Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/806596.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Major_Character_Death, Underage
  Category:
      Multi
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      Sollux_Captor/Feferi_Peixes, Sollux_Captor/The_Psiioniic
  Character:
      Sollux_Captor, Feferi_Peixes, The_Psiioniic, Rose_Lalonde
  Additional Tags:
      Time_Shenanigans, Dream_Shenanigans, SGRUB, Prospit, Derse, Psychic_Bond,
      T.S._Eliot_-_Freeform, The_Waste_Land, Omens_&_Portents, Retcon,
      Painplay, Kink_Negotiation, Rough_Sex
  Series:
      Part 2 of Wires_and_Stars
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-05-17 Completed: 2013-08-08 Chapters: 4/4 Words: 19220
****** Wires and Stars: Incipisphere Intermission ******
by tatterdemalionAmberite_(amberite), titianArchivist
Summary
     Your name is Sollux Captor and you remember the lines of code that
     bracketed the apocalypse. You remember fighting and fucking and
     mourning; you remember dying and living on.
     This is the way it never happened. This is the story of everything
     you saw, and the decision you made, and how it changed you.
Notes
     [This follows directly after Initiation. The explicit content begins
     in the second chapter, and the rating will be revised upward when
     that is posted.]
     And we shall play a game of chess,
     Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
     --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
See the end of the work for more notes
***** A Game of Chess *****
Dreaming, but not in the dreamspace - far from that sense of lucidity, quasi-
reality. There is golden light and a sound like wind on reeds. You hover in
stillness, though the distant wind carries a faint sound like that of bells,
all kinds of different bells ringing at once.
You fly.
Not with the buzzing force of your psionics, but aimless floating - it happens
without really trying; you think at things and move closer to them, gradual, a
sort of rhythmless drifting from the gilt-trimmed window of your room, along
the enormous chain, to walk in the streets of the city.
The surreal quality of your awareness reminds you of something terrible, and it
takes you moments to realize that what it's reminding you of is the hours after
you killed Aradia, the slow surfacing from Vriska's control, and remembering
that jolts you into thinking straight.
For a while. It’s easy to be pulled back into mindlessness, into drifting
through soft dark air over golden streets, and it feels more like actually
being asleep than any of the other kinds of lucid dreaming you've experienced.
This is Prospit, and you are finally here, in the right place, at the right
time. Locked away from waking; locked away from the part of you that’s anchored
to the waking world, the part of you that constructs the dreamspace, that can
pull him to you -
And you feel oddly... flat. Like even beyond the problem of these missing
pieces, you can only find half of yourself. You won't know why for a while.
(Shhh. It doesn't matter.)
Skaia whirls above. Visions form and unform in the clouds, but you can’t
resolve them, or rather, you feel a recognition, a back-of-thinkpan tickle for
each one as of something remembered and suddenly forgotten.
You've seen the code that makes up this reality, an underpinning of the
universe. The comments are particularly strange for this section. They say:
/* initiates/terminates paradox loop */
and they're dated to... Now that you think of it, tonight's date. The code loop
is a kind that would be alarming to the novice, exactly the sort of thing you
think of as an example of what makes ~ATH such a killer language, that it
thrives on constructions which would break a program written in anything else.
Suddenly there's a rippling in the sky, and the distant plateau takes on a new
set of convolutions, expands in dimension, clouds clearing.
It triggers first stillness, then commotion. The strange hornless, hairless
people you see walking about the streets - they look like chessmen brought to
life - start walking with direction and purpose, and in minutes it becomes like
watching your bees organize themselves in response to a stimulus. Somehow
they've mustered into units, standing, marching, preparing.
You know the code that makes this happen: in broad strokes, at least, even if
you don't feel you understand it. Your friends, outside, must be prototyping
their kernelsprites.
The streets shake with motion. You feel exposed, between the mustering of
armies and the too-bright golden light, and then the voices start in.
You can hear them crying out in waves, even here, and you clutch your head and
drop to the flagstones. One meteorite falling, then the next, the doom of
Alternia -
That part, you understand, but it doesn't make it easier.
You want to disappear. No, more than that. You want to find out what's
happening, but you don't want to ask strangers. You gather yourself, stumble to
your feet, are twice almost knocked over by the frantic traffic of the living
chessmen - walk up the edges of the main road, avoiding the path of the armies.
There's a tall castle in the near distance, and you make for there. It seems to
be the focus of massive amounts of activity; you could hardly miss it.
The first door you open takes you into a corridor of brass mirrors, where you
wander for a time, lost, seeing visions in the reflecting frames, and when you
emerge into back hallways, servants blink at you but talk to each other. A
dusty back doorway takes you into what seems to be a library, towering shelves
full of paper books - and that's the kind of thing you rarely toy with, but
it's something you know. Information is information, and you go inside.
The Prophecies Concerning the Coming of the Twelve looks kind of interesting
until you realize it's one volume of many, and written in an unfamiliar
dialect. You're looking for something to distract you from the voices, and this
is not that. Frog Genetics for the Naive Chump is a little more engaging but
your half-assed prophetic sense doesn't think it'll be terribly useful; and
you're just about to pull down Reconstituted Timelines in Theory and Practice
off the shelf when your back prickles with the feeling of being watched, and
you turn around.
There's someone there. You think a girl, if they're as much like a troll as
they look, although the skin is different and the eyes are different and there
are no horns. Her hair is like a photographic negative. But she doesn't look
like a chesspiece. She's wearing garb like yours, only it's a bright pink-
purple color, almost Tyrian except quite a bit lighter and more garish.
She has the same flickering unreal quality as the visions in the clouds, but
she's not distant; rather, so near you could touch her. If she was a troll she
would be five or six sweeps, your age or a little bit younger; but since she's
not a troll, you don't know; she could be weeks old or millennia.
But she's not actually watching you, as far as you can see. She's holding a
book. You're not sure if it's one of the books from the shelves or a ghostly
book of her own, and you reach over and prod.
"Hey!" she says. "Excuse you. I was writing that."
"That's funny. Usually people say they were reading." You're going to take the
apparition on her own terms, even if you get the sense that no one else who
walked into the room could probably see her.
"Well, that would be usual people for you," she says. "Surpassingly
predictable." She plants her elbows on the table, chin to fist, and stares at
you. Like you're the creepy numinous thing being shown to her. You're used to
your eyes startling people, but you're not used to that.
"Do you live here?" you ask, in the hopes of dislodging her unnerving gaze.
"Do I live?" she asks back, and doesn't stop staring.
"...you're asking me. Why are you asking me that?"
"It's a valid question. You're the one who carries the answer. Even if you
don't know the answer," she amends. She slides a silver bookmark, starkly at
contrast with the golden decor, from behind her ear and sets it between the
pages of the book. You catch a few words before she shuts it.
Of flesh and death shall the Speaker be formed, first of the creeping things.
In haste they shall gather His pieces, the one who consumes blood and the one
who conceals it, all but one. So shall His Croak be cut short...
This kind of morbid, abstruse stuff reminds you more of AA than anything else,
and you prickle with unease. Still, this apparition's talk of an answer seems
less finite at least than AA's words about endings... "All right, I'll bite.
What does your life have to do with me?"
Her smile has an edge to it, and in the odd light of the room you catch a
glimmer of violet from her eyes - it would remind you of seadwellers except
that the cold whiteness of her sclera reminds you that she is not a troll at
all. "That is the question, isn't it?" And you're beginning to bare your teeth
in exasperation when she goes on, finally, "- Well, I suppose in some fashion
you unpicked the code that generated me, but the code didn't really generate me
precisely." Which doesn't surprise you: you can't remember code governing her
existence. That doesn't mean anything, of course. "It generated a possibility
reservoir. I, as I stand before you, would seem to be a projection or
manifestation of that reservoir."
And you've just about managed to parse that when you realize she didn't even -
"That doesn't answer my question," you object, automatically rubbing at your
forehead as if your head was starting to hurt – you don't think this is even
the kind of dream you would feel a migraine in, but this is the kind of
conversation that might give you one. "So you're saying there's a nonzero
probability that you'll never exist at all, and I affect your chances? You
don't seem very concerned about it all."
"No - I suppose that if I did exist, I would probably experience some anguish
over the possibility of not existing. But right now I know I don't exist, and
it's hardly unpleasant." You don't think she said that from a place of knowing
too much about your life. But you're not sure she didn't, and it makes you
wince. "Which is not to say that the possibility of my existence isn't
metaphysically compelling. It is both an indicator and a catalyst of the
machinery of doom. Your hand - you're a technical type, right? - moves that
machinery; you have, or will have, a manual override of sorts. But I know only
a heap of broken images." She bites the edge of her fingernail, an oddly
familiar gesture for such an alien apparition, and looks at you sideways again.
"You're being unnecessarily convoluted."
"No more so than the data structures you favor. Which is not a slight on your
data structures. Their convolutions are, in the end, more necessary than they
look."
"Okay, I'll concede that," you say, trying to get a conversational foothold in
her endless riddles. She does know you better than she has a right to,
considering you just met her. Your mind teems with questions, fluttering bits
of knowledge that never stop to settle into a coherent image. Finally you
settle into an exasperated "...But are you here to tell me something or just
feed me vague bits and pieces I probably won't understand until it's too late
anyway? I thought Prospit was supposed to be a friendly game construct, I can't
wait to see the parts of this game that aren't trying to help..." that you
realize is unlikely to yield any useful results but really have trouble
bringing yourself to care.
For such a flat-toothed creature, she manages quite an eerie grin. "Oh, you'll
see them soon enough." And then she purses her lips, looking - a little
chagrined, if anything, which is not what you expected - "You will, but they
don't answer to me. I have a penchant for grandiosity, but I can't actually
take the credit for your misfortune and that of your friends." And then her
expression - freezes, for a moment, something genuinely uncomfortable in it,
and her mouth hangs open like she wants to say something other than what she's
saying, but she breezes on. "You know certain pieces of it already. You are not
a Seer, but your vision twofold gives you an eye into another universe - just
like it gives you Prospit and Derse. The white and the black chessmen at once."
Listening to her talk is maddening, it's like seeing into the clouds, where you
recognize a vision and then don't remember what you recognized, every word
seeming oddly familiar to you even though their meanings are opaque.
"...chessmen? So aliens also have low-tech but infuriatingly complex ancient
mindgames? I'm... actually regaining a bit of faith in the universe here. But
what does that have to do with –"
"Oh, yes, you aren't aware, are you? The game has always been present in your
universe pursuant to the Game; it's far from coincidence." You can somehow hear
where her letters are capitalized and emphasized. "Chess is an artifact, as it
were. You worked with the code; you know how ancient it is - or you can guess.
Your world is seeded with the pieces of this, to teach your memory for when the
time comes, which it has -"
But then you're not listening to her, because something else catches your
attention.
System.statusQuery:sensors&sector=241&status=idle
You almost try to respond to it at first, as if it was a question directed to
you. Then it answers itself. Figures and charts, gray around the edges – in the
gauzy flatness of dream you process the information as if you'd never seen it
before, never heard speech of this kind, a pidgin where mind speaking in
language mixes with machine speaking in code and – as the input becomes more
complex it takes effort to parse it – ailerons and microdimensions – carbon
scrubbing, day/night cycle –
Checks and small adjustments. Astris is in a dormant enough phase that it feels
like you could just reach out and draw him closer.
But you thought you couldn't even hear him here –
Straining to comprehend is dizzying, straining to listen, this should be easy,
but bits of code are passing by completely undeciphered, as if – you were using
a completely different part of your thinkpan to –
This place makes you vague, makes you lose track of information that would
normally be clear. It's a difference of wavelength- not literally, but as
distinct as different radio bands - you're just hearing him closer because of
the connection between you, otherwise nothing would differentiate his voice
from the far-off millions -
and millions, and millions, and when you focus - you haven't been, it's just
the end of the world - of course.
