First Contact

by yesfir

Summary:

They came to this isolated colony at the edge of human territories in search of reprieve, a way of putting their broken family back together again. Instead the Strider-Lalondes find themselves in an insular society operating on antiquated rules, and in the middle of an awkward political standoff with their violent alien neighbors.
In an attempt to stop unchecked bloodshed between the two settlements, an arranged marriage is proposed. As the children of the most influential woman in the colony, Dave and Rose have very little choice but to shoulder the responsibilities of their position.
But in politics, as well as life in general, few things are as they first appear. It quickly becomes apparent that both sides might’ve gotten more than they bargained for in the exchange, leaving a variously traumatized bunch of young soldiers and a mismatched group of would-be troll rebels with the task of settling their interpersonal issues and learning to work together. There is far more at stake than just their lives.

 

[Space opera fic with arranged marriage elements. 3 guesses on which is the slow burn couple, no price.]

Chapter 1: Old certainties

Summary:

Being considered practically royalty comes with some awkward and unexpected consequences. As does having to play nice with your political adversaries.

Notes:

...Fish puns are hard. That’s all there really is to say about the matter. My apologies in advance.

It’s true what they say. Out in the colonies, where life is uncertain every day, people return to whatever old certainties they can find. It’s not just that one lives with a strange mix of new and old technologies, so that charging one’s portable devices on the sun cell blocks might be followed by having to go churn butter or some shit like that. Old kinds of thinking creep in too, in all kinds of ways. Rose calls it fascinating, absentmindedly undoing an offensive row of knitting on a new project, as she watches a group of people pour out an offering of apple cider, honey and salt at a small altar, as a thanks for the harvest.

There’s a rustle above them, and Dave looks up just in time to see Dirk swing himself out of the loading dock attached to the hover craft bay, landing neatly on the ground two floors below. Showoff... but that’s hardly news. “I mean,” the oldest of the four of them says, indicating he’s been listening, “there are worse things to reanimate than superstitions, if you happen to be scavenging off humanity’s dark and strange corners in order to find body parts for your latest shambling creation.”

“Mm, I’ve seen more worrying things too,” Rose murmurs, her needles clicking together softly. “Some of the people in the village curtsy or bow when we walk past, haven’t you noticed? Presumably because we’re the genetic descendants of the woman in charge of this place. Their queen, if you will.”

“Hold on.” Roxy looks up from where she’s been tinkering with Bartholomeow, the kitten she’d adopted after he lost his back legs in an accident. Dirk had helped her fit tiny robot legs onto him, and though they need constant adjusting as he grows, he seems to be taking to them well. “Hoooooooold on. If mom’s a queen, doesn’t that mean...” Dave already knows what’s coming, and watches his youngest sister clutch her own cheeks and beam with some amusement. “I’M A PRINCESS?”

“You say that as if it’s somehow news,” Rose says with a half smile, pointedly ignoring Dirk, who had been mouthing ‘don’t encourage her’ at her while Roxy wasn’t looking.

Dave watches his siblings and says nothing, pretending to be preoccupied with the chicken he’s plucking. All four of them are children of the new technology that their mother had spearheaded herself, allowing for a quicker population of new colonies than simply waiting for nature to take its course. In a way, their mom might just be prouder of them than any other parent out there, because they’re all the direct result of her genius and hard work, rather than a simple biological function. And she dotes on them her own way, for all that she’s constantly busy, constantly working, and most certainly constantly intoxicated.

Dave supposes that he loves his mother, but it’s hardly surprising that the four of them turned out... well, like this.

Thinking of them as ‘oldest’ or ‘youngest’ is kind of a joke, since they’d all been created within months of each other, as if to prove a point - and yes, Dave is certain that had been one of the reasons. First Dirk, who took being the son of a legendary genius a little bit too hard, and who can’t seem to relax for two seconds as a result. Then Rose, who instead goes out of her way to be as unlike their mother as possible, and then quietly resents it when she encourages it. Dave can’t quite pin down his own specific neurosis as the second youngest, other than perhaps a tendency of feeling like it’s his job act both as a buffer and a mediator between their more jagged edges and the rest of the world, quite possibly protecting both sides equally. He’s relieved that Roxy at least seems fairly unencumbered by all that shit, and she mostly does what she wants with great enthusiasm. All they’ve got to do is to keep any alcohol far out of her reach.

“Perhaps we should try to dress the part,” Dave suggests, yanking out the last handful of feathers. “Fit Dirk out with some poofy asshole pants, knee socks and silk slippers. Get him looking properly fucking royal. What do you say, bro?”

Dirk fixes him with a level look, and he’s apparently resigned himself to his fate at this point, because it’s followed by a curt nod. “Absolutely. I’m ready for this fairy godbrother treatment whenever you are. Lay the velvet breeches upon me, and I’ll show you what a true prince looks like. But only, and I want to make this clear, if I can also wear a coronet.”

Rose hums, tapping one knitting needle to her lips. “It’s actually a shame that pattern making is not my forte. I suppose knitting or crocheting wouldn’t be the same thing.”

“Nonono, that’s fine!” Roxy flaps her arms excitedly. “Well, maybe not the full outfit, but least you can crochet him a coronet. That would be cute!”

“What? No, absolutely not. What kind of prince wears a crocheted coronet? That’s one step away from wearing a damn doily on my head.”

The conversation deteriorates in that manner, with Roxy gently poking fun at Dirk in between giggles, and Dirk doing his whole inscrutable, long-suffering thing - even though they all know he’ll do basically anything for their youngest sister - with Rose fanning the flames, smiling faintly. But as he wanders off to the pump to feed it a token so that he can wash off his hands under the erratically sputtering stream of water, Dave thinks about what Rose has said. He can see what she means; he doesn’t much like the idea of reverting to a time where some people were considered better just because of who they were born to. That’s not only bullshit, it’s dangerous as well. Shit, haven’t they seen proof of that in their sparse interactions with the other alien settlement on this planet?

Not to mention it goes hand in hand with all kinds of other outdated thinking, too. Once you start thinking that some people are more valuable than others, it’s easy to find other reasons for why some aren’t as good even as ‘common’ folk, create a lower caste that it’s okay for them to look down on in turn.

Besides which, as much as he might joke about it with his siblings, Dave is pretty damn certain he doesn’t want to be any kind of prince. It’s bad enough, dealing with being a public figure most of his life, both because of his mom and the manner of his conception. Coronets or no, being perceived as some sort of royalty in the eyes of the people here would be bound to involve even more awkward obligations and public scrutiny. He doesn’t need that. His family sure as fuck doesn’t need that. That’s quite literally why they came here in the first place.

A few months down the line, when the irony of this train of thought became apparent, Dave would find himself quite unable to appreciate it. Mostly because by then he’d be ass deep in exactly the sort of shit he’d been hoping to avoid, and then some.

 

---

 

Feferi enters the reclining block where her friends are waiting for her, slamming the door behind her. For some dumbass bureaucratic reasons, they’ve all been officially named her ‘entourage’, and are made to sit around there twiddling their globes or whatever they can think of to drive away boredom, as she attends the attempted peace talks with the weird aliens that moved in right next to their colony. The Condesce had insisted her heiress has to be present for these negotiations since she couldn’t be, which sounds like musclebeast shit, yet here they all are.

More specifically, here they are, watching as she sags against the door and buries her face in her hands, letting out a long, aggravated groan. It’s unusual enough behavior from her that it makes most of them interrupt what they’re doing, and Karkat finds himself shoving his finger in his book to mark his place before lowering it into his lap.

“What’s wrong?” Sollux demands, already crossing the floor to crouch down in front of her.

“It’s... so... stupid.” She kicks her legs a bit where she sits, her movements somewhat awkward since she’s spent so much of her time underwater lately. “I just can’t believe we agreed to their dumb terms.”

Sollux scoots sideways to avoid the flailing appendages, frowning in concern, but before he can say something else he’s cut short.

“Agreed?” Eridan drawls, or tries to drawl, but the slight involuntary rise in his voice just makes it sound like some sort of nervous hiccough. “Don’t tell me we actually decided to bargain with the savages.” His stupid accent makes the last word sound even more derisive.

“As much as my principles would have me naturally oppose anything he says, I have to agree with this loathsome sea dweller.” Equius ignores the filthy look Eridan sends him, crossing his arms. “Even agreeing to parlay with them was disgraceful.”

“They’re weeeeeeeeak! Why haven’t we just-“

“Shut it!!” Feferi cuts Vriska short by impatiently banging her fist on the door behind her. They all gradually fall silent, exchanging glances. Not too long ago, they would have talked over her and not thought much about it, but things have changed. The mantle of new responsibility now resting on her shoulders has given Feferi an air of authority which she never had before. The events of these last sweeps have changed her in in particular, though none of them can claim to be quite the same.

She seems to notice their reaction, and colors slightly, bright pink against pale grey cheeks. She’s still not used to it, and she doesn’t like it much. She still wants them to be her friends, not her subjects - she’s said as much herself. It’s not like Karkat doesn’t understand why, but it’s somewhat aggravating to see someone be handed leadership already culled and skewered on a golden fork, and then immediately balk at the implications.

He’s sure he could do so much better. But of course he doesn’t have a chance to lead more or less anyone. No matter what some superstition fools might think.

Sollux takes Feferi’s hand in his, glaring over his shoulder at the rest of them. “Go on,” he urges her quietly. “Tell us.”

She sighs, seeming to calm down a little bit. “That’s just it. We thought they were weak, but it turns out they’ve already codlonized numerous planets, and although most of their technology is fairly rudimentary, they keep spreading at an algaerming rate.” She wrinkles her nose slightly. “Some sort of biological advantage, apparently? They’re not reliant on a Mother Grub at all, from what I understand. They can prowcreate all on their own - and they’ve found some way of doing it even faster with technology.”

Kanaya let’s out a soft whir, looking half repulsed and half fascinated by the idea. Karkat can at least understand that first part, but honestly, the less he knows about weird alien reproduction, the better. As a matter of fact, he has no interest whatsoever in aliens; not with their collective nutrition platters stacked high enough with the problems caused by their own species. Maybe he ought to be more intrigued, since apart from a handful of regrettable dealings with dersites, this is the first time they’ve made contact with an actual alien civilization.

Perhaps if he wasn’t already so fucking nervous about their position here, he’d actually find it somewhere within his exhausted soul to give a fuck. But he is, and he can’t, and he doesn’t see why this is relevant.

“Anyway,” Feferi continues, “our rayports indicate that despite being pretty small and weak, with no psionic powers to speak of either, they’re apparently really resourceful fighters. Their most notable advantage, howebber, is that they’re not alone. They have SKAIA on their side - and as I hope at least some of you know, going up against them is something not even the empire does lightly. And since we can’t risk this coloachny right now, not with my lusus right here... we have to negotiate.” She pouts slightly. “Honestly, I’d find them and their way of life really fascinating if it wasn’t for the stupid stuff they made us agree to.”

“Okay, the dramatic buildup is really fucking cute, but maybe you can spare us any further pathetic attempts at masturbatory sponge-thrusting by just telling us what we’ve agreed to already?” Karkat slaps his book down with a loud bang, causing Tavros to start slightly next to him. “I mean really, I sure do love nothing as much as listening to someone who never gets to the fucking point, but unless everyone present harbors the same lamentable masochistic streak, I’m sure they’d enjoy it more if your Imperial Highness could just spit it out already.” Sollux looks like he’s ready to bite his head off, and already has his mouth open when Feferi stops him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. She’s looking at Karkat, and her expression is... weird. He doesn’t like it at all, it’s not one he’s sure he’s ever seen her wear, but it’s kind of like-

-guilt?

“The humans demarlinded... well, it’s a form of traditional contract, apparently. It will involve legally binding two symbolically important trolls from our side to two humans of similar importance on theirs. These people will function as a form of tribute, and will in a way be hostages for both sides, assuring that neither side steps out of line.” She looks down, a very quiet ‘glub’ leaving her lips before she continues. “Because of this, they said it couldn’t just be anemonebody. They had to be of sentimental importance to the person with the most authority on each side. Since her Condescension-“ an almost invisible snarl “-wasn’t present, it had to be... me. I had to choose. And it had to be two of you.”

There is shocked silence, as everyone present furtively exchanges glances, the tension in the room suddenly mounting. Most of them don’t want to be the first to speak, in case that singles them out as a likely victim, Karkat figures. A couple look like they’re already planning how to get out of it if they are picked. Vriska’s fingers are slowly curling. But if the sick, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach means what he thinks it does, if the look on Feferi’s face has been for him... then he already knows who one of the tributes will be. But when he opens his mouth he can’t seem to make a sound, other than a faint scraping deep in his thorax, and so he simply sits there gaping like a fucking idiot.

“What kind of contract is it?” Terezi finally demands, lacing her fingers together in front of her face. Trust her to be the one to keep a cool head at a time like this. Trust her, also, to sound morbidly fascinated by this hideous farce.

Feferi winces slightly. “That’s the other thing. It’s something called a ‘marriage’. Humans seem to have some very strange ideas about romance, but more or less... um, it’s a contract that signifishes a- a-“ Her cheeks flush again. “-a concupiscent relationship between the two parties.”

The previous shocked silence is brutally crushed by a new, deeper silence, one that is even more shocked and horrified. No one speaks, or moves, or even looks at anyone else at this point. And then Karkat starts to laugh.

It’s not a very happy laugh; in fact, it is the very opposite of that. It’s bitter, and while it might at first appear to be scornful, it is blatantly and pathetically obvious to everyone present that this is just a way to cover up something else, something that is twisted up and hurt. It’s making everyone feel really awkward, they squirm where they sit and avoid looking at him, and yet Karkat can’t seem to help himself.

“Ohhh. Ohhhhhh. I get it. After all, it makes sense, right? Tell me how it doesn’t make perfect fucking sense, from a royal point of view.” Desperate sarcasm curls his voice in on itself until he feels like he might choke on it. “If anyone is going to be offered as a sacrifice in some barbaric alien mating ritual, the lucky candidate is obviously going to be the heiress’ own pet mutant, since his worthless genetic material will never be a desirable offering to the Mother Grub, even if he finds someone misguided enough to fill those quadrants with.” He rubs at his eyes, pretending like hell that it’s just tears of laughter. “I mean fuck, now that I think about it, who else could it be? Who else could possibly be as painfully fucking redundant?”

“That’s not true.” Feferi’s voice is low, her head bowed, and at least she has the basic decency not to pretend like Karkat isn’t the one. “I wasn’t going to go into how I picked, it seemed like a kind of mean thing to do, but maybe it’s actually good if you know.”

Karkat’s laughter is slowly dying away now, but he tries to hold on to it as long as possible, because he’s not sure that the same can be said for the tears. He can't pinpoint exactly why he's so hurt by this sudden turn of events. Sure, it's a fucked-up prospect in every sense of the word, to be practically sold off to some perverted aliens for a few cheap political points, but is that really all there is to this deep sense of betrayal? Or has he actually allowed himself to hope, perhaps even believe, that his existence within their faction has some real value? Despite knowing that his only merit is a cruel twist of nature which can be wielded as a ploy, as undoubtedly short-lived as it is hollow, he wonders if he'd nonetheless managed to let it go to his head.

If that’s it, then maybe it's embarrassment at his own gullibility that laces his voice with venom toward Feferi, rather than any real conviction that she honestly believes his blood to be worth any less than hers. “Go ahead. I think we all know that you’re full of shit, and that this is exactly why you picked me, but go ahead. Why not lie to me as a sort of especially disrespectful parting gift?”

“Fine! Just shut up and let me talk!” She glares, but she doesn’t really have it in her to keep it up. Her voice softens, sighing and sad. “I was asked to pick one buoy and one girl. Because it’s a ritual concupiscent relationship, I decided to immediately exclude anyone who already has a stable matesprit or kismesis.”

Sollux, now slumped on the floor next to her and holding her hand, flushes slightly. They all know that the only ones that qualify are him and Feferi - and well, they honestly can’t blame her for excluding her own matesprit. They’d all do the same.

“On the buoys’ side, I decided to first exclude the person who has conchstantly advocated for the killing of every shingle alien as a matter of principle.” She glances pointedly at Eridan, who crosses his arms sullenly, “Because, well, that just seems undiplomatic! Secondly I had to exclude someone who would simply break a fragile human body just by touching it, because that would defeat the porpoise.” Equius clears his throat, possibly in embarrassment, but he still looks relieved. “Then I decided to exclude a person who- who might become unstable if he should for any reason be deprived of the clamming substances he frequently ingests.”

They all glance at Gamzee, who appears to have fallen asleep on the floor at this point, or at least checked out completely. Despite himself, Karkat finds himself nodding. Yes, they all remember that one time they all got stranded without any supplies a couple of sweeps ago, and what happened after - how can they forget? They’d probably all be dead if Vriska and Kanaya hadn’t managed to somehow overpower him together, and that was before he hit his growth spurt. If anything like that were to happen now, and he’d be surrounded by aliens... things would not go well.

“So that left two alternatives,” Feferi continues, nodding at Tavros and Karkat. “I presented you both as equal surfgestions to the rest of the highbloods. But, well, you know what they’re like.” She bares her teeth briefly. “They didn’t think the humans would accept it if one of the offerings was- was-“

“Just say it already. Don’t beat around the creep fungus, we all know what you mean. We aaaaaaaall know why they thought the humans wouldn’t want him.” Vriska gestures offhandedly at Tavros, who flinches, but also rolls his eyes.

“Why don’t you say it, Vriska? Since you’re feeling so kelpful, I mean,” Feferi snaps back tersely, and though Vriska lets out a scornful hiss, she nonetheless abates. Karkat can’t help wondering what she’d been trying to achieve. It’s not so simple as having a go at Tavros; from what he’s seen, they seem to have achieved a cautious truce of sorts. To him, it seems more like disgust at letting the words go unsaid, of denying the past and its consequences. Perhaps he even understands it a bit... but fuck if Vriska isn’t terrible at picking her moments.

Feferi massages her fins. She looks tired. “So, as I was saying, that only leaves...”

She meets his gaze, and Karkat opens his mouth to argue, to say something biting, to tell her she’s lying. But what’s the point? He knows she’s right. So he just groans and drops his face into his hands. Despite everything, the most humiliating aspect of the situation is how disappointed he is. After everything that's happened, he'd somehow thought... what? That he wasn't a pawn to be sacrificed, same as any other, if that was what it took? That he was better than anyone else? He ought to be ashamed of himself, but right now he just feels tired. Tavros hesitantly pats his shoulder, clearly trying not to show how relieved he is to not be sent off as a gift-wrapped fuck puppet for humans. Well, he supposes it’s a nice gesture at least.

“Very well. Shall we go, then?”

His head snaps up, and he glares in bewilderment at Kanaya, who is already on her feet and packing up her needles, threads and fabrics, meticulously folding what needs to be folded and sorting everything into the bag she carries for such purposes. Feferi is staring at her too, mouth half open.

“How- How did you know?”

“Well, you did say a boy and a girl, didn’t you?” She manages a small smile, even though the faint light from her skin flickers slightly. “It really wasn’t a very challenging shot to make, even in the dark - and as you know, I do have some advantages when it comes to nocturnal marksmanship.” From the curve of her lip, it’s an attempt at gallows humor, but it falls rather flat. “I would say it is a foregone conclusion that the heiress herself is not a suitable option, which leaves only five girls, yes? And out of those five, only one isn’t already involved in a strong and stable moirallegiance.” She stops packing for a moment, her fingers quickly linking Vriska and Terezi, Equius and Nepeta, Aradia and Sollux. “I surmised that if at all possible, you would not wish to separate anyone in such a relationship either. And for an arrangement such as this to work, at least one ‘human marriaged’ couple will have to live among the humans at all time, am I correct?”

“...Yes.”

“Then I’m the obvious choice. Like Karkat, I have no quadrants officially filled - and I am perhaps a more diplomatic choice than some among us as well.”

“That sounds like a lame way of saying ‘more boring’, but suuuuuuuure.”

“I do not believe I even mentioned your name,” Kanaya gives Vriska a rather tart smile, “but that sure is an opinion you seem to have, and I cordially invite those present to make their own judgement on that matter, and if anyone feels like they too wish to contribute to the discussion, now would be a lovely time to keep their mouth shut, and for preference choke on their own bulge.”

She turns back to Karkat as if that brief interlude hadn’t happened, holding her head high. He can’t quite make sense of the expression in her eyes, other than that it’s both sad and determined at the same time. Is she... concerned? Relieved? He can't see how that last impression makes any sense, but then again, many of her motivations never do. “Perhaps we ought to say our goodbyes, and then return to our own blocks to collect our possessions?”

The goodbyes are awful. Terezi licks Karkat’s cheek, saying that she’s going to miss how delicious his tears are, and though he shouts at her for it, Karkat can’t help suspecting that he’ll miss all her cutesy, weird bullshit too, for however long they will be apart. It's been a while since the awkwardness between the two of them faded back into acceptance and tentative companionship. Eridan seems tense and waspish, and Karkat can’t decide if he’s actually dumb enough to be offended at not having been picked - but whatever it is, at least he holds it back a bit for his sake. Nepeta has tears in her eyes the whole time, and they both try desperately to act like she doesn’t. Sollux gives his shoulder an awkward nudge and tells him to insult the stupid aliens a bit extra for him, and then grumbles and complains when Karkat hugs him. Neither of them can manage to meet the other's eyes once they disentangle.

Gamzee seems bewildered and dejected when brought around and informed what is happening, and envelops Karkat in a tight hug that smells like gross slime pies and shitty soda. That makes his heart twist especially, as the pale thing that never really happened between them hovers like an inconvenient behemoth in the room. He should’ve said something by now. He should’ve done something back when Gamzee needed him. But it’s too late, and trying to make something happen now would just seem desperate - and, well, it would be cruel to Gamzee. He deserves better than to be a half-baked afterthought as Karkat is getting sent away.

“Hey, you- you take care of yourself, alright? Keep eating your disgusting pies, and no capricious fucking violence, you hear me?” That doesn’t count as pale flirting, right? That’s just good sense.

Gamzee slowly squeezes the horn in his hand, managing to produce a distressingly mournful honk. “You’ve got it, best friend. I’ll be all up and taking the best damn care of myself, so you’ll have to motherfucking promise to do the same.”

“What, me? I’ll be fine. Honestly, it’s just as well that she picked me. Apparently it takes what we adults call ‘a baseline of emotional maturity’ to understand that leadership sometimes involves really fucking difficult decisions, and apart from me and Kanaya, even the tiniest scrap of that is pretty much extinct between the lot of you.” He ignores the derisive noise Vriska makes behind his back, leaning his head against Gamzee’s abdomen - that’s as far as he can reach nowadays - and allowing the warm wetness of his tears to slowly soak into his shirt. “I promise, okay?” He drops his voice at least a little bit. “I promise I’ll be fine.”

 

---

 

They don’t speak as their mother explains the situation to them. Dave finds his own face shutting down, slamming down hard on every perceptible emotion like a goddamn airlock. He doesn’t have to look at Dirk’s face to know his is doing the same.

Roxy fidgets unhappily. Rose calmly puts her knitting needles down.

“Shall I assume that the decision of whom to involve in this strange charade has been left up to us, then?” she asks once their mother appears to have finished. She nods, her back turned as she mixes herself another drink. Rose narrows her eyes at her impenetrable waterfall of fair hair, shielding her face from their scrutiny. Dave can’t shake the impression that their mother can’t bring herself to meet anyone’s gaze right now, and maybe he’s wrong, but he thinks he can see her hand tremble briefly as she picks up her glass. She didn’t want this.

“It was the council’s decision - but they don’t really care who goes, as long as it’s one girl and one guy.”

Dave doesn’t look in the direction of that voice, refuses to acknowledge the flat, level statement in any way. He knows without looking that there is not a hint of an expression on the inscrutable bastard’s face. Not like with him and Dirk, who are trying not to give their hand away, but because there is simply nothing to show.

Their uncle doesn’t give a fuck, and he never has.

“Then I’m doing it.” Rose stands up with a confident half smile, shoulders back, chin raised. “A girl can have too much complacency and relaxation - and certainly too much of a small town life. This promises to be absolutely fascinating, not to mention delightfully absurd.”

Of course. They can’t let this happen to Roxy, after all. Of the four of them, she has always been the least fucked up, the one most likely to have a decent normal future ahead of her. They can’t take that opportunity away from her - and besides, Dave doesn’t even imagine that Rose is exaggerating all that much. She’ll get a kick out of this.

He knows what to do, too. Dirk’s mouth is already set, and it’s just like him to try to sacrifice himself too, because out of the four of them, he is the master of self-sabotage. He’s the one who will always hurt himself without thinking, regardless of if it’s the right choice or not. But Dave isn’t going to let him this time. “I guess I’m doing this too.” His nonchalant tone is spoiled a bit by the fact that he stands up so quickly that he knocks his chair over. “Doesn’t look like I’ve got anything better to do.”

Dirk frowns, standing up too. “I can’t let you-“

“-do that, Dave? Holy shit dude, is now really the time to reference one of our obscure movies from the goddamn dark ages of cinema? I appreciate your commitment to the bit, but come on, man, read the room.” Dirk looks pained, opens his mouth again to object, but Dave shakes his head and cuts him short. “Hey, I called it first, alright? I’d say I won the race pretty fucking fair and square. You snooze, you lose.”

Dirk is trying to stare him down, but Dave just crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the wall. He’s not budging. Because they both damn well know why Dirk hesitated, why Dirk wasn’t the very first to speak up when normally, he always is. They both know that for a moment, Dirk was thinking of their dumbass friend and his ridiculous shorts and his winsome asshole grin - and how recent events make the thought of being parted from him even more impossible than before. They both know, more than anything, that Dirk just straight up doesn’t actually want to do this. And they could both pretend like the really cool dudes they are like this isn’t something they both know, but suddenly Dave doesn’t feel like playing by the rules.

He tilts his shades down, looks directly at Dirk from over the top of them. “I’ve got a lot less to lose, bro. So just... drop it already.”

Dirk looks away. “Fuck right off.”

“Yeah, well, that's probably the plan. Anyway, being a complete dick is just something an outrageously awesome and hella sweet guy has to shoulder for the sake of his family sometimes.” He reaches out and puts a hand on Dirk’s arm, giving it a light squeeze. It's stiff and unmoving, but Dave knows he would've moved away if he didn't at least somewhat appreciate the gesture. “Don’t worry about it. I think I can deal with one weird alien, alright?”

“Alright. I’ll let the council know.” This time, Dave does look up, as he tries to decipher his uncle’s voice, attempts to figure out if there’s any emotion there at all. He’s pretty sure the man feels very little except for aggressive indifference towards most people, including his family, but he’s certain that if there’s anything there at all, then it must be actual antipathy toward him in particular - probably because he’d felt it was his ‘duty’ to specifically handle so much of Dave’s education as he grew up. It would be nice if he maybe felt something like frustration at watching him volunteer for this fucked-up mess, letting all his hard work go to waste. Or at least a small measure of schadenfreude as he watches Dave immediately cock his life up now that he’d freed himself from his influence. It would be nice to feel even further vindicated in how much he goddamn loathes the man.

But there’s nothing. He just meets Dave’s gaze blankly, steadily before leaving the room.

Their mother is crying now, and wraps her arms around Rose, calling her a brave and wonderful girl in a choked-up voice. Rose tenses at first, looks like she’s about to squirm out of the embrace, and Dave isn’t entirely sure that he won’t have some choice words for her later if she does. But then Rose sighs, slowly lifting her arms from her sides and gingerly placing them around her mom’s waist. She leans in, and because he’s listening for it, Dave can hear her inhaling to catch the scent of their mother’s perfume. Even under all the booze, it’s always there.

After a moment, Roxy jumps up and joins them, flinging her arms around them both and squeezing them hard. She winks at Dave over Rose’s shoulder, smiling through her tears, and he thinks that neither of them will ever be quite as brave as her. Then he grabs Dirk by the elbow and drags him with him, all but shoving him against the rest of their family before joining in the embrace too. Dirk is a perpetually awkward hugger, but at least he does his best to take part, and right now that’s all that matters.

They’re messed up, but they’re still a family. This isn’t going to change that. He closes his hand around Rose’s, feels her grip grow tight and steady, and he knows she’s thinking the same thing. They’re not going to let anything hurt them. If this is the only way to make sure of that, so be it.

Notes:

Good lord, not much happened in this chapter, but in the next one I promise that the protagonists will actually meet and everything.

Chapter 2: First impressions

Summary:

Things go exactly as well as expected when our protagonists meet for the first time.

Notes:

I didn’t mention this in the earlier note, but both this and the former chapter were written in the notes application on my iPhone because my computer is on the fritz. I hope you can bear with the typos and potential autocorrect errors which might be the result of this. Thank you.

The finalization of the contract will be made in the settlement at the heart of the human colony. At least the final legal touches to the agreement, as far as Karkat has grasped the whole thing. There will also be some sort of symbolic ritual that signifies the beginning of his ‘marriage’, but that isn’t until a couple of weeks. The humans apparently need to prepare for it? That sounds ominous as fuck, but there isn’t much he can do about it.

A group of humans are standing around outside the building, talking among themselves, even though there is still some daylight lingering in the sky. Diurnal creatures are so weird. Kanaya looks like she wants to linger in the light too, but he grabs her by the wrist and drags her inside. It’s too fucking early in the evening for him to be dealing with this.

During the trip here, Feferi seems to have rallied back to her normal infuriating optimism, and she’s now bouncing around and investigating everything around them, exclaiming in excitement and delight over every primitive little thing she stumbles over. Karkat supposes that it is rather nice to see her being her old self again, even if her old self is kind of incredibly grating when your own nerves are pulled taut and singing a melody shriller than the shrieking of a thousand grubs getting simultaneously culled.

Finding a bench by a window, he curls up there with his arms wrapped around his legs. Outside, a small aircraft of some sort descends from the sky and hovers in front of the entrance. A hatch glides open at the underside, a gleaming ladder extending from it, and on the end of it a female human is nonchalantly perched. It’s the very pale one who appears to be some sort of leader among them; Karkat has seen glimpses of her before. Most recently when she arrived for the peace talks back at base. If he understands it right, then it’s her genetic offspring that will be offered up as a tribute to match Feferi’s selected friends - that is to say, him and Kanaya.

Once she reaches the ground, stepping elegantly off the lowest rung of the ladder and taking a moment to straighten her scarf, she waves up at the open hatch. A moment later, someone lands right next to her on the ground, apparently eschewing the ladder. He straightens up and offers her his arm, which she takes with a smile.

It’s another human, presumably male, and just as pale as her. Karkat thinks he might be younger, but fuck it, he’s no human expert. He’s as tall as the female, which Karkat would guess is decently tall for a human, but the truth is that definition basically just boils down to 'taller than him', which... yeah, that's most fully grown trolls and humans alike. The newcomer is kind of lanky, but with broad shoulders. As the two of them approach the group of other humans waiting for them, Karkat notes that the male human seems to practically be a younger copy of another, somewhat taller and thinner male, who detaches himself from the group to greet them. That presumably means he's another genetic ancestor, or connected in some other way - though Karkat finds himself positively marinated in an enthusiastic lack of wanting to know any further details in the matter. They're supposed to share a meal later, so he'd like to keep his appetite.

Out of the aircraft hatch drops another human, hanging onto the edge of it for a moment and swinging back and forth, before letting go at the extreme point of the oscillation. She makes a neat somersault in midair and lands with her arms extended and a big smile on her face, before skipping off after the others, her hair bouncing in unruly curls. Behind her, another human uses the sides of the ladder to slide down to the ground. He’s skinnier and a fair bit taller than the first male, but just like him, he’s wearing black sunglasses that obscure his eyes completely, albeit of a different shape. None of the other humans appear bothered by the now rather faint light, so Karkat wonders what function they fill.

He waits there for the final human out of the craft, the only one who appears to have the sense to climb down the ladder in a sedate manner. Possibly because she’s wearing a dress long enough to drag behind her on the ground as she reaches it, though she moves with the same ease as the rest of them. It’s annoying to admit it, but the four of them all seem graceful, powerful and potentially dangerous - especially the last one somehow reminds him of the way Nepeta looks while stalking her prey.

This is it, then. It has to be one of them. Karkat doesn’t even really know how to process it, let alone form an opinion. They’re just so... alien. Hair so pale that it’s almost blinding, weird kind of pink skin, hornless, blunt teeth. Bizarre, bipedal mammals. What is he even supposed to think apart from, ‘wow, those sure are aliens’?

“They are pretty strange creatures, aren’t they?”

Karkat jumps slightly, looking up to see Kanaya leaning over him, watching the new arrivals with a distant expression on her face.

“Yeah. That’s a way of putting it.”

“So would I be right to assume that it is two of the younger looking humans that just arrived who will participate in this ‘marriage’ with us?”

“I guess so.”

“Ah.” She bites her lower lip, the fang causing a very faint green bruise to blossom there for a moment. “It just occurred to me that- I mean, I presume that they chose a male and female also, but it was not in fact made clear just who was going to- That is to say-“

Karkat rolls his eyes. “It’s fine. I get it. I’m not sure why you’re so fucking picky about this, especially when we’re talking about hairless primate aliens, but if it’s important to you then you can have the female one. It’s not like I give one miserable, shivering fuck either way.”

She looks down, cheeks coloring slightly. “Thank you. I confess that I’m not sure why I’m so ‘picky’, as you put it, myself. But I feel like this will be hard enough without having to fight my own preferences - and, I suppose, sense of aesthetics.”

That gets an derisive snort from Karkat, but he nonetheless turns in towards the room. “Hey, Feferi! Stop sniffing the underside of human furniture or whatever idiotic thing you’re doing over there and come here for a second.”

The contingent of high ranking highbloods all turn to glare at him, the runty little mutant blood shamelessly shouting at the heiress, but Karkat lifts his chin and ignores them. He’s not so dumb that he doesn’t know that it’s only due to Feferi’s influence that he hasn’t been culled a hundred times yet on this planet alone - him and Tavros both - but if they couldn’t touch him before this point then they sure as fuck can’t do anything now. Too much is at stake, politically speaking. So if they’ve got something they’d like to say, then they’re cordially invited to bend over and choke on his shame globes.

Feferi obediently bounces over, apparently completely oblivious of the wall of disapproval radiating from the highbloods - though she’s probably more aware than she lets on. She usually is.

“What is it, Carpcrab?” He peers past them through the window, and then claps her hands in excitement. “Oooh, they’re here! You know... for aliens, aren’t they kind of handsome?”

Karkat gives her an incredulous look, demonstratively turning his back on the window and its view of the aliens. “Okay, if we can leave your apparent brain aneurism out of this for a second, we’ve actually got something important to talk to you about...”

 

---

 

Dave has actually never been inside the recently instated Town Hall. Well, why would he? He’s pretty sure that Town Halls actually only exist so their clock towers can be conspicuous props in iconic 1980’s movies about time travel - which isn’t and never will be a thing, by the way. While there are a great number of phenomena that naturally can cause time dilations and other abnormalities, the idea of actually traversing time in a meaningful way is something which sentient life forms have pretty universally decided to abandon. Possibly because even if there was a way for a physical form to withstand it, it simply would be too stupidly dangerous to the rest of the universe to attempt.

He peers around the interior as he trails after his family inside, shaking his head lightly as if to try to unravel that latest pointless tangent and focus. He takes in the highly vaulted ceiling, the cathedral-esque windows, the candle-like warmth to the glow of the light fixtures. Someone was clearly going for an Olde Worlde feeling, which isn’t exactly surprising at this point.

Lousy goddamn stupid ‘prince’ duties.

His mom makes a small movement toward her face, indicating that shades ought to be taken off indoors, which both he and Dirk stoically ignore. Of course, she knew they would, and smiles indulgently at their disobedience. They both put up with having their hair ruffled as if they’re still goddamn twelve, although Dirk immediately fixes his the moment she lets go. Dave just shakes his head to get his fringe out of his eyes and leaves it at that.

Over on the other side of the room, the troll contingent looms. Really, ‘looms’ is the perfect word for it. It’s mostly those huge ones, a good percentage of them being well in the vicinity of eight or nine feet tall. God, he hopes he’s not going to be married to one of them, that thought is kind of daunting. They look downright menacing where they stand, all exposed fang and mane-like hair, swelling muscles jutting out from under the very clearly defined plates of some kind of sub-dermal exoskeletal structures. Wait, is it still an exoskeleton if it’s under the skin? He’s unclear on that one.

Rose had at some point explained - in excruciating detail - that these are the ones considered ‘highbloods’, which apparently refers to the upper end of the hemospectrum bullshit they’ve got going on. Dave had pointed out, pretty reasonably, that there’s not really an ‘upper end’ to a spectrum, that’s not how those works. Rose said yes, she knew, but for the purpose of understanding troll social order, it helps to think of it in those terms.

There’s a couple of the fishy ones as well, dressed in somewhat fancier clothes in purple tones. Other than that, most of them are dressed in utilitarian black and grey, with little color apart from the strange kind of symbols that they all seem to be wearing. In fact, the only real splash of color-

“There she is,” Rose murmurs softly. “The heiress.”

She sticks out rather a lot, in more ways than one. Most obvious is how the loosely draped fabrics she’s wearing are patterned in a kaleidoscope of colors, with gold glittering at her wrists and ankles, neck and forehead. She’s tall but doesn’t tower quite like the others, and her figure is decidedly softer and more rounded. She’s also smiling widely and apparently genuinely, although the gesture exposes several rows of tiny, razor sharp teeth.

So if that is the heiress, then the two trolls behind her are probably their intended spouses, right?

“Aww, she’s so tall and pretty,” Roxy murmurs next to him, squeezing his wrist encouragingly. “And oh no, help, he’s kind of adorable.”

A fair assessment, really, although that really hasn’t been something Dave had worried about at all. The female troll is borderline statuesque where she stands, dressed in figure-hugging deep red with green accents. She’s easily a couple of inches taller than Dave, her posture absolutely impeccable, and he thinks perhaps she’s just a shade paler than the rest of the trolls. She really is beautiful, but trying to draw a line from that idea to actually marrying her... Yeah, he can’t quite make that thought fit in his head. She looks distant where she stands, undeniably more regal than he thinks he could manage even if he tried to dress the part. The outline of fangs against her lower lip and the curve of her horns only serves to underline how alien she is.

Looking at her is honestly making him all kinds of nervous, so he transfers his gaze to the guy troll instead. It’s... well, it’s borderline disorienting to actually see a troll who is markedly shorter than him at this point. Does that mean he’s ‘lower’ on the spectrum - whatever that entails? His horns aren’t as noticeable either, kind of stunted, and there are no visible fangs. He’s standing with his arms crossed over his skinny chest, face locked in a displeased scowl, and it’s not exactly like Dave feels like he can blame him.

Suddenly he looks up, and for a moment their eyes meet. There are flecks of bright red in his grey irises, and as they stare at each other from across the room, the same color also rises on his cheeks in a surprisingly normal-looking blush.

Well, shit. Poor guy. Rose is going to eat him alive.

“Hey. You’ve got to put this on.” Dirk waves a vaguely collar-like contraption in front of him. Dave makes a face. Right, translators.

They could of course use ordinary human ones, but those are going to need a few solid patches before they translate the strange troll language without too many errors. Right now, they haven’t even been properly programmed with audio translation, so they’d have to keep staring at text on screens while talking to the trolls.

The point is, troll technology is just vastly superior in this aspect, and will allow for smoother interactions. It’s just also that when they’d been described to him, Dave hadn’t liked the sound of it much, and he doesn’t like it more now that the thing is in front of him. It’s kind of... creepy. The collar goes over your head, a small bright light blinking away at your chest, while something that looks like a cross between a crab and a spider on the back of it attaches itself to your spine and plugs itself in. It’s supposed to be fairly painless, but that doesn’t mean it’s not gross.

He does it anyway, because he supposes he doesn’t have much of a choice. It moves like a living thing, fitting itself against his chest under his clothes, and he feels something like a needle prick on the back of his neck. He shivers, trying not to squirm.

“Can everybody understand me now?”

Wow, that’s so weird. His brain is insisting that she’s speaking English, even though he can sort of tell that she isn’t if he concentrates. If he does not, the translation device is doing such a good job at fooling him, he’s even imagining that her words are out of synch with her mouth. Wild.

“Oh, good. I wouldn’t want anyone to miss out the excitement!” The guy behind her lets out a string of waspish little clicks and scraping sounds, which apparently have no human counterparts since even with the translation devices, they’re completely indecipherable. The heiress ignores him. “I’m so glad that we have manateed to come to this solution together, and I hope this means that we can keep working together in a peaceful fashion in the future.” Okay, either the translation is malfunctioning slightly, or this chick just made a really lame pun? Dave also can’t help noticing that some of the highbloods behind her are pulling faces, looking displeased. Some people are apparently not so happy about a peaceful solution. “Howebber, before we set the final glubs of our codtract on paper, I’m afraid I have a small charveat!”

Now it’s the people behind Dave that are stirring instead, frowning and mumbling in amongst themselves. The council are technically democratically elected leaders, a group of assorted public officials of varying descriptions, who are supposed to be merely guided in their decisions by experts such as Dave’s mother. It’s just that her considerable influence in particular often causes her will to sway them more directly. He has a feeling that there would be more of an uproar now if she wasn’t staying so calm. She nods at the heiress to proceed, and receives a shark-toothed smile in turn.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing of great garvity! It’s just that since we have agreefed to do this the human way, we only think it’s fair that we get to make a tiny little stipulation concerning the marriage.” She pauses in an encouraging way, apparently waiting for a reaction.

Since no one else appears ready to give their opinion, and since honestly, this affects him a hell of a lot more than them, Dave decides to speak up. “Sure, that sounds reasonable. Shoot.”

She bounces where she stands, making a pleased little sound. “Oh, good! It’s really a pretty inconsequential detail, a matter of preference more than anything else. All we’re really asking is that Kanaya here-“ she gestures at the girl troll next to her, “is paired with the female human, and Karkat with the male.”

More mutters behind them, and the voices really do not sound pleased. Amazing. Living out here definitely has caused people to revert to old-fashioned, not to mention almost completely redundant kinds of thinking. Dave on the other hand has absolutely no idea what to think of it, if he’s expected to protest or what. On one hand he’s almost relieved, because Kanaya is still kind of intimidating. On the other, he’s got no idea if he’s into guys or not - in nineteen years he’s never even contemplated it, which suddenly seems like an oversight. Shit.

Then someone behind him mutters something that makes Dirk’s shoulders tense slightly, his jaw tightening, and suddenly Dave doesn’t care if he’s into guys. It doesn’t matter. If he’s not, he supposes he’ll just suck dick out of spite - assuming weird aliens even have those.

“Fine by me,” he replies before anyone can manage to make a fuss about it. “Rose?” He doesn’t actually have to ask, because she’s been laughing quietly into her palm since the stipulation was made known. But it only seems polite somehow.

“Quite acceptable. Considering the circumstances, it would be pretty silly of us to refuse.”

“I think perhaps we should consider-“ a council member behind him begins, but he’s cut short.

“Does it matter?” Dave’s uncle sounds bored and impatient. “It’s not like we are trying to unite bloodlines here. The kids are all biologically incompatible anyway, so who gives a shit? Let’s move this along.”

Dave manages to stifle a dry laugh. He still despises the man, but he kind of has a point. And it sure shut the dissenters up.

The trolls meanwhile, now that he turns his attention back to them, are looking positively perplexed. It’s pretty clear that they have no idea why anyone would oppose the idea in the first place, and they’re not having much luck figuring it out. Well, why would aliens have the same kind of hangups around that as humans? Why would even humans in this day and age give a fuck? It’s all pretty goddamn unreasonable.

“Er- ah, yes. Good. That wraps it up, then.” The heiress glances sideways at her friends in confusion, then quickly gathers her composure. “Fintastic! Then we might as well finish up here, and then have some breakfast. Or dinner. Whichever, right?”

 

---

 

“So. Hey.”

Shit, this is going to be so uncomfortable. But staying on the other end of the room forever would’ve been even more so, and also maybe a dick move. They’re not going to get anywhere by pretending the other person involved in this mess doesn’t exist.

A little way away, he can already see Rose in animated conversation with her new fiancée. Kanaya no longer looks particularly intimidating or regal, but rather like someone intensely awkward who can’t figure out what to do with her hands while talking. Amazing. That’s Rose for you.

Karkat starts at being addressed, not strange since he’d apparently taken refuge in reading a book. From a brief glance at the cover, Dave could almost believe that he’s reading some kind of troll version of terrible harlequin romance novels, but perhaps he ought to be charitable and not assume. Maybe all troll media accidentally looks like hot garbage to humans, and he’s being culturally insensitive.

“Oh, right. Hi, I guess.” It’s Dave’s turn to flinch slightly, because wow, apparently the guy has very little in the way of an indoor voice. The sullen silence from the earlier negotiations had him fooled. “I guess it’s time for us to act like we totally aren’t going to have to ritually copulate in an attempt to force our people to get along, all while fondly remembering that each side is likely to brutally cull us if this ludicrous spectacle should turn out to not be effective. Did I leave something out?”

Wow. Okay. “Nah, that pretty much covers it.”

“Great. Wonderful. I’m sure this will be a fantastic conversation that neither of us will in any way regret later.” He draws a deep breath, looking a little bit like he’s already regretting his part of the conversation, but he still plunges on. “Your species has some really fucked-up customs.”

“Yeah, I’m not arguing with you.” Dave takes this opportunity to sit down on a chair next to Karkat, because it feels kind of confrontational to hover over him like this. He crosses his arms over the backrest, leaning his chin on them. “I think this is all some incredibly serious nonsense that we’re both being subjected to. That is to say, all four of us. I’d go so far as to say that it’s downright solemn horseshit.”

The troll looks a bit taken aback, as if he’d half expected Dave to try to defend the situation they’re in. “You mean this isn’t usually how humans handle their quadrants?”

“Our... what now?” Oh god, the rest of his life from this point is just going to be more and more weird alien bullshit, isn’t it?

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Karkat buries his face in his hands for a moment. “What I meant is, is this a normal way for humans to find someone to- to mate with?”

It’s not an unreasonable assumption, not in the context, but Dave still snorts quietly in response. “Hell no. I mean, marriages are still pretty common, but usually it’s an entirely voluntary thing from both people involved, and no one risks getting killed at any part in the process. Wild, I know.”

“...What, never? I mean, there are no potential punishments for failing to promptly perform whatever hideous sexual acts are necessary to make sure your coupling is useful to the continuation of your species?”

“What? No.”

Karkat blinks, as if that thought just can’t fit in his head. “None at all?”

“No! What the hell, dude? What people do in their own marriages is their business, and no one needs to continue their species unless they want to.” Then Dave hesitates, considering recent developments, and adds: “I guess out here in the colonies, some people are pretty focused on that kind of thing? They might go on and on about everyone’s duty to contribute, shit like that, or give you the good ol’ stink eye if you’re not interested in that kind of thing. But they’re 100% full of it anyway, because thanks to my mom, we don’t actually need people to get knocked up or even have partners for new kids to get made. So it’s not a problem.”

“Oh, right. Feferi said something about that ‘biological advantage’ - or as I’d like to call it, ‘shit I absolutely under no circumstances want to hear more about’.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t know what you expect this first conversation to be like, but trust me, me giving you the birds and the bees talk did not figure in even one of my elaborate plans.”

Karkat’s frown actually appears to clear a bit out of sheer bewilderment. “What does your native fucking fauna have to do with anything?”

Dave fights back a terrible urge to laugh. Probably not the best move right now. “Nothing. Figure of speech, which I guess was harder to translate than a lot of shitty nautical puns. Anyway, the point is that our marriage will entail no random threats of death... apart from the whole deal where one or both of us is fucked if our people start fighting. But that’s not normal.”

“Oh.” He worries his lip, and Dave notices that while he doesn’t have fangs like most other trolls he’s seen, his teeth are indeed sharper than his own. Also, his lips are black. “Well, good. I was a bit concerned when the older human male said that thing about us being biologically incompatible, I guess. I hadn’t really considered that in any great detail before this point.”

Dave raises an eyebrow slightly. “What, really? Dude, I’ve been thinking about literally nothing else apart from how our respective anatomies might interact, and what kind of potential crossbreed freak might crawl from the primordial soup we create if we can only find the right scientific means to assist us. You mean you haven’t given it any thought at all? I’m severely disappointed. Clearly our future holy matrimony is doomed to fail.”

He’d tried to make his voice as ridiculously deadpan as possible, but maybe he should’ve known better than to try this particular brand of humor with someone from a completely different culture. Karkat actually physical recoils, a muscle by his eye twitching. “What? Why the actual fuck would I ever think about something like that?!” Especially one which has already come across as a bit neurotic. Shit. Now Karkat’s voice is climbing even further in volume too, and people around are starting to notice. “Is this some kind of twisted shit that humans get off on? Is it? Because let me fucking tell you, just because I was roped into this sick goddamn contract by whatever bullshit political advantage you guys might have on us, you need to know right the fuck now that I’m not interested in-“

“Dude. Dude. Dude! Dude!”

Finally, Karkat seems to hear him and stops mid-rant. “WHAT?!”

“It was... It was just a stupid joke, okay? I didn’t mean- Oh fuck.” Dave rubs his forehead, trying to ignore how literally everyone in the room has fallen silent to stare at them. “Let’s just say I’m really sorry, and also an idiot. Like, will you give me enough benefit of the doubt to assume I was probably clinically brain dead when I made that joke, and rather than some sort of perverted asshole I’m actually just a goddamn medical miracle?” A beat. “Please?”

Karkat’s mouth works silently for a moment or two, that bright red color returning once again to his cheeks. Then he groans, burying his face in his hands. A high-pitched, brittle little laugh escapes from between his fingers. “I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I literally say it just a couple of minutes ago? We were both definitely going to regret this conversation.”

 

---

 

“I realize that we are using translators to speak, and that is not the best opportunity to be discussing the finer points of linguistics, but I wonder if you might indulge me nonetheless?” Rose leans her chin in her hand, and Kanaya detects a very strange little smile pulling at her lips. “Do you perhaps have an expression in your language for a situation in which you overhear only a part of a conversation you have not yourself participated in, and you end up wondering exactly what could have brought it to the point where those words might be uttered in the first place?”

Kanaya watches Karkat slump forward so that his face loudly collides with the table in front of him, while the human called Dave flinches and says nothing. “I’m afraid not - that is, not in the more general context you seem to be implying.” She sighs. “In this particular instance, however, I would probably use the words ‘intensely awkward’, and regrettably also ‘that went about as well as I would’ve expected’.” Now Karkat has piled both his arms on top of his head, as if trying to push it clear through the table with the force of embarrassment alone.

“I see,” Rose murmurs, one eyebrow quirked in apparent amusement. Kanaya grapples for a moment with conflicting impulses, as her wish to stay diplomatic clashes with her need to defend her friend. The latter unsurprisingly wins out. She has always felt like she needs to look out for him, maybe because he tries so hard to look out for everybody else.

“He’s a little bit highly strung,” she explains, fiddling with one of the small implements that look like culling forks, which the humans had used to eat with. She wishes she had her embroidery to occupy herself with while talking. It would be something safe and familiar to look at in between stealing glances of the human girl’s enigmatic expressions. “As you can imagine, all of this came as a shock to us, and perhaps Karkat in particular. He might appear rather... aggressive, but he is actually a really sensitive person.”

“Oh, I do apologize if I seemed to suggest that the situation in question is only your friend’s fault. That was not my intention.” Rose laughs quietly, reaching for a small bag which she had brought with her. A rather fetching accessory, Kanaya is forced to admit. “My brother has many admirable qualities, but an ability to approach these matters tactfully is not necessarily one of them. I’m sure he meant well, but his sense of humor can also be a bit... inappropriate.”

“Ah. Perhaps then, with time, the two of them will be able to find some common ground? I have to admit that those traits - that is, tact and an appropriate sense of humor - are prominently among those that Karkat lacks as well.”

“You mean that perhaps they will bond over their mutual inability to communicate sensibly with each other?” Rose halts with her hand on the clasp of the bag, flashing Kanaya a small smile. “Perhaps.”

She finds herself flushing slightly, and wonders how exactly this human has her at such a persistent disadvantage in their conversation. It’s as if everything she says is not entirely sincere, without going so far as to outright insult her with lies. It’s confusing and maddening. Perhaps she can investigate it further by alluding to a similar topic?

“I’m afraid that in the emotional state he is in now, he might confuse your ‘brother’ further.” The brother in question is kind of just sitting there, looking like he wishes he could leave. Since no response seems to be forthcoming from Karkat, he fishes out a small handheld device and starts typing something on it. Perhaps he’s messaging someone? “He’s got a tendency when aggravated - which is, admittedly, most of the time - to use absurdly hyperbolical statements to indicate that he’s feeling the opposite of whatever he’s actually saying. I suppose when interacting with another culture, that might be confusing.”

“Oh, you mean sarcasm? No, I don’t think Dave will have much trouble interpreting what he means. I’d like to venture that his grasp of that noble art form is deeper than that of your average human. You might even refer to a certain branch of such communication as his native language, his life’s work, or perhaps a sincere spiritual calling.”

“...You are exaggerating your description of your human brother’s habits to make a joke. Am I right?”

“Yes, though not as much as you probably think. And I believe you just used ‘human’ as an adjective to overemphasize the differences between our cultures in a slightly pointed manner?”

“Yes.” Kanaya shifts a bit where she sits, her gaze drifting to the bag which still sits unopened in Rose’s lap. “Does this exaggeration mean that you find me aggravating?”

“Not in particular, no. That sort of joke is something like the foundation on which amicable human relationships are based - though perhaps I am somewhat biased in my assessment, given my family. But now that I think about it, I would venture to guess that the breakdown of communications over there might have been caused by just such an endeavor to establish good rapport, which evidently misfired.” She pauses, and then a slight note of hesitation actually enters her voice. “Did your joke mean that you are aggravated?”

“A little bit,” Kanaya admits. “But I’m suspecting that I might have to learn to come to terms with human insincerity, and perhaps even learn how to reply in the same spirit as it was offered.” She feels like she might actually be able to venture a smile at this point. “I hope you will be patient with me.”

“I will try.” At least this sentiment seems somewhat sincere, as does the returnee smile which accompanies it.

“So, your brother... You think that whatever it was he said to trigger that reaction was an attempt at becoming friends? I don’t wish to cast doubt on your assessment, it’s just... perhaps I would like some assurance that- that-“

“That he won’t hurt your friend? That he at least will try hard not to?”

“...Yes.”

“Don’t worry. Like I indicated earlier, while tact might not be his strong suit, by and large my brother is... truly a good person.” Even taking into account the difference in their cultures, her expression is hard to read. It’s closed, but not in a hostile way. More as if she is subconsciously trying to protect something both fragile and precious. “He doesn’t always give himself the credit he deserves for it, but he is. Both my brothers are notoriously terrible at that. Well, perhaps Dave isn’t quite as bad as Dirk, but...” A small smile. “But I digress. What I meant to say is, I don’t want you to worry unduly. Regardless of how they get along in the future, Dave is at least not the sort to go out of his way to hurt anybody. He doesn’t have it in him.”

Kanaya doesn’t even try to hide her sigh of relief. From what she can tell, it would be fairly pointless anyway. “Then perhaps they are both more similar than I thought at first. I have to admit it’s a relief.”

“Isn’t it?” Rose finally snaps her bag open, pulling out what is unmistakably a pair of knitting needles and a half-finished project. “You see, though I might appear to be approaching this situation lightly, you are not the only one who has been forced to observe then with some misgivings. And I would hate to have to start a war just because some boy hurt my little brother.”

Kanaya is quiet for a moment, trying to gauge how sincere the human is. But she has a feeling it’s a futile exercise to interpret what Rose just said as some sort of human humor. She is fairly certain she meant every word of it. “...Perhaps now is a good time to talk about crafting instead? I think I would enjoy that more.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

Chapter 3: Quadratic equations

Summary:

An attempt is made to make the very first meeting less awful. John sort of manages to accidentally wingman from somewhere out in space. Gossips gonna gossip.

Notes:

My struggle against my phone’s autocorrect continues. If any apostrophes managed to sneak into Dave’s typing, let the record state that it’s not my fault.

Also can “gross foot talk” be a content warning? Dave is occasionally A Problem.

TG: john
TG: john
TG: ...
TG: come in egbert
TG: jesus fuck john please just answer
TG: i cant deal with this
TG: i just took such a huge goddamn bite out of my foot i think i might choke on it
TG: i will be doing nothing for years except hopelessly masticating the remains of one of my extremities
TG: forced to spend life as a mute as i grind down toenails bone and callused skin between my teeth
TG: but at least that will hopefully keep me quiet for a while
TG: goddamn it john

EB: haha ewwww.
EB: that is so gross dave!
EB: but i’m sorry to hear that the meeting with your new fiancée is going poorly.
EB: assuming that’s what all the foot talk was about, and you weren’t just being weird.

TG: yeah no you got me i was actually just opening up to you about my new foot fetish
TG: seeing as how you would definitely be the first person id tell about that
TG: i mean obviously that is super relevant to your interests right

EB: :P

TG: also its fiancé not fiancée

EB: wait, i thought there was supposed to be an extra e at the end if you’re talking about a girl.
EB: because of the french and their words having sex or something?

TG: yeah thats right the french fuck words
TG: just straight up shove their filthy sweaty baguettes in any vowel they come across
TG: grind the consonants down so hard you cant even hear em anymore
TG: because of all the dicks
TG: i mean i should know my mother is french
TG: or part french idk anyway the point is i dont know french but i know what the french are like the horny bastards

EB: uhhhh...

TG: i think the word you were looking for was gendered
TG: also i repeat
TG: its fiancé not fiancée

EB: wait...!
EB: you’re telling me the alien you’re supposed to marry is a dude? :o

TG: yeah thats right

EB: oh! but i didn’t think that you were, you know...

TG: oh god dont embarrass me by saying it

EB: a homosexual!
EB: gosh dave, there is nothing embarrassing about that!
EB: is that why you didn’t tell me about it?
EB: but you know i know about dirk and i’m fine with that.
EB: so there’s no reason for you to keep that a secret. :(

TG: jesus just end me
TG: john this is not a conversation about my sexuality
TG: though fyi i dont know what it is ok
TG: gay straight bi pan poly crypto puppet not a clue
TG: so no i havent been tragically closeted right up until this point when i suddenly spill my beans to you about how my gay ass longs to lick feet and jam elongated bread into the physical manifestations of language abstractions
TG: it just so happens that the alien i got engaged to now is a dude and this has nothing to do with my preferences in the matter
TG: because i dont know what they are
TG: can we move on from that subject now

EB: okaaaaay. but isn’t that a bit worrying to you?
EB: i mean you’re supposed to get married to this guy, right? isn’t it kind of a problem if you don’t even know if you’re into guys?
EB: i know i would be kind of concerned about that.

TG: egbert i am being made to marry this alien who i have never met and do not know at all against my will
TG: and he is being forced to marry me and feels basically the same way about the situation
TG: only more so because trolls dont even have marriages
TG: whether or not he might hypothetically at some point get my dick hard is really not my number one priority right now

EB: ...
EB: okay, i see your point.
EB: :/
EB: i’m sorry dave, that sounds like a really awkward situation.

TG: yeah and i just made it worse
TG: see my previous rant re sudden podophilia
TG: or podophagia
TG: one of these things

EB: you didn’t actually say anything weird about feet to him, right?

TG: what
TG: no
TG: fuck no

EB: i just thought you might have done it ironically, that’s all. it’s pretty easy to misunderstand when you say things like that.

TG: fuck
TG: the worst part is that youre not even that far off
TG: i mean no i didnt actually say anything about feet give me some credit
TG: but i figured maybe some of my truly choice and advanced irony might
TG: idk
TG: make the situation less cringy maybe
TG: maybe even give us something to laugh or at the very least smile awkwardly about together
TG: instead he thought i was serious and some sort of disturbing creep
TG: flew right off the handle as if he was done with it and was moving in with his mom until the handle straightened its shit out
TG: and after i explained that it was a really goddamn stupid joke i think he got embarrassed about his unrestrained handle gymnastics
TG: and now he wont talk to me

EB: oh no!
EB: i’m not really sure what to say, dave. that sounds like an shitty situation to be in, for both you and him.
EB: i would really like to give you some good and stellar advice, but i’m afraid that this sort of thing really isn’t my area of expertise, sorry.
EB: and i don’t think unequaled practical japery is going to help you right now.

TG: yeah no i dont think a bucket of whitewash would do anything except make everything exponentially worse
TG: with my luck it would turn out to be some sort of fucked up metaphor in troll culture or something

EB: that sounds pretty far fetched and totally unrealistic, and i can’t imagine that this will actually be a real thing, haha.
EB: but i take your meaning. he probably isn’t very receptive to a good chuckle at his own expense if he’s already embarrassed.
EB: and you sound pretty miserable, which isn’t a good time to venture into a prankster-off!
EB: so what can i do for you, dave?

TG: just
TG: i needed someone to talk to thats all
TG: and it cant be rose because shes already talking to her own alien
TG: and dirk would feel bad bc im doing this instead of him
TG: and im not gonna worry roxy more than i have to
TG: so

EB: awwww.
EB: well of course, i’m always here to talk to my best friend.

TG: thats just it
TG: here
TG: youre kind of all the way over there
TG: by which i mean off planet
TG: idek exactly where you are
TG: but
TG: do you think you could come visit soon
TG: i could really use having you around right now

EB: :o!!!
EB: dave, it really isn’t like you to actually ask me to come or admit you miss me or anything like that.
EB: now i’m kind of worried about you.

