Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/816591.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      F/F
  Fandom:
      Homestuck
  Relationship:
      The_Condesce/The_Handmaid
  Character:
      The_Condesce, The_Handmaid
  Additional Tags:
      Alternian_History, Anachronistic_Relationships, Black_Romance,
      Breathplay, also_non_erotic_suffocation/drowning, implied_sexual_slavery,
      gillplay/gill_trauma, basically_lots_of_unpleasant_shit
  Collections:
      The_Ladystuck_Blind_Darkfic_Challenge
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-05-25 Words: 2674
****** at the end of all things (or possibly the beginning) ******
by bramblePatch
Summary
     Sometimes the Handmaid doesn't want to deal with the Condesce.
     But only sometimes.
You like her best, you think, when she is small.
She is never particularly small, at least not at any point where you bother
with her; her line runs tall and broad and strong and even at seven sweeps,
scrambling over the rocks along the shore as carefree as the likes of her can
ever be, she is more of a woman than some trolls are in their entire lives.
But she has not yet mastered the condescension that will later be her entire
identity. And she has not learned to hate and fear you in quite the way she
will.
When you are young, during those first few trips through time unaccompanied
when you think maybe you can slip away by yourself and no one will care, you
seek her out because you are curious. You are very young yourself; this may be
the closest in age the two of you ever are. Perhaps two sweeps' difference –
you're not sure exactly how old you are. It's hard to keep track, torn loose
from time, and even when you were very young you never knew exactly how old you
were. Wriggling days, Doc Scratch told you coldly when you asked, were for
people who hatched.
Here and now, she's just barely seven sweeps old, an occasion marked, no doubt,
with great aplomb by her terrifying but doting lusus. Her childhood is too
early for tales of your wrath to have permeated Alternian society, and although
you know who she grows to be, if you really try you can pretend that this
Meenah is the same girl who features in the tales Doc told you when you were
younger.
She is too proud to be skittish of you, you scrawny lowblood still ill at ease
in your own skin after your final bout of metamorphesickness, even if you
already tower over her and your skin is limned with a glimmer of power that
still makes you feel unclean. She is too proud, but she is smart enough to be
wary. She greets you as a friend but her grins are too sharp and she won't let
you touch her. You think that's ok. You wouldn't know what to do with
unreserved friendship.
“Demoness,” she says – when she calls you a demoness, there's almost a note of
approval there, like being an eternal demonic creature damned to spread chaos
and suffering though time and space is something to be admired – “Tell me a
story.”
“Demoness,” she says – she never asks how you know her name, and she never asks
for anything to call you but Demoness – “Bring me a present.”
“Demoness,” she says – you wonder if maybe later, when the system of adult
names is imposed that fits with how you are already called anyway, it will be
because she thinks of you – “I like you better than the other one. The older
one. I'm gonna cull her next time I see her.”
You know she won't, she couldn't, but you wonder what you will do that she
would say that.
 
You're punished for that excursion, of course.