You knew this would happen, it was a foregone conclusion from the rest of it;
but you didn't expect to be stranded here, locked into half of yourself, no
more able to evict yourself from this place and this body than you could evict
one eye from your head. Unable to get from here to your own private dream-
construct, unable to reach him -
Unable to comfort -
- when you're honest about it, unable to comfort yourself. He's going to die,
and you're going to die twice somehow, and you don't remotely have your
priorities straight and you know that. He's going to die, and he wants to, and
it's better that way even though it feels hollow - you thought knowing that
would make it so much easier - you were wrong.
"This is serious," you say, standing up, dropping the book that you were
flipping back and forth in your hands. "Stop going on about chess games and
hoofbeastshit, I need to get out of here -"
"Okay," she says, too-calmly.
"What's that supposed to mean, I just told you it wasn't okay - I need to - to
-" You're not how to articulate why you need so badly to be away from this
place and back where you can reach him. The words stick when you try.
"To endure doom and to bear witness to it," she says for you, overly incisive
as always. "You are a Doom player and you have vision twofold. These are two
different things, and they'll serve you two different ways. If they'll serve
you at all, which is up for debate. But don't ignore the possibility."
"I don't know what you're talking about and I'm sitting here in this library
while my friends are in danger and -" It catches at your throat, you've never
told anyone about your ancestor and you're not about to start with a game
apparition, it's an offense to your dignity -
"And your body is sleeping," and by the way she looks at you she knows it's the
wrong ending to the sentence. "Pretty soon it won't be. I would say 'lucky for
you' but I think you and I have realistic expectations in common as a way of
approaching the world."
He's still in idle, now that you've tuned in on that frequency, you know he
hasn't even guessed it yet, and you can't decide whether that's reassuring or
makes it worse - "Mother Grub on a skateboard, how do I get out of here?"
"You can see from both sides of the board, with your vision twofold, but as a
doom player, there's something else -"
"Will you stop making portentous noises and help me -"
She goes on, undaunted. "- something else you can do. You can flip the
chessboard. And to answer your question, Sollux Captor, the way you get out of
here is by waking up."
You're just about to ask her how the fuck you're supposed to do that when
suddenly you do, with the last disoriented-dreaming realization that you don't
even know her name.
~~~
Waking.
There's a sickly-sweet taste in your mouth and an awful burgeoning sense of
pressure in your head and you feel like hell even before you stagger to your
feet and open_your_eyes -
That was a mistake.
There's a giant crater in your ceiling and you think you killed at least one
neighbor - not that they're going to live anyway. You're pretty sure bicyclops
dad is gone, too. It was destined, from the point where Karkat ran that virus,
and you wish you'd had a chance to say goodbye. You know too many things and
you don't like any of them. But some of them, you were at least prepared for.
Still crawling all over from the mind honey comedown – your skin feels ill-
fitting, your thinkpan emptied and refilled with ostraca and dust – you hear
the Psiioniic's voice at first even more muffled than in Prospit's dreamhaze,
just a humming polyphonic patter of code layered over itself, blending to
indistinguishable then resolving as your head throbs and eases –
The thin wondering thread that reaches whisper-quiet for you, foregrounded
against a rumbling horizon of meteors soon to fall, casualties of skyfire and
shockwaves - so hushed but so unmistakably there that you almost feel you could
speak to him here, in your hive awake, and he would hear you -
And you know that even if words can't cross the divide, he can sense you, and
you think thank you and love, try to center your mind on the way you feel when
Astris holds you, on what everything you've had with him is worth to you -
You could try to construct the dreamspace. You're drained to dregs from the
involuntary expulsion of power, but you could, you think, just barely anchor it
for him, you might have time before -
Your husktop dings, not the normal message indicator but the sharp noise it
makes when someone's flagged it urgent, and you glance at the screen.
CC: S)(ello, are you even T)(--ER-E?
CC: You're supposed to be my server player, rig)(t? Everyt)(ing is going
ronquil )(ere!
CC: K---ELP!
- and you know as surely as if it were prophecy that you won't be able to do
everything in time.
Still, you have redundancy; ever and always, you have redundancy, and even as
you sit down and start figuring out her situation, part of you - part of you
reaches out to Astris and clings, riffles through memories for images to hold,
togetherness in the dreamspace and moments that were beyond words - shouts its
pity and gratitude, and you don't think it's enough to drown out the sadness
you don't want to inflict on him, but that doesn't stop you from hoping.
And responding emotion ripples in echo through you, from outstretched concern
as the unbearable light from your eyes dies away to alarm when you focus so
intently on him to – to understanding, to reaching back.
Deep pride and deeper faith and longing to comfort, longing to hold, that
crystallizes into – not touch but feeling evoked by touch, associations and
responses, the enfolding soothe of hands on your horns - the simple content
closeness of arms around your shoulders; the heavy wondering promise of joined
hands – listening to him as deeply as you can, while you set to solving FF's
problem.
You have an advantage as a server player: you know the code and the commands,
and bringing Feferi through the paces and setting up the game apparatus is none
too difficult. But she grows increasingly distraught.
TA: ye2, there ii2 a meteor headed iin your diirectiion, but iim workiing
wiithiin parameter2.
TA: 2iit tiight and iill have you pulled out of there iin two tiick2.
CC: Okay, I'm putting t)(is t)(ing in t)(e totem wave.
CC: But it's getting )(arder to breat)(e! I can deal wit)( it for a w)(ale, but
I'm nervous.
CC: And my lusus is acting un)(appy...
Of course. The falling meteors would heat the ocean.
You work faster. KK is playing with the memo feature in Trollian, and you're
checking in with him periodically, trying to sound casual. There are more
voices now, but they're further away; many of the nearby ones have gone silent
already.
Karkat is deploying crap around your hive now. Or what's left of your hive. The
ceiling is gone, which is, all in all, rather helpful when it comes to making
room for tall unwieldy game apparatus. The damage to the mainframe is - you're
chagrined when you glance at it, but you can't afford to care whether it's
recoverable or not. The world is ending and you're going to die.
In some ways this is your doing; you unlocked the ancient code - in other ways,
it was always destined to happen, and you're not sure whether to take pride in
being an instrument of destiny or to resent it.
You can't hear yourself in the chorus of the doomed, though the words of the
prophecy ring keenly in your ears as you work; as with each second that ticks
by you become more certain that there won't be enough of them – you never hear
yourself, maybe because you're listening so hard instead for him, who sounds so
much like you – but you know when he hears you.
When you know sudden, fanatic, unreasoning certainty that this is not the end –
faith in the prophecy greater than you ever had yourself – that to die twice is
once to live again – emanating from Astris but in some way closer than the
scattered panicked fragments of your mind that aren't absorbed in him or in the
game –
You know the depths of him struggling to press some alien emotion into you,
shredding at his mind to tear its remnants free, to envision through profound
obscurity what it would be – to rail against death, to scrape and rend up from
its depths, to grasp and ascend into light. He's clawing gouges into the
structure of his thinkpan to show you what he wants for you, longs for you to
have, that he could never – with all the press and force of please, please, do
this for me –
(Even as you feel the ebb of his attention, the switch clicking over with some
weighty order given, the empty ache as pieces of him are forced away from you
and thrown into complying –) He's trying to mute his gratitude as you quell
your grief, but still you know – it's tangled up in I love you, inseparable
from pity that rolls from him like light.
And as your mind fills with ponderous effort, with spinning-up and oceanic
power – even then, part of him speaks to you one final time visual-vivid of
hands and reaching, of finding and pulling each other into dream together – and
with a howl of engines he tells the ship home, and dives.
Something is wrong. You can't think straight. At first you think it's a
consequence of the close attention you're paying to Astris, the effort and
exertion and then sudden exhilaration - the knowing, the terrible grateful
awareness that this will be his final jump - he can hear you still, then he
can't, then it's all-consuming, as he burns through white-hot with pain and
winks out like a flare and -
- something is still wrong. When you brush your fingers to your face to swab
away the blurring tears your hand comes away bloody. You can't think straight.
You can't think. Where your thoughts should be there's something else, a
synaesthetic soundfeeling that hurts, that rips away layers of you. It happens
quickly. I hope I got it right is the last thing you remember, thinking of
Feferi, thinking of -
Then language goes, then movement, then sight.
~~~
Drifting again.
Drifting.
Waking into - fragmented sensations, sharp, metallic, your blood in your mouth
- sense-memory of cool leathery lips, sudden vivid startling invasive -
- not memory but reality - you shout, preemptive, bitter, wordless, it boils
out of your throat and rings through purple streets - as you think, No, not
again, not after everything -
- and then you realize that was not a thought but the anticipation of a
thought, whatever the hell that means. Memory and phantom, death and life
overlapping, you are awaited, you are called. It tugs at you.
Something else is trying to nudge you, order you around. An intrusive voice.
It's not like Vriska, but it still makes you hells of uncomfortable and you
push outward and crackle with force until it leaves and this place is silent
again and you can figure out what you are.
You're - the half of you that was missing on Prospit. And you've died, and
something insistent tugs on you like gravitation, calls you to the scene of
your death.
And you fly, once more, on numinous winds until you're hovering there. Staring
down at your own corpse and at a sea-dweller girl, tyrian-blood tears leaking
down the inside of her nose behind her goggles, fragile and flustered and
desperate. Your own blood stains her lips, dried to golden-dark. "You're okay,
you're okay, you're alive-" Feferi's saying, her fins fluttering with
excitement. She is jeweled and porcelain-perfect and wild-eyed and so small,
everything and nothing like her.
Groggy and waking, you had thought the quiet in your thinkpan was a feature of
Derse where you woke from your death - only a babble of indistinct murmurs in
the background.
Now in what remains of your hive everything is still strangely hushed, not only
the voices of the doomed but the one you can't stop expecting to hear, finally
silent with the rest of them - He's gone from your head, he's gone, and you
feel like crying but instead you start laughing and you can't stop, giddy with
stupid relief, lonelier than you've ever been.
***** the Fire Sermon *****
Chapter Summary
     This is Feferi Peixes. She scares the living shit out of you, through
     no fault of her own. Sometimes you just catch a glimpse of her in the
     periphery, or the flowery-salty scent of her walking past and you
     jolt all over with memories that don’t belong to you and don’t attach
     to her, not really - and you're drawn to that.
     But at the same time she doesn’t want to hurt you - no - she doesn’t
     want to harm you. And she is also nothing like either of the people
     you’re so desperately missing.
     (Warning for self-shaming/self-directed ableism. Oh, Sollux.)
Chapter Notes
     To Carthage then I came
     Burning burning burning burning
     --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Fade in: the Land of Brains and Fire.
You feel the two halves of yourself awake and present, doesn't matter that your
Prospit self still lingers in a now-empty library; your mind busily re-iterates
the code that makes it possible that you are here and whole again somehow. It
feels like your body is firming up as you stand. Here, and whole, and terribly,
terribly lost.
"Hey. FF. Hey, shoosh, you're -" You land next to the Tyrian girl, touch her
arm. There are what look like brains hovering in the air, and she's skewered a
couple of them through, but when you move closer the others dart back to a safe
distance.