TG: yeah well this whole settle down on a newly colonized planet for a while and take it easy with my family thing kind of backfired
TG: and not even just because the one asshole family member i wanted to get away from keeps hanging around
TG: so does that mean youre coming

EB: i’m in the middle of a mission right now, but as soon as i’m done, i will head over there.
EB: i probably need a holiday after this one anyway, it’s kind of a doozy, hehe.
EB: speaking of, i should go back to it. sorry!

TG: nah its cool
TG: thanks for talking to me and probably jeopardizing your mission for the sake of my histrionics i guess

EB: i haven’t jeopardized shit, jackass.
EB: i’ll tell jade you said hi!

TG: did you tell her about all this

EB: nnnooooo you told me not to

TG: yeah
TG: right
TG: i just dont want her to worry about this shit when she has more important stuff to deal with

EB: yeah okay, if you say so. but we both know trying to keep anything from jade is futile.
EB: anyway, i have to go! say hi to your family from me, will you? and jake and jane too!

TG: will do
TG: and uh
TG: thanks

EB: :)

 

---

 

When Karkat dares to peek out from under his arms again without feeling like he might literally melt from sheer humiliation, Dave appears to be using some sort of handheld communication device. He thinks halfheartedly about lambasting him for being rude, but considering he’d just given the table a long, firm smooch in lieu of talking to Dave, maybe he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on there. So he watches instead, still slumped over but with enough of a gap between his elbow and wrist to see how the human seems to slowly relax where he sits. His shoulders had lifted into a kind of defensive shrug at the end of their conversation, but now they’re slowly settling back down. A small wrinkle on his pasty forehead slowly clears up and disappears. A couple of times he even looks like he’s on the verge of smiling.

There’s a small sound, probably indicating that the person he’s talking to has logged off, since he turns off the small screen a moment later. Karkat can’t really help being curious, and maybe a nonjudgmental and relaxed conversation between them could make the situation less atrocious. If the can actually manage to have one.

So he uncurls somewhat, rearranging his arms so he’s leaning his head on them instead, as clears his throat a bit awkwardly. “So... was that your moirail? The person you were talking to, I mean.”

Dave frowns, touching the back of his neck briefly as if to check that the translation tick is still fully attached. Why he’d actually want to touch it is anyone’s guess, those things are notoriously unpleasant, and Karkat just tries to pretend like hell like it’s not there. He feels a certain amount of vindication as Dave shudders and jerks his hand away.

“Sorry, I think there just isn’t any kind of human translation of that word you just said. Mow-rail or whatever.”

“Wow, your pronunciation is appalling.” Karkat straightens up a bit, leaning his chin in his hand. He finds himself intrigued despite himself. “A moirail is... shit, how can you not have a word for that? I mean you apparently don’t know what I mean when I say ‘quadrants’ either, but still.” He tries to think, tries to find the right words to explain... and tries to <em>not</em> think about Gamzee while so doing. The latter fails spectacularly. “A moirail is someone who- I guess you could say they make you whole? They give you what you lack, in a way.”

Dave frowns slightly, but he doesn’t seem like he minds the conversation or anything. More like he’s just trying to figure out what the fuck Karkat means. “That sounds kind of like what we would call ‘soulmates’, I guess? I don’t know. I think I could do with an example to contextualize your description here.”

“Okay, yeah... Say one person is prone to violent episodes, stuff in their head they find hard to deal with, so they’re dangerous. A moirail is someone who grounds them, snaps them out of it. Someone they can always count on to hold them back when they need it.” It stings to talk about, because the words taste like failure. Maybe he would’ve missed it if the topic wasn’t kind of sensitive to him too, but Karkat distinctly notices how Dave’s eyes flicker behind the shades, one hand curling briefly into a fist. There’s something there, something painful, but Karkat sure as fuck doesn’t know enough about humans to figure out what. He should probably steer clear for now. “Or maybe someone has an obnoxious habit of thinking that they have all the answers, and this leads them to manipulate people ‘for their own good’, a moirail might be someone who is a foil for them, who reminds them that they’re not always right about everything, and that’s okay. Or if someone is just a little bit too eager to either constantly kick the shit out of themselves or lash out at others, a moirail can be the one to make them breathe for a moment and realize they’re being a tool.”

Dave seems to relax gradually as he listens to the other examples, although the last one makes his lips twitch slightly. “Okay. We really don’t have a word for that as a specific kind of relationship. It’s not that I don’t sort of get what you’re talking about, but humans don’t have this one designated person who does this for them, which is how you make it sound.”

“You... don’t?”

“Nah. It’s something you do for the people you care most about, your close friends, your family... you might trust one person more than others to do it, but it’s not an exclusive thing.”

Karkat realizes that his face is once again slowly heating up, and on top of that his mouth is hanging open too. He slams it shut, but immediately opens it again, unable not to ask the question. “You mean... your natural state is just constant pale infidelity?”

Dave’s eyebrows go up. “Infidelity? Wait, are you talking about some sort of romantic relationship here?”

“Well, yes, obviously.” Karkat tries very hard not to think about how dumb they both must look, just staring at each other in mounting incredulity. “I said it was a quadrant, didn’t I?”

“Well, I have to say that a.) you didn’t say it so much as you implied it, and b.) remember how I didn’t know what quadrants meant? That didn’t stop being a thing or anything. I still have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”

Karkat makes a tired little sound, rubbing at his eyes for a moment. Even though it’s fully dark outside now, he still feels like he could just curl up somewhere and go to sleep. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who feels like this will be some perpetual repeating joke on both our behalf for our foreseeable future? It’ll be the shitty goddamn gag that just keeps giving, won’t it? Every time we sort of start to feel that we’re beginning to understand, we’ll just be slapped in the face with exactly how alien we both are to each other, and that neither of us really has a clue what the other is talking about. Fucking hilarious.”

“I guess the thought has struck me, yeah.” Dave gets up off his chair and scoots himself onto the table next to Karkat instead, propping his arms behind him and leaning on them. “I mean, we’re kind of this huge, untested diplomatic experiment, right?” He shrugs his thin shoulders, his shirt riding up slightly as he does so. “But then again, I guess it could be interesting? I mean, it sounds pretty sad to say that we’re going into this without any particular expectations, but that’s really just another way of saying that we’re probably not going to let each other down too badly. So we can try to figure out each other’s shit without a lot of pressure on us.”

“...Yeah, that still sounds pretty pathetic to me.”

Was that an actual smile? It was pretty quick, but Karkat could’ve sworn that it was there. “Well, as the old Earth meme poets said in one of their most famous sermons to the masses, we’re going to have to-“ He flicks his sunglasses up and back down again, too quickly for Karkat to get a good look at his eyes, just a brief impression of... red? “-deal with it. Now why don’t you tell me what the fuck ‘quadrants’ is supposed to mean?”

Karkat stares at him for a moment, torn between impulses, but really there is only one possible outcome. “Fine. Okay. I’m going to need something to draw on.”

 

---

 

The dinner for the humans present had included wine, which Rose had carefully avoided, knowing full well that she is not genetically disposed to drink alcohol responsibly while still nervous. Which, despite naturally making sure not to show it too much, she still is. She supposes that she might be excused in a situation such as this, even though it still irks her.

She had noticed earlier - not without a touch of pride - that Roxy had removed herself from the high concentration of wine bottles by the impromptu buffet table, and gone to sit in one of the windows with a mug of tea in her hands. She’d been shortly joined by the alien heiress, and the two had started up an apparently amicable conversation. Feeling after a little while that perhaps uninterrupted one-on-one sparring with her intended is a bit intense for a first meeting, Rose suggests to Kanaya that they might go over and join them. She agrees, which is why they all find themselves together when Rose notices that Dave’s conversation with his fiancé appeares to be growing more animated. At least on said fiancé’s part.

“What can they be talking about now?” she muses, slowly tilting her glass of the slightly bitter, minty fruit juice that some of the flora on this planet provides back and forth. The blackish blue liquid contrasts satisfactorily with the faintly pink glass.

Kanaya and Feferi exchange a glance, and they both laugh. “Quadrants,” they respond in unison.

Rose raises her eyebrows, amused. “That was a very quick and unanimous answer.”

Feferi is still just giggling, but Kanaya makes an effort to restrain herself, placing a hand delicately over her mouth. “The list of things which get Karkat quite that intensely involved is relatively short.” She attempts to adopt a serious expression, and doesn’t quite manage it. “He must be pleased to have a whole new audience for his lectures. You could say that his reception among his fellows of late has been growing somewhat... lukewarm.”

Feferi lets out a not very ladylike snort. “Because we’ve only heard it about a thousand times or so! Honestly, he does keep carping on about it whenever someone gives him half a chance.”

It’s truly fascinating, really, the way the translation devices seem to find ways of inserting nautical puns in her speech. Presumably by letting their own brains do the dirty work there. What a dreadful thought. “Hmm. I was of course already fairly read up on the matter, and I did consider imparting some of that knowledge to my brother. But I surmised that he would be reluctant and contrary, and it would only be a frustrating exercise in which he tried to find new ways to make a joke of the whole thing.” She smiles slightly, sipping on her drink. “Just as well, since your friend seems to be enjoying himself.”

“Yeah! Dave looks a bit overwhelmed, but it’s still nice to see them getting along better.” Roxy is crosslegged on the windowsill now, and has taken on the monumental task of braiding Feferi’s potentially infinite supply of hair. The heiress doesn’t seem to mind, and appears to at least be trying to sit obediently still. “I was a bit worried there for a second, thought maybe I’d have to get some backup!” She momentarily frees on hand to pointedly twirl her portable computing device around on its string around her wrist. “But Jade said that Dave was already talking to John about it, so he’d probably get him to relax a bit. Looks like she was right.”

Kanaya sends Rose a mildly quizzical look. “Mutual friends of yours, I guess? Ones who aren’t here?”

“Mm, they’re still working for the same agency which we used to belong to. Well, still belong to, I suppose, though we are currently on extended leave to spend time with our family.” The best part about it is that it is in no way a lie, nor does it sound like one, but leaves out the vulnerable and screwed-up parts. It’s not like any of that is SKAIA’s fault, anyway. “Both Jade and John have always been good at dealing with Dave’s... peculiarities.” As the trolls exchange glances, Rose adds: “In a non-romantic fashion.”

“Well, not entirely,” Roxy points out, lifting some of Feferi’s hair out of the way and pinning it up so that it’ll stay put. “Speaking of which, Jade said she’s pretty sure that Dave made John promise not to tell her what is going on. She said he’s been clumsily dodging questions.” She grins. “Do you think it’s because she’s his ex?”

Rose shakes her head thoughtfully, shifting her position slightly on the low bench. Since Kanaya is perched in the window next to Roxy, it causes Rose’s shoulder to bump against her knee, and she detects a faint flush on the troll’s cheeks. Obviously she’s made some sort of impression already.

“I don’t think so. They didn’t date for all that long, and I got the impression they both felt it wasn’t meant to be when they broke up. So I can’t see why that would affect his decision to try to keep this from her, foolish as it may be.” Honestly, that sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else. Dave knows better than that. “I think he’s just being protective of her. He doesn’t want her to be concerned for his sake. You know how he is. How they both are.”

“...This is what I get for sneaking up on my sisters, is it? Blatant goddamn slander.”

“When you sneak up on others you get to hear the truth about yourself, dear brother.” She treats Dirk to a serene smile as he detaches himself from the shadow of the massive velvet curtains. “If it’s not palatable, I suggest you make your presence known, and we will attempt to spare your feelings.”

“Pretty silly to stand around lurchin in the shadows anyway. You should come join us!” The heiress pats the bench in between herself and Rose, beaming at Dirk. He looks taken aback, for a moment awkwardly unable to fall back on his aloof attitude without coming off as monstrously rude, and so he nods after a moment of hesitation. He sits down on the floor, though, as if trying in that manner to regain his balance somewhat.

“Are we gossiping about Dave and his fiancé, is that what’s happening here?”

“We are,” Roxy confirms, using a clean fork to assist her in french braiding. “Do you have anything to report from all your sneaking around, hmmmm?”

“Yeah, I listened in for a moment, and was privy to an explanation of hate attraction. I watched my brother desperately try to figure out if he was actually being fucked with somehow, and then removed myself like a coward. I’m just saying, some battles a man has to face alone.”

Roxy laughs loudly, and Rose has to cover her mouth for a moment or two to keep her amusement in check. “I’m sorry if this comes off as very culturally insensitive to my newly betrothed and the royalty present. We’re mostly just having fun at our brother’s expense.”

Feferi shrugs, and gets a stern poke in scalp by Roxy for it. “Oops, sorry! Anyway, you don’t have to apologize. We laugh at Karcrab fairly regularly too. He’s pretty funny when he gets all ranty and shouty!”

Kanaya makes an amused little sound, but her expression quickly morphs into curiosity. “So humans do not experience black yearnings?”

“Not the way you do, no. For us, it’s not nearly as neat and tidy. It’s indeed possible for negative emotions to be mixed up in attraction, and perhaps they might even fuel it. But unless there is at least some positive emotion mixed up in there, it will simply be creepy - and even with positive emotions involved, if they don’t outweigh the negative, it’ll probably be unhealthy. I imagine that there are relatively few humans that could maintain that sort of relationship in a nondestructive fashion. Our brains just aren’t made for it.”

“And Dave in particular isn’t.” Roxy frowns slightly, fingers moving in intricate patterns. “A relationship built on negative shit would only hurt him - he’s just not a very aggressive or hard person. He’s actually hella gentle.”

Dirk inclines his head slightly in agreement. “That’s pretty much it. So it probably doesn’t matter how many times your friend describes it, he still won’t really get it. Because it just doesn’t interest him - I’d say it probably makes him uncomfortable. I can see why.”

Rose notes how Kanaya and Feferi exchange another look, the way the former nods almost imperceptibly and the latter smiles. She resolves, for now, not to worry too much about the quadrants on her brother’s behalf. The silent vote of confidence she just witnessed - albeit hard to interpret in any great detail - seems to suggest that it won’t be too much of a problem at present.

As for her own situation... well, who knows? It certainly won’t be boring, at least.

 

---

 

The completely reasonable suggestion that Kanaya and Karkat move in with their respective humans while waiting for the ceremony they call a ‘wedding’ is met with resistance from some of the older humans. Kanaya has no idea why this is, other than that they appear to find the idea inappropriate somehow, as if it breaks some form of tradition. Whatever it is, it is treated with impatience and exasperation by the younger humans, as if the notion to them is horribly old-fashioned, but the point is apparently not negotiable. Kanaya finds herself wondering if this ritual caution is observed due to the often volatile nature of concupiscent relationships, to prevent conflict or maybe even violence, or if it is simply an excuse made because the older humans do not trust the trolls. She cannot in good conscience fault them for the latter, considering that 'diplomacy' is often used as slang among the empire forces for planet-scale weapons.

Whatever the reason, while the rest of the troll contingent return to their ships, the two of them are instead given separate respite blocks in a newly constructed human hive. To ‘acclimatize’ themselves. Feferi promises to spend a lot of time there, and though she does so in a light-hearted way, the underlying meaning is pretty clear. ‘I won’t abandon you to be alone among humans’.

They’re also encouraged to try to shift their sleep schedule around a bit, since the upcoming wedding ceremony will take place during daytime. Kanaya doesn’t exactly mind that, since she’s fairly used to being awake during daytime anyway, and she had tried to be optimistic about the proposition. Karkat did not appreciate the optimism - he’d said the last thing he needed was a rainbow drinker bugging him about how being a creature of the day is so great.

Optimistic or not, she nonetheless finds that when she tries to go to bed a couple of hours before sunrise, sleep eludes her. Human beds are unwieldy things, obviously not nearly as pliant as a recuperacoon filled with Sopor Slime, and she finds it hard to find a comfortable position. Her mind keeps racing, and it seems impossible to settle down.

That’s ridiculous; she’s slept in far less hospitable places than this, under far more dire circumstances. They are by all accounts safe here, with nothing to immediately fear. The human hive hasn’t been lived in before, and it’s a bit empty, but it’s reasonably clean and well furnished. The room she’s in is cosy, with little touches suggesting that someone has tried to make it welcoming. The bed smells strange but actually rather nice, like clean fabrics and a faint touch of... herbs? Mysterious, but far from unpleasant.

Yet she can’t sleep.

For a while she occupies herself with some embroidery, and then by reading a book. There is a faint haze of light at the horizon, and she can hear the chattering of early risers among the fauna outside. She really ought to at least get to sleep before sunrise if she wants to match her sleeping habits more to those of the humans. But it eludes her.

Finally she sighs, wraps herself up in a blanket, tucks her book under her arm and pads silently down the hall to Karkat’s room. She’s not surprised to find that there is a light on in there, and it’s with a small sigh of relief that she knocks on the door.

“What?”

“I find myself unable to sleep, and I’m getting restless. Could I perhaps... stay in there with you for a while?”

There is a loud sigh, a thud, impatient footfalls. Karkat opens the door without a word, gestures grumpily for Kanaya to enter. She isn’t surprised to find him reading too, or that he apparently has been fussing with his room before that, cleaning the very faint layer of dust she’d noticed off all surfaces and rearranging his possessions. He’s always been unexpectedly meticulous about his cleaning habits. A trait inherited from his lusus, perhaps? He has always struck her as a fairly fussy creature.

She slips into the bed next to him, takes out her book, and starts reading. They don’t talk, but it’s not necessary. Just knowing someone is there, someone who is going through the very same thing and worrying about a very similar future... that helps. As the chirping of the flying amphibians outside starts up, Kanaya finds that it’s hard to keep her eyes open. They did get up fairly early, and it’s been a long day.

There’s a thud next to her, and she looks up to find that Karkat’s book has slipped from his fingers, and he’s slumped on his side, eyes closed. He always looks so young when he sleeps. She smiles fondly, reaching down to pull up the blanket a bit and tuck it more securely around him. Then she gets up to turn out the slight, returns to her own side of the bed, and drifts off soon thereafter.

Chapter 4: The game is afoot

Summary:

Juicy, juicy backstory. A bit of meaty world building. Some fairly fibrous exposition. A dash of plot. And the cotton candy of delicious girl talk.

Notes:

I updated the tags / warnings, but just in case: Some violence + PTSD coming up.

Incidentally, fuck writing Terezi’s typing quirk on my phone. So glad I could use a generator to help me, but I might still have slipped up. Apologies.

It’s a familiar scenario. Not that he can recognize where he is, everything is happening too fast, the old disoriented feeling setting in. Shit, this isn’t good. Losing track of where he is, what he’s doing, what his objective is in the middle of battle... it’s dangerous. That’s how people get hurt, his people. Why can’t he remember? All he can hear is the memory of his uncle calmly explaining that what he needs to do is take out all potential dangers, focus on the fight, keep your head cool for fuck’s sake. But Dave can’t keep his head cool and he doesn’t know where he is and he’s scared shitless.

The air tastes of ozone and blood.

Enemies keep coming at him fast, their features indistinguishable in the hazy air, the light is low save for the eye-searing flashes of plasma bolts. He cycles through the different kinds of ammo on his gun; magnetic, plasma, steel bolt, ionized shotgun, stun; anything that will hold them at bay, but they keep coming. Keep your feelings out of it. Fight. Fuck, the space is too damn cramped to fire accurately anyway, he’s losing ground, he’s backed up against a wall.

Somewhere close there’s the dull sound of an explosion, shortly followed by a shockwave that almost knocks him off his feet. John’s voice crackling with static is in his ear, desperate. “Guys, I need help! It’s Jade, I can’t- There’s too much fire, I- Jade? Jade!”

His heart is beating too fast, cold sweat drenches his uniform. He can’t get there, he can’t move, he doesn’t even know which direction he ought to be running in. Keep your head clear, focus on what’s in front of you, don’t let emotions cloud your judgement- No. Fuck that. It doesn’t help, it never helped, the memory voice just makes the fear worse and he can’t breathe, can't think, can't help.

Jane's voice over the comm: "I've got her, I... oh no. No. I can't-" She chokes on smoke and heat, and her coughing is followed by a wretched whimper - hers or Jade's? - and another muted explosion. "Backup," she chokes. "I need backup."

Someone grabs his shoulder. He can feel the smooth carbon fiber of the knife slip against the inside of his wrist, into the palm of his hand. Eliminate all potential danger. He turns around and slashes his attacker in one balletic movement, the knife tracing a wide arc in the air, finding the familiar outline of an exposed neck. Don’t hesitate. It barely offers any resistance at all. Blood sprays him in the face, he backs away as he tries to clear his vision.

Dirk stares back at him, face paler than it’s ever been before. He opens his mouth, but only blood and spit comes out. It spills down his chin in sticky strings as he collapses to his knees, the impact causing the neck wound to gape wide open like a hideous grin.

Dave can’t feel anything. Not the knife in his hand, not the blood on his face, not the scream tearing at his throat. Nothing.

 

---

 

THUD.

“Horsefeathers!”

Dave sits bolt upright in bed, clutching at the sheets that are hopelessly tangled around his body. They’re drenched in sweat, cling to his skin as he pulls at them in an attempt to free himself. His heart is still pounding, and he has to fight hard against the impulse to hyperventilate, to draw in painfully slow breaths that feel like sandpaper in his throat.

Not this goddamn shit again. The dream is still vivid in his mind, every absurd detail standing out now that he’s awake. It didn’t happen like that. Hell, the explosion and his epic goddamn mid-battle meltdown happened on two separate occasions, two different missions, not even remotely the same locations. It was a close call for Jade, but she's... fine now. She's fine. He knows she’s fine. Dirk-

“Okay, I think I can see what the issue is. Hold still.”

Despite knowing that nothing like what he dreamed ever happened to Dirk, that it was just his traumatized brain rehashing old fears and ‘what if’ bullshit, Dave still lurches to his feet at the sound of his voice. He stumbles to the window, desperate despite himself to see his brother, to assure his reeling mind and the tremble in his hands that he’s still alive. So he can tell himself that he never hurt him, at least not like that, and he never will.

Unsurprisingly, Dirk is on his knees and tinkering with some detail in Jake’s new robot arm. The latter appears to have been chopping wood, judging by the sturdy chunk of pine balanced on the chopping block, but the axe is currently buried inch deep in the wall of the hen house more than twenty feet away. Now that Dave is listening for it, he can hear some alarmed clucking from inside the small building.

“Yep, still haven’t got the finer motor control quite right. I'll need to subtly adjust grip strength, and the sensors need some work too.”

“Well, it’s a damn sight better than when I kept making confetti out of everything I gripped, wouldn’t you say?”

“Better, yes. Still not good enough.”

“You’re such a big old perfectionist.” Jake sighs, but still holds his arm still as Dirk does something that makes the fingers twitch, head bowed over his work. Dave is certain that Dirk didn't mean it as anything else except his usual self-critical horseshit, and he's decently sure that Jake knows it too, but nonetheless his tone is reproachful, perhaps even hurt. He has a tendency of taking everything Dirk says way too personally, and either reacts defensively or tries way too hard to compensate for his imagined failure - and of course pointing this out has occasionally procured similar reactions.

Perhaps it's a moment's self-aware clarity which causes Jake to almost instantly revisit the words, and apparently regret them. “Not that I mean that as any form of reproof, old friend! You know I’m forever chuffed that you’re working so hard on this for my sake, and since I’m truly lucky to have such a great and stalwart companion, slinging brickbats is the very last-“

“Jake. I know.” Dirk doesn’t look up, but he frowns slightly at the hand as it twitches again. “The bad news is that I’m going to need my tools and a more optimal work environment than this to accomplish the task. Why don’t you go back to the workshop, and I’ll meet you there after I’ve finished with the wood?”

Jake looks dejected, shoulders slumping slightly. “Well, frig. If you say so.”

“Hmm?” Dirk starts screwing the terminal on the inside of Jake’s lower arm shut, but halts to glance up at him instead. “What is it?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. I suppose I’m just- Well, dagnabbit Dirk! I guess I just feel so useless with everyone having to go out of their way for me, and me not even able to perform the simplest tasks in return! Is that really so strange?”

“...You’re still recovering, and your prosthetic isn’t fully functional yet. Other than your carelessness contributing to what happened, these circumstances aren’t your fault by even the widest stretch of imagination.”

“See, you say that, but as you point out yourself, if it wasn’t for my dadblasted foolishness-“

“No, I- Forget what I said.” Dirk’s mouth tightens like it always does when he realizes that he overdid the brusqueness once again. Dave has to admit that he can see why it's almost impossible not to take everything he says as extremely pointed faultfinding. “The point is, you lost an entire limb by doing something heroic, something for which I am personally grateful. Those are objectively speaking conditions that allow for a considerable amount of slack to be extended. No one expects you to immediately be able to do everything you used to.”

Jake hangs his head, letting out a sigh loud enough to be audible even to Dave up on the second floor. “I have to say, I don’t particularly feel like anyone expects much of anything from me at present. I’m holding everybody back, aren’t I - making sure we have to stay on this awkward bloody planet and in this awkward bloody situation?”

Dirk starts closing up the terminal again. “It’s not just you. Others really need this break too - perhaps even more than you.”

“...Well, shucks. You’ve mentioned that before, but I admit I wasn’t the best listener at the time. You wouldn’t care to elaborate, would you?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. It’s... complicated.” He tightens the last screw, and then takes Jake’s hand in his, gazing up at him from where he’s still kneeling in front of him. “Will you trust me anyway?”

Jake’s skin grows darker as he flushes, and he looks away. “O-Of course. You know I do.”

Dave grimaces where he stands, backing silently away from the window. The last thing he needs is for Dirk to know that he witnessed that whole wretched exchange. That entire will-they-won’t-they dance is awkward enough without gawking family members, he’s sure - not to mention unbelievably embarrassing for said family members to have to behold.

Anyway, he’s assured himself that he hasn’t actually attempted to decapitate Dirk for real, and the dream is slowly fading into the dark obscurity of previous night terrors. Political debacles that he’s gotten mixed up in aside, he’s on a currently almost excruciatingly safe and boring planet compared to what he’s used to. Even with having trolls for neighbors taken into consideration.

He’s too nauseous to have breakfast yet, but he should at least have a glass of water or something. Stripping off his sodden boxers and tank top, he steps into the hygiene module and lets the misted water, mild chemicals and quick blast of air do its work. It’s always felt to him kind of like getting dry cleaned, not nearly as satisfying as a real shower or bath, but fresh water is too scarce and precious out here still for proper plumbing to be viable. So an indoor bath is a huge hassle. Maybe later on he’ll hike to the salt water springs if he feels like having a proper soak.

As he picks out some clothes to wear, he can’t help feeling like a bit of an asshole for more or less letting Jake think that he's the reason that they're all staying out here. He’d been a handy excuse when they first arrived, just the famous Strider-Lalonde family looking good on pictures with their friend the wounded hero, clearly staying in this dull backwater in solidarity as he recovered. He should’ve remembered that playing that up for the press would make Jake believe it as well, especially since he hadn’t been there when Dave snapped, didn’t know that the situation he’d saved Rose from had been entirely self-inflicted. He’d always been easily led like that.

Jane had probably figured it out, even if she hadn’t been there when it all went down either, and no one who wasn’t directly involved had been told. The point is, she probably knows there’s something they’re all hiding. Might be why she’s been kind of short with most of them recently - and why she’d refused to leave with John and Jade. Maybe she feels like her cousin needs someone around who isn’t keeping secrets from him.

Maybe later on it won’t feel so impossible to tell them about it. At least he hopes so. At any rate, once Jake recovers fully, it definitely won’t be him holding anyone back - not when it’s Dave and Rose who might not be able to leave the planet for the foreseeable future, possibly even forever. He grimaces slightly, taking the stairs down two at a time. It kind of has to be like this, doesn’t it? Since the two of them are the main reason that they’re here in the first place, it really has to be them.

 

---

 

GC: SO

CG: SO WHAT.

GC: SOOOOOOOOO

CG: OH MY GOD.
CG: CAN WE CUT THE CUTESY BULLSHIT PLEASE?
CG: MY SLEEP SCHEDULE IS ALL FUCKED UP BECAUSE THESE DIURNAL GLOBEBREATHS WANT US TO MAKE OURSELVES MISERABLE FOR THEIR CONVENIENCE. AND SO I CAN PARTICIPATE IN SOME KIND OF CREEPY ALIEN MATING RITUAL WITH BASICALLY THEIR ENTIRE SETTLEMENT BEARING WITNESS TO MY DEBASEMENT.
CG: THE POINT IS I AM NOT IN THE FUCKING MOOD TO PLAY COY GAMES WITH A SMUG BLIND GIRL.

GC: WH4T 4R3 TH3Y L1K3?
GC: TH3 HUM4NS, 1 M34N

CG: AH YES, I CAN SEE YOU ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO ASK SOME RELEVANT QUESTIONS, AND IN NO WAY WASTE MY TIME WITH FRIVOLOUS SHIT.
CG: THEY’RE SMALL, SQUISHY AND UGLY. THEIR SKIN COMES IN SEVERAL UNAPPEALING COLORS, AND SO DOES THEIR HAIR.
CG: WHAT DO YOU WANT, AN ANATOMICAL CHART?
CG: YOU HAVE SEEN HUMANS BEFORE.

GC: NO 1 H4V3N’T >:[

CG: FINE, SMELLED THEM. WHATEVER.

GC: I W4SN’T 4CTUALLY 4SK1NG YOU 4BOUT TH31R 4PP34R4NC3S
GC: OR 4BOUT HUM4NS 1N G3N3R4L
GC: 1 W4NT3D TO KNOW 4BOUT TH3 HUM4NS YOU 4R3 GO1NG TO G3T STUCK W1TH OBV1OUSLY

CG: WHY?
CG: WHY IS IT EVEN RELEVANT WHAT THEY ARE LIKE?
CG: BESIDES, OUR ROYAL FUCKING HEIRESS IS APPARENTLY INVITING YOU AS GUESTS TO THE WHOLE SCREWED UP “WEDDING” AFFAIR, SO YOU’LL FIND OUT WITHOUT WASTING MY TIME.

GC: C4N’T 4 FR13ND B3 CUR1OUS?
GC: M4YB3 1 JUST C4R3 4BOUT YOU OR SOM3TH1NG, 3V3R THOUGHT 4BOUT TH4T?
GC: JUST B3CAUS3 W3'R3 NOT M4T3SPR1TS 4NYMOR3 1 DON'T S33 WHY 1'M NO LONG3R 4ALLOW3D TO G1V3 4 SH1T
GC: NOW STOP B31NG D1FF1CULT 4ND JUST T3LL US 4LR34DY >:]

CG: WAIT, “US”?
CG: FUCKDAMNIT. IS VRISKA THERE?
CG: WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I WOULD TELL YOU ANYTHING WITH HER THERE?
CG: I DEFINITELY HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN TO SUBJECT MY PERSONAL MISERY TO THE EIGHT-PUPILLED SCRUTINY OF ANOTHER RUN-OFF-THE-MANUFACTOUNDRY SOCIOPATHIC BLUEBLOOD.

GC: BL4444RRRGH
GC: W1LL YOU JUST T3LL US SOM3TH1NG B3FOR3 SH3 M4K3S YOU DO 1T 4NYW4Y?
GC: 1’M TRY1NG TO M4K3 H3R STOP DO1NG TH4T

CG: WOW, STELLAR MOIRAIL HERE EVERYONE.
CG: SHE DOESN’T WANT HER PSYCHO PALE GIRLFRIEND TO CONTROL PEOPLE’S MINDS, SO INSTEAD SHE BLACKMAILS THEM INTO TELLING HER THINGS BY USING HER MIND POWERS AS A THREAT.
CG: WELL DONE, I CAN SEE THAT YOU HAVE HER PERFECTLY UNDER CONTROL.

GC: BLUUUUUH 1T’S 4 COMPROM1S3 4LR1GHT >:OOO
GC: YOU SHOULD R34LLY STOP T3LL1NG OTH3RS HOW TO H4NDL3 TH31R QU4DR4NTS, 1T'S RUDE
GC: 4ND TH1S W4Y YOU C4N D3C1D3 WH4T TO T3LL US
GC: 1NS34D OF JUST L3TT1NG US KNOW *3V3RYTH1NG*

CG: FUCKING *FINE*. GREAT. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING GENEROUS OF YOU.
CG: KANAYA’S HUMAN IS CALLED ROSE AND SHE SEEMS CONCEITED, CUNNING, POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS AND DEFINITELY OUT OF HER SPONGE. SO HEY, BASICALLY JUST HER TYPE, RIGHT?
CG: SHE USES TOO MANY WORDS AND CONSTANTLY LOOKS LIKE SHE’S PLOTTING SOMETHING. AND I’M NO EXPERT OF HUMAN MATING HABITS OR ANYTHING, BUT I THINK SHE MIGHT ALREADY BE FLIRTING WITH KANAYA. IT’S MORTIFYING AS FUCK TO WATCH, AND IT’S ONLY MADE WORSE BY THE FACT THAT KANAYA DOESN’T SEEM TO MIND.

GC: >:O!!!!
GC: TH4T 1S TH3 F4C3 1’M M4K1NG TO 1ND1C4T3 HOW SC4ND4L1Z3D 1 4M
GC: NOW WH4T 4BOUT YOUR HUM4N?

CG: HIS NAME IS DAVE AND HE’S AN IDIOT.
CG: I AM SURE WE ARE ALL SHOCKED BY THIS TURN OF EVENTS, SEEING AS WE HAVE HAD NO PROOF AT ALL THAT MIGHT SUGGESTS THAT MOST OF THESE ALIENS ARE PRIMITIVE AND BACKWARDS.
CG: INCLUDING THIS WHOLE ASININE SITUATION.
CG: HE WEARS SUNGLASSES AT ALL TIMES, HE HAS A SHITTY SENSE OF HUMOR, AND HE FREQUENTLY EMBARRASSES EVERYONE AROUND HIM BY SAYING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT CROSSES HIS MIND ALOUD.

GC: SO UNL1K3 YOUR OWN FL4WL3SS D1SCR3T1ON 4ND P3RP3TU4L SMOOTHN3SS

CG: HEY FUCK YOU.
CG: I’M NOT NEARLY AS BAD AS THIS INSUFFERABLE DOUCHEBAG.
CG: TRUST ME IF YOU MET HIM YOU WOULD AGREE.
CG: HE’S JUST SO MONUMENTALLY ANNOYING YET PATHETICALLY HARMLESS THAT I AM CLOSE TO VOMITING WITH LUKEWARM RAGE JUST THINKING ABOUT HIM.
CG: AND HE SEEMS TO GENUINELY THINK HE IS COOL WHEN HE IS JUST NOT.
CG: AND I KIND OF WISH I COULD HATE HIM BECAUSE MAYBE THAT WOULD MAKE THE WHOLE SITUATION A BIT EASIER TO SWALLOW, EVEN THOUGH HUMANS APPARENTLY DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND CALIGINOUS ROMANCE? WHATEVER, EVEN IF THEY ARE UNDERDEVELOPED ROMANTICALLY AND IT WAS COMPLETELY UNREQUITED, IT WOULD STILL BE MORE APPROPRIATE TO FEEL THAT WAY ABOUT SOMEONE YOU ARE FORCED TOGETHER WITH, RIGHT?
CG: BUT UNFORTUNATELY THE WAY HE KEEPS TRIPPING OVER HIS OWN WORDS WHEN HE TRIES TO BE LESS HILARIOUSLY AWKWARD IS ACTUALLY KIND OF ENDEARING.
CG: WAIT.
CG: NO.
CG: FUCK.
CG: DAMNIT TEREZI DEAL WITH YOUR MOIRAIL, I KNOW SHE MADE ME SAY THAT LAST BIT.

GC: OK
GC: W41T

CG: FINE.

GC: SORRY 4BOUT TH4T >:/
GC: SH3 C4N B3 SO STUBBORN WH3N SH3 TH1NKS SH3 1S H3LP1NG
GC: BUT 4T L34ST SH3 ONLY M4D3 YOU S4Y WH4T YOU W3R3 4LR34DY TH1NK1NG

CG: OKAY BUT CAN WE NOT TALK ABOUT IT?
CG: IT’S JUST REALLY AMAZINGLY UNCOMFORTABLE AND WEIRD RIGHT NOW, AND I’D LIKE TO KEEP MY FLOUNDERING GODDAMN FEELINGS TO MYSELF FOR A LITTLE WHILE.
CG: IS THAT SOMETHING THAT CAN BE RESPECTED? I DON’T FEEL LIKE THAT IS TOO FUCKING MUCH TO ASK.

GC: OK F111N3
GC: BUT
GC: 1’M GL4D YOU S33M TO TH1NK H3 1S CUT3 4T L34ST >:]
GC: 1 C4N’T W41T TO H4V3 4 CLOS3R LOOK 4T H1M
GC: OR R4TH3R... 4 CLOS3R L1CK!!! H3H3H3H3H3

CG: OKAY NO.
CG: THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE? THIS IS EXACTLY THE SHIT I’M NOT DEALING WITH RIGHT NOW. NOT TODAY.
CG: BESIDES, I APPARENTLY NEED TO STAND UP AND LET KANAYA MEASURE ME. SHE IS MAKING CLOTHES FOR THE WEDDING AND SHE IS NOT LETTING ME HAVE A SAY IN THIS AT ALL, BECAUSE EVERYONE I KNOW IS THEIR VERY OWN, UNIQUE BREED OF A RAGING SHITSTAIN.
CG: I’M GUESS I’M GOING TO LOG OFF AND LET THIS INSANE RAINBOW DRINKER MEASURE ME UP FOR MY CORPSE BOX, OOPS, I MEAN RITUALISTIC HUMAN MATING CLOTHES.

GC: YOU GO DO TH4T
GC: 1 B3T YOU W1LL B3 4DOR4BL3
GC: SM3LL YOU SOON! >;]

CG: YEAH SURE.
CG: BYE.

 

---

 

“I think it was a kiiiiiiiind of unfair of you to let him blame it on me, you know.” Vriska stops fiddling with her own husktop for a moment, tilting her head back in Terezi’s lap to allow her to look up at her. “I wasn’t even close to his pliable little mind when he showed his hand like that.”

“I know. But he’s so sensitive about everything right now, he wouldn’t have listened to me if I said that.” She leans back a bit, deeply inhaling the way the early dusk colors the wispy clouds in creamy raspberry and flecks of blackcurrant. “I didn’t want to get in an argument with him about it, so I let him have his flimsy little excuse. All three of us knew he was lying, after all.”

Vriska snorts, shaking her head. “I don’t know what Feferi is playing at. I mean strategically, I suppose only one of them is a great loss, but still! Forfeiting your own allies just like that is just so weak. I thought better of her than to let something like this happen - and that's some weakass praise to begin with.”

Terezi sighs, flicking a finger at her moirail’s forehead. “Sometimes you’ve got to lose some things to win. After all we’ve been through, I would’ve thought you’d be intimately familiar with that concept by now. You can’t just decide that you’re ‘a winner’ and breeze right through everything without ever having to give something up. There’s got to be a price to balance the scales.”

Vriska frowns, not quite managing to toss her head in the position she’s in, so it turns more into something like an irritable shrug. “I know that. But this isn’t even a win, it’s a stalemate - emphasis on stale. We sacrificed a good, really damn hard to kill fighter and I guess also some guy we know, and for what?” Her fingers drum irritably on the side of the keyboard. “Just so some wimpy race of aliens will believe that we won’t attack them? Fuck, on this useless little boring rock, who even cares? We win nothing by attacking them anyway, so unless you’re a frond hinge twitch dumbass like Eridan, why would you want to?”

Terezi wrinkles her nose a bit. “Unfortunately, and kind of amazingly, Eridan is the least of our problems - plenty of the highbloods and sea dwellers in charge are exactly those kind of dumbasses. Our entire species is rather infamous for that. It’s not hard to see why the humans don’t trust us.”

“Right. So they messed up and scared the stupid humans, and the only thing we can do about it is to cart off our friends as hostages? Screw that.” There’s a sharp crack of something breaking as Vriska brings her fist down, and Terezi doesn’t bother trying to sniff out what it was. More often than not, Vriska breaks her own things when she needs to - and there’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but this particular aspect of it isn’t one which Terezi wants to dwell on too long.

So instead she considers how this anger is only a symptom of the one way that Vriska really knows how to care about people. She turns them into things that are hers in her mind, and then vehemently hoards them the same way she does her treasure. The world must be so easy, seen like that. When it's her moirail, her fussyfangs, her shouty mutant blood, everyone opposing them is obviously trying to steal something from her, and Vriska is usually a much better thief than anyone she encounters. So it's absolutely natural that someone else giving away ‘her’ stuff to placate a group of aliens will rub her the wrong way - and quite frankly, Terezi doesn’t blame her. She doesn’t like this much more than Vriska does, to tell the truth. The way this demand was made by the humans, with no regard for troll culture or their own supposed sacrifices. The way the highbloods had agreed to it, probably because they don’t actually care if Karkat or Kanaya should end up as collateral, and also clearly overruling Feferi’s wishes while so doing. She doesn’t like it at all.

The problem is that it really isn’t Feferi’s fault either. Her position is still a desperately precarious one, regardless of her growing authority. The preference of their shared lusus for the heiress over Her Condescension had ended up shifting the power balance between them, as had the growing affection toward Feferi from the lower blood castes, who see her as their hope for liberation. It had forced the older fuchsia blood to reluctantly treat her heiress as an ally or risk immediate revolution. But to make any decision and actually do any ruling, Feferi still has to work with the blue bloods and up, who remain loyal to the Empress who maintains them as the ruling classes. She can’t simply order them about and ignore their wishes, not without causing the kind of political upheaval that she simply isn’t ready for.

Terezi suspects that Vriska already knows this; it’s just that simply accepting temporary defeat and then waiting around to see what happens next goes against her very nature. The way she keeps downplaying Karkat's role in the situation, in particular, is tipping her hand just a bit too much, giving away how worried she really is. Playing a long game has never really been her kind of con, which is why she’s just not a particularly political creature. She’s too impatient about results, too arrogant about her own importance in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, Terezi wouldn’t have her any other way. If it wasn’t for her confidence and rashness to balance her out, she suspects that she’d one day end up with the mind of a bureaucrat, and then she might as well beat herself do death with her own cane. Life wouldn’t be worth living like that.

“An impasse means we haven’t necessarily lost either. We’re still playing.” She grins up at the darkening sky, as if ready to sink all her sharp teeth into its blackberry scented vastness. “It’s just that we’re going to have to hand the ball over to Karkat and Kanaya for a while... and perhaps the humans they marry too. We let other people make their moves first - and if possible, anticipate them. As long as we don’t admit defeat, as long as we don’t fold, we’ll always be able to turn the tables.”

Vriska makes an amused little sound, reaching up and touching her cheek. “Your metaphors are all tangled up, Redglare. What kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

Terezi laughs then, meeting Vriska’s penetrating stare with her blank, blind one. “What games do you think, Mindfang? Wanna guess?”

“Aaaaaaaall of them?”

“All of them!”

 

---

 

 

“Y’know... I was thinking! About the whole moirail thing you guys have.”

Feferi looks up from the jigsaw puzzle she has been gleefully laying for the last twenty minutes, slowly starting to sort out the 5000 pieces of assorted marine flora and fauna. She’d said that she’d never laid a puzzle before, and with her apparently spending a lot of time underwater, Roxy supposes she can see why. All the pieces would just float away, right?

“Water-boat it?”

“Well, sometimes that’s kind of what I feel like I’m doing - only for everyone.” She crosses her legs and leans her elbows on her knees. “I’m more or less always calming tits down left and right... which I guess to you sounds suuuuuper slutty, doesn’t it?”

“For a troll it kind of would be - or at the very least their conciliatory solicitations would be seen as shallow and insincere.” Feferi shrugs, and her jewelry jingles faintly. “But for a human it’s different, right? It’s not a roemantic thing for you, so it doesn’t come off as hitting on a lot of people in the same way.”

“Nooooooope. Which is just as well, because some of the calamity mammaries I frequently have to undo belong to my siblings. And, well, for humans that’s kind of a big gross no-no when it comes to romance.”

Feferi tilts her head, the mass of braids Roxy had managed to accomplish rustling like a whole nest full of glossy, beautiful snakes. “You know, I suppose for a troll I’m pretty unique in that my direct ancestor is still alive, so maybe I ought to understand a bit better what it’s like to have family. Especially since I don’t feel as strong of an urge to immediately kill her as most of my caste do for each other.” She lets out a deep sigh. “But firstly it’s not exactly an affectionate or nurturing relationship, the way human families mostly are, right?”

“Mostly,” Roxy agrees, trying not to think too hard of the one notable exception in her life. She doesn’t want to sour the whole evening for herself. “Some humans are exceptions to this, though."

Feferi looks momentarily distracted. "Why?"

Roxy just shakes her head quickly, dismissing the question. "No reason. Just cuz they’re the worst.”

“Right." Feferi still looks curious, but seems to understand that now is not the time. "But between me and my ancestor there’s rivalry - I mean, she still wants me dead.” Her cheeks color slightly. “And sometimes, I just feel like I really hate her. Which, ummm...”

“Is super not platonic and non-family-like for you guys,” Roxy supplies, managing to control her instinctive disgusted grimace. “Yikes! And that’s like... super extra yikes with a side order of hoshit.”

“Gluuuuuub, I know. It’s probably weird, even for us. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that if I ever showed those kind of feelings in frond of her, she would just mock me. She’d think my hatred really juvenile and pathetic, so it’s not like I’ll ever let her know. It’s just a very seely side effect of her being my adversary since bassically forever.”

“Woooow. No offense, but... trolls are totes weird.”

Feferi sticks out her tongue at her, slate grey and strangely smooth, but lets out a small titter only a second later. “Says the human. Anyway, you were saying stuff about being the human equiwhalent of a pale village two wheel device, right?”

“El-oh-el... I guess! What I meant to say was, it’s almost a full time job for me cuz there’s always someone who needs me to stop them from having a rack attack. But of course I do it anyway, cuz I love them all a lot. And luckily, what with the way humans do this shit, I don’t have to do it alone!”

“Ohhhh. I guess that makes sense? Though it does sound rather scandalous to me!”

“Okay, but for us it’s just logical. Like sometimes someone is just mad flipping their shit, and maybe then it needs two of us, you know? Like... one to hold ‘em and one to sock ‘em!” She laughs as if what she just said was a joke, even as she glances down at her own fist and remembers the dull shock of pain running through it.

“SCAN-DA-SEA-LOUSE.”

“Shushshshshshshhhh you.”

“Doing it for everyone sounds really exhausting, though.”

“Sometimes it reeeeally is. Supes exhausting. But like I said, at least I have backup.” Roxy frowns a bit, attaching two puzzle pieces that seem to fit. “I’ll be real with you, it sounds just as exhausting to only have one person whose ass you’re, like, personally and exclusively responsible for calming the eff down? And you can’t even hand them over to someone else if you need a break, because that would be like cheating? I don’t know how you do that - I think I'd lose my shit.”

Feferi’s mouth twists slightly, and she looks away. “I guess you’re right. I’ve only ever had one relationship like that... and it did not go swell. Everyone acted like we were sooo made for each other, but it wasn’t true! It was always me dealing with his dramatics and trying to get him to be less glubbing genocidal all the time, it reely was exhausting. Oh, and then he started waxing red for me, which was disastrous.”

“Naaaah. I mean, that sounds like a huge NOPE right there.” Roxy makes a face. “He kind of sounds like a douche.”

Feferi laughs quietly. “He kind of is. But I also know that our failed relationship wasn’t squall his fault. I mean, it’s normal for one or the other to be more murderous and aggressive, but now I think back, our relationship was horribly one-sided. It was moray less just me calming him down, and then me going about my business as I pleased. I guess I wasn’t ready for anything conciliatory, but I just felt he needed it so badly, I went along with it because I cared about him? But I never needed him back, and obviously that wasn't going to work.” She shrugs. “I mean, he’s definitely a douche, and I’m so much better off without him as a moirail. But he’s still my friend, and I hope he can find someone who is more right for him, you know?”

“And maybe one day you’ll find someone who will also hakuna your tatas, and you’ll have two quadrants filled. Just like your matesprit, right?”

“Yeah! Sometimes I’m honestly a little bit envious, because there are ways that a moirail can connect to someone that the matesprit can’t.” She grins. “But then, I also don’t have to deal with it when he gets moody and sour, that’s her job.”

“Plus, you’re totes getting laid.” Roxy rolls her eyes a bit, though she doesn’t really have it in her to speak with too much rankor. “Trust me, always the moirail, never the matesprit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either! Sometimes you just want someone cute to kiss, yanno?”

“Too glubbin’ true! How-a-boat I try to help you with that, and you try to match me up with a moirail?”

“...Oh. Em. Gee. That’s the best idea EVER.”

Notes:

Okay, I’m churning these out p quick for someone typing on their phone, because hyperfocusing is one hell of a drug. Let’s see how long that lasts. Oh, and this chapter is very much a “setting the stage” kind of thing, hence no main character interaction. But the next chapter is the wedding, woop woop!

Chapter 5: Tiny rebellions

Summary:

It’s the big day, and everybody is getting ready. This naturally involves threats of violence, passive aggression of the highest level, bickering about fashion (and Troll Jegus), and some last-minute guests crashing the party.

Notes:

It took a little longer this time bc I’m working RenFaire on weekends and it takes a lot of energy. But hopefully I’ll be able to keep up a reasonably steady output still.

(Also a minor cw for someone offhandedly mentioning pedophilia / child marriage, and also incest.)

“This is preposterous.”

Dirk glances up, looking in the general direction that Dave is staring in disbelief. “Not to imply that all of it isn’t absolutely ludicrous, but which part did you have in mind?”

“Just-“ Dave waves a hand in a general exasperated gesture. “The bunting, the flags, the fancy dress, the goddamn fiddlers?”

That gets him a shrug from his brother, as they both watch a group of people manhandling some sort of arch woven from greenery past them. “People will welcome more or less any occasion that means they can dress up, make a big deal out of traditions, and not least get atrociously goddamn sloppy drunk. The actual cause of the celebrations don’t matter, strictly speaking.”

“I just don’t see why it’s got to be a big deal in the first place.” Someone seems to be handing out little bubble blowing kits to all the children. Dave nicks one when she walks by, unscrewing the little bottle to have something to do with his nervously fidgeting hands. “I mean shit, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a wedding is kind of a bit of a travesty when all the parties involved are having their arms gratuitously and really publicly twisted. Unless you're into that kind of thing, I guess.”

Dirk raises an eyebrow, sidestepping two people carrying a giant garland between them. “Didn’t take you for such a devoted romantic, bro.”

“Look, regardless of my personal stance in the matter - the details of which I'm fairly certain that you both treasure and venerate your ignorance of - it’s kind of an objective fact that romance as a general rule enters into a wedding somehow. Or at least something slightly more poignant than, ‘he doesn’t seem to actively hate the sight of me anymore’ or ‘fuck it, I guess he could be a lot worse’. I don’t think I’m saying anything too crazy or out there, but if I’m wrong then feel free to bring my unreasonable Bridezilla ass right back to harsh reality. I'm just saying, am I talking any kind of sense, or am I throwing a fit because the napkins don’t match the bridesmaids’ dresses? Which one is it?”

“I hear what you’re saying, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’re treading the path of locking yourself in the bathroom until the florist is executed by firing squad, but... well, history isn’t exactly on your side here, my dude.” They both watch the tiny bubbles Dave is blowing spiral into the crowd of bustling people. Dave knows what's coming, and wishes Dirk could be less of a pedantic asshole about this and just agree with him, but nonetheless doesn't interrupt him. “I mean, shit, the fucking royalty of the ages have gotten married on way flimsier grounds than that. And the people who waved flags and shouted hoorah as they went past - do you think they actually gave even one shit if the people in the fancy carriage liked each other, or were actually siblings, or if the bride was all of twelve years old? Fuck no. All they knew was that maybe they got a half or maybe whole day off working their fingers to the bone.”

Dave sighs, feeling uncomfortably singled out where he stands, as everyone around them keep sneaking glances of him. He’s gotten a fair amount of smiles and genuine congratulations, some pitying looks and lowered voices, and a few people have nudged each other and laughed. It really is as though he’s suddenly become separate from them somehow, as if he’s not just some random bozo in the crowd - albeit a famous bozo - but someone who is meant for a greater destiny or some useless nonsense like that.

“Fine. Yeah. I guess so. Fuck it, maybe I was just holding out hope that humanity has evolved past all that. Or at least that our society had.”

“Not to be an insufferable edgelord and cynical just for the sake of it, but... nah. We’re all still a bunch of superstitious apes pretending like we no longer solve our problems by means of vigorous shit flinging contests.”

“I’m not arguing with you, but that is an absolutely fascinating portrait of humanity. Please tell me more.”

It really is impressive, in a fucked up kind of way, how quickly they both reach for guns that aren’t there, and how synced up they are as they spin and jump back from the voice right by their ears. Like a goddamn circus act, albeit one put together by an antisocial ventriloquist ninja.

The troll girl perched on the low wall behind them cackles, swinging her legs where she sits. There’s something impish about her in general, from the narrow face which appears pinched between the bright red glasses and the crescent moon grin full of sharp teeth, to the gangly body and the long-fingered hands resting on the head of a cane, which she has propped against the ground. Even with her eyes obscured Dave gets a sense of being sized up.

“You react a lot faster than most humans,” she observes, sounding delighted by the revelation. “And you were ready to instantly fight me, too. Not very diplomatic at all... but admittedly pretty cool.”

Dirk has relaxed his posture slightly by now, and Dave only realizes that he has not when his brother lightly touches his elbow. It’s a fleeting thing, could easily have been a mistake if it was anyone else, and there is no expression on Dirk’s face - but Dave can still pick up on his concern. Drawing in a carefully measured breath, he allows the tension to slowly seep out of his muscles. Damn, it’s really pretty bad when he’s even more highly strung than his big brother, isn’t it?

“Yeah well, it’s our family tradition to value coolness over pretty much everything else.” Dave manages a reasonably unaffected little shrug. “It’s sort of a cultural thing, so I wouldn’t expect a troll to understand it or anything.”

“No, that sounds highly exotic and I have to say a little bit intriguing.” It’s hard to tell if she’s being teasing because she wants to keep the conversation going, like some sort of vaguely flirty schtick, or if she’s genuinely mocking them. Dave can’t exactly complain about her face being hard to read with the glasses in the way, but he wishes he could at least get a better read on the tone of her voice, and on her body language. He can’t help but wonder how well the translation devices pick up nuances as well.

“I don’t know what to tell you, since I’m pretty fucking certain that I can't properly express the essence of such coolness in mere words.” Before corking up the bottle and putting it away, Dave blows a couple of bubbles in her direction. She doesn’t react to them at all until they’re right by her face, when she very suddenly turns slightly to trace their direction, like an animal sniffing the wind. “At least not without getting a bit choked up - and lets be real, with the occasion and everything there will probably be enough emotions flowing free and sentimental chumps left and right being moved to tears, so there's no need for me to add to it.”

“You seriously shouldn’t press a man on his deeply held spiritual beliefs on a day like this.” Dirk of course maintains his stoic level tone, but apparently he’s decided to play along. “It could get embarrassing.”

“Is that so?” The troll girl laughs again, leaning her chin on the handle of her cane. “I’ll be sure to make a note of humans being excessively emotional - perhaps that’s just a trait that comes with having decadent, delicious candy red blood, regardless of species.”

“That was a pretty impressively weird and kind of creepy comment, presumably made with the intent to throw us off.” Dirk inclines his head slightly. “Consider this my acknowledgment of your skill.”

“It’s not my fault if humans have this weird taboo about talking about their blood, but I’ll take it. After all, how could I resist acknowledgement from such a cool dude?”

“The answer is of course that you couldn’t,” Dave supplies helpfully. “We’re all still being tactful and diplomatic as shit up in here, after all.”

This however appears to be the threshold for how much bullshit Dirk is willing to put up with. Too bad, because Dave was kind of starting to have fun. “So, was there anything you wanted besides checking our reflexes and getting schooled on cool? We’re busy people.”

“Well, I was going to ask which one of you is which. Barring some rather tasty differences in coloration, most humans smell the same to me - and the two of you clearly have more than a passing genetic resemblance, making you pretty hard to tell apart.” She scoots off the wall, her body unfolding like a steel trap in reverse. She's sturdier than Dave had anticipated from her previously crouched position, angular yet powerful, and with the sense of resting tension in every line of her body. “But from hearing you talk and comparing what you say to my sources, I’d say that you-“ The cane suddenly swings up and smacks Dave hard in the shin. “-are the one called Dave, right?”

Dave grimaces, resisting the urge to lean down and rub his smarting leg. “Damn, you have sources reporting on us? Allow me to belatedly shit my pants.”

“Karkat, mostly - but he’s being a pissy little grub about providing details, so I pestered Feferi and Kanaya about it it too.” She shrugs. “They haven’t talked to you as much, but all taken together I had enough information to make an educated guess.”

Well, that should’ve been obvious. Dave isn’t sure how to feel about it, trolls gossiping about him without his knowledge. It’s not exactly strange since he is marrying one of them, but he finds himself feeling a bit sorry for Karkat. It must be awkward to be pressed for information like that, and this girl doesn’t seem like someone who backs off easily.

“Friend of his?” Dirk asks, and Dave is pretty certain that he’s glancing sideways at him.

“You could say that. I try to look out for him, since he’s kind of helpless on his own.”

Well, no point pretending like he isn’t the one she’s looking for, especially with only two options at hand. “So you’ve come to menace me because I’m about to get married to him, is that it? Tell me what will happen if I ever hurt him, that kind of thing? For future reference, the human custom is to bring a shotgun on such occasions.”

"That's the bare minimum," Dirk agrees, poker faced. "Most humans would find anything less to be downright insulting."

“I'll try to remember that the next time I attend a human wedding," she replies casually. "I was going to say that it's mostly just to get a good whiff of you before the whole wedding thing, but...” Her grin grows wider. “Yes, I suppose knowing your scent will also come in handy if I ever have to hunt you down. I’ll just follow that creamy white vanilla with a hint of bright cherry swirl underneath.”

“The whole smelling thing... is that because you’re blind?” Dirk asks bluntly. So he’d noticed too - not that it’s very surprising that he did. "Or are you just being cute?"

“Both, obviously," the alien counters quickly, her words accompanied by a low trilling sound. "I have to say that’s not a very sensitive way to ask about my disability."

Dirk shrugs. “Didn’t really think you’d mind.”

That gets a nod of approval. “I really don’t. It just means that my senses are a lot less boring than yours. So don’t take my threat lightly, Dave.”

“Who’s taking anything lightly?” Dave actually has to hold back a smile. To tell the truth, she’s kind of entertaining to talk to. “I’m pretty sure you’ve just referred to my blood in terms of it’s tastiness twice, and I’m damn sure you didn’t hit my shin on accident a moment ago. Consider me briefed on the subject of you being batshit insane and ready to murder me if I hurt your friend, okay?”

“Good! I’m glad we can all agree on this.”

“Terezi? I, uh, was sent to come get you... by which I mean, I suppose, that Vriska said I had to and, um, I didn’t want to argue with her about it.” The troll approaching is having some trouble navigating his wheelchair through the throngs of people. They’re politely stepping aside from him but stay close enough to stare at him, which makes the path narrow and cumbersome, not to mention probably hella awkward.

“Blargh, what does she want now? I can’t imagine it’s starting yet, considering one of the main players is standing right here. That is... unless Dave here is stalling. Are you stalling, Dave?”

“Uh... no. Nope. Just standing around in an unhurried fashion, due to being pretty fucking surplus to requirements still.”

“It’s still almost three hours until it starts,” Dirk clarifies.

The newly arrived troll now has a small human child climbing on the side of his chair, trying to reach one of his frankly enormous horns. He hesitates a bit, then tilts his neck and gently bops the kid on the head with one horn, causing her to giggle. “No, I mean, I already know that. It is just that they, um, wanted to brief us on the ritual or something, maybe? That is what it sounded like to me, uh, before Vriska got impatient and sent me off to look for you. Which is, I guess, why I’m here? To bring you back for the briefing, that is.”

“Ugh fiiine. I was basically done talking to Dave and his genetic ‘sibling’ here... for now.”

“Oh, um. Hello Dave.” He waves a little awkwardly, putting up with the child now basically hanging from his horn. “Hello Sibling.”

“Yeah, that’s my goddamn name alright,” Dirk agrees solemnly. “Well done.”

A distressed father suddenly appears from the throng of onlookers, grabbing his child and backing away quickly, as if worried the guy managing an actual wheelchair on a cobblestone street is about to lunge after him. The troll looks concerned, as if not quite sure what just happened, but it bothers him all the same. “Uh, sorry!” he calls after the man and child.

“They can’t understand you, Tavros. Only humans wearing a translation tick like these guys can. To the rest of them, it probably just sounds like barbaric alien chatter.” Terezi sighs, stepping between Dave and Dirk to reach her friend. This time they’re both prepared for it, and manage to block the vicious swipes of her cane with their feet, something that gets another cackle out of her. “We should probably go before we make a scene. Apparently humans are notoriously emotional - I’ve got that from a reliable source.”

“I, well, I think that maybe that is some sort of pointed remark or in-joke I’m not entirely getting, but also I have no real reason to actually refute it, so I think I will not comment on this.” With considerable difficulty in the still dense crowd, Tavros manages to somehow execute a three point turn. “It was nice to meet you, Dave and Sibling.”

“Nice to meet you, humans.” Terezi waves at her over her shoulder. “Good luck during the wedding, Dave. And please remember what I said about hunting you down, okay?”

They stand in silence for a moment, watching the trolls leave, before Dirk seems to snap out of it. “You should probably go and start getting ready too, anyway. Clean yourself up before you get dressed in your best fancy asshole attire, all that shit.”

“If you say so, Sibling.”

“Fuck off.”

 

---

 

“Hoooly shit, look at you! You're so pretty!”

When Rose turns around, Roxy actually has tears in her eyes, and she immediately bustles over to help adjust her veil, dabbing at her face with her own sleeve.

