Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first board you visit on troll 4chan is /mc/ - Mediaconflagration, because Kar’s nerdy hatefriend put you onto real, mil-spec field command simulators as being a thing that exist. Of course, he hadn’t told you that you’d need a new system to run them. He’d let you tie yourself into royal knots trying to get things to work by yourself, before offering to do you a custom build that would fix all your problems. In exchange for your old computer, of course—and that was your first foray into troll 4chan. Trawling /mc/ for stripped-down scene releases of the software you wanted, with Sol in the next window being obtuse at you on purpose.

He’d been pretty vague about the particulars of the website you were scouring for files. “Wwhat the shit is this” had netted you the sort of totally transparent non-response you used to get from Vriska when you’d gotten a handle on one of her particularly important irons, so you’d made a note to yourself to come back at some point, especially since the site portal had mentioned something about doomsday devices that Sol had /rolls eyes at and hurriedly glossed over.

So, in between deeply satisfying bouts of simulated warfare on your new machine and running around winning at extreme sports outside in the moonlight, that was what you eventually did. Your first foray onto the site proper was predictably baffling, though you did eventually find /d/ - Doomsday Devices (after several startlingly pornographic wrong turns). And everything was fine for a while and you saved a lot of pictures, until you’d read one impenetrably inane comment too many…and found the box you could use to respond to people with.

You first start posting on troll 4chan in a manner that still sort of makes you cringe to think about. In fact, you flinch away from the thought so strongly that it’s impossible for you to look back on it even indirectly here through narrative convention. For all intents and purposes, you are and always have been a fully-fledged, socially-acceptable, and usefully-contributing member of Hemonymous, the sort who’d never dream of arguing heatedly & repeatedly for perigees about his own blood superiority until people cracked his tripcode, copied his quirk, and stormed unrelated boards throughout the site with thread after thread of ridiculous evvo psych arguments even you came to recognize as being pretty shoddily put together.

Yeah. You’ve got no connection at all to that guy.

The first picture you post is, thankfully, as properly calculated a venture as any you will admit to actually having taken on this website. So one morning you’re perusing a conspiracy thread on /d/ - Doomsday Devices after a hard night of FLARP, and the OP is spinning some ridiculous yarn about a second Emissary to the Horrorterrors lurking at a certain set of coordinates, unplacated and just waiting to glub you all into oblivion. The alleged site is no more than half an Imperial Measurement Unit out from your hive, it turns out, maybe four hours’ journey if you leave Dad home asleep and just fin it, and you don’t have to worry about the sun if you leave from one of your undersea escape hatches.

So you tell Fef that you’re gonna go swim your property line, and the rest of the thread that you’re gonna swim down to double-check this troll’s claims, and that second thing is what you end up doing. You don’t stick around for the free-for-all that inevitably follows even the most obliquely inferred claim of high blood on /d/; nothing comes across worse on this website than talking yourself in self-defensive circles. That aside, OP is a fag and it is your duty to show them up. This particular /d/espondent’s been a thorn in your side for nights with their shitty theorizing, and now that they’ve finally posted the coordinates you can deliver your final strike.

You’ve been around enough to know EXIF data is a thing, even if not precisely what kind of thing it is. Your camera’s Planetside Positioning System will apparently make each photo speak for itself more eloquently than any painstakingly quirkless argument you could construct, so you take enough pictures of there not being anything down here to prove your point, and then a few more besides, because it was a damn long way to get here and you’re bored. Also a little video, because you can. Scenery’s nice enough, even if benthic is pretty much synonymous with boring, bar the odd hot vent or marauding predator you passed along the way.

When you make it back, you start the very first troll 4chan thread that you are actually going to count towards your lifetime total. No name, no trip, no quirk, just the make and model of your camera alongside your first picture. For a thread title, nothing but the coordinates in question. Austere and refined, no weak points to strike at. The fact that only a seadweller could have taken these pictures lends them all the extra flash they need, being as objectively uninteresting as they are otherwise. You post two more of the set in quick succession before you get your first response.

Hemonymous
>What, original content on /d/?

Another pic, another pointedly bland absence of comment in the comment section. Your hair is going to dry funny if you don’t get up and at least towel off, but you’ve got to finish this.

Hemonymous
>can we get some EXIF verification up in this

Hemonymous
>d0 it ur2elf, layab0ut

And so on and so forth, until you’ve posted them all, at intervals calculated to keep the thread on the front page for as long as possible. 

Hemonymous
>EXIF data checks out. Looks like the Emissary theory’s tanked. Good, I hated that guy. But more importantly…we appear to have a blood traitor among us, my frien/d/s.

Hemonymous
>could be a camera strapped to a lusus or something

suomynomeH
>Would you give a camera like that to your fucking lusus? Get real.

Hemonymous
>yyeah tthat’s ttotally aa sseadweller aall rright, aanyway tthey’re tthe oonly kkids wwho gget llusii tthat ccan ggo ddown tthat ddeep rregaradless

For a final touch, you link the video. You’re not in it, same as you’re not strictly in the pictures, but the diffuse light of your bioluminescence is. Somebody out there is probably already inspecting the fucking wavelength for validity but you don’t care, you’re just waiting for the old OP to show up and start blustering about rogue Emissaries again. If they pick new coordinates for their alleged monster deeper than you can go—which is what you’d do, in their situation, if you didn’t want to lose—you’ll just turn around and get Fef to help you out, because some things are important.

Hemonymous
>SHIT ITS A HIGHBLOOD ABANDON THREAD

End Dayz !arENAIuszqqp..
>get the fuck off troll 4chan and go order something from a catalogue, apex predadouche

Oh, here we go. You hide both of these posts and also the next few. Things continue on in much the same vein as you were resignedly expecting, until:

Hemonymous
>WOW you guys seriously? Seriously? There’s attention-whoring highbloods doing their level best to lord it over the rest of us and then there’s hemanons who just so happen to have hatched out with high blood. sufferer’s scarlet nook but you hypocritical little shits disgust me.

What. That…that wasn’t even you, you didn’t type that. They didn’t even type it in your quirk, which would have meant that they were kidding. And then the thread goes on in the new direction:

Hemonymous
>yeah guys a seadweller can be hemonymous if they want I see absolutely no contradiction in terms here

Hemonymous
>TuRn AgAiNsT a HeMoNyMoUs SlUrRyBrO? DiE, fAiThLeSs sCuM! (uvu)

dreadPrognosticatrix .comeATmeBr0..llkyr
>yeah what are you casteist or something lol

Hemonymous
>”(uvu)”, seriously? Get off this board, and take your shitty quirk with you. The seadweller can stay.

Hemonymous
>~we’re all hemonymous here dunno what yr problem is with the OP~

Hemonymous
>OP said they would go forth and then return, and so did they deliver. Some things are sacred. 69 my frien/d/s

Hemonymous
>troll 4chan /d/ is 100% peace love and understanding. the intolerant will be purged from our ranks with cleansing flame :V

Hemonymous
>HEY OP HORNS OR GTFO

They’re defending you. And for scores of similar posts they go on defending you. Okay it’s thinly-veiled ridicule, but holy shit. In minutes the mood of the thread has turned from slavering pile-on to self-congratulatory absurdity. You know intellectually that you’re just a convenient punchline, that you probably would at least fantasize extensively about culling any given one of them in disgust if you ever did meet (though it’s not like you’re in the habit of skulking around in other people’s basements, so the likelihood is low, hah), but. But.

Of course things devolve soon enough into a bitterly self-aware circlejerk over how quickly and thoroughly the black knight brigade of presumably-not-so-high-bloods showed up to fight for your right to post on troll 4chan. But for that little while, a threadful of complete strangers had been wholly focused on you; not the shop you were talking, not the conversation you were furthering, not whatever strongly-worded opinion on resonant crystal lattices you were putting forth. Some of them had even sounded dumb enough to have really meant it, and you know from dumb enough to be really meaning things. You’d started an actual good on-topic thread about doomsday speculation, and then a bunch of people had shown up and fought each other to the post limit in it for your sake, instead of closing ranks against you and attacking.

You maybe scroll up and read the comments left by hemonymous users leaping to your defense, again. Okay a bunch of times. Okay, so you follow that damn thread all the way off the edge of page 15, at which point you screencap it and save it to your desktop. The old OP never showed and you don’t even care. You’ll get them the next time they dare pollute your favorite board with their completely transparent attention-seeking ploys.

Eridan: Well, that was successful! Start another thread about it! ==>

Holy shit, no, have you even been paying attention? That would be a completely transparent attention-seeking ploy. The whole point of this website is keeping your own horns down while cluckbeastpecking other people into line as viciously as possible. Which you find hypnotically compelling for some reason, on par with the actual doomsday content of this board. You’ve been lurking long enough now to know which end is up about these things; if you want more of the right kind of attention for your original content, there’s only one way to get it without turning yourself into a(nother) shitty running joke: you’re gonna have to wait for the exact right time to strike, same as every other campaign you’ve ever been in.

You decide to take a break from /d/ - Doomsday Devices, before you fail to resist your next mysterious urge to fuck things up beyond repair. You shut down the overclocked beast of a hybrid hiveframe you did eventually wrangle out of Sol, peel out of your salt-stiff swim clothing, and plop at last into your recuperacoon for the day, stretching and kicking and shifting your sore limbs. You drift off, like always, to the distant whispers of fight and flight in the back of your head—and you’d like to imagine that, today at least, the dreams soothed away by the slime would have been mostly of crushing your foes.

Just before you slip away entirely, the very last couple of posts that snuck in before your thread expired return to you for some reason.

Hemonymous of the Bathypelagic | Condy is my !SHARKPUP..bdsypdkvl
>Fish thread?
>Ah, too late, and past the image limit. Never mind.

Hemonymous
>HOW DOES HE ALWAYS KNOW

-

When you wake up, you take your Dad out for his evening constitutional. Then you troll twinArmageddons on your palmhusk under the table during breakfast, while strifing briskly with your father in an on-going dispute about your piss-poor dining etiquette.

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA] --

CA: hey sol wwhats a fish thread

He answers you immediately.

TA: iit’2 funny becau2e you thiink ii’d ever actually tell you the an2wer two that que2tiion.
CA: look you piece a shit i knoww its some dumb troll 4chan thing
CA: but all i get when i try to look it up is actual fuckin fishin line in vvarious tensile strengths an gauges
TA: okay, ii would liike two take thii2 moment two iinform you of my 2tandiing poliicy regardiing not under any ciircum2tances 2erviing a2 troll google for other people.
CA: an wwhos hemonymous of the bathypelagic

A long pause.

CA: sol
CA: sol are you still there
CA: do i havve to pretend something electronic of mine is broken because i wwill
CA: sol is this a dead pixel
CA: sol i think i got a dead pixel on this screen wwhatevver shall i FUCKIN do
TA: ehehe 2hut up 2hut up ehehehe oh my god ii can’t BREATHE.

Oh, there he is.

TA: where the 2HIIT did you hear that name?
TA: no, on 2econd thought ii re2ciind that query.
TA: ii don’t thiink ii really want two know.
TA: ju2t, PLEA2E tell me you haven’t been po2tiing piic2 of your2elf, then let u2 never 2peak of thii2 again.
CA: i havvent

Pics? What?

TA: ok good, are we done here or diid you actually have a dead piixel?
TA: becau2e you can’t really do anythiing about tho2e except get a new moniitor and let me have the bad one 2econdhand.
TA: ii’ve never miinded them, at lea2t not on non-e22entiial dii2play2.
CA: no sol i do not in actual fact havve any fuckin dead pixels
CA: im on my palmhusk anywway i dont think these kindsa chitinous screens evven havve pixels
CA: and by the wway stop panting so obvviously after my stuff havve i evver told you howw unnattractive that is
TA: then ii for one am two hundred percent done wiith everythiing even periipherally a22o22iiated wiith thii2 conver2atiion.

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

Huh.

He’d blocked you without responding to a single one of your jabs. Ordinarily, you’re able to keep up the back-and-forth for at least as long as it takes you to do the dishes. The last time you’d gotten this degree of evasiveness from a person, it’d been Vriska frantically backpedalling after having accidentally whistled at your ass on the battlefield less than a week after your breakup (you’d completed your final subadult molt a little early, and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone before showing up to FLARP).

But Sol’s seen you before. There’s something you’re not getting, possibly from being distracted by the mechanics of texting while aggressing your Dad for the right to keep doing so while up to your elbows in device-shorting dishsoap (it’s not like you aren’t being careful!). Why’s Sol flustered about pics now? Hell, he’s already been in your hive, even, to bring over your command simulation system. He’d been just as unflappably businesslike and docile then as Kar had sworn up and down he would be, probably thanks to sweeps of tech support hivecalls teaching him how not to be a target. In all this time the two of you have idly kept up contact, he has never once been so obviously put off-balance as you just saw.

Okay, you think, clattering the last bit of silver into the drying rack. Substitute thread for thread and seadweller for fish and it being some sort of degenerate pornography thing, probably, for Sol’s attitude when pressed on it. Though why any of that would involve posting pictures of yourse—

The noise you make when you finally figure it out is another thing from your past you’d prefer not to be associated with, if only because you haven’t squawked a laugh that badly since you were four.

He’d thought you might have been doing WHAT?

Why?

Chapter Text

Sollux implied, just now, that he thought you might have been posting pictures of yourself on /d/ - Doomsday Devices. You don’t think you’d be up to articulating all the ways in which this is a nonsensical idea even if you had Kar online to help you out.

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA] --

CA: oh right because getting heckled by strangers i dont evven havve the excuse a FLARP to shut up wwith ahabs crosshairs
CA: or a line of sight on anywway i guess
CA: is EXACTLY wwhat i wwant to be seen doing wwith my spare time
CA: wwhy wwould anybody evven wwant to make a thread presumably for the purposes a aggregatin pictures of seadwwellers
CA: the lot of you mash the report button at the faintest wwhiff a salt you catch hangin about a thing i say

You’re pretty sure people don’t really report all the things they say they have. But the poisonous sentiment is the same: Nobody wants you here. You don’t belong.

TA: ii don’t go on troll 4chan.
TA: you don’t go on troll 4chan.
TA: nobody goe2 on troll 4chan.
TA: the po2t2 are all ju2t one really commiitted guy.
TA: al2o, fyii, we are 2till not haviing thii2 conver2atiion.