You're still not sure what the hell just happened, but you're piecing it
together in your mind as Feferi looks up at you with yellow blood on her lips
and takes a deep breath and her face resolves to a self-consciously brave
smile. She says your name, pronounces it like Sole-lux; you're not sure whether
it's her accent or a fish pun. "I'm shore-ry, I didn't realize Mom was going to
die from the heating of the water - or that she'd release the Vast Glub when
she did - I raced right here as soon as -"
"I didn't know either, but I knew I was going to die, so -" You shrug. It's not
a big deal to you now. Looking at your own corpse at your feet is a little bit
unnerving, but it's almost more sad because Aradia would have been so curious
and interested in it and it makes you miss her. "You got here, you... brought
me back, whatever, it's cool now -"
"I -" she says, and she's about to continue when a pair of imps appear in the
doorway and she shrieks, shrill and startled, like she's going to jump up on a
chair like a brownblood from a cartoon - but at the same time throws herself
past you in a leap and impales them, both at once. The monsters pixellate and
release chunks of grist all over the ground. Then she looks back at you,
triumphant and - somehow expectant, like for some unforeseen reason she's
hungry for your approval, and you give a low whistle.
"You've got pretty sick aim," you tell her.
"Well? Don't just stand there, we've got a lot more of these to wade through!"
But the way she says it isn't accusatory, just - wonderfully energetic, and the
way she pinions you with her eyes makes you want to protest and give in all at
once and you kiss her without thinking and pull away tasting your own blood and
feeling startled and confused and appalled with yourself as she laughs gently -
Fortunately, she's right. There's a hell of a lot to be done.
In between tearing down waves of imps assaulting the staircase of what used to
be your hivestem, she squeezes your hand breathless and excited. You would have
expected the battle-frenzy of the highest of highbloods to be huge and
intimidating, but she's small and fizzy, and it's not her fault that she scares
you for the wrong reasons, and not her fault that every time you look at her
and start to get pulled along into her bubble of positive attitude something
stops you because you feel hollow inside.
"Feferi," you say, and you want to be gentle and let her down easy, but she
frowns, she's too bright-eyed incisive behind her goggles, not upset but
concerned -
"You haven't called me that once yet. You're about to say something sea-rious -
am I right?"
"Yes... Look, I can see the pity in your eyes when you look at me and I just...
I'm really not the best potential quadrantmate for you. I'm kind of fucked up
at the best of times, and now isn't the best of times." She already knows rumor
enough about you and Aradia, but you've got to let her know the extent to which
your emotions are a wrecking zone - "I - I had a matesprit before, and our
relationship was a secret, and now he's dead, with the rest of Alternia -" Your
voice only quavers a little bit and you can’t bear to say why you’re at least
as much happy as sad.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, gently.
“I actually probably don’t want to talk about it.” You managed to make that not
sound curt, at least, just honest. You look off into the distance. Is that
another imp approaching? No, it’s a phosphene, an afterimage from the amount of
power you’ve been running mowing them down. You sigh and sit up against the
stairwell wall, legs wide and arms propped against them, tired and blinking,
“Tell me something, then, Sole-lux,” she says and - she’s just so friendly,
genuinely extroverted like no one else you know, it’s hard not to smile looking
back at her when she eyes you like that. “Are you telling me this because you’d
rather I left you alone? Or because you’re scared to disappoint me?”
And she just keeps surprising you.
“...it’s definitely the second one of those things," you manage.
“Is it the first one at all too?” she asks, and you think about kissing her,
earlier when you were frightened out of your wits and mad with relief and
reacting to the end of the world, and - you startled yourself, but that's not
her fault either.
And you reach up - she’s facing you, squatting down, her head a little above
yours - and you put your arms around her because it makes more sense to answer
that way. “I would rather you didn’t leave me alone, FF.”
"Good! Because I don't want to leave you alone," she says. "I would if you
asked, but I pike you." She rocks on her feet and squeals and giggles and falls
over, catching herself on the wall next to you and curling into your arm.
“Augh! Sorry!"
“Silly landdweller movement styles! How does that even work?”
~~~
So this is Feferi Peixes.
She scares the living shit out of you, through no fault of her own. Sometimes
you just catch a glimpse of her in the periphery, or the flowery-salty scent of
her walking past and you jolt all over with memories that don’t belong to you
and don’t attach to her, not really (but they are yours to hold now, you remind
yourself, there is no one else to bear witness.)
She is inherently a frightening thing and you're drawn to that. But at the same
time she doesn’t want to hurt you - no - she doesn’t want to harm you.
And she is also nothing like either of the people you’re so desperately
missing.
Half the time you feel as much pale as flushed for her, and she reciprocates
there, too; and that feels like cheating. It makes it less guilty to know that
Aradia wouldn’t blame you at all, but that also makes it worse somehow. The
part of you seeking annihilation, the part of you that wants to fling itself on
something more sharp and solid than any part of you and just cease to exist -
- it's safe with FF, even though she is that sharp and solid thing; she guards
you where you fail to guard yourself. Or, more accurately, she guards her own
capacities, so well that you're not even certain what they are, so well that
you know it's the practiced habit of a lifetime.
Another new experience is the realization that you're doing as much to calm
Feferi's passions as she is yours - just so subtly and simply that it only hits
you later.
One night she walks up and hands you a hairbrush. "I need you to trawl through
and get the knots out," she says, "can you do that for me?" And you do, and the
whole time she tells you about something Vriska said to her - that beach! - and
the problem she's having with the alchemiter, and then you're halfway through
her hair and the tension's melted out of her and you're not even sure what you
did. For a lowblood, you’re incredibly high-strung, so you were usually on the
other side of that dynamic with AA and it’s weird realizing that it’s actually
relaxing in its own way to calm Fef down; that somewhere in amongst the motions
of your hands to pat and soothe her, the world goes into soft focus.
The empty spaces in you aren't shaped like her, but somehow around her, they
feel less hollow.
~~~
The grass in the Land of Dew and Glass brushes at your chin and shoulders when
you finally clear enough imps from the hillside to sit and eat. Feferi
alchemized something like wingbeast meat but lighter and less tough and salty-
sweet and you're first too involved in savoring it to speak at all, then too
worn out from strifing to say anything that means much. You talk about your
hives and your wrigglerhoods and Feferi glances at you over delicate needle-
fanged bites, holding her hair out of the way; captchalogues the bones, a
little furrow between her brows behind the glasses.
You doze off there for a moment, sprawled in the greenery, and snap into waking
- only realizing after she lays a hand gently on your shoulder and peers at you
with a look of concern that it was her leaning over you that woke you; that you
must have jolted visibly - you don't remember what you might have dreamed.
“When I first met you," she says, staring concerned and intent, "I thought
people startled you and I thought, oh, that’s normal for a computer hacker, you
don’t sea many people - but it’s not that, is it? I startle you.” She leans
closer, and her hair brackets you, heavy-ticklish and smelling of the oils she
uses to keep it moist - you rubbed them in for her, the last time - and your
heart rate goes up, for more than one reason, as if to make her point for her.
“Did I push you into this too fast? I’m sorry - I can be kind of intense, I
mean, I thought it was o-cray but maybe -”
“Shit,” you say, “no, don’t blame yourself, I have - I have weird stuff in my
head, and no business taking it out on you -” But you're still – not flinching
away from her, but darting your eyes, glancing self-recriminating, self-
conscious at the ground – holding your body very still, and she picks up on it,
of course she does, she notices people, really watches, and –
“But it’s weird stuff that has to do with me and not with the other trolls.”
“No, it’s not.” You surprise yourself with how emphatic you sound. “It really,
really isn’t you.”
“Wow, you’re really angry about somefin! But I can tell you’re not angry at me,
so thanks for that reashoreance at least. So. Let’s sea...” She plunks herself
down in your lap, mischievous, casual, turns round and leans her head back on
your shoulder. “...you have weird stuff in your head, and it makes you angry at
someone who’s not me. And jumpy at me. Hmmmmm.” Then, suddenly, she freezes.
“Sollux, am I doomed to die?”
“No! Not as far as I can tell, I mean! Goddamnit, now I’ve scared you for
stupid reasons.” You're grimacing, fidgeting your fingers against each other,
bogged down in barely knowing what to say, let alone how –
“Do it another fifteen or twenty times and we’ll be efin,” she says calmly, and
you realize she’s been noticing you startle for quite a while. “It has
something to do with the voices, though. Am I right?”
“Yes... sort of,” and you grope for words, not sure where to put this or how to
talk about, and then it occurs to you: Feferi’s a highblood. Pretty much all
the ones you’ve met believe in ancestors, bona-fide serious believe in
ancestors, and the tyrian lineage is its own weird rarefied thing. You’re at
least not going to run up against a patronizing attitude. “I... had these
visions, back before the world ended. Not the generalized omen-and-portent kind
of visions. Dreams. But true dreams." You're not sure how much you want to tell
her. Everything seems either hyperreal or unreal right now. A long moment
passes and you steady yourself and she takes a breath to speak before you
manage to continue - "About my ancestor."
"Go on, I'm listening," she says.
"I would... see things from his head, things that happened to him... sometimes
see through his eyes. He - he was enslaved by someone who looked a lot like
you. But what I meant when I said it isn't you - it isn't, she was - horrible,
and mad, and not in a small way, frightening - I, I guess I have daymares about
her," you say because it's easier than explaining - "Am I making any damn
sense?"
Her eyes are wide and curious, and thoughtful like she's assembling something
in her head, and you don't know if it's - anything like the truth, and it's
always so hard to speak of things for the first time - "It's not surprising an
ancestor of mine would be... like that," she says, and grimaces a little. "I
wanted to change all that, but - in the history I've been schoolfed, the
strength of the Alternian empire has always been its capacity for terror. And
the royal line at the heart of it." She blinks, long-lashed and sad, and you
wonder how much of that sadness is about the end of the world and how much pre-
dates it. Then her eyes return from that pensive distance, and she's looking at
you again. "Do you want to talk about what happened to your ancestor?"
You have to think about it, you were expecting her to push you - keep expecting
her to push you, because she's strong and knows what she wants, and you're used
to that from AA; but FF is different, water and wind instead of fire and force,
slow currents underneath quick ripples. You do want to talk about Astris and
you don't. If she could only know without your telling her; if you weren't
suddenly aware of the tightness in your throat and the feeling that you're
walking on a too-thin wall over a too-deep pit - "Maybe," you settle for
saying. "I'm not sure."
~~~
After that it's a little better; you feel a little lighter, less trapped, and
when thoughts rise to your mind you can let them out, mention things in
passing. That you spoke with him in dreams. That he helmed a starship. She
doesn't pry, just takes it in, and you don't even know how to begin explaining
what Astris meant to you, but you think that you could explain to her, if you
could to anyone.
You keep traveling; imps growing stronger and stranger as you go. You're
reasonably certain you saw something in the game code as you reconstructed it
about the attainment of in-game powers, but that was tied to a particularly
nasty ~ATH loop and anyway your psionics combined with her eerie tyrian
resilience seem to be doing fine. Or at least a given value of fine for a
bizarre quest after death and the apocalypse, until Feferi's seadweller ex-
moirail shows up with a chip on his shoulder and brandishing what he claims in
a weird wavy stutter is a "w-weapon of legend" in your face.
Fighting_him_off is hardly the way you'd planned to spend your evening.