“You still remember the part where this is a rather cynical procedure in which it's in fact much more accurate to describe us as hostages, than as brides or grooms, right?”

“Of course I do, sis! I mean, duh.” Roxy gently adjusts the silk flowers crowning Rose into a more symmetrical position. “But you’re also my sister and it’s your wedding and you’re looking just soooo fucking beautiful, you know? And I kind of hope that even if the whole thing is stupid, you and Kanaya can still be happy together! I mean, you’re getting along well, right? So even if there’s a lot of bullshit, I can’t help feeling kind of emotional, seeing you like this.” She pauses for a moment, as if a thought just struck her. “Mind you, didn’t you once tell me that if you got married, you were gonna wear a suit? What happened with that?”

Rose shrugs, watching herself in the mirror. She’s rather pleased with how dramatically the purple chiffon falls in billowing waves from the fitted bodice, achieving an impression which lands somewhere between a roaring waterfall and grasping tentacles. The shapes of the lace appliqué on the sleeves look vaguely ominous too, even though a closer look reveals them to be nothing more than innocent flowers. For a fairly rushed job, all things considered, she’s impressed by the end result. “Well, the idea was always to oppose tradition one way or other. A suit is an obvious choice, in that it challenges the obligation of femininity - but that is not quite as effective here, wouldn't you say? In fact, in this situation, I feel like I would very much like to underline my femininity instead.”

“Ooooh, I get it! To fuck with those stiffs who seriously think that two women marrying each other is some kind of thing nowadays, right?”

“Precisely.” She tilts her head, noting the way the lilac veil shimmers subtly in red. “And besides, this way it stands out a lot more that I am not wearing white. Even if that is a particularly misinterpreted and misunderstood tradition, with a basis in upper class snobbery rather than true symbolism... erroneously or not, I do not want a single person to think that I’m in any way offering up some sort of symbolic innocence as a sacrifice on the altar of public good. You could say I don’t particularly appreciate being made into a martyr, or the pretense that I’m some sort of clean slate for anyone to make their mark on, regardless of my actual level of sexual experience. That really is a mostly irrelevant footnote in all of this; it has no bearing on the signals a pandering symbol of supposed virtue might send. I refuse to play along with any antiquated pretense that the inherent value I have in this exchange has anything to do with my purity, in conclusion.”

Roxy laughs softly, shaking her head. “Wooow. I think you might be, like, way overthinking this as usual, but I admit it’s an elegant way to tell all the humans responsible for this to eff off. The trolls prolly won’t understand it, though.”

“It’s true... and alas, my knowledge of their culture isn’t nearly encyclopedic enough for me to truly reach the appropriately subtle level of passive aggression I wish to achieve.” She sighs loudly and dramatically for effect, exchanging small smiles with Roxy. “So I’ll settle for being dressed in the blood color of their most noble class, save for Her Imperious Condescension and her heiress. Hopefully that will stick in their craw somewhat - or possibly their gills.”

“If anyone could manage to be PA to a buncha aliens with a completely different culture, it’s probably you.” Roxy smiles, holding out a stick of lipstick. Rose twists the base, finding that it’s such a deep purple that it’s almost black. Perfect. But she expected nothing less from her sister. “I believe in you.”

“Thank you for your unwavering faith in my pettiness.” She can’t quite enunciate the words right while painting her lips, but judging by Roxy’s giggles she still made herself understood.

“Well you see, I’ve found that when it comes to pointed pettiness and subtle revenge schemes, you’re simply the best there is.”

“True.” Rose caps the lipstick, carefully wiping away a small smudge with a finger. “So in the future I should stick with my tried and tested trademark, and keep my revenge schemes on a small scale, is that what you’re saying?”

There’s an unhappy flicker in Roxy’s bright expression, and Rose immediately regrets her words. In an instant, they have opened a gulf between them, wide enough to accommodate the better part of a solar system. Certainly wide enough that Roxy will never get to her in time, just like back then. Closing her eyes, she can still see the flickering lights on the display in front of her, the patch of jeweled space wheeling by in the bridge windows. She can smell the acrid smoke spreading through the climate control system, as somewhere at the heart of the ship its motor fused into a white-hot lump, and all its computer banks and control systems succumbed to the rising heat. The steel bulkhead doors sealing off the bridge would last for only so long - but it was long enough for her purposes. The estimated time until complete structural collapse of the ship was about twenty minutes, but E-minus impact was twelve. She remembers thinking that she would accomplish what she came to do, and finding some peace in that thought. Of course, that was before the ship’s radio suddenly burst into life, and Jake was screaming that he was coming to get her out of there. That he was going to save her.

She sighs, shaking her head slightly. “I’m sorry, that was tasteless of me.”

Roxy doesn’t reply at first, just steps up and gently cradles Rose’s face in her hands. She meets her gaze solemnly, a faint glitter of tears still clinging to her long eyelashes. Then she pushes herself up on tiptoes, leans in and presses a gentle kiss to her sister’s forehead. Rose, half expecting some form of well-deserved admonishment, and certainly not braced for something so gentle, feels her own heart contract painfully. She’d almost made such a terrible mistake.

“I wouldn’t let you do this if I didn’t think you could still be happy somehow. I want you to know that.” She tucks a small wisp of Rose’s hair into place. “I won’t let you do anything like that ever again. Especially not for my sake. Got it?”

It’s hard to remember sometimes, because both she and Dirk try so hard to be on top of everything, to cover every angle, but Roxy really is the most astute thinker among the four of them in a lot of ways. She doesn’t need to fight for it; she takes in the world around her and rolls with the punches it deals out. But that doesn’t mean she can’t take charge. “Got it.”

“Good. Now go out there and marry the fuck out of that alien.”

 

---

 

Karkat pulls awkwardly at the collar of the clothes that Kanaya had more or less forced him into. They fit well, he’ll give her that, but they’re a lot more stuffy and ostentatious than anything he’s ever put on his body before. He still hasn’t heard a single reasonable argument for why this wedding nonsense can’t be achieved while wearing sensible clothes, but honestly he’s tired of fighting about it. He’ll just get this over with and get out of this stupid costume then.

“You look ridiculous,” Sollux supplies helpfully from where he’s sitting, far more reasonably dressed up in the traditional black and yellow garb of his blood caste. There’s also some gold jewelry in his ears to not-entirely-subtly signal his status as the heiress’ matesprit, a detail which Karkat is certain that Feferi insisted on specifically to piss of the highbloods. He can kind of respect that.

“Firstly, fuck all the way off. Secondly, you’re just lucky that Kanaya didn’t have time to make clothes for all of us.” Karkat grimaces at his own reflection, shifting his shoulders a bit. “Then she’d have you dressing ‘appropriately’ too, you know she would.”

“Oh chug some piss, you whiny little wiggler, this is perfectly appropriate for an official occasion. The earth human etiquette or whatever states that uniforms and so on are fine.” He offers a lopsided shrug to accompany the smug little snapping sound at the end of that sentence. “It’s just that you don’t really have a traditional uniform, right?” He snickers, sending Karkat a sly sideways look. “Unless you count righteous leggings, of course.”

“Shhhhhhhhut up. Holy shit, can you not?” Karkat shudders. “Every time anyone talks about all that, I start feeling like there’s a drone standing right behind me, culling fork at the ready, okay? It’s bad for my fucking health, so cut it out already and stop being such a dripping sack of liquid feces.”

“Yep, that sure sounds like a dignified and reasonable response to finding proof that your ancestor was a legend,” Sollux snorts. “I think you should try being a little more pathetic about it, I’m sure you could manage if you really put in the effort.”

Karkat looks down at the hairbrush he’d just picked up, seriously considering flinging it in Sollux’ self-satisfied asshole face. Then he feels a gentle nudge against his leg, and looks down to see where Gamzee is sprawled on the floor, grinning up at him. He’d kept banging his horns on the ceiling even while walking hunched over, and human furniture creaked ominously under him, so the floor was really the best place for him.

“Hey, why you gotta be all up and fighting each other on a motherfucking fine day like this?” He nudges Karkat’s leg again, and Karkat finds himself lowering the hairbrush. He resolutely ignores how Sollux, on the periphery of his vision, pointedly makes a diamond shape with his fingers. The gesture smarts for a number of different reasons.

“Yeah, you’re right. You’re- I should calm down.” He sighs, putting down the brush with a thud. “I’m just uncomfortable and warm in these stupid clothes.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that my man, but I gotta tell you, you’re all looking really motherfucking fancy like that.” Gamzee is pretty pointedly not in anything traditional for his caste, and Karkat feels like him not looking appropriate is a cheap price to pay for that. “What’s that crinkly noise at your neck called?”

“This? It’s a cravat. It was the least obnoxious thing I could have around my neck, so.” He fusses with it slightly, glaring at the bright red jewel in the middle of it. “I’m really not fucking sure about this pin, though.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, KK.” Sollux rolls his eyes at him, a gesture only noticeable because it makes faint light flicker across his eyebrows for a moment. “Your eyes will probably be completely red in just a few months anyway. What’s the point in pretending? Look, she even embroidered your sign on your cuffs in your stupid flipping grey, so you might as well show some goddamn spinal column chitin and wear the pin.”

Karkat pulls a face at him, but doesn’t really object. He supposes that in a way it can be an act of rebellion in itself, to for once not hide his mutant blood color on this day, right when they’re making a show of exactly how expendable they think he is. And maybe giving away that some of them also know the stories and still fear him? He’s not sure that is true, but it’s a nice thought - nice and terrifying at once. “Fine. The fucking cravat would probably look even dumber if I took it out anyway.” There’d an awkward pause, then Karkat lets out an irate sigh. “Well? Are we leaving or what?”

Sollux nods and gets to his feet, crossing the room in long, quick strides and flinging the door open ahead of him without even touching it. Gamzee unfolds slowly from the floor, careful not to knock anything over with his ludicrously  overdimensioned goddamn limbs. As he follows Karkat toward the door, for a moment he rests his hand gently on the small of his back, and once again he feels the pressure of unspoken words tie up his throat neatly. He made his cocoon, he knows, and now he has no choice but to engulf himself in its mucus. He just wishes there was something he could say that would make things less awkward and wistful for both of them.

He clears his throat, determined to at least say something when-

BOOM.

At first he thinks it’s a thunderclap, but the sky outside the window is a clear pale blue that stretches all the way to the hazy coppery glow of the desert horizon. Then the hulking shape of a space craft slowly comes into view, blotting out the glare of the sun above. Otherwise it would probably blend in pretty well with the sky, being picked out in light azure and blinding white, with a vaguely flowerlike emblem stamped on the hull. The sound they heard must’ve been the ship descending fast through the atmosphere, displacing the air in its passage. Now that Karkat is looking, he can see the flags and decorations outside whipping around in a sudden wind, and the tent where the wedding is to be held is shifting and billowing slightly too.

“What the fuck?”

They rush downstairs, where people have already congregated in worried groups, staring upward at the newly arrived ship. Karkat looks around in search of anyone who seems to have some kind of grip on the situation, and sees Dave stroll out until he’s right below the now static space ship. He tilts his head back, hands nonchalantly in the pockets of his suit pants, and appears to be waiting for something, looking as cool and relaxed as you please. What an annoying fuck.

“So,” Karkat grabs his elbow and tugs at it to get his attention, “is this supposed to be happening? What the shit is this ship doing here?”

“Oh, this?” Dave shrugs slightly, and the studied laid back attitude is seriously starting to get on Karkat’s nerves. “Just wedding guests arriving late. Don’t worry, the ship will clear out soon.” A glowing replica of the ship’s emblem appears on the ground in front of them, and Dave takes a step back, pulling Karkat with him. “Teleport gate. Touching the edges while it’s active isn’t wise.”

“Yeah, alright, I know how a fucking transportalizer works, you condescending nookpan.” Karkat rolls his eyes, watching as the glowing symbol contracts and grows, contracts and grows, contracts and... and then, with a sound like drone wings encountering a steel propeller, something comes through. Two figures are outlined in the bright flash left by the disappearing circle. A moment later there is an even louder boom as the ship exits the atmosphere again, causing the air to rush back into the space it left. It’s loud enough that Karkat claps his hands over his ears, and he has to blink away tears as the wind whips up a cloud of dust around where they stand. So at first all sound is muted, the figures in front of him indistinct before they resolve themselves into more recognizable shapes.

The first is definitely human, wearing a bright blue uniform with a couple of medals attached to it, looking windswept and stupidly cheerful all at the same time. His hair is actually a normal black, his skin brown instead of pale pink, and his eyes as bright blue as any highblood's. The other is... mostly human, he thinks? At first he thinks she’s got horns, but on second glance they look more like upright ears, and appear to be made out of metal. Even in the bright sunlight, he can also tell that her green eyes are in fact glowing like beacons, and there are similar glows visible all over her body, although muted through the black textile of her uniform. Some extensive cybernetic enhancements, clearly.

He removes his hands from his ears just in time to catch: “-aw man, no, I’ve written such a great speech for later! Trust me, it’s going to rock.”

“Yeah, that’s why I invited you to my wedding. So you can embarrass the shit out of me in front of everyone. I’m so glad you figured out my humiliation kink just in time for a public occasion that will involve members of my family. Sweet.”

The girl laughs. “All that weird stuff aside, I’m pretty sure that’s what friends are for. Hi Dave, it’s so nice to see you again.” She hugs him at the same time as the other newcomer slings an arm around Karkat’s stiff, unresisting shoulders.

“And you’re the alien who is going to marry my best friend, right? Feline in a vehicle - whoops, I meant Karkat, hee hee!” Karkat finds himself herded back toward the rest of the crowd, too overwhelmed at the moment to do anything else. “Sorry about arriving late, we were kind of busy until just now. I’m John, by the way.”

Notes:

I know I said this chapter was the wedding, but in fact it turns out it was the wedding preparations. Don’t blame me, it’s not like I know what I’m doing here. And the next one will DEFINITELY be the wedding.

Chapter 6: ~ATH do us part

Summary:

When life gives you lemons, and those lemons are the day of your awkward as fuck wedding to an almost stranger, you might as well roll with it - and also not settle for some half-arsed kiss.

Yep, this metaphor made perfect sense. Nailed it.

Notes:

Here comes the actual wedding chapter, woop woop! Which means the party + wedding night will follow next \o/

(Also heads up, I updated the tags again with the latest chapter, but this chapter has a more detailed description of a suicide attempt + suicidal thoughts, and also a some more reflections on mental illness.)

“A little bit on the heavy-handed side, don’t you think?” The words might hold more weight if Dave couldn’t see that Jane is only barely holding back a smile, as she embraces Jade in greeting. “Maybe we’ve all spent a bit too long with Lalondes and Striders? If we don’t watch out, we’ll never be able to make an entrance without a lot of hullabaloo.”

“They are a bit infectious, it’s true.” Jade grins, proving that she can be plenty infectious too, since Jane can’t help laughing in return. “But the person responsible for the mode of our arrival is technically kind of a Strider.”

Jane looks bewildered. “I beg your pardon, but I thought we had all of them right here?”

“Yeah, you practically can’t move for atrociously attractive and laid back guys here,” Dirk remarks dryly. “But I think she was talking about the ship’s computer. Am I right?”

“Well, you would know, seeing as how he’s sort of you,” Jade laughs lightly, though the look she sends Dirk is calculating.

“Sort of... but not really at this point.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “Really! I’m still not sure if installing that capricious computer program into the ship’s main terminal was such a wise move. No offense, Dirk, but it’s kind of a handful.”

Dirk looks uncomfortable, fixing his gaze on some point far away. “If you’re the preacher, Jane, then I’m the entirety of the dedicated choir that turns up every Sunday, knows all your best material, and is improvising musical agreement after every other word. But I had limited options at the time.”

Jane looks like she’s about to ask what exactly he means, and Dave isn’t sure he can cope with them having that discussion right now. Because if Dirk is forced to admit that the android host for his computer brain clone had been very suddenly and violently terminated back then, then that’s just more fuel for Jane’s curiosity and frustration. She might push for more answers, might not drop it this time. Today of all days, that’s just about the last thing Dave thinks he can deal with.

Which is why he feels ready to sag to his knees in relief when she’s interrupted.

“Okay, you know what? I’m just about done with this. I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but can we please go through the fucking human greeting protocol at any point which is not now? Is that too much to ask?” Right, Karkat. John had kind of dragged him along with them into the cluster of humans, and he’d been standing there looking increasingly uncomfortable ever since. Apparently they’d just reached the end of his fairly short fuse. “I mean, I realize I’m only one of the main participants in this bizarre and primitive ritual that we’re all about to partake in, not to mention what I’ve been assured is a major diplomatic contract being finalized, but sure, if you feel like your chit-chatting about unimportant bullshit is somehow more pertinent, then feel free to stand around out here idly scratching your globes or whatever the human equivalent is. But I’m going inside and getting this over with.”

Dave is aware that he doesn’t exactly have any other options, but at this point he finds himself a bit more okay with the idea of kissing him later.

“Oh, hehe, right.” John scratches his head a bit sheepishly, grinning. “I suppose we kind of have a wedding to get to, huh?”

“One point goes to the John human for having the base level perception of someone whose head isn’t completely lodged in his own spinal crevice. Well done, John human.” Karkat spins around, glaring at Dave for a moment before suddenly thrusting his hand out in his direction. “Well, are you coming? Not that I have any say in it, but apparently I can’t go through with this merry fuckcircus without you.”

It feels unimaginably strange to realize that he’s getting married to this guy pretty damn soon, and yet when he takes Karkat’s offered hand in his, that actually constitutes as the first time they have intentionally touched each other. His skin feels different, not exactly softer but perhaps... slicker somehow? There’s certainly less friction than he’d expected. It’s also tougher, yielding only slightly to the pressure of his fingers. His hand is smaller than Dave’s, yet the grasp is incredibly firm - and the internal structure seems somehow different as well, though Dave couldn’t begin to guess how. It would, however, be kind of weird to squeeze Karkat’s hand harder, just to get a feel for his bones.

Rose told him before that the higher on the hemospectrum a troll is, the colder their blood runs. Karkat feels like he’s running a fever.

The troll quickly averts his gaze and simply drags him along, and Dave is pretty much fine with letting it happen. At this point, just going with shit seems to be the only viable option. They’ve had a number of awkward meetings in between their first catastrophic interaction and this day, trying hamfistedly to get to know each other in a span that they were both aware was too short to really make any real progress. The pressure on them to try to get closer and find something to bond over had only increased their situational social incompetence - and let's be real, there wasn't that much competence to squander to begin with - and most of their exchanges had tended toward the uneasy, clumsy, and occasionally plain cryptic.

In a sense, that pressure has now let up. There is no way, now, to save their wedding from being this phenomenally weird and awkward spectacle happening between confused and flustered strangers. They can stop worrying about that now, stop trying to fix it somehow, and just make the best of it. That thought is actually pretty goddamn liberating.

So as they storm hand in hand toward the platform where the ceremony will take place, rushing heedlessly through the enormous tent that spans the rows and rows of seats, Dave is surprised to find himself smiling. Everything in his life at this point can pretty accurately be summed up as strange and pointless bullshit, and right now it feels like a welcome change. He speeds up a bit, catches up with Karkat, and then overtakes him, so that he is now the one pulling them both along. The troll stares at him like he’s trying to figure out if Dave has lost it - Dave wouldn’t rule it out - and then seems to decide that why the fuck not. He speeds up too, until the two of them are racing each other up toward the makeshift altar, still without letting go of each others’ hands.

Once they get there they’re both out of breath, have to bend over and try to remember how to breathe properly. The officiant is kind of staring at them, perplexed, but they pay her no mind, nor the guests that have started to take their places.

“This... was really... fucking... stupid,” Karkat opines the moment he’s able to talk at all.

“Tell me... about it,” Dave huffs, and then attempts to straighten up a bit, brush some dust off his suit and straighten the tie. Deciding against wearing his uniform today hadn’t been hard; there are too many things that happened while wearing it that he just can’t deal with yet. Besides, he’s got plenty of sweet suits. “We seem to have lost the brides.”

“Yeah, well...” Karkat stands up a bit straighter too, peering back from where they came in. Dave has to admit that the fancy clothes look pretty nice on him, even if he keeps fidgeting as if uncomfortable. “The way Kanaya will be dressed, she probably needs to walk a bit slower. I mean, I’ve seen her fight in a long skirt, but still...”

“Well, let’s just sit down and wait for them here. Come on. We might as well be comfortable while we wait for those flighty broads.” Remembering that his left hand is still firmly clutched in Karkat’s, he gives it a light tug toward the edge of the platform, gently guiding him along until he sits down next to him. He’s feeling kind of punch drunk, like the force of every recent violent turn of events has been physically jostling him and shaking up his head… and maybe that’s why he disentangles his hand from Karkat’s only to sling an arm around his skinny shoulders instead. Karkat tenses up for a moment, and then lets out a defeated sigh, tentatively tilting his head sideways until it leans against Dave’s chest.

“Okay,” he says, to no one in particular it seems. “Fine.”

 

---

 

After receiving more ‘assistance’ while getting changed than she actually felt she needed, Kanaya is carefully making her way down the stairs when she catches the tail end of Karkat chewing out a group of humans and then grabbing Dave by the hand, towing him away. She glances sideways at Nepeta, who valiantly pretends not to have noticed, instead pointing toward the group of humans.

“AC thinks she might have espied the prey her pack is stalking.”

It takes a moment to adjust her brain to Channel Leijon, but it helps that Rose turns around and smiles at her in that moment. “Ah. Yes. That is indeed the person we were looking for. Thank you, Nepeta.”

“That’s the human you’re going to be stuck with? She doesn’t look like much, does she? That’s pretty lame.” Vriska, of course in her full ridiculous piratesque regalia, leans on the stair rail and studiously cleans her nails. “But at least if you need to ditch her, that little body wouldn’t be hard to hide.”

It’s pretty annoying, having nursed some particularly wounded flushed feelings for someone for sweeps before finally getting over it, to then find the person acting weirdly possessive over you all of a sudden. Kanaya digs a couple of nails into the palm of her hand and tries to count quietly under her breath before replying. She would prefer not to snap over this, not when Vriska only reacts to things like that as if it’s a challenge. “I do not believe that to be the purpose of this exercise, nor would I suggest that you dismiss her capabilities quite so quickly. After spending some time with her, I have certainly noticed that her witty and demure mannerisms are just that. Mannerisms, which I suspect she may discard if need be. There certainly is more to her than what you see.”

“Really now? You know, Kanaya, I can’t tell if you just confessed that you’re waxing red for her already… or that you’re scared of her.” Vriska looks amused, but there’s an annoyed little catch to the way she flips her hair. “Either way, I’d say that’s pretty fast. I guess that means I’m at least a bit impressed with her... and a bit disappointed in you!”

Before Kanaya can decide whether or not to take off her shoe and see if she can actually knock Vriska clean off the stairs, Feferi intervenes. “Oh, will you clam it? Can we please have a moment that's not about you? Come on, Kanaya, you should go down and meet your human ‘bride’!”

“Yes! Let’s go talk to the humans!” Aradia is hovering slightly behind them, presumably to get a better view. “There are a lot of really interesting things about their culture which I would really love to ask them all about.”

Kanaya sends her a suspicious sideways look. “Do any of these questions you’re about to ask have anything to do with death, perhaps? Maybe even extensively so?”

“...Just one or two.”

Nepeta giggles. “AC’s sense of smell is not perhaps as keen as that of Purrope, but she still thinks that she might be able to smell a big, fat lie like that one.”

Aradia makes a small face. “Well, maybe more than two. Is that so bad?”

“Not as such, but I would suggest that you attempt to practice some moderation.” Kanaya sighs. “Just please try not to unnerve or scare the aliens too bad, is really what I’m asking. Since they don’t know you, they might just take your enthusiasm for such matters as something a bit more sinister, perhaps even threatening. Especially from an alien girl who forgets to touch the ground she’s walking on.”

That earns her a small eye roll, but Aradia still pats her shoulder in a friendly manner, smiling. “You shouldn’t worry too much. I’ve got this feeling that everything will be okay.” This time it’s more of a nudge than a pat. “Now go talk to your human.”

They stay put behind her, leaving her to descend the rest of the way alone. This pretty much draws everyone’s eyes to her, which is rather unsettling, and she tries to keep her eyes on Rose to keep her mind off it. Whatever confused feelings she might have for the person directly tied to her in this mess - trepidation, confusion, a little awe, frustration, upheaval, and a not inconsiderable amount of flustered admiration - she still prefers them to the sudden intense scrutiny of a lot of humans which she has little to no relation to as of yet.

“Ooooooh. She’s so pretty!” That hushed and still very audible whisper comes from a human girl that Kanaya to the best of her knowledge has never seen at all. She is human, isn’t she? Yes, those just appear to be technological enhancements, possibly to compensate for some injury just as with that one male human. Quite extensive injury, if that is the case.

Flustered, she feels her grip on her phosphorescence slip slightly, the glow of her skin slowly lighting up the hallway. A hush falls around her, and she is pretty sure she might just die of embarrassment soon. But Rose’s small smile is unaffected as she glides over to greet her. “I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you quite this luminous.” She holds up her hand as Kanaya opens her mouth, smile widening. “It wasn’t in any way meant as criticism. You do look lovely.”

Kanaya fiddles a little bit with her gloves, nervously following the contour of her own sign which she had embroidered there. “I was under the impression that the occasion traditionally calls for a white dress. I wasn’t mistaken, was I?”

“Traditionally yes, and it’s a wonderful dress too. You made this, yes?”

“...Yes.”

“Then consider me thoroughly impressed. But as for me... I was just never all that fond of complying too slavishly to tradition. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Ah? No, no, that is completely fine of course.” Kanaya laughs nervously, gesturing at herself. “But I’m glad I asked you what sort of accent colors to use, so that I may at least match you with my accessories and make-up.”

Rose looks amused at that, but not unkindly so. “Yes, I did notice. Your attention to this kind of detail astounds me yet again. I believe I have a lot to learn.”

It’s exactly that kind of statement which is still a source of frustration for her, because she still doesn’t know enough of human culture to discern if this was a jab at her fussiness or a teasing way to express genuine admiration... or possibly both? Humans are so confusing. But there are people watching, friends whom she does not wish to worry, and notably one person who cannot be allowed to see her back down. Getting flustered here just won’t do. “I believe perhaps the finer points of my instructions for you will have to wait until later. We have a rather important matter to attend to, do we not?”

There is actually a faint flush on Rose’s cheeks there for a moment, the closest she has surely ever gotten to the short end of the antagonism stick in one of these exchanges, which she follows with a half smile. “Oh, well done,” she murmurs as she takes Kanaya’s arm, starting to lead her towards the door. “I will look forward to it.”

 

---

 

It’s difficult to focus on the actual words for any length of time, mostly because Karkat still doesn’t really understand the point of this whole spectacle. Not the peace treaty part of it, of course; even if he doesn’t like it, he can sort of see what purpose they serve in this convoluted mess of a situation. Thinking of himself as a potentially very expendable hostage is depressingly easy. No, he just can’t quite wrap his mind around this whole ‘marriage’ business in itself.

It’s been explained to him in different ways over the course of the previous weeks. Feferi had said it appeared to be a way of preventing red infidelity and outlining rules for interaction between matesprits. Kanaya explained it as a way of securing a cohesive household to care for human wrigglers, since apparently they were entirely dependent on adult humans to survive, and a sensible way of combining your resources. Rose had gone on about the implications in human society of combining one’s families, both in the past and present, as well as creating an independent family unit which was separate from that of your human parents, and also the finer points of economic benefits and social significance, and on and on, until Karkat considered gnawing off his own leg and throwing it as a distraction while he made his escape. Roxy said that it was an amazing excuse to have a great, super fancy party, and also a way to make all your friends give you expensive shit.

When he finally asked Dave, he’d shrugged kind of awkwardly and said that nowadays, it was just supposed to be something people did for each other. Something that made them feel that they’d made a commitment to how they felt about each other, or that made some people feel like their love was more real than before. It was just supposed to be a gesture, really, like a grander version of writing a shitty poem or buying an expensive necklace. Sure, there was legally binding stuff involved, but it wasn’t really any different from the sort of agreement you could make with any cohabitant, regardless of if you ever got naked with them or not.

The important part could be boiled down to, ‘until further notice, I will be yours and yours alone, and that’s pretty much how I like it’.

There had been an awkward silence then, both of them staring out at the rangy flying mammals wheeling far overhead. Karkat had squinted so hard in the light earlier, Dave had lent him a spare pair of shades. “So that's obviously a lot of stuff that doesn’t apply to our situation,” Karkat has said.

“Nah,” Dave had replied. “But I thought you ought to know what it’s really supposed to be like.”

So now that he stands there, with everything too damn hot and bright around him even with the tent blocking out the sun at least a bit, he doesn’t feel like it’s too strange if the words of the ceremony are getting away from him a bit. The ones about unity, faithfulness and family just seem to be another way of laying down obscure-ass rules, and the ones about love, compromise and devotion just sound completely fake, considering the situation.

It had also been mentioned to him that you could add an optional side of religion to the whole spiel if you feel like it, but that both Rose and Dave had been pretty damn set against it. That’s a relief, at least. He’d always viewed religion as yet another snobbish highblood fancy, and he certainly has no interest of involving any human gods in his life.

Suddenly, Dave is nudging him lightly in the ribs. He glares up at him, annoyed at having his train of thought thoroughly derailed. “What?” he murmurs, and honestly doesn’t care that his voice nevertheless carries to those around them as well.

“The nice lady asked us a question,” Dave replies smoothly, nodding towards the officiant.

Oh shit. Right. “I do,” he manages to say through clenched teeth, even as he can feel an inexorable wave of heat rising on his cheeks. Dave echoes the words only a second after. They’re more in sync at the second ‘I do’, and by the time they reach the ‘we do’s, the whole thing flows smoothly. The questions still feel inaccessible and abstract, however. Loving and cherishing isn’t exactly a part of it, acting as becomes spouses seems like an inscrutably obscure and alien request, and forsaking all others sounds like a cruel fucking joke.

Fuck him, they’re going to have to have a talk about that, aren’t they? That’s going to be so damn awkward, and Karkat thinks that perhaps he prefers to consider all that awkward bullshit later. He’s got enough on his think pan as it is.

The officiant turns to Rose and Kanaya, and the whole procedure repeats with them, in a similarly self-conscious and contrived fashion. Rose is wearing a faint smile, as if she just spotted the joke, but her left hand is clenched pretty tight. Kanaya enunciates each word as carefully as always, and still seems to stumble slightly on them. Next to Karkat, Dave shifts slowly from one foot to the other, and then back.

Next is the weird symbolism with the giving of rings, right? He hasn’t even seen the damn things, is only vaguely aware that Rose had handled the specifics of that, with a bit of input from Kanaya. Considering how they’re both dressed now - all that over-the-top seadweller violet on Rose and the figure-hugging white lace on Kanaya - he can only hope that it’s not something that will make him look like a try-hard idiot.

As it turns out, though, the rings are very simple. Just a band of matte black metal, with only the most perfunctory nod to decoration. Karkat isn’t entirely surprised to find his sign carved into the one he’s supposed to hand to Dave, glossy against the somber surface, with two bright red stones set in the loops. He tenses slightly at the color, but then notices that the rings Kanaya and Rose are holding don’t have green stones in the loop of her sign. Instead it’s the same lilac as Rose’s eyes. Dave raises his eyebrows, looking down at the ring he’s holding.

“Of course she went with our dumbass genetically modified eyes. What a perfect symbol for our crazy family and the over-the-top scientific mumbo-jumbo that binds us together.”

“I figured that you’d appreciate it,” Rose says airily. “And since the troll signs are tied to their caste and origin, I thought there was a nice sort of symmetry there.”

Karkat sees Kanaya’s eyes flicker to meet his for a moment, the almost imperceptible shake of her head which signals that she hasn’t revealed what his sign is supposed to stand for in particular. The caste marker of those who have none. The sign of the Signless.

Well, good. The fewer people in the know, the better. It’s not like he knows what the fuck to do with that piece of information, other than to sharpen his paranoia to an even more penetrative degree than before. And he emphatically doesn’t need the fucking humans to know. It doesn't concern them.

The wedding officiant clears her throat and smiles a bit, asks if they’re ready to exchange the rings. Right, that’s what the whole point of this was. Karkat somehow manages heroically not to mess up the words in the whole, ‘With this ring’ litany, or add any profanities to it. It strikes him that unless all of the humans are wearing translation ticks, his part must be complete nonsense to most of them. Well, whatever. They’re just going to have to assume that he’s repeating the words and not just mumbling some particularly fetid slam poetry.

Sliding the ring onto Dave’s finger feels like a strangely intimate gesture, kind of like brushing someone’s hair or doing up their shirt for them. He wonders if it feels the same to Dave, and if that’s why he keeps his eyes cast down as he takes Karkat’s hand in his, or if he’s just focusing on not dropping the thing. He holds onto his hand even after he’s done, looking like he’s working himself up to something. Right, fuckdamnit, he knows which part comes next. After the rather short spiel about pronouncing them husbands and wives, respectively, there’s that last public humiliation to deal with. The kissing. In front of all of these unrelated assholes, and also unfortunately literally all of his friends.

Right then Karkat decides that the last thing he’s going to do is just stand there and let it happen to him. Not on top of everything else they’re putting him through. No. Fuck that in particular. He absolutely refuses to just stand there like a hapless tool while this nervous human tries to make the ignominy as brief as possible.

So as soon as they’re told that they’re allowed to kiss their spouses, Karkat’s hand shoots up, twists itself in Dave’s tie, and yanks him forcibly downward until their faces are an inch apart. He glares at him, right into those bright red eyes since his stupid goddamn shades that he can’t take off even for this have slipped down so they’re dangling under his chin now. “Come on, Dave. I’m waiting.”

Looking stunned and dazed, the human leans in towards him, and Karkat closes his half of the distance in turn. He hears Roxy sigh and then blow her nose. He hears Dave’s mother sob discreetly into a handkerchief. He hears someone laugh, and he’s willing to bet it’s the idiot John human. Then he hears nothing but his own heart, as the strangeness of the moment catches up and blindsides him completely. Dave’s lips are soft, his skin slightly cool, his teeth blunt but not unpleasant as they scrape slightly against his lower lip. He tastes slightly salty. One of his hands is tangled in Karkat’s hair now, the other resting gently against his cheek. His breath flutters unsteadily against his skin. Oh.

Then it’s over, and all the color and light and noise around them comes back all at once, as people in the audience cheer and there’s music coming from somewhere. Dave rights his shades with a faint flush on his face, which makes the strange little speckles on his nose and cheekbones stand out more. His upper lip looks slightly bruised, and Karkat realizes that his own teeth probably did that.

Behind him, Kanaya is blushing so deeply that she’s practically bright green, and Rose looks pleased with herself. Karkat really doesn’t want to know what his own face looks like.

Dave tugs at his hand, once again wearing one of his infuriatingly inscrutable expressions. “Come on, there's a party waiting for us. I don’t know about you, but I could do with a drink right about now.”

 

---

 

As they stand by the door and accept everyone’s congratulations, Rose can’t help but feel strangely detached from events. She examines the cause of the feeling clinically, knows that psychologically speaking it does make sense, but it doesn’t make the experience any less surreal.

The fact is, if not for an incredibly improbable rescue, she would be dead by now. She had intended to die, and she’s still not sure if it had necessarily been a reflection of how she had valued her own life, or if it simply had been a byproduct of her not inconsiderable rage at the time. Or maybe those two things are connected somehow, considering how angry she had allowed herself to become to further her goals. She supposes that kind of thing is what happens when you stare into oblivion and wait for it to blink first.

It’s a kind of disease, she knows that, and she has many words for it. It’s just that she seldom lets others classify it from a more objective standpoint. She simply cannot help viewing any well-intended incursion into her mind as anything short of a challenge, and an invitation to play tiresome mind games which she refuses to allow herself to lose. It’s stupid, but it’s as much a feature as it is a bug.

The plan in itself hadn’t been to die, that was merely a side effect which she didn’t mind. She had made it almost impossible for herself to survive, created a trap for herself so that she would not waver in her quest for revenge. Sabotaged the ship thoroughly, deactivated the teleport’s auto function, made sure her friends were far away...

(But not sure enough.)

It had all been rather clinical, as she’d known she would need to put her life in extreme danger if she was going to succeed. And she didn’t want anyone she knew to… well, to do exactly what Jake had done in order to save her. Better to simply sacrifice her own life than to risk theirs, that’s what she had thought. She’d thought she had made rescue impossible for that reason, but she had been proven wrong.

Maybe she had wanted to live? If she didn’t, wouldn’t she have simply destroyed the teleport completely, instead of merely making it impossible to operate safely from inside? She had told herself at the time that it was the quickest way, but really, time hadn’t mattered all that much.

In truth, she had made it so that the teleport was quite functional still, if one didn’t mind sacrificing an arm to operate it. Turns out Jake had been a lot braver than she ever gave him credit for. Either that, or he’d had no idea that it would take his arm off. She’s never going to ask him that; she has no qualms about being cruel, but not needlessly so.

Is she suppose to feel something poignant now? She ought to be dead, and here she is in a beautiful dress, completely unharmed. The sun is bright, there is laughter in the air, and someone is playing a fiddle as if their life depends on it. She just married an intelligent, interesting woman, not to mention embroiled herself completely in the middle of a political situation which is promising to be engaging and most likely dangerous. Objectively speaking, life is good.

But even if the wedding itself wasn’t a sham, albeit a rather pleasant one, she’s not sure that she would be able to arrive at some sort of revelation now. She can picture it, but not feel it: Something about how she’d been meant to live all along, that she’d almost lost her chance at happiness... along those rather trite and maudlin lines, certainly.

What she’d felt while talking to Roxy is different. For the sake of those she loves, she knows the whole affair was a miscalculation. She now views it as a transgression toward them which she won’t ever repeat again. She is too well aware of the cost of failure now, and so survival must be her priority.

For her own sake... that will take time. Perhaps she will never quite manage it; she is certainly both self-aware as well as erudite enough to know that no cure will be perfect. What she needs isn’t a miracle, or a revelation. She just needs things to hold on to, from one day to the next, and perhaps in that aspect days like this are actually helpful after all. As imperfect as they are... and as corny as that sounds.

Roxy smears dissolved mascara on he cheek in a tight hug. Her mother envelops her and Dave in a cloud of perfume and martini smell as she kisses their cheeks, laughing as she wipes Roxy’s mascara off her lips. Dave squeezes her hand in his, as if to say, ‘I’m okay’ - and she’s glad for the reassurance. Their uncle is nowhere to be seen, which is honestly just as well - both for Dave’s sake, and because Rose couldn’t promise that she wouldn’t try to puncture his foot with her stiletto heels. Dirk gives her one of his monumentally awkward hugs, calls her ‘lil sis’, and for once she doesn’t mind... that much.

Jake gives her a one-armed hug, letting the mechanical arm stay at his side, and then does his hokey finger guns and wink thing at her. He doesn’t say anything about what happened, and she thinks that even if he knew she’d done that to herself, he probably still wouldn’t. He’s a far too generous soul at times.

John practically knocks her off her feet with his enthusiasm and babbling, and she finds herself actually batting at him with her flowers in an attempt to settle him down. As usual Jane shows more restraint than her brother, but there is unspoken forgiveness in her tight hug and hastily wiped eyes - whatever secrets Rose might keep, Jane’s expression seems to say, at the end of the day they are still friends.

Then Jade grabs her from behind and picks her clean off the floor, swinging her around in a circle in those now inhumanly strong arms. She sees Kanaya’s laughing face as she whirls by, and laughs too, even as she affectionately threatens Jade with gruesome retribution if she doesn’t let go. She does, but right before she whispers five words in Rose’s ear. In a way, they sum up both the reason why she will strive to survive, and the reason she cannot entirely regret the way things turned out.

“Thank you for saving me.”

Rose had done what she did for a reason. But she has plenty of reasons to stay alive, too.

Chapter 7: Great life choices

Summary:

Unrequited feelings are discussed, the grooms make some terrible decisions regarding sophorific substances, and cultural misunderstanding is the gift that keeps giving.

Notes:

It took a bit longer to write, but also it’s a longer chapter \o/

“Excuse me, is this seat taken?”

The troll girl on the seat next to it looks up, blinks slowly as if coming back from far-away thoughts. Then she glances sideways, pursing her lips. “Purrobably not? I, um... sort of sat down all the way over here so I could get some time to meowself.”

“Oh!” Jane flushes, having at this point already sat down next to her, and makes a motion to gather up her dress again and get up. “I’m so sorry. I’ll leave you be, then.”

“Oh no, you don’t have to.” The troll girl’s lips quirk up a bit as she hurriedly shakes her head. “I mostly meant from my furiends.” She sighs quietly, curling her arms around her leg and leaning her chin on her knee. “They mean well, of course, but I just can’t stand having them walk on featherbeast embryo shells around me any longer. I needed to get away for a bit.”

Frowning slightly, Jane debates with herself if it would be too forward of her to ask a complete stranger what’s wrong. But honestly the girl looks dejected enough, sitting crouched on the chair with her dress hopelessly rumpled and her strange little blue hat slipping sideways on her head, that it’s kind of hard to resist meddling a bit. So she smiles, nodding slowly. “You could say I know a little bit what that’s like. Sometimes when people are trying to spare your feelings, it just ends up reminding you what’s wrong over and over, right?”

She knows she judged the situation rightly when the troll lights up, her expression shifting quickly to relief. “Yes! That’s excatly what it’s like. They try so hard not to talk about anything that they think would upset me, that every conversation gets stilted and kind of apawllingly stupid after a while, you know?” She sighs, rolling her olive, catlike eyes. “Especially when they think almost efurrything is going to upset me right now.”

Jane nods sympathetically, leaning back a bit in her chair. “Oh yes, I can tell we’ve struggled with some similar kinds of conundra, then. It’s all very well that people try to show consideration and kindness, but there comes a point when it just becomes intolerably overbearing!” She smiles a bit ruefully. “A girl can have a bit too much of being handled with silken gloves, and certainly too much insipid tact.”

That begets another eye roll, and something that is somewhere between a growl and a hiss. “Yeeessssss!” She snorts. “It’s especially dumb when it comes from people who otherwise aren’t known for pussyfooting around. It’s so awkward to watch them try, because they really just end up bumbling around like big, silly herdbeasts.”

Jane puts a hand over her mouth, trying somewhat unsuccessfully not to laugh too loudly. “Oh yes. I’m familiar with that particular display!” A moment of hesitation, then she attempts a softer, slightly more nervous smile. “So in the interest of not tiptoeing around the subject any longer, because that would be pretty foolish in the wake of this conversation... which one of them is it?”

The girl makes a small face, shoulders slumping slightly, but Jane thinks she can still detect some sort of relief in her demeanor. She thinks she understands why; sometimes it’s just nice to talk to someone who isn’t involved in whatever mess you happen to be neck deep in. “It’s him.” There’s only really one ‘he’ it can be, all things considered, but she still gestures to Dave’s new husband, who appears to be bickering with a troll at least twice his size about something. She ducks her head, and a deep green flush rises on her cheeks, matching her eyes. “It’s been him for a very, veeeery long while.”

Jane hums softly. “So long that sometimes, you can’t really tell WHY it is you’re feeling like you do anymore, and you wonder if it’s just habit by now. Heavens, there are plenty of guys out there! But then...”

The troll’s face betrays her surprise, as she ends up filling in the rest of the sentence. “...but then he does something so sweet, or so brave, or so funny, it’s just hard not to feel like that.” There’s an embarrassed pause, and then they both laugh sheepishly. “It’s strange, I’ve never really talked to anyone who gets this before.” She makes an exasperated little sound. “Then again, I’ve mostly talked to my moirail about it, and he doesn’t understand at all. He listens, of course, and he tries to be helpful, but he just can’t see why I don’t even try to do anything about it. He’s even tried to encougar me to! Even though he doesn’t apurrove.”

Jane isn’t quite sure how to comment on that, because apart from the basics, the complications of troll romance are a completely closed book to her. It’s a bit strange to imagine someone talking to a platonic-romantic partner about the problems with a prospective sexual-romantic partner - but maybe that’s because she herself is just a straightforward, rather traditional person when it comes to romance.

There is however still a pretty obvious question there to ask. “Well, not to be pushy, but why don’t you do anything about it?” Just in case, she hurriedly adds: “Whatever the reason, I’m pretty certain I can empathize with it.”

The girl lets out a quiet sigh, eyes lingering for a moment on the object of their conversation, before hurriedly slipping away. “Well, there isn’t really any point.” Jane recognizes that protective flatness of tone, but it’s coming from someone who isn’t all that good at covering up her emotions, and so it just sounds kind of dejected. “When I was younger, I used to think he had no idea at all, and I was being all kinds of sneakretive in keeping it from him, because I was just too shy to talk about it.”

Now Jane can sort of already see where this is going, because at every part of their conversation, the troll girl’s face has been more or less an open book. Even so, she doesn’t interrupt, but makes a soft little sound of encouragement instead.

“Only... I guess I’m actually not very good at being fur-tive at all.” She grimaces ruefully, scratching the base of one horn. “I started to notice after a while that he got more and more self-conscious while talking to me, and he wouldn’t actually avoid me, but there were certain subjects he’d stalk in circles around every time. If I brought them up, even tangentailly, I could tell it made him uncomfortable.”

“Oh gosh.” She’s not sure what the troll protocol is, but Jane still reaches out an arm and gives the other girl’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. It seems like it’s not ill-received, since the troll leans a bit against her hand. “I’m sorry. That’s an unfortunate situation.”

“It’s not his fault if he doesn’t feel that way,” she says in a small voice, as if she’s used to defending this point. Jane offers no opposition, only gives her shoulder another squeeze, and that seems to help a bit. “But I don’t see why I need to talk to him about it, not when it’s so pawtently transpurrent that he doesn’t want to. I think he feels bad enough about it already, and that is definitely not the way I want him to pity me.”

That’s a strange what of putting it, but Jane will just assume it’s some cultural difference. “It a maddening dilemma. Not having your feelings noticed is frustrating, but exchanging that for the object of your affections just feeling kind of bad for you his hardly an advantageous trade.”

“Definitely not.” She kicks the leg of the chair with the heel of one dangling leg. Jane had noticed that most of the troll girls were in practical flat shoes in one way or another. This girl appears to be wearing fuzzy slippers with her pretty green dress. “And it’s only made worse beclaws I’m not sure he understands that I know that he knows. Sometimes it’s annoying, because it feels like he thinks I’m stupid. But...” She shakes her head with a sad little twist to her mouth. “He may not seem like it, but he’s nicer than that. I think he’s just always thought of me as naive and a bit childish... and I suspect he doesn’t want my feelings to be hurt, so he hopes I don’t know. Or purrtends like he can’t tell.” She suddenly laughs, flapping her hands a bit at her sides. “Mrrrr, it’s complicatted!”

“Affairs of the heart usually are,” Jane agrees, allowing herself a quiet sigh. The troll girl sits up a bit straighter, like a cat who just spotted something moving.

“Sooo... I haven’t bored you too much, just talking and talking about meowself?”

“Oh no, that’s quite alright. I hope getting to air it out helped a bit.”

“I think it did.” She tilts her head solemnly. “So... is it the same for you? I mean-“ She gestures in the direction of where Rose and her bride are dancing, and then over to where Dave appears to be upending the last of a bottle of wine in a glass.

“What? Oh, good grief...!” Jane finds her face growing hotter, and she fiddles a bit with the shoulders of her dress. “I suppose the answer is both no and yes. As in, no, I certainly have no such feelings for either Rose or Dave, thankfully. If anything, because Roxy was my very first friend, they became every bit as much part of my family as my brother is, in a sense. Even if...” She lets the sentence die with a sigh; she doesn’t want to sound bitter. Even if they don’t always seem to feel the same. It stings a bit still, but the Strider-Lalondes have always been prone to closing ranks in times of stress, and sometimes they don’t quite realize who they’re shutting out.

“Buuuuut...?” The troll girl prompts, not exactly pushing, but perhaps pulling gently at the implication Jane left hanging. She gives in, because it’s easier to think about that right now.

“But I suppose I’m in a similar position in a way. I have feelings for a certain person, but I have reasons not to do anything about it.”

“They don’t feel the same way about you?”

“Probably not.” Jane sighs. “That’s not really the problem, though. Maybe if I’d properly said something, he could’ve developed feelings like that for me. I don’t know.” She frowns slightly, watching Jake trying to adjust his necktie from across the square where the festivities are held. After a few false starts with the robotic arm, during which he clearly grasps the knot too hard, Dirk wordlessly reaches out and does it for him. “The problem is that someone else also has feelings for him. Someone I care dearly about.”

“Ohhh. He likes them better?”

“Again, I’m not sure I would put it that way. I just don’t want it to come down to him having to choose between us.”

The troll nods slowly, then grins a bit apologetically. “I’m not sure I’d be as unselfish as you about it. I think if I thought there was a chance he’d still pick me, I’d fight anyone purrsuing Karkitty with tooth and claw.”

“Oh, I really, really wouldn’t say that I’m being unselfish or particularly noble about all of this.” Jane laughs, but it’s a fairly brittle little sound. “Back when I was a bit younger, when I first found out that he was my rival, I was quite prepared to fight him for the guy we both liked. He probably felt the same, because slowly but surely he all but stopped talking to me, and I to him, and we pretended like it had nothing to do with him... but of course it did.”

The troll girl has her arms around both her legs now and sits facing her, her expression rapt. It’s pretty strange, telling anyone outside their little group about it all... but perhaps it’s actually long overdue? Perhaps having any friend that wasn’t so deeply involved herself would have saved Jane a lot of grief back then?

“This all happened over the course of almost two years, both of us drifting apart in that uneasy fashion while waiting to make our move, but constantly finding ourselves at an impasse. Then, a bit more than a year ago...” Her gaze drifts over to Jade, who is in the middle of the temporary dance floor, dancing with the troll in the wheelchair. Her cousin and her dance partner are moving in wide, sweeping circles that look potentially dangerous to anyone standing too close. “A friend of mine... got in an accident. There was a fire.” She looks down at her own right leg - the dress isn’t quite long enough to hide the mass of scars. “I was closest, and I’m- I’m the one with medic training, you see? So I ran into that fire to try to save her - but she was too hurt, I couldn’t move her. All I could do was shield her with my body.”

She takes a deep breath, banishes the smell of her own flesh burning, Jade’s blood, singed hair. The troll girl’s eyes are wide, her mouth slightly open. “Anyway, long story short, my rival saved us both from there. And as he was helping me limp away from the scene, I thought... well, how stupid I’d been! There he was, one of my best friends, someone who had just saved my life... and we’d almost let our feelings for a boy turn us into enemies!”

“Oh no. You’re right... I guess that would’ve been sad.” The troll frowns, glancing in the direction of Dave, where he sits slumped on the ground and gazing up at the suspended canopy above. “I guess it’s easier when the one you think of as competition is someone you don’t really know.”

“You can say that again.” Jane shrugs slightly, watching Roxy urge Jake and Dirk toward the dance floor, both of them looking seriously awkward about it, but neither of them able to say no to her. “Anyway, we talked about it, apologized to each other, promised we’d stay friends. But I kept thinking...” She sighs heavily. “I thought, if competing over the attention of a boy nearly killed our friendship, if it ever came down for him to choose between us... regardless of whom he choose, I didn’t think our friendship would survive it.”

The troll’s expression slowly resolves into understanding, and quite spontaneously she reaches out and gives her a quick hug. It comes as a surprise, but Jane finds that it’s not an unwelcome one. There is something quite immediately endearing about this girl. “You said you weren’t being noble, but I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s something only a very strong and generous purrson would do.”

“Well, I was just being practical.” She dabs a bit at the corner of her eye, offering the other girl a watery smile. “The boy I like is my cousin - well, second cousin. I suppose that doesn’t really mean anything to a troll?”

“Umm... I don’t even know what those words mean.”

“Well, we’re genetically related, but not so closely that it’s all that weird for me to have feelings for him.” She tries to save her mascara with the tips of her fingers, and the troll helpfully pulls off her hat and hands it to her, apparently to wipe the corners of her eyes with. She doesn’t have the heart to object. “But close enough that I can sort of make it easier for myself by thinking of him as my family, I guess? It’s at least a lie I can make myself believe... and I know Dirk would never be able to do anything like that. Not because he doesn’t value our friendship, he does, but he just... can’t. Even if he tried. He’s just notoriously bad at knowing what to do with his own feelings, poor dear.”

“I, um, think I understand? At least as much as it’s pawsible for me to. For a troll, the closest thing would probably be trying to move this boy into anothfur quadrant, start something pale or ashen with him maybe. Caliginous would be bad in this situation, I think, beclaws it would be likely to lead to vacillation.” She suddenly giggles. “I sound just like Karkat now. I promise I won’t chew your ear off about the quadrants and how to solve all your romance troubles.” She makes an amused little trilling sound. “Honestly, he’s pretty good at pawing through other people’s problems, seeing what’s so obvious from outside, but when it comes to his own, he’s just as dumb as everybody else.” And more quietly: “Just like me.”

The troll shakes her head slowly, glancing at Karkat on the other side of the square, who seems a little bit unsteady on his feet. Suddenly overbalancing, he ends up practically falling into the lap of his much larger friend, who laughs and ruffles his hair as Karkat swears half-heartedly at him.

On the edge of the dance floor, Jake and Dirk are shuffling their way through a slow dance. Dirk, who always looks like he’s made of liquid in battle, who can run up walls and dash around like lightning, seems to have forgotten how to not move like a robot. Jake keeps tripping over his own as well as Dirk’s feet, and Jane can tell even from over that he’s babbling nervously.

Shifting her gaze again, Jane notices that Dave’s glass is once again magically full. Crap, where is her brother? She’ll need to send him over there to intervene before the fool gets drunk as lord. She’s been down this road with Roxy before, she’s not putting up with this.

“Hey?” The troll girl is leaning against her shoulder now. “I forgot to ask... what’s your name?”

“Oh dear, where have my manners gone?” Jane tears her attention away for a moment after having located John. “It’s Jane. Jane Crocker. What’s yours?”

“Nepeta Leijon!” She beams, curling up contentedly against her side. “Thank you for talking to me, Jane Crawrcker. I didn’t realize how lonely I was feeling.”

“It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Nepeta.” She gives the girl a friendly pat on the head, and notices how a heavily muscled troll a little bit away gives her a look of suspicion. Well, whatever that was, she doesn’t care right now. Time to get a hold of John before Dave makes a complete ass of himself.

 

---

 

For all that he’d complained about the over-the-top preparations, Dave has to admit that the decorations are really pretty. People really had gone out of the way to make it all work with the available greenery close to this desert colony.

Sure, there are the enormous greenhouse bunkers with their climate controlled supplies of Earth plants, but everything that left them is incredibly regulated. From what Dave understands, they’d been allowed to take stray branches from the timber section, but that was about it. Absolutely no flowers could be removed, since those all served some purpose.

So the townspeople had gone out and cut themselves great bunches of the stuff growing close to the salt water springs that looks like multi-colored grass, but which is apparently some kind of fungus. It had braided really nicely into rainbow colored wreaths and garlands anyhow, which now hang everywhere around the square. These were then decorated with the mineral byproducts of the great, mounded algae cluster organisms that dot the desert. Sure, the little sparkling objects are basically just algae poo, but they look like intricate flowers made of crystal.

The closest things the desert has to proper trees has branches that are almost impossible to cut, but huge meaty leaves the size of giant lily pads. They’d gathered a lot of those too, had cut numerous indentations in the marbled, metallic surfaces, and set a small solar light in each one. As the shadows grow longer, they are slowly coming to light one after another. The square is also covered over with a thin piece of fabric hanging between the buildings, to protect the sensitive eyes of the trolls from the worst of the sunlight. They townspeople had apparently put the little solar lights on top of that too, and their glow is starting to filter through. If he almost shuts his eyes, the glittering lights all around him could make him think that he’s in space again.

Fuck, he’s out of wine. But there’s this other bottle here...

He’s holding it up toward the fading light in an attempt to see what’s inside, when it gets yanked clean out of his hand. Dave blinks, trying to focus on the blue blur hovering in front of him him, which resolves itself into John’s torso at first, and then his concerned face as he leans in over him. He’s still holding the bottle way out of his reach, though.

“Hey, Captain Windsock?” Dave mumbles, trying to sit up a bit straighter. Fuck, is he... drunk? When did that happen? “Can I have my bottle back?”

“Err, I think you’ve had enough, Dave.” John takes the bottle and puts it down on one of the tables, the devilishly clever bastard. Now Dave has to figure out how to use his legs before getting it back. “Are you okay? I’ve never seen you get drunk before.”

“Didn’t-“ Fuckshit, the world is spinning. He’s got no legs to stand on here - literally. He groans quietly, rubbing his eyes under his shades. “I didn’t mean to. ‘S just happened.”

John sits down next to him, frowning uneasily. “I guess I can’t blame you for being nervous, but wow. You gotta be careful with that dude. What with, you know, your family history in these matters and all.”

“You telling me.” Now that he’s actually focusing on it, that last glass was probably a mistake. Since he’s hardly had alcohol at all before this point, maybe it’s not such a fucking wonder that he’s got the alcohol tolerance of your average stick insect. Ugh.

“Not to mention, this is kind of your wedding night. I’m not sure that being three sheets to the wind is such a great strategy, Dave.”

Oh god. Holy shit. The most devout of shits living on nothing but herbs and scarce rainwater in the desert. Karkat. He’d been kind of thinking about him somewhere there in the beginning, thinking he needed to cool down a bit and stop being such a nervous wreck. He was going to have one drink and then go back to him. What happened with that? He buries his face in his hands. “John, I’m gonna- He’s gonna think I’m really stupid, John. What was I thinking? Shit. I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you kind of did.” John gently pats his shoulder. “But for what it’s worth, I think your new husband might be a bit drunk too? He was certainly stumbling around a bit moments ago, at least. So it looks like you both fucked up? It’s a shitty silver lining, but there you go.”

“Gotta... shit, gotta go and not- not be here. ‘M tired.” He shakes his head, trying to get the world to come into focus, trying to force his brain to think sober thoughts. Through the incoherent fog that won’t budge, he thinks that this is awful. Why do people like this? It feels like he’s been poisoned, which is literally exactly what he has. He just voluntarily drank poison until he couldn’t think straight. Amazing.

“Hey, Dave?” John leans in, catches his gaze to make sure he’s listening. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, okay? I’m going to go and get some water and something salty for you to eat, that’ll help you sober up a little bit. Then when you think you can think in a straight line, why don’t you go get Karkat before he gets drunker too? You can both go get some sleep. Got it?”

He’s talking to him the way he used to talk to Roxy, all patient and encouraging, enunciating clearly to make sure he’s getting everything. Well, not entirely. For it to be genuinely like a conversation with Roxy, John would need to be dodging some pretty aggressive flirting from Dave’s side with the skill of a professional limbo dancer. The thought makes Dave laugh quietly to himself, but it also makes him wonder if now that Roxy is staying on the wagon... is that going to be a Thing that happens at some point? How incestuous is their friend group actually going to get?

He nods in agreement a least, waits patiently for John to come back, and then sits there sipping water, nibbling pretzels and eating half of an entire enormous pickle, until he stops feeling like warmed-over garbage and starts feeling merely like he should be banned from making any more decisions for the evening. John sits next to him and prattles on about harmless shit until he judges Dave to be at least reasonably less sloshed.

“That’s good. Why don’t you go get your husband and have an early night, okay?” He pauses, then makes an embarrassed little grimace. “You know, in the least awkward-sounding, least suggestive way possible? Wow.”

“Yeah, no, I got that. Since we’re apparently both drunk? I didn’t even know trolls could get drunk.”

“Search me. I haven’t seen any of them drinking the wine or anything like that, they kind of had their own drink and food brought here. Maybe some of that is, like, troll booze? Anyway, he probably needs to take it easy on whatever he’s had.”

Dave nods, accepting help from John getting up. He feels relatively steady on his feet once he’s up, even if he can tell that his movements are more clumsy and his reflexes probably delayed. The whole experience gets a solid 2/10, and that’s only because the apple wine was delicious. Still not worth repeating. “Got it. I’ll go save my husband from himself like the actual knight I am.”

“Go go go! Be the hero!”

“Oh fuck off.” He takes a step, but then stops. “Hey John?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“Aw, don’t thank me. Jane saw you getting yourself pickled and asked me to go stop you.”

“Then my thank you extends to both the Crocker-Egbert siblings, as well as your magnificent bastard of a father who raised such straight-up strapping youth.” He takes a deep breath, starts to walk off again. “But seriously, thank you.”

 

---

 

He really shouldn’t have done that.

It’s bad enough that Gamzee actually brought some of his disgusting fucking pies with him to the party, because even bearing in mind that they’re responsible for making sure he doesn’t go completely shithive maggots... well, those things are still just vile. And he really didn’t need to bring three whole tins with him. That’s just an unreasonable amount of pie.

The point is, he shouldn’t have had a slice. Whatever the reason, feeling nervous about what was to come next, what the rest of his life was going to be like now... he still shouldn’t have allowed Gamzee to talk him into sampling his revolting pie - especially a whole damn slice of it. That was really fucking stupid of him.

Now all colors seem too bright despite the sun finally setting, all sounds are completely overwhelming, every smell is so strong that the swears he’s on the verge of actually seeing them just like Terezi. Everything is just so much, and his feelings are no exception. He has no idea how to deal with all of them.

Which is probably why he’s draped across Gamzee’s lap like a wrung-out towel, and why he can’t seem to bring himself to care too much if his behavior right now borders on outright pale flirting. Can he just be allowed to be calmed the fuck down for a second? Does he always need to be chewing a hole in his own goddamn nerves, or can he just get to take a break from that?