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

Your palmhusk begins to heat ominously in your hand, and you fling it out the window just in time. This showers broken glass across your beach. Distantly, you hear your father’s nyyeigh. Shit.

You abscond to your room and lock the door, drawing the curtains across your magnificent bay window for good measure. All of these behaviors are perfectly acceptable since you haven’t actually seen your Dad yet, and, if you put your headphones on, you won’t be able to hear him either if he calls. You sit down hurriedly at your desk and jab at the keyboard until your system wakes in a great rush of fans and blinking lights, clapping the headphones over your ears and settling your fins back tight. Your trollian window is still open, displaying the last received system message:

-- caligulasAquarium's palmhusk has exploded! --

CA: cmon sol dont be like that

You’re not going to bring up the trouble he probably got you into with your father just now, lest it summon him.

TA: ii am goiing to 2ay thii2 two you for the 2econd tiime, ED.
TA: don’t go on troll 4chan.
CA: awwww thats swweet are you tryin to protect me sol

That would be weird.

TA: oh hell two the no.
TA: ii’m tryiing two protect ba2iically everyone EL2E from your iinciipiient graduatiion from iin2ufferably toxiic douche two iin2ufferably toxiic meme-2poutiing douche.
TA: ju2t, 2iigh.
TA: tell me you’re not an i/rr/egular?
CA: no im a /d/espondent
TA: …
TA: of fuckiing cour2e you are, ii’m not even 2ure what ii wa2 expectiing.
CA: aha
CA: so you ADMIT that you go on this wwebsite
TA: ED, you’ve met me, iit would ba2iically be 2hockiing iif ii diidn’t.

Would it be? You remember brusque professionalism, wry self-assurance, really cool shades. You remember how he’d moved, deliberate and unafraid, like neither of you were a danger to the other. You remember the sort of quiet competence at his work you watch the hell out for in other people’s minions on the field. None of that really spells “basement-dwelling shut-in” to you.

TA: ehehehe /d/ though, ED, really?

Whoa, hold up.

CA: yeah
CA: wwhats wwrong wwith it
TA: a bunch of blueblood a22hole2 2iittiing around lavii2hly competiing two 2ee who can put theiir iimperiial allotment to the mo2t iinanely 2elf-defeatiing wa2te?
CA: hey wwhered that “blueblood” come from sol
CA: i thought the wwhole point a this deal wwas the hemonymity thing and here you are talkin demographics at me

You really had thought that was the whole deal. Do. Do think. Have spent exorbitant amounts of time and energy learning how to think.

CA: wwoww sol youre bein more casteist than I am at the moment
CA: careful you dont fall out a the sky next time you try to fly someplace on account of having forgotten how to yellowblood
TA: fuck you two biilgeblood, go drown.

Hah!

CA: wwell looks like i gotta step up my game
CA: sol from wwhere i stand the lot of you landdwellers comprise an indistinguishable sea a clamorin hostility to me anywway
CA: and i dont see as howw the exact range a execrable hues in question makes the least little bit a difference to the character or quality of an upstandin board like /d/
TA: do you ju2t, liike, not thiink?
TA: at all, ever, about anythiing?

HEY.

CA: hey
TA: a bunch of blueblood fuckpan2 wiith THE most exclu2ii2iively expen2iive hobby two end all exclu2iive, expen2iive hobbiie2 are ab2olutely goiing two be rabiidly ca2te-con2ciiou2 on a hemanonymou2 fuckiing iimageboard.

You are nearly deafened by volume-stacking as the next flurry of pings hit you all at once.

TA: the re2t of u2 giive each other a hard tiime about everythiing like iit aiin’t no thiing becau2e iit’2 niice two be able two wiithout threat of repercu22iion.
TA: the 2hiit we 2pew iin all diirectiion2 on troll 4chan would get any of u2 culled in the 2treet, ba2iically.
TA: but the 2ort of u2er2 the hiigh hobby board2 get don’t even have the decency two pretend two be pretendiing, you know?
TA: al2o, it’2 hiilariiou2 that you piicked the ONE board wiith a 2iignificant population of u2er2 liikely two genuiinely and uniironiically 2corn you for beiing a 2eadweller, liike ii’m fuckiing lol rn ii may actually cry.

You rankle. Well, only one thing to say to that.

CA: wwoww sol youre raggin on my choice a board now is that really what youre doing
TA: ehehehe you’re damn 2traiight ii a
TA: FUCK.
TA: ii am not doiing thii2.
CA: excuse me i do believve that you just fuckin did
CA: /d/ is a refuge for true scholars and gentletrolls a the apocalyptic persuasion wwhether or not they got the allotment or appropriate site to do a build a their owwn
CA: and wwe wwelcome all comers so long as theyre wwillin to keep their color outta direct discussion an instead combat one another fairly on the field a their ideas
CA: and anywway i knoww for a FACT wevve got a lowwblood regular
TA: oh, thii2’ll be good.
CA: like actual you-low before you jump on me about fuckin relativvism or some shit
CA: and theyre evven a fairly stand-up sort a guy from what i can tell
CA: we call em doomsdig hemanon as if theyre titled and everything and they dont evven post wwith a trip
TA: pic2 or iit diidn’t happen, fii2hbreath.

— caligulasAquarium has sent file 783856400.dʒɪf —

CA: look at that rack and tell me thats evven a midblood
TA: iit’2 a piicture of a hole iin the ground.
CA: FUCK YOU its a picture a the excavvation site of a historical artefact of destruction
CA: an the troll takin the picture wwas floatin wwith their back to the light so you can see their shadoww if you tilt your screen

The troll in question hadn’t retaliated to a single one of the scathing comments drawn by their slip-up. Had responded solely to technical queries; had continued, undeterred and unedited, to post pictures of their progress on the dig. You had remembered that, later, the way the slurs had just…been eclipsed by the ongoing dialogue, through no mechanism you’d been able to detect at the time.

TA: FUCK.
TA: ii TELL people not two po2t theiir 2hiit on troll 4chan but do they lii2ten??
TA: DO THEY HELL.
TA: RAAARARRAAUUUAAAAUUAGHGHGGHGGGGHHGH!

Wait a minute.

CA: sol
CA: hey sol
TA: YE2 2HUT UP IIT’2 TOTALLY ARADIA.
TA: GOD.

A self-recriminatory pause.

CA: oh
CA: wwell
CA: sorry for shitting up her thread

2x self-recriminatory pause combo!!

TA: ok 2o moviing on and pretendiing liike THAT exchange diidn’t ju2t happen.

No, Sol, hey, come on.

CA: no sol hey come on
CA: i aint lettin you off that easy you aint even told me where YOU deign to hang out yet if /d/ is such an egregious wwaste of my time
TA: WHY AM I EVEN 2TIILL TALKING TWO YOU ABOUT THII2?
TA: FUCK.

— twinArmageddons’s input device has exploded! —
— this user must connect a new input device to proceed! —

You break into a wildly triumphant grin, enough to mess up the lay of your fins beneath your headphones. The inconvenience posed you by every device of yours he’s ever blown up is more than counterbalanced by the few of his you’ve gotten him to destroy. Now you kind of wish you knew enough to make fun of him properly, get him to do himself some real property damage. Kar says he got Sol to blow out all the windows in his hive once, but you’re not entirely sure that you believe it.

Maybe it’s time you check out some other boards. You lean back in your chair and stretch, popping your spine, letting your headphones fall finally askew around your neck. Various places on you pull and twinge, old injuries, and you luxuriate in not having to push yourself past the point of discomfort, here, safe in your hive. You’ll do your stretches before you leave. God but you’re stiff. Maybe your adult molt will come early, too, and you won’t have to wait on Ascension for artificial inducement. How long have you even been sitting here?

Oh, fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck. You are going to be so late.

You leap back from your computer like it’s in danger of exploding and throw yourself into action. You crash through your hive like a herd of hoofbeasts, swearing and picking things up, until at last you burst out onto the deck mostly-attired and clenching a hastily-snatched slice of grubloaf between your fangs. You call around it for your Dad, muffled, while hastily fumbling with your cape clasp, and hear his answering wwhinny from over the side. He’s down on the beach, already tacked up, with a box, into which he is slowly and methodically finishing collecting each and every last glass shard from the broken window.

You feel awful. When you drop to the sand he narrows his eyes and wwhickers at you to stay back, like you’re still the same barefoot whirlwind you were when you were two, and you feel worse still.

-

When you get home at last, exhausted and strung-out, you untack your Dad, give him a rubdown, and spend a few minutes resting your forehead against his smooth, white barrel while he works on the slab you gave him of frozen fish. Then you shuffle indoors, nuke yourself a brightly-packaged Cup Nodules, and sit down to check out some of the other boards.

In the mood you’re in, they all turn out to be impenetrable and boring, though you do at least understand the shape of what you’re looking at now.

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]--

CA: sol i think troll 4chan might be a wwaste of time
TA: at la2t, he’2 catchiing on.

Who the shit cares this much about plants? They’re sniping at one another’s opinions as vigorously as any /d/ebate you’ve ever seen. The thread on chainsaws looked interesting enough until you’d clicked a thumbnail and the messy green gore had all been vegetation, everyone was bickering about pruning, and people were debating the relative merits of shit versus guts for fertilizer.

Is this what Sollux sees when he looks at the board where you spend all your time?

CA: do my hobbies look this boring to other people
TA: 2peakiing as 2omeone moiiraiiled two the dii2triict nonfatal league FLARP champiion for two 2weep2 runniing.
TA: ye2.

The technology board is full of people arguing about keyboards, and you morbidly run a search for the one Sol sent with your machine. It’s sought-after. You aren’t sure how you feel about that, or your immediate desire to leap into the fray and gloatingly describe what it feels and sounds like to type on.

You have never before, not once, paid any attention to what your keyboard sounds like. You kind of deeply resent it having been brought to your notice now.

TA: have you gotten two a board wiith a background that ii2n’t 2ort of liight blue yet?
CA: no wwhy
TA: no rea2on.

Holy shit this is a lot of pornographic material.

CA: holy shit this is a lot of pornographic material
TA: ehehehehehe iit begiin2.

Yeah, except not actually. You’re exhausted and your eyes are glazing over. Nothing looks even the slightest bit appealing, it’s all an indistinguishable avalanche of fleshily indeterminate grey and wobbly splotches of bright color. And people bitching, as usual. You can’t make narrative heads nor tails of the disconnected snippets all over frontpage, either, it’s all just a gross, crass blur.

CA: okay fine look
CA: just fuckin tell me wwhos hemonymous of the bathypelagic already
CA: you flipped out pretty hard and it was funny i could use a laugh
TA: no.
TA: and al2o DOUBLE NO.
CA: sol cmonnnnnnnn
TA: jftgi.
CA: am i not making it clear enough that i wwanna harrass you specifically into telling me

A long pause. Tired as you are, you are poised to leap from your chair and possibly fling yourself out your window this time. A background process sets a harddrive swapping and startles you badly, but you hold your ground.

TA: fiine.

-- twinArmageddons has sent you a link --

TA: btw thii2 ii2 a 2iite that’2 2criipted two archiive any thread that iit receiive2 enough reque2t2 for.
TA: ii’m not trawliing the actual board2, for porn, for YOU, at thii2 tiime of day two prove 2uch a poiintle22 poiint.
CA: i knoww wwhat fuckin troll 4chanarchivve is sol
CA: wwe havve good threads on /d/ too that sometimes wwe wwanna save if thats not entirely outside the scope a your small smallminded minds ability to comprehend
CA: wwait
CA: wwhyd you send me to a thread full a pics a greenbloods gettin it on
TA: becau2e ii’m not fuckiing explaiiniing thii2 2hiit.
TA: ju2t, look at the thread and tell me what you 2ee.

You look. It begins:

Hemonymous
>Get in here, greenblood bretheren!

and continues on, oddly amicably, from there. Nobody seems to have a problem with the specificity of the request. Or at least no more than any bunch of /d/espondents might also have with, say, any given “six-pointed decay matrices only, fivepoint peasants pail their lusii” thread.

It’s similar in structure to the threads on /d/ as well, you guess. You’ve got your probably a couple of people serving as the main draw, settled in to imagedump for the long haul; your smattering of one-off, contextless pictures serving as vehicles for cross-talk; your abstruse in-jokes and your jargon. You nod approvingly to yourself at the lack of useless text posts wasting everyone’s time and eating away at the bump limit. This is a good thread. Civil, focused. Nobody even bothers to make fun of the guy posting under a trip. You can see why it all got archived.

You ignore the way your breath is maybe speeding up a little. Oh, you appear to have clicked on a picture of a diminutive boy with blown pupils biting hard into the soft vulnerable meat of probably-a-girl’s thigh, magnificent curl of her bulge right there next to his face speaking to the sort of absolute ebon trust the old planetbound aristocracy spent exorbitant amounts of time and energy writing plays about. Haha. Um. It looks like the friendly neighborhood triptroll you’d noticed is posting the whole set! Where did all these open tabs come from. You don’t even know.

You receive a message ping and minimize the window as startle reflex, fins flared and straining to hear over the galloping in your chest. Your paranoid freeze gives way to an irate glare at the screen, just as soon as you’ve satisfied yourself that your Dad hasn’t somehow gotten into the room.

TA: ii would 2ay you’re beiing 2u2piiciiou2ly 2iilent atm, but ii 2ort of have thii2 complete certaiinty about what iit ii2 you’re doiing rn.
CA: oh as IF my pants are evver anything but on in front a this machine
TA: ehehe no 2hame iin iit.
CA: howw does this evven havve anythin to do wwith anythin sol tell me that
TA: fiir2t. tell me what you 2aw.

Haha. No.

CA: a good thread i guess

-- twinArmageddons has sent you a link --

TA: now, tell me what you 2ee here.

You bring up your browser and reluctantly tab out of what you were looking at previously, switching instead to this.

Hemonymous of the Bathypelagic | Condy is my !SHARKPUP..bdsypdkvl
>Ah, I do believe it’s time for a bracing early-morning fish thread.

Hemonymous
>Oh, give it a rest.

Hemonymous
>Shut up fool, the master is at work.

