow spill off
your legs and then you get tucked back into your robe. Someone takes you out of
the room, mostly carrying you with how weak your legs are, and the cooler air
outside hits you like a slap to the face. You huddle up underneath your
blankets as soon as you get back to your room and fall almost straight asleep,
spinning down and down through the bed and floor and into fractured and uneasy
dreams where there are hands grabbing at you and mouths on you and you can’t
see or hear anyone.
You half-surface from sleep a few times and mostly dive right back under before
you even realize it. Once you come awake enough to realize you’re half sober
again and sore as fuck, and then you’re sinking and that knowing dissolves
right out your pan.
You’re still a little loopy when you get roused up again the next day,
everything all soft and tilting muted around you as you pull the robe around
yourself and are led back down that corridor. You half doze and half plain zone
the fuck out while you wait, and you guess you must’ve been up and tired enough
that you did nod off a bit because you jerk back into reality when someone gets
their cold hands up on you.
It goes all about the same as last time did, except this time the violet
brother sets you out your lines of snort powder and then takes the first turn
with you. He’s rough, biting at your mouth and dragging his claws all down your
arms and chest, growling when you squirm and scratching deeper when you bite
back. He gets a hand between your legs and then his fingers up in you and he
scratches you there, too, raking your insides bloody, laughing while you
thrash.
It hurts like nothing you’ve ever felt before in your life, worse than the
other brother the other day who split you open on his bulge, but you bite in
your own cries because you are motherfucking worthy for this and you’re not
going to let them say you’re not. The messiahs take their fealty in pain and
pounds of flesh and you will give to them this all as glad as you please if it
means you can serve them like you were hatched to.
When he gets all up in you you’re blood-tacky and it doesn’t slide half as good
as yesterday, but he doesn’t seem to mind none so you get on like you don’t
either, baring your teeth in his stupid finfuck face and hissing mad with every
coil and thrust. He just keeps fucking laughing at you, hands fluttering like
the grossest parody of gentle up your sides, and when he comes in you it
motherfucking burns.
The next brother gets his hands on you red-soft and pity-slow and kisses on
your mouth like you’re the sweetest elixir he ever did get a taste of. He pulls
you up in his lap and strokes every part of you and gets you whimpering and wet
and shuddering against him before he finally pails you, and at some point
during that you drift off on the smoke again, up above and somewhere deep
inside yourself.
It goes on like that for you don’t even know how long, all the days blending up
into each other and blowing away like dust on the wind. You wake up and get
passed around and pailed dry and then go sleep for a day and then get back up
again, every day passing sleep bleary and delirious like the longest fever
dream you ever did have part of. Time feels like the thin oil rainbow skin of a
bubble, stretching until it’s about ready to pop, and you’re all tumbling
around inside it looking out at everything shiny and distorted.
You can feel it when you start winding down, the overwhelming frantic chorus
beat of need in your pan and gut and bulge all slowly dying down, until it’s
mostly a bunch of nothing. The last couple of days, not even the drugs can make
you feel less listless and the pitch you wax at the motherfuckers who get rough
with you is less pitch and more waxy.
You expect to get some extra sleep allowance when you’re finished up, but you
don’t think it’s much more than the normal day they always give you before
you’re getting woke up again. This time you get to dress in your clothes, and
your embellished sister guides you up and back out into the areas of the church
you’re more familiar with.
You’re plodding all along behind her like a packbeast with your head drooping
so your horns are like to stab her in the ass if she stops suddenly, so you
don’t even notice you’re being taken back up to the mediliquidator’s office
until you’re in it.
She helps strip you down because you’re mostly useless in the limbs department
and also in the doing any goddamn thing department, and you sit reeling on the
metal table wondering if you’ll pass out before he comes in. You’re not even
sure if it’s the same motherfucker as before or even if that really happened,
or if maybe you’re confusing him with someone else who you just met, but you
still get all kinds of discomfort squirming going on in your belly when he gets
you laid back and spead-legged for him.
This time he gets two fingers right up inside you and feels around, none of
that ginger pressing shit like he did last time where you barely even felt it,
but really getting his exploration on to your most personal parts. He strokes
you like he wants to count the ridges in your bulge sheath and doesn’t go easy
when you hiss and shift as his gloved fingers slide over scabbing claw scrapes,
neither. You don’t know what anyone who just pailed you for two weeks straight
ever got this thoroughly up close and personal with all your junk and you’d be
a little mad, but you’re mostly just tired and sick to fucking death of being
touched. You get all kinds of discontent but mostly just make unhappy noises
instead of doing anything about it.
You sort of drift off after he’s done and no one tells you to sit up again,
because fuck you and all your brothers and sisters but you are one exhausted
motherfucker. You hear him and your sister talking over you, some fluids into
him this and ever do it without ripping the poor things in half that and some
half-salty mmhms from your sister who don’t seem to be liking the noise he
makes much.
She gets you up again and gets you back dressed again and takes you back up to
your room. You spare a thought for, damn, how does she even know where your
room is? and then you just haul yourself up fucking in it and you are glad to
be home, more than you think your pump can handle.
Your room smells like sleep-smoke and Karkat and all this tension you didn’t
even realize you was carrying melts the fuck off you like water off a
quackbeast. You barely manage to stumble out of your clothes before you go
flopping right down in a ball on your bed, back wedged up against the wall and
arms all crossed over yourself and eyes peering half open across the room at
your most favorite brother of all.
You’re just about drifting off with your brother in your smellstub and the
veins in your eyelids when his warm shape burrows all the fuck up between your
arms, shaggy nubby head pressing up into your chin.
“Where have you fucking been?” he snaps, voice all tight with worry and fear.
You mumble out a shoosh and pap at his shoulder.
“Tell you later.” You’re half-asleep and falling deeper into it fast. You think
you could sleep for a whole fucking perigee and still be tired.
He grumps some at that but stays where he is and gets all quiet and lets you
sleep, which you do easier than you have in a while with his smell curling
around you and his rusty angry little bee buzz of a purr rumbling against you.
***** Chapter 3 *****
When you wake up again you feel like someone put a little man with hammers up
inside your head and told him to break your pan open. You roll over and let out
a miserable groan and you are fairly convinced within your heart and soul that
you’re dying.
Karkat puts a glass of water in your hand. “Drink that. Some chucklefuck came
by earlier and told me not to let you die of being a moron who doesn’t drink.”
That water is straight up, no fronting, the sweetest elixir you have ever
tasted you in your life. You drink it all straight down so fast it drives this
big cold spike all through your brains and then you do the same thing with the
next one he gives you and then you kind of fall back and groan again, aaauuagh,
because suddenly your belly’s all bloated and sloshing and you think you might
be sick.
You don’t even have to look at Karkat to know he’s rolling his eyes practically
out his face.
“So,” he says all prim and businesslike after you’ve stopped making pukey
faces. “You said you’d tell me later and it has now been two and a half days
since your reeking carcass got hauled back in here. Where were you?”