~~~
All this time you've been ranting at Karkat about how the Land of Brains and
Fire is this big joke making fun of you and right now it actually seems funny
in a horrible way; your brain feels like it's lit on fire. Defending against
physical projectiles is one thing - trying to keep an energy pulse weapon from
harming you is an entirely different matter, and you're in better practice than
you've ever been in your life so this isn't a migraine, thank god, because it
would be a fucking terrible one if it went that way, and you don't feel quite
like you're manic the normal way, ha ha, but you’re vibrating with tension like
you had energy grubs for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and you didn’t but you
can’t remember when you ate a normal meal either. Your skin feels hot all over,
scorched with the backwash of energy; does that little choad even know he would
have incinerated you if you weren’t - ugh, this is stupid and your clothes hurt
and -
- you’ve been saying all of this out loud to Feferi without even realizing it,
as she hauls you toward the ablution trap, and you're still ranting. “What did
he even want? - was this about you, because if it was he should have just
talked to you, this is not even just hoofbeastshit, this is like - fucking
horrorterror shit, the stankiest loaf of horrorterrorshit I have ever wasted my
psionics on -” and she’s shooshing you and hauling the scorched remains of your
T-shirt off and your skin is unbroken but inflamed a surreal shade of yellow
all over. When the fabric slides against your skin you hiss out “Fuck!” and she
goes slower -
Everything greys out for just a little while, you’re conscious of time passing
but you’re not talking any more, everything moves in fits and skips and the
tiniest movement of the cloth grates like she’s rubbing sand against your skin
and you catch your hands trembling, your eyes closing, even though you’ve been
through so much worse. You only half-hear, dull and floating, her popping the
cap on a bottle of something as she strokes your hair soft and distracting, but
the sting of the alchemized antiseptic is enough to jolt you out of your
exhausted half-trance, still too dazed to say a word. It’s like she’s touching
the unskinned cords of your muscles, now, like the stuff on her fingers is
being rubbed raw onto exposed nerve-endings and you bite down on your lower lip
and you recognize this, somehow, in some pocket at the back of your thinkpan
that you’ve had no reason to mind in a long time. It’s - the directness of it
and - she starts in on a sensitive spot near a grubscar and you leave off
biting and inhale hard - and her scent, and there’s something - skin-searing
and the tang of the sea - there’s some familiarity, in the way this hurts, and
it’s turning you on so badly that you’re already half-unsheathed in your pants.
She stops when you whimper out loud and you’re only just aware that you did
because it startled her into stopping, and your head whips around to look at
her - the outlines of her horns, sudden animal fear and then you see her eyes
and it’s the (right/wrong)look in them and everything is so silent and calm and
safe. “Oh! I’m sorry, Sollux - I’ll -”
"Nodon’tstop,” you stammer out rapidly, breathing hard through your nose
between words. Your face is burn-hot and your cheeks pull strangely when you
speak and you’re grateful for how the light-scalded skin hides the blush of
shame that’s written through you indelibly. “I need you to do this -" until I
can't think anymore about how sick I am for wanting it, shot through with the
horror of borrowed memory that becomes something beautiful because it's a piece
I have left - and you’re watching her face for an answer, there’s a moment of
confusion and then she looks at you with narrowed brows and wide eyes.
She knows you like some roughness when pailing, the feel of her claws in your
back, the bite of her fangs, and she finally says “Oh! I be-reef I understand -
” And she smiles with gentle mischief - you can’t get over the way she is
sometimes, there’s something palpably indomitable about her presence and at the
same time she shows you that she’s feeling genuinely timid. Part of you says
that’s not what you need right now and part of you requires exactly that, to be
able to trust, to let her take you through this.
Still eyeing you straight-on, she goes for the button on your jeans, and you
don’t know how to quadrant the look on her face, it’s at the same time steady
pale caretaking and fever-bright flushed curiosity - and if the T-shirt was
like sand the jeans are sandpaper on your hips. Feferi nudges your collarbone
with the heel of her hand and you slump against the porcelain and gasp with the
sudden shock of cold on your back and arch up, a little, and she works your
pants down from your waist.
Her claws scrape against your thighs on the way down, just lightly, a graze you
wouldn’t even have noticed if you weren’t hypersensitive and burning all over,
enough that you could almost wonder if she did it by accident except for the
way she looks at you, questioning, reading the way you hiss and try not to
squirm. You don’t want to have to talk, are afraid you’ll have to ask her to
come up and do it again after she forces your jeans over your cramping feet -
half of you just wants to have this done to you, the other half just doesn’t
want to look at the urge hard enough to form words, Dig them deeper, I need -
but she’s seen what she needed to see and when she straddles you to pull your
underwear off, leans over you silhouetted against the ceiling light and kisses
your stomach, you’re anticipating - fearing your reaction - getting a twinging
half-buried thrill from wanting the bite that comes slow and careful and
tearing-deep.
You stare up at your ruined ceiling unseeing, each of her perfect highblood-
whetted teeth a tiny monument of pain but - no - you do see, the fading-white
afterimage of her against the cracks and waterstains - the coilings - the
extravagant riot of her hair - and the shame is like a choking liquid in your
throat that you can barely breathe through and you blink your eyes disoriented,
shaking off the image; you need - you need the dial turned up on this, you need
it - “Go faster. Please -” - to drown out the babble of thoughts and images
reminding you why, and she lifts her head and looks at you questioningly again
and you writhe against her, exulting in the way the movement scrapes and burns
along your skin, the pinpricks of hot-cold pain where her teeth went in and the
trickle of blood. She reaches up then, fingers against sunburnt grubscars and
you ask only by squeezing your eyes shut hard before she digs in and for a
moment there’s only an array of sensations like weights pinning you to the tub.
A moment, and then it’s complicated again, a jumble of mental noise like
crackling radio signals, but your bulge is primed and thick and squirming with
need.
She scrapes claws over your oversensitized stomach and hits the spot where the
bite mark is and it hurts and it’s sweet, then it's a vertiginous tipping point
and as her claws catch at still-bleeding skin you shove it all back, practiced,
automatic, cram it into a corner of your thinkpan and there’s nothing and
you’re terrified. Her claws scratch closer to your bulge - dig into your inner
thigh - and you can’t feel any of it, the all-over smarting of your skin, the
cold of the ablution trap, your bulges writhing against each other - you needed
it, were just sinking into it, and now you think you might -
Feferi says something that you can’t hear over the thoughts - borrowed images -
memories that are rushing in to fill the numbness, without pain to drown them
to perfect silence, and you slam your head back against the ceramic and come
back begging into the hard brightness of the moment, her hand on your bulges
squeezing too hard, perfect, the cracking white net of pain centered just
there, the back of your skull, where - no -
- hands on the sides of your head, holding you still. Face pressed close to
yours and shouting and her cold breath on your cheek is a piece of something
that’s broken and you can’t put it together and - “Sollux!” and she’s touching
your head with her hands, suddenly too gentle and eyes wide with alarm and so
very definitely Feferi, so very definitely your friend, small and scared even
as she holds you in place with strong highblood hands and she’s staring at you
shocked and saying, “What did you mean by that? To let go and let you take it?”
and then the question you feel coming a moment before it hits, hits like a slap
for all she’s not angry. “Who were you saying that to? You - you mumbled
somefin about a needle -”
You feel dirty and sad and small, want to collapse in on yourself with disgust.
You want to close your eyes but it won't help you hide from her or from
yourself. "Never mind, okay, I'm a pretty fucked-up troll, I shouldn't have
dragged you into this, just leave it."
Her eyes widen further, amber and dark pupils and she says, "This is about your
daymares, isn't it."
"Yeah," and for a moment you think she's going to drop the subject there and
you should feel relieved. Instead you're just bright with dread - shoved up
into proximity with things you weren't looking at, scared she'll ask more and
scared she won't.
But she circles back around, undeterred, laces her fingers tightly around your
horns; it’s inherently soothing but it also says she’s not letting you off the
hook.
“What did you mean by let me?” she asks again, quietly and deliberately.
There’s no way around this, at least not completely: you wouldn’t lie to FF
outright and more than likely couldn’t if you tried, not with her silvery
quick-darting eyes on your face, not when she’s pulled herself this close to
putting your two and two together.
“I used to - do this sometimes,” you say, fully aware that you haven’t defined
this and that your lisp gets thicker when you’re nervous, “I - for my ancestor
- he was always in so much pain and I, uh, I figured out how to - to take it
from him for a while,” and you lick your lips and swallow against a dry throat,
hearing every little sound of your mouth moving, feeling every rustling
movement of air - “He never wanted to let me,” you add, miserably, because you
hadn’t actually answered her question yet, and as soon as the words are out
your mouth you know you’ve said too much.
You turn away and shut your eyes, half because you can’t face the gentleness of
her reproach and half because you’re going to cry if you’re not careful and
you’re aware that if you do, she’ll turn this into soothing you, into a
feelings jam - or maybe she won’t, maybe she’ll be too angry, and either
possibility is just bad, so you swallow it back and breathe and she says, “Look
at me. It’s o-cray, but look at me.”
Her voice is not steel; it’s willow and kelp and all the things that grow and
encircle and bend but never break, and you can’t escape it, and you snap your
eyes open, holding your breath.
“Don’t do that! You’re looking at me like I’m going to hit you.” And you let it
out in a shaky laugh, but she’s not done, not staring at you any less hard.
“This - the thing you told me about wasn’t just dreams.”
“No,” you say softly, “it wasn’t.”
“You pitied him,” she says faintly, and then an indescribable expression breaks
over her face and she says, "Oh my cod. He - it wasn't - you didn't mean a
ghost or a vision from the distant past, an apparition out of ancient history,
you meant - he was alive, when the world ended." And you nod at her, just a
slight dip of your head - not certain what she's trying to get at, until she
leans back against the wall of the ablution trap and says in a stunned whisper
- "The Empress's Helmsman."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tail me?" Feferi's voice rises, sharp, a little frantic, and
you flinch back and hide your face again, and then she leans in and cups your
face in her hand, careful, delicate - "I'm not - I can be angry later," she
says firmly, "but this is important, and - I knew the story, that she kept a
powerful yellowblood, but I would never have thought to put it together with
you -"
"Because -" You pause for a moment, trying to put the thought together. "I'm
always having to tell people ridiculously fucking impossible things - and half
the time they don't believe me - and so I, I only bother when it's a survival
matter usually, I don't want to waste my credibility on - a wild tale that
could just be my thinkpan going on holiday, as far as anyone else is concerned
-"
"But it's not," she says. "You see true things, efin if they sound impossible -
"
"But I'm also crazy," and it comes out whiny and you're shivering, hot and cold
at the same time, awkward and miserable. "I'm not always reliable. I -"
And she shifts closer and wraps her arms around your head tightly, pressing
firmly in a way that gets past the initial sting of skin contact, hanging onto
your horns with her fingers and holding you to her chest. "You know you're not
always reliable, Sollux. You know to doubt - but you doubt too much, and when
you are shore of something, I'll bereef you. Promise. Just don't hide important
stuff! You scared me!"
"I'm sorry," you murmur. You lean in against her cool skin, and a purr starts
up in your chest, and - it feels strange, like you could cry, but the tears
aren't coming; but you're beginning to trust in a way that goes beyond just
this - "I'm - I'm sorry, I fucked it up."
"No, no, stop that, yes, that was a terrible attempt at pailing but you can do
betta than that." She strokes your hair, claws raking lightly against your
scalp. "If you still want to."
Held like this, physically assured that she isn't going away, you can just
barely start to unlock around your embarrassment and tell her "Yes, yeah,
please -"
“What I was doing wasn’t working for you, though,” she says, pensive. “You
freaked out. Tell me what happened when you freaked out. I scratched you and
you just -”
“- yeah, I kind of became drastically estranged from the handle there. Fuck.
Sorry.”
“No, stop apologizing, shelly! I need you to explain, because I don’t want to
mess you up like that.”
“I... I shut it down too hard, it was sudden and that wasn’t good, I...” You’re
having trouble making the words come out your mouth; you feel a little dizzy
and realize you’re breathing shallowly, and she strokes your horns and waits
patiently for you to finish. The story you’re telling is too intimate to tell,
somehow, you don’t feel like you have the right, but the universe as you knew
it is over and all any of you can do is make the rules up as you go along. Even
knowing that, your voice feels sticky and leaden - “Usually I would... lock it
down, the pain, when we... and I’d still feel it, in the back of my mind,
just... oddly nonspecific, I guess, just all over, and - that became an
experience I miss, somehow,” and the words tumble out of your mouth rapidly at
the end as if you’d shaken your thinkpan to empty them out, still not fast
enough to keep you from cringing and blushing as you say it.