It starts out all right, if uninspiring. Pictures of Her Imperious Condescension in various states of magnificence and/or magnificent deshabille. Some pictures of trolls in action during FLARP, some pictures of dead trolls as trophies in the aftermath of FLARP. Obligatory pictures of actual fish. But the further down you scroll, the more horrified you become, experiencing a building, crawling aversion that glues your hand to your input device and your eyes to the screen.

When you see a familiar pair of trolls in the throes of pitch passion, one's fangs sunk into the other's thigh, the picture so clumsily, carelessly hue-tweaked for her bulge to be "violet" that his sclera were left the wrong color, you flip off the handle entirely.

CA: sol
CA: sol that was the SHITTIEST thread
TA: iit’2 almo2t phy2iically paiinful, i2n’t iit.
CA: ALMOST
CA: sol
CA: there wwere image manips
CA: sol there wwas a guy wwith PLASTIC FINS
CA: an people wwere LOSIN THEIR SHIT ovver him an ASKIN HIM FOR POSES
TA: okay that guy ii2 kiind of a runniing joke ehehe.
CA: YEAH MAYBE IN THE WWAY THAT COMES RIGHT BACK AROUND TO BEIN SINCERE AGAIN
CA: THEY WWERE LINKIN EACH OTHER ARCHIVES A HIS STUFF

You look down at your distal claw, which has rigidly applied itself to the shift key while you weren’t paying attention. No, fuck this. You shove back from your desk and slam out into the day-darkened halls of your ship. And if you drag your claws across the bulkheads as you go, well, there aren’t any other trolls around to hear the racket.

Chapter Text

It takes you a long time to calm down.

By the time you become capable of relaxing your hands from crooked claws, you're so disgusted with yourself you basically nosedive into your recuperacoon to get tonight over with as quickly as possible, trying not to think.

-

You entirely fail not to think. When you wake the next evening, after far too few hours of sleep, you are buzzing with equal parts rage and determination.

This sustains you through your evening ride, breaking your fast, and hollering "DAAAAD" a lot while hunting fore and aft through the ship to find your camera. He keeps fucking telling you it's where you left it, but if you knew where that was, you wouldn't be asking him, right?

All of your confidence deserts you the moment you find yourself actually standing before one of your mirrors, camera in hand, contemplating logistics. You don't even get your shirt off before you're slinking back to the last working computer in your hive, the one Sol did on commission for you, and navigating to the board he showed you yesterday.

If you're going to do this properly, you need a plan of attack.

You decide to start with what /i/ - Iconolagny (because that had been the board) looks like ordinarily first, so you go there instead of the greatest-hits version on the archive. It doesn't seem like hemocaste-specific requests are particularly common; the bulk of threads are egalitarian, with nobody paying much attention to whom the rumble spheres are attached.

One thing you do notice: that guy whose painted gills you'd wanted to slice into actual openings into his body cavity isn't the only troll posting selfies, or even the only one with a substantial following. There's tons of polished images that you inspect for lighting, angles, tone and pose etcetera, taking reams of mental notes on tactics; but there's an equal amount of things that are clearly amateur, from grainy lowblood stuff on up to crisp but equally poorly-framed highblood stuff with, like, the feet not included in the picture or something. A lot of it's taken in bathroom mirrors, like you started out thinking you'd try.

Almost all of the professionally staged pictures are composed to prominently feature faces and the calculated slant of horns. Which, obviously, those are the main visual and emotional draws of a piece; without this vital information on pitch vs. flush, even the lewdest picture is much less compelling.

But almost none of the selfies have even the troll's head in the picture. You're not entirely sure why, beyond the obvious "what if someone I know sees me," but surely someone you knew could recognize you by your body. You only met Sol once and don't even give a fuck, but you're pretty sure you'd know a picture of him from the neck down if you saw it.

God, but you're too nervy to even be getting any carnal enjoyment out of this. Yet another injustice heaped upon many, all stemming from what Sol had gloatingly led you by the nose through yesterday.

Fretting idly at your scarf, you click on one last thread--double bulges double stuffed, looks likely to contain lots of inventive crotch shots--and about halfway down your blood runs Fef-cold. Somebody posts a selfie (thick glistening orange bulges; you've never seen a color that enticingly vibrant, and think they must have fiddled with the levels some) and starts acting coy about taking requests for what to stick 'em into. They don't get very far stringing the thread along, when suddenly:

Hemonymous
>52.37269, 4.89299
Mykron Lowel
Hemotype #FF6633
3266 Stem 4J Colony 17
Looks like I'll be the one double-stuffing you today, camwhore.

Hemonymous
>dude. DUDE. post those horns. I wanna search the database and see how he looks too.

Hemonymous
>lol omfg r u ssrss who even MAKESS the exif misstake

Hemonymous
>RUN LOWBLOOD RUN XD

Hemonymous
>Type that face again and you're next, pupa.

You are suddenly, flesh-crawlingly glad you washed out. You haven't felt this overwhelmingly terrified about a close call since you still sucked at FLARP. It's not even relief, you just feel awful. You get up in a daze, skin prickling all over, and wander out onto your deck to lie on your back for a while. It's breezy tonight. The wind curls through your horns and plays with your hair, sweeps soothingly across your face and ruffles at the edges of your clothing.

You would never have recovered from the embarrassment. Literally never.

You hear a soft tap and a clatter. That was not a normal seaside night sound; you roll onto your belly and rise from the cool decking, silently, to go investigate. When you peer over the side you surprise another seadweller, one of the ones whose meeting you'd been late to yesterday, busily engaged in setting explosives against the side of your ship. They look up at you for a long, frozen moment, and move to stand.

You don't let them. You leap right over the railing bare-clawed, because you are really, really sick of the whole world's shit, and it's only afterwards, up to your elbows in slick stinking guts, bristling with aggression and distantly wondering why that had been so easy, that the guilt hits you hard enough to make you have to put your head between your knees and swallow back thick spit and maybe bile.

You're riflekind; of course, they'd thought you were flirting. Fucking hell, THEY were probably flirting, right from the start. You're not dumb enough to have ever let on anything about the layout of your hive to another seadweller, but that hadn't been a vulnerable patch of hull by any stretch of the imagination.

Well. At least you won't have to deal with their shitty time-wasting at get-togethers again.

Your Dad knows better than to fly his tempting-target self to your side once a surprise attack is already underway, and does not come to you. You sit alone on the rocks for an indeterminable amount of time as the blood on you slowly congeals, watching the waves recede. The moons are low on the horizon and the tide is about to turn again when you unstick yourself from yourself, drag the ragged corpse below the waterline, scatter the powder-based explosives into the sea, and clamber back up to your ship, a handful of the troll bones already strewn here snapping beneath your heels. You have no interest in washing yourself clean in the dark chill of the ocean tonight; right now, you want to be enfolded in comforting heat.

You make your way to your smallest and most secluded bathroom, shedding bloody black flakes as you go. You reek, foully, and when you start up the warm water you reek worse, even as the caked-on gore sloughs free of your skin. The smell hangs in the air, indelible purple, long after the water runs clear. Everything is horrible. You still end up with your hand between your legs.

You're not after anything fancy; "self-pailing" is a misnomer, one you're not entirely sure is even physiologically possible. You just want to find the simple, no-fuss relief of a quickie. Without holding anything or anybody in your mind getting off can be a tidily undilated, external-pressure only affair, but tonight your arousal trajectory refuses to cooperate. The third time you find your firmly stroking fingers dipping back into yourself, you give up in frustration and get out of the shower. You don't want to clean up any more goddamn violet tonight.

You don't towel off. You don't want anything on your skin right now. It feels irritatingly good to stride bare and dripping through your halls, and being pissed off about it isn't helping any. Your Dad passes you disinterestedly at one point, preoccupied with lusus business, and you ignore him back. You'll always be a squealing little wiggler refusing to be bundled into clothing, to him, until the night you Ascend and ever afterwards; he'd given up on you, actually, eventually, and it had taken Fef and all of her pretty things to get you even half-civilized.

You don't feel very civilized, at the moment.

When you find yourself standing again before your hiveframe, your camera is sitting right where you left it. You pick it up.

-

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]--

CA: hey sol
CA: so how do you go about strippin the exif data off of a series a things
TA: congratulatiion2, that ii2 probably the lea2t opaque thiing anyone ha2 ever 2aiid two me.
CA: shut the fuck up wwill you tell me howw or not
TA: not.

You feel an irrational stab of fury. Your scarf's in your mouth and you don't even care, you want to bite on something that badly.

CA: god DAMN it sol i can fuckin followw fuckin instructions wwhen i havve a mind to just tell me wwhat to do and ill do it
CA: i knoww for a fact that you havve spent eighteen hours at a stretch before helpin kan so dont evven try to put me off about wwastin your time
TA: remiindiing me of that debacle ii2 doiing nothiing two endear you two me, ED.
CA: fuck if im here to be endearin myself to you

you type, realizing only after you hit enter that you are hissing (and also about a half-second away from typing "pissblood.") Shit, get it together, Eri. You choke the black stone in your throat back down into your belly, because Sol doesn't need to deal with your spectacularly misdirected aggression right now. (Nobody does, echoes behind the sentiment, and you wince at the thick, remembered reek of purple).

CA: look wwhy dont you just do it for me it wwont take you hardly any time at all
TA: if you were KK thii2 would be the 2hiittiie2t lead-iin two 2endiing me a viiru2 ever.
TA: no, what am ii 2ayiing, iit would be pretty 2tandard actually.
CA: wwait Kar sends you nudes a himself
TA: no he
TA: you actually took nude2.
CA: wwell yeah
TA: and you want two 2end them two me.
CA: im not expecting you to look at em or anything just do the exif thing
CA: cant you change the vieww settings to minutiae and make there be no previeww on your end if you wwant
TA: ED.
TA: ED no.
TA: there ii2 no way iif you 2end me tho2e piicture2 that ii am NOT goiing two look at them okay ii'm ju2t puttiing that on the table now.
CA: sol you idiot im posting these on troll fuckin 4chan howw the shit would it be sensible a me to be unable to handle YOU lookin at them

You are completely unable to handle the idea of Sol looking at these pictures.

-- caligulasAquarium has sent file pics.rar --

CA: just take off the goddamn exif data and send them back
TA: ii can't beliieve ii'm doiing thii2.

You wait. You don't even bother to pretend to yourself that you're not poised on the edge of your chair.

-- twinArmageddons has sent file piic2.rar --

And then he doesn't send you anything more at all. You can't fucking take it. You finally break.

CA: wwell so howw do they look
TA: oh look!
TA: iit'2 another conver2atiion we AREN'T HAVIING.

You nearly put your head in your hands with relief. He hasn't left.

CA: no cmon sol youvve been on here longer than i havve do you think they're gonna
CA: you knoww
CA: go ovver well

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has unblocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

CA: god damn it sol get back here

-- twinArmageddons [TA] has unblocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --

TA: they're fiine.
CA: wwhat thats it not gonna tell me i got nothin to wworry about
TA: ED, ngl: you have lot2 of thiing2 two worry about.
CA: oh shut your trap sol
TA: but not the2e piicture2.

The blaze of triumph sweeps through you too swiftly and thoroughly for you to even be taken aback at yourself. You relax at once into a sprawl, then immediately pop back up again.

CA: nevver mind keep talkin
TA: ok the only thiing holdiing me back from explodiing your 2y2tem riight now ii2 how hard ii fuckiing worked on it en2uriing nobody could.
CA: wwhat really
CA: hahaha
CA: i mean im no kan but i wwas sort of wwonderin wwhy it hadnt gone up in an electrical fire yet like evverything else technological ivve evver owwned

-- twinArmageddons is an idle troll! --

CA: hey
CA: sol
CA: sol hey
CA: ok i'm goin to go post these don't PAY ATTENTION or anything god

-

You agonize extensively over whether to start your own thread, finally deciding not to, and begin to scroll through what's there currently instead, looking for a likely opening. This board moves more slowly than some others; you find a Hemonymous of the Bathypelagic thread still on the ninth page.

Plastic fins guy--you refuse to dignify him with his real title, even to yourself--didn't make an appearence, this time, but people had posted some of the "better" of his pics. Including a few that make you shudder, in which he's pressed artificially truncated hivehold objects to his "gills" like he's stuck them inside. Him, you would cull in a heartbeat.

You scroll to the bottom of the thread.

Hemonymous
>Who says there aren't any fish on /i/? Just -look- at all these fucking fish.

The appended image is of a school of little fishes that you know well to have a high oil content and to be quite delicious, if you're willing to work a net. You think about breaking for a snack but that would just be stalling at this point, and you refuse to tolerate that in yourself. You've had your planning time, and used it well; now it's time to execute.

You post your first pic. You include the make and model of your camera, that's all--no name, no trip, no quirk, and no coordinates.

-

This time, when you nosedive into your recuperacoon, it's because you shoot into it in an exuberant, flying leap.

You spend a little time spinning yourself in circles, kicking glorpily around and around. You keep it up until your head is spinning perceptibly more than it was already. When at last the sopor kicks in you curl up, dazed and breathing deeply. You really, really hope the dreams you aren't having today will include ripping that fucker's shabby fins and then his entire face right off.

That had been the BEST FUCKIN THREAD.

Your name is Eridan Ampora, and you are amazing.

-

You get frowned at some about the killing when you show up that midnight to talk bracket assignations, pointedly not late. But nobody really cares and the workload gets rebalanced without question; your terse description of events assuaged idle curiosity, and a disproportionate amount of responsibility gets put on the suitor in these sorts of circumstances anyway. And the troll in question had been nobody's quadrant. Except, you know, some lowblood's or whatever.

When you get home, you rig up an extra layer of hive security and double check all of your ammunition caches. You don't think an auspistice is particularly likely to set the ball rolling on a revenge cycle, but you don't really feel like dying in turn on account of a quadrant miscalculation.

You spend some time on the military sim to take the edge off before contacting Sol. It has a chat but for some reason he's always dug his heels in about playing against you, so he's not on your in-game heckleroll.

At length, you remove your clunky VR headset and shake out your hair and fins.

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]--

CA: sol
CA: hey sol
CA: if i take some more pictures wwill you do them too
TA: ED gdi ii don't want two have two look at any more of your goddamn 2amey piicture2.

