Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/236766. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: M/M Fandom: Homestuck Relationship: Eridan_Ampora/Sollux_Captor Character: Eridan_Ampora, Sollux_Captor Additional Tags: Crossdressing, Corsetry, Xeno Stats: Published: 2011-08-08 Words: 3651 ****** Such Deliberate Disguises ****** by roachpatrol Summary You look back up at him and he's just staring down at you, like just for this one moment you're beautiful, in this strange secret place, where no one else can see you're beautiful and he wants you. Notes My contribution to the homesmut kinkmeme's thigh-high_challenge. It's the duality that gets you. Maybe that's all it is, just one more duality to engage in: all the cutesy little divisions he displays, red and blue, on and off, they're nothing like an affectationand everything like a symptom. Dark and light, pitch and pale, hating you and hating himself.  Thing is, you do what you want, and only what you want. You're royalty. The game remembered it, even when all your so-called friends were more than happy to laugh it off and name you failure, name you loser, the game named you prince and prince you were and prince you still are and no one is ever going to forget it again. You go where you like, and your password trumps any amount of encryption a lowblood like him can afford, no matter how brilliant his modifications, no matter what clever tricks he can eke out of his little beehives. It makes you well up to the tips of your horns with smugness, each fancy lock that clicks open at a tap of your rings, as you go up, up, the endless empty rooms of his hivestem. The elevator hasn't worked since your second trip up, after which he'd torn the wiring out. He likes to make you work for him, likes to think he can make you struggle and ache and persevere. But you, you just like the anticipation. A hundred flights of stairs from ground to roof, and you with your swimmer's legs, trailing your fingers along each empty room and humming to yourself. Up and up, your footsteps like paired scars through the dust, carving yourself into all his corridors. You know his hive better than he does, by now. You don't break a sweat. The eightieth floor, the dust fades away. Only the top eleven floors are actually ever even incidentally inhabited by their architect. The ninety eighth floor he keeps his workroom and respiteblock, and spends probably ninety eight percent of his time there. Karkat's been there, often. Aradia, too, and Terezi even a few times. Maybe others. Maybe Fef. You don't care. The eighty ninth floor, only you and he know about. They eighty ninth floor he keeps his soul in. "I'm wwaiting," you call, softly, into the crushing darkness. He can hear you. Of course he can hear you. The whole place is rigged up so that every little bit of it reports right back to him, sight and sound and humidity and pollen level, probably he can hear half a hundred of his neighbors, too, wired up half the city bit by bit, in his maniacal drive for more and more information, more and more control. Serket was never the webmaster of your little gang.  It's dark on this level, all shadows and choking gold-green dust, smells like wax and water-damaged cement, pitch-black the way he likes all his nasty little secrets to be, the way he'd like them to remain. You don't care. You make your own light, white as death and twice as pretty. A snap of your claws and it sparks, a soft twining scarf of light just for you and you send it shimmering up to hang just below the ceiling. There are the dessicated remains of feral hivecombs, up there, depressing little baroque skeins of circuitry that remind you of your pale cathedrals, all that glorious pomp and circumstance rendered just for you and all of it utterly meaningless till you came and signed your name on top with holy fire. You make things mean what you want, anymore. This world you are lord of is an empty stage, a blank book, a dream without a dreamer, and nothing means anything until you say so. You do what you want. A wardrobe, in the middle of the floor, big and boxy. Not even automated, not a wardrobifier, just a lowblood's rectilinear costuming receptacle made out of big slices of wood, and it is to this you go with steady steps. You've worn away the dust in a wide track, by now, your steps from the stairs up to this box, and the carver of the other set of steps from the stairs down should be entering stage right soon enough. Your cape drops to the floor in a whisper of rich fabric; your glasses follow, and the world slips into soft-focus. Your scarf, your shirt, each of your fine rings. You toe off your sneakers, peel down your crisp tight trousers. The air feels good on your bare skin, warm and thick and still in a way you don't get at sea. You lean against the side of the wardrobe. It's heavy, solid. Doesn't budge an inch. Your partner in this whole delicious little drama finally deigns to make an appearance, treading wearily along his little rut towards you. "Wwell hello there, stranger," you drawl, low and vicious, and if looks could kill your ancestors would be dead. "Shut up," he hisses at you. He comes