“That still didn’t answer my question. Or rather... that tells me a lot of
fins, but not what made you flip out.” Feferi's stare is almost sharp enough to
make you close back down, except that it's not accusatory, not jealous; and you
remember telling her that you had a matesprit before, and that she could have
turned away then -
“I... I guess I was startled, I did it automatically and - there wasn’t enough
sensation to leak through, everything went dead and blank. Like accidentally
tuning the volume too low on your media viewer. Except with my body, which was
stupid.”
“Okay,” she says, “really that’s enough wincing at your shell-f, I think we
can... before that it was good, right? And I’m already getting the idea that I
need to go slow, even if you were telling me to go faster. Wait. Why were you
telling me to go faster?”
“It wasn’t enough,” you say, and you’re sure that your ears are even brighter
yellow than they were, because the words come out in a kind of wretched plea -
“I just needed - everything - all over -”
"All right," she says, "all right, tell me how you want to feel," and you're
lost and stammering but she's so very patient and eventually you do.
~~~
You aren’t - haven’t been - aware of how all-over sharp she can be until she
starts touching her way back down you, slowly, earfins scraping at the
underside of your chin when she kisses your neck - her necklaces digging hard
into the tingling-hot skin of your chest, leaving arcs of dotted white like the
marks of blunted teeth - sparks of rebuilding pain so incidental that you’d
overlook them if she didn’t know exactly what she was doing, easing you back
into this. The antiseptic bottle rolls cool against a mark on your hipbone for
a bizarre soothing moment as she hisses in between her teeth, a sound that’s
half a shoosh and half the sharp breath of absolute concentration and there’s a
loop of her hair fisted in one of your hands, cool and coiled-smooth and
keeping your claws from digging into your palm.
You’re coping, in some half-instinctive way, by trying to keep each touch
separate in your head, as she pours the scalding ointment again and kneads at
the coiled-tight muscle on top of your thigh - the caustic healing surface
burn; the way her fingers knead into tight flesh that spasms and aches and
won’t relax; the slow burning warmth of almost wanting her claws, now, that
she’s being so excruciatingly careful not to use them. The ebb as you think
you’re getting used to this; the razor-bright spring tide of pain when she
reaches the soft underside of a knee and the burn goes to a sear and her
fingers pinch hard and expert into a tendon, the whole-body twitch that you
can’t help and the smoldering nerve-endings that the movement reawakens,
writhing against the floor of the ablution trap in search of a scraping, a
digging in that smooth porcelain can’t provide. The sense-memory of the light-
weapon’s glare direct on your skin broadsides you, transmutes into something it
wasn’t nearly during the battle, and you want - you want that again, want the
ceiling to open up and pour down noon-harsh light just for those frantic
moments between exposure and harm, for bones like hot coals and skin vibrated
down to flush and flame. You aren’t even sure that the scorch of the gunfire
hit there but still she’s rubbing liquid pain over the soles of your feet,
scraping up the drips of it with her claws, heels to toes, and that’s it,
you’re groaning out loud with it something wordless and sounding in your own
ears nothing like pain.
You almost can’t tell when she starts using her claws finally, because they’re
so sharp and she’s so slow and meticulous that you barely feel when they go in,
right now with your skin lit up hot and thin and abused every touch feels like
that, but afterward the hard stinging stays, and you breathe through it - you
realize she’s working her way up the sides of your legs, symmetrically, tracing
tiny surface cuts into your skin and each one burns anew with the antiseptic
rubbed all over you - somewhere your breathing turns into moaning, quiet,
rhythmic, uncontrollable, and they don’t fade, you can’t even feel any blood
trickling out, she hasn’t scratched very deep but it’s like she’s setting
signal fires, twin rows of them along your body - up past the knees now and she
slashes longer marks into your thighs and your legs are entirely aflame. You
can’t hold anything separate now and they blur together and it’s magnificent
and still you need more.
You’re suspended, you’re cold all over, despite the burns, except for the
scratches threaded down your legs, you need more and there’s a chill sticky
sheen of worry over the pain that she won’t do it, that she’ll plateau you here
and you won’t - you can’t name it, can’t put it into words that mean places on
your body or things she can say, can’t say wring me out until I start to rip
and expect that to mean anything except in your own malformed twisted-backward
‘pan, you’re whining and tugging at her hair and your bulges are twisting slick
against your own stinging-taut skin and it’s not enough.
She leans in over your shoulder and it should be completely incongruous that
she shooshes you but somehow it isn’t. She works the tiny scratches into your
hips, now, up along the sides of your stomach, even slower and more careful as
she reaches more sensitive skin, and you want - you want to move, to thrash and
pull and grab at her but you also desperately don’t want to risk interrupting
what she’s doing - up toward the ribs, now, and you don’t even notice that your
feet are starting to forget the all-over stinging until she slides her skirt
off and there’s a pause. You let out a ridiculous whimpering noise when she
stops touching you - and then there's a clink as she unhinges the little cuff
anklets and you don’t know why but then she drags her ankles along the tops of
your feet and it’s this entirely new sensation, she’s never taken them off with
you before and her skin there is scraping grit and tiny daggers and it wakes
everything up again. She runs some water into the trap, lukewarm in a way that
would be soothing except that it's like hot metal against the inflamed skin of
your back.
Your whimpering deepens into a startled pain-laced moan and you rub your abused
skin wanton against hers, catching and sticking and feeling like the whole
surface of it could shred and crumple against her, tissue-paper-delicate, crush
and smear over with bruises until you’re nerves all over and she could touch
you anywhere, now, and it would go to straight to your spine as intense, as
trembling hot as a hand on your bulge and you think she knows it.
The claws go higher - slower - drawing it out and gradual and oh, you can feel
each cell as her claws part skin, bit by bit by luxuriant ripped inch and she
doesn't even know it but the time she's giving you over the most sensitive
places, just up by your grubscars and underneath your ribs, is time to think
too hard about it, until bright new hurt layers over itself layers over old
ache, going to stereophonic-resonant shivering all over.
Between you reaching for her and arcing up and mewling loud for it at the back
of your throat you finally, finally get her bulges wrapped around and between
yours and you know her body well enough by now to feel that she’s just as into
this as you are. Somehow that goes straight the base of your spine even more
than the sensation does, that she’s fully unsheathed and the tendrils twine and
twist, press and squeeze and weeping-cold and in every direction at once, each
thin curling frond sliding against you on its own, the colliding and the
crossing-over and the tips of your bulge caught between the flat sensitive tips
of hers and you can never help falling back into this overwhelmed and curling
your fingers around the both of you and trying at once to contain the slick
chaotic all-over touch and press more of it against you. Affirmations come
gasping from your throat lisped to the point of slurring, and you twine your
legs around and between hers, contact and bright startled coolness like
immersion in cold water, exhausted muscles in your back cramping and straining
as you cant your hips up squirming and shameless.
She pauses again, twists up, and unclasps the bracelets from her wrists-- the
sound, itself, goes through you in a spike of wanting, because you know what it
means now and you’re already all-over cold burning, your skin is barely real
and you thought this would be about losing yourself but she makes sure you keep
yourself there, the whole time, staring into your eyes as she scrapes one wrist
sandpaper-hard against the back of your neck, up beneath your ear and the burn
here is hardly bearable as it is, where your bare skin caught the full force of
the light. You hold your breath and clench your hand around your joined bulges
as her shark-rough skin drags over your jawline and up your cheek, her fingers
soothing through your hair as her wrist blazes marks that you know will last, a
thick yellowed scraped-away swath, her hand holding and hurting all at once and
you hang in the balance of it, dug-into clawed-bare open, every movement of her
smooth-rough skin and her tendrils and her breath magnified vibrant and so
closely felt that it’s like she’s peeled some barrier away you didn’t even know
was there, like she’s slipped you whole and trembling-new out of your skin and
beneath her hard silvery gaze you’re flayed pure, carded, shredded, receptive,
begging. “Please” - over and over again, you don’t know how you’re managing
language but you can’t stop saying it and you don’t care how badly you’re
lisping and the shame is gone, burned away and torn up in this - you don’t even
know what you’re begging for, only that she shouldn’t stop.
                 [http://chaosbutterfly.net/files/fefsol.png]
                             (art by mulattafury)
Her face blurs and shifts in your vision, and your mind has to swim slowly
through explanations until you realize that there are overwhelmed tears in the
way and what that means, what she’s done for you, and the salt stings against
the crepe-thin skin at the corners of your eyes as you give in and close them,
as she draws in and presses her wide black mouth against yours. It’s the
slicing of her fangs into your lips as much as it’s the soft sliding of hers,
it’s that when you offer her your tongue to bite her teeth are barely sensible
little pinpricks, delicate and controlled, even as the curling of her bulge
against yours goes faster and squeezes almost hard enough to hurt and one thin
tendril stretches out into you, just one, usually it’s the spread and press of
all of them, pushing and stroking like thin lithe fingers, but this time it
reaches deep and low and your nook strains and clutches at it, that narrow
slippery stimulation making you suddenly aware of how empty you are. It’s so
subtle and so slow and trying to focus on it paradoxically makes everything
else tune in wonderful and scalding and overwhelming and you scream out loud
into her mouth and your bulges thrash against hers in a long, hard, forceful
release that hits you in waves.
You cling to her through it, shuddering, as drifting warmth suffuses through
you under the harsh all-over pain, gauzy and translucent and a last tremor
rocks you and you make soft grateful whimpers into her shoulder and knead with
your fingers at the frondy edges of her bulge and that, that does it for Feferi
- she collapses down heavy against your arm, letting out an unabashed noise
that's half moan and half purr, gasping and squirming as her genetic material
splashes into the water, spreads out around you in a slippery cloud.
And you know it'll pass, the sensation of everything being perfectly all right,
as both of you lie in the water spent and panting and pressed skin to skin; the
illusion will burst and dissolve, won't survive after you open your eyes again.
But the other feeling, like you're finally present in your skin, no longer
locked away from yourself - like you've let out a breath you were holding for
two weeks - just might.
***** Death by Water *****
Chapter Summary
     Strange pulsations and finely honed electric crackles move through
     the enormous mass of grey matter. You wonder if electrocuting the
     giant brain would give the planet a seizure, and then you're not sure
     how you managed to have a thought so simultaneously horrifying and
     inane.
     "Nice duds. I mean, the meninges and all. Pretty classic."
Chapter Notes
     He passed the stages of his age and youth
     Entering the whirlpool.
     --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
You actually drift into sleep for a while, Feferi's comforting weight still
pressing you into the ablution trap; it's a numb doze, shallow like the water,
hypnogogic voices making meaningless noise over a blank backdrop, the barely-
aware passage of time. Not really dreaming.
Until - it's like a dream but it isn't, it flows in familiar-strange and
vertiginous and goes through you and pools in your veins and you're jolting all
over, icy-cold and white-hot, and you gasp out loud - snap eyes open - still
stinging all over, though it's both damped and replaced with a kind of shivery
tingling, and it doesn't feel the kind of good that it felt... however many
minutes before, and you're awake and blinking -
She's staring at you wide-eyed, propped above you. "Oh! Oh my cod! I'm sorry, I
hadn't manta do that -"
"Do...?" You're still groggy, and you pull your head up and rub your eyes - or
start to before you realize the water is filthy, and look at your fingers in
mingled horror and pride instead. That's. Uh. Well. You're both going to need
an actual ablution, to say the least.
FF's still babbling, blinking at you rapidly the way you've learned means she's
nervous - "I was looking at you and I thought wow you're a mess - and I was
thinking aboat, uh, exactly how is tonight going to go, we have to keep
fighting shrimps and you're still injured and I didn't exactly kelp - and I was
touching you and it just happened -"
You lever yourself up in the tub a little, reach over to drain the nasty water
out, look at yourself - yeah, the bright yellow flush where Eridan scorched you
is faded from the skin of your arms and chest, though the cuts Feferi left with
her claws are still there -
"Can I," she says, "can I try and heal you more?"