Samey?

CA: samey
CA: shit they are kinda samey arent they
TA: ii...yeah, they kiind of are, you're ju2t poiintiing the camera your2elf iin every one of them.
CA: wwell not all a us can just fuckin float tech with their minds to take pictu

Heyyyyyyy.

CA: are you thinkin wwhat im thinkin
TA: ii have offiiciially lo2t any abiiliity ii may once have had two know what you are thiinkiing, ED.
CA: you should come ovver to my place

Nothing can go wrong with this plan, except possibly your imminent demise at the hands of blue lightning of some sort reaching out to get you from an exploded power supply. The silence stretches, broken only by the muted humming of fans, and you feel your fins start to flick happily as your computer continues to chug on unmolested.

CA: haHA youre not evven disconnecting on me wwhats the matter cant get into my amazin hivveframe for some reason
TA: 2HUT UP, 2HUT UP!
CA: my securitys really great see i knoww this guy he handles all my tech stuff
CA: i dont really think youll be able to get into one a his builds sol i think its maybe beyond your skill levvel
TA: GIIVE ME TWO MIINUTE2, AMPORA.
TA: II AM GOIING TWO WRECK YOUR 2HIIT.

You pull the plug on him at the one-minute fifty-eight seconds mark, and your reflection flashes a fangy grin back at you from the screen.

You get up, stretching, and then your face falls back into set lines. None of your motion detectors have gone off, but you slip out of your room to stalk silently through the ship anyway, patting your father once between his watchful eyes where you pass him standing guard over your room. He floats after you for a while, then takes up another position with a better vantage point on intruders. By the time you return to your room, you calculate that you've given Sol enough time to cool down for it to be safe to hook things up again.

You sit through the accusatory improper-shutdown bootscreen and troll Sol as soon as you are able.

-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]--

CA: sol i wwas serious you knoww
TA: THII2 II2 WHY GZ'2 MIIRTHFUL FUCKIING ME22IIAH2 IINVENTED THE TIIMIING FUNCTIION, ED.
TA: or, oh hey, here'2 an iidea!
TA: GO A2K YOUR FUCKIING LU2U2.

Not all the way cool, then.

CA: haha ew sol gross
TA: your FACE ii2 what'2 gro22.
CA: howw wwould you evven knoww it wwasnt in any a the pictures maybe i got really hot since you last saww me
CA: like evven hotter than before
CA: wwanna make fun a my face gonna havve to make fun a it to my face

This is such a completely batshit thing to be asking a lowblooded acquaintance to come do for you. You are that highblood in each and every terrible work stories thread; it is you.

But goddamnit, you need these pictures.

CA: cmon sol it doesnt havve to be wweird youvve been by before you know im alright and i knoww youre
CA: wwell youre you
TA: ...
TA: that'2 flatteriing.
CA: anywway you can probably take better pictures than i could
CA: i mean look at em you wwere right on about me bein stylistically limited wwhat wwith bein stuck holdin the camera in each one

And now it's genuinely bothering you. And you'd been so proud of them, too, fuck. You're dumb and so are each and every one of these goddamn samey pictures.

CA: i mean starting out wwith shitty selfies is fine but not keepin up wwith em
CA: makes me look kinda desperate doesnt it "lonely an possibly too off his rocker to get anyone else in his hivve" is wwell distinct from "sexy singles not in your area"
CA: wwhich is wwhat im goin for considerin the whole anonymous aspect of the hemonymity thing
CA: if im gonna do this im gonna do it right sol

You've always refused make a poor show of anything you've tried.

TA: ...
TA: 2o you're 2ayiing, you're not goiing two do anythiing by...
TA: ....
TA: ......
TA: ........
CA: i dont get it
TA: .........
CA: fuck
CA: half measures
TA: ...............
CA: HALF MEASURES
TA: ....................
CA: sol i wwill put a fist through this screen i swwear on all thats holy
TA: ...................................
CA: -caligulasaquariums screens been punched through on account a sol being a massive bulgemunch an he cant see any more a your shitty finish crumbs-
TA: ........................................................................

-- twinArmageddons [TA] ceased trolling caligulasAquarium [CA] --

CA: NO WWHAT YOU CANT JUST SIGN OFF
CA: FUCK YOU ANYWWAY SOLLUX CAPTOR GET BACK HERE

Chapter Text

-- apocalypseArisen [AA] began trolling caligulasAquarium [cA] --

AA: s0llux says
AA: 0h, excuse me
AA: s0llux d0es n0t say that he is g0ing t0 be 0ver tw0 h0urs after y0ur next FLARP meeting disbands
CA: oh
CA: uh aradia wwasnt it

Sollux's moirail, you think, and prick up your ears. This sets your headphones askew, and you slide them preemptively down around your neck.

AA: i l00ked the fatal league's administrative schedule up
AA: h0w are y0u guys d0ing with y0ur brackets
CA: oh dont evven start wwith me on brackets
CA: i wwould rather go on a candle-lit hate date wwith my owwn rifle an leave the scope on after than deal wwith another fuckin interminable go-round about THE GOD DAMN BRACKETS
CA: this shit straight up should not be takin half a this time to finalize
CA: but no wwevve all gotta play fuckin games an favvorites suddenly noww that wwere dowwn to the wwire
AA: y0u'd think y0u wouldn't get these sorts of pr0blems in the nonfatal league since less is 0n the line 0bjectively speaking
AA: but it is that much w0rse!

Eugh, you can't even imagine.

CA: unchecked bloody fuckin quadrant nepotism I bet wwithout the wweak ones under threat a gettin wweeded out
AA: yes
AA: 0f c0urse it w0uld make little sense to run a pred0minantly l0wbl00ded league in any other fashi0n c0nsidering the significant pr0p0rtion of wildly 0verp0wered players
AA: but I d0 envy your league's ability t0 permanently divest itself of the inc0mpetent at times

You do your best to ignore the uncomfortable chord that strikes with your most recent homicidal indiscretion.

CA: yeah but noww that wwere all powwer players in the highest ranks that just leavves us wwith that much less to distract ourselvves from one another wwith

True enough.

CA: wwhich wwas fine until just lately

Change the subject, change the subject.

CA: but you wwill not believve howw much a our staff meetings are taken up wwith fuckin flirtin nowwadays its a travvesty cant get anything done at all

Come on, Eri, change the subject.

CA: sometimes i swwear im the only one left wwith fins on still takin the future a the empire seriously insteada kickin back an lettin evverythin slide pre-ascension
CA: wwhich is STILL a wwhole swweep off last time i checked
CA: treasurer brought accelerant in their cup instead a coffee an poured it right on a girl last time set her right on fire right there in front of evveryone no shame at all

There.

AA: speaking 0f
AA: if s0llux d0es not c0me h0me t0m0rr0w because he is dead
AA: i will kill y0u with my brain
AA: and p0st pictures 0f myself 0n /d/ with y0ur severed fins taped t0 my face
AA: 0u0

-- apocalypseArisen [aA] has ceased trolling caligulasAquarium [cA] --

For a variety of reasons this makes you feel better instead of worse. You wonder who you would be, with a moirail like that. Who you could become.

-- carcinoGeneticist [cG] began trolling caligulasAquarium [cA] --

CG: ...BOY AM I GLAD THAT I DON'T DO QUADRANTS.

This again.

CA: kar i keep tellin you you just havvent met the right trolls
CG: NO, I'M PRETTY SURE WHAT I'M FEELING AT THAT STATEMENT IS STILL UNCONTROLLABLE PAROXYSMS OF ALL FOUR AT ONCE.
CA: haha howw wwould that evven feel
CG: YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW. I DIDN'T WANT TO EITHER, BUT HERE WE BOTH ARE.
CA: that mean youre a quarter pitch for me
CA: god thats wweird

Really weird.

CA: arent you like not evven fivve imperial feet tall wwhat wwould that evven be like
CG: ERIDAN, I KEEP TELLING YOU THAT I DON'T COME NEATLY PREPACKAGED INTO QUARTERS. OBVIOUSLY THE FLURRY OF BLOWS, BACKHANDS, GENTLE CARESSES, AND RIGHTEOUS PAPPINGS I WOULD VARIOUSLY AND **HYPOTHETICALLY** RAIN DOWN UPON YOUR PERSON WOULD ALL LAND AT FULL-STRENGTH.
CA: dowwn huh
CG: I WOULD LEAP ON YOU FROM SOMETHING. YOU AND SOLLUX THOROUGHLY DESERVE EACH OTHER, THOUGH AT LEAST HE HAS THE DECENCY TO BE SPINDLY ABOUT HIS HEIGHT.

Kar thinks you're annoying but he thinks Sol's worse. You think Sol might get it from him the other way around, though.

CA: sol aint spindly kar he's lanky havve you evven looked at the guy
CG: ...
CG: YEAH, SO, I'LL TALK TO YOU LATER.
CA: see ya kar
CG: SEE YOU.
CA: < < < o8 3 > 3< <
CG: WHAT IN THE GIBBERING FUCK, ERIDAN. WHY IS IT LIKE THAT. WHAT DID YOU DO.
CA: no look kar see theyre all cut in half an divvided up
CA: im just tryin to be sensitivve
CA: you doin that paroxysm thing a yours again is that why you havvent signed out yet
CG: I HOPE SOLLUX REWIRES EVERY SWITCH IN YOUR HIVE TO DO SOMETHING COMPLETELY BIZARRE.

-- carcinoGeneticist [cG] ceased trolling caligulasAquarium [cA] --

-

You dash down from the crow's nest as soon as your proximity alarms go off, to jitter readily by your great, baroquely overwrought double-doors. You wait for him to knock, feeling extra obnoxious with excitement, instead of going out to meet him on the deck; at the distant double-rap (called it!) you override the pneumatics by main strength and cast both doors open onto...onto an insufferably crooked smirk, and eyes that it takes you probably too long of staring at to register are bare behind the shimmering haze of psionic output.

Belatedly, you glance upwards.

His bi-color shades are floating, there, sparkling with more than moonlight. You track them, in rising horror, as they descend slowly and majestically to alight upon his face.

"Half-measures," he says to you, solemnly. He is indifferently-dressed, psionic-skinny, and still in those shoes that don't match; he is exactly as you remember him being, except not making any appreciable effort to hide the smirk, this time.

"Okay," you say, lowering your brows and using the scant inch you have on him to its fullest, "so, the thing about me being well-behaved? Was contingent on my also bein' unpro-fuckin-voked," and you start out low and conspiratorial but drop all the way down at the last into the most theatrical snarl you can pull off without a warm-up.

You don't expect the startle. You really don't expect the blush.

Your fins snap flat to the sides of your head like collapsed umbrellas. Oh, shit, good job Eri, way to immediately hit on the guy. The whole point of this was NOT to come across a thinly-disguised retelling of the proceedings on troll 4chan later; he went all this way out of his way for you as a hatefriend, like he's always doing with tech stuff for everyone who asks--not to mention the way you've come to notice your troops treat you, sometimes, neither properly fear nor yet again respect, but this--sort of death's-head resignation--

(Like they're only waiting for you to go away--)

"I," you say at once, a little roughly from not having paused to clear your throat, "didn't rightly mean it that way, Sol--" and you take a half-step back and to the side, nervously reaching up to adjust your own glasses.

Sol heaves an explosive sigh. "Yeah, I know," he says, and, taking your opening, brushes stiffly past into the foyer. His hands are thrust as deeply into the pockets of his jeans as they can go--which isn't far, they're fitted--and he's hunched a bit, now, every line of him radiating tension. It unnerves you; it compels you. You follow after him, avidly, and only realize how poor of a host you're being when he happens to glance back at you and stops cold. You were paying attention too closely to step on his heels; you halt also, in a swirl of expensive fabric.

He meets your eyes levelly. After a long, fraught moment, he swaps their colors. You blink. He does it again, starting up a slow oscillation, like some sort of psionic screensaver--wow, you did not know he could do that--and the tension breaks the rest of the way.

"Whoops," you say, and pocket your glasses to rub at your face; you've molted away the worst of your crap eyesight and don't really need them indoors. He makes a dismissive gesture like it's no big deal you were hunting him through your own goddamn hallways just now, your guest, and you grimace negatingly at him.

"E.D., it's fine, you're fine, I don't care. Where's your camera?"

"Look, Sol, I can actually interact in a civil fashion without fuckin'...hypnosis or some shit, I swear--"

"You think I'm hypnotizing?" he says, off-side of the smirk now twitching uncertainly like it wants to get in on the action too.

Holy shit, you cannot handle him laughing at you right now.

"I think you're--" pushing it, you just barely manage to click your fangs shut short of saying. "Look, you fuckin' flew here, right, I'm fresh from, ugh, anyway--" you're not, exactly, you'd at least sluiced off the secondhand coffee stink and brushed your fangs when you got home-- "let's eat something, Dad'd blow a gasket if I weren't at least that polite."

He'd been down deep all yesterday, hunting up "something special," and you had not been able to call him off. Lusii.

Sol opens his mouth, shuts it, nods. You make sure to walk in front, this time.

-

You've fantasized extensively in the past about, say, somehow inducing Kar to come over and then stuffing him with expensive delicacies, but Sol displays no perceptible opinion of your food. He seems only aware enough of it enough to triangulate accurately on each rich slice of fatty, marbled fleetfish--your dad put out a whole platter with it all arrayed in complex inflorescences. Lusii--and not choke on it accidentally on the way down.

Dad also left out the good tea service, which you eye with a certain death's-head resignation of your own. He'll know if you don't use it, too.

You talk about what you're planning as you bustle, and finally join him; he nods a lot, eyebrows slowly creeping up his forehead, and gradually relaxes for real. After a while you're pretty sure he's eating on automatic for the same reason you were, which is because you're too busy trading off talking and listening to pay attention. "Were," because you know you are well capable of taking in twenty pounds of flesh in one go and then lying around for days afterwards, cold-blooded as you are, and explicitly portion yourself not to do this when you're expected to maintain civilized levels of activity. You thus run out of stuff on your plate sooner than he does and put your feet on the table instead, which is a great heavy ironwood affair carved all over with compass roses and big enough for this not to be space-invadingly offensive.

