Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/639756. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive_Warnings, Underage Category: F/M Fandom: Homestuck Relationship: Feferi_Peixes/Sollux_Captor Character: Sollux_Captor, Feferi_Peixes Additional Tags: First_Time, Bad_Sex, Communication_Failure, Consent_Issues_(Mild), Helmsman_Kink, Homestuck_Kink_Meme, Community:_homesmut, Bloodplay, Sensation_Play, Sollux_is_a_pushy_sub, Especially_when_things_get disturbing, For_all_its_tags_this_story_is_actually_mostly_talk_and pretty_tame_considering Stats: Published: 2013-01-15 Words: 2048 ****** Study in Fuchsia and Gold ****** by tatterdemalionAmberite_(amberite) Summary Her fingers dance circles around that little node, and when she brushes a claw along it, experimentally, Sollux shakes all over, still toppled limply in her arms, breathing fast and harsh. "That's where the main jack would go," she murmurs, softly, idly. (Prompt: "Maybe she knows just enough about the Condesce and the Psiioniic to think it's the most romantic thing in the world, or just enough that she was horrified, got over it, and then got really into it; and maybe he's willing to indulge it. He probably knows a lot more about helmsmen in general than she does, since as a kid he must have assumed that was what was coming to him; and what if she's stupid and naive about it and he has to correct her, possibly while she's going a bit farther than making out, which neither of them had exactly planned--") Notes (This was kind of unnerving to write, despite being actually kind of tame in the department of what anyone does.) See the end of the work for more notes They sit out on a promontory in the Land of Dew and Glass, Sollux shirtless, both reclining. Refraction from all directions gives a sourceless, clear light. Though it's far less harsh than the Alternian sun, it's far brighter than moonlight. No shadows fall; everything is exposed, the edges sharp and crystalline. Feferi's claws are sharp, too, very sharp, so she is delicate with them. Their tips whisper over his skin, leave light scratch marks pale gold on grey where blood rises to the skin, as her fingertips press and probe along the nape of his neck, down his spine. Curious, tender, curious, searching. She finds the spot she's looking for, with her fingertips, and he goes slack against her, all his breath rushing out in a sudden sigh. Her fingers dance circles around that little node, and when she brushes a claw along it, experimentally, Sollux shakes all over, still toppled limply in her arms, breathing fast and harsh. "Aah... fuck." She keeps stroking him, her touch light, indulging in the blissful languor it seems to evoke from him. "That's where the main jack would go," she murmurs, softly, idly. He goes stone still in her lap. Even his breathing, silent. "I saw it in a blueprint," she continues. "You know that, right? - that you have a nerve center there at least twice as complicated as any non-psionic's - it's rEELLy cool, I think," she says and she giggles and glubs. It takes a trained ear to detect the shy, nervous note to her voice. Sollux breathes in, seemingly about to speak, but before he can get a word in edgewise she does something again at that point along his spine, this strange, creeping, ticklish sort of touch, and all he can say is "Auhh - nnh -'" but he doesn't go all relaxed and floppy like before. His shoulderblades jerk back, and then he is motionless, and to be motionless he stiffens every muscle, utterly rigid in place. Like a prey animal trying to fade into the scenery. He takes a deep shuddering breath then and says "Yeth I know that--" and something about the edge in his voice catches her up short - and she runs her fingers through his hair, soothing distracting half- absentminded, but not really absentminded, not at all. She doesn't look at him directly but out of the corner of her eye, staring ahead while intensely paying attention to the periphery. "How much have you thought about that?" Feferi asks. "A lot." Sollux's voice is neutral, diffident. Carefully constructed, a set- dressing made of paper. When he unfreezes it is only to lift his hand and chew on one of the claws. "...Me too," Feferi says. She laughs, a little, a weird shy laugh. Sollux's cheeks have gone uncommonly gold. "Why?" he asks. Still lying in her lap, he turns around half-facing her, anchors one arm around the softness of her waist. "If I tell you, will you swim away from me?" He crooks his other forearm to shade his eyes against the odd, exposing brightness, but there's not really a direction or angle