There’s a shift in the air close by, a fair scent of something sweet, but Karkat doesn’t open his eyes just yet. While his senses seem to be working overtime, his brain appears to be stalling.

“Hey.” That’s Dave’s voice. Dave. Dave is definitely not supposed to see him like this. Not if he’s trying to preserve his dignity at all.

Karkat’s eyes fly open, and he does the only thing he can think of to try to stop the inevitable. He puts his entire hand over Dave’s face, giving it a gentle push. “No. Fuck off. I’m a complete fucking disgrace right now and I would like you to respect that.”

He didn’t think he pushed all that hard, but Dave makes a strangled little noise, overbalances backwards, and lands smack on his ass. “Oof!” He blinks, shades askew. “Okay. So John was right and I’m apparently not the only one who is outrageously intoxicated. Great to know.” He runs a hand through his hair, leaving the fluffy light tresses standing on end, and there’s a faint red flush on his cheeks. “So first, not cool man, I’d just gotten off the floor. Secondly, I think we both need to go sleep all our seriously questionable decisions off before we end up making some more.”

There’s a piece of bright pink vegetation from the decorations stuck in his hair. Wow. It’s so bright, it’s practically glowing. Distracted, Karkat reaches out with his hand and gently frees the scrap of fluorescent fungus. Dave’s hair is exactly as soft as it looks, and Karkat’s hand lingers there a moment longer than necessary. The human’s cheeks darken further, and he stares at Karkat as if not sure what to make of the gesture.

“Bright,” he explains, knowing he should probably be angry at how dumb he sounds, but finding it hard to gather up the energy.

Dave leans his face in his hands for a moment while drawing in a deep breath. “Okay. Right. My incredibly professional diagnose is that you’re not, in fact, alien drunk. You’re alien stoned, aren’t you?” He meets Karkat’s aggressively blank look, in which he endeavors to put just about the entirety of his vast amount of what the fuck. “Right, nevermind.” He glances up at Gamzee, as if it’s the first time he notices that he’s there. “Hey, big guy? Can you maybe help us both up so we can go have a lie down?”

Gamzee blinks slowly, then grins his ridiculous, half-concussed grin. “Whatever my little man’s man wants, I’ll be happy to lend a motherfucking hand. I think perhaps he went just a little bit too hard on the pie, but it’s all good, he needed to get his wicked chill on.”

“Hey, douche bag, you’re the one who gave me that poisonous goddamn pastry,” Karkat grumbles, but the way he hides his face against Gamzee’s shirt probably takes the edge of his words a bit. When he looks up again, he notices Dave looking between the two of them as if he’s trying to figure something out. Karkat supposes that he’s only got himself to blame, after telling Dave all that stuff about quadrants.

Then he feels Gamzee start to unfold under him, followed by his enormous goddamn hands gently grasping him under his armpits. Before he can protest, his friend simply lifts him up and puts him down on his feet. Then he reaches down and does the same to Dave, apparently without any effort at all.

“There you go, my dudes. I think maybe the human is right, best friend. You should probably go and have a motherfucking righteous rest, really hit that snooze.”

Dave looks a little bit disoriented where he stands, but then solemnly reaches out a fist toward Gamzee. “You know what? You’re just objectively great. Let’s be bros when I’m not sozzled senseless, okay?”

“You’ve got it, future friend.” Gamzee gently bumps his fist against Dave’s, and Karkat rolls his eyes to cover up the weirdly sentimental feelings that are threatening to take over.

“Okay, great. That was really just amazingly poignant. Can we go somewhere I can lie down in peace and quiet now, and not listen to the stupid shit everyone around me keep regurgitating from their protein chutes? Was that what we were doing?”

Dave doesn’t even really reply properly, unless you count a small, “Yup,” followed by grabbing Karkat by the arm and tugging him with him. Finding that it’s hard enough to stay upright and not collide with the people they pass, Karkat contents himself with stumbling along after him.

They’re apparently to live in a residence closer to the border between their two colonies later on, but for tonight at least, they’ll have a block in a hive meant for visiting political guests. He’s not sure why this was the choice, what was wrong with the place he’d previously occupied or for that matter Dave’s home. Kanaya has speculated that since this is a big and official ceremony, perhaps tradition demands especially nicely furnished respite blocks for the last part of the ceremony.

If Kanaya’s research on these matters is correct, this is the part of the proceedings where the actual ritual copulating is supposed to take place. But Dave had talked about sleeping, right? So maybe he feels like that would be just a bit hasty too? Karkat sure as fuck hopes so. He’s still not sure how he feels about the human, or what to make of his own feelings during that one kiss, but unbridled mating fondness right this instant definitely isn’t it.

Uncertainty in this matter causes him to hesitate briefly in the door to the room, as Dave navigates a bit unsteadily inside. He makes an exasperated noise as he reaches the bed, and Karkat squints at it in confusion. Someone appears to have stripped the colorful leafy parts off desert vegetation and spread it all over the sheet? What is it with humans and putting colorful plants everywhere?

“Couldn’t find rose petals, huh? Maniacs,” Dave mumbles, which makes little to no sense and can probably be disregarded in that case. At least he seems to be brushing away the invasive plant matter, and once Karkat gets there, most of it is cleared away. Dave’s kicking off his shoes, then shrugs off his jacket. “I guess it’s too much to hope for that anyone’s left pajamas here? Eh, at least it’s a wide bed.”

“What’s pajamas?” Karkat demands, trying unsuccessfully to undo the buttons on his shirt sleeves.

“Uh... clothes to sleep in? Don’t trolls have those?”

He’s going to chew Kanaya out over these buttons being so small and impractical. “We usually sleep in cocoons full of slime, you dumbfuck. Why would we wear clothes? They’d only get wet.”

“...Oh. Right. Jesus, do you want me to just unbutton you?”

“...Fine.”

Karkat looks the other way while Dave undoes his sleeves, then moves on to the front of his shirt, trying to pretend his face isn’t burning, and also that he can’t feel the cool human fingers accidentally brushing his skin. They undress in silence from that point, and Karkat quickly slips between the covers once he’s down to his underwear, feeling exposed. Dave is still wearing his shirt, and he hesitates for a moment, swaying slightly.

“Okay, so we both had a bit too much of something or other, we can both acknowledge that and accept our shame, right?”

Karkat gives him a bleary look from where he’s snuggled up. “What’s your point?” He’s definitely starting to regret that pie even more. It obviously has the opposite effect on Gamzee, but for him it seems to make whatever he’s feeling even more intense. He doesn’t care for it.

“So we’ll both probably feel like shit in the morning, right? I mean, I’ll be real... I’m already feeling a bit like shit, and it’s bound to get worse.”

“I don’t know.” He’s not about to explain that mostly he’s feeling incredibly emotionally fragile, and his senses working on overdrive isn’t helping. “I mean that stuff I had is really not made for eating, so who the fuck knows? Gamzee’s been doing it for so long, he’s probably a lot more used to whatever poisonous bullshit it does with your brain.”

“Yeah, sounds like tomorrow is going to be a blast. Specifically in the sense of like... 'blast radius'. A serious goddamn upchuck party, sharing the fun around. Anyway, I think I’m going to just go get a bucket.”

Karkat tenses up, heart suddenly hammering. What? Oh fuck, he should’ve known not to trust the human, shouldn’t he?

“There was some kind of cupboard down the hall, there should be-“ Dave pauses, staring at him. “...Are you okay?”

“No! I’m suddenly not fucking okay at all! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“...What?” Dave looks bewildered, halting on his way to the door with his hand still outstretched. Like he’d just been doing the most casual thing, and he can’t wrap his pan around that maybe Karkat isn’t at all emotionally ready for human copulation antics.

Karkat wraps the blankets around him, scooting over to the very furthest corner of the bed, away from him. “You know, I was beginning to delude myself into thinking you were an at least marginally rational individual. So thank you for reminding me that you and your entire species are depraved fucking lunatics, I guess?”

Dave looks completely taken aback by now, and a little bit hurt. “Dude... what are you talking about? Did I do something wrong?”

“Well, I don’t know Dave, did you? Maybe it’s completely normal for humans to not even ask someone, and just assume they want to mate as long as they’re ‘married’, what the fuck do so know? But I’m not-“

“What? Mate? What the fuck?”

What right has he got to look so confused and vulnerable, after what he just said? Karkat grinds his teeth together, fighting an instinct to just run away. “Don’t you dare act like you didn’t literally just say that you were going to- Don’t you- Don’t.”

Dave is slowly lifting his hands in a placating gesture, shaking his head. “I have no idea if you just hit the paranoia part of the high or what, but whatever you think I said, I didn’t mean it like that, okay? Neither of us is clearly in any state to do anything like that. Literally the last thing on my mind right now.”

“But-“ It’s hard to talk through the panic, the disorienting feeling of everything being strange and alien and out of control. “You just said you were going to- to get-“ He chokes on the word and his own humiliation.

“A bucket?” Dave blinks at him as Karkat lets out a hiss, hands curling into fists. “What the actual fuck has a bucket got to do with sex?”

“...Wait. What?” Karkat stares right back, his confusion suddenly managing to overtake both his rage and the impending panic attack. “You mean... you don’t know?”

The moment stretches out forever, both staring at each other as if trying to gauge if the other one is joking, or possibly just insane. Karkat relaxes slightly, but can feel the slowly dawning realization that maybe he just made a huge fool of himself, and that in no way makes it easier to break the silence. So he just gapes at Dave like a fish trying desperately to breathe air.

“Okay. Okay. Cultural clarification time.” Dave sighs, swaying slightly where he stands, and leans against the door to support himself. After a moment he takes off his shades, rubs his eyes tiredly. “Humans use buckets as cleaning supplies, alright? And for carrying shit in. And in this particular case, I was going to get one in case I’m hung over in the morning, to have something to throw up in-”

Karkat tries to speak, but all that leaves his lips is a scandalized little squeak. He’s pretty sure that if you can die from blushing, his fate is sealed. Humans are freaks.

“-which is totally normal in human culture, and not some kind of fucked-up emetophilia kink, okay? I just didn’t want to hurl on the goddamn fancy-ass carpet.” He stands there in his boxers and his shirt mostly unbuttoned, looking dazed and tired and a bit chilly. Karkat suddenly feels like an asshole. He crosses his arms over his chest, looking away.

“Humans are so fucking weird.” He sighs explosively, knowing he has to say it. “I’m sorry, alright? It’s definitely not my fault that humans use pails for weird shit like that, but I guess... I guess I flew off the handle a bit. I just thought-“

“Yeah, okay, I really have no idea how buckets might be utilized for sex, and quite frankly I feel like that’s a great discussion for literally any other day.” Dave ignores the choked little sound of disbelief Karkat makes. “But I’m sorry for freaking you out like that. I didn’t mean it.” A beat, then: “So, I guess I’ll pass on getting that bucket?”

“I’m not having a bucket in this room for any fucking reason!”

“Got it. Okay. I’ll just try to make it to the wash basin if I have to.” He dithers slightly where he stands. “So is it like... okay if I come over there?”

“For the love of fuck.” Karkat rolls his eyes. “Yes, Dave, you may in fact sleep on the bed instead of the floor, because I’m just that good of a person. Truly the legends of my benevolence and compassion are true.”

Obviously that joke flies over Dave’s head a bit, but he lets out a small sigh of relief, stumbling back over to the bed. Karkat wordlessly kicks some of the blankets back over on his side, and they both lie in silence, trying to pretend like they’re not listening to each other breathe. Karkat isn’t sure exactly how he’s expected to sleep now, and keeps pondering if he should just try to get up again as soon as Dave’s asleep, until he ends up drifting off without even noticing.

At some point during the night, he wakes up briefly because Dave grabs his hand and holds on to it as if his life depended on it. Karkat gets out a half coherent question, but the human appears to still be asleep.

He mutters a few choice curses to no one in particular, but he doesn’t take his hand back.

Chapter 8: Relief

Summary:

Rose and Kanaya manage to maintain some dignity in approaching the wedding night, while all guys in the story consistently keep being awkward losers.

Notes:

I keep updating the tags, but yeah, more heavy mentions of substance abuse + child abuse in this chapter.

“Well, that was somewhat unfortunate.”

Kanaya’s voice seems to indicate that she’s trying to keep the remark light, nothing more than a gentle jibe at the expense of the boys. But since she’d stopped mid-dance to gaze after them as they stumbled unsteadily in the direction their room for tonight, her brow furrowed in worry, her attempt at levity doesn’t even manage to get off the ground. Rose frowns slightly as well, silently berating herself. She’d been preoccupied, yes, but not so much that she couldn’t have kept an eye on her brother. She should have at least noticed that he was drinking before it got to this point.

“He doesn’t usually do this. I have to assume that he was even more nervous than what I accounted for.” She doesn’t like how defensive her voice sounds, even though it’s perfectly reasonable to want to explain the situation. She doesn’t want Kanaya to worry that her very drunk brother is going to be a regular feature in Karkat’s life, after all. But the truth is that she’s feeling protective of her family as a whole, because Kanaya is far from stupid, and she’d probably noticed Roxy’s wistful little sigh earlier as she passed by the impromptu bar, and how she’d held on to Dirk’s arm for a moment to steady herself. She can’t possibly not have noticed the state their mother is in by now.

She probably hasn’t noticed how hard Rose has to clamp down on the temptation to at least try the wine, but she might have noticed her not drinking and wondered about it. That in itself is a vulnerable little thought, and Rose would very much like not to have had it.

If asked for a guess, Rose might’ve assumed that Dave would react to alcohol the way Dirk does, which is to say hardly at all. But no, that would be a shallow assumption, and she’d like to think that she is more astute than that. After all, one of the reasons that Dirk had avoided so much of their uncle’s unpleasant mind games is that stoicism comes so naturally to him, and that even when emotional he will attempt to control his own reactions perfectly. His inability when it comes to escapism certainly leads to its own issues, but loss of self control isn’t one of them.

There really is only two ways for a control freak to react to lowered inhibitions, she supposes. Either like Dirk, who instinctively fights it whether he wants to or not, or like herself. She’d prefer not to think about her own opposite reaction.

But Dave... he’d always been more sensitive, more expressive and less compulsively serious than his brother. If there was any justice in the world, he would’ve been allowed to do nothing but spend his days making music, creating ironic ‘art’ and researching esoteric branches of history and science. He was never made for the world of intricate politics and high stake situations which they’d been born into, but he also doesn’t have the kind of mind that can turn away and pretend not to care.

In other words, he was in every way flawed according to their uncle. He cared too much and yet wasn’t violent or ambitious enough to back it up - that’s how he saw it. Which was why he’d taken Dave under his wings at a young age, and it had taken far too long for the rest of them to fully grasp what that meant. They’d thought him an eccentric but well-meaning family member who wanted to protect Dave, had his best interest at heart under the ironic demeanor.

Rose isn’t sure she will ever forgive herself for being far too late to see through the aloof act to the antisocial, abusive bastard that he is. If anyone should’ve understood what was happening, surely it was her. When she thinks of it that way, she can’t help feeling that it’s doubly her fault that they ended up here. Her reckless suicide mission, and her failure to protect her brother.

She knows Dave thinks that the three of them have a pact to protect Roxy, because she’s the one of them who is the least messed up by their upbringing. But Rose is pretty certain it’s more like her and Dirk protecting their younger siblings; the one who is thankfully least affected, and the one who has been hurt the most; both of them still capable of vulnerability against the odds.

Not that she disagrees with that it should be Dave who ended up in this particular mess with her. In fact, it might just be good for him...

A light brush of fingers against her cheek brings her back to the present with a start. Kanaya looks a little bit sheepish, but her hand nonetheless stays resting gently against her cheek. Her fingers are slightly cool, reflecting the blood hue of her mid-spectrum caste, which is delicately staining her cheeks at this moment. The faint fluorescence unique for her kind only serves to accentuate the flush. “Are you worried about your brother?”

Rose sighs, suppressing the more complicated answer in favor of one which will do for now. “Not exactly. Despite how he acts, in some ways he’s surprisingly sensible. I imagine he won’t want to repeat this experience in a hurry.” She tilts her head slightly, allows a faint smile back on her lips. “How about your friend? I’m guessing this is somewhat out of the ordinary for him too?”

Kanaya replies with an exasperated little noise, rubbing tiredly at her forehead. “I don’t know what he was thinking. At least from what I understand, the consumption of alcohol for soporific and pleasurable purposes is not uncommon in human society. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s accurate. It’s been a part of most of our cultures for thousands of years by now, and is considered quite socially acceptable, along with a few other substances of a similar nature. But those are grown almost exclusively for medicinal purposes in this colony.”

Kanaya nods. “Yes, that is the impression I got. But to put it rather mildly, consuming Sopor Slime is not considered in any way normal in troll society. Not any more than I imagine humans indulge in ingesting their own bedding?”

“...I can’t say I’ve ever felt tempted to nibble on my sheets, no, but then again that wouldn’t do anything except probably disturb my digestion.”

“It’s true that the slime might indeed be pleasurable to consume, I have no personal experience on the matter, but it is nonetheless meant to provide a suitable soporific effect through skin contact only.” She glances at the huge highblood troll who is still gazing off affably in the direction where Karkat and Dave had left. “Gamzee is the only one I have ever heard of who keeps eating the wretched stuff.” She makes a face. “As distasteful as I find it, in his case I have to admit that it’s the preferable option. Without its influence, he is honestly the most vicious and terrifying troll of his caste I have ever come across, and when it comes to highbloods, that really is saying something.”

Rose raises one eyebrow slightly. “He self-medicates to overcome his own genetic predisposition? Fascinating.”

“Yes, and the only reason he’s allowed to continue doing so, I imagine, is because of Feferi’s influence. Otherwise, you could say our society does not look kindly upon those who would prefer to control their violent impulses.” Her eyes drift to the path down which Karkat left too, and for a moment her hand goes to her neck as if looking for something which isn’t there. Then she hastily lowers it again. Interesting. “At any rate, there is no reason at all for Karkat to do something like that.”

“Well, I imagine that he’s rather nervous too. It certainly seemed that way before and during the ceremony, did it not?”

There is a hint of a fond smile on Kanaya’s lips for a moment, even if it’s quickly replaced by a stern frown, like that of a disappointed parent. “I realize as much, yes, but it was nonetheless foolish of him. And the flirting-“

She cuts herself short, looking embarrassed, and Rose raises her another eyebrow and gives her an amused look. “The flirting?”

“It- Well, it probably didn’t look like flirting to you, but let’s just say his behavior with Gamzee was very blatant, despite the fact that a pale relationship between them would probably be rather inadvisable right now.”

Rose laughs quietly then. “You know, even for humans, getting kind of drunk and collapsing in someone’s lap does indeed come across as a little flirtatious. So inadvisable or not, I suppose that I’m still relieved that the flirtation in question was pale, considering the situation.”

“I suppose.” Kanaya sighs, looking a little bit tired. So it doesn’t come entirely as a surprise when she tentatively reaches out and grasps Rose’s hand in hers. “Perhaps... Unless you mind terribly, I would suggest that it might be time for the two of us to withdraw as well? It’s been a long day, after all.”

Rose nods, wondering exactly how much Kanaya might have researched the concept of the wedding night, and whether or not she might expect things to be done in a traditional fashion. She does come across as someone who takes things rather literally, and her slightly flustered demeanor now seems to indicate that she at the very least considers it a possibility. Oh dear. They are going to have to have a talk about this... in private, of course.

Not that Rose necessarily minds the idea at all. Kanaya is beautiful, intelligent, pleasant to spend time with and unpredictable enough to fascinate her. She personally has fairly little sentimentality tied up with feeling attraction and acting on it, although the fact that she respects and likes Kanaya certainly makes the prospect even more interesting. She wouldn’t mind indulging in an infatuation, perhaps even something more lasting, if that is indeed what she’s starting to feel.

But... well, it has to be on both their terms. Rose is aware enough of her own manipulative and selfish nature to know how easy it would be to simply make use of the situation to her own advantage. But she won’t. Awareness means that she can choose how to act, and so she will choose to make sure that anything they do is on both their terms. It will be far more interesting that way.

She smiles brightly, giving Kanaya’s hand a little squeeze as she nods. “That sounds like a good idea. Besides, there are a few things I would like to talk to you about.”

 

---

 

“Welp, there they go. I’m officially the only one of us headed for certain spinsterhood now.”

Dirk glances up at Roxy, raising his eyebrows slightly and saying nothing. Jake had gone off to get drinks, which they probably both deserve after that seriously awkward spectacle Roxy had coaxed them into. He supposes he should make a show of being annoyed with his little sister... but who would he be kidding? She knows that awkward or not, he still enjoyed it, and would probably do it again in a heartbeat if given half an excuse. So what’s the point.

At least she doesn’t call him on it even though she could, instead she just winks at him, taking a moment to adjust the low neckline of her dress. She had expressed incredibly clearly earlier that there was literally no point in being the maid of honor unless she got a shot at being the ‘most eligible total babe’ at the wedding party. After a moment or two, she had added that what she meant was a huge and unashamed slut - though he’s not convinced she hadn’t said that specifically to make him grimace.

Not that he actually gives a shit about the sex lives of his siblings, but he also would prefer not to hear about it.

“I mean, two of my siblings are sooo respectably married now, swanning off to consummate the whole affair, and here’s the two of us.” She grins, clearly despite her obvious attempts at getting in character. “I’m pretty sure I’m justified in having some sort of Jane Austen inspired crisis about this.”

Dirk snorts quietly. “I’m pretty certain that as the youngest sibling it is in fact entirely reasonable for you to be the last to get married, if we’re supposed to be going full Austen here. Either that or you should’ve taken the chance to run off with a disreputable soldier at age sixteen.”

“See, that’s my problem! I mean, I had all these soldiers to choose from even back then-“

“You were a soldier back then, Roxy. Still are.”

“-well, exactly! I should’ve been spoilt for choice.” She sighs theatrically. “But they were all just way too reputable. Makes it hard for a girl to be seduced away from her family and cause a proper scandal.”

“That, or our social circle was just a little bit too small, despite our involvement with SKAIA.” They had always been an insular little group, and it hadn’t helped that they’d almost immediately been chosen for rather specific and classified missions. Their family because of their mother’s influence on the board of SKAIA, their uncle’s position within its forces, and the other four because they hailed from a bloodline of especially notable heroes and explorers. They all just had an edge on the other recruits around their own age, having been trained long before they joined the ranks, and being well versed in complicated interstellar politics. Viewed like that, their relative isolation from the rest of the forces made sense.

Roxy hums in agreement. “It’s true. So that makes two eligible boys that weren’t my actual flesh and blood, le sigh.” She holds up two fingers as if the fact needs further demonstrating. “One who was already spoken for one way or the other,” she lowers one finger, and Dirk doesn’t really have time to comment on the assumption before she continues, “and the other...”

They both glance at John, who is now talking excitedly to Karkat’s huge friend, gesturing wildly like the doofus he is. “The other was indeed ‘way too reputable’,” Dirk notes dryly, “if by that you mean that he was a bit too damn decent to get involved with you while you were still drunk out of your fucking mind about ninety percent of the time when you weren’t on a mission.” He pauses, glancing sideways at her, trying to gauge her expression. He could’ve put it more tactfully, he knows he could, but the problem is she’d know what he was thinking anyway. As far as he can tell, she mostly just looks pensive. “There’s nothing stopping you now, though.”

She looks away, smiling a bit tiredly. “Yeeeah, I know. It’s just kind of weird now, you know? ‘Hey, remember back when I used to be super drunk all the time and kept hitting on you even though you kept turning me down? Well, I’m not drunk now, so maybe you and I can get married and have babies!’ It’s kind of hard not to sound mad desperate, I guess.”

“Yeah, I would avoid phrasing it like that,” Dirk replies, ignoring her eye roll. “But from what I can tell, he’s always liked you. No reason why you can’t hit on him now in a not drunk, not incredibly aggressive fashion.”

“Wooooow. Look who’s talking!”

“...When have I ever been drunk?”

“Oh em gee, so not what I was talking about and you know it. Do I have to spell it out to you, huh?”

“Spell what out, if I may ask?”

They both jump slightly, as Jake suddenly stands between them like an easy guy to forget about. Right. He was getting drinks. Fuck.

“That he’s not even half as smooth as he thinks he is, and maybe he should get schooled himself before handing out lessons to others,” Roxy replies cryptically, winking.

“...I beg your pardon?” Jake says, predictably. Roxy just laughs.

“Don’t worry about it, Jake.”

Dirk feels like they have gotten pretty fucking far away from the point now, and instead veered into confused and uncomfortable territories which he’d rather not touch right at this moment. “Anyway, it’s not like those were ever your only options. Not even just the boys, either - let’s not indulge some platitudinous pretense that there’s a single completely straight person in our family any further.” He nods at the room at large. “So get out there.”

Roxy giggles, poking his cheek. “You know it’s pretty bad when even your own brother is telling you to go get laid. But I can take a hint and will make myself scarce.” Without another word she strolls off, but she does direct a seriously unsubtle wink over her shoulder.

Jake is still standing there with both their drinks in his hands, looking befuddled. “What the Dickens was all that about?”

It’s Jake, so it’s predictably impossible to guess how much of that he caught. But the faint flush on his cheeks seems to suggest that he’d have to be a lot dumber to not catch that Roxy was teasing them, and what that most likely was about. It’s so damn hard to tell even now; Dirk can never be entirely sure how much he really gets about... well, about this entire goddamn mess. Had he ever caught on to Jane’s feelings about him? Had he any opinion at all about the fact that she had decided to withdraw before either of them even made a proper move? Does he get that this probably means that she in fact deserves him so much more?

Not in so many words, maybe. But enough to make this situation more awkward still.

Dirk takes his drink from Jake, kind of wishing that he could actually get drunk just for once, but he knows that the only thing it’s likely to do is make him more gloomy. So instead he sips on it while his gaze is inevitably drawn to Jane. He doesn’t exactly consider himself an expert on such matters, but odds are that she in fact looks lovely in her dark blue cocktail dress, which makes good use of the ample curves which he, Dirk, certainly doesn’t have.

...Shit. It’s still hard not to compare himself to her at every single opportunity, even though they’d promised each other to cut that fucking nonsense out. Can’t he focus on something more useful? Like how she seems to be in an animated and happy discussion with one of the trolls, the one confusingly dressed up in a nice green dress, something that looks like a very rumpled hat, and slippers. They certainly seem to be getting along, judging by the way the troll is lying with her head in Jane’s lap - but then again, Jane was always so good at making people open up. Also unlike him.

He sighs, knowing he just can’t get his mind right tonight, and tears his gaze away. Fuck his self-punishing brain and the cluster of obsessively examined yet completely immutable complexes it rode in on.

There’s a brittle clinking sound and a muffled ‘oh shucks’, and Dirk doesn’t even have to turn his head to know that Jake had accidentally set his glass down too hard and broke it. He really needs to fix that damn arm. But also, had Jake really finished his drink that fast, or-

That’s as far as he gets before Jake very carefully slings said arm around his shoulders, giving them as light a squeeze as he can manage. “You know, I know you’re forever brooding and worrying yourself addlepated if given half a chance, and I do realize that it’s your very own brother and sister that are caught up in all this jolly awkward ballyhoo...” He frowns, looking concerned. “But, well, there has to come a time when a man realizes that there’s only so much he can do, don’t you know? The onus isn’t always on you to make everything alright, old chum.”

Dirk sighs. “I’m fine, Jake. Truth to be told, there’s no actual reason to worry about Dave or Rose tonight. I imagine that the former is sleeping off his embarrassing inebriation already, and the latter... well, she can handle herself.”

Jake’s nods hesitantly, but his frown doesn’t go away. “Then what is it? It’s not hard to tell that something is troubling you.”

“It’s nothing.” He keeps his tone flat and even, but notices almost immediately that this is a misjudgment. Instead of calming assurance, his words somehow turn into a terse dismissal. Jake’s expression easily betrays his hurt, as does the way he kind of sags where he stands. Now that Dirk is really looking, he notices the slight tension around his mouth, the nervous fidgeting of his other hand. Right, Jake doesn’t do very well with crowds for extended periods of time, and that combined with his lowered self-esteem after he lost his arm... he’s probably not feeling too good. But he’d reached out even so in an attempt to help - which Dirk then promptly threw back in his face.

Fuck. Why is he so bad at this?

Jake tries to pull away, mumbling something about being tired, and Dirk knows he can’t just let him leave. Not like this. So instead he puts down his drink and takes hold of Jake’s metal hand to make him stay put, slips his other arm around his waist. “I’m tired too.” He sighs, forcing the words out. “Look, maybe we can talk about things... somewhere else? Just not here.”

Jake looks taken aback, and then downright flustered, and Dirk isn’t sure what to do with that. Had he meant what Jake seems to think he means, that they’re finally going to talk about the quite frankly monstruous elephant in the room that is his convoluted feelings for him now? He doesn’t know. He’d just wanted to not reject Jake’s help when it was offered, not have him go back to his house feeling dejected and hurt and more than likely insecure.

“V-Very well. Crikey. Let us find somewhere more-“ He actually swallows audibly, making a gulp sound like in a cartoon. “-more private to talk. Lead the way.”

Well, this will almost certainly be disastrous, but Dirk has somehow painted himself into a corner now. He does as Jake asks, tugging him with him, and can’t help momentarily meeting Jane’s gaze as he passes her. It’s solemn and steady, and almost entirely impossible to read. In a perverse way, it might even be easier if he could see any resentment or anger there. Jane always had much more of a temper than anyone else in their group, so why can’t she be pissed off now? Dirk is pretty sure he deserves it. But she just looks a bit jaded, a bit defeated. And... is it just him, or does she look relieved as well?

The troll girl pauses mid-story to look up at Jane. Her gaze snaps to Dirk and Jake, then back, and her eyes seem to widen in sudden comprehension. She reaches up and pats Jane’s face gently with obvious compassion, and thus Jane is the first to break eye contact, smiling tiredly down at her new friend.

Just as well, because Dirk has to look away too or risk Jake noticing, because that’s something neither of them need in their lives. However they’ve worked things out between themselves, and whatever he might personally think of the results, in a way this part doesn’t really concern Jake. This is Jane’s decision to make, and Dirk is just going to have to respect it.

So he leaves with his arm tight around Jake’s waist, and with Jake’s head leaning cautiously against his shoulder after a moment or two. He has no idea what’s supposed to come next, what to say, how to behave now. In fact, he’s got no damn plan at all, and that’s a terrifying thought.

So he’s got no idea why he’s suddenly feeling relieved too.

 

---

 

“What was it you wished to speak to me about?” Kanaya feels that she deserves more recognition than is currently available for keeping her voice steady and matter-of-fact, even as Rose helps her undo the string of buttons running all the way down her back. She isn’t at all surprised to find the human taking to the task quickly and effectively, with a minimum amount of fumbling. She has seen how neatly she handles her knitting needles, after all.

“This, in a sense,” Rose replies - unnecessarily cryptically, Kanaya feels. But at least she’s quick to elaborate. “I am going to assume - because I would not insult you by suggesting anything else - that you have done some very thorough research of human wedding conventions these last weeks?”

“Yes. That is correct.” If her vascular system could stop its impromptu gymnastics right about now, that would be helpful.

“And since I started out so strong, I shall go on with my assuming, and make the assumption that this included the customs surrounding the wedding night in one form or other? I do believe there’s a fair amount of it available on the SKAIA informational network, and I’ve seen no indication that trolls do not have access to it.”

“This, also, is accurate. The highbloods are suspicious of it, calling it an alien conspiracy and preferring our own data grid. But while I find the name aesthetically displeasing, SBURB is in fact the most comprehensive, widest-spanning means of communication and information transfer available, and it would be foolish not to access it.”

Rose sounds amused. “You’re avoiding my original question, Kanaya.”

It would be nice to think that having her back turned on Rose would mean that she cannot tell how flustered she already is, but she knows that’s nonsense. If nothing else, she is once more losing control of her autoluminescence, meaning the room is quite brightly lit by her skin. She might as well grab the musclebeast by the udder.

“Yes. In fact, I had been meaning to speak to you about that as well...” She can hear her voice shake as it trails off, not at all the assertive tone she had wished to take, and wishes that this could be a problem that she could solve by carefully gathering information instead, or by giving advice to someone else... or just taking her chainsaw to it. Regrettably, neither of these things sound like a viable option.

“Done,” Rose declares, undoing the last button. The air in the room flutters against Kanaya’s back as Rose steps around her, gazing up at her with a small smile. The way her eyes reflect the glow from Kanaya’s skin makes the troll think about Nepeta’s lusus. “Regardless of what you read - and bearing in mind that some early human mindsets in this respect are downright barbaric - I’m aware that this is not your custom. Nor have we known each other for long enough for us to approach this matter in a way more in line with how your culture deals with it.” She shrugs, her pale shoulders catching the light strangely. “I admit I don’t have a thorough understanding of how your society views more temporary entanglements, and certainly not how you feel about the matter, but to simply assume you would be alright with it seems irresponsible at best. So I thought I’d make clear that I do not expect you to do anything you are not comfortable with.” She pauses, then frowns slightly. “I’m so sorry. I should have prefaced my tiresomely long statement with that, shouldn’t I?”

At first it is hard to find her voice in the midst of the overwhelming relief, but Kanaya makes a herculean effort to struggle through it. “Honestly I find the structure of your statement to be very elegant and objectively enjoyable, and I think I can say that I was fairly okay with being held in suspense for some while for the sake of a more sophisticated delivery.” Rose laughs in response, and Kanaya finds that she’s able to smile as well. “But thank you. I don’t wish to imply that I haven’t enjoyed your company greatly so far-“ She falters again, conscious of her cheeks coloring, and Rose shakes her head.

“No such implication has been noted,” she assures, and there’s a glint in her eyes that makes Kanaya’s legs feel just a bit weak.

“-it is just that it is rather a large step to take in such a short time, especially since...” She flashes a weak smile, lowering her gaze. “...I have never done anything like that before. I have not, in fact, even kissed someone until today.”

Rose reaches out and takes her right hand in hers, gently twining their fingers together. “Then let’s take this a bit more slowly, shall we?”

Kanaya hesitates, but curiosity gets the better of her. “Have you? That is to say...”

“Yes,” Rose replies simply. “A couple of times - it was hardly anything dramatic, and it didn’t involve a lot of emotional investment, but it was enjoyable even so.” She leans forward a bit so their gazes meet again, lips quirking. “But please don’t take my cavalier attitude as impatience. I do not mind letting you decide the pace at all.”

That is in fact strangely reassuring, and Kanaya finds her own shoulders relaxing a bit, her face relaxing into a more genuine smile. “Then perhaps... something a bit more appropriate for the moment?”

“I’m all ears.”

Kanaya allows herself another moment of hesitation, thinking through if this is in fact what she really wants. To both her surprise and relief, she finds that it is. “I would like- During the ceremony there were so many people watching, I didn’t feel like I could relax at all, so I thought perhaps that we could try... maybe just kissing? I would like to know what it is like when it is not...”

“Mandatory? Supervised? Incredibly awkward? Slightly hampered by restrictive corsetry?” Rose raises her eyebrows with a meaningful smirk. “All of the above?”

“...Yes. That about covers it.”

“Then I would prefer actually removing this dress and my heels, if you don’t mind? There is something to be said for comfort over aesthetics in this particular scenario.”

“I do not mind at all. Since it’s only you and me in here, I think perhaps we should aim towards being as comfortable as possible.”

They exchange smiles, more relaxed now, and go about removing their dresses and accessories, stripping down to their underwear with far less awkwardness than Kanaya would have anticipated. Since Rose had indicated that she should take the lead, she gets on the bed herself after clearing away some of the rather pretty decorative plant matter. The human slides down beside her, her body feeling exactly as soft and warm as she’d expected, and yet somehow still, the sensation takes her by surprise.

“Ready?” she asks, a little bit teasing, but there is nothing demanding about it. There’s expectation, but no insistence.

Kanaya feels like a reply would be pretty superfluous, so she simply leans in and allows their lips to brush together. Gently at first, trying out the new sensation, trying to maneuver them both into a better position. Rose’s arms quickly become wrapped around her neck, her fingers trapped in her hair, and her own hands end up resting on her waist. She completely fails to realize how they draw closer to each other with each deepening kiss, each experimental flick of a tongue or tentative graze of a fang, until it’s brought to her attention by Rose sliding her leg over her hip, pushing her slightly backwards until she’s practically on top of her. She’s scandalized to find that she doesn’t mind.

Other than that, though, Rose does nothing except kiss her back. Her hands stay where they are, and she doesn’t shift around or press closer. Even when Kanaya’s breathing audibly picks up, and she can’t hold back a small gasp as Rose bites down on her lower lip, she doesn’t push. She allows it to be just kissing, albeit passionate and rather undressed such, and Kanaya is grateful for it.

After a while they both find themselves growing drowsy, the kisses getting slower and softer, the pauses between longer. Without really making a decision on the matter, they start drifting off in each others’ arms. Kanaya wakes up slightly as Rose disentangles herself momentarily, fishes on the floor for her pillow, and then scoots backward to align her body with hers again. Too tired to talk, Kanaya wraps her arm around her waist, buries her face against her back, and allows sleep to claim her.

Notes:

If you think I’m hyped about writing the ~morning after~ all of these shenanigans, you think right.

Chapter 9: Every day is the first

Summary:

The morning after the wedding dawns with some remembered backstory, a discussion on morality, cuddles and... hairy legs.

Yep.

Notes:

Write a fic full of incredibly wordy characters, they said. It will be fun, they said.

...Okay, it is fun, but damn.

It takes a while for Jake to wake up, coasting uneasily on the edge of muddled dreams because his eyelids still feel much too heavy. Usually he’s an early riser but maybe he was up late last night? He shifts slightly in an attempt to jog his brain a bit, and then immediately freezes. He’s very clearly not alone in his bed... and just like that, the previous night starts to crystallize in his still sleep-soggy brain, causing him to open his eyes in mild alarm.

It appears he didn’t misremember. First of all, this isn’t actually his bed. Secondly, Dirk’s face is barely more than an inch from his own, meaning that even without his glasses, he can still see it relatively well. Speaking of glasses, Dirk also isn’t wearing his own rather ridiculous eyewear. It’s not exactly the first time Jake sees him without them, or indeed sees him asleep, what with their many missions together. But it certainly is the first time he, ah, has the opportunity to study it quite so closely.

He lies still, knowing Dirk is a notoriously light sleeper, and that he’ll no doubt wake up if he tries to move away. He thinks perhaps it would be nice with just a moment or two to gather his thoughts. So instead he notes how when he’s asleep, Dirk’s mouth relaxes from the firm line it usually is pressed into, making it look soft and almost childish. He can glimpse a hint of orange in between his fair eyelashes, because apparently sleeping with his eyes completely closed is just not cool enough for him or something. He’s noticed this before, and is still torn between thinking it seems silly and impractical, and being kind of impressed regardless.

Like this, he looks more like the guy Jake had first met standing next to him on the quite frankly vast floor of one of SKAIA’s training halls, waiting for the superiors who called them there to explain why. It was after Jake had finished the initial half-year of training, which at the time he’d scoffed at as being ridiculously easy for a fellow of his experience and considerable amount of sheer grit. It was a position he’d later been forced to revisit more than once, and often to humiliating results.

Back then, though, he’d been full of gumption, excited to finally be allowed some genuine action. Like everyone else, he had been sorted into one of SKAIA’s specialist forces at the end of his training, a designation based on the abilities he’d shown, and which would determine his further training. He and his three cousins had ended up in different forces, and while he couldn’t say he was surprised, it was nonetheless a bit of a bummer to think that they would henceforth have fewer opportunities to spend time together. So he’d been surprised to enter the room only to find his cousins there as well, dressed just like him in their spanking new uniforms. The same cut and fabric, save for a few minor details, but all in different colors.

Unsurprisingly, Jade had ended up in the black and white of the Space forces, dedicated to the exploration and assessment of new planets - she had always had such an enquiring mind. John was wearing the blue Breath uniform, which signified that he would be working with backup and support to the other forces. They were frequently underestimated, since they had no speciality as such, but Jake had always supposed that meant that they possessed the qualities to excel in just about every situation. Jane smiled at him as he met her glance, and then pulled a bit awkwardly on the grey and green cloth of the Life uniform she was wearing. Of course she was in the force dedicated to bringing forth excellent medics. She had always looked to the needs of others, after all.

Jake had looked down then on the yellow and white of his own uniform, which slated him for the Hope force dedicated to outreach and peacekeeping. Even now, remembering the surge of pride he’d felt back then will always cause him to smile, even if it’s tinged with complicated and bittersweet feelings as of late.

Then the door had opened again, and four other youths had entered almost nonchalantly, right on the hour. They were also in four different uniforms. Light, research and analysis; Time, the strike force; Void, scouting unknown territory; Heart, infiltration and subterfuge. They’d lined up next to Jake’s family without any sign of surprise, waiting calmly for their superiors to speak.

Jake had tried very hard not to stare at them, and regrettably did not succeeded all that well. Of course he knew who they were - didn’t everyone? While it might be true that his family had quite the number of truly remarkable heroes to live up to, full of derring-do and outstanding moxie, they were by and large also people who shunned the public eye as much as possible. So while the recent generation had grown up aware of the greatness of their ancestry, they had also grown up in relative anonymity themselves, even disregarding his and Jade's particular... situations.

Not so much the children of Professor Lalonde, the fruit of her genius as a scientist and her dedication to populating new planets without having to rely on more traditional methods and mindsets. Not to mention nephews and nieces of an actual war hero as well. Jake had watched them on popular video streams many times, self-assured and bright even at their tender age, always dealing out witty answers and dazzling charm like cheap cigars. Enigmatic Rose, smart-mouthed Dave, charismatic Roxy, and tough-as-nails Dirk.

The latter was standing so close to Jake that if he reached out sideways, he was sure he’d be able to knock the shades off his face - not that he’d ever be caught dead doing something so discourteous, of course. And now he’d noticed him staring despite his best efforts, turning to meet his gaze with an unreadable expression. After a moment or two of intense eye contact - intensely uncomfortable, if he was to be honest - the other boy inclined his head very slightly.

“I’m Dirk,” he said.

“Yes,” said Jake, because he already knew that, and found himself more than a little bit flummoxed by being addressed directly so suddenly. He noticed a small twitch that couldn’t quite be called a smile and realized his own mistake, a wave of heat running up his neck to settle on his face. That’s what you get for spending your entire childhood interacting more with old ruins than with people. “Hell’s teeth, what kind of sorry introduction is that? What I meant to say, of course, is that I’m Jake English.”

“Yes,” the other boy agreed, and though Jake wasn’t sure if he was mocking him or attempting to make a friendly joke, he couldn’t help grinning in response.

Really, it’s hard not to become best friends after a first meeting like that. Especially as the eight of them were immediately dealt their very own special mission and informed they were frequently to work independently with each other. At the time, it had certainly felt like fate.

Had it felt like that to Dirk too? Did he actually believe in things like that? Even after years of friendship, it can be so hard to tell with Dirk, who will pretend to take so many things seriously that he doesn’t give a hooting fuck about, and then will turn right around and downplay things he’s seriously passionate about. Him and his brother both, but it’s a lot more transparent when Dave does it.

He’d simultaneously downplayed and been painfully obvious about his feelings for Jake, if such a thing was even possible. On one hand, he’d never said a word about it for so long, perhaps in the interest of attempting to retain a professional relationship. On the other hand, he hadn’t exactly been shy about alluding to it, and neither had the infuriating AI brain-twin android he’d created. Nor had he done much to hide the mounting tension between him and Jane, which was how Jake had been clued in about her feelings too. At least, he’d assumed that to be the reason, knowing full well that he wasn’t always the most perceptive of fellows. It had seemed to explain a lot... right up until the point when Jane suddenly seemed to lose all interest in him right after Jade’s accident.

He wasn’t exactly hurt by that; he’s fairly certain now that he’d been more relieved than disappointed. It was just frustrating, as he suddenly once again understood jack shit.

For a majority of all this time, he’d felt like it was an inevitability that he and Dirk would end up together. He’d given up on contemplating if it actually was what he wanted, since it appeared as if it would happen regardless. When Jake thinks about it now, with Dirk’s breath gently ghosting against his face, it seems like such an irresponsible way of thinking about it, so reckless with both his own and his best friend’s feelings. But that’s how he’d seen it.

Then all at once, a lot of things had transpired in rapid succession, most of which he had no explanation for still. The mysterious destruction of Dirk’s android, for one thing, and the subsequent transference of the AI into their ship. While it was quite a bear to deal with as a ship computer, it meant that it wasn’t constantly shouldering in on literally any interaction Dirk had with anyone. That certainly removed some of the feeling that he was being herded towards an inescapable conclusion.

This had coincided with... well, something happening to Dave, something which had made him difficult to deal with, cut off and dangerously volatile. Dirk refused to talk about it - they all did - but Jake could see how much it burdened him. Suddenly, his best friend was depending on him in a way which was different than before; in the weeks that followed he was much less demanding and more... vulnerable.

Then there was that whole awful affair with Jade being taken over by the damn Green Sun Corporation, and Rose getting trapped in the cargo ship that plowed right into that bastard Doc Scratch’s base of operations. He’d gone after her without thinking, and it was also without thinking he’d physically thrown her onto the teleport pad, reaching outside it to operate it. The whole thing happened so fast, he hadn’t even for a moment contemplated what the consequences might be, that’s the sad and not very heroic truth. And as they had reappeared in front of the majority of their friends, there had been a moment when his brain somehow hadn’t registered that he was now missing a limb. So he’d stepped forward in relief to greet them... and covered Dirk from head to toe in his blood.

He can’t remember much after that, as the blood loss quickly robbed him of his sensibilities. But he remembers staggering forwards helplessly, only to find Dirk’s strong arms catching him. He remembers the stunned, “No,” breathed into his ear, and then hitting the ground when Dirk, too, seemed to lose his footing. Dirk, who had always seemed incapable of making an involuntary movement, who always landed on his feet.

He’s sure that he had felt hot tears on his neck, heard the scrape of a choked sob, and then Dirk’s voice made raw and frantic by panic, calling for Jane over the communication gear. Then... nothing.

That’s how they’d ended up here. Recovery from the wound was going to take quite some time, and there were murderous and clever agents out there intent on their deaths, so a remote refuge had seemed like a good plan. Jane was tending to his recovery, Dirk to his prosthesis. As for the others... well, presumably they were there for the other reasons Dirk had mentioned, although Jake has no idea what those are. Perhaps Rose is recuperating from her accidental brush with death... but for this long? It’s all so blasted confusing, and no one seems all that eager to enlighten him.

The important part right now is that when he sat down to talk to Dirk about his feelings last night, to his surprise Jake found that the feeling of inevitability had gone missing. There was no smug android to bully him with insincere-yet-pointed overtures, and the Dirk in front of him no longer seemed like the impenetrable fortress he did before. He seemed hesitant, picking his words slowly and awkwardly, instead of spitting them out at the pace of the usual speedy drawl. Jake could still see the vulnerability of the guy who worried himself sick about his brother but couldn’t talk about it, the genuine affection of the guy who had panicked to see Jake wounded, the care of the guy who was asleep in a chair right next to his bed when he woke up in the medical bay. All those aspects of Dirk were there right then, had always been there, and Jake realized then that he owed them both more than to simply pretend like he had no choice.

It had still completely blindsided him when he’d suddenly decided to just kiss the man, and apparently it had done the same to Dirk. But it actually felt good to take charge for a change. He knows he’s not a leader now, not a hero; no matter what people call him, he knows the truth. But at least he’s brave enough to do this, and to do it for the right reasons.

Even so, it had been downright alarming how fast Dirk had folded backwards with him on top, how quickly he seemed to relinquish control completely. Enough so that Jake had stopped, asking timidly if this really was okay. If he’s to be honest, he’d been more than a bit relieved when Dirk rolled his eyes and wrapped his legs hard around his waist, ordering him not to ask stupid questions. There was taking charge and then there was flying blind, after all. It was nice to have a copilot who seemed to know what the devil he was doing.

“So, are you going to keep staring like that forever? Not that it’s not flattering, but your slack-jawed admiration is getting embarrassing at this point.”

Jake starts with the realization that Dirk is now awake, bumping their foreheads together painfully. “Argh! Gosh friggin darn it, Dirk.” He rubs his head, giving his best friend a put upon look. “I was somehow hoping, in vain I realize now, that being your boyfriend would spare me from that kind of fickle malarkey.”

“...Nah.” There is a moment of practically audible hesitation, and Dirk’s voice is slightly less unflappable when he speaks again. “So... we’re boyfriends?”

“Well, yes! I mean, I assumed as much.” Jake feels a bit hot under the collar, being asked to be the one to define their relationship now. Metaphorically, of course, because as he’s becoming more and more aware of by the second, he’s in fact not wearing a stitch of clothing. “Give a man some bloody credit, Dirk. I wouldn’t just go around kissing someone who I know has such ardent and deeply held feelings for me if I wasn’t planning to- to-“

“-to make an honest man out of me?”

“Yes... In a manner of speaking, that is.”

Dirk raises one eyebrow, propping his head up on one hand. “Is that what you call what happened last night? Shit dude, you didn’t even buy me dinner.”

Fuck it all blind, now his face is practically on fire and Dirk most definitely did that on purpose. He’s so pleased with himself too, blast him. “Well, by gum, I suppose that next time when we start getting a bit frisky, I’m supposed to immediately stop and offer to treat you to whatever high-class establishment your heart desires! Is that what you want?”

Dirk makes an incredulous little sound. “I can’t believe you just seriously used the work ‘frisky’ with impunity. Congratulations, now I suddenly feel slightly dirty - not because I’m lying here with a sore ass, but because I appear to have molested someone’s actual grandpa.”

Jake is about to offer a stern rebuttal, perhaps including a few choice words on the subject of this not being even remotely suitable pillow talk, but another concern overtakes these ones. “Ah, you’re- you’re not in too much pain, are you? I tried not to be too-“

He’s cut short by Dirk waving his hand dismissively. “I’m fine. Did you hear me complaining?”

“Well, no. But you never do that, regardless of what’s happening! I just thought I’d ask.”

“... Fair. Well, for the purpose of making this as clear as I possibly can, I have no regrets about a single thing that happened last night. If you open any suitably x-rated dictionary on the page of enthusiastic consent, you’ll find a picture of you putting your dick in me. Got it?”

Why is he like this? “Y-You didn’t have to put it like- That was thoroughly- Auuughhh”

Dirk sighs, reaching out and running his knuckles carefully across Jake’s cheek. It’s such a surprisingly gentle gesture, it stops him dead in his tracks, gaping at Dirk. “Sorry. I’m not actually trying to make fun of you for being considerate, as inconceivable as that might sound. I’m just- Well, fuck, I’m just a lot better at talking about dicks than how I feel.”

Jake sighs then, and after a moment of dithering he leans in and rests his head gently against Dirk’s chest. His arms settle around him after literally no hesitation at all, and at least that makes the whole situation feel a little more natural. “Strewth, I already knew as much. But I suppose I’m man enough to deal with it.”

“Good.” A beat. “Thanks.”

 

---

 

Kanaya is already awake when Rose opens her eyes, sitting up in bed with her embroidery in her lap. Apparently some kindly soul had put some of her personal items in here. She had explained that she was more used than most trolls to being awake during daylight, but that the quick transition these last weeks had nonetheless disturbed her sleep patterns. Rose wonders how long she has been awake, but it feels invasive to ask somehow.

Maybe that’s a silly thought, all things considered; Rose isn’t sure. She leans her chin in her hand, regarding the troll with interest. She’s still not wearing any clothes, just her blanket pulled up to her hips, so there is plenty of new things to study, now that she’s not preoccupied. Kanaya’s skin, which earlier had seemed paler than that of other trolls, now looks more or less exactly the same with her strange bioluminescence subdued. The shapes of her limbs seem a bit off, and after a moment or two Rose concludes that it’s because she’s looking for the familiar outline of muscles and bone which define a human form, but the shapes look slightly different. Not surprising, since it would be strange if troll internal anatomy overlapped entirely with that of humans. They’re not even mammals, after all.

Speaking of which, Rose is interested to find that Kanaya does indeed have shapes which read almost exactly as breasts even with her clothes off, with only a few differences. Obviously there are no nipples, because what would an insectoid life-form that doesn’t even raise its own young do with those? She’d also noticed that they seemed firmer, as if consisting less of fatty tissue and more of muscle... or some other form of tissue, filling some other purpose.

There are stark green markings on the sides of her torso; a very pleasing contrast against her skin, Rose finds. She naturally doesn’t have a belly button, but there is something else there instead, just a little bit off-center. Rose reaches out her hand slowly, giving Kanaya ample time to avoid it or stop it, but although her movements still and she glances down, she otherwise makes no move at all.

Rose gently rubs her fingers over the slightly lumpy tissue, some of it a paler grey than the rest of the skin, and some of it shifting in green. It’s not exactly hard to understand what it is; she has seen plenty of the human equivalent. Even so, it seems polite to ask. “A scar?” she inquires, gently running her fingertips along the edge of it and noticing how Kanaya shivers in response.

“Yes,” she replies, her voice matter-of-fact and just a little bit testy, though Rose can tell that the irritation isn’t directed at her. “Years ago a series of events led us to be stranded on a small research station on an asteroid. At the age we were at the time... well, young trolls are fairly volatile even during the best of circumstances, and those were certainly not that. As we were starting to run low on resources and energy for the oxygen synthesizer, the situation grew a tad... fraught. One of our friends panicked and brought forth the suggestion that we ought to kill off the lowbloods so that the higher castes would survive until rescue arrived.” Her lips tighten. “I disagreed.”

Rose mentally flips through the deck of Kanaya’s friends whom she had made a point of interacting with at the start of the festivities last night. It’s hardly a very challenging mental exercise. “What was his name, now... Tall, talks with a strange accent, absolutely tried to hit on me? Ah yes. Eridan. Am I right?”

“How could you possibly tell?” She rolls her wide-set eyes, and Rose feels proud of apparently having afflicted her with this much sarcasm in such a short while. “Yes, that is correct. He tried to use his stupid ostentatious gun to shoot Karkat, and I...” She sighs. “Well, I jumped in front of him. I received the brunt of the beam, at least for long enough for Feferi to club Eridan senseless with a one wheel device someone had left lying about.” Her lips quirk in a tart expression. “You could say it was a fairly dramatic break-up.”

“... Pale quadrant?”

“Yes.” Kanaya shrugs, and her shoulders move strangely, as if hinged differently from a human’s somehow. “Normally, I imagine I would have died from that wound. In a sense, I did die - or at least got really close, which is how my abilities as a Rainbow Drinker awakened.” She pulls a sour little face. “Just in time for me to help prevent someone else from murdering our entire party. I did mention what happens to Gamzee in the absence of Sopor Slime, did I not?”

“It does indeed seem like a precarious situation to be in. But... they are still your friends? Even after what happened?”

Kanaya looks uneasy. “You have to understand, we’re a naturally violent species. It is true that some of us have done things which might disgust someone who belongs to a more social species, but for us that kind of behavior is encouraged.” She bites her lip, shaking her head. “No, it’s not even true to say it’s an inevitable part of who we are, that is just more highblood propaganda, but it is a poison which runs especially deep in our society. It will take a lot of time and patience to remedy what has been endemic in our species for so long. Until then... it would not be entirely right to simply reject those that fall victim to the indoctrination we all have been subject to. If we do not believe they can change, or at the very least control themselves, how can we hold such beliefs for our entire culture?”

It all comes out in one big rush, and Rose listens carefully, because this feels like it might be important. This isn’t just idle speculation, but rather some firmly held beliefs. It’s fairly clear from the way Kanaya’s cheeks color as well, her breath catching slightly as if she’s said too much. Within troll society, Rose imagines that what she just heard would be considered taboo in more ways than one. So she soothingly runs two fingers up Kanaya’s chest, her hand coming to rest gently against her sternum.

“Don’t worry, I have no stake in troll politics - yet.” She smiles slightly as the emphasis makes Kanaya starts, playfully tapping a finger against her skin. “And if I did, I suspect I would agree with your position. If nothing else, a married couple is supposed to present a united front if at all possible.” She is quiet for a moment, doodling nonsense shapes with the tips of her fingers. “I agree more generally too, about giving people a second chance even after they- hmm, shall I say attempt violent and potentially harmful actions? About not blaming people for being a product of their own upbringing, certainly.”

Kanaya looks a little bit startled. “Forgive me for saying so, but you speak as if you have experienced similar situations. From my research, I would’ve assumed that situations like this would arise with less frequency among humans. I found it... interesting, the way you seem to condemn violence so completely.”

Rose can’t help smiling, though the gesture is tinged in rather grim amusement. “Well, I imagine your forays into human history have, perforce, been rather specific and narrow.” She follows that with an offhand little shrug. “It’s true that human values and ideals are vastly different from yours, and many of us do indeed strive to uphold them as best we can. But we’re not perfect by any means. Often, we end up falling rather short of what we want to be.”

“I... think I understand. It’s the same with us, only the other way around. Some of us simply are not cut out for a life where cruelty is a necessity.”

“Mm. I might not agree with it to the degrees to which troll society takes it, but it’s not as if it is untrue. A bit of cruelty is sometimes needed.” She laughs softly, not entirely happily. “But the problem with thinking like that is of course that a lot of very bad people have used similar arguments to justify truly monstrous things. At least troll society makes no secret of that it’s the right of the strong to do as they please. Among humans, it’s a lot more insidious.”

Kanaya regards her solemnly, then puts her embroidery aside and scoots closer across the rumpled sheets until their legs brush together, their hips bump. She slides an arm under Rose’s waist, splaying her fingers against the small of her back. It’s a comforting gesture, and Rose doesn’t know what to think of it, isn’t certain what little bit of darkness or hurt had showed on her face to make Kanaya react in such a way. She strikes out for something more general, less personal.

“I mean, look at this colony. It’s relatively new, all things considered, but what happens the moment a group of us are isolated in a fairly harsh environment?” She leans her face against Kanaya’s chest, gazing out through the window. “So much of the progress we have made starts draining away, and old superstitions and predispositions rear their ugly heads. We revert to the old and tried without actually considering whether or not it was right.”

“I imagine that is a persistent ill that befalls all sentient creatures which form some form of societies,” Kanaya murmurs, tentatively running a hand through her hair. It’s a pleasant sensation, and Rose has no issues with leaning into it, humming softly in appreciation. “But if we did not believe that we could change, what would be the point? We might as well keep wriggling around in the mucus of the hatching dens and never leave.”

Rose laughs then, more genuinely this time. “That’s a metaphor that needs a bit more work from a mammalian perspective, but I see your point.” She sighs, nuzzling against Kanaya’s neck with her temple. “Perhaps we ought to table all discussions of philosophy for now? I fear things have taken an unfortunately dolorous tone for the very first day of our marriage.”

Kanaya doesn’t offer a verbal reply, only keeps threading her fingers through Rose’s hair, the hand on her back moving in small, soothing circles. That’s good enough, really.

 

---

 

There’s a sun beam hitting him right in the face, and it’s nice and warm but also so bright. Dave considers turning over in bed, but his head is throbbing and he doesn’t really feel like it. He’s not feeling nearly as shitty as he’d expected, though.

Wait, why was he expecting to feel shitty? That’s right, he got drunk off his ass, didn’t he? He remembers John fussing over him - oh, right, he gave him water and pretzels and even an enormous pickle. What a magnificent bastard. That must be why Dave isn’t nearly as hung over as he probably deserves. He’s just got a moderate headache and a case of mild nausea, and also his mouth feels kind of sticky and weird. That’s not too terrible. He can manage it.

Sooo... why did he get so drunk again?

That’s when Karkat makes a weird klicking, grumbling sound and wraps his arms tighter around Dave, and he realizes that the troll is in fact straight up on top of him. Uh. Okay. Wow. He peeks slightly through his eyelashes, flinching in the blinding light, but accepting it as the price he has to pay to assess the situation. Yep. Not only is Karkat on top of him, but he’s clinging to him like a barnacle with all available limbs, arms flung around his neck and shoulder, and both legs tangled with Dave’s.

He’s pretty certain that when they both went to sleep, they were on the opposite sides of the bed from each other. What with the awkwardness of the whole bucket conversation, it had seemed best to just try to get unconscious as soon as possible. Considering Karkat’s reaction to that, too, it seems incredibly unlikely that he’d decided to grope Dave while he was sleeping. Unless he’s literally the best actor Dave has ever met or something, and that seems highly unlikely.

So he’s probably just the most intense sleep cuddler he’s met instead, and that’s really saying something too, what with John always ending up drooling on his shoulder when they had to bunk together on missions. Is Karkat...? Yeeep, there are faint red smears of troll drool on Dave’s chest now. Nice.

Shit, but it’s actually kind of cute? Karkat isn’t all that heavy, so it’s not like he’s being smothered by him or anything, and it’s kind of nice to be held like this. Although... damn, he’s glad he doesn’t appear to have had one of his nightmares during the night, because he has no damn clue how he’d react to waking up with someone on top of him then. He’s pretty sure that it’s frowned upon to kick your new spouse clean across the room right when you wake up - or, well, at any time. Don’t kick your spouse across the room. This has been a really fucking obvious PSA, kids.

Maybe he should tell Karkat about the nightmares and everything? Okay, but has he considered the counter proposal: Maybe he can try to never talk about it ever and just... gag himself before going to bed? He could claim that it’s a human custom and not weird at all. It might work, right?

He’s quite ready to think about something else, so he gazes down curiously at Karkat. His mouth is slightly open, and he’s making a very faint whirring noise which Dave supposes is like the troll version of snoring. It kind of makes him wonder what they really sound like, without the gross translation thingies activated. Maybe he’ll try to find out later.