You go over logistics, like not letting any incriminating details like welding seams or rivets creep into the background anywhere, like how you'd wanted to do it so a whole narrative arc gets captured in sequentials, stage things to engage the viewer as much as you can without being able to look right at 'em from the picture. You volley a few ideas back and forth about how best to achieve this without showing your horns. You agree on going for a pitch feel, and don't even feel bad about how decisively he nods while making reference to your temperament. He talks lighting, logistics, limits?--you shrug, make a face; he promises to pin you to the ceiling if you give him any real trouble, and so offhandedly, god, you want to moosh his face right down into the table, but you're too comfortable to get up--

"An I wwanna do a lot a shots wwith fins," you say, "like, so many, Sol, you don't evven knoww," emphatically enough for you to realize you've been letting your accent slip. Shit! Oh, well. He lisps. Maybe, if you don't fuck this up, you can win the right to go be unintelligible at Kar together until he starts going on about his auricular sponge clots, which is definitely a thing you want to hear get said by him in real life at some point.

Sol laughs and you halfheartedly raise said fins at him in irritation, then give up and let them lie lax. Partly because he's laughing at them, but mostly because you've never been able to be anything but sort of giggly while on your back. Slouched low with your feet kicked up is apparently close enough for physiological purposes. At least you don't go over all funny when your horns get grabbed, like you've heard can be the submit-trip for other people. You growl at him sullenly and lace your hands over your stomach, and he props his elbows on the table, struggling to get his face straight. You just sort of watch him as he struggles. It's pleasant.

He gets his eyes to quit their flickering eventually. "The Living Luminescence of the Deeps, huh," he says sagely, steepling his fingers.

"Plastic fins guy," you hiss, and wow, okay, there go yours. You are so mad you nearly struggle upright. "He has no title to me, Sol, so do not speak it aboard this ship, urrrgh that fakeass fuckin finless--" you break off, snarling at your own stripey knees.

"Ehehe, at least everyone's stopped forcing that dumbass 'sea-dwuh-wuh-vwuh-veller' meme, even I'm glad to see the back of that one and it barely slopped over into /t/. Hey, E.D., were you around for--?"

You sit bolt upright in your rush to cut him off, feet crashing to the floor.

"It took 'em so fuckin' long to leave off on me for that!" you burst out in frustration, smacking the tabletop open-handed, and there falls a vast and crushing silence between you.

"You." Sollux says to you, staring.

Oh, no.

"I, uh. I...of course not, Sol, I dunno what you're talkin about, I mean I hated that guy too, I mean that's ridiculous, who wwould--"

"That was your quirk," he says, in tones of dusking revelation.

"There's only so many of 'em to go around, Sol--" you say, you plead, voice rising in increasing desperation.

You are swept with the sinking, morbidly familiar certainty that all hope is not yet lost, a siren song you know is lying to you. The music thunders in your head, drowning all thought, overwhelming reason.

"Ehehehe."

"IT WASN'T ME," you roar, in an ecstasy of despair.

"IT SO FUCKING WAS!" he caws right back at you, disbelievingly, victoriously, entirely without dignity, pointing. He begins to howl with laughter. You feel the jaws of a great trap, closing.

Your vision tunnels to the column of his throat.

("Stop laughin, Sol," you can already hear yourself saying, low and intent and dreadful--)

The target you are focused on drops out of sight, and you check your lunge. He has fallen to the floor. He is having trouble breathing; he is mewling something to himself that resolves on your approach into "lmfao, lmfao, lmfao!" You find yourself on your knees and one hand beside him, the other awkwardly hovering to strike.

"Stop laughin', Sol," you say, and he does not. "Stop laughin'!"

Sollux continues to roll around weakly, clutching his stomach. He has gone nearly silent but for the occasional rusty squeak, probably with the internal torment of a seized diaphragm. This is miles worse than "ehehehe;" if you touch him now you will not stop until he is dead. (But--)

He aspirates spit and starts weakly choking. His legs kick like a struggling stick insect's. Your poised hand falls, heavy with fatalism. You take him by the neck.

No--he hunches in on himself defensively just in time, shoulders hiked up to his ears; you have a fistful of the front of his shirt. You yank him onto his back and kick a leg over to loom properly, very aware of the sweep and shadow of your cape as it pools around the both of you, the breadth it lends your shoulders, the way he lights the space between you with the frenetic flicker of his eyes.

He's warm between your thighs, his stomach taut and quivering. It's distracting; it distracts you. You hesitate for a second, mantled over him, then give at the knees and sit down hard with all your weight. He glurbles like you've killed him; you have literally heard that glurble before from the throat of a dying troll. He heaves beneath you once, twice, as he fights for breath. You are rolled up and down with the motion, like the sea.

He's crying. There are actual tears running revoltingly down his face. He's trying to speak through the rictus grin, more sorely overstretched pain than pleasure in it, breath chirping and whistling unsteadily in his chest. "I c-- aihkkh--I cn--hggk--"

"What," you rumble, warmed up now, and you lend it every dark and threatening harmonic you know, and he shudders all over, eyes falling closed. You think they might have rolled back in his head? You can't be certain. He's trying to speak. His throat is bared, now. Your hands itch for it.

"I CAN DIE...I can die..." he's still sniggering wetly, hampered more by his own self than by your weight. A cold chill trickles through you as he manages the words. You can feel your pupils constricting to slits, the colors in the room going funny with it, washed out. No. "happy--!" he wheezes at last, in one hard-won, brief convulsion of coherence.

What.

"GOD FUCKIN' DAMN IT, SOL, IT IS NOT THAT FUNNY," you holler, and shake him hard enough to set him flopping.

Chapter Text

-

"Nnnnhehe, nnehehehe, nhheheheheheh--"

At some point--you're not sure when--it stopped being quite so overwhelmingly weird to be touching Sol. Yeah, you're sitting on him, but he's still fucking laughing at you, isn't he, nothing's changed, except for how you've just found out he's apparently got enough self-control to be sat on during an argument without turning you into a fine mist. This is a disgustingly large amount of self-control for anyone to have, you think, you don't care how servile-bred and -blooded.

You give up on shaking him when it just makes him whoop. There is only one avenue left for you to win this confrontation, and if it's just as meaningless as going best two for three in Rock-Paper-Scissors-Dragon-Troll Spock, well, you haven't met a straw you wouldn't grasp at in extremity yet.

You grit your fangs, rear up--he goes "huhhgk" at the shift in your weight--tuck your chin, and slam your forehead down onto his. The reflex kicks in instantly in both of you to roll your crowns forward, to seek and find and hook into the contact; you brace your hands either side of him and scuffle until your horns are solidly locked.

Yours are nice enough to look at, but his are vicious like to put an eye out, crooked just right for fighting. You thrill to the danger of it, even as the odds you run all fall out in your favor. Your neck is bent further than you'd prefer, but you've got muscle to compensate; you've left your entire ventral surface open, but, well, he's welcome to try it. You yourself try an experimental flex against his pressure, and it causes your horns to slip together with a dull clack all the way to their bases.

He goes rigid beneath you, suddenly, finally, acknowledging the threat at last, and you feel all your stymied fight rush up in you at once. You want to shove, to pull and twist and battle--

"NonoNONONO--" he yelps, jerking unattractively instead of matching you. His hands fly to your shoulders and he digs in all ten blunted claws. You tilt your head on automatic to help him out, alarmed, and you both disengage with one final, rich click of horn on horn. This travels down your spine and all the way to the soles of your feet even as you recoil uncertainly and stare at him. When you decide this is still sort of breath-tradingly close to be to a guy having a flipout, you slowly straighten your arms, seeing if he's got it together enough to let you loose. He does. You sit up, but politely, the desire to use him as a fulcrum having mostly deserted you by now.

"Don't ever lock horns with me," he rasps, all levity gone, one hand on his rack, the other rubbing in quick little circles at his temple. Oh, okay, that's really explicit actually, wow, where else can you look, away, yes, right--

"Okay," you say, "okay, Sol," averting your gaze, and for a moment you even mean it. You take your weight on your knees again, scoot back mild as milk, tug your clothes straight. He levers himself onto his elbows the second he gets the space and breathes out shaky and slow. You notice that he is obviously, entirely, and offensively distracted from you. You notice this at roughly the same time as you notice the angle you've got on him, now.

Well, you think. Maybe he could use a better distraction. Okay, this is a lie: you don't think at all. You just stoop like a diving beakbeast, and sink your horns into his belly just short of hard enough to puncture. He gasps, and you feel the flutter; for a half-second he slackens entirely, and you feel that too.

You wonder, wildly, if he's actually going to yield. But before you can think of anything else to regret having done later, space itself splits with a whipcrack sound. An entire constellation of sparkles explode into existence around you, expanding outwards in a great blazing sphere to fill the room. They hiss and spit where they hang; they eel through the air in little random flicks and pulses. They look really, really, really really dangerous.

You hold your ground. He'd telegraphed that, badly; you'd felt his sudden focus through your horns. You maintain the outward pretense of being unable to care less, while inwardly finding yourself deeply preoccupied with what it would feel like were one to touch your skin. Your nictating membranes slip across your eyes as you commit yourself to finding out.

He senses your resolve in turn, you think, breathing slowly and steadily where you've pinned him, because they get a little livelier. The whole mass takes on a slow, galactic twirl, with the two of you at its center. You peer warily out from behind your second eyelids and messed-up sweep of hair, aware your own breath is coming shallowly now but still completely uninterested in backing down. Your lips pulled back from your fangs some time ago. They're bared now, rigidly, like Sol's were. Your whole face aches.

A fat little squiggle of light comes wandering by, a single straying spark, lazy as a dim season blowfly. You pretend you are ignoring it. It crackles softly to itself, slowly becoming more white than either red or blue. (You are not ignoring the least little part of it.) It moves at random, idly. It moves to fill your vision.

It gets you right in the nose.

-

You think you must have spent some time scrambling blindly around the room with the astounding pain of it, because when your vision clears you are standing sort of pressed back against the table, unable to remember how you got here. You think your nose is bleeding, but you can't tell, because you can't feel anything but an undifferentiated sea of pain where you once had a face, and don't want to touch to check.

"Zoll, I dingk bai nobe ib bleedig," you tell him, numbly.

"Actually there's just this big, gaping hole left where it used to be," Sol says, watching you like you're the most entertaining thing to have ever happened to him. "It's an improvement."

"I shoulda splid you righd down th' middle," you tell him resentfully, and gingerly reach up to rub away the awful, burning ache. By the time you surface from your hopefully-not-too-suggestive ministrations, tingling and smarting, Sol's smirk has graduated to a grin. It's hard to tell with how many teeth are showing by default. You think you can see a few extra peeking out around the sides now that are new to you.

"It's not like anyone's going to be looking at your face, E.D.," he informs you cheerfully, and you groan and debate the relative merits of flipping the table on him. Pros: hilarious. Cons: he would do it back to you with his mind. You hang your head for a second, wincing as your horns inform you exactly what they think of your choice in hatefriends. You straighten up, flip your hair out of your face--you'll be okay with going back to not noticing your horns any time now-- and in all of a motion roll your shoulders and shed your cape, tossing it onto the back of a convenient chair.

Your eyes glance over the table as you do so, and you grimace. Ahh, the ever-present washing-up. Sol's watching you expectantly, and you wave him off. "Look, Sol, let me take care of this first. I got a, what," you hunt for the term, "ablutionblock just down the stairs from here, if you," uhhhh, "want the gaper or anythin'. Or a shower." Shit! "You can use my stuff if you want, I don't care, got plenty of it."

Those goddamn eyebrows are up again, but the corners of his mouth are pointedly turned down, so at least he's trying not to laugh at you. That's quadrant corners to respect, you think, and doesn't put your back up, which you are fervently glad of. If you'd still wanted to pick a fight with him right on the heels of that experience you'd be worse cullbait than Gamzee "chill, motherfucker, it's not trash anymore, it's this other motherfucker's necklace. Miracles," Makara.

You split, him to seek out the indicated stairs, you to pile everything onto the platter and dump the whole mess in the sink.

-

He looks warm, damp, yellow, and a little flustered when you at last go down to find him, having heard the pipes clang from upstairs and having taken it as your cue to actually do the dishes instead of halfassedly leaving them. You take his general aspect to mean that he hadn't planned on showering, but had found himself unable to resist your swank setup. Your favorite part of that bathroom is the massage setting for the jets; you wonder if he found it.

"Could you get the water hot enough?" you ask him, thinking sort of wistfully about Kar.

"Yeah, but it was kind of salty and gross. "

"Fuckin' desalination system," you swear, with feeling. At least you know the tap in the kitchen's fine, you'd used it for the tea. You yourself can drink seawater, if you're willing to sit around drinking copious amounts of it and dribbling concentrated saline out your sinus glands, but running out of fresh water all the way out here would be the actual death of any landdwelling troll without Sol's capabilities.

Hell, maybe even him, if he were already dehydrated and it were hot and he had to make the flight--no, wait, you've got some bottled stuff lying around still, you think, from back when you'd been taken in about artisanal springwater.

"What, worried about your hair?"

You hipcheck him immediately. "I ain't the one with the worrisome 'do at the moment, Sol." You hope he knocked an elbow when he hit that bulkhead, you really do. Also his hair's fine and so is yours, you're both just sort of attractively touseled. Him from genuine neglect, you from the studied variety.

"Fuck you, it was your saltwater!"

You bicker like you're both online, minus either of you storming off in a huff, as he trails you deeper into your hive. You are aware of each twist and turn you make the same way you'd been aware, previously, of the manner in which your cape had draped over you both. But he's at ease, and you make sure to keep him that way, going out of your way to show your back to him a lot and holding off on eye contact as much as you are able.

Gradually the bulkheads around you give way to wooden wainscoating and patterened velvet wallpaper, spotty and dank with age. The half-light here is thin and disorienting, cast by naked, flickering bulbs in old, cracked sockets. A sharp turn down a narrow hall and up a discreet ladder and you emerge again to metal and rivets and neat, tight modern workmanship. Diffuse, omnidirectional illumination in a more pleasant wavelength swells to light this space, as you come to the room you'd been thinking of using. As you key the blast door open, you're struck with a sudden thought.