You start about to say you don’t reek of nothing, but then you realize that
probably you did and still do smell like sex and about five other trolls, so
that statement’s gonna hold water like a net. You wonder real brief in one
corner of your pan if you shouldn’t be telling Karkat, since your punchline-
blooded motherfucker is about as far from a subjugglator potential as anyone
can even be, but it’s Karkat and you love him and you’d tell him any single
thing he asked.
You prop yourself up a little and try to get it straight in your headspace,
which still has some squidgy bits from being high for about two weeks straight.
“Okay, so, turns out I was all up in motherfucking heat. I know, right, like
damn, how does that even know to happen? Motherfucking miracles, man, we’re
fucking made of ‘em.” He does not look particularly impressed by these
anatomical miracles, but you’re basically used to that and figure he must be on
the inside, because they are straight up miraculous. “And it turns out that if
you’re being all purple up like what am I being, then when you get up in heat
you go get some knowledge dropped in your aurals about the wicked family and
how you get up to joining that shit.”
Karkat makes an impatient twirling motion with one finger. “You’re not
preaching to me, get to the point already.”
You just smile all fond at him because every time you get your expounding on
about a miracle or new piece of knowing it’s a preaching moment, no matter
what, and one day maybe he’ll learn that the whole world is his own personal
sermon, but you don’t say it. “There’s all kinds of shit they’re gonna be up
and doing, but first of all you gotta go make your due contribution to the
slurry.”
He’s gone a really interesting shade of pink under his cheeks. “Do you mean you
were off getting p-pailed?”
“That’s about the shape of it,” you tell him. “‘Cause you know the priests are
being celibate motherfuckers, right, so you gotta make sure you contribute
before that happens so as our caste doesn’t just up and fucking get ceased to
be existing, you dig?”
He’s still blushing and now his mouth is kind of turning down the way it does
when he is thinking over something and realizing he really doesn’t like it. You
frown a little at that too and reach out to try and press a corner of it up.
His lips are so soft against your fingers and lowblood hot, and you think about
that time so long ago when he kissed you.
Suddenly, you wish that it had been him who’d pailed you first. He wasn’t even
in season with you, couldn’t have done it anyway, and anyway it would be a
motherfucking heresy to be doing a thing like that, spilling out your color
into his mutant slop, but you wish you’d done it. You bet he would’ve been
sweet as anything and blushed the whole way through and probably said fuck a
whole lot and blustered when he didn’t know what the fuck even was he doing,
and his hands would’ve been so warm. You want to laugh a little at that but it
comes out like this shaky-ass sigh and you feel this sadness squeezing your
pump for just a second.
“Yeah, everyone knows that. So you’re not gonna do it again?” Which means,
you’re not gonna disappear on me again? His eyes are big and bright with worry.
“No, you only do it once.” And you’re pretty solid convinced that even if you
up and could, you wouldn’t ever want to do it again. You’re wondering how any
motherfucker stands doing it every sweep, but you guess maybe it’s easier if
you’re with someone you’ve got those kinds of feelings in your pump for,
anyway.
“That’s good to know. So what ridiculous fuckery is next?”
“Can’t tell you,” you say, because you can’t and even though you plan to as
soon as you get it done, you’re gonna pretend like you’re keeping it under
wraps for now. Give him a little taste of mystery. “Secret shit, brother, you
know. I don’t know when they’ll be taking me to up and do it next, though, but
don’t get your fret on if I up and all disappear again, okay?”
He huffs and frowns and beetles his eyebrows in together all angry like, but he
agrees anyway. “I don’t see why they have to make such a stupid production out
of the whole thing.”
“It’s a motherfucking performance, brother, how can they not? Ain’t no mirth or
whimsy in some boring-ass shit you tell up to every motherfucker what points
his sponges towards it.” You stroke the pouting bow of his mouth with your
thumb and grin to see him go all wobbly with surprise. “Shush up now.”
You pull him in a little and lean up a little and kiss again, this time all
soft and dry and slow. You don’t taste each other none, just press your lips
together, and then you lay back down and curl yourself in against his chest.
After another day you have to go back to your regular schoolfeeding. Some
others throw some weird looks your way but no one really says anything, and you
guess your teachers must all know what’s up because none of them says a word.
Karkat gets put in charge of telling you what all you up and missed so you
don’t fall too far behind, which he does as sour as squeezed citrusfruit.
No one says boo to you for near a whole perigee, enough time for all your
scrapes and scratches to heal and you to barely even remember walking funny,
and you to put back on the weight you lost besides. You’re all conflict and
qualm up inside yourself about it because you like the break, and like feeling
like shit is normal, and definitely like being as close as you can get to
Karkat, but you want to know what’s happening next. There’s this little
squeakbeast stupid part of you that wonders if you really are unworthy, if
maybe somehow you didn’t do good enough.
Then, when it’s just been long enough you’re starting to get real worriment
going up inside yourself, you get a visit from a brother who you think you’ve
seen around. He inquires all polite after your health and how your
schoolfeeding is going and then makes it known you’re coming with him, which
you up and do with all the speed you can muster.
You can’t lie that you aren’t getting a little tired of being taken places by
motherfuckers you don’t really know, but you figure it all basically counts as
good shit so you’ll let that one slide. Besides, a little mystery never up and
hurt nobody.
He takes you at least to somewhere you actually get your recognition on to,
which is one of the purification rooms. You’ve been in them before, for when
you first got your white base coat and then after you completed your face, and
you know basically what’s going to happen. You get given the sacred ablutions,
stripped and washed and rubbed down, all with plain soap and cold water that
leaves you curling in all small and shivery on yourself. It’s the barest kind
of cleaning, all your dirt and grime and even your face washed clean off, until
you’re practically nothing.
Then you get on a robe, still black but much heavier than the other one you
wore just recently, and are ushered into the little prayer room off the
ablutions chamber.
Your priest up and schoolfeeds you again, and this is shit you did not have any
knowing of. It’s the ritual. It’s your induction and your first sacrament of
the holy suffering. He tells you in words all heavy and measured and slow that
drop like stones inside your pan, of what they will do to you, of what pound of
flesh they will take, of how they will carve the loyalty out of your unworthy
motherfucking body and make you into someone close to even halfway fit to serve
the mirthful messiahs.
You are grave with the knowing of this thing. You are heavy with it. It sits
like iron in the center of your pan and you try to wrap yourself around it. You
shiver with it and he sees you but does not comment, lets you run through your
own cowardice, and only when you give assent to having it done on you does he
react.
He smiles, all proud, and your pump swells with it.
Then it’s again with being walked somewhere else, the priest all up and behind
you with a hand between your shoulderblades, and if you maybe lean a little
back into his touch because you’ve got some fear lingering up in you, he
doesn’t say a peep of it.
This new room is a surgical story, all empty sterile white like the most left
desolate of places, all gleaming steel and porcelain like to almost hurt your
eyes. It’s softened only somewhat by the tapestries up on the wall, the kind of
delicate bloodwefts that take sweeps to make, and the thin curl of sweet
incense through the air. It’s a quiet kind of smell, like mist rolling in.