Between his black lips his teeth are visible, straight and sharp and tainted the very faintest hue of pink, probably since his saliva is red. His tongue appears to be dark grey from what little Dave can see of it, also with the same slight pink tint to it. Weird. He’s not honestly sure if the weirdest part is how different the trolls are, or all the ways in which they are in fact alike - how does it make sense for insect people to have tongues, after all? Maybe it’s a combination of the two. Like how with his eyes closed, Dave could almost trick himself into thinking Karkat is human, albeit one with a bit of a fever. You keep thinking they’re basically the same, until some weird and random detail trips you up. It’s wild.

In the interest of science, he slowly reaches up and cautiously ruffles Karkat’s glossy black hair. That’s strange, too. Really rather stiff and bristly, and if you stroke against rather than with it, it kind of prickles your skin? But the surface of the actual strands is silky, the texture nice and thick as Dave buries his fingers there. He wonders if the hair of different trolls feel different, just like it does for different humans. Probably, right? Kanaya’s hair looks so well-behaved and slick, and Feferi’s hair looks basically like a big, fluffy black cloud.

Then there’s the horns. Dave pokes one slightly, then runs his finger gently across the smooth surface. A bit less like horn and a bit more like the surface of a beetle’s shell, maybe? He thinks the former is probably a bit rougher than the latter, and honestly there is hardly any friction at all, not to mention that the sheen to the surface is borderline iridescent. It’s really quite pretty, this close up.

“So, firstly, good morning I guess? Secondly, what the fuck?”

Whoops. He’s awake. “Shouldn’t I say the same? I mean, you’re the one on top of me, not the other way around. I think gently poking your horns is fairly mild compared to literally pinning a dude to the mattress with your body - that’s in the rules of sports, I’m pretty sure.”

Karkat props himself up until he can glare down at him. He looks sleepy and bedraggled, and the hair on the side of his head that was pressed against Dave’s chest is smushed down and sticking out at weird angles. This close up, he can feel the strange vibration in Karkat’s chest when he speaks, hear the faint little clicks and and hums behind his speech - wordless sounds that can’t be translated into something human, Dave guesses. “Yes because clearly an involuntary action that happens while I sleep is exactly the same as something you chose to do because your ability to control your fucking impulses is actually slightly more pathetic than my will to put up with your bullshit this late- fuck, I mean early in the morning.” He raises his hand and touches one horn a bit self-consciously, and Dave notices that his nails have the same yellow-to-orange tint as his horns. “What’s wrong with my horns?”

Dave raises his eyebrows slightly. Damn, the room is still so bright. Where the fuck are his shades? “Nothing, dude. It’s just that in case you hadn’t noticed, I am lamentably hornless. I’ve never known the joy of horns, and neither has anyone in my direct vicinity. So since you were getting all comfortable on my chest anyway, I thought I’d check what they feel like. That’s all.”

“Oh.” That appears to derail him a bit. “I guess that’s... not too strange.” He frowns a bit, reaching out and running his fingers across Dave’s scalp where, supposedly, his horns would be if he was a troll.

“D’you think maybe I’m hiding them there somewhere? Because let me tell you, this flimsy blond shit crawling its way out of my scalp couldn’t hide so much as a blade of grass, let alone two bright, candy corn colored horns sticking out of my skull.”

“Fuck you.” Karkat runs his hand more slowly through his hair this time, feeling the skin with the pads of his fingers. “It’s just weird, that’s all. There really is nothing there at all. Not even a pair of stunted horn beds or something.”

“Yeah no, we never had any. Like we ain’t the evolution of some kind of super smart gazelle or some shit like that, slowly losing our useless horns over time because no one ever does any head sparring anymore. We’re just straight-up apes, and the only stuff that might become obsolete over time is our excess hair.”

Karkat frowns, reaching out to rub his thumb across Dave’s chin. “You mean this?”

Dave snorts. “Man, that’s just because I was so strung up yesterday, I forgot to shave. It’s pretty generous of you to call it hair. It’s more like a mild skin condition. Hell, even if I tried to grow it for months, all you’d have would be some kind of scraggly lichen that may or may not dissolve in rainwater.” He lifts his left leg - the one Karkat isn’t directly on top of - as far up as it will go. Which is pretty far, considering he’d been taught early to kick people in the face and do weird contortionist shit to fit into air vents. “I was more talking about this.”

Karkat glances sideways, and then blinks a bit in surprise. “On your... leg?”

“Yeah, sure. Leg, arm, armpit, crotch... but my arms are relatively bare, and I wasn’t gonna hold up the other two to your face, was I?”

Karkat colors at his words, but his hand is already reaching out as if he’s hypnotized, fingers running gently through the wispy blond down. Dave shivers, thinking maybe it was a mistake to invite this while Karkat is sitting square on top of him. “...All your hair is so soft,” Karkat murmurs, which means his voice is at a normal speaking volume for once.

“I guess? It does this thing where it kind of grows out of my skin and that's quite literally it, courtesy of the messed-up genes I had the pleasure of inheriting. Ethnically ambiguous albino hair with a texture somewhere between limp straw and fiberglass. The only way to get it to do anything is to spend hours on it like Dirk. I mostly just let it be.”

Karkat isn’t really listening. He’s still brushing his fingers across Dave’s leg, hence his nervous babbling. When he gets to the knee he falters for a moment, then slowly allows his hand to glide down Dave’s thigh. His breath catches, his heart starting to beat faster, and the further down his thigh that hand gets the more intensely he’s feeling Karkat’s weight on top of him and-

“Whoa!” He grabs Karkat’s hand in his, hoping his voice doesn’t sound quite as breathy and weird as it feels. “Okay, I know I literally initiated this, but uh... maybe not any further down? Especially not when you’re kind of sitting right on my beef whistle, you know? Unless you want shit to get awkward in what you would call a bucket kind of way really damn fast.”

“What? Oh.” Again the floundering pause, and then Karkat looks like he’s been genetically spliced with some breed of beet root. “Fuck. I didn’t mean to- I mean- Why did you- I was just- Fuck.” His eyes are inevitably drawn down, and Dave is glad he cut him short early enough that he’s only at half mast right now. Karkat probably can’t notice that, or he doesn’t know what it means. Either way, the troll suddenly rolls off him so fast, he just keeps going until he rolls off the bed and hits the floor with a loud thump and a string of curses.

Dave reaches out to the bedside table and grabs his shades, putting them on and staring up at the canopy as Karkat gets to his feet and stomps around looking for clothes. Hopefully they’ll have breakfast up for them soon. Until then... maybe a quick cold wash. In lack of a shower, there’s the pump down in the courtyard. Desperate times, desperate measures, and so on.

Notes:

Well, someone had to get laid during the wedding night, and lbr it wasn’t going to be the people actually getting married.

Chapter 10: Tick tock

Summary:

Two rooftop conversations, wherein Jade deals admirably with boys being difficult, and both the feelings of robots and the confusing ins and outs of teenage sexuality are discussed.

The sunrise over the desert had been truly magnificent. Jade swings her legs slowly, perched on one of the taller rooftops in town. She hadn’t had much of a chance to spend time on the planet before they were off on another mission again. Everything had happened in such a blur back then, and honestly she’d still been so shaken by being taken over by bad guys, it had been hard to take anything in. She kind of wishes that she couldn’t remember anything she did while in that state, that she could think of everything she did as happening to Another Jade, but it doesn’t work like that. Since her brain is part computer now, she has a perfect record of every horrifying event that transpired, every cruel thing she said. It’s all there if she wishes to access it.

She tries really hard not to.

She has however gone through every memory, every file, every part of herself while obsessively looking for any sign that they might still be able to take her over. She hadn’t been the only one, in fact, and so far not a single trace could be found. The unsettling dreams have stopped completely, and she no longer has those strange intrusive thoughts. Presumably, she is safe.

Even so... it is hard to disregard the fact that all her computerized parts are in fact Green Sun products. Their damn logo is even printed on some of the parts, invisible to the human eye, but naturally not to hers. Just another smug, shitty joke from the smuggest and shittiest joker of all. Another way of leaving a mark on her, as if his deranged laughter in her head when Rose’s ship crashed into his moon base wasn’t bad enough. It had continued even as she had been able to feel his body burning, until the very last vestige of his mind was consumed.

On one hand, that hopefully means that he’s dead for good. On the other, it’s hard to convince herself that the last part of him that is alive doesn’t exists within her now. Lousy goddamn psychics.

She’s been told that it’s different now, that there are security routines installed in her brain that will ‘clamp down like the asscheeks of the very hardest of gym bros while doing some serious lifting’ if anyone tries to take her over again. But even being a cyborg, that is all a little bit too abstract to be actually comforting.

“It seems you are doubting the security of your brain, and/or the tightness of that hypothetical assclench, despite my assurances. I would say I’m hurt, but my emotional response is much more nuanced and complex than that, and we both know it.”

Jane blinks, then frowns at the empty air in front of her. “Hal! That is so rude. You can’t just go through my thoughts whenever you feel like it. That’s a serious invasion of privacy!”

“Grab a wrench and untwist those nipples at once, Harley. It’s not like I would ever waste even the minuscule fraction of my attention it would require to constantly keep tabs on your thoughts. You’re by far the least boring organic out there due to your substantial upgrade, but not even you are that interesting.” His voice in her head, probably by ironic design, is like a spookily distorted version of Dirk’s. “Besides, if I could seriously monitor your thoughts in secret at all time, the routines I installed in you wouldn’t be doing their job. From the moment I connected to you, I had exactly ten seconds to make myself known, or even I would probably have been utterly annihilated. I spoke up after exactly 9.9999999 seconds - and because you are what you are, you’re capable of quite a lot of thoughts in that timespan.”

It’s part wheedling flattery, part mockery and part genuinely friendly appreciation - but it’s hard to tell how much there is of each. Jade sighs, rolling her eyes. “Fine! I suppose you getting ten second snippets of my thoughts from time to time is something I can put up with, compared to the alternative. So...?”

“So why did I contact you.”

“Yes!”

“Oh, that wasn’t a question. According to my calculations, that was the only logical continuation of your sentence.”

Jade snorts loudly. “Your calculations my ass! You’re being twee now. Just answer already!”

On the part of her field of vision that she thinks of as the ‘screen’, where Hal’s words are appearing in print as she speaks to him, a new viewport opens. It shows a reel of several movie characters shrugging, one after the other. Jade can’t help laughing, even though he’s being such a difficult customer on purpose.

“Just wanted to know how the wedding went. It’s all so primitive down there, there were hardly even any cameras present that were advanced enough for me to hack. And the troll technology is proving to be... a challenge.” He sounds annoyed, but Jade thinks it’s probably good for him to not have everything go his way. “Call it brotherly concern... for a given value of both ‘brotherly’ and ‘concern’.”

It’s hard to know if he’s actually sincere about caring, or if he just wants to amuse himself with gossip, but Jade doesn’t mind either way. “It went well enough, I think. Rose seems to be having fun without anything immediately dangerous happening, so that’s nice. I don’t think just living the simple life and taking it easy suited her, to tell the truth.”

“Probably not. Even if I try to dumb down my thinking to the level of supposedly clever humans, that still sounds nauseatingly dull.”

“Not necessarily! This place is actually really beautiful,” she turns her head around so he can get a good view, “and even if it’s all pretty simple, it sounds like there’s always a lot to do. I kind of find it relaxing already.”

“As an entity with no need for either beauty or relaxation, I’ll take your word for it.”

“Fiiiine, be that way.” She shrugs lightly. “I think it’s really done Dave a lot of good. He looks like he’s been eating and sleeping better... he’s a lot more relaxed than before too. I know that awful man has still been around, but I think he mostly sticks around their mom now and leaves Dave alone.”

“You mean their uncle? I’m still not sure why you all suddenly dislike him so much. Most of his actions seem very logical to me.”

“No! I’m not going to debate this with you again. I’m having a nice morning, and I’m not going to ruin it by talking about that asshole, thank you.”

There is a pause during which there is no reply, and Jade is willing to bet anything that Hal is going to pretend that the previous exchange didn’t happen in that passive-aggressive way of his. She’s proven right only a moment later. “So, it all went off without a hitch despite the circumstances? That seems unlikely.”

“Well, I didn’t say that. It’s still pretty awkward, them having to marry strangers who are also aliens. Rose seems to get along with her spouse pretty well, but I think it’s still really weird for Dave. He actually got pretty drunk during the party.” She sighs, frowning up at the wispy clouds drifting past far above, even as a small part of her brain analyzes their structure and composition, throwing up recorded atmospheric data for Muspell, the planet. “I don’t imagine it’s actually because the alien is a guy like John thinks - or at least, I don’t think it’s the major concern. Dave is just pretty sensitive about letting people that close, for any reason.”

“Spoken as his understanding yet exasperated ex girlfriend.”

“And as his friend. Mostly that, actually! I mean, he wasn’t my boyfriend for that long.” She presses her lips together through his pointed silence, until finally she rolls her eyes and groans. “Okay, okay, that was part of the reason why it didn’t work out. Back then, there were all these things that obviously bothered him, but every time I tried to talk about it, he’d make it into a joke. It was just impossible to get him to be serious, even when I could see that he was really upset. At least the- the sort of breakdown seems to have made him a bit more willing to talk about stuff.”

“Having feelings sounds incredibly impractical. I’m glad I, a robot who became a ship, will never experience anything like that.”

“Woooow, you’re so full of shit, Mr Threw Himself Heroically In Front Of Dirk To Save His Life.”

“Eh. I was just reasonably sure that with him gone, there would be no one to stop one of you from deactivating me with a sledgehammer. Probably Jake or John.”

“That’s total bullshit and you know it. Dirk told me what you said when you thought you were going to die.”

“Yeah, I remember. ‘Rosebud’. Very poignant.”

“No, not that. Before that.”

Another long silence, during which Jade listens the chittering of the local fauna and the slow bustle of the town waking up below her. “Harley-“

“I won’t pass it on. It was just that right after I woke up with all my new robot parts, I didn’t even feel like a real person anymore. I told Dirk about it since he was the one who... installed them, and I was kind of taking out my anger on him. And he told me. Because if you were a real person... I had to be one too.”

Another long moment of silence. Jade waits patiently for a while, and then patience goes missing. He’s probably just sulking. “Look, I think it’s best if we drop this subject for now. Maybe we can talk about it later, okay? People are starting to wake up, and I think I see Dave down there.” She squints, even if it’s not necessary since her left eye zooms in automatically after a moment or two. “...Why is he so wet?”

“It seems you would like to know why your ex boyfriend is so wet. Since even my most advanced calculations offer no answer to that - or indeed to the illogical actions of biological lifeforms in general - I will refrain from making a ‘that’s what he/she/they said’ joke, and let you get on with finding out why for yourself.” Oh yeah, he’s definitely sulking.

“Good idea! Later, Hal.”

There is no answer. He has disconnected.

 

---

 

One good thing about the water from the pumps, since they are hooked up to deposits of paleowater a long way beneath the desert, is that it’s icy cold. Admittedly it’s not entirely easy to keep from shrieking in an undignified manner while dousing himself, and the long rant on the theme of ‘fuck this’ that he settles on instead is only marginally more respectable. But at least it is a 100% certain bonerkill - or indeed ½boner kill.

The weird looks he gets from a couple of passersby helps too.

He’s using his shirt to towel off his hair a bit when he gets addressed from almost right above his head, and just about jumps out of his skin. Maybe one day he won’t instinctively reach for a gun regardless of the situation, but it sure as fuck isn’t this day. All he gets is a handful of wet pants, since he wasn’t about to strip those off in the middle of the courtyard.

“Dave! Ohhh, sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” Jade crouches down where she’s perched on some of the facade decorations on the building, looking sheepish. “I guess I should’ve gotten down before calling out.”

Forcing himself to relax, Dave shakes his head in reply. “It’s cool. I should’ve remembered about the mysterious ways of the elusive android furry in the wild. If you get a bit further up, maybe find somewhere a guy who doesn’t have robo-glutes can relax too, I can join you in a bit.”

She giggles, nodding, and ascends at speed back up to the roof where, presumably, she came from. Dave raises his eyebrows slightly, impressed. She’d always been fast and nimble before, of course, but the inhuman speed at which she moves now is something else. He hadn’t really had much time to assess the changes in her much, other than in an ‘oh shit, she’s gonna kill me’ kind of way when she was mind-controlled by that cue ball-headed narcissist.

Sliding his shades back on, he then stuffs his shirt in his bag and flings it over his shoulder, mentally measuring the distances for a moment before darting forward. Making his way up the facade is easy; there are a lot of handholds, and he’d always enjoyed the parkouring that frequently ended up as a part of his job. He’d never even minded that part of his training as a kid... much. He’d minded the part where his uncle was apparently incapable of grasping the concept of a safety net. The actual climbing had been fine, the falling not so much.

Thankfully the roofs don’t slope too much - something about being designed to gather up what little rainwater there is while at the same time getting as much out of the solar tiles as possible - and Jade has found a ledge above a couple of windows that is almost flat. The dark surfaces are hot to the touch even at this hour, so Dave pulls out his shirt and puts it on the roof before sitting down, just to add another layer of insulation. Jade doesn’t seem to notice, but then again, he wouldn’t propose to guess how much of her legs are still made of living tissue.

“Sooo,” Jade chirps, tilting her head just like she always does. He tries not to notice how her hair doesn’t move quite naturally, because it is in fact not natural hair. “Why are you so wet? And why outside? Aren’t there facilities inside?”

He tries out the sentence, ‘Oh, my new alien husband accidentally gave me a half chub by stroking my leg hairs for science,’ in his head, and decides he’d rather throw himself off the roof right the fuck now before saying that to anyone, let alone Jade. Naaaaah. “Yeah, but the goddamn hygiene modules get me down. It’s like getting dutch ovened by a machine, and you end up trying not to inhale while the chemicals are sprayed on you like the wettest of soap farts, or you’ll spend the rest of the day with a taste in your mouth like you tongued a well-scrubbed mama’s boy’s asscrack. So even though the fossil water we pump from the ground is colder than all the witches’ tits in the most BDSM possible metal bras within the frigid depths of space, and even though I just used up way too many of my pump tokens in one go... it was still preferable, you dig?”

Jade blinks at him, then snorts loudly, bumping her shoulder against his. It’s the right one, so it feels completely normal. “You’re so weird,” she says, scrunching up her nose slightly. “But okay, you don’t like the hygiene modules, so you went out and dunked yourself in cold water from the pump instead.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s another way of saying it, if you don’t give a shit about poetry. What about the arts, Harley? How quickly you robot people forget about the arts.”

She sticks out her tongue at him, but since she’s laughing at the same time, he doesn’t take it very seriously. Dave bends over to root around in his bag, making a triumphant little noise when he finds the fist-sized, square object he was looking for. “Hey, can you help me with this?” He demonstrates which button to press to get it to dispense a fine mist over his skin. “A thing that the hygiene modules are actually good at is that they spray you down with this sun screen shit at the same time. So just in case, I think I should probably get a refill of that, or end up looking like a sad molting lizard.”

“Sure!” She takes it from him and scoots back a little bit so she can use it on his back. “So, um... how did last night go?”

Dave can’t help it, not when she left herself wide open like that. He glances over his shoulder at her, raises one eyebrow and breaks out his very best deadpan. “Are you asking me if I got laid, Jade?”

”No!” She prods him with her foot, rolling her eyes. “I mean, I would assume you didn’t, since apparently you got really drunk! What was up with that?”

“See, the thing that was up with that...” Dave looks away. “Is that it was stupid and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Dave...” He feels her hands still on his back.

“Look, you don’t have to worry, alright?” He rakes his hand through his damp hair. “I hardly enjoyed any part of that fervent attempt to make an ass of myself, not to mention I’ve still got a headache now. So there definitely won’t be a repeat performance of that particular shitshow. No chance of me becoming another sequel in the saga about how poorly my family deals with alcohol.”

She pats his neck lightly with her free hand as she starts spraying him down again. One of her fingers navigates across one of his many scars without hesitating, and he appreciates her for it. She'd never pried back when they were a couple, perhaps not even noticing that his skin was a bit more fucked up than everyone else's - he hopes that's the case. He hopes she's not beating herself up for not realizing. “Honestly, I was mostly worried about how you were feeling. And, well, your husband? How did he feel about it?”

Dave snorts. “Shit, if he really minded, he’d be kind of a hypocrite, considering he got thoroughly baked on some kind of troll weed pie.”

“...What?”

“Look, I don’t have all the details on their edibles, but I think his huge friend might be the alien version of a stoner, and definitely supplied him with something that made him about as coherent as I was feeling at the time.”

“Oh.” A moment’s pause. “Well that’s... good? I mean, not exactly good, but at least he’s probably not going to be angry with you, right?”

She’s always been so good at finding the most positive spin on things possible, but Dave can’t help making a small amused sound. “I’m pretty sure ‘angry’ is just that guy’s default setting. But yeah, no, he wasn’t judging me for my drunkscapades as such. Just, you know... other stuff. According to him, there appears to be a lot about me which makes for great judgement material. Madness, right? Clearly aliens don’t know greatness when they gaze upon it.”

Jade mutters something under her breath about hating Hal when he’s right, and Dave sends her a sharp look. “Please tell me that smug discount version of my brother isn’t eavesdropping on this conversation.” He feels bad about badmouthing Hal considering what he’d done to him, and the AI being the irrefutable reason why Dirk is still alive. But to be fair, if Hal didn’t keep rubbing that shit in his face at any opportunity he gets, maybe he wouldn’t.

Jade just gives him a disapproving look, but she’s kind enough not to call him out. “No, he’s not. I just spoke to him earlier, that’s all. You know, one robot to another?”

That’s her way of gently reminding him that disparaging Hal’s existence as an actual individual is kind of a dick move when talking to his cyborg friend. Dave rubs his face, and he doesn’t argue with her, but he doesn’t know what to say either. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t cover all of his complicated feelings in the matter. It never will.

She remains quiet for a moment, finishing up his back and giving him back the sun screen dispenser so he can do the parts he can actually reach. Edging herself back down next to him, she offers him a kind smile, clearly to let him know that she’s not mad at her. Wow. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve his friends. She’s the only one who wasn’t directly involved when he flipped his shit who knows what happened, probably courtesy of being robo-buddies with someone who was, but she’d never passed it on to Jane or Jake... or anyone else for that matter.

“So,” she says in a tone which clearly signals that she’s switching to a lighter subject and that’s final, “once John stopped trying to keep this whole thing a secret from me - really, that was very silly of both of you! - he asked me my opinion of you getting married to a guy. You know, as your ex girlfriend.” She giggles as Dave groans and almost accidentally sprays sunscreen inside his mouth.

“Goddamn Egbert,” he mutters, wiping the stuff off his lower lip. “He can’t just contain his dorkiness to himself, he has to spread around the embarrassment as well.”

“Yyyeees, I thought it was pretty dumb and I told him so. I mean, I’m not sure what he was expecting me to say! It’s not like having a girlfriend at some point means you’re disqualified from liking guys too.” She tilts her head slightly, giving his shoulder another nudge. “He said you’d told him that you didn’t know for sure if you did. Have you come to any conclusion there?”

Dave thinks about the feeling of Karkat’s fingertips sliding down his thigh, the solid weight of him despite how scrawny he looks, the heat of his body flush against his. The way his body had reacted before he had time to really think of it. Had that been some kind of proof that he’s into guys? Or had it just been a reaction to anyone touching him like that in a good long while, considering it was like what, two years since he and Jade broke up? Shit, he’s nineteen, if he’s going to assume that all the random shit that’s given him boners somehow define his sexuality, then he’s got some severely niche and unfortunate fetishes to deal with.

Not that he minds if he does like dudes, because honestly, who apart from the people in this insane colony cares? But maybe he’d like to know for sure before he... well, he supposes before he hypothetically takes things any further with Karkat? Though that’s an awkward thought that he’d rather not explore right now.

“Nah, not really. I mean, we’ve mostly been trying to figure out if we even like each other, which was awkward enough with the wedding looming over us like some kind of kitschy doomsday countdown.” He finishes spraying down his arms and tucks the sun screen dispenser back in his bag. “That, and dealing with the constant cultural clash. I mean, I’d say if anything turns out to be an issue, it’s probably because he’s an alien, not a guy. What do our ideas of gender even mean to insect aliens that don’t give birth, you know? Do troll dudes have dicks? So do some human girls, so why would that even matter, purely from a determining what corresponds to our own standards perspective? I mean fuck, they have a different language, so ‘male’ and ‘female’ are most likely approximations. They’re probably nothing like us. Do they actually have sexual organs in their feet? Anal teeth? What the fuck is, and I quote, a ‘shame globe’? What’s the deal with buckets?”

Jade is staring at him now. “Um... I don’t know?”

“Of course you don’t. I don’t either. The point I’m trying to make...” Dave flounders, waving a hand aimlessly. “The point- The point is that everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”

Jade smiles, but a bit uncertainly. “Well, leaving xenobiology and advanced gender studies aside for a minute... how would you feel about dating a human guy?”

Dave makes a weird gesture that combines shaking his head and shrugging at the same time. “I don’t know. It’s just hard to imagine, but I don’t think that says anything about my sexuality because... well, I just don’t think about dating, full stop.”

“Not at all?” Her lips twitch slightly, but Dave just frowns.

“Not really. My whole life was just a long stretch of preparation for joining SKAIA, and once I got there I was busy thinking about missions most of the time.” She raises her eyebrows a bit, and he rolls his eyes. “I mean sure, I’d fuck around and have fun on my spare time, I’m not Dirk levels of tightassed, but I didn’t have enough of it that I could waste it making friends outside our group, you know?”

“I suppose... I mean, I didn’t really do that either. I guess it never felt that important. We would always have each other, you know?”

“Exactly. So even though we were all in the middle of hormonal prime time, the dating pool was pretty slim and we couldn’t all keep pissing in it or it would go rank.”

“Ew, Dave!”

Right. Maybe not something to say to the one person within said dating pool that he had dated. “I mean, uh... you and I, that just kind of happened, you know? At least for me it did. Suddenly you just kissed me out of nowhere and I thought oh, okay, this is actually pretty nice.”

She looks like she is either contemplating laughing in his face or slapping him. “Would you like a bigger shovel?”

“...No, I think I’m digging myself deep enough with the one I’ve got, thanks.”

Laughing it is. At least that’s good. “It wasn’t exactly ‘out of nowhere’ for me, but I think I see what you mean. It wasn’t all that complicated, is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Exactly!” He manages not to actually grin with relief, but he’s grateful that he’s got friends who are good at extracting the intention from his meandering, incomprehensible bullshit. “Boy meets girl, girl eventually clues him in about liking him, they date, boy messes it up... but hopefully not too badly since they keep being friends.”

“You didn’t mess up, Dave,” she sighs, poking his side with a metal digit cold enough to make him shiver. “It just didn’t work out. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault.”

Since that’s not related to the point he’s trying to make, he refrains from bringing up how his emotional issues were pretty much the main reason why it didn’t work out. “Okay, but the thing is... things with you were still a pretty straightforward. Trying to imagine dating a guy isn’t, since the only guys I really know are my brother, a guy that there was already kind of a line to get into to get a part of, and... well, John. Who is John. And that’s as far as I’m taking that thought, because no. Not that he isn’t attractive... I mean, not that I’ve thought about it, but like... Fuck, what I mean is that I need my best bro without weird invasive thoughts about boning him.” Man, put like that, he supposes he can understand the whole troll things about pale romance a bit better. At least in theory that would mean making sure there’s never any awkward sexual tension getting in the way when you just need someone to be real about feelings with.

Jade giggles, shaking her head. “You always have to make things so complicated, but I see what you mean.” She colors slightly. “So what about just... just sex? I mean, you don’t have to be dating someone...”

“Well yes, obviously. But that just seems kind of weird to me, I guess? Hello, nice to meet you, let me shove my tongue in your ass.” Jade makes a choking sound as a giggle appears to collide with a scandalized yelp, and Dave hurriedly adds: “I mean, not that I judge anyone who does that kind of thing, obviously! I just can’t imagine keeping a straight face while a complete stranger interacts with my dick - I mean, I’d crack up or cringe or something if shit got too serious, or I’d say something weird that would send them running.”

Jade gives him a dryly amused look. “It’s not like you didn’t do those things back when... well, you know.”

“Exactly! That’s my point, though. You already knew me, so like, even if I was a pain your ass, you didn’t immediately get up and leave the first time I blurted out something absurd with my face in your tits.”

She swats him then, and he can’t help flinching. “Ow, Jade, careful with the goods please. I’m still a squishy human, and I don’t feel like explaining bruises shaped like your hand to my new alien husband. I don’t know, I just don’t really feel like we’re at that point in our relationship.”

“Oops. Sorry.” She looks a bit sheepish, gingerly patting his arm. “But I guess I see your point. I haven’t been all that interested in strangers either, not more than once or twice.”

“...How interested was that, then?”

Jade flushes. “Wouldn’t you like to know!”

“Well, yeah, that’s why I asked.”

“Well, I’m not telling you, so there.” She gives him a light shove, clearly making sure to control her freaky robot strength this time. “So you’ve never...?”

“Wow, pretty hypocritical to ask that immediately after, don’t you think? But no, apart from losing my virginity to you and the awkward teenage making out-slash-sex that followed, I’ve resigned my dick to majestic solitude until the moment I find someone else worthy enough of the benediction of its touch.”

She just gives him A Look, which he honestly knows he deserves, and he’s actually impressed that she doesn’t fling him off the roof. “Anyway, I guess maybe don’t worry too much about all that then, and just keep trying to figure out if you like him, and in what way? That probably is the best way to go about it, like you said.”

Dave nods, and after a moment or two leans sideways to rest his head on her shoulder. “Thanks. For like... everything I guess, but right now for dealing with whatever weird, mutant shit my stream of consciousness throws up at the shore, gasping and writhing and stuff. I appreciate it.” He glances up at the sun, frowning slightly. “Hey, robot friend, what’s the time?”

Jade pinches him, but not very hard at all. “The time locally is eight dot twelve dot four in the morning, out of a twenty-six hour, five minute and forty second day, rounded off to even hours and adjusted quarter-annually for the sake of conventions.” Her voice goes more flat and inhuman while reciting data. After a moment or two she adds, like an afterthought: “Tick tock.”

Dave doesn’t really worry about that part, though, because he’s already scrambling to his feet. “Shit, I’m late for breakfast. I told Karkat I’d meet him there.”

Jade grins. “You’d better hurry, then!”

Notes:

I know every chapter is usually at least three segments, but my god, both Dave and Hal are SO WORDY? These dudes never shut up. Especially Dave.

Chapter 11: Good intentions

Summary:

It’s hard to get along and also hard dealing with not getting along, especially when you’re both neurotic fucks with very little in the way of filters.

It’s also hard when you can’t trust your brain not to make everything worse.

Notes:

This one took a little longer to write, sorry :P I’ve been a bit tired now that autumn has hit for real, and also I appear to have lost my glasses somewhere. I will try to keep a better pace, though.

It’s a very pleasant day, for all that there’s a bit of urgency in the air. The shared breakfast feels more relaxed than the party last night, and Kanaya spends her time idly listening to other people talking. Rose is engaged in some verbal back-and-forth with Terezi and Vriska, which all of them seem to enjoy in the same way some people enjoy juggling edged weapons for fun. In the same vein, being a spectator to it is both a bit nerve-wracking as well as rather satisfying.

Roxy and her friend - Jane, wasn’t it? - are having a lively discussion with Feferi and Nepeta which involves a lot of loud laughter from Roxy, squeaky excitement from the heiress and expressive gesturing from Nepeta. Jane doesn’t appear quite as rambunctious as the other three, but she nonetheless smiles and laughs with the rest. Equius is sitting close by, no doubt dragged there by Nepeta, but he looks a bit awkward and out of place next to the bubbly vim and enthusiasm that the four of them are positively radiating. Kanaya has to admit that the tableau presented is pretty funny.

It’s really good to see Nepeta looking so happy, all things considered. Kanaya kind of hopes that she’ll get more chances to hang out with the humans, if this is the effect they have on her.

Eridan is talking to the human called Jake, and Kanaya had noticed with fascination how his awkward come-ons at the beginning of the conversation had repeatedly flown completely over the human’s head, until the point where Eridan just... gave up. Now they’re arguing about about cinematography, apparently from the opposing viewpoints of an indiscriminate omnivore and a hideous snob, but not in a particularly rancorous fashion. The one called Dirk is sitting next to them with his chin in his hand, watching the exchange with the same blank expression he consistently wears, though Kanaya notices a possessive arm placed firmly around Jake’s waist.

Next to her, Karkat is tapping the table irritably with his nails. Dave is late.

She hears him by the door before he sees him, apparently in the middle of bickering with someone.

“Daaaave, wait!”

“What?”

“I don’t know, maybe you should put a shirt on?”

“...holy shit, right. Bad enough my pants are wet, I must look like a tool.”

“Yeah, kinda. Here let me... What’s that gross thing on your neck, by the way?”

“What, the creepy translation spider? Didn’t you get one too?”

“Durrrrrr Dave, I’m part computer now. And Alternian is one of the languages I’m programmed to understand.”

“What, really? That weird. I mean, human devices are absolute shit at it still.”

“Well, humans didn’t make my robot parts, now did they?”

“...Oh. Right. Shit, sorry.”

“It’s fine. There, turn around.” A pause. “Good enough. Now go apologize to your husband, okay.”

“I, uh- yeah. Got it.”

Kanaya becomes aware at this point that the reason she could hear the entire exchange so well is that everyone around her has fallen silent and is listening too, eyes either fixed on Karkat or the door. Her friend’s cheeks are bright red under their scrutiny. A muscle under his eye twitches.

Dave walks in, and then stops awkwardly as he encounters an entire room full of people staring at him. “Uh, hi? Damn, I know y’all must’ve been languishing miserably without me, but seriously, it’s kind of sad when you make it so obvious. I mean, shit, I turn up a quarter of an hour late, and no one has anything better to do than to stare with bated breath at the door, hoping for just a glimpse of my chafing, damp pants and my villainously rumpled shirt? Should’ve just left the shirt off to let everyone bask in the glow of my scrawny white chest, I guess.”

The smack next to her has to be Karkat’s face meeting with his hands. As is confirmed by his muffled voice when he speaks next. “Oh my fucking- Is shutting up before you embarrass us both further a thing you could conceivably attempt in your future? And by future I mean right the fuck now, this very instant, before I have to go over there myself and strangle you to death with your own disheveled attire?”

Everyone’s eyes snap back to Dave, as if following the action of a particularly nasty Onslaughtennis duel. He grimaces, pulling at a lock of hair that appears to have gotten stuck in his shades. “Okay, okay, maybe not the best way to start this completely rad apology I had in mind, but to be fair I wasn’t talking to you, you know? Just, fuck, there’s this entire crowd of assholes clearly not minding their own business and they’re kind of throwing me off? And the threats of textile-based violence aren’t doing it for me either, I gotta say.”

“Oh? Oh isn’t it?” Karkat is rising out of his seat now, leaning forward on the table, which he’s gripping hard in both hands. “Well shit everyone, stop the word bangers immediately, the human doesn’t feel like this is doing it for him. Too bad his own repugnant culture has us trapped like this then, because let me tell you, this choo-choo scuttler has only just left the station!”

“No, that’s not- Is this a big deal to you?” He’s raising his eyebrows now, the flat drawl of his voice appearing to grow more nonchalant the louder Karkat gets. “Is it really? You go from ‘welp shit, who’s this douchebag’ to ‘why are you not writing a shitty sonnet where you kiss my ass and tell me how sorry you are that you arrived late for breakfast’ in hardly any time at all? For real? Because I gotta tell you, that’s kind of creepy.”

It’s fascinating to watch, really. From the way Rose has explained it, this strange tension in the air, which reads to Kanaya like the whole thing in front of them is either dangerously close to waxing full pitch, or will be the start of some seriously awkward vacillation... that might just be part of a normal human romance? One that is nominally red, but can contain traces of more or less every other kind of romance as well.

Humans are strange and outrageous creatures.

Karkat’s fists are clenching and unclenching rapidly, and though Kanaya knows that he can indeed be touchy about things like time keeping and organization, she also knows that this isn’t really what it’s about either. It started as irritation at being made to wait, compounded by the attention being paid to him when Dave finally entered, and then escalated far beyond his normal level of background aggravation by Dave acting so flippant. She’d object to that more herself, if it wasn’t so plain that Dave is just trying to compensate for his nervously fiddling hands and restless posture.

Now, she’d venture, Karkat doesn’t know how to act, because he’s probably still thinking about the situation in terms of quadrants. Does he respond to what seems like a caliginous situation in kind, despite knowing that humans don’t observe that kind of courtship? Should he try to turn the exchange more red, and risk looking like he’s flagrantly vacillating already? Or maybe try to defuse, mixing a third quadrant into the mess - and right in front of Gamzee, no less? Or should he let it drop? Kanaya is still confused about human relationships too, but she’s pretty certain that the latter is the wisest move. She also knows it’s not something that comes easily to Karkat.

“Heeey, okay, this is pretty funny and all, but uh...” The human named John is suddenly standing between them, hands raised in a placating gesture. “Maybe arguing from opposite ends of the room is a bit unnecessary? Why not just talk to each other up close, huh? That way you’d have less of an audience, too.”

Okay, Kanaya isn’t sure that the humans aren’t playing some kind of quadrant bingo on purpose now. Considering the way Karkat is staring at John, cheeks stained a furious red, he’s thinking along the same lines. Feferi stifles a giggle in her hand. Vriska raises her eyebrows. Eridan rolls his eyes.

Gamzee reaches out a hand and nudges Karkat’s elbow almost timidly. “You know, I don’t think I really am about to get a hang of human culture and all that noise yet, but maybe... maybe cool it a bit on the shouting? I think this might be one big motherfucking misunderstanding.”

Karkat looks like he’s about to snap at him too, and then pulls in a deep breath so suddenly that he practically chokes on it. “Okay. Right. Fine.” He breathes out explosively, his strangled irritation coming out as a series of waspish little clicks down in his throat. Really, he can be so childish at times. “Misunderstandings is pretty much the theme of my life at this point anyway. Sure, why not indulge in some more cultural sensitivity lessons, Karkat, since that is going so well for you. Thank you, I guess I will, because apparently the human fuckparade of mixed signals isn’t going to get any better, and I’d like to not descend even further into the blistering depths of humiliation wrought by my own renegade squawk gaper.” He sits back down in his chair, arms crossed defensively over his chest. “Feel free to get over yourself and sit the fuck down.”

But Dave is still just kind of standing there, and something about the line of his shoulders and pinched lips suddenly makes the situation less funny, less like something that can be observed safely and dissected for details. It’s like they can all sense the shift in the air, going from spectators to involuntary inciters in an instant. The other trolls, like her, shift awkwardly in their seats, unsure how to deal with this sudden minefield of human fragility. The humans’ reactions, however, are more interesting still.

John is lowering his hands, brows pulling together in worry, and Kanaya notes that he moves slightly, placing his body directly in the path between Dave and Karkat. Rose is frowning, fingers twitching. Dirk’s hand moves and then stops, and he shakes his head with a small grimace that almost looks like shame. Roxy stands up.

The only ones not reacting overtly are Jake and Jane, but the latter is watching her friends very carefully.

Karkat’s mouth gradually softens out of its petulant expression, as it slowly seems to dawn that this all just went wrong on him. His eyes are softening too, both out of contrition and sudden insecurity. Kanaya has seen that expression before, knows how easily his jargon can carry him away until there’s suddenly no ground under his feet, nothing to support his anger and nothing that will allow him to backpedal. Her stupid, sweet, utterly thoughtless best friend.

His mouth opens, and she knows that it’s to frame an apology. But Dave seems to suddenly snap out of whatever froze him, his lip curling momentarily as if he’s tempted to bare his teeth, and then stifles the impulse. His face goes blank, not even betraying the studied aloofness from before. “Fuck this,” he says, and then simply turns around and walks right out again.

A moment later, they can hear Jade’s voice. “Dave? Dave, are you okay? Dave, wait up!” Apparently she was waiting outside.

Karkat gets up as well shortly thereafter, not meeting anyone’s gaze, and exits the room a bit too hurriedly. Kanaya suspects that he’s not trying to catch up with Dave so much as outrun his own emotional response, so he can deal with it where no one is looking.

Any moment now...

“Well, fuck...” Gamzee gets up, sighs, and lumbers after him. Maybe, Kanaya thinks anxiously, it might actually be good for Karkat to have a moirail right now. They can probably work something out... right?

Rose primly puts down her knife, lifting her napkin to dab at the corners of her mouth. “The hovercrafts will leave in an hour and a half. Since breakfast is officially ruined, perhaps we might all attempt to get ready?”

No one disagrees.

 

---

 

The landscape whipping past below the hovercraft is in some ways rather uniform, with the same shades of umber, terracotta and dusty pink blending into one another endlessly. There is little to break through the monotony now that they’ve left the deep dark green pits, fiery orange mud and cotton candy fungi of the salt water springs far behind. A majority of the desert vegetation clings to the sides of cliffs or creeps across whatever shadowy corners a rock formation or a hole in the ground might offer. Even the treelike vegetation out there looks almost indistinguishable from the rocks themselves, with only the flash of a leaf reflecting the sun to give them away.

Then again, Rose wouldn’t call it boring by any stretch of the imagination. The swirling patterns of dust across flat plains will give away to deep, impossibly carved canyons at a moment’s notice, and only a minute later the hovercraft has to weave perilously through sharp, spiraling cliffs. Rose enjoys this in particular, as they can hear the wind wail and roar among the labyrinth of rocks, and watch huge flights of flying reptiles and clouds of batlike insects pass below and above.

Because it’s her mother’s private hovercraft, there are several large windows on the sides with plush sofas running along them, as well as several half-spheres of glass protruding from the floor so one can watch the ground directly below as well. She notes that most of the trolls traveling with them are keeping well away from any windowed surfaces, clearly still struggling with the idea of a sun that doesn’t actively harm those caught in its rays - at least not as quickly as it does on their home world. There are some notable exceptions however. The one called Aradia is flat on her stomach against one of the sloping windows, excitedly pointing out everything they’re passing by and trying to get Sollux to stop lurking in the shadows and come join her. It doesn’t look like she’ll have much luck with that. The girl called Terezi is licking the windows and cackling loudly, saying it tastes like bubblegum and whatever “grubroast” is. Oh, and of course Kanaya is sitting happily curled up in a sofa, enjoying the slanting rays of the sun on her face. It’s a beautiful image, and Rose allows herself to enjoy it a moment longer.

She does, however, have a mission.

She finds Dave toward the back of the craft, slouching in one of the window bubbles on the floor. He’s so tall, his body has to be folded into a lot of awkward angles for him to sit comfortably there, but there’s still plenty of space left. She slides down next to him without addressing him first, leaning her head against his shoulder. He sighs.

“Is there any way to opt out of the sister-to-brother psychobabble hour? Not really feeling it right now. Not even with the addition of the illest of beats or the most serious of fires would Rose Picks My Brain be my jam right now. Sorry.”

Rose nudges his arm with her elbow, but not very hard. “So defensive so soon, dear brother? Why, you’re not even going to give me time to haul out a suitable couch, serious notebook and appropriate German accent before you decide to shoot me down so viciously?” He looks like he might actually snap at her, so she holds up a hand to cut him short. “But I’m not here to analyze you, Dave, or even to ask questions unless you want me to. It’s just that we haven’t actually talked since this whole circus began, and I thought perhaps it was time to rectify that.”

He opens his mouth as if to refute her statement, then frowns, shaking his head slightly. “Shit, I guess we haven’t. I mean not a proper, no-fucking-around, face to face Dave and Rose chat with no other goddamn interlopers to dilute the pure Daveness and Roseness of said serious business talk.” He winces slightly. “Do we have to have one right now?”

Rose sighs, only a little bit theatrically, and watches a group of some sort of animals skitter up a cliff face below, far enough away that they are only visible as movements and faint shadows. “There can be some fucking around, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be all serious business. But since the fact of the matter is that we are the ones melodramatic enough to throw ourselves on this particular sword - in other words, we’re in this together... well, doesn’t that require at least a perfunctory attempt at bonding over it?”

She honestly wishes at times like this that she was better at expressing herself sincerely, with no hyperbolic sentimentality, nor any affectionate passive-aggressive barbs to muddy the waters. She has to rely on the fact that Dave must know the nuances of her particular brand of communication by now, just as she knows how to parse the different tones of his ramblings.

He quirks an eyebrow at her, and she already knows he’s planning to be contrary. “Sort of like a ‘Spouses of weird aliens’ support group? Solemn circle of chairs in a cramped-ass room, holding hands and crying, the whole nine unit of measurement of your choice? Hello My Name Is Dave And I Married Someone Who Probably Hates Me, And Not Even In A Sexy Alien Kind Of Way?” He lapses into moody silence, tilting his head away as if something just caught his eye, but Rose would bet anything that he’s just staring at nothing behind his shades. The dark glass reflects the rushing landscape down below.

“You don’t actually think he hates you.” She’s very careful to keep what she said a statement, not a question. That makes it neutral enough for him to ignore if he likes to, but he can counter it if he feels like it.

There’s a calculated pause, as if he’s waiting to see if she’ll go away, despite both of them knowing perfectly well that she won’t. Then he groans, running a hand through his hair. “No, I don’t, and that’s not even the point. The point is that he’s still fine with being an asshole the moment I put a foot wrong, and I do that a lot because I’m an asshole too and I suffer from permanent Fuckupa Pedis, which is this rare and lamentable condition where your feet are literally never where they’re supposed to be - the medical term being that they’re rascally little fuckers - so you spend your whole life either chewing on them, accidentally kicking people in the face, or climbing slowly up your own asshole.” He laughs abruptly, not very happily. “Shit, maybe I am developing a thing for feet. Quick, go tell John immediately.”

She disregards most of that as his mouth running on automatic while his brain is preoccupied with other things. But she can tell that he’s unhappy and doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s not all that hard to read, if you actually know him. “I know you’re worried, Dave-“

“Worried? Fuck no. Worried is some hand-wringing, lip-biting irrational shit. I’m getting very calmly and rationally concerned that this is all gonna make me even more insane than I already am. Which is- it’s not something you want to hear from someone who has already gone certifiably bananas in a distinctly violent way once before, I get it.”

She sighs then, a soft and not entirely steady little sound, and leans against him a bit more heavily. Very well. Maybe it really does need to be a serious business talk about feelings. Not one where she analyzes him while dancing in circles around him either. The real stuff. “I know, Dave. I’m having similar concerns. You’re not the sole member of our family to have gone right off the deep end, if you recall?”

He glances sideways at her then, eyes more crimson than bright red in the shadow of his glasses. “Okay, let me preface this with saying that I’m not a complete asshole and I know you’re being serious right now, but... why?” His gaze darts over to Kanaya, who is sipping something from a cup and gazing pensively at the horizon. “I thought you were getting along really well with your new wife? You can make her blush just by looking at her by now, it’s this whole disgustingly cute thing.”

Rose shifts a bit where she sits, glancing around to see that no one is close enough to hear, and speaks in a lowered voice just in case. “Oh, we get along fine. But... hm.” She’s not quite sure how to explain it, so she searches for words while watching Karkat stomp over to where Kanaya sits, flinching at the sun and muttering to himself, but nonetheless flopping down gracelessly next to her. She smiles and offers him something out of a bag, probably those delightfully sinister-looking caramelized bug snacks. “You know that thing I do, where I treat your thoughts and the words you use and whatever you’re feeling like some sort of specimen I have pinned down to examine?”

“The thing that drives all of us nuts, which is the reason that Jane once threw a ladle at your head - which I congratulated her for, by the way? Yeah. I think I know which thing you mean.”

“Hurtful,” Rose mumbles, but it isn’t really. She can all too well understand why it frustrates the people she loves to be treated in such a fashion. It’s just that she doesn’t know any other way to be. “The predicament I find myself in is that the exigencies of my somewhat twisted mind demand that I treat every thought, feeling and interaction the same way. Including my own. That along with my manipulative streak and, alas, narcissistic nature means that-“ She breathes out heavily, realizing that she’s using polysyllables as a means of stalling. Over at the couch, Kanaya appears to be scolding Karkat for managing to get little insect bits all down the front of his shirt, and is brushing him down. He flaps half-heartedly at her hand, scowling, but it’s pretty clear that he’s not actually trying to stop her. “-I don’t actually know what I’m really feeling, most of the time. I pick everything apart in its components as if I’m getting paid to perform mental surgery on myself, and I often provoke specific reactions from my own psyche because I enjoy whichever particular narrative I’m entertaining myself with currently.”

Dave raises his eyebrows slightly, and Rose feels unfamiliar heat rising on her cheeks, her momentary discomfiture causing her to glance away. “I know I’m fond of her, Dave. She’s a really nice person and she deserves nice things happening to her.” Her mouth twists slightly, in something that was meant to be a smile, but which grew hooks and barbs in the making. “And I’m not sure I’m actually a nice thing happening to her. I’m not sure I’m not just pretending to be, because right now it pleases me to play that part. In a month, a year... will I feel the same? Or will I end up hurting her? Will I end up hurting others in the process too?”

He’s quiet for a moment, and then suddenly his arms are wrapping around her, practically pulling her into his lap as he hugs her. It’s rather disorienting. In her mind, he’s still somehow the slightly runty, scrawny preteen who would hang out in her room when she was trying to focus on her studies, mumble-rapping under his breath and stealing her snacks because he always seemed to be hungry back then. It’s strange every time she’s reminded how much bigger he is than her now, still lanky but made of practically endless arms and legs, elbows and knees. She’s the shortest out of the four of them, more petite in her build than Roxy, and she feels like she’s practically drowning in the hug.

It’s not bad, though. She leans her cheek on his chest, noticing how he smells like sunscreen, shaving cream and apple juice. Clean, simple smells. Her little brother, who has hurt so much and still gives so much to others.

“Hey Rose?” he mumbles, and his voice sounds so much deeper with her ear against his chest. “I know you’re by far the baddest bitch out of all four of us, no matter what Dirk might think...” She laughs softly, and he chuckles and actually ruffles her hair. The nerve. “But since I don’t have y’all’s personal problem of turning literally everything into some kind of machiavellian mind puzzle, maybe you can, I don’t know, try to trust me on this even if you can’t trust yourself? I know that sounds cheesy but, shit, just- just listen, alright?”

His hand presses gently against the top of her head, tilting her chin up slowly. She rolls her eyes slightly, but allows it. “I’m listening, Dave.”

“You like her. When you think about hurting her, even accidentally, it makes you feel like shit.” He shrugs slightly, leaning in and placing a light peck on the top of her head, making her feel like he’s older than her for a weird moment. “That’s enough, Rose. You can work with that. Whatever comes next, even if it’s not traditionally how things should go or some bullshit like that, or even if happens because you were trying to manipulate yourself into this weird-ass seduction saga like you’re personally the writer of the shitty Harlequin novel of your life... As long as you actually give a shit, and try your best to not fuck up the people around you, that’s all that matters.”

She smiles a bit tiredly at how earnest he is, settling down next to him with her head against his shoulder again. “You know what they say the road to hell is paved with, right?”

Dave makes a small sound, and she can’t decide if it’s exasperated or amused... or both. “It’s better than not trying. Having good intentions beats the hell out of sitting around and thinking you’re already boned so why bother, any day.”

She supposes he has a point, at that. It doesn’t exactly solve her problem, but it does sound less inevitable when he puts it like that. “This wasn’t what I imagined at all,” she gripes, swatting at him a tad too feebly to have the desired effect. “I was supposed to make you feel better with my considerable wisdom, not the other way around. I’d like you to please take my poor ego into consideration in the future.”

He snorts. “Rose, there is no way conceivable by man or alien to actually forget about your ego. It’d be like forgetting about a live sperm whale hanging out in the same room as you. Maybe your mind drifts off for a second, but there it is when you look up, huge and looming over you and probably about to crush you to a fine pulp, or just knock you the fuck out with its enormous metaphorical whale dong.”

She jabs him in the ribs with a finger in revenge, and he makes a funny squawking little sound and tries to twist away. Curse the cruel fate that made all of them some varying degrees of ticklish - except Dirk, the bastard. But it’s pretty funny when he gives her a betrayed look like she just broke some kind of sacred accord, and she can’t help laughing. Even so, she’s still concerned for him, and maybe it shows on her face, because he cuts her short before she can speak again.

“I guess it sort of did help, though? I mean, it’s a lot easier to focus on figuring someone else’s shit out, but that’s not really all of it. I guess what I mean is, maybe I should just take my own advice and just try to work this out. I mean, it’s not like I hate him either, but like... well, every time I get a little bit closer to really liking him, we both fuck up and it feels like hitting a square on some screwed up relationship board game, telling you to go back to the start.” He grimaces awkwardly. “But like I said, maybe I’m just blowing it out of proportion too, and all I gotta do is relax and trust that I can do this. It’s just...”

She’s close enough to see his eyes flicker, hear him swallow hard. She bets anything that if she were to lean in and listen to his chest, she’d be able to hear his heart speeding up. “Go on,” she murmurs, not bothering to hide her piqued interest.

He gives her an unimpressed look, but doesn’t bother to comment on it. “I don’t know where the line is anymore,” he blurts out instead after a moment of agonized hesitation. “Every time I get angry or stressed I think shit, is this it? Is this when round two starts? Fuck, I know the last time we were on an actual mission, there was real-ass danger instead of awkward social situations that probably set me off. But I still remember that it didn’t really feel all that special, you know? I was about as stressed out as I usually is, I was holding shit together, and then suddenly...”

She nods, and she can still hear Dirk’s voice frantically trying to snap Dave out of it even as he tried to get away, to dodge, to not die. Her own voice trying to stay calm, trying to direct attention away. She can remember so clearly the blank look in Dave’s eyes as she stepped in between them, shielding Dirk with her body, her certainty that her brother would never raise a hand to her. The shock of him grabbing her was so violent, she didn’t even remember that she was supposed to be fighting back until it was too late.

“I’m not even sure what did it, what made me snap,” Dave says in a low, miserable voice. “So I keep thinking... what if he pushes me at the wrong time, what if he says something that- Like, I’m not even talking full delusional murder-mode here, but even if I just hit him once, even if I just threaten to, or get all... all tensed up and cold and make him feel like I’m gonna do something bad...” He draws in a shaky breath. “I don’t wanna be like that. I don’t-“

“-want to be like our uncle,” she finishes, laying a finger over his mouth before he can protest, before he can call her out on analyzing his words like she said she wouldn’t. “You’re not. You know that. But if you still feel like you can’t trust your own reactions, I think I can at least promise to keep an eye on you both. I’ll be living close by, after all.” She gently pats his cheek. “If things between you seem like they’re going bad, I’ll find some way to intervene.”

He gives her a heartbreaking look, somewhere between hopeful, ashamed and uncertain. “Last time... I threw you into a wall,” he reminds her, as if he has to. As if she can’t hear the sound of the breath being knocked from her lungs in the silence between each word.

“I know.” She smiles then, glancing over at Roxy and John, who appear engaged in a particularly rowdy game of slam, cards flying everywhere. “But just like last time, I’ll be sure to have some backup. I promise.”

Notes:

Another really talky chapter, but hey, stuff is sort of happening in the background? Besides, Dave and Rose were super overdue for a chat.

Chapter 12: Regrouping

Summary:

The past never goes away, the future is uncertain and potentially messy, so hold on to the present and don’t let go.

Notes:

HELLO. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been learning how to drive (yes at the tender age of 31, don’t @ me) and it’s taken up a lot of my time. But here’s chapter 12, and I’ll try to work on 13 now that I’ll have more time to spare. Thanks for your patience!

“It’s the sea!” Feferi has stayed away from the windows for most of the trip; like most of her kin, direct sunlight still makes her uneasy. But now she rushes to the window which Aradia is still glued against, pressing her body flush against it next to her, so close that their elbows are jostling playfully for space. Aradia laughs at her eagerness, showing a white row of teeth which are significantly more blunt than what is usual for their species - but not for her blood caste in particular.

She’s so much smaller than her, her body so much frailer, and she doesn’t even have proper fangs. And she could fling her princess clear through this reinforced window without even batting an eyelid if she wanted. Feferi finds it delightful.

Idly she thinks that there should be a word for this kind of relationship too, the kind you get when you both occupy different quadrants in someone else’s grid. There’s a special kind of kinship to it, a fondness built from seeing someone else supply someone you love with something they need, something you yourself can’t give. It shouldn’t be a reason to feel jealous, but to appreciate your shared dedication to another person’s happiness, and to strengthen each other in this task.

She wonders if she should say something about it, but the sea inexorably draws her attention back. She can feel the protective fins by her gills flaring, as if aching for something other than dry air. The webbing between her fingers itches. She sighs, watching the coast grow nearer.

Because of the dramatic tides along this coast, what with the three massive moons, a lot of sediments from the plains frequently tint the water along the shoreline in rust, tan and pink. At this distance, it looks rather morbid, as if the blood of a hundred, a thousand culled rustbloods has seeped into the waves. At the same time, it’s rather pretty, the currents creating swirling patterns against the dark azure depths.

Somewhere down there, her lusus is waiting for her. All of them who still have living lusii had been forced to hide them away from the growing opposition toward their faction among the highbloods. Alternia hadn’t been safe for either of them anymore, especially after Karkat’s ancestry had been found out by a select few. Kanaya’s lusus was already dead from natural causes, Aradia’s had perished in the incident that almost took her life, Gamzee’s had been the victim of a targeted attack, and Vriska claims her lusus had suffered the same fate. No one questions that claim; no one is that unkind. The rest of them, though, found their guardians in need of protection, and had taken steps.

The biggest problem, literally, was Gl'bgolyb. She needed to be taken to another planet, not so much for her own safety as because she needed to be somewhere off planet where Feferi would be safe, so she could keep maintaining her bond with her after fleeing Alternia. If this was done in a way that displeased her, the consequences would be immeasurably horrible. Even after Feferi had managed to convince her that it was in their best interest, it had taken such a huge operation to get her here, so many favors owed, such a terrible effort which had almost culminated in catastrophe.

Oh well. At least the seas of this planet are full of enormous underwater terrors lurking in the deep trenches. Her lusus will not go hungry here.

Another way for Eridan to convince himself that he’s useless, though. She lets out a string of worried high-frequency clicks, the kind which humans apparently have trouble hearing properly. He’s taken to occupying himself with strange architectural projects, and she lets him, making sure he has everything he might need to that end. It’s better than him going on about killing off all humans, or moping. Even though she doesn’t feel that way about him anymore, she still feels responsible for how badly it ended between them... and also maybe a little bit sorry about hitting him with a one-wheel device and breaking off a part of his left horn. Even if he was really asking for it. The point is, she still keeps an eye on him, just in case.

She rather misses their friendship, though. He’s really the only other sea dweller who is on her side, and she misses being able to talk to him without things being so awkward. Even if his own relationship with water is still really weird, he would at least understand why she is so happy to be back here in a way that land dwellers can’t quite grasp.

She sighs, the window in front of her misting over slightly, even from her relatively cool breath. A dainty finger appears in front of her nose, using the condensation to draw a smiling face with sharp fangs and a decent attempt at her horns. She giggles, and Aradia bumps her shoulder against her arm.

“No frowning! Especially over dumb ‘buoys’.”

Feferi sticks her tongue out in mock affront. “This is my fishpunishment for hanging out with the precodnizant, isn’t it?”

That gets her a snort from the other girl, along with an amused look. “Or maybe he’s the most common cause for that face, silly. I don’t need any precognitive abilities to make an educated guess.”

She supposes Aradia has a point there. And it’s pretty dumb to fret about things she cannot help, especially when so many exciting things are happening right now. She should try to focus on that for now, and work on some kind of solution down the line. Lucky for her a cluster of rectangular shapes come into view on the plains below, offering a perfect distraction. “Look! That must be the human settlement. Their buildings almost alwaves have that shape for some reason.”

Aradia squints, head tilted as she tries to make it out. “Do they always live all clumped up like that? And isn’t it supposes to be by the sea? It looks pretty odd, all those little platforms around it, but no water.”

“See all that flat ground that sort of glitters, and all those small pools of water?” Feferi lifts her hand and points at the stretch of land between the settlement and the sea. “I bet the tide is low right now, that’s why it looks like that. The glittery stuff is probably salt after the water’s been drying out.”

“Is that where they’ll be living? It seems a bit... crowded.” Feferi notices how she glances sideways along the window, where Karkat is now leaning against Kanaya’s propped-up legs, arms folded over the back of the sofa and his face buried in them. He looks like he might be napping. Kanaya is awake, sitting carefully still so as not to jostle him. She’s holding an open book, but it rests forgotten in her lap as she gazes out the window with a thoughtful expression.

“Nooo, that was still a bit too far from the border. It was agreefed that both couple will be housed esquidistant from the border but on opposite sides. That way both sides can kelp an eye on each other.”

Aradia raises an eyebrow, though her smile stays where it is. “That doesn’t sound very trusting, does it?” Toward the back of the ship, their friends’ spouses sit leaning against each other in one of those strange window bubbles. Rose’s eyes are closed, her expression tranquil; it’s impossible to read much of Dave’s at this distance, with the shades covering his eyes. After this morning, it seems like a good idea for everyone to take a break and rest up.

Feferi grimaces slightly in response to Aradia’s question. “Well, trusting isn’t exactly what I’d call either side right now. Honestly, it’s reely dumb. It’s not like the human settlement hasn’t been here for years before - and we knew about it! They just didn’t know aboat us, because until recently, all of our facilities were underwater and far out at sea. The sea dwellers were content to ignore what they saw as a minor infishtation of primitive aliens on land.” She sighs. “But it was hardly possible to hide it when we transported my lusus here, and around the same time, Professor Lalonde and her children’s arrival brought a fincrease in humans - including her personal seacurity detail.” She shrugs tiredly. “My own entourage didn’t look kindly on the humans appearing to increase their firepower right at my arrival. I tried to convince everyone that it was a coastincidence, but at that point everyone was shouting and not inclined to listen to sense anymoray. Fast forward a quarter-sweep, and here we are.”