"You okay with me closin' this after us?" you ask, accessing the pad settings just in case and looking back--no, at him, as he walks right past you in.

"Yeah, it's fine. That model's been crackable for a while now, you should seriously consider upgrading."

You roll your eyes and tell him the combo regardless, because you are proud of remembering to be that considerate. You watch as he walks forward into the spartan room, one of your few with every surface entirely refinished, and picks up your camera, which you've left on the sort of raised waist-high platform in the center. You'd left that architectural feature in, as well as its twin on the ceiling, feeling they lend the place character.

Sol looks up from the camera, now whirring busily to itself in his hands, staring lingeringly here and there in arbitrary places as if those eyes of his are seeing beyond the walls.

"Hey, E.D., is this the old helmsblock?"

You blink. How'd he know? "Yeah, it is."

"Rude."

"What--oh, come on, Sol, what do you care, it's not like the modern rigs aren't all walk-on-walk-off anyway--"

"This wasn't."

You fling up your hands. "Excuse me, are you a willin' tool of Empire like the rest of us or are you not?"

He blows a split-tongue raspberry at you, to which you retaliate by stripping off your scarf and shirt. Wow, okay, he trailed off pretty hilariously there, but it's a delicate business doing this without making an even more hilarious tangle of yourself. By the time you're free (and with all grace and properly deliberate poise, thanks), you're over it enough to surface with a straight face.

Sol's quiet, now, and you keep your head high and don't look at him as you fold your clothing up and set it aside. You...don't want him quiet. This is weird enough without him going quiet on you. You kneel to unlace your boots--you normally wear trainers, indoors, but your current pair is like half a sweep old, and thus much too scuffed and tatty to wear in front of company--and as you're hiking up your pant leg to get at the second set of laces, you're struck with an idea. Ah, perfect. Let's see if he can pretend he's AFK through that, then.

With new resolve, willing your fins to a casual half-mast slant and holding them there, you unbutton your trousers and shuck them like you've got swimwear underneath instead of nothing. You rise, regally. You fold your pants and toss them onto the neat stack of your things. You take off all your rings, one by one, methodically, and then rake your claws through your hair, with brisk finality.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Sol relax out of his defensive hunch over the camera. He's standing by the, fine, the block in the center of the room, and has been switching back and forth between macro and standard lens settings in a totally transparent attempt to look busy this whole time.

"E.D., what the hell," he says, sounding impatient and disgusted and only a little bit strained. You mentally congratulate yourself, the same way you do at every salvaged conversation with him.

"You havin' a problem a some sort, Sol?" you ask, crossing your arms and tilting your head inquiringly, keeping your fins still with an effort.

"Just take the fucking socks off before I figure out how to block you I.R.L."

You give in and let your fins flick out to frame your grin. You don't feel weird anymore, now that Sol doesn't. He floats lightly up to sit on the edge of the block, showing a slice of skinny grey ankle where he's let his legs hang as he settles, and you set to removing the socks.

Hop, hop, click.

HEY.

"Don't take fuckin' pics a this!" you yelp in indignation, sock in hand and sock on foot. The flicking has jumped ship from your fins to his dumb, mismatched eyes now, which glitter down at you like the inset gemstones of a badly-hidden pile of shitty wands.

"How was I supposed to know we weren't already started? I.D.K., E.D., that was pretty sexy," click, click, "Keep going, yeah, just like that--"

You throw the sock at him and miss, badly, but he ducks and you take the opportunity to divest yourself of the other one before he can--oh, nope, he'd floated the camera, and gotten a pic of that too. Wow, you kind of really ha--

W-e-ll. You are going for a pitch feel, aren't you. Okay, yeah. You hate this guy! Wow, do you hate him. You hate him a lot.

The camera's right up in your face, now, coruscating a little around the edges with his light. It tilts to look down your front, and you swipe at it. It bobs out of reach and only then you realize Sol's been talking.

"Hey, E.D., hey."

"Holy shit, Sol, that's annoyin'--" oh, wait. You...do that to him all the time, don't you. The hey-Sol-hey thing.

He doesn't let the pause stretch to become meaningful, just speaks as soon as you've stopped rumbling and he's sure he's captured your attention.

"Simple," he says, then makes an and then gesture, "Salacious, right?"

The lisp and accompanying eyebrow waggle undo you completely. Your fins give one great, magnificent flap before you can stop them, and you snort, shaking your head to get them to settle. "Yeah, just...tell me what, and when to switch, Sol. You sound like you know what you're doin'." This guy has clearly seen more pictures of naked trolls than you've seen little fishes, and you're on the tinfish spawning route: that is a lot of little fishes. (Getting it on, coincidentally.)

"So, like...really lewd, or really really lewd."

"That second one," you say, before you can catch yourself, and roll your eyes at his fist-pump and hissed yessssss, even as his enthusiasm (if only over you falling into his trap) allows you to go on to say: "I, uh, was actually plannin' on seein if I could...you know." Your hand twitches for the scarf currently piled with the rest of your clothing. You hadn't brought this up earlier, because, well, why would you? But somehow it doesn't seem quite so entirely out of the question now, actually standing here. Naked. And he hasn't run off or bailed on you or got stuck on weirded-out and stayed there. Maybe--

"Let's go for it," Sol says, nodding down at you decisively from his vantage point. You remind yourself how he'd seemed to share your excitement, earlier, your investment, as attentively enthusiastic as if you'd been discussing the budget for a new hiveframe build. Like this was any other project two trolls might undertake together. What a solid guy.

"Yeah, I mean that was part of why I wanted you, you're--" you say, waving a hand at him as if to encompass all of his Solluxish qualities at once.

"Yeah," he says, maybe a little grudgingly but not sounding too bothered, you think. "Just don't go pale on me or anything, E.D., that would be majorly counter-productive."

"Eugh, Sol!" That's the last quadrant you need getting mixed up in this. Anyway, this is all much too ridiculous to be in need of serious calming-down about anyway. You're already committed wholesale, why be nervous now? You got that over with ages ago. Who even was that guy, having reservations about things, you've never heard of him.

"We'd be the worst moirails. I'd kill you like two seconds into my first migraine," Sol says meditatively, drawing up a knee and resting his elbow on it, sending the camera back into the air with a nearly imperceptible twitch of two fingers.

"What, not the second one," you say, but he ignores you and taps the side of his glasses instead, absorbed, and you remember your camera can link up wirelessly to stuff. Neat, he'll know exactly what he's taking, then.

"So," he says, pushing his glasses up his nose with his middle--two fingers. Who even does that. This guy, you swear. "Uh, stretch? I guess?"

You stretch. The camera, haloed red and blue now, swirls around you to take some body shots. You, brightening, flex for it, then remember you were talking about something.

"Oh, you'd kill me! Like hell, you haven't seen one of MY freakouts," you tell him, warming to the subject, unwilling to be bested even at being bad at things. He makes a face. You threat-display at him--well, at the camera, but facing him, meaningfully, knowing you're right.

"Not planning on it, either," he tells you quellingly, and you can feel all the blood drain right back out of your fins from where they've been flushing purple.

Oh, shit. What is wrong with you. Change the subject--

"Oh, no, no, no. We're cool, Sol, you're a really together guy--"

You fail to change the subject.

"I mean I'm not so fuckin' self-absorbed that I'd invite you out here and then go 'oh whoops wherever did this dead lowblood come from,' you know, 'he shouldn't've messed with a seadweller, right guys,' I mean that's what I'm not gonna do--"

Wow, this is worse than rolling for initiative against Vriska.

"E.D., it's fine, fuck. I get it, O.K.?"

"No you don't, Sol. I mean, I wish I could tell you different, but. I do kinda...tend to strike without warnin' and..." your voice goes smaller, "you should know that. About me." You look down at your linked arms, at the murderously sharp claws on the ends of your fingers, pricking at your flesh even though you're hardly gripping.

Before you can find the words for an actual apology--which you're working up to, you swear, and it'll be about being such a shitawful host and coming so close to killing him back there, and all of it, everything, he interrupts your train of thought.

"O.K., E.D., least sexy pose ever." You glance up. He's staring down at you impassively. "Like, all the sex just drained right out of you. Dang."

"Well, sorry--" you say, primed to apologize and going off on a hair-trigger.

"E.D.," he huffs at you, exasperated, "holy shit, do you really think I don't know what it's like to be dangerous?"

"Goddamnit Sol I get it, you're a psionic, okay! I've noticed! I mean I killed like every fuckin' kid I ever crushed black on before Vriska!"

"Oh."

"Yeah OH," you shout, gesturing wildly, starting to pace, horns throbbing with the urge to rake and strike. "I'm not saying you're some delicate red ingenue I could never fuckin' harm okay I'm not hittin' on you," shit, were you, you didn't mean to, "I'm sayin' you got a lot a experience workin' with unstable psychos with the cash to afford your builds and I like my odds of not flippin' the fuck out on a guy with a proven track record of not causing me to flip entirely the fuck out!"

You don't even know what you're saying. You are kind of flipping out. You wish someone would hit you; you want to boil over. Your muscles writhe and strain all along your frame. Even your bare feet are in on it, toes flexing as if to drive clipped claws right through the tile.

Click.

Your breath hitches. That's when you realize one of the reasons your chest is tight is the long, low, rolling rumble you are currently producing.

"Sexy's back," he informs you.

"Oh, leave off," you spit, choppily, broken up by your effort to speak through the other sound, but your head's clear now. You remember what you're here to be doing. You feel the energy crackling through you and you let it rise up, let it raise you up; you roll your shoulders and arch into a toss of your horns like a plainsbeast, a tightly-controlled, torquey motion, heavy with intent.

The camera floats by out of the corner of your eye, and you flash both fins and pupils at it, mugging a silent snarl--then blink at the click. There's no way your horns aren't in that picture. He's wasting your time. Hot fury surges through you, and you lunge.

But the small, sane part of you responsible for calculating your tantrums as a wiggler is still ascendant, and though Sol bobbles the thing enticingly like a laser pointer--asshole--you grit out "Lemme take it down, like I'm puttin' the viewer on their back," quite coherently, you think, around the resonant snarl. You stalk after it, watchfully, waiting for your chance to--

The camera swoons to the floor and you surge over it at once, hands slamming down either side like it really is somebody's face. Plastic fins guy's face, you think, and feel your jaws gape in homicidal fury; but then there's a flicker in its light (which goes red) and you think, Sol. The twanging, volatile tension soaked all through you goes up like gasoline.

The camera tilts to get a shot all along the underside of your body, with the program now, and at that simple, single indication of attention--at the soft, cooperative click--you unsheathe all at once. You're panting, you're dripping. You're on fire. Your internal-fit-overseer is screaming internally about there not being another camera to get a different shot of this.

Sol doesn't clear his throat, or shift, or do anything perceptibly to draw your attention. You find yourself searingly aware of him anyway, where he sits on the block, just barely in your field of view, very still. Time drags on. He does nothing, as you brood over your catch, just waits. The tension recedes to a manageable level, and when the camera clicks again it surprises you harmlessly. Your eyes refocus on it, blown pupils narrowing, and you are able to shake yourself all over and stand. When you do, you are presented with...the other camera, a slim pocket-sized thing, floating. Haloed blue.

It distracts you from the pull in your guts as your bulge retracts, slimily, sending a drop or two of clear fluid pattering to the floor. It distracts you from the fast, fluttering twinge in your nook, slick inside and aching even as standing mostly reseals it. You can feel a single drop of something--hopefully not purple, god, you hope--charting an intrepid course down your thigh, heading for the inside of your knee; but you are so, SO distracted from all of these things right now.

That had been what the change in color meant, before. A second fucking camera. You feel a broad smile spread across your face. Good hatefriend, best casual acquaintence. You dart forward, sort of going 'lalalalalala' in your head about what that makes things feel like between your legs, and seize it right out of the air, entirely disregarding the contact zap the psionic aura gives you. "Fuck yes, two cameras, Sol, this is perfect, this is gonna be so great--"

"The fuck did you expect, E.D.? This is the second time you've met me, right?"

You stare up at him, eyes shining, breathless with anticipation, head filled to overflowing with visions of twelve-point grey type, paragraph after paragraph, and all singing your praises. "Sol, holy shit, I cannot fuckin' wait to post these pictures."

His face falls a little--or, no, wait, you think he might be rolling his eyes? It's really hard to tell.

"I dunno if I quite caught that facial expression," you say, tapping your chin musingly with his tiny camera. "You wanna run that by me again?"

He slips off the block as you speak and strides directly into your space, shoving those eyes right up to yours and exaggeratedly rolling them. You trail off. This close, you can see he does have pupils, they're just not black, because his eyes are lit from within. With no shadow in them, they're just...openings. If you held him down and them open and peered for long enough, you think, you might be able to just make out the backs of his eyeballs.

Yes. So. The gesture's perfectly intelligible at this distance. You aren't wearing your scarf, either for him to grab (everybody tries it at least once, and you know that face: he'd like to), or for you to bite on. You want to bite him. You want to bite him right on his--you blink, and glub, and shove him off, bobbing your horns in warning. If you fail this now and jump him, you lose the only chance you will ever, ever have to prove yourself an okay and trustworthy enough guy to join Kar's actual social circle. Fuck, that was close.

He steps off, but not without an abortive toss of his own horns back at you. Like a crane; like somebody with a fancy hat in a brisk wind. Like they're gonna fall off if he tilts his head wrong. You forgot to ask him what was up with that.

"Anyway," he says, lightly, taking a breath and gesturing diffidently--with his hands stuffed in his pockets again, it mostly consists of a muted elbow-flap and a nod--once he's retreated to a more conversational distance. "Keep going, or take a break? 'Cause it's getting late, and this is plenty to work with, so if you wanted to quit this would be a good time. Fuck," he breaks off suddenly, with feeling, but you're preoccupied.

As soon as he offers, you yearn at once for peace and quiet, for retreat, for time to recoup and feel...less. But you really hadn't expected you'd be able to unsheathe. At all, but especially not without an actual fight--you'd been toying with going The Full Awkward and asking Sol to knock you around a little, maybe make good on that pin-you-to-the-ceiling threat. But even standing this close to a fully-clothed troll, whom you've never even faced on the field of battle... you're still aching for it. You're not entirely sure what "it" would be in this context, but if it continues to involve taking spectacular pictures of your junk, you decide you are definitely down for more "it."