Right in the center of the room is a big reclining chair done up in old smooth
leather. The priest takes your robe and helps you get up in it and then just
stands there at you side. There’s feet stirrups but he doesn’t make you get
your feet in them yet, lets you keep your ankles twisting all nervously
together. He’ll stay to bear witness, he says, and puts a big hand all soothing
on your shoulder and tells you to relax, not to worry yourself up about it.
The troll who comes in to do it surprises you. She’s barely blue enough to not
be green and old, hair all streaked with grey and horns pale at the tips. She’s
not hunched or nothing, though, and there’s no hint of falter or weakness in
her stance nor shake in her hands as she goes about setting what she needs out
on the tray next to you.
You try not to look none at that because everything on there scares you and
you’re getting yourself whipped up into a proper panic even without it. A
scared little whimpery noise escapes you when she nudges at your legs to get
them apart and your feet in those stirrups. She chuckles and pats the inside of
your knee, hand rude-hued warm against you, and you feel a little more at ease,
although you’re sure the look you’re giving her is like a cornered hopbeast.
She explains to you in this real easy, slow voice what she’s gonna do, walks
you through the steps before she does ‘em and tells you why. First off she gets
these wide leather cuffs you didn’t even get your notice on around your wrists
and ankles, to keep you from squirming around too much at a bad time, she says.
Then she wipes your thighs and then your crotch down with something soft and
cool. She gets you real thorough, all around your seedflap and then poking in
under it to get the delicate outsides of your nookslit too. It tingles and
burns all wet and cold against your skin, making you shift around a little, but
it doesn’t last for long enough to get unpleasant. That’s to make sure you’re
all clean, she says, just like how she’s gonna go wash off her hands and scrub
up under her claws - all trimmed short and rounded off so she couldn’t hardly
hurt a fly with ‘em - and then douse ‘em in alcohol too.
You’re feeling more cold and uncomfortable than scared now, mostly, and you
only barely even jump when she goes for something on the tray and then it
starts pushing up inside you. It’s thin and long and plasticky, maybe, and
while it doesn’t really hurt, it feels all kinds of motherfucking odd.
She does some fiddling to it and it starts to bloom open, stretching you out,
which gets a lot more close to hurting but never quite pushes over that line.
Apparently it’s being some kind of speculum, and for getting you open so she
can see what she’s doing. She says she wouldn’t want to be operating on you
blind and she figures you wouldn’t either, with that low laugh again.
It goes real slow so it doesn’t hurt, just aches and almost burns and is as
uncomfortable as fuck, until she’s got you wide enough to suit her purposes and
then gets a couple fingers up inside you to do some feeling around all thorough
like.
She rubs her fingers all around the underside of your bulge sheath, up and down
its whole length and then slowly across the width of it, pressing until she
finds where your sheath stops and the walls of your nook begin. It starts off
feeling weird and gets to good pretty quickly. Your bulge comes slithering out
to say hello, coiling against its own self in the open air. Mostly you try to
pretend it’s not, because this isn’t supposed to be sexy and it’s kind of
embarrassing that it’s waving itself around practically right in her face.
She makes a satisfied kind of noise and slides one finger all careful like in
between the edge of your bulge and the sheath, which, okay, feels about as
fucking weird as anything you’ve ever felt before. It’s like getting an eyelash
stuck in your eye, just on the edge of painful and irritating and wrong, like
something being where it just plain should fucking not be. The longer her
finger stays in there, too, the worse it gets.
She’s not in any hurry to get it out, though, leaning over all calm to pick up
something that rings faintly metal against the tray.
“First,” she says, in a level schoolfeeding voice, “we remove the bulge sheath.
This will hurt, but try to stay relaxed.”
You don’t get much time to even tense up, though, before she’s already doing
it. What she’s got is a motherfucking scalpel and she gets the blade of it up
right beside her finger on your sheath, slicing through the thin membrane
smooth as butter, and you’re so dumb with the shock of it you don’t even feel
the pain until she’s halfway down your nook.
It knocks right the fuck through you when it hits, though, punches your lungs
straight out your back and crushes your throat closed so all the noise you can
make is this thin, high little thready scream. It just goes on and on til you
can’t hardly even believe it’s you making that noise.
She don’t pay you a single shred of mind though, just keeps on carving as neat
and slow as you please, like you aren’t even making a dying animal racket at
her. The pain eats its way up through your throat and the roof of your mouth
and gets in your pan so you can’t hardly even know what’s happening, just that
it hurts and you hate it and you’d do about anything you could to make it stop.
You think maybe you’re trying to ask for it to, all under your breath, but all
that comes out is that tea kettle shriek.
The pain doesn’t stop when she’s done, but it abates some, and you become aware
that your body was stretched in a tight agonized arc when it slumps back all
boneless against the chair. Numbly you watch her pull your sheath out and drop
it up in this little metal bowl on the tray, and you get your marvel on some
about how such a little scrap of flesh gave you so much hurt.
You are set alight between your legs, you’re burning up into your guts, you’re
hurting still so bad you can’t hardly even be ashamed at how little it took to
get you screaming. You want to beg for her to stop. It’s worse than you ever
could have conjured it in your imagination to be. You’re a coward again, you’re
a fucking wiggler, you’ll be whatever names anyone wants to give you if she
just never makes you hurt even half as much as that ever again.
You bite all that back and watch to see what she does next, trying to stop your
panicky fear gasping.
“Our next step is to excise the bulge,” she says, voice all steady and level
and reasonable like she isn’t talking about taking that wicked little blade to
your most sensitive bits. “Hold as still as you can, please, it would be
unfortunate if I slipped.”
You grip at the cuff chains hard enough to make your knuckles go nearly white
and lean your head back, shut your eyes, and try to think of anything that
isn’t what she’s about to do. You wish she’d do it quicker, so you had less
time to think about it, but she don’t seem in any mood to hurry up.
Your bulge has tucked itself right the fuck back up inside you. She gets it
pinched between her thumb and forefinger and pulls it out straight as far as
it’ll go, then a little more so it’s stretched tight. A helpless whine curls up
out your throat all unbidden when the scalpel gets back in you, tapping its
slow way up to the base of your bulge.
She does it as fucking slow as she can, cutting you in careful little half
circle slices and pulling on the end of your bulge to peel it away bit by bit.
You feel like nothing but a sack of dumb twitching meat, nothing but raw nerves
and pain like lightning in your skull. You’re sick with it, you shake with it,
you are all aquiver and quavering and you can’t even keep your voice up through
it, so bad it hurts. You sob soundlessly and jerk at your cuffs and shake until
you think you might come apart.
You start to grey out near the end of it, everything going all fuzzy and
distant and wobbly distorted, feeling like you’re tilting even though you know
you’re lying flat. You honest to god think you might puke from the pain and
that’s not any kind of helping. She gets done before it gets too bad, though,
before you throw up or pass out proper. This time you don’t watch, don’t think
you can, but you feel the tug as the last little slivers of skin holding your
bulge in place give way and hear the sick wet plop as she drops it into her
collection bowl.