You've seen her answer game challenges with her life powers - there are things
in the Land of Dew and Glass, trees which must grow branches across to the next
challenge, wounded consorts who tell secrets when they're healed - but you've
managed to avoid injury yourself. Until Eridan happened.
"What the shell, yeah. Go ahead." She giggles delightedly when you use one of
her puns back at her and settles her palms on your chest - concentrates,
fiercely, almost like she did while you were pailing - and you're not quite
prepared for how it feels, sudden and startling and - somehow alien, unnatural,
but not bad, just that the feeling spreading through your veins does not belong
to you, it's like a dimension outside your body suddenly intersecting with it,
like harsh sunlight spearing through cracks in a wall, and you imagine you can
feel cells opening up to receive it, DNA being set to rights like a data solid
being formatted. You remember dying to the Vast Glub and it's distinctly,
familiarly the opposite of that, like an audio track being played in reverse,
and when you gasp and curse out loud you can feel the oxygen permeating through
your airsacs and you open your eyes on fading white afterimages and see marks
closing up on your skin.
"Are you - did I -" Feferi looks down at her hands on your chest with a kind of
resolute wariness, like she's not sure she trusts what just came out of them.
She exhales softly.
"I'm fine," you tell her. "Everything's fine. Let's get clean."
~~~
The imp you've just demolished was huge. Huge and disturbing, shaped at the
edges like something that makes your brain itch in an indescribable way.
Feferi's planet looked more appetizing than yours for a while, but now that
you've gotten a good look, you think you'd rather keep your brains and fire.
Still, the obstacles aren't insurmountable. After she sweated it out for a
while with her 2x3dent, you finally managed to land a precision beam, spearing
through and reducing the monstrous enemy to code and grist, and now FF is
looking at you speculatively. "Your ancestor - did he teach you that?" she
asks, and you remember you were supposed to be talking about him more, and nod,
still feeling odd and shy about the whole thing.
"Astris taught me a lot of things," you say, and then quickly, realizing you
never said - "I gave him that name," and color rises to your cheeks. "He - had
his title, the Psiioniic, but he felt like his wriggling name didn't - quite
belong to him anymore -"
"You say it like you're making a confishion," FF says, quizzical, and you lower
your eyes.
"I kind of feel like I am. I'm not sure I ever had the right." Half proud, half
guilty; it feels like hubris to be proud, but it's something you did for him,
one of the few things you can point to and really feel that you entered his
reality and gave him something back -
"Whale, did he want you to give him a name?" she asks.
"Yes," you say quickly. There's something about the way she talks sometimes: it
feels like she's being impatient at you, but she's not, really, you're starting
to get a feel for that now; she's... you're not sure anything would actually,
legitimately test the patience of Feferi Peixes. It's more... like the trick of
psionics you used to take out the imp, a pinpoint of focus, slicing through
barriers, straight to what she's looking for. It makes you shiver; you're not
certain you could lie when she's like this, not because of force or pressure
but because it would simply feel too bad.
"Then of course you had the right. "
"I just." She sees through you, and suddenly, you see through yourself, through
your protestations of inadequacy, and realize - "But really I was scared.
Scared to ask the questions - scared to look deeper - scared to figure out if I
could do more, because if I could -" You remember moments in the dimness,
avenues of questioning closed off. The way he let you off the hook; the way you
allowed him to. And you did the thing he wanted most, anyway, at the very end;
but you did it because of Aradia and because of fate and because of your
voices, as much as anything else, you were not his weapon, only Doom's; and
your eyes fill with tears. "It's not even that I know what I could have done,
it's that I don't - because I hesitated, always, because I didn't truly believe
- oh, god, what is coming out of my squawk gaper, I sound like a wrigglers'
show - but I didn't believe I could -"
"Sollux." Feferi catches your face in her hands, turns your chin to her and
cradles vine-soft and iron-strong - "We are young." And when she says we you
realize she's thought about this before, the weight of the burdens she could
take up - could have, before the world ended - "You would have arrived at it
when you were ready. I just min-now it. You can think aboat a fin and plan
toward it without making it happen right now., and you would have realized that
too."
"I know that, though, that's obvious, I just -"
"- hold yourshellf to higher standards than anyguppy else?" she interjects,
just playful enough to catch you off-guard, and and there's that inescapable
thing again; you know she's right, you can't look away from it, and tears spill
down your cheeks and she presses her hands to your face like they were made to
go there. Made for other things, too, you think; made to rule, to coax and to
strike -
"But I need to," you manage, "nobody else can, and when I think of that -"
It's too much, it's just too much, and she whispers, "I understand," and you
know as certain as death that she does, and you wish you'd known her before the
game - you would have had something to talk about then, too, helped each other
bear up under the weight -
You cover her strong cool hand with yours, warmer and somehow softer than hers,
differently textured, and you don't want to name what's taking shape, only
something is, undeniably, and you lean against her grateful for a moment that
stretches timeless and soft before the next battle begins.
 
~~~
Your own planet is getting weirder and weirder. Or maybe it's your head. You
suspect by the end you won't know the difference. Ha ha, brains and fire, so
ironic.
FF has gone back to deal with the Land of Dew and Glass; unlocking the last
parts of the path to the Denizen is always tailored to the skills and
weaknesses of the individual player, and it's safer for her and you both to go
it alone. Every so often you check in with her on your - you've gotten into the
habit of calling it a shell phone, her oceanic puns keep rubbing off on you -
Right now you're following a stream through a narrow cavernous tunnel, the
walls bone-pale and coated in weird branchy membrane, the water clear but oddly
warm, salty to the taste and slippery on your fingers. A kind of faint
thrumming pulse vibrates through the membrane every so often, like a very slow
heartbeat. It's a long route, but it's safer than taking the final gate
directly to Ananke's lair.
You have a bit of an edge in these matters, both from game code and from the
lore you've picked up on Derse and Prospit; though you wouldn't have chosen for
yourself to participate in their intrigues, your ability to access both realms
means that people keep asking you to carry messages and sneak around on their
behalf. Probably about two thirds of the other players owe you favors at this
point. It's not so bad.
The road is long and tiring to walk; you're saving your powers for the
confrontation, and when you see the distance widening to a rounded, slightly
triangular aperture, you know you're getting close. A kind of electric tension
runs through the air here; or maybe it's just the effort of keeping your
psionics contained. You're tired, but you're pushing forward. The sooner you
make it through, the better.
Through thin membranous layers into the stifling closeness of the round cavern
-
Strange pulsations and finely honed electric crackles move through the enormous
mass of grey matter. The air around you is humid and sweltering, and you're
wishing you had just gone through the portal, if only so you could scuttle back
out of here once you're finished with whatever it is you've come here to do.
The denizen confrontations are strangely obfuscated in the code, governed by
algorithms of which you can't predict the outputs. It'll be a matter of life or
death, you know that much. It might or might not be a battle. You wonder if
electrocuting the giant brain would give the planet a seizure, and then you're
not sure how you managed to have a thought so simultaneously horrifying and
inane.
"Nice duds. I mean, the meninges and all. Pretty classic." You're babbling,
tired from your surreal journey, and you have no clue how it's going to try to
communicate back. Because you do know that much; the denizens are always
supposed to talk before they try to kill you, if they do try to kill you.
Then something gropes toward you feather-thin and faintly electric. You try to
lash out, but it snares the back of your neck before you can move.
Sollux Captor, it says. Hero of Doom. Now we speak.
It's pouring words into your thinkpan like you would pour mind honey into a
jar, direct, immediate, and there's a sense in those words like the thing it's
describing has already happened. Now we speak. Yes, we do.
The voice is like a chorus of voices, some of them in languages you know you
don't know but somehow comprehend anyway, each contributing syllables, weaving
in and out of clarity. It feels like going mad.
You're trying to articulate a question, something like How does this go - when
it overrides you and answers before you're even done thinking of it.
You ask me questions, and I give you answers pertaining to the dead, and what
you choose will decide who is dead.
There's something about that which nags at you. Not decide who dies but decide
who is dead - but it's lost in the disorientation and rage at having thoughts
poured into your head, talking over your own; it's like what Vriska did and it
makes your spine crawl and you almost throw the weird outreaching synapse off
before you remember that strifing with your denizen is probably a bad idea if
you have another option -
"It's really fucking obnoxious," you say. "To think over me like that. Can you
at least let me speak out loud first?" - and realize that Ananke is probably
the sort of entity that takes things overly literally, and clarify, "Will you,
please?"
- and realize that you have an answer in its patient silence, that it knew -
"...If you knew I would ask that, why were you - never mind. Fate stuff. Fuck.
Okay."
Then you cut to the point, because it's all you can see- "How do we die?" But
the Denizen doesn't answer. Something like laughter bubbles in through your
nerves. You wait, decide it's not going to cough it up, and finally ask, "Do we
win?"
Oh, yes, Mage of Doom, you win, Ananke says, mocking, and a chill runs down
your spine. If you accept your doom, you are doomed to win.
"If."
If, it confirms.
"...but I've never heard a voice and then someone lived - not to my knowledge,
anyway. You can't change fate, you can't escape doom - it doesn't - it doesn't
work that way." You're hanging onto the comfort of hearing your own voice in
the alienating weirdness of the humid pulsing skull-cavern.
The road goes where it goes, but there are other roads.
Except where it - she? - says are what you actually hear is a word that doesn't
exist, some composite of meaning from shreds of is and was and will-be and is-
not, and roads suggests a parallel of quantum states and you realize that in
all realities the amount of sideways skittery hoofbeastshit your brain is doing
trying to track this conversation is going to give you a massive headache.
"You're telling me - that the things I've already seen don't have to happen.
That what I thought was absolute is - not mutable exactly but that I can evade
it."
Yours, as the hero of Doom, comes the sly voice into your mind: to choose your
doom or the doom of your doom. Every player gets a choice. That is yours.
"But there's a catch."
To refuse one set of consequences is to embrace another, Ananke says. Passivity
is also action. Everything has a price, an invisible exchange.
"What do I have to do to win your grist?" You're keenly aware that you're going
to be one of the last to solve your planet, because you were the last to enter
the Medium, and even with Feferi keeping pace with you for solidarity, it's not
like she got in much earlier.
Find the key, Ananke says.
"The key." She doesn't repeat herself - you're thinking of Ananke as she even
though giant brain, right, because that kind of effortless self-composed power
- "Is this some kind of, oh right, it is some kind of glorified video game, you
might as well call it the macguffin -"
But it is a key, she says, at once.
"Like literally. A key."
Yes.
"Like, piece of metal or plastic, goes in a door, really?" You know sarcastic
tone isn't enough to get you killed here, because you don't get killed here.
Small mercies of knowing your fate.
No. It is a key.
And no matter how you rant from that point on, Ananke is silent.
~~~
You dig through everything you have on your palmhusk, all your meticulous notes
on the game, on words and themes that appear in the code and the comments: no
dice. No mention of keys. Something is nagging at the back of your mind and
you're trying to identify it, but you're too exhausted, and once or twice catch
your mind drifting into half-sleep. Scraps of voices, no, the echoes of voices,
rippling backward instead of forward in time - and you're trying to make out
what they're saying -
Finally, defeated by your own body, you walk back out of the cavern and look
for a place to curl up and rest. There's no sopor here and no dreamspace and
you can barely make any kind of pile with the contents of your sylladex, random
junk, t-shirts and data solids and some grist you captchalogued just to see
what would happen; you curl yourself into as small of a space as possible on
top of the meagre assemblage, nestled into a divot in the fleshy wall. But it's
been too long, and sleep hits like a transit conveyance with the brakes cut
anyway.
You dream:
You dream of flying.