“Oh wow. You’re right, that’s really dumb!” Aradia laughs, and though it really is no laughing matter, Feferi can’t help grinning back. She can’t help or change what her friends are like, and honestly, she doesn’t want to. Not a single one of them. She doesn’t really want to be changing either, but she’s aware that she has little choice in the matter at this point. “But even if how we got here was stupid, doesn’t mean we can’t be clever about the situation right now, right? And it doesn’t have to be all bad. I mean, if they have to live close to each other on opposite sides of the border, that means we don’t have to be very far apart, right?”

Feferi nods, smiling. “That’s true! I’ve already made arrangements so that we can all live in the same hive on that side.” She doesn’t add how important it is for all of them not to be too far separated right now; they need to stick together in case the Condesce‘s agents make a move again. Karkat in particular is a dead troll walking if they let him too far out of sight.

From the look Aradia gives her, it’s clear that she already knows, but she chooses not bring it up as well. “That’s nice! So, where will they be staying on the human side?”

They’re practically on top of it already, but Feferi still points to the towering cliffs to the west of the settlement, where one lone building is silhouetted against the bright blue dome of the sky. “Up there!”

 

---

 

It had apparently been some sort of communication hub from the time before they got SkaiaNet set up down here, making this place obsolete. John never paid much attention to the boring parts of history classes, to which all kinds of now redundant technology definitely belong, so he’s not sure what exactly had been going on here or why the high elevation had been necessary. Thank god he hadn’t been forced to hang around here for an extended time before they managed to set up the network, that sounds miserable.

As they’d fixed up the place for Dave and Karkat to move in, they’d torn out all the old electronics and dumped them outside, and they’re still there in one big heap of wires and circuit boards. Predictably, Dirk is already crouching down and running his hands over the mess, murmuring softly to himself. John catches Jake’s eye, and they both grin and roll their eyes. Even if it’s outdated and kind of dumb, the guy just can’t help getting his hands all over it. What a nerd!

One of the trolls, the one with the lisp and the perma-bored expression, steps over and crouches down as well. He raises his eyebrows slightly, huffing out a quiet laugh. “Wooow. This is just amazingly primitive, isn’t it?” John feels that’s kind of rude, even if it’s true.

Dirk just shrugs and nods. “Of course. But I imagine it took a while to have something more useful set up. Paperwork, bureaucracy... The beauty of the more simple shit is that you can just set it up anywhere and it’s ready to go.”

“Not that I imagine a lowblood like you would understand-“ Oh hey, it’s the big guy with all the muscles and a definite personal problem related to his odor. “-but there is a strong beauty inherent in the simple yet effective. Plus, it’s fiddling hard to hack, if you excuse my language.”

Dirk looks amused, if that is the right word to use for the very slight, very brief quirking of his lips. “Wow, that’s some pretty disgusting use of profanity there, but I’ll let it slide for now.”

The lisping troll just snorts. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure who you’re talking to. All I could hear was the gurgling of the last vestiges of spongejuices slowly draining out of some asshole’s skinvents along with an ocean of sweat.” He lifts one hand, which immediately starts to glow, and some of the mess on the ground lifts up and starts swirling through the air, assembling itself into... something. Dirk lets out a low whistle, watching raptly, and John doesn’t doubt that he can actually tell what’s going on. Weirdos, all three of them. “As for hard to hack... that just depends on how hard you try.”

John leaves the nerds to have fun with whatever they’re doing, he’s got bigger fish to fry and anyway he’s not that interested in technology. Dumping the bags he’s carrying by the door, he roams through the house, noting how it’s actually pretty cozy. Sure, in some places the walls appear to be just bare masonry, but whoever fixed this place up has covered them with woven mats in bright colors to keep out the cold. Assorted mismatched but nice furniture as well as rugs have been dragged in to fill the spaces where all the communication equipment used to be. And once he climbs the spiral staircase in the middle of the small tower to the top floor, he finds the rooms already fully furnished, the walls painted, even curtains in the windows. This must be where whoever operated all the equipment used to live.

He also finds Dave, standing by one of the windows and staring out over the sea, wearing that dumb inscrutable expression that fools exactly no one. He doesn’t turn around as John walks up to him, but he can feel him glancing sideways even though the shades mostly obscure his eyes. “Damn, how’s a guy supposed to get his cinematic brood on like this? I’m pretty sure ‘some dork named Egbert sidles up’ isn’t in the script for this scene.”

John snorts, bumping their shoulders together. “I hate to tell you this about your brooding... but it’s really rather transparent and not really all that distant and rugged at all. I think we’re going to have a movie night so you can learn from the masters!”

“Oh hell no. If you think I’m going to model my innocent lips and sweet brow after the half constipated, half lobotomized expression of whatever sweaty clowns you get your rocks off to, you can just forget it. Your action ‘heroes’ are bumbling tryhards who all have complicated relationships with their wives because they’ve never learned to communicate beyond grunts and vapid oneliners, and no one can truly love a man who comes with a ‘yippie-ki-yay motherfucker’. That’s my final word on the matter.” A deep breath. “I would rather be a shitty brooder than curse myself to that unloveable fate.”

He’s really tense, then. Dave always rambles, but he usually at least allows himself to breathe or leaves some kind of space in the conversation for John to bounce off him a couple of times. Then again, everything sure is weird right now, so that’s hardly surprising.

Nudging Dave’s shoulder a bit more gently this time, John lowers his voice a bit. “Is there anything I can do? I mean I mostly suggested the movie thing because you get a kick out of riffing on my awesome tastes, but you don’t actually sound like you were having any fun. You just sounded kind of bad-tempered and tired.”

Dave makes a quiet sound, lifting one hand to rub at his eyes under the shades. “Sorry man, that probably came across as way more cross than my usually cool material. Pretty entry level stuff, really.”

“It’s okay. Even a master hipster has an off day, I bet.”

Score! Dave actually smiles at that, bumping his shoulder back against John’s as if he’s annoyed, but John can tell some of the tension has gone out of him. “Don’t worry too much about me, though. I had a very thorough feelings jam with Rose on the hovercraft, leaving absolutely nothing left to examine - especially if it was of an even vaguely phallic nature.”

Dave always does this thing where serious business ends up wrapped in dumb jokes, especially about dicks. It had taken a long time for John to catch on when he wasn’t just being a wise guy, and if he’s to be honest, he still doesn’t really know how to decipher it when he does. But he’ll do his best to just sidestep some of the jokes meant to trip him up. “It’s good that you talked about your feelings. I mean, both of you being kind of in the same boat and all.”

“Yeah.” Dave picks at a loose thread on the sleeve of his shirt. “If I’m gonna be stuck on a boat without oars or a motor or whatever, and that boat is going over a metaphorical waterfall of interspecies misunderstandings, I pretty much couldn’t find a better person to share the ride with.”

“Yeah, at l least one of you will be smart, heh.” John chuckles as Dave clearly stifles a laugh. “But also, she tends to overthink things waaaay too much, so it’s good that you’re around to cut through all her convoluted ideas from time to time.” From the way Dave glances back as if looking to see if Rose has somehow materialized in the room, John is pretty sure he was right about that conclusion. Hell yes, he’s so good at offering friendly support. “But just so you know... you can talk to me too. Whenever you need to.”

Dave’s lips quirk a bit again, but the smile looks a bit sad to John. “Yeah, I know. I’ll message you if I feel like I’m going insane, Time Force honor. Or just babble endlessly into your inbox if you’re busy, so you can have a first row seat in witnessing my rad descent into the coolest and most ironic of madness. I promise I’ll make it an epic goddamn spectacle. We’re talking King Lear if King Lear wasn’t kind of a dick but just this sweet dude doing his best.”

John rolls his eyes a bit, because Dave sure likes to make it hard to talk seriously with him. “Well, yeah, obviously. I mean not the madness part, hopefully that isn’t actually necessary, but I of course you can always message me. But I’ll also be sticking around for two months in that town down there, so I’ll be around for some sweet friendship bro jams too.”

Dave says nothing for a moment or two, then breathes out rather suddenly and slings his arm around John’s shoulders, leaning on him just a bit. “Thanks, dude.”

“No worries. Obviously Jade will be staying too, she doesn’t want to be left out, so it’ll be all eight of us on leave together for a while.”

Dave once again doesn’t reply right away, just gazes out over the ocean. John can see some kind of big winged creatures wheeling high above the waves out there. “Shit, has that even happened once since we all met? I mean, for longer than a couple of days?”

“Huh, I guess not.” He hadn’t really thought about it; there was always a really important reason behind each and every mission, and a lot of the time they just kind of blended together. But maybe that had been another thing that had been eating at him? Maybe apart from his uncle not being even remotely close to as awesome as Dave used to claim, but actually being a huge asshole, he’d needed a break from everything for quite a while. John feels a small sting of guilt as he watches the slight frown pulling at Dave’s face. Should he have kept a closer eye on his best friend? Now that he thinks back, he thinks perhaps there were quite a few signs that Dave was just... tired.

Admittedly, there’s quite a huge leap from someone being tired and needing a break and just... straight up hallucinating some shit and trying to kill your brother because you think he’s someone else right now. But maybe the small things had all added up one after another, until finally Dave had just snapped. Maybe that explained it at least a little bit? John has to admit that he rather wants an explanation, because it had seemed so senseless, so impossible when they had burst into that bunker just in time to see Rose slumping against a wall, a smear of blood running from the point of impact down to her head. At first it had looked like they'd gotten there too late, as Dave turned away from her and raised his gun with a blank look on his face, firing right at Dirk. Dirk, down on one knee, his leg clearly busted, his face white and wide-eyed and scared. All John had time to do was shout, ‘Dave no!‘ at the same time as Roxy screamed, ‘Dirk!‘ in the most horribly helpless way imaginable.

Lucky for them that Hal moved a lot quicker than the two of them. Less lucky, in a way, for Hal.

All he could really do was intercept the beam head-on, with a horrible crackling sound of fusing metal and failing circuitry, an immediate sharp stench of ozone and burning plastic, and a blinding light as his electromagnetic field overcharged, grew and then burst like a soap bubble. It did however buy them a moment when Dave flinched back in confusion, shielding his eyes from the glare, and a moment was all they needed. It was enough for John to get behind Dave and put him in an armlock, enough for Roxy to run up before he had time to struggle and straight up clock him in the jaw.

‘I’m sorry,‘ she had whispered as he sagged in John’s arms, unconscious.

At first John had felt less apologetic about the whole thing, and hadn’t even felt bad about simply dropping Dave to the ground like a sack of potatoes. He’d been honest-to-god angry when the first words out of Dirk’s mouth after helping Hal out were, ‘Is he alright?’ He hadn’t felt like Dave deserved that concern after what he’d done. How could he have hurt his own family like that?

Then Dave had woken up confused and shaking, without a single comprehensive memory of the day before, tugging at the cuff keeping him shackled to his bed in the sickbay and begging John to tell him what was wrong. Why were they all staring at him like that? What happened? Why were Dirk and Rose in there too, were they hurt?

At first they’d suspected mind control, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have a notable enemy who was very capable of such nefarious shenanigans. It was a convenient place for John’s anger to go that wasn’t his best friend, and he was relieved. But that bastard Doc Scratch had actually contacted them and sworn up and down that he wasn’t responsible. Rose grudgingly admitted that he usually didn’t outright lie. So John’s anger had stalled, not sure where to go, an uncomfortable burning spike in his chest whenever he talked to Dave.

It had taken months and a lot of shit going wrong before he could finally talk about it, finally explain what had really happened on that day. John’s anger had finally found the right target, and he’s relieved about that. Because Dave doesn’t deserve it, and if he’s to be honest, it had really hurt to be that furious and conflicted about his best friend. And even though he was going to miss him, he’d supported his decision to take time off to recuperate somewhere far away from all the stressful shit they’d been dealing with lately. He seemed like he might need it. Rose too, after almost dying, and Jake after being super heroic and losing an arm in the process!

It was such a shitty twist of fate that their cozy vacation had turned into this weird political marriage debacle! John feels kind of sorry for the aliens too, it’s not like they seemed any more prepared for this weird situation, but as far as he knows they weren’t actively trying to get away from an already kind of shitty and potentially dangerous situation. Beside, what kind of bro would he be if he didn’t firmly take Dave’s side in the matter?

“So uh...” He hesitates a bit, trying to think of a smooth way to bring it up, but he honestly has no idea how that’s even supposed to be a thing. “You’ll probably need to talk to him about that fight you had, huh? Do you-“ Argh, this is going to be awkward, but you have to make sacrifices for such a sweet friendship as theirs. “Do you want me to stick around as like... moral support or whatever when you do?”

Dave’s eyebrows shoot up, and are shortly followed by a small smile. “It’s sweet of you to offer and all but... nah dude, I think it’s something I’ve just gotta wrangle in a manly fashion, which is to say on my own.”

“Why not?”

“Um... I guess I just don’t want him to feel like we’re ganging up on him? I don’t really know him that well yet, but I already have this feeling that most of the time when he totally flips his shit, it’s because he feels cornered somehow, see?” Dave makes an awkward little grimace. “Besides, uh... you trying to kind of mediate between us like you did before? It was nice of you and all, but actually that’s like... a kind of unfortunate thing to do according to troll culture, I think?”

John frowns in confusion, trying to figure out what Dave means, and why his ears are turning red all of a sudden. “How? Is it like... culturally important to them to scream at each other over breakfast or something? Man, aliens are weird.”

Dave makes that little head motion that means he’s rolling his eyes. “No, not exactly. I mean yeah they’re weird but this is like... you trying to chill the two of us out when we’re both being hostile at each other is apparently like a romantic gesture to trolls.”

“Wait. What?”

“I mean search me, I want to be on record as absolutely not getting this strange-ass shit, but that’s how Karkat explained things to me before. It’s like... hostile interactions can be romantic to them, apparently? But apparently so can seeing two people being aggro at each other and going ‘hell naw, not in front of my breakfast’? It’s like a platonic romantic threeway where two people are low-key fed up with each other all the time, but the third party makes sure they never actually go all the way into straight-up hate snogs.”

“Eww okay, that’s... kind of messed up.” John emphatically sticks out his tongue, and Dave makes a small noise of agreement. “But I guess I can see how talking this out with him will be weird enough without him assuming that we’re both hitting on him in whatever weird alien way is normal to him?”

“You got it. And this marriage is gonna be complicated enough without him thinking that all three of us are in ashen love together, whatever the fuck that actually entails. From how I get it, you can only be in one type of love with someone at a time? At least I think so, I kind of tuned out some of the more complicated parts of his lecture.”

“So uh...” John raises his eyebrows slightly. “Do you want to be in some other kind of love with him? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Whoa, what? No, that’s not- I mean maybe? It could be nice if we could actually have some kind of feelings for each other despite this marriage being a sham, I guess.” Dave pulls a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up awkwardly. “Fuck, like I said, I still haven’t even worked out what my sexuality is or how it even relates to a weird insect alien. I think maybe I think he’s kind of cute? When we’re not flipping out at each other, I mean.”

“Awww! Well, that’s a good start, right? I think it would be really nice if you could fall in love with the alien you’re married to and live happily ever after in spite of all the odds against you, that sounds like such a sweet love story!”

“Oh my god, you’re such an embarrassing nerd.” Dave jostles him affectionately, and John laughs and pushes back against him. “But yeah, at least I don’t want to lock our romantic possibilities into basically the weirdest and most confusing option available just yet. And, uh, I’m not sure how you’d feel about that either?”

“Um, well... You know I love you as a friend and all but-“

“You’re not in weird alien meditation love with me and my husband? You cut me deep Egbert. You cut me real deep.”

“Pffff smartass.”

“You know it. Within my almost negative amount of ass, a truly paradoxical amount of sheer brains is contained under great pressure, always jonesing to burst free.”

“Sounds like a gross personal problem to me! Or maybe you’re hitting on me. Are you hitting on me Dave?”

“Hey, maybe I just want you to join this sweet dude harem I’m planning? Can’t a guy ask his best friend to join his harem without it being gay?”

“...No. I have to tell you, that’s pretty gay Dave.”

“I’ll be the prettiest gay... except I guess when Dirk is in the same room, then there’ll be two of us.”

The one thing that John really feels should have told him that something was wrong in retrospect was that they couldn’t really talk like this anymore. That is, Dave would still make stupid jokes at first because apparently that’s just how he deals with things, but that was just it. It was just stupid jokes, and the part of it that was about real feelings had slowly gotten lost, and once they headed towards the breaking point even the jokes had started wearing thin. And then afterwards it had all been so raw that they couldn’t really joke at all anymore, just talk about heavy and serious shit that felt like pulling teeth even if it was important.

It’s nice to sort of be back to normal, even if everything has changed and very little looks like it will stay the same in their future. To John, the only important normalcy has always been the few things you can carry with you, the things you hold on to even if the world comes down around your ears and the only real choice is to try to build something new. There’s always something.

In the end, that’s all that really matters.

Chapter 13: While asleep

Summary:

It’s hard to say for sure who is broken and who isn’t, or if the distinction matters at all. But broken or not, not talking about it has never made those parts go away.

Notes:

I wanted to write at least a two-perspective part like I usually do, but this one got so long, I decided to just post it and be done with it. It’s v babbly but then again, why have Dave and Karkat as a main pairing if you’re not prepared to write a lot of talking? :P

The people who had lived there before them had been a married couple too, Dave had told him. He hadn’t said how he knew. Maybe because there is only one bed there, and apparently sleeping together consistently is a customary thing for married humans. It seems impractical and pointless, because what does it matter when you’re asleep anyway? But then again human beds are very different from recuperacoons. Obviously sharing one isn’t as cramped, or nearly as intimate as the both of you submerging in the same slime. Maybe if you’ve only got blankets to rely on, the custom had developed because it’s an easy way to stay warm?

Still pointless, though. It’s not like it had been kind of nice to wake up so close to someone else. Definitely not. At any rate they’re having a recuperacoon moved in later, for whenever his dreams start to grow restless and troubling. He’d prefer not to start babbling weird shit to Dave in his sleep about seeking shelter from the sun, running from drones, or red hot iron. Fuck that in particular.

Snooping around the bedroom to take his mind off things, he finds a picture that was knocked off a clothing repository at some point and left in dusty limbo in the space between the plywood and the wall. It depicts a couple of humans in what looks like some form of beige work clothes, smiling widely at each other and ignoring the camera. A male and a female, both wearing their hair short, their skin much darker than Dave’s. The female is standing and the male is in a chair, and the former has her hand resting lightly on the latter’s head.

He finds himself staring down at the picture for fuck knows how long, feeling strange. It feels like an intrusion somehow, not exactly because of what the picture depicts as such, but because this used to be a part of someone’s home. Something they choose to display because it presumably had some meaning to them, but now it’s just another piece of junk they left behind when they moved out.

It’s also strange because has to assume that they are the married couple that used to live here, and this is what that kind of relationship is meant to look like. Whatever the tense, uneasy state of affairs with Dave is, it sure as shit isn’t this.

The longer he looks, peripherally aware of a muffled conversation going on a few rooms away, the more he starts to think that the female looks deformed somehow. Her abdomen shouldn’t jut out that much on such a skinny frame, right? It takes him a few more minutes of squinting to figure out that this is probably that whole ‘pregnancy’ thing Kanaya has touched on briefly before he’d told her to shut up or he’d be forced to vomit in her lap as an act of crude self-defense. So the female looks like that because she’s infested with another, smaller human that hasn’t made its gruesome way out of her body yet? Gross.

Strange... they kind of look more like moirails than matesprits in this picture. But obviously not, since they’re in fact in the middle of a cycle of procreation together. He wonders if he isn’t in fact watching something way more intimate than he was first aware of when he picked up the picture. Do they show this to others? Surely every female can’t just hide away while this process is visible on their bodies, however unpalatable it is? He can’t imagine how that wouldn’t end in a downright culling of all males.

But what the picture depicts is supposed to be the more traditional purpose of a marriage, isn’t it? Somewhat obsolete now, but still apparently important to the people in the colony. Obviously everything about this whole arrangement is just a carefully orchestrated charade, and the male human who turns Dave into one big flinch whenever he’s around had even argued for the current arrangement of couples by pointing out that they’re not biologically viable together anyway. So the male:female ratio and distribution didn’t actually matter.

Still... despite procreation apparently being voluntary for humans, and despite Dave explicitly having said that he views marriage more as a romantic gesture, Karkat suddenly wonders if that’s another thing Dave has been robbed of by being tied to him. Is this something he would’ve wanted under normal circumstances? Maybe as the product of an alternative route of procreation, he doesn’t worry about it? The humans in the picture look older than him, so... will he want something like this later on, albeit achieved through different means?

The idea of what they call ‘parenthood’ is so bizarre, Karkat has no idea how to even relate to it. Trying to imagine himself caring for one of the squishy human equivalents of wigglers as if he were its lusus is both repellent and strangely fascinating, like considering taking on a vaguely sentient alien as a pet. Imagining Dave doing the same, holding one in his arms the way he’s seen the humans in the town do, makes his heart do something soft and strange. He’s not sure he likes it.

He also finds himself idly wondering if Dave would’ve chosen to marry a female if he’d been given the choice. It seems like the more common way to go about it, albeit apparently not exclusively so. Some of the humans had seemed disgusted by their demand, but Dave hadn’t been among them. He’d seemed kind of annoyed at how they were acting, and had been the first to agree with their terms, so clearly it hadn’t bothered him. But if humans are more prone to being strangely picky the way Kanaya is, he suddenly wonders what he would’ve preferred.

Which is stupid. What he would’ve preferred is obviously to get married to another human, presumably one that he actually gives a shit about. Karkat finds himself holding the picture in his hands a little bit too hard, and slowly relaxes his grip on the frame before he damages it. He’d prefer not to have to explain this alien contract to every single troll potentially interested in whichever quadrants he’ll still have available in the future, yet here they are. What’s the point of feeling resentful and hurt that Dave might have picked someone else if given a choice? Wouldn’t he have done the same?

He curls up on top of the bed, the picture slipping from his lap onto the sheets, and then it slides with a silent clatter to the floor. He shivers slightly, wrapping his arms around his legs. Night is falling, the temperature dropping steeply as the last rays of the sun are strangled by the horizon. Outside the window a spectacular array of stars are fading into view, and all Karkat can think of is that it’s all so sad and lonely. The frustration, the anger, the confusion and embarrassment are all still there, but far away as the wind picks up outside and he becomes aware that he can no longer hear any voices, the emptiness of the house aching like an open wound. He wishes he was home. He misses Alternia. He wishes his lusus was here.

Darkness arrives like a fist, and he should be more comfortable at night, but the last two weeks have fucked so badly with his internal clock, he finds that it just makes him more tired somehow. There are no lights on in the bedroom, nor can he see any light coming from any other room. It’s really getting kind of cold. What the fuck?

“Hey.” And suddenly Dave is standing in the door, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. He’s holding a dimmed lantern in one hand and a small wad of some kind of shiny textile under his other arm. He looks like something is on his mind, but then he’s momentarily derailed. “Dude, do your eyes actually glow in the dark?”

“Well, yeah? We’re a fucking nocturnal species, Dave, not that you humans appear to give a shit. Even if we don’t all light up like Perigee’s Eve decorations the way rainbow drinkers do, is a little bit of bioluminescence really that fucking weird?”

“Huh. I guess not.” Despite Karkat wanting to bite his tongue off for coming off so aggressive and resentful right out of the brooding cavern entrance, this time Dave doesn’t appear to rise to it. He looks more relaxed somehow. Regardless what humans think, Karkat is seriously starting to suspect that John is his moirail after all, or at least serves the human equivalent of the same function. “Hey, it seems like while they were fixing up this place, not a single fucking one of them thought to maybe check out the power and see if everything was okay. I mean I guess I can’t blame them, I too am frequently distracted by bright colors and ordinary objects like rugs and cushions, but it would’ve been cool if they did.”

“...So, the reason for the bulge-numbing goddamn cold is-“

“Yeah, something appears to have chewed through the isolation around the batteries powering this place, letting in the damp. They’re currently covered by an inch thick layer of some white, crusty shit - some kind of acid.”

“Wow. Great. That’s fucking fantastic.” Karkat sticks his hands in his armpits to stop his fingers going numb, and buries his feet under the blanket. “I’ve personally always enjoyed temperatures that make my shame globes crawl whimpering up my own nook in a desperate bid for warmth. That sounds really fucking cozy, don’t you think?”

“Hey, tell me about it. Dirk fucked away the entire afternoon doing robot battles with two of your friends, and he only discovered this once they went down to where Rose and Kanaya will be staying. Since it was already getting dark by then, we didn’t feel like there would be any point trying to fix it tonight. He, Jade and Roxy will be here tomorrow morning to deal with the problem.”

Karkat tries to not look too pitiful where he sits; nocturnal they might be but prone to roaming around the landscape for no reason they’re not, so he’s never noticed before exactly how biting cold the nights on this forsaken fucking planet are. He’s only in a t-shirt and pants, and suddenly wishes he hadn’t dismissed Kanaya’s offer to knit him something warmer so quickly.

Dave seems to notice his distress anyway, and the corners of his mouth lift lightly. Normally Karkat would probably go off on him for that, but he’s too cold and tired, and anyway it doesn’t seem like an unkind smile. Dave finally stops hovering in the doorway and comes inside, setting down the lantern and then dropping the bundle of fabric squarely on Karkat’s feet. “We do have this, though. It’s a field blanket. Mostly it’s the Space and Void forces that use these, and Jade had a spare one; they’re standard equipment for exploring new territory, so they have to stand up to a lot. Meaning they’re practically completely isolating and have heat strips sewn into them - oh and they’re proof against corrosion, will deflect most standard energy beams, can nullify impacts up to 1000 pounds per square inch, and will neutralize poisonous gasses, but that’s probably... marginally less useful right now.”

Karkat can’t help how his mouth relaxes until he’s no longer outright scowling, even if it would be a bit of a reach to call it a smile. “Speak for yourself, human. I saw you eat one of those... what do you call them? Burr-eat-ohs? From my regrettably extensive and incomprehensibly harrowing studies of your human anatomies so far, I’d can only conclude that the neutralizing of poisonous gasses is probably the only way I’m going to survive the night.”

Dave snorts, sitting down on the bed next to him and starting to unfold the blanket, spreading it over the one that is already covering the bed. “Fuck yeah, fart jokes. That’s how we know that we’re married for real, like the institution just got officially cemented. I solemnly declare the mystique to be gone from this bitch, and it’s never coming back. On with the granny panties and hand over the remote. Let’s watch a reality show.”

“Does it ever worry you that about half of what you say is word plantmix?” Karkat demands even as he slips properly under the covers. He lets out a displeased little noise as his shirt rides up a bit, and the fabric underneath him is cold and slightly damp against his skin.

“Says the dude who says shit like ‘plantmix’ and ‘thermal hull’ - what the fuck is up with these translating creepy crawlers anyway, why do they keep translating the literal meaning of some words and not others? Are they just fucking with us?” Dave dims the light further before slipping the shades off his face. Then he also scoots into the bed with a small grimace, brushing his fingers briefly against a corner of the field blanket and causing a panel to light up. “Okay, it’ll take a little while to warm us up with a normal blanket in between, but that’s still a lot nicer than having this thing directly against our bodies. It’s made to be utilitarian, not cozy.”

Karkat, who had been working on a biting retort regarding human vernacular, is about to ask how the fuck Dave proposes they keep from freezing their various bits of anatomy off until then... but then again, the answer is obvious. Letting out an annoyed huff, he turns on his side and scoots until his back is pressed against Dave, then reaches back and tugs impatiently at his arm.

“Um-“ It’s rather gratifying how taken aback Dave sounds.

“Will you just try to not be a complete idiot? I realize we’re still in the early stages of the wretched disease called friendship, but do you at least have enough pity in your deformed alien pump biscuit to manage that? I need some body heat, and you’re regrettably the only candidate, even though you only barely manage to suffice in that regard.” He tugs at the human’s arm again. “Now don’t just lie there like a heap of cooling behemoth leavings, will you?”

“That’s- Thats the most poetic invitation to spoon I’ve ever heard. And that includes John letting out a lengthy fart and saying ‘here, I warmed up the bed for us.” He’s a shit about it, but at least he does what he’s told, wrapping his arm around Karkat without further ado, the other curling around his shoulder. “Holy shit, you’re so warm. This is like cuddling a tiny furnace, it’s so great. Ten out of ten horn cozies, or whatever the fuck you wear.”

Karkat jabs an elbow into Dave’s ribs in response to the word ‘tiny’, but not very hard. “And you’re delightfully lukewarm, like all of your kind. My only consolation is that I’m at least not trying to warm up a highblood right now.” Not that a gentle cool touch on agitated, hot skin couldn’t feel nice, but nope, shutting down that line of thought right the fuck now. Look at what we’re all going to focus really hard on thinking about: Not this. Besides, despite his words, the mere presence of another body with any kind of heat in it is already doing wonders, slowly seeping into his back. He feels muscles he hadn’t noticed tensing slowly unknot themselves, and sighs quietly in relief.

Dave leans his chin against the top of Karkat’s head, sighing in quiet contentment. He seems at ease, and maybe this moment of relative peace between them means that they can pretend this morning didn’t happen? Or maybe it could turn out to be the prelude to another bout of misunderstanding and aggravation, until the sum of it all completely outweighs their combined ability to cowardly shove new problems under the knotted floor fabric.

Maybe, even though he hates the idea of bringing tension into this relatively restful moment, he should use it to try actually dealing with shit.

“Hey?”

“Mmm?” Dave sounds sleepy, but Karkat perseveres.

“Sorry for being so shitty to you this morning. I was unreasonably wound up about relatively minor shit, and I guess your weird brand of humor just tripped all my already trembling rage triggers... but, fuck, I’m not saying that’s an excuse. I just do this stupid thing where I get really fucking defensive and I keep backing myself into a corner until there is literally no choice except doubling down on being the biggest asshole in the room and showing the roaring gulf of my spinal crevice off to anyone unfortunate enough to be present.” He takes a deep, gulping breath, feeling like the whole apology has gotten way away from him and turned into the latest step on the Vantas Self Loathing tour. He’s pretty sure Dave doesn’t need this shit, and it’s beside the point anyway. “So... yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

Dave is quiet behind him, his breathing so slow and measured that he must surely be putting conscious effort into controlling it. With the way his chin is pressed against his head, Karkat can feel a movement in his throat, then another, and another. As if he’s swallowing repeatedly, or maybe working on something he wants to say that clings to the inside of his mouth and tries to climb down into his chest once more. He waits, listening to the way the sounds of the sea below somehow manage to deepen the silence rather than fill it, and he tries not to squirm.

“I, uh- Well, I guess I should start out with saying ‘apology accepted’ so we have it out of the way and you can start breathing again.”

That’s the exact moment that Karkat realizes that he had indeed not been breathing while he waited, and chokes on the surprised and urgent gulp of air he draws in as a result of this realization. “Ffffu-hhhhhuckkk!”

“Right. Good. Would hate to have you slowly losing consciousness while I’m telling you this, because quite frankly this doesn’t seem to get any easier, and I really don’t wanna have to do this again.” He breathes out heavily, and Karkat feels his skin prickle as his breath ghosts over his horn beds and makes his hair flutter slightly. “It’s not the whole, you know, shouting and swearing and sarcasm, or the wild hyperbole that just keeps going and going as if you’ve been deep-throating Duracell Solar’s creepy AI bunny mascot all your life. I guess all of that is just who you are as a person, and I respect that.”

“Wow. Thank you so much, you heinous piece of fuck.”

“See? Like I said, it’s not that. I’m pretty cool with that.” There’s a hint of a smile in Dave’s voice, but also a note of uncertainty, and while Karkat rolls his eyes and mutters in response, he also squeezes his wrist briefly to urge him to go on. He seems to get the message, or maybe he’s decided to get it all out regardless of how he’s feeling. “I guess what it boils down to, if I’m putting the whole situation under pressure and raising the temperature and then staring my hideous mass of roiling insecurities and fucked-up memories down until that fucker blinks first... is that what got to me, probably, was just how you kept being critical while I was actually trying to make it better.”

Dave doesn’t seem to have noticed it, but he’s closed his fist so tightly that now the arm draped over Karkat is trembling slightly with the tension. Tentatively, he slides his hand up and rubs gently at it with the pad of his thumb, trying to get Dave to unclench it. It’s unclear if the human notices or not, but at least the tension eases up somewhat.

“I mean, if I’d been trying to get a rise out of you - and honestly that’s so easy it’s like a waste of my talents, like putting floaties on a shark and tossing it in the kiddie pool... it’d be a massacre is what I’m saying. Anyway the point is if I was actually trying to antagonize you from the beginning, obviously I wouldn’t have minded a pretty harshly negative view of my actions, because that would’ve been the point.”

Karkat can feel heat spreading over his skin and knows it has nothing to do with the slowly warming blanket. “Wait, what are you-“

“Okay, no, don’t read too much into that. Repeat ‘humans don’t have quadrants’ to yourself until you find enlightenment. But also shut up, I’m almost done.” Karkat considers arguing because honestly, but bites down on his tongue instead. Dave is trying to tell him something important, and he’s not about to fuck this up even more.

“But I really was trying to get to the point where I could apologize and everything would be cool, like not only for being late but for just fucking off in the morning like that. But you didn’t want to hear it and I couldn’t find a way to deescalate or even get across what I wanted to tell you. I just felt like I kept making it worse, and the big shitty twist was that there was no actual way I could do it right and that... feels bad, man.” There’s something there, like claws snagging on fabric but in his voice, or maybe in his chest. A hint of glance-over-the-shoulder tension, as if something is hunting him. “There’s stuff I don’t really wanna go into because it’s this...” He waves his arm suddenly in a sweeping gesture, and then drops his hand a bit sheepishly back into Karkat’s. “...this whole thing. Which is just too much to talk about right now. But the point is... you know the concept of a fight or flight response?”

“Fucking obviously, you primitive goddamn mammal.” Karkat pokes the back of Dave’s hand, which really isn’t a very satisfying way of expressing exasperation, but it’ll have to do. “What about it?”

“Well for... reasons, mine is pretty jacked up. The whole ‘flight’ part doesn’t work as it should. So sometimes I end up thinking I should shoot shit even though it’s not actually stuff you can fight, like explosions, or big rocks... or more abstract stuff like misunderstandings. It’s what always happens when I feel I can’t escape, which is a problem when like I said the whole ‘flight’ route doesn’t come naturally to me.” He lets out a hoarse little sound that might be a laugh, or at least an attempt at one. “Am I making any sense at all?”

“Not really, but I think I understand what you mean anyway.” Karkat places his other hand on top of Dave’s, tentatively holding it between his. “Chewing you out when you’re actually trying to get along makes you feel trapped for whatever undisclosed reasons... and that’s bad because it makes you want to shoot me?”

“Well, no, I don’t wanna shoot YOU, just... the whole situation. But you’re part of that and I don’t know how to deal, so... I had to force myself to get out of there because I still felt like I might.” A beat. “Holy shit, that’s so fucked up.”

Karkat suddenly feels himself relax slightly. “...Nah. That sounds fairly straightforward, actually.”

“Wait. It does?”

“Yeah, of course. I don’t know how humans solve shit, but you know, there’s a good fucking reason why trolls as a species need the conciliatory quadrants.” He shifts his shoulders a bit so he can turn around and look at Dave in the faint light. “You could say that we collectively don’t believe in ‘flight’ as an answer, and the higher up in the blood castes you get, the worse it is. Which is why my best friend once tried to go on a murder spree motivated by his blood caste’s capricious bullshit and pie withdrawal, and was only stopped because one of my friends was less dead and considerably more pissed than expected, and the other is just a straight-up sociopath. Oh, and before that, another friend had panicked and tried to shoot me.” He shrugs as Dave stares at him, feeling somewhat defensive at his obvious disbelief. “It’s just how things are, so before you open your ignorance shaft, I invite you to try some cultural sensitivity and not make a big fucking deal about it.”

Dave just shakes his head silently at first, lips pressed together as if he’s trying to hold onto something elusive. Then he lets out a small sigh, which turns into a laugh halfway through.

“You know what the weirdest part of this is?”

“What?”

“Imagining any of your friends doing anything that might hurt you.” Karkat twitches in earnest surprise which he cannot repress, and a ghost smile pulls at Dave’s lips. “I’ve seen them around you. They’re really goddamn protective, aren’t they? Closing ranks everywhere you go, guarding every angle. I was brought up to be a soldier, and they’re not being subtle about that shit. They really care about you, don’t they?” Dave’s voice comes out so soft, and for a moment Karkat has to close his eyes to keep the memories in.

“It’s you they want anyway! Why should the rest of us have to die? I never said I wanted to die for this!”

“Didn’t you know, my invertebrother? It’s my sacred motherfucking duty to cull you. It always was.”

“It’s... complicated.” He grimaces, rubbing a hand over his face. “But basically, that all happened a couple of sweeps ago. Nowadays, all of us have finally figured out that we’re all we’ve got. It’s just more practical to sort out our shit within the group, no matter what we might feel about it, than to fight each other.” Eridan must’ve figured out that there’s nowhere for him to run if he defects; all those bridges are well and truly burned by now. No mercy, no redemption. Her Imperious Condescension has never shown any of these, and her... allies aren’t known for it either.

As for Gamzee... Karkat isn’t sure exactly what tipped the scales there. They’ve made sure he’s never run out of pie again, kept him well away from other highbloods and their crazy goddamn cult. It’s been years now, and he’s never seen a trace of that other side of him, the one that spoke like silent blades in restless shadows, and then like crushing blows in utter darkness. He’s the same pitiable goofball he always was, and Karkat can only hope he stays that way.

When he finally opens his eyes, it’s to find Dave meeting his gaze steadily, one eyebrow slightly raised as if he’s just figured something out. Only Karkat can’t for the life of him tell what that might be. The scrutiny is making him pretty uncomfortable, though.

As if responding to his thoughts, Dave breaks eye contact, followed by a small dismissive motion of his head. Or maybe that was a nod? Karkat can’t tell. “Okay. I’m not gonna say that it’s not weird from a human perspective to hear you talk about all this like it’s no big thing, because sorry, it’s just kind of fucked up.”

Karkat can’t help but agree, but he refrains from saying so out loud. He just scowls impatiently, nudging Dave’s leg to encourage him to get to the point.

“And don’t think for a second I’m okay with that kind of cultural exchange between the two of us. I want to be on record as being all kinds of not cool with random murderous impulses regardless how culturally significant they happen to be, okay?” Karkat just rolls his eyes, but Dave’s exaggerated deadpan keeps him from actually kicking him. He’s not going to get a rise out of him on this. “But I guess it’s good that you don’t think I’m... shit, I don’t know. A worthless piece of garbage and completely messed up beyond your capacity to give a shit?”

Despite the way he phrases it, like it’s all some kind of a big joke, Karkat can sense the hesitation behind the words, a vulnerable mess of jagged old wounds. There’s something like pleading in his expression, something that Dave probably thinks he’s hiding way better than he does. It’s the darkness, Karkat realizes. Humans aren’t used to hiding their feelings in darkness, because other humans can’t see them. That’s why he’d turned down the lantern before taking off his glasses too. In darkness, they’re more vulnerable; paradoxically, that makes them feel like their feelings are more protected. But trolls, of course, can see in the dark.

He reaches out and puts a hand lightly on Dave’s cheek, feeling as if he’s edging dangerously close to pale territory, but Dave has nothing to go on but the faint glow of his own eyes. It somehow feels more fair to give him a tangible gesture beyond his words; words usually let him down. Dave jumps slightly at the touch, but doesn’t draw back. “You’re vastly underestimating my capacity to give a shit even about worthless pieces of garbage, since that describes almost everyone I know.” Fuck, that sounds terrible. His voice and his words are terrible. But for some reason, after a moment of stunned silence, Dave grins in response. “Look, can’t we just agree that I’ll try to be less of a raging asshole, and you- you can just tell me when something I’m doing is fucking with your head, alright? And that way maybe we can stop having some kind of diplomatic crisis every five fucking seconds?”

The air outside the blanket is still cold, but the small space the two of them inhabit is warm, the air between them loaded with so many complicated feelings, it feels heavy to breathe. Dave is relieved, Karkat can tell. He’d like to know more about what humans are like normally; he’d like to know what it is that makes Dave feel so broken. But in a way, he guesses that they’re approaching this from opposite ends.

After all, he’s never actually managed to convince himself of everything that he just told Dave. That this is really just how trolls are. That it’s not fundamentally fucked up, the way they treat each other. That there isn’t a better way; that it’s impossible to get there.

So maybe they’re both broken, only in opposite ways. Maybe that means there’s somewhere in the middle where they can meet each other.

Or maybe it means that only one of them is. That’s an even scarier thought, one that drags echoes of dreams in its wake, and burns like hot metal on flesh. Dave’s arm is still resting lightly across his chest, and Karkat unthinkingly draws closer to him. This time, as he closes his eyes, its to keep something out

Dave makes a soft little sound of surprise, but then he cautiously pulls his arm closer around Karkat, and he doesn’t say anything else. Maybe humans have things waiting for them in their dreams too; maybe that’s why they sleep together. It suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.

Notes:

Here’s hoping I managed to edit everything I needed to before I posted. One day I’ll have a computer again and The Struggle with autocorrect + adding formatting will be over :P

Chapter 14: The void, the fire

Summary:

New adventures beckon, the dark is full of secrets, some old wounds get a chance to mend.

Notes:

Welp, this took a bit of time to write. I’ve been kind of hyperfocused on drawing lately - fanart, because of course - so that’s eaten some of my spare time. But don’t worry, I’ve got future Plot Ideas brewing + also there will be domestic stuff happening too because I’m a sucker for it. Thank y’all for your patience <3

Shadows flee across the ground as they make it down the steep slope of the rocky outcrop, on top of which Dave and Karkat’s new house is perched. Some of them are merely a result of the glow of Kanaya’s skin, kept bright for the sake of her human wife’s more feeble eyes, but Rose notices that some of the dark shapes moving across the ground have a more organic, skittering quality to them. Most of them are small, nothing to be concerned with, but she’s seen enough of the more ferocious fauna of this planet to be on her guard. Dave might no longer trust himself with one, but she finds the compact weight of her gun against the small of her back to be rather comforting.

Not that she imagines she’d need it even so. Ahead of the group, Aradia and Sollux are not even bothering to step on the uneven ground, hovering like silent ghosts. One is outlined in a faint blue-red corona, the other almost completely invisible in the dim light. Tight on their heels are Terezi, who for obvious reasons is traversing the darkness with more ease than even her dark-adapted friends, and Vriska. The latter might be less graceful about her descent, but even when the ground below her crumbles and briefly turns into a sandy slide it seems unable to knock her off her feet, so Rose must award her a few grudging points for sheer poise.

Flanking her and Kanaya on each side are Gamzee and Equius, great hulking shapes that are mostly noticeable by a flash of Gamzee’s fangs, a reflection off Equius’ shattered eyewear, the dim glow of their eyes. She knows Gamzee is carrying Tavros on his back, and Equius has his hastily dismantled wheelchair strapped to his. Even so, she can’t imagine anything that wouldn’t think twice about attacking either of them.

She knows Nepeta is somewhere out there in the darkness, but the only sign of her presence is the occasional squeak of something dying, and the faint scrape of sharp claws encountering bone.

Bringing up the rear are Feferi and Eridan, assuring that anyone attacking the group would truly have to be suicidal. Admittedly they’re both a little clumsy on the brittle sandstone, but every time Rose glances back all she can see is light catching on an excessive amount of sharklike teeth, a gleaming trident and an impressively over-the-top rifle. She can hear the snap of a cape in the wind, the soft rustle of silks. Very dramatic. It’s hard to not approve.

“So,” Rose murmurs casually, causing Kanaya’s attention to snap back from contemplating the darkness around them, rather obviously scanning for dangers. “I take it that everyone being on guard has less to do with the relative danger right at this moment, and more with uneasiness springing from leaving one of your number behind.”

Kanaya frowns slightly, eyes darting towards a rattle of dislodged rocks somewhere further down the slope. “Expecting the worst at any given moment is only prudent,” she murmurs. “But no, I cannot say that we enjoy being split up... and perhaps we’re a bit more on edge than the situation strictly warrants.”

“Oh please!” Vriska is momentarily silhouetted, a paler shadow against the gaping void of the sky, as she scales a rocky outcrop. “More to the point, it wouldn’t be so bad if we were actually leaving a competent member of our party behind. Not someone who still can’t stand seeing a little blood. That’s what everyone is worried about.”

Rose isn’t an expert, only having had so long to study troll culture, but she parses that in particular as, ‘leaving one of the softer, gentler members of our party to fend for himself feels unpredictable and scary’. She can sort of understand the sentiment, even though she’d long since been forced to admit that neither of those things are necessarily a weakness. She can see how trolls would view it differently, however.

Kanaya sighs in annoyance, but Rose notices that she doesn’t actually dispute what Vriska said. Her fingers tremble slightly as they lift her skirt out of reach of some kind of thorny, creeping vegetation. That won’t do.

“Well, for what it’s worth, he’s not actually left all on his own, is he?” Rose smiles a little wryly as Equius doesn’t bother to hide a derisive snort to her left, and she thinks she can detect a sarcastic note in the otherwise indecipherable series of clicks right behind her back. “I understand you might not necessarily be impressed with the abilities of humans by and large - I shall endeavor not to take this too personally. This will not be hard, as I actually do not care.” She can see Kanaya’s lips quirking slightly, and Terezi cackles up ahead. “I will however point out that while our society might be lacking in necessary competitiveness from your perspective, consider our family something of an exception. We were raised with a perchance somewhat exaggerated sense of our own superiority, and a burning obsession with living up to it. And aside from contributing to a number of truly delectable neuroses, it did in fact shape us into, among other things, formidable warriors.”

A moment of not entirely polite disbelief follows. Rose maintains her smile, searching in the darkness around her for the simple minds of small critters, like faint lights flickering before her inner vision. She locates the steady flame of a full consciousness which is trained on one of them in particular, biding her time until it makes its move. Then she pulls her gun in one fluid motion, aims and fires into the solid darkness. There is a brief dying squeal followed almost instantly by a startled hiss.

“That was my purrey!” Nepeta’s voice from the darkness sounds rather miffed. “Who killed it befur I could? Eridan?”

“Why the fuck would I bother doing something so pointless?” He sounds half insulted and half - and Rose notes this with a certain amount of smugness - impressed.

“And where exactly were you aiming?” demands Equius in an ominous growl. Rose returns his glare coolly, but someone else replies for her.

“Sh-she was aiming for the animal’s mind.” Tavros’ voice is a little shaken, as well as slightly muffled by the wild tangle of Gamzee’s hair, but he nonetheless sounds certain. “I could feel her holding it still right as she shot.”

“Just a demonstration,” Rose says smoothly, returning the gun to its holster. “I will admit that’s a little trick my brother doesn’t know, but on the other hand... out of the four of us, I’m the worst shot. Which is to say I’m still excellent at it, just not as good as my siblings.”

It was a little showy, perhaps, but she’s already noticed that trolls don’t often deal in subtleties, so it should suit them. Besides, she might as well indulge in her own sense of drama when she can; she does enjoy it so. Kanaya looks startled, her eyes following Rose’s hands as if re-evaluating them, weighing her new knowledge.

“Humans can do that?” Rose can’t decide if Vriska’s voice is accusatory or intrigued. Perhaps both?

“We don’t have any natural aptitude for it the way you do. For us it’s strictly an acquired skill, and it takes a lot of work, not to mention a few modifications by someone already gifted.” Rose grimaces slightly, remembering the claustrophobic chamber, the pressure of his voice against her mind, the feeling like an incision, the light... the light, the green light... and somewhere, her own voice, her scream muffled through the gag. “Some complete asshole taught me. But it does come in handy at times.”

She can feel a probing mind touching hers only a moment later, and hastily gathers up the jagged edges of her memories and buries them deep within. She senses a shape made out of predatory bright light and edges, ravenous and unflinching. Not a pure hunter like Nepeta’s had been, steady and clear; this is the mind of an omnivore, an adapter. Much like her own, and yet so very alien. She gently rebuffs it, and can feel a hint of Vriska’s reluctant acknowledgment before she pulls away.

“So... Dave would really be able to defend Karcrab in an emergency?” Feferi sounds hesitant, but at least a bit hopeful. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to doubt you. Most humans just seem very soft to us, and your brother is... rather unlike you.”

“You mean the ridiculous rambling and pathological need for attention?” Rose smiles slightly. “Though honestly, all four of us would probably wither and die without the latter... our need just expresses itself differently.” Personally she had never cared if the attention was negative or not, even takes dark enjoyment in the antipathy she can draw to herself. Dirk is the same, but he also tends to believe the negative opinions of him that inevitably follow. Roxy revels in positive attention, but doesn’t actually give a fuck about the negative side most of the time. And Dave... Dave will happily antagonize and provoke, confuse and aggravate, but any actual hostility directed at him will get under his skin every time. He can’t help it.

He really is soft in a lot of ways. Soft and surprisingly vulnerable. But far from defenseless.

“There’s that, yes, and... well, you rather gave me the impression that the two of them are... alike, in some ways.” Kanaya glances sideways at her, a faint smile pulling at her lips. “For our species, Karkat is fairly unique. It’s honestly hard to even imagine him with an established kismesis. Knowing anyone well enough to truly hate them would mean that he’d start seeing the parts which deserve compassion and understanding, and he probably couldn’t help feeling pity for them instead. It’s... kind of a personality flaw in a troll, but sometimes- sometimes a flaw is necessary.”

Rose’s ears pick up a string of muted, exasperated clicking from up ahead, and she thinks maybe it came from Terezi. She’s not entirely sure. Kanaya is being very cautious with her words, but there is something almost like reverence in her tone. Something to take note of, perhaps. “In certain contexts, ‘flaw’ is really just another word for ‘mutation’,” Rose points out, her voice impassive. “And a mutation is sometimes the next step in evolution.”

Kanaya’s eyes widen slightly, and when she speaks, her voice is even more controlled than before, like someone carefully assembling a jigsaw with a pair of tweezers. “Yes, those are certainly words that mean things, as you said.” Out in the darkness, the other trolls are being very, very silent now.

Interesting. But she probably shouldn’t push it.

“As for my brother, you’re not exactly wrong. I’ve also noticed that the two of them are rather similar, as you say. But...” She sighs, eyes trailing the momentary streaks of a brief meteor shower up above. “Even if he’s not a warrior by inclination, he’s certainly one by practice, not to mention sheer skill. He’ll do what’s necessary, and like the rest of us, he’ll always protect what’s his. That, if anything, is a family trait.”

They may not understand the concept of family, but from what she has been able to decipher so far about their culture, evidence suggests that it’s a prominent troll trait too. The change in the silence around her seems to indicate as much. In a strange way, Rose suspects that no flashy display of power would’ve had quite the same impact as those simple words.

Gamzee lets out a low laugh, somehow good-natured and slightly ominous at the same time. “Shiiiiit, now you’re all up and speaking our language, aren’t you?” Rose remembers what Kanaya had told her about him before, and notes how her new wife’s fingers twitch slightly in response. She also notices how Aradia turns around in midair ahead, and the rustle behind her as Eridan casually shifts his rifle into a new position. Gamzee doesn’t appear to notice, or maybe he just pretends not to.

“You’re still wearing a translation tick, dipshit,” Sollux points out dismissively.

“Whoa.” Gamzee lets out another laugh, this time without any of the previous tension. “Fuck, you’re right.” Another beat, and a flash of a fanged grin among shadows. “I’m still pretty fucking glad that my best motherfucking friend has found more people to look out for him. He’s gonna need it.”

“Gamzee?” Vriska’s voice in the dark is a little too sweet, giving it a razor blade in cotton candy quality. “Shut up.”

Wandering through the dark, surrounded by volatile and powerful aliens she doesn’t understand yet, Rose smiles. There’s something here. Something huge and unsaid, something that is no doubt going to unravel with all of them at the heart of it, and take the world as they know it with it. And while she’ll do anything to make sure her loved ones aren’t hurt by it, there is no way she can help how her heart starts beating faster, her fingers curling, her muscles tensing. She recalls one particularly smug line Doc Scratch had left behind in her mind, one that had irked her at the time.

After all, you’re exactly the kind of person who will stare into the void until you can see yourself reflected there, not understanding that the mere act of looking is what creates the reflection in the first place. Before we’re through with each other, Rose, you will have learned as much.

It was true, as most of his more infuriating insights often were. But at the time she’d thought he’d tried to point out a bug, not a feature. Now she’s not so sure.

“You know, that’s a scary expression you’re wearing,” Kanaya mumbles by her side.

“Oh.” Rose shakes her head, willing herself back to the present. “I’m sorry.”

Kanaya sighs, reaching out and taking her hand to guide her down a steep patch of brambles. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, did I?”

 

---

 

It’s going to take a couple of days to get the electricity set up properly in Karkat’s and Dave’s new home, mostly because once Dirk and Jade poke around a bit in the wiring, they come to the conclusion that it could all be made a lot more reliable and efficient with just a few changes. Roxy rolls her eyes a bit at that, but Dirk is pretty sure that she’ll have a lot more fun setting up the computerized side of things if the system they’re rigging is a bit more advanced.

In the meanwhile, everyone else works on making the place a bit more like a home. The people from the village had done their best to make the place habitable, cozy even, but for two people to actually maintain an existence there for the foreseeable future? That’s going to take a lot more work.

So Jake and Jane set to putting together a coop where some animals can be kept, the latter also serving to remind the former to take breaks and go easy on his arm. That’s a relief for Dirk, who is all too aware that he’d give into his tendency to hover otherwise, and right now he really doesn’t want to immediately sour things between him and Jake by being too pushy. He wishes there was an actual tactful way to thank Jane for taking over nagging duties, but he’s not a complete goddamn idiot.

The rest of the humans present work on moving the food that was unloaded down in the village up to the house, along with Dave’s personal items. The trolls engage in something similar, bringing up strange rations and various items of their intriguingly organic technology from the other side of the border. Honestly, Dirk can’t wait to have an extensive poke at it, and while Sollux had extensively insulted him while he first looked it all over, he’s starting to suspect that’s just how the guy talks to people. So he’d done the only sensible thing, which was to insult him right back, albeit more subtly, and hopefully this means he’ll have someone who might be willing to give him a crash course on the stuff later. Maybe? He’s still not sure how to talk to these aliens... but since he’s never been good at talking to humans either, he supposes it’s fine.

The real fun will start once Roxy figures out the troll computers, he suspects. The trolls won’t know what hit ‘em.

As a compromise with their nocturnal neighbors, they do most of the work in the morning and evening, which suits Dirk fine. Some of the rewiring of the place has to be done from outside, and there is probably no amount of sunscreen in the known universe which would prevent him from slowly shedding his own skin under the desert midday sun. And this way, it leaves them with the dubious pleasure of getting to know the rest of the aliens better.

Mostly, he just watches them, mentally tallying up their strengths, potential weaknesses, possible strategies for fighting both alongside and against them. Perhaps it’s a bit of a character flaw to think of new acquaintances that way, but Dirk considers that he has more than enough proof that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Most of them move like people who are used to fighting, albeit in very different ways. Fiddling with a hopeless tangle of wire and hoping that whoever was responsible for it still lies awake at night to ponder their shame, he idly sorts the trolls into different categories based on perceived viciousness, weapon proficiency, tenacity, brute strength, and... other talents. Of course it’s the mind powers that are the biggest unknown factors. It’s annoyingly hard to judge someone’s strength based mostly on pure speculation regarding the potential of their powers. He’s fought other aliens with similar capabilities, but that experience really says very little about how trolls might apply them in similar situations.

Sollux looks like a stiff breeze could knock his gangly frame over, but with that mind combined with the ease and precision with which he uses his psionic abilities? He’d clearly make a formidable opponent. As for Aradia... she’s petite, moves with erratic grace, not quite like a fighter but not like someone who wouldn’t put up a fight either. Earlier, he’d seen her clear away some large rocks from the shoreline below by flinging them so far out to sea, the following splash was impossible to hear.

He’d need more data to make a proper assessment, but it’s always best to simply assume the worst.

He’s been informed by Rose that the girl with the cutting voice and the strange left eye is a telepath of some sort. He likes that even less, because she seems dangerous enough without any such powers. Not to mention how those kind of abilities are just bad news to begin with. He remembers when Rose has first acquired the same skill, how he’d asked her to test how hard it would be to take him over. As an experiment. She had declined, but after a moment of intense silence, had hesitantly added that she thought it would be quite hard to accomplish. That his rigid command over his thoughts would be nearly impossible to get past.

He’d heard the unspoken caveat in her voice, and had asked if that wasn’t a good thing. Sighing, Rose had admitted that it both was and wasn’t. A mind like his - like hers too, to a lesser degree - was like a fortress, she said. Hard to break into, yes, but once the enemy is inside? It becomes just as hard for the original occupant to reclaim it. You could end up shut out forever by your own obsessive self-control. By contrast, someone with a more flexible mind might be more easily swayed by outside influences, but they would be much harder to keep out. Like water, they would always come flowing in through all the little cracks which people like Dirk would never allow to exist in the first place.

For people like them, the stakes of such games are always higher, that’s what Rose has said. People who don’t know how to bend will splinter instead.

He grimaces, reaching into the hopelessly lashed together mess that’s supposed to hook up the tower to the backup generator down by the shore. They’re going to have to reconnect the whole thing.

“Jade? The wire strippers... thanks. How’s the battery going?”

“Well, it’s not a great big gross lump anymore! I think I’ve worked out a way to make sure the damp stays out too.”

“Good.”

Dirk frowns for a moment, then lets muscle memory once again take over as he resumes his assessment of the aliens. He has a hard time getting a read on one of the two enormous highbloods as well. One of them is simple enough to gauge, clearly the kind of person to rely on his considerable strength in battle - from what he’s seen, he’s got relatively few choices in the matter, since it appears to make him unsuitable for many martial disciplines. Dude just keeps breaking shit.

The other one though... It’s not that the whole bumbling, affable giant thing is an act, not exactly. But sometimes, just for a moment, that guy moves less like a sloth and more like a praying mantis. The others are cautious of him too. Some history there, clearly.

If he’s to guess which ones to watch most closely, it’s that one, the telepath, and the whiny seadweller. The latter admittedly mostly because Dirk personally thinks he lacks backbone, and certainly not because Jake seems to inexplicably enjoy his company. Definitely not. Okay, maybe a bit, but if a guy can’t at least be allowed to be biased in his own head, things will have come to a pretty pass.

As for people he’d most like on his side in a fight, it would probably be Equius, Sollux and Terezi. Maybe Nepeta too, and depending on the planet, Tavros - if Rose’s guess that his powers work specifically on non- or semi sentient life forms is accurate. It’s probably pretty telling that he bases this on which trolls seem easiest to direct or at the very least co-operate with. He’s always disliked following anyone else’s direct orders, but at the same time he cannot entirely condone his sisters’ tendency to reject all authority when they feel like it.

He jumps slightly as something brushes against his leg, then realizes that it’s just Roxy’s cat. She’d left him to roam around the site as they worked. Inexplicably to Dirk, since he’s had to make a fair number of painful adjustments to the animal’s prosthesis, the creature seems to have taken a liking to him. He’s never really been an animal person, but Bartholomeow doesn’t appear to care.

“Do I look like someone who could be reasonably expected to feed you? Even if I do, you’re barking up the wrong twink,” he mumbles, swatting half-heartedly at the cat. The cat replies by excitedly batting at his hand. Then he focuses on one of the dangling wires, body tensing in preparation for the pounce. “Oh hell no. Go on, scram. This is not a goddamn playground. Roxy, come get your cat.”

She just laughs at him, as he’d known she would. What if he just... scoots the cat away with his foot? Okay, now he has a kitten hanging from his foot, chewing at his shoelaces. This is not an improvement. Shit.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” There’s a noise somewhere between an exasperated sigh and a laugh, and then Jane is gently scooping up the cat in her arms. He wriggles, but Jane just flips him onto his back and starts scratching his chin, and soon the kitten is rumbling happily with his feet in the air.

“... Thanks.”

“I’ve never seen anyone so helpless in the face of small, defenseless animal,” Jane replies with a small, hesitant smile. He’d really expected her to walk off, but instead she leans her back against the wall of the tower and eases herself down onto the ground.

Dirk shrugs, turning his eyes back to his work, because he has no fucking clue what else he’s supposed to do. “It doesn’t listen, and I don’t want to hurt it. So my options were pretty limited.” Fuck, he can’t believe he just said that. He’s officially a tool.

He can hear her rolling her eyes, which really just cements the matter. Jane is generous, but she has a stated bullshit capacity, and he just completely demolished it. “He just wanted a bit of attention. Cats aren’t actually that hard to understand, Dirk.”

“I’m busy.” Shit, did that sound dismissive? Is he being an asshole? Probably. Goddamn it.

Jane sighs. “We’re in no hurry, you know. Taking a break to distract a kitten wouldn’t hurt. Or just to get a bite to eat.” She nods in the direction of a bag next to her on the ground. “Go on, I brought some sandwiches.”

Dirk hesitates, but... well, he hasn’t talked properly to Jane ever since the wedding. He’s not going to make anything better by turning down a simple, friendly gesture just to be stubborn. She’s obviously trying to meet him halfway, which is more than he’s accomplished these past couple of days.

“Here, let me.” Jade suddenly reaches past him, grabbing the wire strippers from his hand and scooting him sideways at the same time. It’s a conspiracy, then. Especially since Jade winks at him, and what is worse, her other eye turns from green to red for just a split second.