in close and you can feel his radiant heat, the prickly buzz of his telekenetics. "Gladly," you say, and tilt your head up. He sets one small, perfect hexagon cell of honeycomb on your tongue, and you lean back, closing your eyes and savoring the way the mind honey burns through your mouth, the way it makes you feel light and loose and careless. He lets you peel his t-shirt off, his baggy jeans. Cheap fabrics, utilitarian, skirting the shameful edge between worn-soft and worn-through. Even a shit-for- blood like him could afford better, but he doesn't care about these. You've seen him with holes through his knees, sleeves like punchcards from stings and sparks. When he's naked you drop easily to your knees and lick his bulge, getting him wet before he even starts going hard. He pushes away from you when you try to slip a finger up his nook, already breathing a little hard through his teeth, like this hurts him, like he doesn't love it just as much. He opens the wardrobe, two violent snaps of motion as each door swings out. This is what he spends his care on, these frothy little shameful secrets he keeps locked up tight. Your rings could open that door for yourself, but why would you ever bother when he's so beautiful like this? Sweeps ago you'd seen him locked in death's dream kingdom and he'd been gorgeous even then, twisted up in silk and shame and coming into his own lonely claws, and you'd already known you'd had to have him. But that had been the crown on top, your eyes meeting across the memory and the way he'd taken too many aching seconds to run from you. Things are better, here. Now. When it's real. You turn your gaze to the twisted-up cieling, watch the hexaform patterns double and rebound in your vision, everything sparkling at the edges. Mind honey does strange things to a troll's head. It sets you free inside yourself, and everything just goes sailing off and away for a while. He pulls out bright satin skirts and stockings in crimsons and golds, blues and violets, pulls out a skein of vividly ultramarine ribbon and snaps it between his fist like a garotte, like he could ever raise a fucking hand to you. You lick your lips and roll your hips, watching him watch you, watching him prowl back and forth, taut frustrated arcs that sweep closer and closer to you, their axis. He's going to touch you: it's only a matter of when. His hands are rough, through your hair, when he finally snaps. He hates your hair, hates that royal streak of purple through it, hates that your mutation- - harmless, cosmetic-- only bolsters your unassailable position above him rather than courting a culling like his fleet of abberations do. He twists it out of its carefully tousled updo, runs his nails harsh across your tender scalp till you've got a soft mess of tumbled waves around your face, hanging in messy curls around your fins, and you're nearly purring from the stimulation. He hates your fins, too, but there's nothing he can do about that. If he left marks on you, you might get asked questions, and you might answer those questions, too. He wraps the ribbon around your neck, a wide blue band to hide the masculine angle of your throat, and pins it with a needle that'd stab if you weren't so very careful. His fingers linger too long on your pulse, the slow tidelike beat of a troll who's going to comfortably see his way outside of millennia, and you smile real sweet and run your tongue over the soft warm skin of his bony wrist, the overclocked feverish heat of filthy piss-colored gutterblood. All his fancy mind-powers and the swill in his veins is hardly befitting an animal: he will be dust one day, dust underfoot, and you will forget him. He kisses you, all helpless fury, and you think giddily that perhaps on that far off day you might finally be free. Sollux kisses like he does everything else, hot and cold in turns and no follow through, all his devastation turned inwards, and it's the best thing you could ever possibly taste. You run your fingers over his bulge again, pleased to feel it hard and wet, already wanting for you. He breaks away, trembling, and picks the handsfulls of red and blue. He wants to act like he owns you, tonight, like he's marking his claim. You are allready far away and flying and have no complaint, have less than any complaint. He has a corset in his thin gray hands, violently red and blue, and you hum in approval, even though this is no longer your show: even though he could give less of a fuck about what you like and you, you like that. You let him turn you around, lean your forearms on the hard cool wood of the wardrobe and roll your ass up against his bulge while he wraps the stiff fabric and sharp boning around your ribs and laces you in, tight enough to strangle. You'll have welts for nights, now, long thin lines crossing your gills in diamond-patterned fishnets. You peer over your shoulder at him as he works, his face distant with concentration, pulling the laces through the eyelets with all the reverent precision a programmer can muster, his hips moving just a little more up against your flesh than they might have to. You squirm against the bindings, testing him, and whimper when he gives the stays a punishing wrench.  "Begging for it tonight," he mutters, and deigns to run one contemptuous finger along the stiff upthrust line of your own bulge. He licks his finger, a flash of your violet on his dark lips, and you whine with desire. "God. Look at you." You huff, breathless, your pulse rate finally starting to rise up to meet his with every passing breathless moment. Caged up like this you have to take short desperate little breaths with just the very top of your airsacs, your primary torso gills pinned-down and useless, and the secondary filaments lining your face-fins starting to flush with futile desire. It's a strain, all through you, and it makes you feel caught and held and helpless and good. He pulls stockings up over your legs, soft as a dream, red on one leg, blue on the other, up over your thighs till the back of his knuckles are nearly brushing your nook. You breathe hard and fast and admire the way he looks between your trembling knees, run your hands over the twin pairs of horns and watch his long eyelashes sweep over the red and blue spill of light from his psyonically filmed-over eyes. They were black, once, you'd knocked the glitter right out of him and underneath there'd just been nothing, an endless blind void and so very pretty. You press his eyelids closed and he lays a soft, strange little kiss where your legs join, his wet tongue brushing against you just enough to make you cry out for him. He pulls away, laughing to himself, leaves you to sag to your knees and run your own hands across your body, the slippery constricting satin and the burning damp heat of your sweat-prickling bare skin. Some nights you spend hours doing up garters and petticoats, eyeliner and lipgloss and boots and bodicies but he doesn't even bother giving you a skirt, tonight, he wants this quick and dirty, wants you whorish and filthy as a gutterblood selling himself for sopor. You can do that. You can more than do that. The honey's all through you now, all the spaces your air isn't anymore, and you're hot for him and sloppy desperate. He doesn't do more than draw stockings up his own legs, the black- and-gold striping making them go on forever and ever before you're on him, pressing him up against the mirrored inner door of the wardrobe and palming handfulls of his suprisingly soft ass as you swallow down his bulge to the root. Your hands are hungry along his stockings, nails digging sloppy gorgeous ladders from pinstripe to pinstripe, coy little windows back to his trembling gray vulnerable flesh, fraying that line between the merely obscene and the truly impermissible. He can't stand for you to fuck him naked, needs the reminder that all this is happening in some kind of separate, sacrosanct space. A dream, he likes to tell himself, likes you to tell him, and you do. It's all lies, though, lies as pretty as the shape his slackening mouth makes above you as you suck and swallow and snag your claws on his silk, lies you let him tell himself. The bows are bindings, the lace is just leashes he puts on himself for you, wrapping himself up pretty as a present. But then again, you've got your own chains, and he reminds you of this when he digs his fingers into the taut ladder of binding up the back of your spine and makes you work for every last scum-colored taste of him. He doesn't taste like scum, is the thing, he doesn't even taste of mustard. He tastes rich and vibrantly alive, tastes salty and physical in a way you don't think you're ever going to be able to find words for. You slide two fingers through the wetness spilling down your fluttering throat, spread the moisture slick over your fingers and drive them deep and eager up into him. You get fireworks at that, and again when you curl your fingers and drive in farther his mouth coming open in a rough snarl and his eyes blazing with a glory of optical pyrotechnics, red and blue so bright they fade to violet, so beautiful. You spare one hand for yourself, but before you can even reach down to where you're aching for relief he's grabbed your horns, wrenched your head up close to his stomach till you can't even think about breathing, just working your throat desperately around the burning-hot intrusion so as to keep from dying. You choke again and again, riding through as best as you can, and when both of your hands are clamped tight to his thighs, one still dry and one wet with two colors of fluid he lets you go. You tilt your head to the side and breathe as fast and hard as you can, grateful for the reprieve but so distant from everything, drifting lost with wonder and need in your own honeyed-up head. Everything is painless, even the building pressure inside you, even the way your knees grit against the harsh floor, and you want nothing more than to cling to him forever. "God," he breathes, and drags his bulge across your turned-away cheek, painting a slick dark golden trail from your jaw to the bridge of your nose. You look back up at him and he's just staringdown at you, like just for this one moment you're beautiful, in this strange secret place, where no one else can see you're beautiful and he wants you. "Finish me," he says softly, and runs one set of nails, gently, through your hair.   