Mass and acceleration, trajectory and timing -
At first it seems like - any old lead-up to a jump, the calculations and the
movement - but everything is dragging, everything is so difficult - you're
working through a mental fog, dazed and migraine-pained, every tiny adjustment
so difficult, focusing through thick roaring head-noise, and at first don't
understand why -
You reach for auxiliary power and find a blank. Reach for computation banks to
shuck off some of the cognitive load and nothing.
There's nothing to amplify you, nothing but your own powers, strong as they
might be but still meager in the face of what they have to move - and you're
not him you're you and, disorienting, disjoint from context, you don't
understand why you have to be a starship and why you can't see - not that you
need to see with your eyes, the reverberations of your psionics locate you in
space, everything felt in intense proprioceptive outline, rock and atmosphere-
bubble and the cold that threatens from outside - TZ and KK behind you and an
enormous power source ahead of you and where the hell is Feferi-
and your head hurts so much, hot like molten iron, something is wrong wrong
wrong and you know this and at the same time it's only Doom, it's only the
known, the foregone conclusion -
Jolting awake, in between, and turning over, the jagged stuttering thin sleep
without sopor and without anyone to hold, but still you close your eyes again
because you need the rest -
You sleep again and dream this time of Aradia, alive and winged and
luminescent, singing to you softly, but you can't make out the words -
You wake and can't return to sleep again, begin tooling around with your
palmhusk to ease you into wakefulness, checking messages - decrypting -
- of course. Duh. Obviously. How did you miss that before, anyway? It should
have been obvious what kind of key Ananke needed, only you were too tired and
dazed from the long strange walk. You pore through the code notes again, and
this time, it doesn't take you long to find reference to another Land, now that
you know what you're looking for.
The problem is that what you're looking for doesn't actually exist, not in the
alpha timeline. And there's only one way to get at that sort of nonexistent
thing.
Time to troll AA.
TA: ii'm contactiing you on a hunch, let'2 2kiip the hoofbea2t2hiit thii2
tiime.
TA: can you do a thiing for me wiith one of your crazy tiime dupliicate robot2?
AA: y0u mean it is time t0 tell y0u ab0ut the d00med timelines where i wasted
my denizen enc0unter 0n asking stupid questi0ns
TA: ...iif they haven't happened, how do you remember them?
TA: never miind, don't an2wer that.
AA: it is 0k
AA: i w0uld prefer if y0u did n0t understand this yet anyway
AA: it makes y0ur ch0ice easier
TA: ii don't know what you're talkiing about and iit'2 alarmiing me a liittle,
but my braiin ii2 pooped the fuck out from talkiing two ak.
TA: 2he'2 liike a walkiing miigraiine, except wiithout the walkiing.
TA: becau2e 2he ii2 a giiant braiin iin the miiddle of braiin2viille.
TA: iit'2 kiind of a joke, my planet ii2 a fuckiing braiin theme park liike iif
troll walt dii2ney had a central nervou2 2y2tem fetii2h.
TA: 2o how'2 the weather on LOQAM, oh waiit ii bet iit'2 0k.
AA: yes it is
TA: the lea2t you could do ii2 try not to ruiin ALL my punchliine2.
AA: really
AA: because i th0ught what y0u wanted was the inf0rmati0n i g0t fr0m my denizen
TA: were you ju2t beiing 2narky wiith me.
AA: i d0nt kn0w
AA: i guess s0
TA: ...wow. thank2, ii gue22.
AA: anyway as y0u pr0bably kn0w
AA: i 0nly remember this because 0f the inherent flexibility 0f time f0r me as
c0mpared t0 0ther players
AA: because the act 0f asking the questi0n d00med the timeline in which i asked
it
TA: waiit, hold up a miinute here, ii2 receiiviing the an2wer goiing two doom
my tiimeliine?
AA: n0
AA: it 0nly d00med mine because it meant i c0uld n0t pr0ceed thr0ugh the
denizen enc0unter n0rmally
AA: because asking the questi0n effectively inv0ked a glitch that made my
denizen h0stile and unkillable
AA: f0rtunately after remembering 0ne instance 0f this d00med timeline i was
able t0 time events s0 that y0u c0uld access the err0r message
It's weird thinking of a doomed-timeline version of yourself, and downright
unpleasant realizing that you were responsible for her death again - no, don't
think about that, shut up Sollux brain go home.
AA: it referred t0 line 005732 in the game c0de
Code, now, that's always something good to think about. You think you remember
the section that's from, and it's one of those oddly self-referential pieces
that don't seem to connect to anything but are nonetheless necessary for
everything else to run smoothly -
- and yes, there's a comment on it that - well. You'll be damned. That could be
an encryption key, all right. It's the right bit length for it and it doesn't
seem to serve any other purpose, and you hadn't noticed it before because SGRUB
code comments are, as a rule, downright arcane.
TA: thank2, ii really appreciiate thii2.
AA: 0k
If only she would say something - no, fuck this line of thought and the
hoofbeast it rode in on. You have bigger brains to deal with than your own.
You're pretty sure the comment has the key you're looking for, and if you're
wrong, well, that's just another doomed timeline, right? It has a bunch of
other stuff, too - something that looks like an encrypted message, but when you
try to decrypt it with the key, it turns up garbage.
Well, you can look at that again later. Right now you're getting to your feet,
brushing off stickiness from the wall where you've been curled up, shoving
things back into your sylladex. Ananke is waiting, and you step through the
aperture.
The enormous synapse stretches out to you again, and you're prepared this time
when it tingles into contact.
The key, Ananke says. And you think of the key. It's not terribly long; all of
this code is so ancient, and you've always found it easy to remember sequences
in binary. You begin reciting it in your mind, ones and zeroes. Realize, as you
do, that it's slotting into place somehow, like data entered into a program -
like there's something encrypted that it's about to decrypt -
- and breathlessly, as you finish the sequence and the cavern around you
pixellates, unravels into messy blocks of light, you realize too that the game
code making up Ananke herself was in the form of encrypted data, so neatly
disguised it is - was - like a palindrome, and you're decrypting her,
shattering her into brilliant faceted chunks of grist.
You stand and survey the results, and all you can think is that you are so very
relieved the realism of the grey-matter theme did not extend to what happened
when your denizen chunked.
In what's probably the most 'current' of KK's memos - that time-transcendence
feature is more trouble than it's worth sometimes - you leave a line.
TA: ii got the grii2t hoard, you can 2tart the alchemy party now.
***** What the Thunder Said *****
Chapter Summary
     "He knows the future. He has premofishions." Feferi's fins flare as
     she turns to face Karkat, wide-eyed urgent behind her goggles, and
     another blackish cube drips off the end of her 2x3-dent and
     disappears as she gestures – "He never says anyfin unless it's
     important, for glub's sake listen to him!"
Chapter Notes
     I have heard the key
     Turn in the door once and turn once only
     We think of the key, each in his prison
     Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
     --T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Aradia dies and she dies and she dies, and you can't do anything about it: she
made it that way; Time made it that way.
She dies and she dies and every time you hate yourself a little more for not
caring. She dies gloriously, throwing out nets of sparks that unite to form a
vast protective umbra, and still there are more of her robotic ghost-selves.
Each halo of psychic force only lasts seconds against the shockwave and each
time another of her pops into being, an infinity of metallic time-clones, none
of which understand you the way Aradia did once, lining up to sacrifice herself
again and again for everyone, but it's not about her, you have no doubt she'd
throw any of the rest of you into the fray if that was necessary -
In death she twists death to her purpose, becomes a fireworks display, a giant
fuck you into the aether.
And she dies and she dies, and you don't.
You're sickly conscious of what a near thing it is, how paper-thin your mind
and body would be against the Black King if you were on the front lines,
because the edge of that murmuring frequency still hits in lapping waves
through the shield Aradia makes and you know the sound of death like no one
else here does, know the sound of your own death, of winking out like a blown
transistor, falling blood-choked and graceless and insensible.
And right now you've done as much as you can in battle: made quite a dent in
the overgrown chessman, throwing meteors back at him, but your head is
throbbing, overheated and overspent, and you're sitting on the platform inside
the shield trying to recover; TZ snuck up behind you the last time you had to
come down and catch your breath, and hissed "I smell singed lookstubs, STOP
before they run down your face like appleberry jam," and you think it was
hyperbole but it coincided too closely with the premonitory wisp, it isn't your
time yet, not yet - but even knowing that, it still makes you feel worthless,
and so you're digging through screens of code on your husktop to distract
yourself, trying to check and double-check and make sure all of you have
everything right -
"What is mister grumpy doing anyway?"
You look up with a start. You're pretty damn good at tuning out distractions.
Terezi Pyrope is literally looming over your shoulder, sniffing, and before you
can stop her she licks your screen. Great. Now it's all smeary, and you can
barely make out the lines of code.
"Where does the loop start?" she asks, without preamble.
"What the shit do you mean, TZ? It's a loop. Loops don't start or end anywhere;
they loop." But something's nagging at the back of your head as you say it.
That odd timestamp...
"But isn't ~ATH code always hooked to endings?"
"If you think I'm sitting here giving myself a migraine off the stray harmonics
leaking from Derse Dude's cut-rate Glub out there so I can give you tech
support -"
"As a very wiseass troll once told me, calm your rumble spheres. I'm tryingto
do the Seer Thing." Terezi contorts her face into an almost farcically serious
expression and blocks your view of your husktop entirely then, scrolling the
touchscreen with her nose.
"Hey! Last I checked that was my husktop. As in not yours. As in just you wait
until you hit one of the booby traps -" This section is gibberish anyway; you
have no idea what she's even getting out of her snooping.
"I'm not going to, dummy. They all smell like sulfur and ozone." She gets out
of the way, though. "So if a loop doesn't start or end anywhere, is that the
same thing as saying it starts and ends everywhere?"
"I guess," you say, kind of distracted. You were trying to re-read the code
governing the win conditions, and she somehow managed to hit a key somewhere
that sent you to a completely different section -
Hey, wait, this is the section you were thinking of just now, about Prospit and
Derse and the algorithm that generates their prophecies.
You'll be damned. The code comment timestamp has changed and now it's giving
today's date - using game-time notation in addition to the Alternian calendar,
as if to rub it in your face. And the comment itself has changed, too. In
addition to what was there before, now there's...
...a block of something encrypted.
It doesn't take much to arrive at the hunch that this encrypted chunk of code
comment has something to do with the other encrypted chunk of code comment. You
try pasting them together in both possible orders, but the key doesn't make
sense of them until you string one of the comments back to front, and use an
operator at the end that loops it with the other. Then everything decrypts just
fine. Fucking SGRUB code.
And once you do that, you can read it plain as day. The comments are,
themselves, a piece of code.
More specifically, they're a game modification: a patch, a hack.
"You smell like sudden flabbergasted discovery," TZ says.
"I'm not flabbergasted," you protest. "I'm just. Interested. I found a hidden
bit of code."
"What does it do?"
You're still trying to figure that out, but you don't want to say so. "It
modifies the game," you say. It's beginning to take shape in your mind, there's
a bit that makes a portal open up and drills through reality, you're kind of
used to that by now; but the most daunting part of it is the part that's
supposed to reset all the loops to a set point - you're not even sure that's
possible, like TZ just said, a loop starts or ends anywhere it pleases, and how
would it - but there's a line substitution in here, and -
- wait, this is madness, one of the things it's patching is your mobius double
reacharound virus, how, this code was written millennia before you ever -
There's a pressure change in the air, and Aradia's robot selves start to change
formation like faraway flying mechanical ants. And you see Feferi coming back,
Feferi who's the front-line fighter against the Black King because of her
immunity to horrorterror psychic noise: for a moment you wonder if all is lost,
but no, of all of you she is the least mussed, nearly impeccable, and there's
pixellated gore on her 2x3dent.