Lousy goddamn loving friends. Lousy goddamn interfering AI which he admittedly created himself.

Sitting down next to Jane, he allows his gaze to momentarily flicker over to the half-assembled animal coop, only to find no trace of Jake there. He’s absolutely sure that his eyes couldn’t have been visible behind his shades, and that his expression hasn’t changed even slightly, and still Jane chuckles a bit dryly. “I had to argue with him to get him to go sit down for a while. I could see him grimacing, and his range of motion was limited, but he just refuses to be sensible about it. I hate having to pull the medic card on him again and again, but it’s the only thing he’ll listen to when he gets contrary.”

Dirk frowns, pausing in the middle of reaching for a sandwich. “I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can work on balancing the damn thing again as soon as I-“

Jane gives his shoulder an exasperated little nudge with hers, careful not to jostle the kitten in her arms. “The prosthesis is fine, Dirk. More than fine - your work is, as always, impeccable. That’s not the problem.” She looks tired, he notices now that he’s sitting so close to her. “The problem is that it’s going to take a lot of adjusting, and he’s going to have to learn to be patient with himself. And no matter how much he works at it, it’s still never going to be his real arm. I think he knows that’s the real trouble, deep down, but he doesn’t want to accept it.”

Dirk can’t say much to that. If it was him, he knows he’d be just as bad. No, correction, he’d be a million times worse. And from the way she’s looking so pointedly at him, Jane knows that too. “Where is he now?”

“Oh, he stormed off in a huff.” She shrugs, a small smile tugging at her lips. “Lucky for us that he’s never been able to hold a grudge for more than five minutes, isn’t it?”

He can feel the corners of his lips lifting slightly in response, and Jane’s smile widens a bit. It feels almost like it used to, before he let his insecurities about Jake grow into an obstacle between them, an awkward elephant in every room they were together in. “You... just knew I was looking for him, huh.” It’s not exactly a question, but she answers it anyway, her voice soft.

“You’re always looking for him, Dirk. It’s what you do.”

He can’t dispute that at all. He grimaces slightly, running a hand through his hair. “Not sure of it makes me sound less or more creepy when you say it like that.”

She snorts, startling the now dozing cat slightly with the sound. “Well, I’m not sure what that makes me, if that’s your takeaway.”

There it is. They haven’t acknowledged it at all ever since the explosion, the day when he got her and Jade out of the flames. He remembers how angry he had been at first, when she had run into the inferno without a plan, as if she didn’t care that she was just going to kill herself as well. But then he’d found her covering Jade with her own body, and he’d understood. If she hadn’t done what she did when she did it, Jade probably wouldn’t have lasted long enough for his plan to mean jack shit. They are both the kind of person who will run into fires for other people, but the way they think about it is fundamentally different. And in the end, it took both of them to bring Jade home.

They needed each other. He needs his friend. He’d decided to tell her as much, but she had been way ahead of him yet again once they were back home. They’d talked long into the night as they waited for word of Jade’s situation, comforted each other in what ways they could. She generously, he awkwardly at best. They’d admitted things to each other they’d refused to talk about before, and it had been a relief to finally be open about it.

The next day, her demeanor toward Jake had completely changed. That wasn’t something she had mentioned during that night, and she brushed Dirk off when he tried to ask about it later, but he had nonetheless wondered. He’d known for damn sure that nobody just got over those kind of feelings that quickly.

“Jane, I- shit.” She leans against his arm, and he tries not to tense up. It’s the least she can do. “I don’t think that. About you.” Way up ahead, a couple of winged creatures wheel against the softly darkening sky in lazy circles. “If you want me to be honest about it, I think you’re too damn good for either of us.” I wish I could be more like you. Hell no, he’s not saying that. She’d probably sock him, and to be honest he’d deserve it.

“And what good does being too good for others do anyone?” Her reply comes out sharp, and Dirk winces.

“Yeah, you’re right. That was a moronic thing to say. I know that doesn’t help at all, I just wanted you to know-“

“No, Dirk. It’s fine.” She sounds resigned. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I- I do this thing, where I decide to be the bigger person, because I tell myself that’s what will make everyone happy. But that doesn’t actually work if I go around feeling sorry for myself all the time, and getting angry with people for doing what I decided was best for them in the first place.” She laughs quietly, though it sounds more like a sigh, and then reaches for the bag with the food. “Eat your sandwich, Dirk. Just holding it doesn’t actually accomplish much.”

They sit in silence as they eat, but somehow it doesn’t actually feel that bad. Like the tension is once again starting to release between them. Fuck him if he’s going to look back at this conversation and feel like he was completely useless, though.

“Look, I realize that this is exactly the kind of thing I’m shit at, and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to change in a hurry.” He scrunches up the waxed sandwich paper in his hands, and then drops it on top of the kitten in Jane’s lap. That appears to be the right thing to do, because the little shit acts like it’s his birthday come early, and Jane smiles. “But I don’t want to seem like I’m not trying to make this work either. Shit, with everything that’s happened, we all need each other more than ever. I don’t want to be the one selfish fuck who doesn’t even try so long as he gets whatever prime cut of ass he wants.”

“I don’t think you’re selfish, Dirk-“

“That would make you a terrible judge of character, Crocker. And I know you’re not. So try again from the top with less bullshit.”

“Oh, alright, fine! I don’t think you’re unreasonably selfish, does that suit your self-deprecating baloney better?”

How’s he supposed not to laugh a bit at that? “Acceptable.”

“Well, it’s true that you can be a bit of a pillock at times, emotionally speaking, but heaven knows you’re not the only one.” She rolls her bright blue eyes, and now they’re both smiling for a moment, before she grows more somber. “But I don’t actually blame you for doing what makes you happy, you know? Or for- oh goodness, don’t mind me...” She looks away, her eyes suddenly a bit shiny. With her neck at this angle, he can clearly see where the flames licked across her skin, forever staining it in darker shades of brown and pink, leaving it shiny and distorted. “...for doing what makes him happy to.”

He wants to ask her what he’s supposed to do if he finds out that he can’t. If being with him won’t actually make Jake happy. But the words won’t come. It seems like such a cruel thing to ask. “So I can do that and still be friends with you? It seems pretty fucking lopsided when you put it like that. All for me and nothing for you.”

She raises her eyebrows then, exasperated and amused at once. “Yes, what could I possibly get out of having a friend who will get me out of actual fire if needed, Dirk? Honestly, for a clever guy, you sure are dense sometimes.”

“Right. I guess you’ve got a point.” It still seems like a pretty lame exchange rate for having to put up with his bullshit, but he’s not going to make her have to argue about it on top of everything else. That kind of whiny, self-serving nonsense is at least one way he’s never going to test the patience of his friends. “Thanks, Jane.”

“Thank you too, Dirk. Lets be patient with one another, alright?” She extracts one arm from under the cat, wrapping it around his waist for a quick hug and cheek kiss. The she somehow manages to get to her feet while still cradling the cat. “Now if you excuse me,” her voice is back to its usual briskness, “I’m going to properly introduce Bartholomeow to Nepeta... and take him off your helpless hands, you brave warrior you.”

And just like that, she’s walking away, carefully sidestepping some project involving a lot of fabric which Kanaya and Rose appears to have marshaled John into helping them with. The sound of high-pitched excitement a moment later suggests that the kitten has found a delighted and attentive audience for all its adorable shit. Dirk hesitates where he sits, but after some internal sparring can’t help but to conclude that the only way of learning where to draw the line between ‘overbearing’ and ‘normally supportive actual goddamn adult’ is to try it out. So he gets up as well, brushing the dust off his pants, and turns to Jade.

“I’ll be back in a while.”

She looks up distractedly, smiling. “Oh, right. He went that way, by the way.”

“...Damn it, Harley.”

“Hmmm?” She’s already returned to work, sticking her head into the compartment previously occupied by all those wires.

“Oh nothing. I’m clearly fighting a losing battle here anyway. Gotta admit when you’re defeated, and the shit’s written on the wall for all to see. Perform some kind of inscrutability seppuku to formally let everyone know that you’re officially retreating.”

She just giggles, the sound echoing as she scoots further inside the wall. “Go get your boyfriend, silly.”

Chapter 15: All in the past

Summary:

Past deeds move fast, but what was left undone moves faster still. New bonds are tentatively made, old ones remembered.

Notes:

Well, here’s a really fast new chapter to make up for how slow the last one one ^^; I’m not sure I can quite keep up this speed, but if we’re lucky I’ll find some middle ground. Thank you all so much for the encouraging words you’ve left so far, it’s lovely to have such engaged readers <3

It’s still far too bright outside for any respectable person to hang around there, but fuck knows he doesn’t want another lecture from the princess about having to compromise with the primitive aliens. Only she doesn’t say it like that, of course not. She goes on and on about finding common ground and reaching out and how they honestly do not have the luxury to be choosy about allies and anyway she’s sure if he just gave them a chance... She usually starts out patient and cheerful, but if he argues she’ll slip quickly into her exasperated, clipped voice, the one she reserves almost exclusively for him and which Eridan hates. But at least it’s not as bad as the pleading voice.

The point is, it’s easier to just put up with it. With the light, the unreasonable hour, the sensory confusion caused by the heat radiating off the ground, the stupid humans. Better to not be rocking the proverbial nautical vessel, even if that kind of caution is really only important for chumps who cannot breathe underwater.

Fef is watching the Roxy human scale the outside of the tower now, giggling at her antics. Then she suddenly takes off herself, powerful legs propelling her up the side of the structure, using her greater strength and reach to overtake Roxy with a laugh and a triumphant toss of her heir. Really showing off how competitive and wild she can be, under that bullshit saccharine facade. As if that’s not just so completely transparent.

Whatever, it’s not his business. Hasn’t been in a long time. It’s just kind of sad how obvious she’s being about it, and at the same time neither she nor the alien girl are probably even aware of it. Maybe he can mention it to Kar later, he’d probably get a blast out of analyzing it. He could no doubt do with something to distract him, what with the whole shitstorm he’s caught up in now.

...Then again, he probably won’t. For one thing, the others still don’t trust him around Kar alone, which is just so fucking unfair. It’s not like he’s ever tried to kill him again or anything. But you make one little mistake, and people will brand you for life over it. And Kar on his end seems to maybe have forgiven him for trying to kill him, but he’s still sore about him shooting Kan instead. It’s not even like he did that on purpose... and she turned out fine, didn’t she?

Even so, just because everyone else wanted to make a big deal out of it, he’d gone to her and asked her forgiveness. She had given it, too, albeit accompanied with some extremely graphic descriptions of what she’d do to him if he ever tried to hurt Kar again. Graphic enough that a guy could get quite the wrong idea, if he didn’t know her better and also maybe knew better than to push her when she had that glint in her eye.

None of them really trusts him anymore. But he’s going to show them all, isn’t he? One day the thing he’s been working on in secret, the thing Fef has been giving him free reigns at without even asking any questions, will be complete. Soon. Then they’ll know they shouldn’t have underestimated him. It reaches far now, almost all the way to the human settlements. They’ll see, too. They’ll all see.

Eridan turns his head demonstratively away from that abominable display of interspecies flirting, shielding his eyes against the brighter sky at the horizon, and makes a few bitter clicking noises at the back of his thorax - but not loud enough for anyone to hear. Just in time, as it turns out, to see Jake jumping off a rocky ledge a bit off the track and disappearing from view, followed by a sound of sliding rocks and some muffled swearing. Eridan hesitates, but although he’s definitely a complete goddamn idiot and wouldn’t know cultural refinement if it bit him, Jake makes for less odious company than the rest of his entire species. No harm in at least checking up on him.

Picking his way across the uneven ground, he leans cautiously over the ledge to peer below, aware that he probably weighs more than the squishy mammal, prosthetic limb notwithstanding. He finds Jake sprawled on the ground a bit further down the slope, awkwardly attempting to sit up while trying not to move his robot arm at all. It’s a pretty pathetic display.

“Oh for fuck’s sake... just hold still, will you?” He swings himself off the ledge, managing to keep his balance pretty easily now that Jake has taken almost all the loose rocks with him. Stalking down to the startled human, he bends down and easily yanks him into a sitting position, causing Jake to wince and stifle a whimpering sound. So much for gratitude. Lowering himself onto the ground next to him, Eridan gives the human a nudge with his shoulder. “What did you think you were accomplishing anyway, knowing you can’t even keep yourself properly balanced like this?”

Jake gives him a slightly put-upon look, but then sighs and drags the fingers of his healthy hand through his hair, leaving a streak of umber dust behind. “Just typical that you’d have to bear witness to my spectacular pratfall on top of all the other ways I’ve made a fool of myself presently. I have to say, Mr Ampora, that I’m not exactly on the top of my game today.”

Eridan just shrugs, shifting on the uneven ground to find a more comfortable spot, and then gives up with a frustrated little grunt. “How would I even be able to tell the difference? You humans are a thoroughly embarrassing species overall.”

Jake inexplicably lets out a quiet snort of laughter, bumping his shoulder against Eridan’s in turn. He’s done this before, acted as if the insults Eridan slings in his direction as a matter of course are somehow to be considered rapier wit, rather than the abuse it’s intended as. It was just as baffling then as it is now. Humans are so strange and stupid. Is this what comes of not having proper caliginous relationships, not even understanding when someone is trying to antagonize you?

“To be honest though, I don’t feel falling squarely on the ole derrière ranks particularly high on today’s buffoon-o-meter.” And now he goes and puts his hand all dramatically on his forehead, leaving a brown smear across it too. Eridan starts digging through his pockets with ill grace. “I really didn’t put my best foot forward back there with Jane. I hope you didn’t have to bear witness to that regrettable episode.”

Despite saying the exact opposite, he seems somehow hopeful that Eridan might know what he’s talking about. He snarls impatiently. “You are wildly overestimating how interesting your human interpersonal nonsense is. Why the fuck should I have been watching?” Also, the Jane human had said she would rip his fins off if he came close to her again. The nerve! “But if you want to talk about it then I guess I have nothing better to do than put up with it at the moment.”

Finally finding the handkerchief he was looking for, he reaches out and brusquely grabs Jake by the chin. The human’s eyes widen and he flinches slightly, but Eridan only tightens his grip. “You’ve made a fucking mess a yourself, idiot. You can talk about how you fucked up with the girl who apparently isn’t your moirail because humans don’t have those or whatever, even though she hangs around and stops you from doing stupid shit to yourself, which is probably the closest you ever get to being properly destructive. Just let me clean you up, it’s disgusting to be frank.” Jake’s skin is markedly warmer than his own, just like a lowblood’s. He knows they don’t have a hemospectrum, but did anyone actually say what color of blood humans have? If they did, he missed it.

Whatever it is, it’s probably gross.

Jake just sits still as he roughly rubs the muddy smear off his forehead, eyes wide and mouth half open, as if he’s confused by something. Damn it, why is he even wasting time on this idiot? He has no real answer, but nonetheless also runs the fabric across Jake’s head to catch the worst of the mess in his hair. Once he’s done, he presses the handkerchief into Jake’s hand with an impatient gesture. “Hang on to it until you’ve had a chance to wash it, will you? I don’t want it while it’s covered with human body fluids.”

Jake looks down at the handkerchief for a moment, and then suddenly grins at him, wide and guileless and absolutely fucking free of any sign of intelligence. Blunt teeth, like the rest of them. What’s even the point of them - his nubby teeth or humans as a whole, take your pick really. “Golly, I guess I was making a bit of a spectacle of myself there. Thank you kindly, good sir.”

“Ugh, I have no idea what you actually talk like as a human, but in translation you should know that you sound like a monstrous tool.”

Jake laughs a bit sheepishly, shrugging his shoulders and then grimacing in pain as he jostles his robot arm. How helpless can one human get? Revolting. “Yeouch... That sure is what people keep telling me, but I feel like I’d be a right old pushover if I let that stop me! Wouldn’t you say that’s no way for a man of stout heart and integrity to behave?”

“What? Listening when other people tell you that you’re making an idiot a yourself? Fucking forgive me, but I thought that was your whole problem that you wanted to discuss, wasn’t it?”

He laughs, but also slumps a little bit in defeat where he sits. “Well, I suppose when it comes to this whole kerfuffle with Jane, you’ve put your finger right on the crux of it! I know she’s only thinking of what’s best for me, like a true chum would, and also she is sort of my doctor. But... Blast it, I suppose I just can’t help feeling like I’m being nannied from every direction, like everyone is walking on eggshells around me. I’m not sure why, but sometimes it feels like everyone is keeping secrets from me, as if I’m just too darn half-baked to understand what’s going on.” He lets out an explosive sigh, twiddling the handkerchief distractedly. “You may think I’m an idiot-“

“Fuckin obviously.”

“-and that this is clearly all just silly old paranoia. And you’re right! But it’s hard to shake, and I end up taking it all out on Jane and Dirk.”

“Well, if you want my advise, your matesprit ought to be aware that this is what you’re like by now, so if he can’t take none of it he’s obviously not for you.” He hesitates, and then reluctantly mutters, “Then again, I never had any fuckin luck in that quadrant, so what the fuck do I even know?”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that Dirk is prepared to deal with some of my moody horseshit on a regular basis, and he’s certainly a tough enough fella to take it.” His brown skin darkens slightly, and Eridan isn’t entirely sure if the blush means the same as it would for a troll. It seems likely, though. “But I suppose I just don’t want to be someone that everyone feels they have to handle all the time... do you see what I mean?”

“...Well, yes. I suppose I actually do.” It’s one the saddest and most vulnerable things he’s ever been somehow tricked into admitting about himself, so it’s a bit strange how much of a relief it is to say it.

“See, somehow I just knew you would!”

“Is that a fucking insult, human?”

“Not at all.” He slaps Eridan’s arm in what appears to be jovial gesture. “It’s just nice to have someone understanding around to advice me in this - someone who isn’t directly involved, or already sick to death of my angsty hooey.”

“Who says I’m not? I’ve had all of five minutes a this useless shit.” To his surprise, Eridan finds himself having to bite back a smile as Jake chuckles next to him. He notices something behind them at this point, but decides to ignore it for now. “But fine, if you’re desperate enough to want more a my shitty fuckin advice, how about this: You could just get over it already. The arm thing, I mean.”

Jake visibly tenses up, but Eridan decides that fuck it, he asked for this. “I don’t get what you’re even complaining about, to be honest. I mean, that thing is clearly an upgrade on the feeble mammal limb you had before, right? How is that even a contest?”

Jake glances away, his healthy arm wrapping around the robot limb in a manner that is either protective or humiliated... possibly both. “I’m not sure ‘upgrade’ is the right word something that makes me screw up royally at everything I used to be able to do.”

“So what? I mean, obviously it will be different, it’s not your actual fucking arm. You’re not getting that back anyway, though, and if that’s what you’re upset about then just say that.” He shrugs irritably, reaching out and tapping the metal of the prosthetic limb, causing Jake to flinch. “But instead you got something that’s able to do things your old arm never could, right? So why throw a fit over all the ways it’s different, when you could try to learn to use this thing instead? Seems to me you’re just tryin to use what’s no longer there no more, over and over, when you should be learning how to use what you have.”

Jake stares at him, mouth open as if to argue, expression tense and raw. Eridan grimaces, pretty sure he just went way too far, and as usual completely unable to back up or off. “All I’m saying,” he mumbles a bit lamely, looking away, “is maybe you have to do things you used to differently now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do them, or that your new way is any worse or anything. And if there’s some things you can’t do no longer, fine, you can’t. Someone else can do that. Stop wasting time on that and figure out what you can do instead.”

Jake draws in a deep breath, and then just holds it, as if he’s trying to figure out all the ways he’s about to tell Eridan to go fuck himself. Well, great. Fan-fucking-tastic. A friendship officially ruined in thirty seconds, after just a couple of days. That must be a new record, even for him.

“Thank you.”

“Yes, well, I- wait. What?”

“Thank you,” Jake repeats simply. When Eridan turns around to see if the human is fucking with him, there are tears in his eyes, which he hurriedly tries to rub away with the back of his hand. The hand that is still holding the handkerchief. Amazing. “I appreciate- I appreciate your honest and forthright opinion on the matter, and you’re right.”

“I- I am?” Wait, shit, why does he sound so surprised at that? Well, besides not being sure if anyone’s ever actually been happy for his advice before, that is. He could at least pretend like this isn’t the first time he managed to say the right thing.

“You most certainly are.” Jake sighs, and then finally seems to recall that he’s holding a piece of fabric that is a lot more absorbent than the heel of his hand. He dabs at his eyes with it, offering a slightly damp grin when Eridan rolls his eyes and makes a few embarrassed scraping sounds. “I guess I just decided that- that the way I was before was just better, and if I couldn’t get back to that in a double jiffy then I just had to be a lost cause. But now that I’m actually saying it aloud, I realize what a bird-brained idea that really was.”

“That sounds like an unfair insult to featherbeasts.” Eridan attempts a cautious smile, and is amazed to find Jake returning it, albeit a bit feebly.

“I mean, I don’t think I can just stop being upset about losing an entire limb...“

“Who said you had to be? If you are, fine, people can just deal with it. Just stop pretending like it’s about Jane or your matesprit or people keeping secrets or the robot arm or whatever, and maybe you won’t be so fucking insufferable to be around.”

“...Sound advice if ever I heard it. You’re a real sensible guy, Mr Ampora, did you know that?”

“...A fucking course I am.” Fuck, there’s no way Jake isn’t noticing his embarrassing and completely irrational blush. He needs to think of a distraction, quick. So he jerks his head back in the direction of the thing he’d noticed earlier. “By the way, your matesprit is hiding behind that bit of vegetation.”

Jake blinks at him, then spins around in a comically exaggerated fashion to squint in the direction indicated. After a moment or two there’s a sigh, and the Dirk human steps out from behind the gnarled bit of flora. “Infrared or electromagnetic?” he demands of Eridan, ignoring Jake for the moment.

“Infrared,” Eridan admits a bit reluctantly. Technically sea dwellers have both, but the electromagnetic sense was developed to work under water, and is basically useless on land even if human technology wouldn’t be playing merry hell with it anyway.

“Got it.” He nods, then turns to Jake. Maybe the other human can read his expression better, but it looks annoyingly blank from where Eridan is sitting. Which is why it’s surprising when his voice comes out so hesitant. “Sorry. I wanted to check on you, but I didn’t want to interrupt. So I decided to wait. I guess it kind of got away from me.”

Jake looks like he considers getting angry, which honestly Eridan thinks would be pretty fucking justified. But maybe he’s worn himself out on emotional theatrics, because he just makes an exasperated little sound. “Great jumping Jehoshaphat, Dirk, you don’t have to treat everything like an espionage mission.”

“Right. Sorry.” His jaw tightens slightly. “I just wasn’t sure what to do. It’s not because I don’t trust you.”

“Well, what’s that got to do with the price of a fresh mackerel? I’m sure I wasn’t trying to call your trust into question.” Jake looks baffled, and Eridan and Dirk briefly exchange looks. Eridan isn’t sure, but he has a feeling the pale human is rolling his eyes as hard as he he. “I’m just saying it’s a flaming ridiculous way to behave. And maybe a fella could get a bit jumpy if he always feels like he’s being under surveillance... you know?”

“Sure.” Dirk raises his eyebrows slightly, then looks away with a small shrug. “Anyway, as shocked as I’m sure we both are by this, it’s not like I disagree with anything this idiot just said.” Eridan makes a face and a rude gesture at Dirk from behind Jake’s back. “And for the record, I’m glad you managed to figure things out. I knew you would eventually.”

“You did?”

“What, are you calling this face a liar?” If it’s possible to get more deadpan, Dirk just did. “Anyway... I believe in you.”

Something seems to pass between the two humans that Eridan isn’t privy to, but well, that basically describes most of his life at this point. Why even bother getting upset? And it’s annoyingly hard to disapprove of anything that makes Jake smile like that.

“Well, gee. Thanks, Dirk.”

“No problem.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Now go apologize to Jane, you uncouth goddamn swine. Honestly, I’m embarrassed for you.”

“Gadzooks! You’re right!” Jake jumps to his feet, and then almost overbalances before Eridan grabs the back of his shirt to steady him. He really needs to work on his balance.

“How the fuck did you even survive until maturity?” he gripes, letting go once Jake looks like he’s found his feet. “What with having no natural advantages at all, is what I mean.”

Jake just laughs and gives him another rough slap on the shoulder, hard enough to make his teeth click together. “I’m really bloody grateful for your help, Eridan. I won’t forget about this, mark my word. Now do excuse me, I have to go apologize to a lady.”

They leave, Dirk with a brief backward glance and an eyebrow raised to something approaching a question, but not quite high enough to be a challenge. Eridan stays where he sits, feeling simultaneously flustered and exhilarated about the whole damn exchange, but not entirely sure why. It just feels, somehow, like things have changed. And also, maybe, like there’s something really obvious that he’s missing. He can’t put a flipper on it right now, but it’s definitely related somehow to something he was thinking about only a little while ago. If only he could figure out what.

 

---

 

At first he thinks that he’s on the asteroid, eating a tense meal of the ever dwindling rations left by previous inhabitants. But as he reaches out to receive the tightly pressed cylinder of dry protein and the small pack of yet inactive water crystals, someone instead hands him a bowl. It’s made of some strangely iridescent material - some sort of carved lusus shell he realizes, nearly dropping it in delayed shock.

Around the rim, someone has carved a pattern of small leaves. The slew of meat and fungi inside is so hot it’s steaming, and it smells delicious.

Looking up, there are four other figures sitting around the fire with him. There are others out in the surrounding darkness, but all of them are indistinct.

The one who handed him the bowl is shining like a beacon, casting dancing shadows all over the smoky cave ceiling far above. Beneath the almost blinding light he manages to catch a kindly smile, and a hint of features that remind him of someone he... Kanaya?

“Welcome back, dear.” No, not Kanaya. The voice is older.

“Finally got through! I knew the humans would be useful.” This one seems old and young all at once, as if she has no fixed point in time. Her hair almost engulfs her wiry frame where she sits, and there are words in Alternian scrawled all over her skin, shifting like living things when she moves.

“It might still be two late.” This figure is just a suggestion of contours, as if he’s not entirely there. His voice sounds like an echo, a sigh. A familiar blue and red glow surrounds him.

The last figure is startlingly normal by comparison. An ordinary adult troll, only a little bit taller than Karkat, with a tattered grey cloak draped around his angular shoulders. But it’s only when he sees him that Karkat begins to tremble, the bowl slipping from his fingers and landing with a clatter on the cave floor. He feels his skin go clammy and cold, his lips numb and uncooperative as he forces himself to speak.

“Please no. I can’t deal with this. Not again. Please. I’m fucking begging you.”

He regards Karkat solemnly, even perhaps sorrowfully, but there is no mercy to be had in his expression. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds like he means it. For all the good that does. “If there was another way... But we need you. Your people needs you. It can’t go on like this.”

The shining one sighs, shaking her head slightly. “Kanny, the drama isn’t helping. You’re scaring the poor thing half to death.” She offers Karkat another barely visible smile as her companion stifles a plaintive sigh. “He really does mean well. There’s just so much he was never able to do, so many he never managed to help, and it hurts him so.”

“You’ve been out of reach for so long... really scared us!” A fanged, leonine smile between lips still stained faintly with blood. She shapes her words like someone who has half forgotten how to talk to anyone but herself. “Now that you’re here again... not much time.”

“And he’s right. We need you. There’s no one else.” The female figures glare at the diffuse one, but for a being made merely of highlights and shadows, he manages a pretty passable dismissive shrug.

“She’s right, too. This happened because I failed.” It’s a simple admission, free of self-pity. The bright red eyes meet Karkat’s own, and there’s a hint of a rueful smile on his lips. “And in the end... well, I suppose it will be your choice. But there are things that we need to show you.” He nods toward the shining one, who offers Karkat her radiant hand. “Please.”

It’s every bit as much of a plea as Karkats own words, and impossible to defend himself against. He wonders if he could just get up, turn his back on them and walk away. Somewhere, there must be a way out of here, right? But they’re watching him in unflinching silence, and Karkat thinks back to the things he’s seen. Aradia cradled by the bloody, broken carcass of her lusus. Sollux’ body fused with the asteroid guidance system, the timer ticking down too fast. Tavros methodically rigging his four wheel device with explosives. Nepeta’s body hitting the wall with a sickening crack. The spreading pool of blood around Kanaya, soaking into his clothes, all over his hands as he tried fruitlessly to stem the flow. Terezi kneeling in the court block, grinning. Vriska dropping the laughsassin’s body to the floor, her hands trembling. Equius' hands growing still over the finished weapon, his head bowed and his face stony. Gamzee leaning closer, his hands slowly tightening around Karkat’s throat. Eridan’s voice breaking as he pulled the trigger. Feferi snarling and covered in black blood.

Looking down at the grey symbol on his own shirt, he thinks: This has to end somewhere. If I don’t do it, who else is there?

He takes the offered hand, his body tensing for what he knows will follow. The murmur of waves, the stench of sickness and stagnant water, the chafing heaviness of chains weighing his body down. Hands on his skin, the crisp rustle of silk, a mind as empty and cold as the sea. A small voice whispering get it out get it out get it out, but never loudly enough.

“I’m sorry, my child. I’m trying to hold it in.”

Another hand grasps his free one, small and hard as old wood. He hears the sound of wind roaming through caves, watches the acid rain trickle from above and carve little rivulets and pools in the cave floor. His fingertips ache, raw and bloody. The solid silence of empty years settles upon him, and he knows that loneliness makes the sound of choked sobs echoing against stone.

“Over soon. Promise.”

A shadow shifts, and the only sensation that joins the chorus this time is one prolonged, never ending scream. It is voiceless anguish and thousands of years passing in the form of one thought, one emotion, one unchanging note.

“Sorry. Can’t help it. Hurts. Sorry.”

And then finally the familiar stench of burning flesh, the excruciating pain in his wrists, but deadlier still is the quick ebbing of his blood, his senses, his mind, everything seeping away through the wound in his side. It is at once merciful and terrifying, a relief and a terrible regret. He wants the pain to end, he wants it to be over, he wants the world to just let go. But he has so much left to say.

The words fill him, the words at the end of all words, the things left unsaid and undone, a world largely left unchanged and aching. Every tongue silenced with his own, every body broken, every dream destroyed. It’s too much for one person to bear, let alone to hold onto and remember, to make sense of as it rises like an unstoppable tide in his mind. The shadowy figures in the cave close in, their eyes bright, their voices joining the chorus. There are gentle hands on his face, soothing words, but he cannot hear them through the waves, the silence, the scream, the anger. He cannot hear them through his own wretched sobbing.

Still, somehow, something is left behind as sleep finally surrenders him like a prisoner, and he breaks the surface of the Sopor Slime as if he’s clawing his way out of his grave.

You will know what to do. TRUST THEM. Find the words. SET ME FREE. The Green Sun. JUSTICE. You are not alone, even in dreaming.

 

---

 

Once they get one of those cocoon things dragged into the house, Karkat goes there to sleep instead. It’s probably for the best for both of them, what with his recurring nightmare issues, and Karkat complaining about restless sleep and backache in the morning. Anyway, it’s not like Dave sees any reason why they should have to share a bed. They’re getting to know each other just fine in the waking hours, and until they actually figure out how to relate to each other like normal people, this wedding is nothing but a political sham anyway.

He tells himself all these things, and still it’s hard to get to sleep. It’s quite frankly preposterous. Sure, he’s slept next to his friends and family members a lot during missions, but in between he’s always had a separate bed and room like any goddamn healthy, growing guy ought to. There’s no reason for this bed to feel so damn huge and uninviting just because Karkat is not in it. As for somehow feeling colder now than before they got the heat working inside... yeah, he’s calling bullshit on that. What kind of soppy bullshit tropes are in charge of this, that’s what he’d like to know.

It’s the third night in a row he’s ended up twisting and turning for an hour or so, and when he finally manages to start drifting off, the relief only barely manages to outweigh a thoroughly miffed feeling. This is absurd, and he’s not standing for it.

As a soft noise by the door startles him from the barely tangible cloud of sleep he’s managed to conjure, dispersing it like so much mist in sunlight, his first reaction is to scramble urgently for a weapon, hastily turning on the bedside lamp. The second, once he’s tried and failed to detect any danger, is an exhausted groan. He flops back onto the mattress, staring wide-awake up into the ceiling, and knowing it will probably be another hour now. “I hope you’ve got a damn good explanation for waking me up,” he tells the indistinct shape in the doorway. “I mean shit, not to be dramatic or anything, but I don’t actually want to have to kill you. If nothing else, it’ll probably be considered pretty uncool, politically speaking.”

“Well, fuck me, I didn’t know this room in my own damn hive is only available by reservation. Please kindly direct me to the appropriate manner of communication, and I will make sure to grovel in a suitably revolting display of pantswetting humiliation next time around.”

Dave winces, rubbing his hands over his face. “The appropriate manner of communication,” he says, his words coming out slightly muffled, “is what we humans call a fucking indoor voice. You ever heard of it?”

There’s the quick intake or breath that usually precedes a rise in either pitch, volume or both. Dave considers if clapping his hands over his ears would be too undignified or not. Then Karkat exhales again, a small whistling sound as if someone just gave him a swift uppercut in the stomach. “Sorry,” he mutters, at least somewhat quieter. Soft footfalls brush across the floor, and then he’s suddenly standing by the bed. In the soft, yellowish lamplight, his normally already messy hair looks damp, forming a spiky halo around his head. His shirt clings slightly to his skin.

He’s shaking.

Dave sits up, concern chasing irritation away. “Shit, are you alright? What happened?” His eyes once more dart to the bedside table where he knows Dirk left him a gun, ‘just in case’.

Karkat just shakes his head, lifting the blanket in both hands and giving Dave a beseeching look. When he nods, the troll crawls into the bed next to him and pulls the blanket up all the way to his nubby horns. “I had a nightmare.” His voice is back at the usual volume, but at least the blanket muffled it somewhat.

“...Wait, I thought that was literally the whole point to why you sleep submerged in fucking slime baths. Isn’t it supposed to keep nightmares away, or is it actually some kind of culturally significant skincare routine? Was something lost in translation there? Is it mostly for slime wrestling slumber parties?”

“Oh my sweet mother grub, shut the fuck up.” Karkat peeks over the edge of the blanket with one baleful, feebly glowing eye. “It’s supposed to do that, but it only works properly if you receive the same dosage every night, like any other fucking medication in the entire universe. If you end up skipping a few nights because some numbsponged alien customs, for example, it’s possible to still have bad dreams even when you’re in your recuperacoon. And then it’s really fucking hard to wake up from your dreams because you’re literally submerged in a powerful soporific.”

He once again disappears almost completely under the blanket, and Dave can actually feel him shivering now. He bites his lip, then nods for no ones benefit except his own, carefully placing his arm across Karkat’s waist. “Okay. Do you want to stay here for the rest of the night?”

No reply, but a jerky movement that is probably a nod. After a moment or two, Karkat wriggles a bit closer, one hand closing around the front of Dave’s shirt in a vice grip.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

This time he’s definitely shaking his head, and a more pronounced tremor runs through his body. “Yeah, thought not. Just thought I’d offer.” Without really thinking about it, he starts running his fingers through Karkat’s hair, the way Rose used to when he had nightmares as a kid. “Okay, let’s talk about something else then. Take your mind off it.”

Karkat shifts a bit, his shoulders slowly starting to relax. “Like what?”

Dave grimaces unseen at the ceiling, resigning himself to his fate. “The book you’re reading... what was it? ‘Pale hands, flushed cheeks’? Why don’t you tell me about it.”

Notes:

Man, I struggled with writing Eridan’s perspective bc I’m writing them as a bit older and after some Character Development, but I still want them to be recognizable as themselves. This is obviously a bit harder with more minor characters, but I hope I managed to pull through. Also obviously I don’t write out most of his accent, because that would get really obnoxious really fast, but I left in the supplementing “of” with “a” a couple of times because that a bit less disruptive? At least I hope so :P

Chapter 16: Linguistics

Summary:

Erotic linguistics. That’s all there really is to say on the matter.

Notes:

Updating tags to cover these shenanigans. NSFW ahead.

“Having stayed well hidden as the scorching rays of the sun ravaged the- the earth, Garrys awaited her kismesis. While she watched-“

Kanaya looks up at the sound of Rose’s quiet murmur, finding herself genuinely impressed. She can only have had the foresight to start studying Alternian for maybe a quarter of a sweep at most, and Kanaya would guess that it has been far less than that, yet her pronunciation is honestly remarkable. Certainly she struggles with certain sounds, ones that Kanaya would venture that the human’s language simply lacks, but she’s still quite advanced for a novice.

Rose of course notices her attention, as she notices most things, and looks up with a faint smile. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

Kanaya shakes her head, even if it’s not strictly true. She had been taking a bit of a nap. Since they’ve all recently come together during the early mornings and late evenings, catching some sleep during noontime as well as night has become part of their daily patterns. But just like the humans, Kanaya has always found it difficult to properly rest while the sun is up, and her sleep had been shallow and fitful. On top of that, she finds that the incessant sound of moving water close by make her restless for some reason. Really, she’s happy for a distraction.

Rose tilts her head, her look suggesting she has seen through Kanaya’s little white lie, but she doesn’t call her on it. “At any rate, I didn’t mean to expose you to me butchering your language in such a fashion. It is quite beautiful and complex, and deserves a better treatment than what I can only call my hamfisted attempts to jam our blunt human grunts into the complex angular structures of your Alternian syllables.”

Kanaya can tell that she’s exaggerating her humility somewhat, but there is still a hint of delicate hesitation in her expression. She has already noticed that running paradoxically parallel to Rose’s undeniable narcissistic streak, is a tendency for unexpectedly harsh self-scrutiny and criticism. “Not at all. I was honestly about to remark that you’re doing exceedingly well, considering you must’ve had quite a short time available to study and enhance your skill. You rather put us to shame - I know my own attempts have been terribly feeble by comparison.”

Rose shrugs, but her smile widens slightly. “I’ve always had an ear for languages, and enjoy studying them at my leisure. Alternian has offered me a pleasant challenge so far.” She tilts her head a bit, and Kanaya can tell from the slight pursing of her lips that this part of the exchange will be more playful. “But come now, I won’t actually perish if fed anything but a steady diet of outright flattery. If you’ve got any criticism for me, please let me hear it. How else am I supposed to improve, hm?”

Kanaya worries her lip slightly, because despite Rose’s teasing tone she would like to come up with something constructive to say. However, she’s not sure how the most obvious appraisal will be received. “I would not exactly call it a critique as such, that implies that I think you were doing something wrong - which isn’t entirely accurate. It’s more like... an observation.”

“Oh dear. If you’re taking such pains to preserve my poor ego, perhaps I should be worried.”

“Yes, I am clearly angling to verbally ruin you, and escort you without delay to the nearest school feeding facility. Alas, you have rumbled my attempt to completely wreck your human shit.” Rose laughs at what Kanaya thinks was a fairly passable attempt at their strange, almost ritualistic insincerity. It’s... encouraging. “But in all seriousness, I think what mostly stands out about your pronunciation is that it comes across as rather, well, flat.”

“Flat?” Rose tilts her head thoughtfully. “Are you perhaps referring to the lack of all those little auxiliary sounds - the clicks and whirring and so on?”

“Yes, that’s indeed what I mean. Vocalizemphasis - or vox for short, if you’re actually speaking about it. Generally we don’t. It is just a thing we do naturally but mostly do not acknowledge.” She’s not sure how to explain the complicated relationship troll culture has with displays of emotion, many of which are both central to their societal structures and yet curiously subject to scorn or outright denial. It’s a thorny subject, and she decides to leave it be for now. Let’s stick to the semantics and the purely technical side of things. “I would guess that humans aren’t actually capable of those?”

“I’m afraid not. At least not while speaking at the same time - and probably not with the same sort of nuance.” Rose trails her fingers absently over the cover of the book which she is still holding, eyes bright with interest. “So I was right to assume that those serve as some sort of emotional intensifiers?”

“Yes. I did listen in a bit to a few of you talking without my translation tick activated, and it seemed to me like humans modulate the tone and pitch of their actual words to express different emotions, is that correct?”

Rose possesses such animation when speaking of something that interests her, even if it’s somehow expressed through relatively small gestures and subtle mimicry. It’s as if she is always restraining some part of herself, the intensity of which would rip through the flimsy world around her if she were to ever unleash it, so she makes do with letting little flashes of it show here and there. Kanaya catches herself half expecting objects to rattle off the furniture around her, or at least randomly levitate the way they do around Aradia when she’s excited.

It had been like that almost two weeks ago, when they first made their way to their new hive - only more so. It had been difficult, before that point, not to compare her attraction to Rose to her previous flushed feelings for Vriska. It’s as if being immune to the rays of the Alternian sun has caused her to gravitate to anything that might actually burn her. But on that night, she had known that her previous inclinations were positively pale - both figuratively and literally - compared to what’s happening to her now.

It really is as though a new celestial body has appeared in the sky, much more blinding than anything she has seen before. But warmer, too. That really ought to be more concerning to her, and yet...

Rose is looking at her in anticipation. Kanaya feels a flush creep across her cheeks, and she clears her throat. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I said that’s not just correct, but very succinctly put,” Rose repeats, eyebrows slightly raised.

Kanaya is aware of the way the heat still lingers on her skin, but attempts to ignore it. “Well, as you have probably already surmised, that- that wouldn’t work very well with Alternian. You’d risk changing the entire meaning of the words. You can hold out certain sounds for effect, at most, but usually that is done to be able to fit more vox into one syllable. Vriska is pretty notorious when it comes to doing that.”

Rose nods thoughtfully. “And you can also use vox to express a specific feeling, without needing to accompany it with words, correct? Thought so. Which most of the time has no proper translation to specific human words or sounds, and therefore is interpreted by our brains as more of a tone, or even just a vague feeling.”

“That would make sense, yes. While your more flexible speech patterns are interpreted as vox to us, even though you’re not actually capable of it. Which is why it was a bit jarring to hear you actually speak Alternian, I believe. Without the interference of the translation, of course your words would sound less...” Shes not sure what word to use, so she merely waves one hand vaguely.

“Emotive?” Rose suggests. Then she sighs, leaning back against the padded side of the lounging chaise she’s perched on. “That’s a bit of a shame. I’m afraid I couldn’t find much information on the subject in my study materials, and even if I did, I suspect that my ability to master such subtleties will be limited.” She glances down at her book again. “I’m guessing that since it’s largely intuitive, it doesn’t really come across in text either?”

Kanaya gets up from the pile of pillows she’d been dozing on, crossing the room to where Rose is seated by one of the large windows. She had requested those for her own quarters, and Feferi had graciously accommodated her. It had been decided that arranging a hive for all of them close to the border would be the most efficient way to go about things, and it really took very little time for the assigned robots to accomplish a suitable structure. Right outside the window, water glitters in the bright noonday sun. It does so outside all of the windows, apart from the lower ones, owing to the fact that those are under the surface of the water. This is because the hive is situated in the middle of a handy salt water lake which is continuously fed by the shifting tides. It’s low tide now, meaning the lake is cut off from the sea by a narrow rocky ledge spanning between the much steeper cliffs on either side.

From this window it is also possible to see across the border, and if one squints a bit, to make out Karkat’s and Dave’s dwelling on top of the nearest peak. No one had said anything, but Kanaya knows it had been arranged that way for a reason, and she’s grateful.

Sitting down just behind Rose and arranging herself so that she can glance over her shoulder, she drapes one arm loosely around her waist, and uses the other to open the book once more. “If you don’t mind...?”

“Not at all.” Rose leans back against her, strands of her soft hair tickling Kanaya’s neck as their cheeks don’t quite brush together, yet come close enough that Kanaya can feel the heat radiating off her skin. Her small frame feels so delicate cradled close to her like this, and yet it’s as if she can sense the coiled potential within her slight limbs, power compressed and perfectly tempered. Her own vascular system performs a not entirely unpleasant jolting maneuver as Rose presses closer, and her breathing stutters and then slows in response to the resulting tension. She notices, too, how small bumps appear across Rose’s skin, and the fine hairs on her lower arms rise up slightly. Some sort of mammalian reflexive response, no doubt, which she cannot guess the purpose of.

Trying not to allow herself to be distracted, Kanaya quickly turns the pages with fingers that suddenly seem a bit too clumsy for her liking. She scans the text until she finds a likely passage, and then carefully pins down the spread with the tips of her fingers. “In prose, the words are rather supposed to carry the emotional narrative on their own, and indicating any sort of vox is usually considered terribly gauche. But in dialogue...” With her nail, she taps a small line of colored dots and dashes in between the lines of text to bring them to Rose’s attention. “Describing every variation with words would be tedious and would probably sound rather clunky, so it’s not uncommon for authors to include some pointers. It’s not as exact as actual letters, and there are things like... dialects, personal preferences, highblood or lowblood affectations, all of which cause different trolls to have very individual interpretations. But these ones translate to something like...”

She tries to carefully ennunciate the way the initial soft whir blends into a scraping hiss, thinking too late that maybe she should have picked a less loaded piece of dialogue. Rose shivers next to her, her breathing noticeably picking up in counterpoint to Kanaya’s almost painfully slow breaths. Warmer blood, she thinks a bit dizzily. She reacts differently to adrenaline, just like a warmer hued troll would.

“Come and claim what you presume is yours, then,” Rose reads in somewhat less elegant Alternian than before, the words that were meant to accompany the vox. Is it just Kanaya, or does her skin feel slightly warmer?

Rose slides one hand around the cover of the book, allowing it to sink carelessly into her lap as she splays her fingers against the back of Kanaya’s hand. She curls them slightly so that her beautifully manicured, bright golden nails dig into Kanaya’s wrist for a moment, then slowly trails them up along the angle of her arm. She turns her body along with the movement, until their foreheads rest together, and uses the hand now cradling Kanaya’s neck to gently push her backwards onto the sloped surface of the chaise.

It’s such a fluid, natural progression of events that Kanaya finds her own reactions delayed, but she’s not going to let the human solely claim the initiative in this exchange. With her arm still curled around Rose’s waist, she pulls her with her even as she folds, easily lifting up the other girl’s much lighter frame in order to slide her legs beneath her, so that when she sets her down once more she ends up perched on her lap. Rose lets out a startled little sound, which is followed by a low laugh, rich and warm, as she shifts to get more comfortable. Her dress slides up in the process, unveiling soft-looking yet powerful limbs. Kanaya experimentally runs her fingers across the silky skin now exposed, fascinated to find her fingertips catching slightly on a light dusting of stubble. For some reason she cannot quite fathom, it appears that the hair that used to grow there has been removed. How curious.

They’ve had a few moments of tentative intimacy after the wedding, but Rose has been clearly conscious of Kanaya’s wish to explore their potential relationship more slowly, and hasn’t pushed at all until now. And this time around, Kanaya has to admit, she’d been trying to signal very hard that she wouldn’t mind a certain amount of push. If Rose hadn’t taken her up on it, she might’ve considered pushing a bit herself.

Rose sighs, the sound hitching slightly as Kanaya’s hands dive underneath her skirt and continue up the back of her thighs. She curves her spine slightly like a cat, rolling her hips up against Kanaya’s hands, and then closes the already tense and aching distance between their lips. Kanaya is surprised by how much intensity Rose puts into the kiss, and just as surprised by the ferocity with which she returns it. Rose presses her body against Kanaya’s with some urgency, rolling her hips downward this time, and then lets out a low moan that is almost completely muffled by the kiss.

When they break apart they are both breathless, and Rose’s lips are parted as she half pants, half laughs for breath, eyes intent and seeming to scorch whatever they land on. There is a shockingly bright red smear on Rose’s lower lip, and a taste that is both familiar and alien in Kanaya’s mouth. Human blood is heavy and salty on the palate, and that color... no, best not to think about it. Not now.

Rose doesn’t appear bothered by being nicked by Kanaya’s fangs. She licks the blood from her lower lip and smiles, before leaning in and trailing lingering kisses and hot, wet breath along the upper edge of Kanaya’s ear, across the slightly ridged skin behind it, and then across the smoother, more sensitive skin of her neck. Every few seconds, she stops to nip experimentally with her teeth, making small murmuring sounds against the worried skin. Kanaya finds herself shockingly unbothered by the little sighs and whimpering sounds that pass her own lips as this progresses.

She does however tense slightly as Rose’s lips reach her chest, and Rose’s fingers start to undo the lacing of her dress. The human halts, looking up quizzically, her face slightly flushed and her mouth half open and soft.

“Too much?” she enquirers, her voice nonetheless smooth and seemingly in control, even if it is chased by ragged breaths.

Kanaya half expects that she’ll say yes, so she’s taken aback when a very urgent, “No!” comes tumbling out instead. She flushes, offering Rose a tentative smile to somewhat take the edge off the desperation in her statement. “No. Please, continue.”

Rose smiles, just a little triumphant, and resumes what she’s doing. Her hands are just as skilled and quick as Kanaya remembers, chasing fabric away with the same ease as she draws a gun. Kanaya isn’t quite sure what it says about her that this is the connection she makes, nor is she entirely sure that she wants to. Once done with Kanaya’s clothes, she leans back and quickly pulls her own dress over her head, discarding it on the floor. The silky, sliplike thing which appears to be some sort of chest protector follows suit, and now they are both exposed save for their underwear.

Kanaya is a bit too aware of the fluid already slowly soaking into hers, staining the off-white fabric a pale green. Rose’s on the other hand are black, so she can’t see if she’s having a similar effect - if indeed that’s something that happens to humans. She had been just a bit too bashful to do any such research, even if it would’ve come in rather handy right about now.

Rose dips back down and resumes her exploration, painting a trail down the middle of Kanaya’s chest plate with the tip of her tongue, her nails painting whimsical trails on each side. It’s not a particularly sensitive part of her body, of course, what with all the dense musculature and subcutaneous chitin plates there to protect the main vascular system. Even so, it’s a pleasant sensation, and the rapt attention is gratifying in itself. She leans back, closing her eyes and sighing, only to have them fly open with a jolt as Rose’s lips suddenly brush along the edge of her left grub scar.

“Oh!” Without any conscious input, she finds one hand tangled in Rose’s hair, and the human smirks at her.

“Was that an ‘oh please go on’ or an ‘oh please stop’? Just so I’m clear.”

“I- It just surprised me.” She swallows, trying to relax once more. “Go on, but... carefully? The actual scars aren’t very sensitive, but the skin around...”

Rose nods thoughtfully, leaning in and exhaling softly where her lips just were, causing Kanaya to shiver. Then, still not breaking eye contact, she runs her tongue in a burning trail around the scar, and makes a soft little noise of satisfaction as Kanaya responds with a chattering whine. “Good?”

“Yes. Good.” Kanaya watches her shift to the other side, lets out a fluttering sigh when she repeats the gesture, and has to bite down a protest when she allows her mouth to wander lower down. For a moment it tickles a bit, and she squirms, but then Rose’s mouth is right above her nook area and she freezes instead. The fabric of her underthings is very thin, not to mention completely soaked through, meaning she can feel every warm breath coming from Rose’s parted lips. The human meets her gaze in silent inquiry, and Kanaya doesn’t trust her voice right now, so she simply nods instead.

She had expected her to just remove the underwear, but instead she leans in and presses her tongue against the sodden fabric, moving it in a slow, deliberate circle. Unsurprisingly, Kanaya finds herself already slightly extended underneath, and the movement somehow manages to hit every stalk, causing them to uncurl further as she sinks down against the chaise with a choked moan.

“Oh, there they are,” Rose murmurs, utterly unfazed as the textile fails to entirely hold Kanaya’s rapidly extending bulge. Kanaya is about to respond, something slightly acerbic perhaps, but Rose takes one of the stalks into her mouth and sucks gently on it, and her words unravel into utter, breathless nonsense. She has just enough presence of mind to lift her hips slightly as Rose finally tugs at her underwear, and that’s about it.

“You know, the descriptions I read definitely don’t do it justice,” Rose muses, voice low and pleased. “Certainly more pleasantly arranged than a lot of species I could mention. Kind of like an anemone, isn’t it?”

It’s not exactly an unflattering remark, but it still causes Kanaya to blush, not sure how to deal with this casual comparison. “A bit, I suppose. I cannot say I’ve actually thought of it.”

“No?” Rose chuckles softly, running one finger gently along the edge of Kanaya’s nook, causing her to shiver. “How remiss of you. Is there no poetry in your soul?” The stalks reach reflexively toward the warmth of her mouth, and this time she takes in two, pinning them between the roof of her mouth and her tongue. Kanaya keens, the hand that is still tangled in Rose’s hair clenching.

“And they’re only external when in use, right?” Rose inquires once her mouth is free again, not quite managing to sound as casual as she’d probably like, but apparently still overtaken by curiosity.

“Yes?” Kanaya’s head is swimming, and she wants Rose’s hands and mouth back on her right away, but she doesn’t quite have it in her to say as much. “It would be impractical to have then out there all the time. Are- Are yours any different?”

Rose lets out a small laugh, a teasing puff of warm air that is thankfully followed by probing fingers once more. “My parts are almost exclusively internal, with some important exceptions. But enough about them for now. I’d like to focus on you.” She spreads Kanaya’s legs a bit further with an authoritative hand, leaning closer. “Oh, and these are the things with the funny name, right?”

Kanaya is about to ask what she means, but only manages to gasp and shiver as Rose decides to show what she means. “Ah, that’s- y- you mean shame globes? Though boys tend to use that expression more than girls, since they’re less pronounced on us.” She wrinkles her nose a bit. “I’ve always found it to be a bit of a misnomer, personally.”

“Mm, I have to agree,” Rose murmurs. “I like them already.” And then her tongue follows her fingers, and Kanaya has to cover her mouth with her hand to keep her startled yelp from becoming a scream. It’s almost too much, almost overwhelms her completely, especially as Rose keeps stroking her bulge, wicked fingers playing with her stalks. It’s almost too much, and at the same time only barely enough, as she squirms desperately against Rose for more pressure, more friction, more. It’s nothing close to doing this to herself, so much more direct, and she’d never imagined how quickly her inhibitions could unravel under someone else’s touch.

It really isn’t enough. Fuck. “I- please, if you could-“ This is so embarrassing. “-inside me?”

“I’m so glad you asked,” Rose replies with a satisfied smile. She shifts her weight to her other arm, briefly sticks two of her fingers inside her mouth - to wet them, Kanaya realizes. A thoughtful gesture, although probably not necessary. Maybe that’s why the little pleased murmur as Rose uses the tips of her fingers to spread the entrance of Kanaya’s nook a bit more, before inserting first one and then the other finger.

“Oh,” Kanaya breathes, digging the nails of her free hand into the padding of the chaise. And then again, “Oh,” as Rose’s tongue returns, painting little patterns right above the opening, at the base of her stalks. Rose’s fingers are small and delicate, but she spreads them out and twists them around, roaming around and finding every single swelling pleasure node with almost unsettling precision.

She really, really isn’t going to last long under this kind of onslaught. Which means... “We don’t...” She interrupts herself with a soft, whining whir as Rose’s motions still, probably to allow her to speak unhindered. “I’m not sure if we even have a pail.”

“Is it strictly necessary?” Rose demands. “If it’s not for procreative purposes, I mean?”

“Well, no, but I’ll ruin the upholstery,” Kanaya says feebly, rapidly approaching the point where she won’t even care as long as Rose goes back to doing what she was doing. But Rose nods thoughtfully, pulls her fingers free, and tries to hold back a smile as Kanaya lets out another plaintive noise.

“I’ll be back in just a moment.” She disappears into the ablution block, only to return only a moment later with a fresh towel. Kanaya watches in dazed confusion as she lays it down on the floor close to the chaise, then gestures for her to scoot closer to the edge. “There. It should be fine if it ends up on the floor, right?”

Kanaya nods and positions her hips as directed, prepared to agree with anything if it means that Rose puts her fingers back where they belong. Thankfully, that’s exactly what she does, returning to the task at hand with renewed focus and enthusiasm. Kanaya’s legs, now propped against the floor to support her hips, tremble and almost buckle in response. It takes every shred of self control she had to not instinctively wrap them around Rose’s shoulders and press herself closer. Instead she merely twitches her hips encouragingly toward her, begging for something she can’t quite articulate. Rose obliges by inserting another finger and splaying them wide.

This time, there’s no way to quieten herself at all as she finally unravels, feeling herself contract and then finally release the almost painful amount of pent-up fluid. Her voice tears like fabric with the force of the shout, pleasure riding on her voice and in the tense line of her body, pulsing out of her with every new wave of released genetic material. For a moment the world has to capitulate under the force of it, reducing her entire awareness to the shuddering jolts of her body, her hands scrabbling and grasping at everything she can reach, and Rose’s fingers still moving inside her, drawing out the exquisite agony of the moment.

Then it slowly seeps back, a little at the time. She looks down, her mind wiped clean and filled with lightness, to see Rose’s pale skin and hair erratically stained in green all over, glistening with a faint sheen of sweat wherever it isn’t.

She giggles.

Rose grins, shifting her weight from her knees to her feet. “I think we might need a bigger towel,” she remarks, and Kanaya has to cover her mouth once again, this time to muffle a snort of undignified laughter. She’s dangerously perfect, this strange alien mammal with her pale pink skin - well, somewhere under all that mess - and her intense violet eyes. But it doesn’t worry her at all right now.

Rose makes a movement as if to stand up, but Kanaya slides forward onto her knees, until she’s perched across Rose’s lap instead. Still laughing, she pushes her backwards onto the floor. Rose goes over with a small gasp, rather gratifying really, and then obediently lifts her hips as Kanaya pointedly hooks a finger into the lacy band of her underwear.

Well, that certainly is different. Kanaya curiously brushes her fingers through the soft downs of hair, causing Rose to squirm a little bit. “Tickles,” se murmurs, but she doesn’t actually seem too displeased.

“You said most of it is internal, yes?” Kanaya asks, wanting to show that she at least was paying attention, even if she obviously hasn’t done the extensive amount of research which Rose has clearly hinted at. She explores the soft pink folds with the tips of her fingers, pleased to indeed find moisture there and following it to its source. “So this is sort of like a nook, then?”

“For our intents and purposes, certainly,” Rose murmurs, lifting and spreading her legs unasked, possibly to give a better view. Her hips twitch slightly. “Its one of the two most important parts of the equation. Care to guess what the other one is?”

In response, Kanaya simply lets her fingers roam across the slick, warm area, carefully watching Rose’s face. She’d said something about an exception, so-

“Ah!” Rose suddenly presses her eyes shut, head dropping backwards to expose the arc of her neck. She looks very appealing like that.

“I think I found it,” Kanaya suggests, pressing her finger a bit more firmly against the slightly swollen protrusion. Rose shivers, and then squirms slightly.

“Careful,” she breathes. “It’s very sensitive.”

Kanaya nods her understanding, drawing a more cautious circle around the raised area before sliding her fingers back to the wet opening below. Rose lets out a fluttering breath and closes her eyes, and therefore quite misses as Kanaya uses her other hand to rub her own nook area, playing with her half retracted stalks to draw them out again. They’re a bit more prehensile and easily maneuvered when she’s no longer so worked up. So as she leans forward, its quite easy to allow a majority of them them to slip inside Rose.

The human’s eyes fly open and widen as Kanaya presses her body closer to hers, pinning her to the ground with her weight. Then she makes a sound that is more a growl than a moan, snaking her arms around Kanaya’s waist and pulling her closer still, pressing their lips together in a needy kiss, all aggressive tongue and nipping teeth. Her legs clamp around Kanaya’s hips only a moment later, hips rolling and stuttering. As Kanaya moves the rest of the stalks forward to rub against that intriguing little protrusion, Rose returns the favor by managing to puncture Kanaya’s lip.

“Sorry,” she breathes, a speck of green blood making a sharp contrast against the paler green stains all over her face. It makes Kanaya wonder if she has red human blood marking her own neck in turn.

“Don’t worry about it,” she suggests graciously, experimentally moving and spreading out inside Rose to see what gets a reaction. The human squirms and moans softly, her voice climbing slightly with every new movement. Kanaya experiments with this for a while, then attempts to match the rolling surges of Rose’s hips somehow, and is rewarded with a greater urgency to her movements, and Rose tightening the grasp of her legs around her even further. It’s really very pleasant, even if her bulge is slightly numbed by her previous release, and she would very much like to try this again later.

“Almost, I- there...” Rose’s whole spine arches this time, her nails digging into Kanaya’s back. Obediently, she tries to repeat whatever it was she did, pressing her stalks up against her own body and the slightly coarse texture she can detect there.

Rose actually whimpers this time, urgently freeing one of her hands to reach down between them. Kanaya makes room for her fingers, giving her adequate space to rub hard and fast at the now quite noticeably swollen nub, her hips moving in frantic, off-beat jolts.

It’s hard not to notice the force of the sudden contraction around her, nor the way Rose bites down on her own lip and clings to her as her life depends on it. As she shakes and thrashes her body against hers, her hand abruptly goes still, appearing to simply apply pressure instead, and there appears to be an influx of warmth around her pulsating human nook.

Then she goes limp, falling back against the floor with a shaky, contented sigh. Kanaya watches her apprehensively. “Was that...?”

Rose simply nods, apparently out of breath. She shivers as Kanaya shifts slightly, and she can sense another small contraction. It does seem a bit wetter down there, but not nearly as much as she would expect.

“Are you sure?” she ventures.

Rose laughs, finally opening her eyes. “Beyond all doubt. Trust me, I would tell you if I was in any way dissatisfied. I don’t tend to suffer in silence.” She rolls her hips lazily, another happy sigh escaping her. “We’re just not as deliciously dramatic as trolls when it comes to our climax, regardless of our equipment - but especially not if we’re laid out the way I am down there. I believe you’re already somewhat familiar with how a uterus works, right? They do not require that sort of drama - as welcome as it was.”