You slip your wet fingers back inside him, twisting till he sighs and sinks just a little down, and then you work him just the way you've learned he loves as you let his bulge slip back inside your mouth, minding your teeth so very perfectly. He makes a small, wrigglerish sob, and bites down on his bony fingers to stifle his cries as he climaxes, blazing with perfect true-violet light. With the corset in place it's a stretch, swallowing all of him down, half a pailful and it doesn't seem like it's got enough space to fit but you manage. You feel strange and tight all through, by the time he's done, dizzy and utterly decadent. "Eridan," he whines through his teeth and the blood of his bitten-through fingers, holding on hard to one of your horns like he's going to die, his head bowed and his face so loose, so beautifully empty, the optics faded to a dark, worn-out smouldering of twin coals. You settle carefully back on your heels, feeling like a thin shell filled utterly to the brim, so close to coming apart. Still breathing hard, he draws the softness of one stockinged toe over your neglected bulge, and presses down. You cry out and clap your shaking hands to your face, your screaming mouth, as you shudder and release torrents of useless fluid across your stomach and thighs, soaking the thin silk of his stocking and your own. Nothing like a pail, not any little thing like a pail, coming off into nothing more than a dark oilslick across the floor, and it's this final blasphemous obsenity that has you weak and wanting, sprawling undone in your own puddle of wasted violet. Your color is nearly as rich as it's possible to be,so rich it's nearly red again, and it soaks into the dust to be just one more stain in this warm and shameful little cell of a room. There's not much of the floor here that isn't painted your color, anymore. You crane your arms behind yourself, fumbling for your corset's ties, and he grabs your wrists. "Keep it on," he says, and his bony thumbs dig hard into your pulse points, intent. "Keep it on till-- till you die." You sneer, and kiss the corner of his mouth beside one snarling fang. He's only the boss of you when you let him, and he knows it and he knows you know it too. But it's enough. He picks up your shirt himself, pulls it roughly over your head. You almost feel like you slosh when you scramble to fit your arms through the sleeves. You hang on to his bifuricated horns for balance as he pours you back into your trousers. Your head swims and you're little more than a sagging arc of exhausted desperation, fighting for every bare sip of air, and it makes you feel utterly insane. Why did you agree to this, why can't you at least ask him for a little mercy, a few inches of slack? You crack open your mouth, as he slips your sneakers on, and you're still wearing your stockings under the trousers and he grins at you and it all just dries up in the back of your throat. You let yourself be primped and posed like a doll, a sharp little seadweller action figure, and he kisses your forehead when he stands back up, this strange tender gesture that makes tears prick the corners of your eyes and you couldn't even say why. The corset's so tight, so fucking there, a nearly-unbearable pressure that makes you step with so much extra caution, makes you breathe with so much extra effort. The world ripples when you take your first step away from him, wavering like everything's underwater, and you've got eighty nine flights of stairs down to go, with the rising nausea of your mind-honey comedown welling up through the bellyfull of genetic material like a poisoned tide. You'll be lucky to make it two flights before having to find some nasty corner to vomit in, to curl up in your own sick second-hand filth and shake and cry and want to die, Sollux listening to every wet and miserable hiccup and likely palming himself into another climax through his ratty gray jeans. You turn your back on him, and walk out with your head held high and proud, your back straight as a mast. You take the light with you as you go; it's his hive, he can skin his own nose getting back up his own stairs. No concern of yours, not now that you're done with each other.   God, you feel so sick.   Why do you do this to yourself, every perigee, every single fucking perigee? With one snap of your royal rings you could have and have had a dozen seablooded nobles all fighting each other like sharks at a chumfest for the chance to lick your feet but instead you're here, each turn of the tides, you come and you go like this little room holds your soul, too. It's nothing pale, this thing you two have between you, it's no color at all but the sick void of loathing, filling the both of you up from the inside out. Nothing pale could be such an exercise in mutual self destruction; nothing black could excuse the reverent tenderness with which the two of you go about it. Maybe it's about what you need to get along. You've only ever hated everyone else to give yourself enough contrast to see by. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!