You come aware of yourself sobbing, big stuttering gusts of hurt noise on every
whistly breath you gasp in. Everything between your knees and hips burns like
it was flayed open and salted. Your mind feels fuzzy as it did when you were
drugged, bleary and stupid slow and too distant to really pick up on anything.
You’re about the most miserable bitch you think you’ve ever known of.
You think maybe she’s done, but then she’s talking again and you don’t quite
catch it, your ears ringing with your screams and your panmeat fizzling
unresponsive. Doesn’t much matter though. All it means is she’s going to hurt
you more.
She puts the scalpel down, at least, and you start to breathe a little easier
at that except whatever she picks up is even worse. She touches just the tip of
it to one of the burning lines of pain where she cut away your sheath and it
sears you, it shoots lightning up your spine and sets your head on fire and
your whole body to spasmodic shuddering. She traces all along the path of where
she cut you with it, full up to the brim with methodic care. You come woeful to
the realization that you were dead motherfucking wrong when you thought nothing
could hurt as much as that scalpel, because this is like if she’d rubbed it in
salt and then edged it with glass, maybe, like digging hot grit into the neat
surgical slices done through you.
She pulls the speculum out of you by slow degrees, so you mostly get used to
how much it hurts when the walls of your nook touch each other again, and then
goes to tidy up all her equipment. You loll back and listen to water in the
sink run, while the priest who came to witness rubs on your shoulder like
that’ll even fucking help. You guess maybe it does give you something to ground
you, a point to focus on that doesn’t hurt. Mostly you focus on not passing the
fuck out.
Suddenly something’s touching you down there again and you make this low little
sobbing sound because you’re not sure how much more you can even take right
now, but it isn’t any kind of hurting. She rubs you careful clean of all the
blood drying on you with a soft wet cloth, talking at you again in that teacher
voice.
“You’ll be coming back in for another session once this has all healed up a
little more, in a couple of weeks.” With that she unbuckles the cuffs and steps
away.
You slide out of it boneless and scared to even move. It’s not so bad at first,
just standing up on your feet, doesn’t hurt much more than laying back did.
Then you try to take a step and you realize your body is all kinds of harsh at
you right now and screaming it as loud as it can. The priest gets you by the
shoulders and holds you up a little. You make it to the door and then list
against the frame of it like you’re drunk, and lean down and get sick all over
the floor.
It just hurts so fucking bad, ceaseless dizzy throbbing pain all up and down
every inch of yourself. You are saturated with it and it’s sending you wobbling
all off every kind of balance, physical and mental, til you can’t hardly think
any better than you can walk.
You start to make some apologetic noises, but she just laughs and says you’re
not the first person to lose their lunch and you probably won’t be the last.
Somehow you manage to hobble your way back up to your room, where you collapse
on your bed very carefully and then lay doing your best imitation of a board,
on your back and legs stretched out flat. Squeezed too close feels like pushing
on a bruise, but something inside you pulls unpleasantly when you try to
stretch them too far apart either. You guess maybe she cauterized the cuts shut
or something, because you haven’t bled much more and you were doing it like a
stuck fucking pig right up until she put that burning thing on you.
Karkat’s off in schoolfeeding, you guess, so he’s not there to fuss over you
none. You can’t tell if you’re disappointed or not. You know he’ll ask what
happened and you know you’ll tell him, even though technically it’s not
allowed, because he’s Karkat and even though you’re sick with pain and tired as
motherfuck, you’re also all kinds of delirious happy about this shit.
You bet no one would even get that salty about telling him. You tell him
everything. You two haven’t made any official troth yet, because you can’t do
that until you’re eight sweeps, but you’ve both been stupid pale for each other
since only about for fucking ever and you think everyone else knows it too. As
soon as his eighth wiggling day, you’re gonna both go and get yourselves
scarred up so to show who you’re righteously belonging to.
You drift off with soft thoughts of being official moirails and how much he’d
probably get his enjoyment on to know you’re thinking romantic shit like that.
***** Chapter 4 *****
You wake up with him sitting next to you and glaring down, the way he does when
he’s really worried but doesn’t want to say it. You manage a sleepy half-smile
back and reach up to touch his face, rub your fingertips over all those
wrinkles in his brow.
“What in the name of your retarded bullshit clown gods happened now?” He sounds
real worried too, all threading through his voice til it’s squeaky high with
concern. “Are you hurt?”
You bark a short little laugh then. “That does not even begin to fucking cover
it, my brother.” You pat at the angry slash of his mouth. “Don’t get your worry
on, though, I’ll be okay. It’s all shit that’s up and supposed to happen, don’t
give it no mind.”
“It’s a little hard not to give it any mind when you smell like a fucking
slaughterhouse. What happened?” He shifts down to lay next to you, curling into
the grumpiest little ball against your chest. You pet at his fluffy hair and
kind of forget what you were supposed to be talking about for a minute, until
he elbows you. “What did they do to you now?”
The pain is doing its sicknasty throbbing all up through your business even
when you stay perfectly still. It almost feels like your pulse. “Aw brother,
don’t talk about it like that. They didn’t up and do nothing to me, except for
start to invite me into the motherfucking fold of the holy.”
“Okay, that’s great, but what did they do?”
You mull over how to even up and speak that noise, and decide to just go with
the basics, since you figure Karkat probably doesn’t much have an understanding
of the theological reasoning behind it and isn’t interested in hearing it, as
much as you’d like to tell him. “They up and cut a motherfucker’s bulge out, is
basically it.”
He goes an awful kind of still and rigid against you, pulling this concerned
little squeak noise out your throat. “They what?” You have never heard him so
filled with incredulity. He brims with it.
“Just sliced it right the fuck up out, pretty much.” You give an experimental
little shift of your hips and bite back a hiss at how much more it makes it
hurt. “Feels fucking weird without it, man, like, you don’t even notice you can
feel that shit until it’s gone and then you’re like, damn, what the fuck even
happened, where’d it go? Feels all empty.” Although not as much as you’re sure
it will later, when the pain abates and stops filling up that empty space with
hot swelling.
He pushes himself away from your chest and back up to sitting and you are
almost sorry to behold him, because he is fucking wroth. You get the
realization on that you’ve never actually seen him mad, that even his worst
rage is tetchy compared to this, and for a second you feel so fucking small,
having it pointed at you.
“They - they - how can you just sit there and talk about that like it’s
nothing?” There’s this odd tight note in his voice you realize is nearly a sob.
“That’s the most gobsmackingly horrific goddamn thing I’ve ever heard, Gamzee!
Oh my fuck, they...” He pats at you, all random like, your cheeks and shoulders
and chest, like maybe he wants to try to lay soothing hands on where you’re
hurt but knows he can’t, or maybe like he just wants to soothe everything out
of you. “Sweet nookgnawing Christ, I can’t.”