She is in her prime, supreme, undisputed ruler of Alternia and the better part
of this arm of the galaxy, and she is very, very angry.
Not at you. It is almost nice to see her angry at something other than you,
except that you are equally enraged by the circumstances that have drawn her
ire, if for somewhat different reasons. You don't want to intervene here. You
want to let her burn herself to a husk from her own impotent rage, you want her
to be unsure of her rule, a sitting duck for the next tyrian who fights her way
out of the breeding caverns.
But history is fragile here, and the time-space continuum is not forgiving,
especially in cases that involve interlopers like the two of you. She is no
accident of spawning that can be allowed to eliminate herself in a fit of
pique, as much as you'd like to watch her go down in flames. So you go as you
are bid, and seek her out. You know your own fury is writ plain in every tense
line of your body, in the quickened shimmer of sickening colors.
There is a very small window of history where you can be safe, where you can
slip beyond the ken of your keeper, where you belong. And she's cut it short –
as you always knew she did, time is not precisely sequential for you. But -
But how dare she, here and now, be angry at what the rebellion has forced her
hand to, when she has just ordered the deaths of the only trolls who will have
ever been able to offer you any degree of shelter? You cannot safely approach
the only other troll in history to wield the powers of the Void; the short time
in which the Sgrub players live is too precarious. And even if you could seek
refuge with the boy, he wouldn't have Darkleer's grudging compassion, any more
than the other Breath paradox clone will have Skyblade's casual bravado. You
think you have a few more encounters with those men, from your perspective, but
not many. The time when Mindfang drags you all together by force of personality
is so brief.
The Condesce and her forces have made certain of that.
If you dared, you'd rend the Battleship Condescension to scrap and let her and
all her people flop and suffocate and freeze. You'd break her, tear her, impale
her; you'd – you'd do anything but what you actually have to do now.
Which is get her to get her goddamn act together and move on.
You flicker into the proper time on the bridge of her flagship just as she's
reached the shreiking and throwing things stage; you think she was more
dignified as a child. A thousand sweeps of rule has done nothing for her
temperament.
As you appear, you snatch – what is that, a bracelet? She must be really put
out, if she's resorting to throwing her jewelry at things – from midair, which
has the twofold effect of getting her attention and also keeping the heavy gold
bangle from beaning the Helmsman.
(You remember his name, too, of course, but you don't care to use it while he
hangs, insensate for the moment, in the psiobionic array.)
You crumple the heavy loop of gold in your hand with a bright flicker of color,
and stare her down, waiting a long moment for the Condesce's wordless snarling
at your sudden appearance to resolve into actual language. It doesn't.
Finally, your own small supply of patience runs out and you fling the ruined
bangle back at her. “Would you shut the actual thrice-damned fuck up?”
She bats it out of the air but at least she does, in fact, shut up.
“What is wrong with you?” you demand. “You've won, you heinous bitch! What
possible excuse do you have to be upset now?”
“Won?” she snarls. “I just barely broke even. I had to give up territory. Do
you know how long it's been since I did that?”
“The thirteenth perigee of the fourth bright season of the one thousand and
twenty fifth sweep of your reign, as measured from your conquest of your
original marine brood-clan,” you reply, almost by rote, and the prompt,
accurate reply – you don't make mistakes when it comes to the timeline – seems
to startle her for a moment.
“I had that miserable little scrap of mountain back under my control within
four perigees,” she snaps. “That's not the point.”
“What is the point?” You delicately arch an eyebrow. “Is the point that this
mess made you stop fucking around and act like a queen again for once? That you
couldn't put quite as much trust in your enforcers as you thought you could?
That brute you left in charge did kind of make a mess of things.”
She winces, almost imperceptibly.
“I mean, not that you can really blame him for getting distracted, Skyblade was
a distracting kind of guy,” you add, and the, after a moment's exaggerated
thought, “Besides, it's not like he's the highest in the chain of command to
decide he'd rather fuck a rebel than kill him, right? That's why you keep tall,
yellow, and polycornate over here around?”
You kind of have to wonder how many living trolls can render Her Imperious
Condescension speechless. Not many, probably. Not that you're entirely sure you
count as living.
“I mean, if you're so upset about losing one planet that was just stagnating
and spawning rebellion after rebellion anyway, you obviously care more about
being able to ride his bulge than his interstellar spacegoing capabilities.”
The shocked look on her face quickly twists into a sneer. “What, jealous much?”
You probably shouldn't let her have that as the last word. You wink out of that
time then, anyway; you'll just have to hope you've put the wind back in her
sails.
If you'd stayed much longer you might have ended up proving her right and
you're really not sure your employer or your handler would approve of that.
 
On the way back to the distant future, you stop in on a major battle you'd been
meaning to see to anyway and tear apart half the battlefield in frustration.
The account of one of the survivors is made into several highly popular movies
and plays a major role in public perception of you for several centuries.
 