in which to push it away. "Shit, FF, I don't know," he says. "Probably not. I like you." "Whale, I... I'm kind of embarrassed to say!" she says and she giggles again and she's blushing, cheeks tipped with strange bright magenta that looks like it belongs to a flower rather than a troll. Then it is her turn to go still and quiet, as still as she ever is, which is never quite wholly. There's a quality of undulation about her, the ebb and flow of her breath, the way her hair whorls and glides with vitality and movement of its own. "My ancestor," she says, "I've read stories. About her, her Helmsman - it's hard to find out much mor-ay than remoras and those are so strange -" Her lips purse, and the fins at the side of her neck flare curiously. "I. I don't want to be like the Empress-- " The unspoken words are obvious; they hang in the air like the light. There are ways in which she can't not be like the Empress. She is like no other troll alive. Was like no other troll alive, even before their world ended. "I don't think you will be," Sollux says. His voice is gentle and awkward - but it has pity in it, an attempt to comfort. "It's not important now," Feferi says. "Maybe it will be again." His voice is dark, glum, not the hopeful tone of someone who relishes the prospect of a new universe. The air goes heavy and null around them, dampened by the intrusion of futures. He squinches his eyes shut and chews on the edge of his claw again and Feferi automatically swats his hand away from his lips. She has a fraction only of her adult strength but her hand pushes his to the ground, without trying, and his eyes snap open and stare at her, his breath suddenly hard and fast and panting. "Maybe it never would have been important," Feferi says. The words are carefully schooled free of emotion, but in them a hint of the voice that could speak with Gl'bgolyb: not a power to violence; a power to negotiate, to bend without breaking. The troll tarot card of the woman with her arms holding open the jaws of a cholerbear, the implacable calm -- "She would have krilled me, whether I was like her or not. --Is this okay?" She's leaning over him now, bringing their faces close; his head's still across her legs, the other arm circled around her waist. "Yeth," Sollux hisses. There's a kind of strain in his expression, a feverish intensity, want fighting with doubt, and his eyes flare like they might throw off sparks, though they don't just now. "Are you shore?" He doesn't answer in words. He grunts and moves his other hand, the one that's not pinned, to reach for her, to pull her head down to his level, and there's a kiss, or a thing like a kiss, an awkward collision of tongues and fangs and lips and noses. When they break away she shucks off her shirt. He flips over on his belly and pulls her closer, and somehow she winds up straddling his thighs. There's not any clothing underneath her skirt, and her bulge is already writhing outside of its sheath, fronds and layers, not like a landdweller's bulge at all, and his mouth goes into a little o of startlement when it makes contact against his boxers. "Are you surprised?" Feferi asks, her voice breathy and hazed with lust. Sollux laughs. His head is turned on the side to look up at her, red eye glinting. "I thought mine wath unusual." "Yours - oh," she says as he finishes stripping down underneath her, squirming back and forth to take the boxers off. "Oh, I sea." "Not thcared of my mutant bulge?" The larger and smaller yellow protrusions twist against each other, writhe between his legs and reach towards her. "That's a seally question, Sollux." Her smile is impish, innocent. "If I was, would I - AH! - be doing this?" Somewhere in that sentence they'd begun to intertwine, one tendril hooked against another, drawing each other closer into contact, slowly tangling together. "What rumorth did you find?" Sollux asks her, "nnh!--anyway." And Feferi blushes brightly again and at the sight of that he grins, the flash of extra fangs, perhaps enjoying her discomfort. "Remoras that she has, um, had a troll a - a lot like you, as her Helmsman, and that, that they are - were in a quadrant with each other, or - somefin. Inseparable." Feferi draws back a little, a guilty look on her face. "But I thought about it later and I'm not shore I bereef it. I mean." She chews on her lip a little. "I think you could be a reely good ship, but I wouldn't make you if you didn't want to--" "What would you make me?" Sollux asks. His voice is rough and strange and impatient and his questing eyes are looking up for something other than what she's