You sit yourself up even though wow, you really don’t want to, you’d rather be
in about any other position than that, and pull his face in close. You knock
foreheads. “Shoosh bro, come on, what’re you getting salty about? They do it to
motherfucking everyone.” He smells teary and it just tears you to pieces
inside.
“What am I - Gamzee, I know you are not actually half as appallingly stupid as
you like everyone to think you are. You really don’t see what could possibly be
a little upsetting about hearing that they mutilated you?”
You give him the longest shoosh whistle you can muster up, reaching up to rub
your thumb over the tip of one nubby little horn. “Aw, brother, no, it’s not
being like that. You’ve got this all twisted around in your pan to be a bad
motherfucking thing, but sure as shit it ain’t.” With your hand on his horn he
goes mostly quiet, not purring or anything happy, but quiet enough to let you
put words to your thoughts. “It’s like, fuck, I don’t know if you’re gonna get
it, because I know you’re not religious, but it’s like... Suffering and feeling
up in pain is all about what is life even being about, my brother, it’s the
holy truth of fucking existing. They put the hurting on me to show me the path
I gotta take, the way to get to enlightenment and serve my most holy mirthful
motherfucking messiahs. And they take from you too as like a, a symbolic
motherfucking thing, like to show you’re giving shit up, you’re sacrificing. It
makes your pain fealty physical. You get what I’m laying down?”
Your brother’s quiet for a good long time and then gusts out a sigh. “No. Not
really. I think it’s fucking stupid and and you’re completely crazy. But I
guess kicking up a fuss isn’t going to change anything, and it’s not like you
can sew the fucking thing back on.”
That’s maybe not really the ideal response you wanted, but you’ve been steadily
coming to being at peace with the fact that your best brother can’t share in
your spiritual feelings. Sometimes you ache for all the ecstasy he can’t ever
come to feel, but mostly it’s okay. Motherfuckers are all being different and
even if he doesn’t believe in the messiahs, you know he’s got a ticket up to
the dark motherfucking carnival anyway. You’ve long since decided to make
fucking sure that that particular miracle is true.
You smile anyway, and tilt your head to kiss him. “Yeah, pretty much.”
He lets you both slide back down to laying. “So is that it? Are you done
getting mutilated by crazy people?”
“Nah, I got some more to do yet.” You kiss him again just to keep him from
squawking whatever noise he had in mind at that. “It’s not so much more. I’ll
tell you about it.” Show him, too, once you get to the last bits, which you’re
almost more excited about because it’ll be something to show other than just
the hurt and emptiness.
By the time two weeks is past you’re still not used to the empty sensation of
something missing nor the pull of the scars, but it doesn’t hurt much anymore.
Mostly it just fucking itches like to kill you, and you can’t hardly even
scratch most of the time because it still hurts to touch. Karkat gets some
lectures and nasty looks to you when you do give in and scratch, half because
he says you’re going to give yourself an infection or something and probably
half because it involves sticking your hand all down the front of your pants,
but you have trouble finding a fuck in you to give.
Your gut’s all churning with apprehension when you get taken back down again.
You’re glad you got told to fast the day before, or you might’ve gotten sick
again during the ablutions, and probably definitely when you stepped back up in
that room.
In a weird way, though, you feel less scared of it, because now you know about
the shape of what you’re in for when you settle yourself into that chair. You
guess it is like that old saying about the evil you know.
She spreads the speculum out wider than before and then gets up in you with her
fingers, pressing up inside you and then on your stomach with your other hand.
Apparently that’s to find the bit of your innards that makes your genetic
material, which she says needs to get taken out. Which you guess means more of
the scalpel and aren’t really too excited about, to tell the honest
motherfucking truth, but you just kind of nod and try not to squirm too much
when she gets that ticklish spot by your right hip.
Once she’s found it she does get the scalpel up ins. You just grit your teeth
and try not to jerk every time a cold metal edge bumps against your walls, and
wait for the hurting to start. It’s probably not as bad as cutting into your
bulge, but that’s already mostly a memory and this is right here and now, the
blade parting your delicate skin under it like it isn’t even a thing to be
doing that to a motherfucker.
You don’t scream none this time, at least, just whine and go all stiff. The
worst isn’t actually the cutting, even, but when she’s done with that and then
has like four fingers and what feels like a pair of tweezers inside you,
pulling on something that tugs unpleasantly up in your guts and tapping the
scalpel blade on little connective bits that are so thin you hardly feel them
sever. It just keeps going on, tugging and glancing little split second pains
and a deep sense of invasion, fingers and instruments where nothing should ever
be touching, and then finally it pulls loose and she gets everything back out.
It’s motherfucking tiny, the thing she drops in her bowl, just a little lump
maybe caeger sized and all dripping with purple. You kind of marvel a little at
how that was tucked all safe up inside of you until just a second ago, and how
it’s apparently what made all those bucketsful back when you were in season,
and now it’s this little lump chilling in your medisister’s steel bowl.
You actually yell when she touches the cauterizer to you, thoughts all derailed
and mind panicking for a second because you just flat were not even expecting
it, and then keep up a steady whimper while she gets the new hole she made in
you real thorough. It can’t have been that big, but it sure feels like it when
she’s burning it shut.
All her instruments get pulled out of you and then she sits back on her little
stool and gives you some time to come down from that, just watching until your
breathing’s back to mostly normal. “I find this next part is usually the
hardest,” she says, which is not a pronouncement like to fill you with any
measure of joy. “Sometimes we have to do it twice, if the scarring doesn’t form
right.”
You get a little time to be most unthrilled at that thought, and then another
piece of metal is getting all invasive in your body cavities. It’s wide and
cylindrical and sharp, all covered in spikes that drag a hundred burning little
lines of agony down the inside of your nook. You are as helpless to prevent
yourself from trying to squirm away from it as a newly hatched wiggler, body
responding on automatic. It don’t help none, though. She just keeps pushing
until it’s in as far as your body will let it go.
Then, just when you almost adjust to the prickling heft of it in you, she
starts twisting it. You’re fucking lost, you are gone, you’re carried away on a
wave of the most profound pain you’ve ever been given to experience. It whites
you out, it shorts you out, it scours every shred of thought from your pan and
leaves your whole body hollow and crumbling. The spikes rake you deep as she
twists and she goes so slow, so fucking slow, and you thrash, shaking the chair
and rattling your chains. All that does is drive them deeper in.
You hear a low, warbling animal cry, the sound of something in so much pain
it’s like to just up and die, and you realize with a distant shock that it’s
you.
Then you lose the thread of that thought, reality sliding all slippery out of
your grasp, and it just hurts again. The entire world is narrowed down to the
raking sear of agony inside of you. It goes on and on until you think it can’t,
and then longer just to show you it can, until you’re half-convinced you’ve
never not been in this much pain and you almost start to acclimate to it, the
way you start to get used to the water just before you drown.