Nothing gets attention from strangers like real arousal, as visually distinct from self-stimulation as the pink moon is from the green one; this is choice material. You hardly ever see pitch stuff where the troll doesn't look like chopped meat, either--pushing the physical to compensate for the disconnect of having to stop and take a picture, or tolerate the ashenly quelling presence of a third cameratroll--but you aren't marked up at all; that's different. That's, wow. You don't even know what that is. Like you're a fuckin'...canvas, or something. Pure. Yearning for the audience's claws.

And if you're shaky and a little unbalanced, well, Sol is a quiet steady presence like a stone, isn't he? Okay, fine, no he isn't, you're not an idiot, you know from being barely held in check, and he must be under an incredible amount of granite-shearing pressure. Here in the bowels of a highblood's hive. Doing this.

But you think: moirailled man. And how it must steady him, the strength of a third person here keeping him tame. You remember how you felt when he laughed right up at you, under you, into your face; how breathless you'd been, too. How it felt to see him standing again, hipcocked and insouciant, afterwards. You think about how it would feel, to trust yourself around other people like he does, someday.

You think about these fucking pictures, holy shit. And the tight, uncomfortable feeling in your nook, your sheath, demanding you spread your legs right now and then possibly wrap them around something. You resist widening your stance, try to look nonchalant, probably fail, don't care.

But. "Maybe, uh, from the other way around, pitchwise," you say, and he nods twice in quick affirmation.

"Sure! Ehehe, yeah, it'd be the really creepy sort of pale getting you back down again if we fucked up more of this--"

"Oh, what, ick, Sol--"

"But hey, if attention's all you want, E.D., I definitely know some places we could post those pictures, eheheh, they'd love it on /qs/--"

"You go on fuckin' /qs/?" You recoil, aghast, then sway forward onto the balls of your feet, eyes narrowing, weighing how best to satisfy your overwhelming urge to take your horror out on him. Maybe you'll--

He dodges preemptively. "Touch me and I pap your bulge! Right on the bulge, E.D., I'll fucking do it!" he hollers, bouncing back on his toes like he's got any idea how to fight on foot instead of floating, and you move to take a swipe at him because you cannot physically refrain, and are entirely composed of equal parts SOL! and CUT IT OUT! at this point. Forget Kar, you need to make this blight on the face of trollkind bleed right now--

But then he crisply snaps his fingers, and sends the cameras whizzing around your head. You make a rough noise, backing up, attention darting this way and that as he widens their gyre, drawing you along with their unblinking eyes back out into the room, until you stand all the way clear of him, block, and piled clothing. You cross your arms, arrogant-straight and irascible, and they slow their orbit. There's an easy assurance in the way Sol moves them, probably born of sweeps of maneuvering the view through complex levels in video games.

You trust him with getting your best angle.

"Right, where d'you want me, then," you ask, still half-distracted by both your lingering desire to claw him up and the flickering progress of the cameras rotating around you. Your head swivels to track them involuntarily as they swing by. He doesn't miss a beat:

"On your knees."

You think: Oh, nice, this is goin' to look so fuckin' good, and drop with all the alacrity and grace of the thousand times and more you've knelt for sniping. The cameras take up their positions, set to clicking busily, and you can tell they're good choices, great angles. You bow your head proudly, feeling the ripple down all the great muscles of your back--

He guides you through a variety of positions, and you meticulously bend yourself to his words. You arrange each limb, lounge more, sprawl less, twist thusly to keep your face and horns from view. On your side, on your back. On your hands and knees. It's nothing like the frenzy of before, crying out for resolution; you could do this forever. You kind of want to.

And as Sol hits you with great idea after great idea you feel a lazier, less-triumphant loosening take hold all through your body, a deep and steadily-increasing throb. You're dripping, now, and more than just that initial bit of lubrication held at all times in the sheath. The steady plip of your clear fluids against the tile is all you have to mark the passing time. Sol doesn't mention it. In turn you make no effort not to smear through it as you move. (You know what you like, in a picture.)

By the time he has you down on knees and elbows, gazing half-lidded at your crossed arms, fins swept forwards just obscuringly so, your bulge is hanging in an idle, glistening coil and your nook is more exposed than you can recall it ever having been. You feel sloppily dilated and swollen tight at once, your internals bared all the way to the first tier of ruffly bits; you wonder what they look like. You've never seen them. You've never even felt air there before.

You've never yielded, to anything, like this before.

"Hey, Sol," you say, surprising yourself with your own voice. You cracked the 'hey,' and clear your throat before trying again. "I wanna get a really good shot, yeah?"

"Yeah?" he asks, low and rough where you were expecting high and nasal.

"Like, spread," uh, "myself. You know what I mean?"

"Hnn."

"Huh?" You sweep the fin on that side back to peer at him, over the muscled swell of your shoulder and...ass. Which you've currently got pointed right at him (when did that happen?). You meet his eyes. You have no idea what yours look like, but his are literally blazing down at you. He swallows and you hear every complex, wetly organic sound of it. He speaks:

"Can I?"

"Wh." It's not a what, just a whuff, the punctuation of surprise. Can he? You don't know. You untwist, stare back down blankly at your own hands. And then, in your mind's eye, you see the picture.

"Yes," you say immediately, head popping back up. "Fuck yes, Sol, do it--ow!"

He must have literally flown to you. The first thing of his hand you feel is the psionic snap of his belatedly-dampened aura, a sharp jolt of pain right on the buttcheek. Thank god he hadn't gone for your nook, you'd. Have. Possibly liked that, you think dazedly, as your bulge begins to thrash heavily between your legs. You let your head drop back down onto your arms, and only realize that you are moaning when this muffles the noise of it.

The pain fades to a deep warmth and tingle, beneath the steady pressure of his hand. You can feel his long fingers flex into you, once, twice. Your name is Eridan Ampora, Sollux Captor is touching your ass, and in your mind's eye you can just fucking see the picture. Later on, you're going to. And so will--

You exhale, shuddering, relaxing all at once from your flinch. Sol's touch firms to a grip, and he draws in one long, shaky breath of his own that has you pressing back against him, hard. Your chest is to the floor now, your face on the tile, your hands in your own hair, fisted. Your bulge is moving constantly, frantic. Your hips twitch with its transferred kinetic energy.

At the moment, you are about ten thousand times more preoccupied with your nook. Fucking touch it, you think. Touch it, touch me, just fuckin', move your hand Sol--

"--don't tease," you plead, no pretense. As that last word turns over like a starting engine into a steady growl in your chest, he touches where you really want him to at last. You trail off on the sibilant but keep up with the vowel, drawing it out into a low, liquid, satisfied thrumming. Like a boat underway, as heard from underwater, as he oh sweet FUCK that! isn't teasing--!

You only know it's two fingers because, well, this is the second time you've met the guy.

It takes a second to really start hurting. Dry, you think, and it's about all you're capable of thinking; and then Ow! again. Splayed there, trilling high and startled, you strangle for a moment on a noise that might be a sob. You ignore it completely. You have better things to think about. You're so wet, and it doesn't matter at all, because he went in dry, and is now keeping up a steady, sinking pressure. Ow ow ow if that was a knuckle you hope he hasn't got any more of them--

You stretch, you burn. Your body accepts, rearranging inside in a series of strained, painful breachings. The searing discomfort at the entrance to your nook eclipses the smoulder you are trying hard to remember having felt, at one point, further in. Miserably turned on, eyes squeezed shut and watering, you try to press yourself back and up to match his slow, inexorable onslaught.

Bit by bit, limbs trembling finely, you retake your lost ground. Your overwhelmed nook rallies. You flutter, inadvertently, and then clench with desperate purpose when that somehow eases his passage, just in time for there to be no more to take. You are panting, harshly, your pulse thundering in your ears, bending all your will to holding this pose for the sake of the camera that your electroreceptors report has a really, really good shot of what's going on between your legs.

He withdraws, just a little, and angels sing. It still hurts but the heat of him is warming you and spreading, and now each move he makes draws your wetness with him. Your bulge, previously arched up warily against your lower belly, stretched out slender and away, darts backwards in sudden interest. You feel it quest across his idle knuckles, just the tip, and the sensation is enough to make your whole body twitch. His hand pauses. Your bulge caresses, emphatically.

You can feel it, the exact moment of decision when those fingers you're courting tuck harder into his palm instead of unfurling. You don't know whether to writhe or brace yourself--

That second one, you think, as Sol slides his fingers in and out twice, testingly, and then begins to energetically piston them. On every other thrust, he twists, hard and deep and exploratory and nothing like a bulge. I should have picked that second one.

But you didn't, and now you really are sobbing, deep wracking sobs that extinguish into choking, gravelley snarls. You're short-circuiting all over; you're glowing, bioluminescent, fitfully and then stronger and stronger. It feels good, him delving into you, it feels so good, it feels amazing; why have you been superciliously getting all your work done this whole time instead of single-mindedly chasing after this--

You know the second your gills get in on it, though, because you feel a shoutpole of pure terror at the slip, as if a book held under your arm and forgotten about had made an unexpected bid for freedom. They clamp and you didn't clamp them; they relax again and you definitely didn't do that. When you keen, submissive, reflexive, that's-far-enough-thanks, it whistles out thin and quiet, the pressure soughing directly out your sides. You clamp again and your noise swells, lose your hold on them and fade out again.

You are terribly aware of the cameras, clicking. You are terribly aware of a lot of things, all of them having to do with Sol--none of them having to do with him going for your gills, rippling in tempting waves along your sides. He slows, listening probably, and you shut up right quick, try to reach for a different sound, find you can't make any. You glub, once, reflexively, trying to get air out of places it's not supposed to be. You manage one breath, hands on your own horns, one chirp, and then it takes hold of you again and your gills all seize tight and then flare at once, even the fucking neck ones you don't actually care about.

Behind you Sol makes a quiet, surprised sound. The breath you take at it whistles the wrong way into your body cavity through your open sides. You don't even realize you're coming, at first, he's kept it so intense; you peak like you fucked it up trying to make it ashore in a heavy sea, seized by a great wave and set tumbling.

It gives you your gills back. As soon as you've surfaced, you seal them shut, spending your first breath on a belated yowl that drowns out the last few liquid sounds of the genetic material spilling out around Sol's fingers.

Well, you think, impaled there, so that was purple, but at least it wasn't a full release. You hope. You can't tell. That would be so fucking embarrassing, you think. The thought is oddly hard to hold onto. You snuffle hard and scrub your streaming face, pull yourself together enough to pull off of him wetly and tip over onto your side out of the puddle.

"Eheh," Sol says, from behind you, as you make the massive effort required to prop up a leg and get out of your own way, resheathing.

"Wh. What," you manage, aching and buzzing all through with exhaustion, unable to raise your head to look up, let alone at him.

"Hey E.D., Hey E.D.," he says, and you draw the strength from somewhere to roll over onto your back to see what it is. His eyebrows are doing the thing. Your eyes then focus on what he is waggling in the foreground at you, shiny with purple slick.

"...," he says.

You groan in deep dismay. "Yes, Sol, okay, I get it--"

"Two fingers--"

"Oh my god--"

"Twoooo fingerrrrs, E.D.--"

"One-trick fuckin hoofbeast."

"Two-trick," he says, insufferably satisfied. "You're the other one."

"I'll kill you where you stand."

Yeah, except not actually. Also he isn't standing, he's on his knees, and shuffling closer. You hear the creak and rustle of joints and cloth. It is very quiet, in this room. You can hear every sound your bodies make. He plants himself solidly beside you, on his skinny butt, knees drawn up and arms crossed over them, head pillowed, lighting you as he looks down.

"Yffnnrgh," you say, which was supposed to have come out as something besides that. Wow, it should probably be bothering you to be so disproportionately...this, with another, totally unimpaired troll. But it's not like he's your kismesis or anything, you think, rolling your shoulders and settling your head back until your horns are resting just so on the tile. You guess it's fine.

Sure feels all right.

Chapter Text

Both sets of your eyelids drift closed, then halfway open, lazily squaring your field of view. From this vantage point Sol's eyes are upside-down and shining, and for a moment yours twinge painfully at the light. You relax all the small muscles and let yourself stare, allowing the illumination to drill into your skull.

You only really realize you've gotten yourself into a contest when you start feeling naked again for the first time in--you don't know how long.

You constrict your pupils with an effort, wet your lips. "Sol. So. When were you flyin' hivewards. Don't wanna trap you here."

You totally want to trap him here. You love those novels.

"Fucking hell, E.D., it's like noon or some shit, I can't go back now."

Oh.

You blink.

OH.

"Great!" you say, not galvanized enough to get up yet but nearly, "Sol, that's fantastic, you can stay over, we can pick out all th' best ones--"

"O.K., I had not previously bought into any of that highblood-stamina propaganda hoofbeastshit, but how the fuck can you even still be going--"

Ahaha, he sounds impressed, he thinks you're impressive.

"How can you not want to post these pictures right th'fuck now?" you ask, slurring only a little, giddy and breathless. "Holy shit, you took 'em, they're more than good, Sol, they're amazin', let's do it!" and, wow, you certainly are on your back right now, aren't you.

"E.D."

"Sol."

"E.D., no."

"Sol. Yes."

He stands and you grab wildly at his ankles, hooking your claws into the nearest pant leg. You latch on, stretched out long and lithe, growling. He swears and hops a little, then, experimentally, pulls. You dig everything you've got into the floor, heels to horns, hanging on and re-establishing inverted eye contact. He doesn't move you an inch; you are dense-boned, and mostly muscle.

He facepalms. Both of them. "Fine. We can sort the pictures--"

Yes! You let him go and gather yourself, marshaling your enthusiasm and your strength. You take a deep breath, say, quietly, to yourself, "Hup," and flip over.

Right into your own slick.

You make a noise, inarticulate, inadvertent, impossible for you to dwell on even indirectly here through narrative convention. From somewhere else, distantly, over the ringing in your ears, you can hear Sol's voice. He's laughing at you.

This is horror like you have never known.