giving him. "If I did?" Feferi's lips hang open, slightly, breathless, tongue against her teeth. "I--" Sollux reaches for her hand and pulls it back down over his, now adjacent with their hips. "Tell me. Show me--" "I, uh," says the princess, and she touches the place on his spine again and he doesn't hold back his reactions this time, lets his body spasm and roll and his fingers clench around hers. The words come out her mouth all at once. "There would be a jack here and one here and here-- And--" They have the weird flat tone of fantasies privately rehearsed, never meant to be said aloud. She straddles him, rocking, as she speaks. "There was. There was this one story. It - ahhh, ohh - it wasn't about them really but about some imaginary trolls, but you could tail if you'd reed between the lines and." "What, Feferi, what?" They're both slick with arousal, the fronds and tendrils of her bulge enveloping his, twisting and ensnaring as he writhes and squirms underneath her. "And I think the author got krilled for writing it but - in the book she could pleasure her helmsman without touching him, just with the ship controls and, and -" she says, and by now she's blushing so hard her ear-fins are the shade of Alternia's smaller moon, keeps falling out of rhythm with him, but they're both so desperate for this that it doesn't matter-- "plugging into his nervous system--" "Would you take my eyeth out? They don't alwayth, but it maketh it eathier to work the connection into the optic nerve -" Even as he rocks against her and breathes hard, he manages snarky and sardonic and rueful. Pathetic, too, but pathetic with prickles and edges-- "It's how I thought I wath going to go blind, once, before the game happened, now I have no idea..." She looks slapped and stunned but her bulge doesn't retreat, doesn't tangle toward him any less insistently, even while her face goes weird and distant and queasy and helplessly aroused. The seadweller is out of her depth. "I - I don't know - would you want that?" Her fingers are clammy against his skin. She digs her claws into his hips for something to hold onto and he lets out a mewl of pleasure or pain, saving him from having to answer. "Fuck - Feferi," he says instead. "Don't thtop now -" and because it is the obvious option other than hearing him continue to say these things she shuts him up the way she knows how. Her claws draw lines of blood along his spine that open cleanly around their sharp tips. Nothing coherent is coming out of his mouth now, only keens and helpless noises wet in the back of his throat. Feferi presses her tongue to that point on his spine, tastes the ochre blood that wells up in the cracks. But she's also doing something more than that - this weird sudden raw shock of connection passes between them, obvious but intangible, neither of them could describe it if they tried and it's what he needs, it's what he needs. There's not even time for anyone to get a bucket. Sollux gives a strangled shout and a blast of energy discharges from his eyes, scorching the ground harmlessly but heating the air to a desert prickle around them as he comes, both hands clutched in the grass ripping up handfuls of it, there's not even anything in his nook but he still goes off with enough force and suddenness that yellow droplets spatter Feferi from bulge to knees. She hasn't come but she stops moving, goes dead still, keeping her mouth pressed to him softly, until he stops trembling and everything has gone as starkly silent as it is starkly bright. "FF?" Sollux says, still half out of breath. "Are you okay? Shit, I think I fucked this up. I'm --" Feferi interrupts, trammels over his self-castigation. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she says, burying her face in his neck. "I'm sorry--" "What, for making me come like a fucking pressurithed hothe?" He exhales hard and it turns into his usual nasal laugh halfway. End Notes Maybe as an antidote to all the close second person I've been writing, I felt like this one deserved weird, semi-omniscient externality. I ganked the nerve point idea from the roleplay log of someone I can't seem to track down to credit. My apologies to anyone who prefers Sollux's lisp not be written out; I like it written out in short smuts, so I've decided I'll write it out in short smuts for the time being. I feel the need to indicate that this is not in continuity with Wires & Stars - not that it will confuse anyone yet, but these characters here are... younger and less self-aware than the versions to appear over there. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!