You don’t know if you pass out. You still feel it, but you’re not there, you’re
somewhere floating in the dark inside of your own pan, and so you can’t tell
how long it takes before you realize that the monstrous fucking thing she’d
been raking your insides with is gone. The pain ebbs out like the tide, all
slow and in and out still, but eventually you can see and breathe again and
then you think you can probably even move, maybe. You realize suddenly you’re
going to have to walk back to your room and you give a little sob.
She doesn’t burn none of this shut, which you think you can count as a bona
fide motherfucking miracle. Instead she wads some gauze up inside you, which is
about the opposite of what a miracle is, with the way it pushes all rough
against the thousand thousand torn places. It helps with the bleeding though.
The priest more carries you than anything else this time. You shake like you’ve
got fever chills and totter like the oldest motherfucker about to plough horns
first into his own fucking grave hole and somehow manage to get up to your
room.
Karkat’s there and he makes some most unruly noises as soon as the stink of
blood and hurt on you hits his nostrils, but you hardly even hear it. You just
cant forward and fall into your bed and turn over to lay, staring woozily up at
the ceiling.
He gets over to you and lays himself all tight against your side, little hands
fluttering nervously everywhere over you, papping your face and petting your
hair and running fingernails in slow lines up the length of your horns. That
goes a long way towards loosening up the tight panicky pain knot in your chest.
“What the hell, Gamzee?” You shake your head. You are in no mood for talk. You
don’t know if you can even make a noise that isn’t a sad slow groan and you
don’t want to try.
He gets it, because that’s just how things are working between you two. You’re
two in sync motherfuckers and it makes you glow, it does, to think of it. The
pain isn’t less but you still feel years better with him there, all little and
fierce and hot and worried to the tips of his precious nubby fucking horns over
you.
It’s nearly morning and you’re exhausted, but you’re also still all edgy with
adrenaline and you can’t quite fall asleep. The pain marching steady up your
spine keeps you up too. Karkat tries to stay awake with you, but you feel him
go lax and start breathing all slow and smooth and deep after a while, that
fight lost. You don’t really mind. Wasn’t like you two were talking much,
anyway, and he’s still there.
You guess you drift a little, because you lose some snatches of time. You dream
strange dreams you can’t tell from reality, people touching you and voices and
pain and metal and Karkat, all melding together into a big soundless bubble.
This one takes a lot longer to heal. You have to have Karkat help you get the
first lump of gauze out and put in fresh, because halfway through pulling on it
you about pass out and lay there whining at the ceiling until he takes pity and
does it for you. His hands shake and he hisses some unkind shit under his
breath, but doesn’t say boo to you about it, so you figure that’s basically
okay. You’re not feeling very kind about it right at first either.
You don’t know if you’re sick or just laid flat with the pain and dizzy from
blood loss, but after a day you think you finally come onto the real meaning of
it. You come into some knowing you are sure is true of why it’s sacred, how
this is holy. You hurt so fucking bad that you’re transcendant with it. You
hurt so much you can’t remember not hurting, and in your pain is joy too, and
ecstasy, and the vast world of unfathomable wild dreams you pick secrets like
flowers up from. This is the meaning of existing, you figure, the very basest
most rude kind of being to ever happen, where you are just flayed out flat and
you feel, nothing but animal nerve response and dumb neural sparks, nothing but
the purest way your body can react to anything.
You weep with the understanding and you’re not even ashamed, and you just smile
at it when Karkat jolts all alarmed and tries to ask what’s wrong. You tell him
when he asks again like he’s really worried you’ve popped off your own fucking
nug that it’s nothing, nothing at all, except you have just realized a miracle.
The miracle, the truest miracle, the first motherfucking miracle anyone ever
gave to any little thing that lived up in the oceans that you’re all descended
from.
The first couple of days are the absolute worst, where you can’t hardly do
anything but lay in bed and slide in and out of being conscious and ponder the
cracks in your ceiling, mostly. Then you start to come back to yourself a
little, when you start regaining all that blood and your body starts knitting
together a little.
You still can’t really walk without wanting to lay down and die, so you don’t
go to schoolfeeding, but you’re more awake and it makes Karkat happier. You
practice moving around your room when he’s gone, so he doesn’t have to watch
you hobbling, because his face gets that crumpled in look whenever he does that
makes your bloodpusher ache.
It never quite stops hurting, which you get is the motherfucking point, but
it’s one thing to hear that and then another to still have that ache up inside
you and be told you have to be walking up and around to your lessons again.
Whenever you start to feel harsh about it though, you remind yourself of the
shit you realized about the first miracle and then every odd pull of scar
tissue between your legs makes you smile a little.
The pulling is almost the worst. It just feels motherfucking weird, all tight
and painful to stretch and hard like nothing up in there should be. One day a
while after you get back to lessons you sit up on your bed and hike a leg up so
you can get your fingers in there and feel around.
Karkat blurts out the funniest strangled squawking noise you’ve ever heard,
like someone stepping on a honkbeast. You laugh so hard at that that tears come
out your eyes and you fall back against the wall, and you can’t even keep doing
what you were because your arms don’t wanna listen to you.
“What in the name of every bulgerotted fucking dog your ancestors pailed with
do you think you’re doing?” he demands, cheeks burning red and mouth all set
like he isn’t embarrassed.
“Aw shit, you fucking honked, do it again...”
“Gamzee Makara.” He stands there with his hands braced on his hips and looms
all over you and twists his face up into a real impressive scowl. “What are you
doing. Why are you fingering yourself in the middle of our room in the middle
of the night?”
“Aw, b-bro, it’s p-p-practically, hahaha fuck, no, sorry, sorry!” He snatches
your pillow up and gives you a thwack across the face with it, so you try to
calm yourself down some, even though he’s the cutest damn thing you can even
think of when he gets all indignant like this. “Practically time to sleep, man,
but anyway, uhhh, I wanted to see what it felt like?”
He just looks at you with that look he gets when someone’s being really dumb,
like maybe he thinks someone took out their thinkpan and put a slug in there
and he’s working out whether or not he’s pissed or just feels sorry for them.
“‘Cause it still pulls and it feels all motherfucking weird and I guess it’s
all scared up and uhhh, I wanted to get my motherfucking feel on, since I can’t
really see.” You shrug. “That’s all.”
He relents some, sitting down heavily on the bed next to you and sighing,
pillow bunched up in his lap. He plucks at it all fussy like. “I guess it makes
sense to see how it’s healing.” He still gets so fucking awkward about this,
but you can get your appreciation on that he’s trying not to say none of the
negative thoughts you know he’s up and got towards it.
“Yeah, exactly,” you say. Then you wait, just to make sure he doesn’t have
more, and figure that’s about as good as him saying he’s not gonna get salty
with you over it. You hike your leg back up, knee nearly against your shoulder,
and lean your back against the wall while your fingers get their wicked
exploration on.
You mostly don’t ever touch yourself unless you’re cleaning. No real point to
it. Mostly you don’t want to, especially since all your junk’s been in a pretty
constant state of hurting ever since that first pailing. The landscape feels
familiar and alien at the same time, your seedflap looser than it’s ever been
before, which you aren’t sure whether that’s because of puberty or because of
getting cut, and your nook definitely open wider than it should be. Without
your bulge it kind of dents in up at the top of it and feels weird to touch,
like where a missing tooth used to be.