She's already older than most living trolls, and she's still young.
You're older, of course; you've lived far too many lifetimes by this point,
meddling in history, building up civilizations for her to knock down, haunting
events she has not seen yet, and you're nowhere near able to see the end of
your service. But she's no child. And not for much longer will she be the
savage warrior-princess who has blown like a storm over first the sea and then
the land, bringing once-independent cities and states and nations to heel.
Any night now, she expects word of the defeat of the last major holdout.
History will celebrate – or rue, depending on who you talk to – her
commemoration of that victory, razing the ancient city to the ground. What
little resistance remains will crumble – for a few centuries, at least.
This morning, though, she is a queen but has not yet seen fit to declare
herself empress of all Alternia. And when she dismisses her attendants and
slips below the surface into the flooded portions of her newly built palace,
it's not hard to look past even that degree of regality and see the girl from
the rocks, all those sweeps ago.
You fight back that mental image, as she enters her private salon and, finding
you draped along a bench, levels a trident at you. That weapon would probably
give most trolls pause, but you are busy trying to hide how uncomfortable and
dizzy you are, meeting her in her element. It takes only a tiny flex of power
to knock the trident from her grip.
(Breathing is a privilege, and one you have learned to do without indefinitely,
but that does not mean that to do so is pleasant.)
“Is that any way to treat an old friend?” you ask, your voice twisted oddly by
the water. You step forward, and there's something incredibly satisfying in how
she goes rigid with what would appear to be combined fear and anger as you
reach for her – a narrow hand on her shoulder, and then, on a whim, a kiss on
the mouth, too gentle for it to matter that your teeth are blunt as pebbles.
You pull away when you feel the pinprick of claws under your chin; you wonder:
could she actually tear your throat out if she tried? Probably. It wouldn't
kill you – killing you is not that easy. You wonder what it would be like, but
not enough to test it, not now. Instead, you draw back until you can see her
face clearly, and smile. “Just stopping by to say congratulations, love.”
“You're not my friend,” she sneers. “You're not my love.”
You shrug, an insolent gesture, and turn away. You pick at your nails with the
tip of one needlewand. “Why, Meenah. Anyone would think you didn't like me.”
“Get out.” It's an order, a commandment, and one you have no intention of
obeying. “How dare you speak that name.”
“I'm sorry, I thought it was traditional to keep hatched names between
friends,” you drawl.
You're not sure where that second trident came from – more of a three-pronged
dart, really, perhaps she had it hidden in her hair. You should be better at
this than to only notice the weapon when she has flung it at you and it is
embedding itself in the hollow at the base of your throat. Not a mortal wound,
for you, but you cough and choke around it and are gone in a twist of sickly
light, gone to a time when the palace is deserted.
 
Somehow Doc seems even more smug than usual when you storm into the mansion,
clutching at a throat wound that still leaks a steady stream of maroon onto
your dress.
 
There is one bit of history that you have never been allowed to touch, to even
get close enough to to find out what shape it takes, and that is her ultimate
return to Alternia, in the end of all things.
You were not permitted to know until now, until you need to know to carry out
your part, that it was truly the end of all things, for you as well. That you
would be permitted to have an end. You are several times older than troll
civilization by this point, and you have been permitted to think that this
would continue indefinitely. And now, you are informed: no. She must kill you.
You must go to die.
But “now” is a shaky concept for you anyway, and you think you have time for
one last excursion into the past.
The far past.
 
She is so small. You have not seen her nearly this small since you were barely
more than a child, yourself – she cannot be more than six sweeps now.
And there is no especial caution in her. She is curious, at your approach, and
a little defensive all troll children are, but there's no recognition in her
eyes when you come to her, towering over her and flashing with bright,
unnatural colors.
Good. Time to make an impression.
The curiosity in her eyes turns to fear as you grab her by the shoulders, force
her to her knees and then her back; it turns to panic and disgust as she tries
ineffectually to fight you off and succeeds only in opening shallow scratches
that leak maroon onto her hands.
You crouch over her, your dress riding up over your hips and one knee pressed
against the junction of her legs. With one hand you hold both of hers over her
head. With the other, you reach under her shirt to toy with her gills, making
her writhe and shreik with pain and indignation – making her inadvertently
grind herself against your leg.
You kiss her, hard, cutting your lips on her teeth and bleeding into her mouth;
long, until her narrow chest is all but convulsing for lack of breath and her
gills are fluttering uselessly against your hand.
“Meenah,” you say, voice low and breath hot against her ear-fin, “Do you know
who I am?”
“Meenah,” you say, pinning her with your weight, “you will remember your
Demoness.”
“Meenah,” you say, sitting up and wiping your hand, streaked with magenta from
a torn gill, against her shirt, “you will never manage to kill me.”
You hope she proves you wrong.
 
Finally, she does. She does with vicious aplomb. You hope she has just as
shitty a time of it as you ever did.
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