"Wweh?!" he warbles down at you. "Shit, fuck," wheeze, "Wwehehehehe--"

You rise up. You are gutted, dripping purple. He will never take you seriously again. He cannot. You have always considered yourself to be uniquely qualified to know when all hope is lost, and all hope is lost, now. You must kill him. You were wrong to have refrained. You will die on Ascension with no pails and no quadrants, and you will go gladly, and Kar will fall to his knees and weep gently over your broken body and your choices.

But if you lunge for him now, you will slip in it.

He takes a picture. You lunge for him. You slip in it.

Eridan: Kill Sollux Captor! ==>

You cannot kill Sollux Captor. Sollux Captor has absconded in a blaze of blinding light.

You get to your feet, slowly, deliberately. You step clear. You find your footing.

Eridan: Kill him like you killed the others! ==>

Oh, definitely. Without question.

But damned if you are going to run around raging mindlessly after him, barefoot and indecent. Fuck no; he's already gotten one picture of you like this. You need your clothes, your real clothes, your gun. You need a fucking shower, holy shit.

Spots dancing in your eyes, chin smarting where you'd smacked it, you go to your folded clothing. You put your rings on first, one by one in proper order. They slide on rather more easily than usual. It doesn't matter--they won't stain, and neither will the glasses tweezed delicately from a pocket with your clawtips. When you walk out the open blast door, wearing nothing but these things, you do so with dreadful dignity.

Your situational awareness is compromised enough that if Sol jumps out at you camera-first from a closet or some shit you are not going to be able to do a thing about it. Even if you could see, what could you do with your legs trembling like this? Fall on your face again? Yield? You stumble right there in the hallway at the thought, at the gut-deep twinge that it sends lancing through you. Aaaaagh-- No, you have to kill him--

You're barely sore at all, the one place he'd really touched you. Just throbbing. You list sideways and fling out an arm to catch yourself, arousal surging in you as inexorably as the returning tide.

You want his yellow-- you want his heat--

You bow your head.

(elbow-deep in slick stinking guts-- indelible color--)

Fuck your life! He doesn't even hate you back and now you have to kill him!

...No.

You close your eyes against the spots that linger in your vision. You think of Karkat. As if from very far away, your mind calls up his voice for you:

Somehow... you have to not kill Sollux Captor.

-

You'd been cleaning sticky violet off yourself the last time you'd been in here, too. And similarly miserable. No; this is worse than that was, because now the water is in fact salty and gross. You stand in it haplessly as it rinses you and runs in little rivulets across your lenses. You wait until it runs cold and clear. You wait a little longer.

You give in. You unfist your hands. You press them to your chest, hard, slide them slowly lower, let your rings drag across your skin like his blunted claws might; you shut your eyes and bare your fangs and click your horns against the tile--

Your hands are cold and boring, where his were warm and merciless. Your bulge languishes. It lies there partially extruded in your palm and literally fucking languishes. You stare at it accusingly, and it continues to pine for Sollux Captor, whose laughter continues to echo derisively in your ears.

Fuck that guy!

Fffuck. Fuck. That guy.

You are ravenous to fuck that guy.

What would Sol's legs look like spread, your hands on them heavy with rings? How far up inside does he stay grey, before turning golden? You can't lick him there, like you've heard landdwellers do. What would he look like, stretched around you, twined past you, stretching you?

You don't know. You can't even see the picture.

If you punched him right in his stupid smirk, would he come up snarling? Would he come up swinging, too? Or would his furious incandescence be the last thing you'd ever see?

You have no fucking clue.

You drop your hands to your sides, every part of you drooping. Your shoulders slump; your fins sag limp and listless. You turn off the water, and by the time you've half-heartedly toweled yourself dry you look and nearly feel like no one has touched you today at all.

It's a really shitty feeling, under the circumstances. It lasts until you've tied your robe and done what you can with your hair. The salt gives it body and volume like Fef's, and it's just the wrong length for that to look anything but stupid; you claw it all into submission until it turns lank and dull with overworking. For the first time in your life it occurs to you to punch a mirror. You don't, because that would be stupid, but--

But your arm twitched, and the fabric of your robe shifted softly against your skin, and you are now intensely aware of your own nakedness beneath it. You freeze, caught and held by your own gaze. Soft eyes, grey as pearls. Soft skin, brushed with just the barest hint of dusky violet. Soft fins, subtly opalescent. Soft lips--and you come so close to punching the mirror, this time, that you end up with your knuckles fucking softly pressed against it.

You've never in your life looked more distastefully vulnerable. You need to get dressed. Right now.

-

You are uninterested in testing your newfound resolve not to take Sol out on sight. But you refuse to slink around cautiously in your own hive, either, no matter how little you want to run into him wearing nothing but this bathrobe. You compromise by storming to the wardrobification chamber as directly as possible.

The wardrobifier itself is dark and silent in the center of the room. You skirt its railing and walk along the wall instead, where all your real wealth is on display. Each outfit, weapon, and treasure hanging here was won by you, and each surfeit of buckles and fan of bristling shoulder spines vies for your attention.

But what would Kan pick out for you to wear, if she were here to help you both survive this?

Simple yet elegant, you think. An ornate chest of drawers holds all of the things she has ever impeccably hand-tailored for you. You pick out slacks, trim but not tight; shirt, loose but not flowing; vest, embroidered but not overbearing, and finish out the look with a severely unsnatchable neckcloth and the least combative of your boots. Opaquely obsidian everything, all the violet kept to subtle threading. There are no mirrors in this room, but you know what you look like: austere and refined, distant, and at the thought you feel the last of your bloodlust drain away.

You'll swing by your room next, you think, hanging up your robe. Check for Sol on your motion detectors, if he hasn't disabled them by now. Pry him out of whatever hiding place he's found or floated to, and stuff him into--show him to the nearest recuperacoon for the day.

You remind yourself while you walk that you haven't launched yourself across a negotiation table in, oh, sweeps and sweeps now! That you are extremely well-socialized, for a seadweller, and widely known for your favorable cull-to-murder ratio--better than Vriska's, even, for all her common breeding. That you were, are, became level-headed enough to be the very first kid in the royal cohort to join the highest and most teamwork-oriented tiers of FLARP. Relatively speaking, you are the master of self-control; a statistical outlier is you.

You just got in a little over your head back there. But, hey, now that you're done with actually taking the pictures you aaaaagh, you. Probably shouldn't be thinking about the pictures--HOLY SHIT.

Why's Sol in your room?

In your chair?

Eridan: There he is! Kill Sollux Captor! ==>

You're glad you tied your neckcloth tight, because the eager flare your neckgills make when you lay eyes on Sol is horribly embarrassing.

Get it together, Eri, you think. It's the only chair in the room and he had to sit somewhere. Fucking look at him, does he look combative to you? No he fucking doesn't, he's just sitting there, at the map table, across from--your father.

Who is staring at him, forbiddingly, over the second-best tea service, as Sol fidgets uncomfortably with his cup. There are little biscuits daubed with rosettes of fish paste. Why can you not catch a break.

Your father turns to you cordially and wwhuffles.

"Dad, you can't just--" he cuts you short, slanting his long, elegant nose towards Sol. Who, as some small consolation, is clearly suffering with you.

"No I am not going to introduce you properl--" Snort!

"Dad."

He sets down his cup with a delicate clink.

"Dad! Meet Sollux Captor," you say at once and with all due formality, "my hatefriend who is spending the day and then going home in the evening. Sollux Captor, meet my estimable lusus." Sollux Captor nods hesitantly to your estimable lusus. "--Now Dad can you please go--no we do not need any more snacks. Dad, please go. Dad. DAD. GO. Please."

You shut the door on him, finally.

"Well, the crackers are nice?" Sol offers, tentatively. "Wish my lusus could cook. He only ever, you know. Grilled..."

When you turn around to face him, his eyes are flickering so fast they're nearly violet. "It's okay," you say heavily. "You can laugh."

"E.D.," he says, tightly, pointing at his eyes with both index digits, "This is not a laughing flicker, this is a 'your dad doesn't make any noise when he floats, E.D., what the fuck' flicker, because guess what files I'd just finished transferring when he came in, go on, guess--"

Your fins bristle in terror. The pictures. "No, tell me he didn't see--"

"He didn't, he didn't, it was this close, it was this fucking close, fuck--"

Sol has unbent enough to sink back into your chair a little, shaking his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Just," he says, looking up, "tell me he can't work keypads."

"Are you telling me," you say levelly, walking past him, "that yours can't?"

"E.D.," Sol says, from behind you, and you hear the creak of your chair's expensive coeleather as he stands. "I keep my Dad chained up on my roof."

You should be so lucky. "We'll just turn it," you say, eyeing your desk and then decisively lifting your end up a bit and pivoting the whole thing until it faces away from the door. Sol, for his part, rolls your chair over. And then flops down into it.

That's. That's good, that he's this relaxed around you. In your room. Enough to look away from you entirely, to turn the monitor back on. That's--

No, who are you kidding. You resent him profoundly. How easily he claims your space. How good he looks in your chair, at your desk, touching all over your things. You want to take hold of the headrest and spin him until he topples or makes you stop. You want to put your hands on the armrests and go in melodramatically for a kiss and then stick your tongue in his ear instead, laugh at him for a change, you--

You are feeling this way about a 100% nonreciprocating guy, who laughs at you because he's seen you at your most unguarded and pathetic. Who has no idea what you look like when you're fighting, or been presented with any reason to ever want to. Who hasn't so much as hit you, full stop, you think, deliberately eliding the "yet."

Get it together, Eri, you think, and you get it together. You do not pick a fight about your chair. You step away to drag over an only-slightly-wizardier-than-it-is-nautical chest and sit on that instead, and when you look up again he's still staring fixedly at the screen. He looks frustrated and tired. You recall that, on top of having flown the whole way unaugmented, you are now keeping him up very late into the blistering day that trapped him here--

"Were you wantin' a real meal again, yet," you ask him belatedly, sitting up a little, own voice foreign in your ears. Because you don't, but you don't actually know how often a yellowblood--

Sol jerks up from his own slump, raising his face from his hand where he'd propped it. "No I fucking do not want your--nngh. Let's just. Get through this."

You rest your elbows on your knees, as he tiles the screen with folders and windows and open command prompt terminals. He doesn't want to be here. Well, obviously. The fuck do you have to offer this guy, you think, as he flips through the pictures at ludicrous speed. His life's completely on whatever obscure lowblood track he's chosen, he's got a whole circle of hatefriends all as decent and dependable as he is, he's already been working for sweeps. Hell, pulling down the kind of credit he must, you're not even an attractive financial proposition--wait, what was that.

"Sol, go back," you say, staring intently. That hadn't been a picture of you taking off your socks, or striding around pointlessly-- that had been a picture with him in it.

He doesn't go back. Instead everything randomizes, but then there's another one--you're up and insistently tapping the screen before you're really aware of what you're doing. Sol makes a low, frustrated noise, but you're not listening; you're too busy leaning over him to get a better view. You pin the icon you want him to enlarge with a clawtip, and a little rainbow of pixel-strain ripples out from the point of contact.

Sol strikes your hand away.

You recoil to your full height, glance down on automatic to check for blood-- none, just four white lines scored across the back of your clenched fist, burning with sensation. If he'd had claws, that would have been a crippling blow. You can't believe you set yourself up for that. You really can't believe he took the shot.

"If you want me not to fuckin' jump you," you say, coldly and clearly and before you can properly stop yourself, "that's not any way to go about it."

If you were hitting on him any harder you would be leaving a visible dent. Your ears strain for the faintest hiss, the slightest excuse-- but he's silent, and at this angle you can see the tension in his shoulders that belies the steadiness of his hands. Which he's holding slightly raised, poised to type or to defend-- his space. Which you are currently looming in.

'Course he fucking hit you. So would anyone. You're just being weird about quadrants, again and as per fucking usual. If you start harassing him on purpose he'll rebuff you the next time with his eye-lasers; you know that much about how lowbloods function. You sit back down onto the lid of the chest with a thump, trying to keep your fuming to yourself.

Sol deflates a little, but he's still holding himself like he's surrounded by barbed wire and broken glass, and it's pissing you off-- maybe you should just go. No, you can kick him out, he should go-- "I should go," Sol says, accompanied by a flurry of papery little Reclamation Bin sounds. Shit, what is he deleting, you want to see-- He sags back, presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. "Why the fuck did I even come here."

And you were being so good. "Oh, come on," you burst out. "What do you even want from me?"

"Your spade!" he shouts.

Wait.

What?

"What the hell, Sol--"

Sol spins on you, literally. "Yes I fucking want you to fucking jump me! FUCK. I even hate how dense you are, you numbsponged pan-addled tasteless douche-- I'm sorry, am I not being obvious enough for you?" he shouts, wildly, hands flying up to his temples. "I'd wreck more of your shit but you don't have anything left!"

The flash in his eyes bleeds out and up into something very like flame, wreathing his head in crackling psionic discharge, and you are whole-body bewildered. Yeah, you're hateable, you're strong and you're fast and you're better than everyone, you've crafted yourself into the fucking Orphaner reborn-- but you haven't been showing him that, you left it all at the door. So he's been scoping you out this entire time and you've just...

The horror hits you like the wrong sort of slap to the face, as Sol leaps to his feet, no, levitates, and every lightbulb in the room bursts. Time seems to slow. You gave him every courtesy and made him fight for none of it. Shit, you didn't fight. You've just been open, relaxed, distracted. You took off your cape-- and have, have you been whining? You don't know! You haven't been paying attention! How could he have possibly tolerated any of this shit from you? Laugh at you (lying there), fuck, why hasn't he stormed out in disgust--

You stare up at him, uncomprehending, as the glittering haze of lightbulb shards siphons down to spin around him in two counter-whirling bladed rings. "I came all the way out here," he spits, "on the slim fucking chance that I could finally piss you off enough to reciprocate--" he looks into your face, wildly, and all at once you realize that you have no idea what you look like, now that you know it matters, that you need to control what he sees. "But what does it matter what I want, right! I'm just the fucking camera tripod! I can't do this anymore," he continues, travelling arcs of lethal white lightning beginning to ladder up between his paired horns. Horns yours have so-recently, so-unguardedly been between, and, oh. (Oh.) "I'm done, I can't even look at you without-- FUCK. FUCK THIS. /QUIT."