You get your fingers sliding properly up inside your nook and sweep them all
slow around, wiggling a little to get a better angle. The scars are all thick
slippery lumps of hard tissue jutting out against your fingers. You imagine
like you can read them, like maybe a blind troll could, and wonder what they’d
say. Mostly you just feel, pressing and stroking and wondering at how changed
it is. The skin between the scars is thin and kind of wet, almost like the
inside of your cheek but a little rougher, and still sensitive. Touching it
feels good, but it’s all mute and vague.
Beside you, Karkat shifts. You decide to go ahead and have some mercy and pull
your fingers out, going to get your pants, when he stops you.
“Could. Uh.” He’s practically pink, staring fixedly at the floor and grinding
his teeth together hard enough you can see his jaw flexing.
“Yeah?”
“Could. Can I? Feel?”
You can’t even talk for a second. Fuck you if that isn’t sweet as sugar. “Yeah,
sure, of course.” You do a little shifting so your back is against your
headboard and your legs are spread around him, so he doesn’t have to get on the
floor or nothing. “Don’t even have to ask to be touching any part of me,
brother, you’ve got blanket fucking permission for that.”
He turns and reaches out like he thinks you’ll run away if he does it too fast,
hand shaky. At first he touches just your seedflap, real slow and gentle,
barely grazing you with his fingertips, and then he gets a finger in your nook
proper and crooks it a little.
“Whoa.” He sounds more stunned than anything. His face is blankly mortified,
but as he keeps moving his finger around, turning and wiggling and stroking a
little more firmly at your scarred walls, it changes to a look of deep pity.
“Haha, yeah, for sure.” You chuckle and try not to feel nervous, but there are
butterflies taking a first flight all the fuck around inside your ribs.
Karkat’s rubbing all over your scars in the most sensitive and intimate part of
you, and he’s doing it with that look on his face like he wants to put you in a
jar and keep you. The only way it could get more romantic is if he licked them.
He doesn’t do that, but he lays a kiss on your thigh, just above your knee,
before pulling away and settling back against the wall.
“...Put your pants back on,” he says eventually, and it occurs to you that
yeah, you’re just laying there pantless and spread-legged, and you maybe flush
a little as you do. “Wow. That - does it hurt?”
You swivel back around and lean up against him. “Yeah. Not real bad, like, but
it aches when I walk and gets pretty bad if I run or sit wrong or something.
Scars’ll are tight as fuck.”
“Gamzee,” he sighs, turning his head into your neck and breathing it out over
your throat. You wait for more. “Gamzee.”
You guess that’s all there is, then. You pet at his head, fluffing the back of
his hair up and then smoothing it down, and think you can’t wait until you’re
old enough to be officially pale with him. Pale as the fucking moon, white as
milk. You love this boy like nothing else you can put a name to.
Only a few evenings later, your priest shows up again. You may have been making
a show of hobbling around because it made Karkat fuss over you, but you stand
straight and try to match his strides as best you can and try not to wince.
You’re starting to hit a growth spurt and your legs are getting pretty long,
which doesn’t help in the area of learning how to not split yourself open
crotchfirst just by walking, because sometimes you accidentally just forget and
take these big motherfucking steps that make it feel like someone’s pailing you
with a chainsaw.
You’re pretty sure he notices. He doesn’t slow down, though, and when you get
down to the ablutions chamber he says he’s proud of how you’re progressing and
that you’re very nearly done and officially a new subjugglator. You choke up
with excitement at that, get your pipes all good and blocked with anticipation,
and stay silent through being washed and led to the room.
The stirrups spread your legs uncomfortably apart, but you don’t think to peep
a complaint on it. The woman welcomes you back with one of her husky laughs and
then gets down to the business of inspecting you, just with her hands and
fingers, doing about the same as you and Karkat did a few days ago.
“Very nice,” she pronounces finally. “How does it feel?”
“Hurts, some,” you tell her. “Pulls like a motherfucker when I walk.”
She nods like that’s all good. “Very nice. Very good. We’ll be all done here,
after this, then.”
You’re almost not sure how you feel about that. Glad, to be sure, and excited
because of what it being over means, but you’ve nearly gotten used to making
these visits.
“This shouldn’t be so hard, but you have to make sure to hold still for this
part. Very important.” She smacks the inside of your knee to demonstrate.
You nod and then lean your head back and count the tiles on the ceiling, going
still and as relaxed as you can. You hardly even jump when she swabs you down
clean, and you almost don’t notice she’s started until the second jab of the
needle. Once you’re attention’s on it, though, you realize that it’s not
exactly a walk on the beach.
She works with neat, precise little stitches and this, at least, she does
relatively quickly, with a looping grace. Whatever she’s using as thread has to
be pretty strong, since it’ll be there for a while, and it feels smoother than
you imagine actual thread would.
“We’ll be sewing up your nook and seedflap both,” she says. “Aside from being
uncomfortable, the thread’s made for long-term wear and not likely to break on
you unless you’re doing something extreme. Of course, you’ll want to come back
and have it redone every so often, but we’ll get to that when we get to it.”
None of the individual jabs hurt that much, exactly, or at least not near as
much as anything else she’s done to you, but by the time she’s halfway down the
slit of your nook you’re shaking, and by the time she finishes every stitch
makes your breath stutter out hard.
She blots at you with an alcohol-soaked cloth, which does make you jerk a
little and earns you a reprimanding look, then starts in on your seedflap. You
grit your teeth and try to figure out which hurts more. Your nook was more
sensitive and the stitches tighter, but the skin of your seedflap is a lot
thicker and she has to push the needle deeper through it.
It’s all miserable is what you end up deciding on, by the time she finishes.
It’s not like the blinding agony of the last two times, but it still pulses
with a deep, hot pain that you know won’t leave for fucking ever, will keep you
up until you want to scream into the day, will keep you all distracted and
snappish through the night.
It’s all worth it, you think as you stand up on shaky legs. Worth every drop of
blood and ounce of flesh lost, worth every scalpel slice and needle prick. Your
first steps as a proper subjugglator are short shuffling things, trying to get
used to all the conflicting ways everything pulls when you move your legs, but
you feel triumphant enough to make up for it.
The rest of the day is spent in prayer, alone on your own in a little boxy
room. The floor is fingerbone spirals and the walls blood painting, wicked
pictures splashed straight onto the stone. Prayer incense, thick and sickly
sweet, winds its way around you. You commune about your pain and what you’ve
learned and how you feel and what your motherfucking future is to be, which is
the same as you always knew. You’re the ticket man, the stub ripper, the toll
taker, who lets all the blessed and lucky into the Carnival.
Now, more than ever, you are sure of your role. It’s a sweet feeling, to slot
neatly into the place that’s been kept waiting for you. Your hatchright is
hanging right there for you to claim, ripe low fruit so swollen with its
succulence you don’t even have to pick it, just wait for it to drop into your
waiting hands.