"I think we've won," Feferi says, "I think we krilled him," and a blunted
shockwave rumbles through - a front of doomed-timeline Aradias crumble under
the force, and the next line takes up the shield - and around you the others
are taking notice, starting to argue or celebrate -
But you hear - like an echo, at first, like you're hearing them twice except
they're not saying the same things, you hear them.
Faintly approaching like the noise of distant engines, so quiet you'd usually
miss it completely except that there's barely anyone else to listen to, you
hear the voices of the people around you.
"If there were a prize awarded for accurately guessing the one troll here who
would have his neural meatpile jammed so far up his nook that he wouldn't
notice we'd won," KK says, "I would be rolling in so much grist right now that
I would level up to gristillionnaire. Who pissed on your stack of sopor pies,
is what I want to know."
"That's not a level and I think you're confusing me with GZ," you answer,
staring distracted into the distance - no, his voice definitely isn't redoubled
the way the others are -
Nepeta and Equius and Tavros and Vriska and Eridan and Feferi, oh, god, Feferi,
and your own thin and thready and exhausted in the distance -
A faint buzz of noise, so quiet you can barely make out - arguments and
whispering and mundane indignities, giving no hint of the cause, making you
wonder if you're imagining it - No, making you try to justify the thought that
you're imagining it, so you won't have to speak up, won't have to face this.
But you know, you always know the difference - back on Alternia you could
probably have been culled for attempting to explain the distinct frequency
difference between an auditory hallucination and the voices of the doomed, like
some kind of bizarre pompous thinkpan-noise connoisseur, but it's there and
it's real.
And Feferi promised she'd believe you.
"We can't win," you say out loud.
"We did win, you miserable moody chute-huffing gloomsack -"
"No. That's not what I mean. We have to -" You're doing that thing again, the
thing where you stumble over words because you're sure no one will believe you.
Feferi promised, and she's looking at you now, sharp-eyed and expectant, and
you raise your voice and try to modulate it to something other people could
take seriously. "Incoming fucking transmission, okay. If we win, a lot of us
will die. This isn't going as planned."
"What do you mean - all the time I spent bailing water off Kanaya's planet and
frogsitting -" Karkat complains.
You're remembering things your denizen said to you, doomed to win and your doom
or the doom of your doom and you're compiling code as they speak over your head
-
"He knows the future. He has premofishions." Feferi's fins flare as she turns
to face Karkat, wide-eyed urgent behind her goggles, and another blackish cube
drips off the end of her 2x3-dent and disappears as she gestures – "He never
says anyfin unless it's important, for glub's sake listen to him!"
"But we're on the verge of entering a new universe, one that, I might add, I
sweated for, I bred frogs until my eyes crossed and my horns turned inside out
-" You almost say not that anyone would notice, KK but you're trying to focus,
between the voices in your head and making sure you're not skipping any steps,
and you're not going to get into it with him right now. "And now you're saying
it's never going to exist."
"And what, you'd rather everyone die?" FF says sharply -
- compiled, your finger hovering, and you remember the spectre of a white-
haired hornless girl, saying, You can flip the chessboard, and you know it'll
be too late if you wait for everyone to decide. You have to act unilaterally.
You run the file.
The thing that appears in the air is luminous, a crack in the world, shaped
like one of the Gates that link your worlds except inverted, the fine tracery
of circles lining a tunnel through space and time, the webwork of points turned
out, and a cold wind blows across the face of the platform.
Terezi prods at the edge of the shape with the base of her cane – the arcs and
points hover unchanged in midair – and finally breaks the silence. "It smells
like retroactive continuity," she says.
"What the globeslurping fresh hell is that supposed to mean," Karkat says.
The others are returning from the front line as you speak. The first of
Aradia's robot selves - you think she must be the one from the alpha timeline
by the way the others look at her, but you're not sure - touches down and faces
the portal and then turns to you -
A metal hand on your shoulder, like she means to pap you and doesn't know how,
and you think you stop breathing for a moment -
"It would have been good," she says in her metallic, distant voice, "but not
worth it." And you open your mouth to speak, not sure what you're going to say,
but then she lifts off, thrusters crackling, and flies through the portal.
Another one of her follows, then another, and you're all left watching the
stream of Aradiabots disappearing through the weird recursion-hole in game
reality.
Equius speaks up then in his booming baritone. You hadn't realized he was back.
"Where she goes," he says, "I will follow." You hadn't realized he was back. He
looks like a poster for some second-rate Trollbarians! game grub that can't
decide whether it's meant to be self-insertion or fanservice, sweating through
a torn shirt with his normally impeccable hair mussed, and you normally kind of
resent him but right now you're just glad to see the consensus shifting. Feferi
has come to stand next to you and caught you by the wrist.
"And here I thought you were going to ask me to order you around," Karkat
grumbles, and EQ looks poleaxed.
Nepeta is darting up behind him, her bloody artificial claws retracting with a
wicked snick. "What's yowl this?"
Feferi presses your wrist as she answers. "It's a change of plans."
"That we're still debating over," KK says, but he sounds uncertain.
"There isn't much time," you say out loud. You feel something in the air - no,
something in your head, call it what it is; but you're sure of it, and now that
you've spoken up you're not going to back down -
"Well, friendleader," Feferi says to Karkat, "stop carping and lead us, you
know everyfin you need to -" while at the same time Nepeta is saying to him, "I
go where my meowrail goes, please, let's not split up the clowder -"
"Fine, let's go," Karkat says, "but if everything goes to rancid mammoth
droppings it will be forever on record that we did it on the advice of this
walking warped data solid," and glares at you, and you think for a moment that
he's going to go on a tangent airing your romantic dirty laundry with him but
he doesn't.
The parade of Aradiabots flying through slows to a trickle and finally one last
half-broken timeclone throws herself in, leaving the portal full of whistling
empty dark.
Eridan wanders in from the edge of the group, still trying to act like he's
preoccupied with cleaning that ridiculous fucking harpoon gun - it's not
pointed at you, thank god - and glares into the gateway as if the Aradiabots'
choice makes the prospect of following even more distasteful to him.
"I don't believe this," ED says, drawling out the V in that weird way he has.
"I'm not gonna give up everything we worked for because this dirtscrapin
mustardblood meddler of a wwannabe engineer says MMFFFF-"
Karkat just stretches his arm up and shoves Eridan's ugly hipster scarf in his
mouth. He yanks on the seadweller's hand, and it can't possibly be simple
physical strength that pushes him through the portal, maybe sheer startlement,
but ED trips and rolls through and vanishes, with KK following just behind.
Equius ducks through the portal and Nepeta takes a running leap close on his
heels. Kanaya watches them and leans toward Terezi, flicking her eyes toward
you – "So you really See...?" Terezi nods, but Kanaya still hesitates; starts
to lock her chainsaw in her sylladex but instead holds it braced in one hand as
she steps through.
"Heh, I don't see whyyyyyyyy everyone believes you," Vriska says, bending over
your head as if she's telling a secret, but loud and obnoxious as ever. "You're
just trying to keep the new universe for yourself, am I right? But I'm onto
you. Well! At least those losers are gone. Hey, Pupa! Looks like we get to
split the spoils!" She attempts to loom over Tavros. He propels his hoverchair
up a notch, leaving her staring at his chin. "And maybe some for you, too,
Pyrope. Just like old times. Go on, the rest of you get out of here, the jig is
up." Terezi seems equally unimpressed.
You'd like to shove a wave of force into her stupid smirking face, but you're
avoiding that because you're not sure if her mind control would work on you
right now. Feferi glares at Vriska and hisses. It's a frightening sound even if
you're not the target, layered with frequencies that hurt to hear, and you
wince and rub your temples. "Shore-ry," she whispers to you. "But she's at
least got one fin right. We'd betta get out of here."
"I'm not sure if the portal will stay open after I bring my husktop through, so
I'm not leaving until everyone else is gone," you tell FF, quietly, the
explanation you don't owe to Vriska.
Feferi draws herself up to the fullness of her still-small height and speaks in
a voice that rings like a bell. "We may not know where this portal will lead,
but the alternative will get some of us krilled! Our race is small enough as it
is. I speak not because I would have led that race, once, but from the desire
to preserve it. Time is short." As she speaks the crashing death throes of the
Black King are fading to a faint susurrus. "Sollux knows the cod of this game
betta than anyone else. Go forward now. Or get your wrasse out of the way."
Vriska makes a big show of bored applause. "Oh, pep talks now! Please. Wait,
you always were fond of those. Maybe because you don't have snazzier ways to
influence people."
Terezi looks sad for a moment, then grins. "Smell you on the other side," she
says, squares her shoulders and vanishes through the portal.
"I'm not all up and thinking I'm the smartest one here, Tavbro," Gamzee says,
"but it would be a motherfuckin' shame to miss out on whatever new miracle
everyone is getting on to seeing, is how I feel it. Yeah?"
"Uh. Yeah," Tavros says, a lot more seriously, and, "You first." You privately
think that is clever of him: GZ could get lost in his own recuperacoon.
The highblood gives a big silly grin and rolls his shoulders in a shrug, and
then grabs the pointy front end of Tavros' hoverchair. "Got your nose!" He tugs
Tavros in after him.
And then it's you and Feferi and Vriska.
 
You don't know exactly what will happen to Vriska if she doesn't step through
with the rest of you. The temporospatial hole should go through to a different
iteration of the universe, you know that much - will there be a Vriska there,
if not this one?
You're not inclined to care too much. Voices are doing a strange thing now,
simultaneously present and absent, like the continuity lines that draw them to
you have been disrupted, but now you're hearing all three of the people present
including yourself, and the context is rapid-changing scrambling like the hack
is glitching something about this timeline. You need to get out of here, and
you're starting to recognize it in your gut as well as in your head. "FF, let's
go," you hiss.
"You don't have to do this," she's saying to Vriska. "I'm not clamming that I
pike you, but you don't deserve to be left behind -"
"You're just too cluckbeast to lead!" Vriska says. "Buck-aw, buck-aw! God, it's
soooooooo obvious. Go on and run away with the rest of these suckers if you're
so determined. I'm not going to pass up the chance to be the sole god of a new
universe." She flips her hair and turns away, resolute. There's a last
murmuring rumble of wrongness and the fallen Black King finally goes,
literally, dead silent.
A crack splinters thunderous through the air, and across the platform the door
to a new universe is glimmering into existence. A timer in your head counts
down precious seconds. And you grab Feferi's hand.
Vriska is still cackling, now behind your back. You ignore her and dive through
the inside-out spirograph with Feferi just as the scent of ozone rises and the
fabric of reality starts to waver where you are - where you were, because now
you're - you're -
- you're waking up.
Chapter End Notes
     INTERMISSION OVER! And if we never have to wrangle a Hivebent
     timeline again it'll be too soon. Next up, Wires and Stars:
     Consummation should start posting in a week or two. THE STORY MOVES
     ON!
     Meanwhile, remember, comments are the manna of the gods, and keep us
     going through barren deserts.
     Also: do you have a fantroll? Are you planning (or have you already
     done) fanart or other fanworks for or related to Wires and Stars?
     Your_fantroll_can_be_in_our_story! - more than that, we really need
     'em for all kinds of bit characters who will be working on the
     periphery to help or hinder the protagonists. So please let us know
     if you want to participate, and we'll have a submission form up
     shortly!
     (If you've done art for us and don't have a fantroll, please let us
     know if you want to give away your fantroll cameo and we'll find a
     good home for it.)
End Notes
     Hopefully the summary, and Chapter 17 of Initiation, answer any
     driving questions you might have about what's going on with the state
     of the universe, at least in a general sense.
     But if not, remember you can feel free to ask us at any time - in
     comments here, or privately on our Tumblrs.
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
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