Your legs are numb from kneeling when the priest comes back and it takes a long
time to surface from the inside of your own head. You meditate swirling in your
skull, leaning back and dropping down through cloud layers of all the righteous
realizations you get going on, and coming back out of is sometimes a chore. It
takes adjusting to remember how to move your body and exist in space, and
sometimes still you just up and plumb fucking forget not to start wandering
back down all those uncovered corridors of your mind.
You space out some on the way back up. Every step reminds you of what you’ve
become, and once you start thinking about it you just can’t stop, turning the
new fact over and over in your mind to examine every new and gleaming edge. I’m
a subjugglator. It’s in the tug of thread in your flesh, the ache of scar
tissue pulling with your stride, this new secret sacrament you share with the
other faithful around you, proof of holy hatching stitched right into you.
You go to your room just long enough to get hurriedly dressed and then it’s off
to schoolfeeding. You still walk all ginger and careful and you get looks for
it, but you pay them no more mind than you do any of the little carapaced
critters scuttling around by your feet. They’re beneath your concern, they are
below your purview, they are in your mental files as no fucks given.
Barely you can even participate in your lessons, concentration all scatter shot
elsewhere. You’re too giddy with new excitement. Karkat’ll tell you later
anyway, after you tell him what you’ve finally up and gotten through. You can
see the question written in his face every time he looks at you, but he no more
asks than you’re going to tell out here, in the middle of all everyone. It
kills you just as much to keep silent, ‘til you’re about squirming with it.
Back in your room for the day, he fronts all like he doesn’t want to ask. He
fidgets with his bedcovers, he fidgets with his clothes, he starts to read a
book and stares at the same page for ten minutes. You lay out and get yourself
acquainted with how that feels.
“Okay, so what fresh new horror has been visited upon your blighted crotch
now?” he finally asks. “Or did they decide they were done carving bits out of
you?”
“About done with the carving, yeah, brother.” Your draw your legs up and shift
around, wiggling your loose pants off. You’re not going to be wearing anything
tighter for a while, that’s for sure. “Got me some motherfucking holy writ now,
come look.”
He walks over to you with a wary weariness, all tight with fear that he’s going
to have to witness some new hurt, but when he gets there and looks you can see
by the relaxed slump of his shoulders he doesn’t feel too badly about it. He
sits next to you and thumbs over the stitches, counting the bumps with his
fingerpads.
“You’re insane. I mean that sincerely, by the way. That’s not an insult, just
an honest assessment of your level of sanity and rationality, which is actually
a value less than zero. You are a completely shithive maggots, around the bend,
motherfucking lunatic.” It comes out of him all slow and almost solemn, like a
pronouncement, while he rubs over your new stitches, pushing a little here and
there to see how much give they have.
You take his hand and kiss all his knuckles. “A brother’s got to go with what
feels right to him in his chestpump, you know that. It would be motherfucking
crazy not to. What’s even the point then, man, spending your whole lfe denying
what your self all wants? That’s insane.”
“No, willingly mutilating yourself for shitty clown gods is crazy. But
whatever, it’s done. Is this all? Hard to see what else they could do but I’m
sure you guys could figure something out. Maybe next you can file down your
horns!”
You draw him in against your side and pat his side. “This is it. Now I’m
finally being what I was always meant to up and be. Everything’s just how it
motherfucking should be, and you know why?”
He groans and buries his head against your shoulder. “Don’t start.”
“Come on, my brother,” you needle, fighting to keep the grin out of your voice.
You get all preachy serious as you can. “Do you motherfucking know why the
truth of which I’ve just imparted to you is motherfucking being a thing that’s
true? Do you have that knowing, brother?”
“Gamzee, for fuck’s sake...”
“I asked up to you a motherfucking question, and I expect from your mouth to
come an answer. Why’s all this shit being true?”
“Is it stupid shitty dumb miracles?”
“That’s right.” You get him by the chin and tilt his face up to you and lean in
to kiss on his pursed little mouth. “Do you motherfucking notice and recognize
miracles? Because they are all around you, if you stop to look, this is the
righteous truth.”
He lays a kiss back on you and then pushes you away, grimacing. “Yeah, yeah,
sure, whatever. Everything is miracles always. The fact that I haven’t
strangled you is a miracle.”
You flop down on your pillows with your body curled all around him. “Except I
know you love me.”
Karkat sighs all defeated, shifting down until he’s got his back all leaned up
against you. “I still don’t know why. You drive me to murder on a daily basis.”
“Love you too, to the fucking moon and back.” Sometimes you feel stupid sick
with it, with how most of the time you just want to grab him and hug him and
never let go of him.
About maybe a month later, after you’re all settled with yourself and getting
into your new training pretty good, you wake up and he’s got this dizzy heavy
kind of scent coming off him. It pricks sweat at the nape of your neck and
makes your stomach do slow trembly flips and every inch of him look like it
needs your hands on it right fucking now.
You guess this is how you must’ve been smelling up to him, and you can’t really
blame him for getting up in bed with you. If you didn’t have to head off so
soon for schoolfeeding, you’d probably spend the whole day just licking the
taste of heat off his skin.
You don’t know what the policy is for kids with no quadrants who aren’t purple.
You definitely don’t know what it is for mutants, who can’t give to the slurry
anyway, even if they don’t get culled none no more. Probably it’s nothing,
probably he’ll just get to left to his own devices, but you can’t shake the
fright that grips you that someone’ll come to put him down in a half lit room
and get him pailed til he’s wrung out dry.
So that night you get him all in your lap and kiss into his mouth and let him
grind against you and wrap yourself around him, all soothing cool. He’s
motherfucking beautiful and it twinges some when you think about it, a hot
little pain flash from up between your legs, but mostly you don’t feel it much
physically. Karkat feels it enough for both of you, you figure, and this way
you can get your appreciation on to all his pretty noises so much better
without being lost up in your own need.
No one does get any business up with him. You almost feel selfish keeping him
to yourself, with how sweet he gets all plastered hot and whining against you,
breathing please against your lips, and you almost feel like it might be
heretical, to partake of this pleasure when it’s been made so clear you’re
barred. But he’s Karkat and you love him and if you’re selfish, then you’ll be
selfish, and keep him yours in every way he’ll let you.
“Wish I could’ve made you feel this,” he sighs against you once, in your lap
with your fingers curled up inside him.
You try not to let it ache none when you think about that or how your
hatchright stole up a way for you to be his from him. You’re his in every other
way, so what’s the one little one?
Nothing much, you decide. Nothing much at all, less than nothing, when weighed
against the way he feels draped all boneless and worn out against you, breath
puffing against your shoulder and body still shivering from aftershocks. He
fits so perfectly against you, heart pounding against your chest, and his touch
is so delicate when he rubs a thumb over the line of your stitches you don’t
even think about flinching, no matter how vulnerable it makes you. It’s written
in the motherfucking stars. That one little thing’s no matter.
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