Kanaya nods slowly. It makes sense, now that she thinks of it. The genetic material of the partner is supposed to be added to what is already there, inside, so no excessive output is necessary. What a strange, fascinating thought. “Good,” she says, somewhat embarrassed by her own hesitance. She can feel herself retracting out of Rose now that she’s no longer making a conscious effort not to. Rose responds with an almost regretful little sound as she untangles her legs from around her waist, which is rather satisfying in and of itself.

She rolls over on her back next to the human, lazily entwining her fingers with hers. They’re still slick and a little bit sticky, stained a pale green. She finds she has no idea what to say now. This wasn’t exactly planned; it was, in fact, entirely spontaneous, even perhaps a bit hasty. She can’t say she regrets it, not at all, but she finds herself unpleasantly unprepared for the aftermath. What does this mean, exactly? She realizes that from a human perspective, they’re already in a sense in as committed relationship as it’s possible to be. But from a troll perspective, she’s still not sure what this makes them. Are they matesprits now? Is that what she feels?

Realizing that Rose is looking right at her, she offers her a nervous little smile. Rose returns it, turning Kanaya’s hand around in hers and pressing a small kiss to the back of her hand. “You still don’t have to have it all figured out just yet, you know,” she says, her lips twitching in amusement as Kanaya starts in surprise. “I’m pretty good at reading faces as well as minds.”

“I didn’t think-“ Not entirely accurate. She hadn’t assumed, but perhaps wondered.

“I just wanted to clarify.” This time, Rose kisses her fingertips. “But just so you know... I don’t mind if you’re not certain. We can take our time.”

Well, that’s a relief. “Thank you,” Kanaya replies, and she means it. After that, words aren’t needed for a while.

Chapter 17: No place like

Summary:

It's possible that everyone can feel it now. Something is happening. All anyone can do is try to be prepared... but for what?

Notes:

WELL no doubt a lot of you are reeling from the epilogue, bc I know I sure as fuck am. In this the year of our lord 2019, we appear to be waiting for a Homestuck upd8, because we never get off this ride.

ANYWAY, I wanted to publish something for 4/13, but writing took actual time and it's technically 4/14 here now. But hey, it's still 4/13 SOMEWHERE on the planet, and AO3 lets you pick publishing date, so it still counts. Happy 4/13, y'all!

The static, bleak eyes of the stars outside the bridge window seem particularly uncaring and dull right now. Usually the little blinking names and facts that accompany them would thrill her, no matter how mundane, but right now they only serve to make the whole world seem distant and unknown. Jade slumps into a chair, sighing as the impact causes it to twirl around, which honestly says everything anyone needs to know about her mood.

She’s never been any good at goodbyes, even temporary ones. Honestly, it had been so nice, just spending some time together with her friends for a while. She’d never really appreciated how little time they used to have to just take it easy to enjoy each other’s company, which she supposes is because they’d always been busy working from the moment they’d met. There hadn’t exactly been many opportunities to learn what off time felt like, or to dedicate such time purely to social interactions.

Even as a very small child, she’d been isolated from the rest of her family, what with the way her grandfather was always moving around. Which she had loved, of course, she hurriedly adds even if it’s only for her own benefit. Of course she’d been young enough that a lot of her memories of the time are very vague, but exploring new planets together, roaming the stars… her early childhood had been an endless, carefree adventure in a lot of ways. Sure, in retrospect a rather dangerous one, but at the time she’d had no idea. She’d never felt like she was in danger, not as long as she had him to protect her. Nothing bad could happen with him watching over her.

Until it had.

Gosh, she really is in a glum mood! Usually she doesn’t think much about that nowadays.

The problem is, as nice as spending time together down on Muspell had been, the awkward truth is that neither of them knows what comes next. Jade had always kind of assumed that when Jake, Dave and Rose had recovered from the previous events, they would leave that planet and return to work. It would be like it used to be again, the eight of them together, going on adventures and fighting bad guys. As strange as it sounds, she’d been excited about it, now that the Green Sun Corporation looked like it wouldn't pose any trouble for a long while. Even though technically the Green Sun has been the reason Jade had decided to join SKAIA in the first place, to get answers and possibly even revenge, as things stand it had seemed like they’d have more fun without having to deal with them. So she’d expected things to go back to the way they were, only simpler.

She’s pretty sure, too, that John had thought the same thing, and that’s why he’s been kind of out of sorts and snappish ever since they took off. He has a tendency of going into sulks when he’s frustrated, and right now, Jade doesn’t even feel like she can blame him. Because the fact of the matter is, things will never be exactly as they were before. The most likely outcome, if the political situation remains stable, is that Dave and Rose have to stay where they are indefinitely. For the sake of the safety of the settlers, and also supposedly the trolls, there is no way they or their spouses can actually leave the planet at all.

They’d already stretched the terms of the contract slightly by crossing the border back and forth these last two months, but presumably that was acceptable as long as both sides could keep an eye on them. That kind of leniency obviously can’t be expected if they decide to completely remove themselves from the situation they’re supposed to pacify.

Then again, if the political situation doesn’t remain stable… well, Jade can’t truthfully say that leaving feels right in that eventuality either. But what are they supposed to do? Just deciding to retire completely seems a bit drastic, and she and John can’t just sit around waiting just in case things decide to go bad down there.

Or can they? Should they? Is there something they’re missing?

She sighs again, closing her eyes and letting her head fall back heavily against the padded headrest. This is bullshit.

“Please tell me you’re not sulking too, Harley. It’s like a goddamn PTA meeting full of nothing but disgruntled rich people up in here.”

She hadn’t heard him enter. Partly because he probably didn’t in fact enter, he just appeared where he wanted to be, and partly because even if he had, he wouldn’t have made a sound. A logical consequence of being a holographic projection of the ship computer. She glances over her shoulder and makes a face at him, as he lounges with his arms draped over the back of his chair, slightly ruining the illusion of his presence since the soft padding doesn’t budge at all under the nonexistent pressure of his limbs.

Just like his voice, his hologram’s appearance is a slightly distorted version of his human creator, as opposed to the sleek blued metal version he’d been before. Dirk is pale, sure, but Hal’s skin is just straight up paper white, and there are faint red hints on the tips of his hair. That along with the spookily glowing eyes and the cyborgy red circuitry details on random patches of skin is all probably some kind of ironic joke. Like he’s making fun of looking as malevolent and creepy as possible, just to mess with everyone’s heads, that sort of thing. He’d played up the whole Dirk’s evil twin nonsense even back when he was a robot, so it would be just like him.

She should probably feel a bit offended by it, since it’s pretty close to what she’s ended up looking like whether she wants to or not, just by virtue of being a real, actual cyborg. But instead… it’s kind of nice, to not be the only one in their group who looks decidedly weird and inhuman.

“No, I’m not sulking.” A beat, and she gives him a stern look. “You didn’t antagonize John, right? I really don’t want to have to deal with defusing another of his weird tantrums just because you couldn’t find something better to do.”

He rolls his eyes slightly, the glowing irises visible even through the illusion of his shades, which don’t actually have frames and just kind of hover in front of his eyes. “The harsh, inevitable truth is that he’s waste of my talents. It’s like asking a virtuoso pianist to play chopsticks. Anyone can play that shit, and perfectly inanimate objects can get a rise out of John when he’s in a pissy mood. I’ve got better shit to do, and honestly? So do most non-sentient objects as well.”

“If you really believed that and actually knew when to step off, John and Jake probably wouldn't be permanently fed up with you, you know,” she points out mildly. Maybe Dirk wouldn’t have such a complicated relationship with the program he literally created either, but that whole mess is an entirely different nest of snakes, and one she has decided to stay well clear of.

Hal just pointedly ignores that, tilting his head. “So if you’re not sulking, why the dramatic sighing? Are you practicing for your star role as a tragic heroine? Are the oxygen levels not to your liking? Tell a simple ship your troubles.”

“Ugh, you’re such a smartass. I’m just feeling a bit sad, that’s all. We only headed out an hour ago, and I already miss them all!” She tilts her head back so she can meet his gaze more comfortably. “And I guess I worry that things will never be the same again. Doesn’t that worry you a little too?”

In response, he raises an eyebrow in a distinctly noncommittal manner, but she’s pretty sure that’s just to try to get a rise out of her, and that’s basically what he does instead of breathing. He somehow manages to be even worse than Dave and Dirk when it comes to that sort of nonsense.

Pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around her knees, she lets her gaze drift once again to the distant stars outside. They haven’t moved or changed. Of course they haven’t. You have to move rather incredibly fast for stars to appear to be moving in relation to yourself, and they’re cruising at a very leisurely clip right now. Hmm.

“I guess I’m worried about some other stuff too. The situation down there is just a little bit… fraught! And while everyone is doing their best at keeping things quiet, if something does go wrong...”

“If something goes wrong, then everyone we know are sitting right in the expected path of that particular shitstorm, and they’re all wearing their nicest white shirts,” Hal supplies helpfully. “Are there any sign that things are about to go wrong within the foreseeable future, though?”

Jade wrinkles her nose a bit and looks back at him, tapping her fingers against her leg in thought, and then starts slightly at the surprisingly loud sound of metal on metal. She still forgets from time to time. Hal probably noticed, but has the good grace not to comment, at least. “I don’t know. Honestly things seem pretty calm? The people in the towns seem to have relaxed a lot, and they don’t even seem to mind much when the trolls came with us a couple of times. Some of them even played with the kids down there! It was… nice. It feels like people are really making an effort to reach out and show willing. I think they really trust Professor Lalonde, and the wedding… it was something they could all understand and relate to somehow, I guess?”

“And what about the trolls?” he says, easily picking up on what she’s trying not to say, even when he’s not actively inside her head.

“I’m not sure,” she admits a bit reluctantly. Again, he raises an eyebrow, and she pointedly looks away. She fixes her gaze on one particular star instead, and a list of its most common names pops up next to it and starts to scroll down. One of them is Stiller, and she makes a mental note to tell Dave about it. She’ll never quite understand his penchant for centuries old trivia, but it’s kind of sweet. “I mean, I haven’t seen many of them outside of the Heiress’ group. There’s a handful who I think are advisers or politicians or something? They keep coming and going, but they don’t exactly interact with us humans. They seem distrustful, but not downright hostile.”

He walks around her, utterly silent: No footsteps, no clothes rustling, no breathing. He could absolutely fake these things if he wanted, probably so well that no one could tell the difference, but she supposes there’s no point in doing that other than to cater to the comfort of those he refers to as ‘organics’ - which always makes her smile a bit, because it makes them sound like produce. Would the Strider-Lalondes even be classified as completely organic from a food perspective, anyway? They are genetically modified, after all.

This is a very silly thought.

Hal sits down on the floor in front of her, legs crossed and hands placed loosely in his lap. Making it hard for her to avoid his gaze. He picks up mannerisms like that annoyingly fast. “Something is bothering you. Tell me.”

Asking nicely, however, is not a habit she imagines he’ll ever learn. “Well, it’s hard to tell you what it is exactly, because it’s mostly a feeling… a hunch, I guess.” He nods at her to go on, and the fact that he doesn’t dismiss it or at the very least make a joke about not having feelings only confirms certain suspicions she was having before. “It just feels like something is off. Like there’s something they’re not telling us. I think there’s some kind of political thing going on beyond what we were briefed on, and they don’t want us to know about it. There’s this tension in the air, and I’m not even sure if political is the right word. It might have political consequences, but it seems more complicated than that somehow. Like… philosophy? Some kind of fundamental change, or… oh, I don’t know!”

“A paradigm shift.”

“Maybe.” She gives him a very direct look. “Hal, do you know something?”

“More than even you could possibly imagine, Harley.”

“Oh, you know what I meant! Don’t be cute with me, mister - no one thinks the Marvin act is funny.”

He shrugs, the red glow of his eyes seeming to leave faint trails following the slight movement. “I would prefer not to say anything yet. I don’t subscribe to the notion of hunches or intuition, and I prefer to have all the facts assembled before I draw conclusions.” She raises an eyebrow in retaliation for him doing the same just a moment earlier, because that certainly was a lot of words he used to mean basically the same thing as her, ‘I’m not sure’. He has the decency to look away in turn. “Some of the data I gathered so far seems to indicate that it wouldn’t be unwise to keep an eye on the situation, just in case.”

“What data? Will you share it with me?”

He is quiet for a moment, carefully studying her face, and then abruptly shakes his head, causing a smeared red streak of light to linger in the air. “No. Not yet. Keeping an eye on the situation is one thing, but it would probably be just as bad to blow it out of proportion if it turns out to be nothing. And you’re still a bit too human for me to trust you not to do that.”

I don’t want you to worry, Jade translates for him in her head. He can be surprisingly sweet sometimes. And just like the rest of his family, for a given value of family. Always trying to protect people from knowing things that will hurt them, as if being kept in the dark can’t be hurtful too. But she appreciates the sentiment even so.

“And is that why we’re moving so slowly right now, Hal?” she asks shrewdly, reaching out with her foot to nudge his knee even though she knows it’ll pass right through. “You don’t want us to get too far away, just in case… right?”

He gives her his blankest possible face, which really is an answer in and of itself. “That would be illogical. Even if something were to happen, dragging out our journey is unlikely to make any difference at all. That would be some coincidence.”

“Sure thing, wise guy. I’ve got your number.”

“Which one? I am literally made of the damn things, Harley. You can’t possibly have them all.”

“I like to think that I have the ones that matter,” she says with a grin, and she thinks she can detect just the slightest lift in the corners of his mouth.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

 

---

 

 

The way into the house – sorry, hive – the trolls and Rose are all staying in is a sort of tube running from the lake shore to an entrance way under the surface of the water. It’s translucent and kind of gross looking, like walking through a gigantic piece of gelatinous intestine, even if it’s surprisingly sturdy underfoot. But at least the glimmering lights lining it and lighting the way through their murky underwater descent are rather pretty, and the see-through walls mean one can watch all sorts of creatures swimming by.

That includes Feferi, who shoots past in a spray of tiny bubbles, the silk of her dress trailing behind her like brightly colored fins. Roxy supposes all those loosely draped layers are specifically designed to be easy to wear while swimming. She laughs and waves at her, and gets a shark-toothed smile and some sort of high-pitched, cheerful-sounding chittering back, before the heiress once more disappears into the dark depths. She moves hella fast underwater, and looks a lot more alien and dangerous in her own element, like she’s almost too wild and strange to get close to… though not in a bad way, Roxy thinks loyally.

There’s some sotto voce grumbling behind her, and Roxy guesses even before glancing back that it’s coming from Eridan. What’s his deal this time? Apart from generally acting salty toward Feferi still, after apparently literal years of not being a thing? Talk about a guy who needs a hobby. He meets her gaze for a moment, then rolls his eyes and looks away, and this time she manages to catch the words ‘embarrassingly flippin obvious’… whatever that’s supposed to mean.

She had asked Feferi why he didn’t just swim his way into the hive the way she did, what with being a sea dweller too – it’s not exactly like he shuts up about it ever. The princess had replied with a shrug that he wouldn't say, but she suspects that he’s just being self-conscious. He’d never swum much as a kid, apparently, because he had this bee in his bonnet about ‘keeping an eye on the land dwellers’, so he’d never gotten much practice in. And now Feferi is pretty sure that he’s just embarrassed because he’s not all that good at it, so he avoids it.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, they all file into the incredibly over-the-top antechamber, the walls covered in portraits and the furniture dripping with gold details. It’s pretty obvious that this part of the hive is considered part of the royal residence, with a sort of well leading directly from it down to the rest of Feferi’s chambers. But with Roxy staying over the night, they’ll both be heading to the upstairs common area, since every room below this point in the hive is full of water and kind of hard for anyone without gills to hang out in.

There’s a splash from the decorative pond in the middle of the room, and the sound of metal hatches opening and closing, and then Feferi steps out, casually wringing the water out of her hair. It seems to have some sort of goose feather quality where liquid just slides off the strands, and it kind of makes Roxy want to dunk some water over the heads of the rest of the trolls, to figure out if it’s just a sea dweller thing or not. Not right now, obviously, but maybe she could get Gamzee or Aradia to agree to it later. They’ve both sure got a lot of hair, and they’re more relaxed than some of the others, so they’d probably make ideal test subjects.

As they pass upstairs on a gently sloping ramp which winds its way through the center of the strangely congealed-looking building, the rest of the trolls drop off one at a time to go to their own spaces. The only ones going together are Kanaya and Rose – and if Rose thinks Roxy didn’t notice her putting her hand on the back of Kanaya’s neck as they were walking through the door, she’s definitely got another think coming.

It’s still a little bit surprising to see everyone separate like that. Somehow, with all of them living in the same building, and all of them being friends, she had expected for some of them to be roomies at least. Especially the ones that are in relationships with each other. She has certainly shared rooms with every every single one of her friends as well as her whole family, and back when Dave and Jade were a thing they’d all made sure they could always get a room together as a matter of course. It just seems so natural to want to use every precious moment together with people you like, especially when you don’t have to be doing anything except hanging out.

But Feferi had explained that trolls don’t really work like that. Of course they would spend time together and hang out, but not having a clearly defined space that is just yours would be utterly unthinkable. She’d laughed and said that otherwise the walls would soon be dripping with blood, and Roxy got a distinct feeling this was one of those times when Feferi laughed but wasn’t actually joking.

The so called reclining block up top is really nice, though. The floor is soft, kind of spongy and velvety at the same time, and mounds up into different chair- and sofalike structures that you can sit on. Cushions are strewn everywhere, and low tables are affixed to the walls to allow people to eat or play games, as well as to make space for a number of their strange-looking computers. Maybe she’ll have some time later to fiddle around with those some more, because let’s be real, how can a girl help falling in love with something that combines both her leet haxxor skillz and her not to be underestimated knack at experimental biology?

Feferi hits a switch, and the faceted dome overhead that is kept opaque during the day hours slowly becomes transparent again, letting in the light of two of the moons and a myriad of stars. Short of actually being in space, spending time in a mostly unpopulated desert in a largely untouched part of a galaxy really is the best way to stargaze.

A couple of discreet lights set into the floor are already glowing softly, providing enough light to make out the shapes of most things in the room at least. Trolls don’t exactly go in for huge amounts of lighting in most of their spaces, which she supposes is understandable. At least the computers emit a gentle kind of phosphorescence as well, but Roxy decides she’s still going to switch on the little orb light on her personal computing device. It’s just too weird to sit around talking with someone in the dark, when all you can see of them is a dim silhouette and a pair of glowing eyes.

She warns her nocturnal friend before she takes a seat on the ground and activates it. Feferi watches the projected little ball of light rise up from the screen with avid fascination, her face painted in soft pastel luminescence as it cycles through one color after the other. She experimentally passes her hand through it, and giggles when the little light construct breaks apart around her fingers, fragments of it glittering on the gilded tips of her claws and her multitude of heavy rings, the glow penetrating the webbing around the base of the digits and showing up the fine lacework of veins under her skin. Roxy grins.

“Pffff, and you accuse me of being totes cute when I’m messing around with you guys’ technology. Look who’s talking.”

Feferi sticks out her grey tongue in response, broader and smoother than Roxy’s own, just one more of those things that are all the more alien because they’re fundamentally familiar. She could write a whole thesis on the strange prevalence of the kind of life forms which humanity once, in its customary self-absorbed manner, used to call humanoids. But she’d only add that thesis to like a thousand billion others examining this very phenomenon, and she’s got better things to do than indulge in rather frivolous vanity publishing... even if the subject is fascinating and fun.

In the sky, the moons hang heavy and close to the horizon. She thinks she saw a sliver of the third one hulking behind the jagged rocks and scraggly flora of the desert plains to the south, but the overhead dome doesn’t reach far enough down for it to be visible while she’s sitting down. The visible ones are the color of a ripe blood orange and of pool water respectively, but she hasn’t determined how that affects the light quality in the room yet. The globe light, much more imminent than any celestial body, now bathes Feferi in a pink glow, accentuating the magenta flecks in her grey eyes. Most of the rest of the trolls seem to have eyes that are fully filled in with their blood color, with a few exceptions. Eridan’s eyes are about half filled in. Gamzee’s still has a couple of grey flecks, but are mostly purple. Apart from them it’s only Karkat, who perhaps has a bit more color than Feferi, but only just.

The princess glances up at the moons and sighs, a scraping little sound echoing the sound of her exhalation.

“You miss home,” Roxy guesses.

Feferi starts guiltily, then smiles her very widest smile, the rows of teeth gleaming sharp and pearly white. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a downer. How did you guess?”

“Mm, just a hunch.” Roxy shrugs loosely, twirling a strand of pale hair around her finger. As the light shifts to pale blue, it looks kind of like cotton candy. “I guess it’s because I kind of miss home too. Except ‘home’ is a bit of a loose concept when no one planet has ever actually been, well, your home. I can’t even say that our ship is our home, even though that comes closest, because we’ve still spent more time out of it than in it, probably. So it’s more like… missing a feeling, I guess? This place is nice, but it doesn’t have that feeling yet. Not even after like eight months.”

Feferi tilts her head, her hair whispering across the floor and catching a bit against the moist silk of her skirt. “You don’t miss Earth? Isn’t that where humans orcaginated from?”

“Yeah, sure, the human race. But I’ve never actually been there, yanno?” She smiles a bit as Feferi’s eyes widen in understanding. “I was born in a lab inside an asteroid orbiting Skaia’s main space station, the Core. Don’t even remember it. For as long as I can remember, all four of us have been traveling around to wherever my mom had work next, never stopping anywhere for long. Anyway, the Earth is pretty out of the way nowadays, mostly just this big resort where people go to retire or ‘find themselves’ or whatever. So I guess it’s never been a priority.”

Feferi nods slowly. “I sea. I guess that was a little silly of me. I mean, it’s not like every troll grows up on Alternia anemonemore, what with the size of the empire. It’s just always been…” She gestures vaguely and looks up at the sky again, as if she can penetrate the sheer, overwhelming distance if she just tries hard enough. “It’s a part of me. Our whale society is a big mess, and it’s not like home has ever been a safe place or anyfin – I’m sure some of my fronds never ever want to go back, what with how awful some things were. But I was lucky enough to be happy growing up there, and you know… I keep thinking that one day, if we actually manage to finally sort everything out and things are better, maybe...” She makes a genuinely unhappy little face, eyes now moving to the blank wall that separates them from a view of the sea. Her voice is small and forlorn when she speaks. “But even so… it won’t be the same. It can’t be.”

Roxy doesn’t know what to say, how to parse the childish loss in her voice accurately. She opens her mouth hesitantly, but she’s too late. Feferi shakes her head and brightens back up as if someone had just flipped a switch somewhere, and Roxy feels a bit like she’s looking into a very strange mirror for a moment. “Whenever we can go back, I’m just dying to show you so many places! Whelk, a lot of them you’d obviously need some equipment to visit without drowning, but I know you’re just going to love-”

She prattles on about her home planet, and it’s not like Roxy doesn’t listen, but she also can’t help thinking about the untold assumption in those words. That they’ll leave this planet together one day. That they’ll leave this planet at all, despite the political deadlock. That something will happen to drastically change their situation not just on this planet, but on a galactipolitical kind of scale… possibly even more widely spanning than that.

Outside, the sandstone cliffs bordering on the sea rise high enough that she can see them from where she’s sitting. On the top of one of the closest ones, a lonely yellow light glimmers, like a misplaced star. Dave is probably asleep by now, and maybe his shouty husband too. It had been a long day, and a pretty emotionally exhausting one, what with having to say goodbye to Jade and John. She knows how difficult it must be for her brother, even if he tries to be all stoic about it like he always does.

It’s not much fun for anyone else either, but she knows how much Dave relies on having John around, and how good Jade has always been at redirecting him when he gets into a funk. What with everything, he could really use having them around. But she understands why they can’t just wait around here indefinitely as well. John would get restless quickly, and he’s kind of a pain to be around when he’s like that. While Jade would probably cope better, they can’t exactly let him go off on his own, now can they? So unless someone else feels inclined to go, this is how things have to be.

It had been a nice day, though. They’d gone down into the little town in the afternoon, now right next to the water at high tide, and wandered around the winding jetties and rooftop paths. People had been cautious, but by now they seemed to have gotten used to their alien visitors, at least somewhat.

It had only taken a little while for all the children to flock to their group, to beg Tavros to ride along on the back of his chair, use Gamzee as a jungle gym, play tag with holograms that Jade projected for them, and make delighted and horrified faces as Vriska told them gruesome pirate stories, helpfully – and just as dramatically – translated by Rose. Though potentially the funniest part was watching Dirk trying to avoid interacting with the kids altogether, and seeing the face he made when Dave dragged him along despite his protests.

It had been nice, and a good way of wrapping up the visit. It sort of weighed out the part where the goodbyes themselves were pretty sad.

Roxy decides that dwelling on that isn’t going to solve anything at all, and lets the thought sink back into obscurity for now. She’s having a nice sleepover with a friend, damn it! She’s going to allow herself to have a good time listening to Feferi talk about shoals of glowing fish lighting up the water, and watching the sunset from the bottom of the sea where the rays can’t harm you. Roxy leans sideways against her friend, cool dry skin and slightly wet silk brushing against her elbow. Feferi pauses briefly and gives her a searching look, but when Roxy says nothing and just smiles at her, she nods and picks up her tale.

A bit later Sollux and Aradia join them, bringing snacks, blankets and a number of movies. Sollux flops down and puts his head in Feferi’s lap, claiming to have a headache, but doesn’t seem to mind as the rest of them talk and put on a movie. He just lies there and interjects a cynical comment here and there, and Roxy joins Feferi and Aradia in teasing him in turn. It all feels very relaxed, as if just for a moment things are in balance, and she isn’t needed for anything more urgent than just being as chill as she can be. She catches Aradia watching her with her head curiously tilted a couple of times, but only gets a wide grin in response to her raised eyebrows every time. Whatever it is, clearly it isn’t urgent or even necessarily bad.

She starts drifting off where she sits after a while, her head leaning against Feferi’s arm, and even the nocturnal trolls start looking a little sleepy, what with having been awake kind of ‘early’ for their species. Pulling the blankets closer and cocooning her body in it, she gives Feferi a slight shove until she gets the hint and lies down too, carefully so as not to jostle Sollux. Aradia drags a bunch of cushions over and positively buries herself among them next to him.

Roxy manages to pause the movie by the simple expedient of dragging her foot across the keyboard of the husktop, and dims the orb light with a voice command. There’s silence and darkness, and she looks up blearily at the stars, wondering where John and Jade are now. Probably far, far away already, even though it only was a couple of hours ago since she last saw them.

She closes her eyes.

Her communicator buzzes.

Making a face at it, she ponders if she could just maybe ignore it until the morning. What could possibly be important at this time of night, on this boring little planet, anyway? Maybe she can just… pretend she was already asleep? But no. She’s been a soldier for too long. Any message should be considered a top priority unless there is immediate danger involved in receiving it. She props herself up on her elbow, sighs, and reaches for the communicator.

Five seconds later, she nearly drops it, swearing loudly enough that the trolls jump and open their eyes. On the brightly lit screen are three curt messages in Dave’s bright red text, and they contain enough information to make her heart race as she reaches for her gun.

 

TG: code affleck

TG: coming down

TG: hostiles

Notes:

In honor of this hellcanon, I naturally had to do a cliffhanger <3 Sorry if it's a bit short, but HARK, A PLOT?

Chapter 18: In the dark

Summary:

The excrement has officially hit the whirling device, and an unpleasant political plot is uncovered.

Notes:

HERE WE GO. This one is longer, because there was no way of shortening down this chapter that wouldn't just be cumbersome and stupid. ALL ABOARD THE PLOT WAGON, CHOO CHOO. It only took me until I literally broke 100 000 words, well done me.

As a heads up, emetophobia warning on this chapter, and also violence ahoy.

Dave had fallen asleep pretty much the moment his head hit the pillow, the lines of his body slowly softening from tightly controlled exhaustion into genuine rest. Karkat tiptoes into the respite block only a minute after he lies down to check, and he’s indeed out like a primitive human light. He’s sleeping on his stomach, one arm wrapped around his pillow and the other lying loosely at his side. He’s still fully dressed, and apparently hadn’t even taken the time to take off his stupid shades properly. Now they’re slowly being nudged off his face by the pillow, digging into his nose a bit, and he’ll end up either sleeping on top of them or knocking them to the floor.

Karkat sighs testily and slides them off the rest of the way, transferring them to the bedside table. He moves slowly and carefully so as not to wake Dave, because he’s already noticed that the human sleeps restlessly; he’s apparently not the only one in this hive who is plagued by regular nightmares. A couple of times he’s passed outside the block and heard Dave tossing and turning in there, hands clasping frantically at the sheets, mumbling indistinctly and in clear distress. He hadn’t been sure how well he would take being woken up, it’s not exactly uncommon for trolls to react with instinctive violence if their sleep is disturbed, and he’s not taking any chances with humans. So usually he’d just tried to make a lot of noise outside of the block, until a sharp gasp or brief shout told him that Dave had woken up.

At least for now, his slumber appears untroubled. His breathing is easy, albeit seeming to catch a bit in his throat every now and again. That had worried Karkat when he first heard it, but it seemed to happen pretty regularly, so he has to assume that it’s a normal human thing. The one time he’d asked Dave about it, he’d said that he couldn’t tell if Karkat was actually serious about his question or if he was trying to be passive-aggressive about his ‘snoring’, whatever the hell that meant. Karkat had gotten annoyed and snapped back at him, causing Dave to adopt that smug shitstain deadpan expression and try to mess with him, and they’d had another pointless back-and-forth that left Karkat feeling aggravated and confused, but not necessarily angry. He can only assume that Dave feels roughly the same about all their idiotic exchanges, but neither of them seem to know how exactly to break the pattern. By now it’s practically a routine.

Karkat sighs, sitting down on the bed next to Dave. His added weight causes Dave’s hand to shift a bit, brushing against his own. Bigger than his, with long and slightly tapered ‘fingers’ rather than his own short and sturdy prongs. Overall softer than his own too, but the skin on the inside appears hardened, as if trying to protect the apparently rather delicate structures it hides. A large number of meandering white scars bear silent witness of how futile that apparently is. Over the very back of his hands there’s a faint dusting of very fine hair, almost invisible in the gloom, but he knows it catches the light and glitters when the sun hits it.

Karkat distractedly runs his own hand across it, feeling it tickle his skin gently. Just like that time right after the marriage ceremony, when there had been that… moment between them. He feels his cheeks heat up just thinking about it. What on any forsaken planet you’d care to mention had possessed him to keep moving his hand further and further down like that? Maybe it had been the sheer fascination of the softness under his hand, the alien texture. Or maybe, a treacherous little voice suggests, it had been the way Dave had started breathing so strangely the moment he moved past the human’s frond hinge, the way his lips had parted and his cheeks had started to turn pink...

He reminds said little voice that literally no one asked it, fuck you so very much, and he’d like to be able to ponder things rationally within his own damn think pan without interruptions from the most inane and embarrassing parts of his psyche. Clearly nothing of any kind of value would be lost if he just never heard from that particular dripsponged array of impulses ever again. And with that he wishes it a good – and above all silent – rest of eternity.

Not that it helps, of course. He’s always had a real bastard of a mind, that is clearly prepared to betray him at every slightest opportunity. Meaning that his eyes drift up to Dave’s face on their own accord, watching how open and defenseless it look like this, his cheek slightly squished by the pillow, jaw loose, forehead smoothed out. His eyelashes are as fair as his hair, but very long, and they flutter slightly against his cheek as his eyes move beneath twitching lids. Probably dreaming something, then, but nothing too bad. There is a familiar twinge in Karkat’s chest, rather shapeless and indecisive as of yet, but unmistakable even so.

Fuck fuck fuck . He presses his hands over his eyes for a moment, before dragging them slowly down the sides of his face, letting out a soft hum of frustration. This is exactly what he needs, isn’t it? Human ‘marriage’ farce aside, what he clearly needs at this already fucked up juncture in his life is a sudden aberrant surge of romantic feelings for a borderline culturally incompatible alien. Why does he always do this? Well not with aliens specifically, that’s a new one. But why must so many of his more straightforward feelings always devolve into this hideous mess of unspecified pity and not-quite-hatred, or at least always teeter awkwardly right on the very edge of it? It’s honestly even more embarrassing than Kanaya’s kneejerk ashen meddling, though at least he hasn’t reached Eridan levels of indiscriminate and undirected crushes.

As usual, he isn’t even sure in which quadrant to sort these particular feelings. Probably not blackrom, that’s about it, but that’s not actually all that helpful. Sure, he can say that it doesn’t feel much like his feelings for Gamzee, but that whole thing is so twisted up with guilt, uncertainty and regret that he’s not entirely sure if that’s helpful at all. Maybe he’s not even capable of unambiguous, normal pale feelings, or flushed feelings either for that matter – nevermind the whole different can of dirt noodles that represent his issues with blackrom. The thought has struck him before. Maybe he’s just a huge, self-sabotaging clusterfuck of a person, and there’s no way for him to have entirely normal relationships at all, period.

Fuck, what does he mean by ‘maybe’? Let’s be brutally honest here. He already knows he’s a mess. Might as well swallow that particular medicine capsule dry, and choke on it if he doesn’t like it.

Even so… what harm is there in just enjoying the moment? Even if he’s probably going to find a way to completely botch this, is he really such a useless tool that he doesn’t deserve to just feel good about being close to someone who might not be as much of a waste of space as he thought? Someone who makes a space next to him every time when he has a nightmare. Whose laughter he’d listened to as he raced Roxy and Nepeta from rooftop to rooftop in the town below. Who would double down on teasing him every time, but who didn’t seem to mind listening to his rambling retorts. Who surprisingly enough draws pretty well when he actually tries, and who looks so absorbed when he does so, lips pursed and brow slightly furrowed. Someone who had sounded so raw and tired as he carefully skirted around obviously painful memories he didn’t want to divulge, and told Karkat that he didn’t know how to run away, even when he should.

Wow, this is embarrassing. He’s glad that no one is privy to his thoughts right now, or can even see the expression on his face. He’s glad he can’t either. He doesn’t need to know what kind of shitbrained sap he’d looked like.

Getting up, he walks around the bed and tentatively lies down next to Dave. He watches his back moving gently with each breath, the way his pale hair is smeared across the pillow, the slight smattering of strange skin discoloration that dusts his neck, the same kind that’s on his face and arms as well. He doesn’t touch him again, afraid to wake him up if he does, but scoots a bit closer to him still. It’s nice. Really, this human habit of sharing your respite hours is growing on him more and more. In fact, maybe he ought to get some rest? Not sleep necessarily, because for the record sleeping at night is still stupid, but just… close his eyes for a little bit?

He closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, he would assume that he’d indeed only had them closed for a second, if it wasn’t for two things. The first is that Dave is now standing up next to the bed, lifting something in both hands. The second is the two strange trolls that are in the room with them, one by the window and one by the door. The one by the door grins, and the moon catches on the sharp sickle shape her teeth form, and on the even sharper actual sickle in her hand. The incredibly familiar sickle.

“Threshecutioner!” he gasps, and at the same time it registers that the thing Dave is holding is a gun of some sort. He’s trying to keep both trolls in his line of sight – but, Karkat realizes with a feeling like something icy crawling down his back, the light is low and it must be hard for him to see them properly.

“Which one’s fastest?” he says, voice stripped almost completely of any tone, other than a terse rasp.

“She is. The one by the door. But the-” His eyes flit to the hulking great figure by the window, weighing his huge club in one hand like an afterthought, and he gulps. “-the Laughsassin has more reach.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Dave says curtly.

Karkat is about to ask what he means by that, when the human suddenly tugs the field blanket from where it’s still lying crumpled at the foot of the bed and flings it over him. He makes a frightened noise, struggling against the fabric now restricting his vision and his movements, and he doesn’t understand what is happening. Even worse, he doesn’t understand why it’s happening. Why would Dave incapacitate him when they’re both in mortal peril? Why’s he suddenly trying to kill him? There’s the sound of energy blasts and collapsing plaster, and a high-pitched giggle as the shots are presumably avoided. “Guns are a pretty shitty close quarter weapon, or didn’t you know that, human?”

“Yeah,” Dave agrees with the laughing Threshecutioner. “Pretty fucking shitty.”

Karkat claws at the unyielding blanket, wanting to see what’s going on but too panicked to try to figure out how to get loose rationally. He hears the heavy steps of the Laughsassin striding closer, the rumble as he laughs scornfully under his breath.

“Night night… Signless.”

Well, that’s it then. This is where he finally dies.

He presses his eyes shut, bracing himself for the blow, trying to accept that this was always his fate. But he doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to. He wants to live. He-

There’s an extremely loud buzzing sound and a bright yellow light shining right through his eyelids, causing him to flinch. A hiss and the sound of stumbling footsteps makes him assume that it surprised the Laughsassin as well. When Karkat blinks in confusion and pain, eyes streaming, he sees a strangely weblike light rippling back and forth across the blanket above him, his body enveloped in its golden glow.

Someone grabs his elbow and tugs him off the bed. He squawks, trying to fight the intruder, but it when it quickly becomes obvious that it is in fact Dave, he just slumps to the floor instead. The human is wearing his shades, which might be just as well, since the field blanket is still glowing brightly on the bed. The Threshecutioner appears to be hesitating, glancing at the Laughsassin, who has covered his eyes with his hands and is hissing in pain. The club is on the ground.

Dave lets go of Karkat, once more training his gun at the two trolls, who have been forced closer together on the other side of the room. “I gotta say, a gun is still a pretty shitty weapon right now,” he says, sounding way too calm. Then he suddenly tosses it aside, causing it to clatter across the floor and bump Karkat painfully on the knee. Their adversaries follow it with their eyes, looking perplexed. There’s a tearing sound of igniting air molecules as some kind of plasma dagger hisses and spits into life in Dave’s hand – Karkat has no idea where he even got that from. He’d been staring at the gun. “But it’s a great fucking distraction.”

Dave darts forward, ducking easily under a swinging sickle, jumping over one of the attackers as she tries to tackle him off his feet. From the brief thud and her painful exhalation of breath, he uses her back to kick off from as he launches himself against her still partially blinded colleague. Acting instinctively, the purpleblood swings a crushing blow in Dave’s direction, surely with enough force to pulverize a fragile human skull. But Dave lands, grabs the arm, twists and pulls it forward, all in one balletic movement. There’s a horrible sizzle and the sound of burning flesh as the plasma dagger disappears into the Laughsassin’s exposed armpit, and he howls in pain and shock as it carves inexorably downwards, cutting through his chest plates as if they were made of cobwebs. Dave’s face is locked in a strange snarl of concentration as he pushes the dagger further and further in, burrowing through muscle, bone structure, organs, all while purple blood gushes over his fingers and his adversary convulses in agony.

Of course, that means that his weapon as well as his hands are completely occupied as the Threshecutioner charges again, sickle raised to part his head from his shoulders. He looks up, expression hardly changing at all as the blade descends.

There’s a series of loud, crackling blasts, cutting through the night accompanied with the violet tinted flashes of energy bolts. Over and over again they light up the confined space of the block, hitting flesh inexactly and indiscriminately, and the blueblood’s body twitches and jolts violently in response. She stumbles back toward the wall and collapses against it with a loud thump, sliding bloody and limp to the floor. A few more bolts hit the wall where her body had been, causing the stone to light up, to crack and emit a tortured whistling sound. Then there’s silence, save for the gun once more hitting the floor when Karkat’s numb and shaking hands finally manage to drop it. He stares down at it, at his hands, at Dave staring back at him, at the dead Threshecutioner, and her equally dead colleague finally collapsing to the floor. The room stinks of blood. His hands are cramping from holding down the trigger so hard.

Karkat tries to say something, to let Dave know that he’s okay maybe, but instead doubles over and vomits all over his own feet, the floor, the gun. The smell of acid and half digested food does nothing to improve the stench of carnage. Karkat struggles to breathe through his still convulsing throat.

“Nice,” Dave says distractedly, disarming his dagger. With his other hand, he’s already typing something into his communicator, as if this is really the time for it.

“I- I- they… fuck, I thought you were trying to...” Karkat manages once he can speak again, throat raw with gall. He glances at the still faintly glowing blanket in wordless explanation, and Dave follows his gaze. “What the fuck were you…?”

“I told you, right? It can nullify blows. Converts kinetic energy into light somehow, I think. Sorry, I wasn’t exactly in a position to discuss battle strategy at length with you. Kind of makes me a neglectful spouse, I know, but also a slightly more alive one. Oh, and some would claim that giving away the surprise burst of light to the nocturnal enemy is something of an inexcusable goddamn blunder.” He walks over, glancing down at the puddle of vomit and the gun at its center with a grimace. “Well, you practically emptied out the charge on that one, so I think I’d rather not pick it up. Nevermind. If I know Dirk, there are more guns downstairs. Come on.”

Karkat blinks, feeling weak and still nauseous. “Go? Where?”

“Down to your friends. Best to rendezvous with our allies in case there are more of them, right?” He frowns. “Besides, I’m not the plan guy. That’s usually a Dirk or Rose thing… or Jade, but... yeah...” He shakes his head, getting behind Karkat and giving him a light shove toward the door. “Let’s go.”

“Right. Right.” He should’ve been saying that. He remembers when he was younger and still had delusions about being the ‘plans guy’; when he thought the only way of being a leader was to shout at people and try to get them to do what he wanted, despite not actually knowing what the fuck was going on. It’s embarrassing to think about, but still more embarrassing to realize how useless he was through this entire encounter. All he’d managed to do was pick up the gun that Dave had obviously dropped next to him for a reason, and he’d almost been too late.

‘Signless’ the Laughsassin had called him. It had probably been meant more as a slur against his blood, or maybe a taunt toward his ancestor. But the blow lands, probably unintentionally, as a reminder of how little he has managed to do with said ancestry. He remembers the figures in the cave, the hands on his face, the voices begging him because there is no one else to turn to. He remembers the feeling of burning iron eating its way into his flesh. And what has he done so far? Apart from letting Feferi use who he is in certain circles to gain leverage, he hasn’t done a single miserable, shivering thing. He’s even kept the dreams a secret from his friends, because he wanted to pretend like it wasn’t really happening to him, that it wasn’t real somehow. They would take it as proof, and he doesn’t know how to deal with that.

Pathetic, really. He used to tell people that he was a hatched leader. He still likes to cling to the belief that he could actually lead people to greatness, doesn’t he? But when there’s finally clear evidence that this is in fact something he’s made for, that he’s needed for something, he sticks his head in the sand like the giant featherbeast he is.

It’s not exactly what he wanted. But it’s a lot better than what someone like him should expect. A lot better than he deserves. And he’s fucking it up.

He can’t help turning to look at his would-be-killers before he leaves the room. Dave had just walked straight past them once the fight was over, just like Vriska or Eridan would. Just like all of his friends would by now, if he’s honest with himself. But he can’t help thinking about it; wondering what kind of people they were, how their lives had managed to bring them to this point; wondering what they’d been thinking right before the end. Had they, like he had just now, thought about how much they wanted to keep living? Or had they been prepared to die tonight? They’d seemed so certain of themselves. Someone had probably told them that they were there to cull a weak lowblood without any powers and a squishy, helpless alien. An easy job, hardly worth mentioning, but worth some prestige because some superstitious idiots saw the runty mutant as some sort of leader.

The problem is that he can’t really tell himself that he or anyone he knows is in any way better people than these two. Sure, they’re asshole highbloods, but… in different circumstances, can he tell himself that one of his friends couldn’t just as easily be lying in a still slowly expanding puddle of blood on the ground now? If he looks just at the blood, it could just as easily be Gamzee or Equius that were killed here tonight. That he helped kill. Him. He pulled that trigger.

His throat contracts again, and he tries to tell himself that he had to, but it doesn’t help.

Dave slips past him and grabs his hand, pulling him with him. His fingers are cold, icy cold against Karkat’s own. Glancing at him as they run down the stairs together, he looks tense, his mouth locked in a thin line and his neck held stiffly. Well, that’s hardly surprising, is it? Other than that, he can’t read much from his body language at all. The signs he’d look for in a troll aren’t necessarily the same in a human. His weirdly pale skin looks like it might be a little bit paler than normal, but Karkat isn’t entirely sure. Once they reach the bottom floor and he has to stop to wheeze for breath for a moment, however, he notices that what he took for just the jolting movement of running doesn’t in fact stop, because Dave’s entire body is shaking.

The human stops for a moment to look at him, check that he’s fine probably, but then he pulls his hand free and walks over to a metal locker wedged under the stairs. He holds out his communicator to it, and it responds with a whir and a click before springing open. Dave snorts.

“Half a goddamn arsenal. I’d say I’m surprised and appalled by my brother’s general lack of trust in the good of sentient organisms as a whole, but that would be a filthy lie. Still, it comes in handy. There are even some troll weapons in here. Crafty bitch.” He waves Karkat over, and honestly, for all that he’s still feeling sick over what happened upstairs, being unarmed right now also feels like a terminally bad idea. “Let’s just grab what we need and run.”

Karkat nods, reaching past Dave to grasp the familiar handle of a sickle. It strikes him that the one the Threshecutioner had wielded upstairs is probably of an even better quality, but there is literally nothing in the world that could convince him to run back up those stairs and pry it from her cold, dead hand. Not when there’s a perfectly serviceable one right here. Dave raises his eyebrows slightly, but doesn’t comment on the choice. He just hands him a compact looking gun, shows him how to arm it and tells him to hide it somewhere on his person. Then he straps on a holster with practiced ease, and clips the handle of some kind of ion or plasma blade onto one of his belt hooks. His hands are still shaking, and he’s breathing strangely for someone who is standing still, in shallow and fast little gasps. But before Karkat can comment on it, he closes the locker with a bang and sets off toward the door, leaving Karkat to scramble hurriedly after him.

They run as fast as they can downhill without risking life and limbs. Dave must be moving half blind, but using any kind of light source would make them an obvious target and they both know it. Even so, he’s incredibly graceful and has unreasonably long fucking legs, meaning that Karkat’s night vision isn’t actually much of an advantage. He still finds himself struggling to keep up, and doesn’t have enough in the way of breath as the cold night air burns his lungs to tell him to wait up. Besides, they’re all alone out here. There’s no time to waste.

Karkat is fairly certain that the two sent to kill them would have gone alone, but they might have backup waiting somewhere out there in the dark in case they don’t report back within a certain time frame. Against a unit of four, five, ten of them… how long would they survive? Say, to the nearest decimal?

There are two bright lights traveling up the side of the slope toward them. Karkat feels his whole vascular system seize up, but it looks like they’re heading up from the human side of the cliff. Slowing downs so he’s next to him, Dave nods in what appears to be relief. “There they are.” He appears to be measuring the rapidly decreasing distance between them and the lights with his eyes, then suddenly grabs Karkat under the arms and shouts, “Catch!” before flinging him bodily down the slope and presumably towards his death by collision with one of whatever those vehicles are.

Except the one he’s heading for swerves slightly, and something hard and metallic grabs Karkat in a clumsy and uncomfortable vice grip. “Hey-up, my old chap! My apologies for the rough treatment, but we’re in a bit of a hurry!” shouts a voice in his ear over the howl of air around them, instantly telling Karkat that the Jake human is the one who managed to postpone his appointment with his maker. Looking up now that he’s fairly sure he’s not actually having some sort of nervous collapse right at the moment, he sees that Jake’s other arm is holding on to Dirk, who in turn is holding on to some kind of curved metal prow covered in buttons and levers, and appears to be steering whatever perilous piece of junk they’re flying. Seriously, it only vaguely resembles some sort of hoverboard, looking like it was lashed together from random shit from a dross disposal area – and considering what he knows of Dirk, it probably was.

Glancing back, he catches a glimpse of Jane on a second one of these crazy hovering contraptions, looking like she’s regretting every choice that brought her to this point, with Dave holding on behind her. He must’ve jumped on right after throwing Karkat onto the first one – and so help him his bothersome ancestor, he’s going to kick his ass for that at a later date. When there’s more time, and he isn’t feeling quite so close to keeling over in a dead faint or having a panic attack, and also isn’t trying not to throw up what little he has left to throw up on Jake.

They climb over a rocky outcrop, moving almost vertically for a moment, and Karkat feels his feet slipping off their newly found foothold. But Jake and Dirk seem to have their feet secured by some kind of straps, and they’re carried safely over the crest of the rock only to plummet quickly down the steep incline beyond. Further down, he can now clearly see the scattered moonlight playing lazily across the eddies and wavelets of the dark lake water, and the solid black shape of the ostentatious hive the rest of his friends have been staying in. He can also see a red and blue light streaking toward them at breakneck speed up the hill, and it seems like only seconds later when both suicidal hovergarbage rides and their passengers are surrounded by the same glow as Sollux turns in midair and matches their speed. Around them a bright bubble of light crackles madly, not particularly inconspicuous, but Karkat knows that practically nothing can penetrate the field while Sollux maintains it.

“We can’t leave you alone for five fucking seconds, can we?” he demands acerbically, but Karkat is accustomed enough to his moodiness to recognize the thinly veiled worry. “AA is sweeping the area for enemies. The rest are waiting down there.”

Karkat would ask if it’s wise to send Aradia out alone to do that, but generally speaking that’s not a question you ask about people who can tear apart buildings with their minds. He still worries about it, though.

“I’m really fucking glad to see you,” Dirk shoots back at Sollux before Karkat can assemble a coherrent answer. “Could you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“I didn’t have time to rig any brakes on these damn things.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…!”

 

---

 

 The long and the short of it is that somehow, they do in fact manage to stop. It is not elegant. It leaves Dave and Jane lying in a bruised pile along with about half the DIY hoverboard, a little way away from where Karkat, Jake and Dirk comprise a second similar pile. There’s some very loud swearing on the general theme of the entire human race coming from it, so at least Karkat appears to be fine. Jake flops over on his back and groans. Dave tries to tactfully remove himself from where he’s lying with his face half buried in Jane’s ample cleavage.

Jane helps him the rest of the way by firmly shoving him sideways onto the ground, jumping to her feet and marching – somewhat unsteadily – over to grab Dirk by the front of his shirt and lift him several inches off the ground. “You complete- ‘Look, Jane, you’re the only other person with two reliably functional hands, you have to steer it.’ ‘You’ll do fine, Jane.’ ‘This is the brake lever, Jane. Don’t worry, you can’t fuck this up even if you try.’ Why I ought to- to-” Apparently she can’t come up with anything bad enough, because all that she manages beyond that point is a long, frustrated growl as she shakes Dirk a couple of times, before letting him go and standing up straight again.

"Easy there, Janey," Jake ventures, raising a placating arm.

"Don't you Janey me, mister! Your idiot boyfriend nearly got us killed!"

Jake opens his mouth, but then closes it again. It appears he can't really dispute this fact, so he turns to look questioningly at Dirk as well.

“In my defense, that was the brake lever.” Jane narrows her eyes dangerously, and Dirk winces. “It’s just that I hadn’t had time to connect it to anything. The whole thing was a bit of a side project.”

“Oh really! So why didn’t you say so?”

Dirk raises his eyebrows a bit. “Because you’re not an idiot. I wasn’t sure you’d get on if I told you that the brakes didn’t work.”

She gives him a withering look, then sighs and buries her face in her hands. “And what does that make you, exactly?”

That gets a short laugh. “I think you already know. You alright there, Vantas?”

“No! No I’m not even remotely alright, which is the only reason why I haven’t kicked your ass yet, you crevice fondling, lardsponged shitlord!” A beat, during which Sollux snickers loudly. “And you! Are you going to stop standing there tickling your nook all day or are you going to help me up?”

By this time, the rest of the trolls as well as Rose and Roxy have managed to reach them. Dave finds himself getting helped to his feet by Gamzee, who pulls him upright as if he can barely feel his weight, and then receiving a quick hug by Roxy before she once more she once more lifts her rifle and aims it out into the darkness. She doesn’t even seem to notice or care that this leaves a number of sticky purple blood stains all down her pajamas.

Any minute now, Dave is sure that he’s going to actually feel something.

Rose has her eyes closed, a frown of concentration creasing her forehead, her lips moving silently. “Apart from Aradia, I can feel a number of troll minds out there, but they’re too far away to get a proper read on. There are at least seven separate groups spread out in the wasteland though.”

“I count nine groups of two each.” Vriska isn’t visibly armed like most of the rest of her friends, not that this makes her look any less dangerous. She gazes out into the darkness with a studied lack of concern, a vicious smile on her lips. “Probably hanging back to see if we’re making a run for it. But if we go inside, I expect they’ll attack before the sun comes up.” Her smile tightens into something a bit more mocking. “What do you say, your hiiiiiiiighness? Are we running again?”

Feferi bites her lower lip, an indecisive flicker in her eyes, but then she straightens up. “We-”

“We’re going inside.” Karkat’s voice is still a bit unsteady and frayed, but he stands with his chin raised, and there’s something… different about him. Something Dave can’t place. “We need to regroup. Besides, we can’t get off the planet yet… isn’t that right, Feferi?”

Feferi looks at him, searching and grave, and then suddenly smiles unexpectedly. It’s not like her usual bright, cheerful smile: it’s rather taut and brief, but there is something warm and genuine about it even so. As if something unspoken had passed between them in that one look, and she’s pleased with whatever it told her. “Karkat is right. We’ll go inside and try to formollusc a plan. If we have to fight our way out later… well, we’ll deal with it.”

The rest of the trolls are glancing at each other, wearing a variety of very pointed expressions. It’s pretty obvious that there’s some significance here that the humans are missing by a mile. And whatever it is, Dave is absolutely certain that it has everything to do with what is happening tonight – and just as certain that the trolls have been hiding a lot from them.

There’s a soft sound as Aradia touches down, an errant shadow detaching herself from the chthonic darkness above. “We should get inside. I don’t think they actually want to use it, but there’s a drone ship standing by over the sea to the northwest, and that means they have a visual on us. It’s probably not a good idea to stand around talking.”

The moment he gets inside, Dave stumbles off to the nearest bathroom, mumbling something about washing some of the blood off. Then he spends what feels like an eternity dry heaving over the toilet, trying not to throw up just like Karkat had, and longer still with his hand pressed over his mouth, unsure if he’s trying to stop himself from hyperventilating or holding in a scream. It really makes no sense. This is nothing he hasn’t done before, nothing even all that bad. But for some reason it feels just like after his very first battle... and in some way he cannot define it also feels worse.

Maybe it’s because he hadn’t been on a mission, hadn’t fallen asleep being aware that at any moment he might have to fight for his life, hadn’t prepared himself for the inescapable knowledge that at any time everything can go wrong. He’d lain down to sleep thinking about how he was already missing his friends, his mind weighed down but also warm with the memories of the day, and had apparently passed out straight away. The first time he woke up again, it was to find Karkat lying next to him, curled up close with an arm slung almost protectively over the small of his back. He hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t stirred when he lay down, hadn’t even noticed someone wrapping an arm around him. Somehow that was a nice thought. As if Karkat belonged there with him, had made a space in his life without Dave even noticing. As if he was safe with him.

The second time-

He has no clear memory of anything before the point where he was standing up and aiming a gun at them. Everything before that, which included both identifying that there were intruders in his room as well as grabbing the gun and getting to his feet, must’ve happened instinctively. He’d only seen them as vague shapes with glowing eyes, had thought shit, shit, I need some kind of light. That’s when he’d come up with the idea to cover Karkat with the blanket to protect him, grabbing his shades in the same movement to protect his own eyes from the searing light.

He fills his hands with cold water, lowering his face into it, scrubbing hard to get rid of the smears and splatters of purple blood. So much could’ve gone wrong. Karkat could’ve struggled free. Or the bigger troll could’ve pulled the blanket off before hitting him. The other attacker could’ve disregarded his vague firing in her direction and moved in while his attention was divided. She could’ve seen him grab the dagger when the blanket discharged and not fallen for the gun distraction.

Karkat could’ve fired too late to save him.

But that’s how it works, isn’t it? No plan is flawless. If they’ve been taught anything, it’s to think fast on their feet, and to adapt their strategy whenever things go wrong. He’s lived his whole life hearing stories from everyone about how this was what made his uncle a galaxywide hero. He’d been told he was lucky to train under a tactical genius like him.

Washing off his neck and arms as best he can, he decides this is as good as it gets, and he doesn’t much feel like hanging out alone with his thoughts anymore. They’re providing incredibly awful and unruly company, and he doesn’t feel like he needs to take that kind of bullshit. So he wanders up the stairs to the room where the rest of them are gathered, and right into an argument. Not that he would’ve expected anything else. Collective argument seems to be the only way trolls make any decisions at all, according to his still somewhat limited experience.

“-you would just listen to me! It’s important.”

Feferi rubs her fins tiredly. “We don’t have time for these kind of emotional theatrics right now, Eridan. Can’t it wait?”

“No.” There’s a chorus of not particularly well-stifled groans, and he glares around the room. “Why can’t a guy try to come with some helpful advice without everyone being so fucking mistrustful?”

“Well,” says Vriska, sounding bored, “mostly because all your ‘helpful’ advice is about killing all aliens and also all land dwellers. It gets reeeeeeeeally dull after a while! Talk about a really shitty one-trick hoofbeast.”

“And because the last time we were in mortal peril, your so-called solution was to try to kill a party member,” Kanaya points out, noticeably keeping her body right between Karkat and Eridan.

“Yeah, I can’t actually say that trying to shoot me for being the person who least deserved to breathe your precious fucking oxygen inspires great confidence in your conflict resolution skills,” Karkat agrees, leaning tiredly against Gamzee’s arm. He looks like he’s about to straight up pass out any moment now. Dave tries to move in his general direction without actually walking right through the argument.

Eridan’s mouth twists. “It wasn’t about that!” he shouts, loud enough to make Nepeta and Tavros jump, and Kanaya to reach threateningly for something that looks like a chainsaw with a really bad attitude. “I know I said- I said a lot a fucking things, alright? And sure, fine, I didn’t want to die by slowly choking to death with the rest a you, but… but that wasn’t why, alright?”

Karkat sighs, rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand. “Then what? I’m sure we’re all literally wetting ourselves in excitement to know why you thought putting a big hole in me was this amazing idea. I mean, I sure know I am.”

“Because- You could’ve said- I thought we were friends!” It comes out a lot less vicious and a lot more pitiful than Eridan was probably going for. Dave quietly sits down on Karkat’s other side, watching this whole troll drama unfold. “And then I find out that we’re all there, that we’re going to die, and it’s all because of you! They were out to kill you all along, they- All those rumors we heard, all that talk about the Signless, all of that and- and we used to laugh at it, remember? I just thought you were sensitive about your blood! I even tried to be nice about it. And it turns out you were keeping it a secret because… because you didn’t trust me, right? I was going to have to die because of you, and you didn’t even trust me enough to fucking tell me that.”

Karkat just stares at him, eyes wide and his mouth hanging slightly open in shock. The room is silent. You could practically hear a pin fall. Eridan looks embarrassed and bewildered, and there are pale violet tracks down his cheeks. Then Karkat sighs and buries his face in his hands for a moment, as if gathering strength.

“Look,” he says, and despite his tired body language, his voice is surprisingly kind. “It wasn’t like that, okay? There were four people who knew about it at the time, and I only told one of them. Terezi knew because-” his cheeks darken slightly, “-she apparently smelled it on me, and connected the dots. Vriska knew because she can’t stay out of peoples fucking minds. I told Feferi because it was something she needed to know. And the last person is the one who told me about it – that is, about the fucking Signless and what he did, all the shit people are expecting of me just because I was born with this despicable mutant sludge in my veins. Alright?”

The unexpectedly soft response seems to derail Eridan’s anger somewhat. He sits down heavily next to Jake, who pats his shoulder and mutters something that sounds like, “Steady on.”

“The one who told you… Who?”

Someone clears their throat a bit hesitantly, and everyone turns to stare at Nepeta, who flushes and squirms a bit under the sudden intense attention. “When I found the hatchright left behind by my ancestor, it turned out not to be any kind of weapon or treasfur, nothing like that. It was just… a message.” Dave has no idea what she’s talking about, it sounds like complete nonsense, but all the trolls are making faces as if it’s some kind of revelation. “It said I needed to find the new Signless and tell him all these things. That- that I was fated to.” She looks down, cheeks now deep green and her expression wretched. Dave isn’t sure why, but again it seems like the trolls are picking up on it. Karkat squirms awkwardly where he sits. Nepeta sets her jaw, and it’s obvious that whatever it is that’s making her look so mortified, she has decided to power through it. “So the first time I saw Karkitty’s sign… that’s when I knew. So I told him.”

“And I, to no one’s great surprise, acted like the rankest asshole in this or any other galaxy about it,” Karkat fills in, mercifully turning the attention back to himself. “You know how I used to riff on you for the whole Ancestor bullshit, Eridan. I didn’t believe a word of it back then. But when the rumors of the new Signless started, I told Feferi, because I figured maybe she could use it to get more lowbloods to join our side. I just thought it was a dumbass political ploy.” He grimaces. “And then the highbloods started to try to kill me. Apparently they believed it.”

“And that’s what this whole agreeing to the political marriage thing was all along.” This time everyone turns to stare at Dave, who is just about as surprised to hear his own voice as they are. But he’s kind of pissed too, so he’s not going to let that stop him. “I’m right, aren’t I? They went along with it because they figured it would be Karkat who ended up the sacrificial spouse, and shit, what better way to get rid of him? All they had to do was wait a while, then off him quickly in the night and blame the humans. Let’s be real here, at no point in this debacle did they actually give a fuck about starting a war with us, because that’s not how they think, right? That’s how Feferi thinks, and they used that against her. They pretended to want to avoid fighting, so that when Karkat was lying there dead on human territory, they could point the finger at us instead. Hey look, lowbloods, your hero is dead and humans did it! So sorry for your loss, absolutely gonna send a bucket of flowers or worms or something for his funeral, whatever it is that trolls do, now lets make war on these monkeys and forget all about your dumb little rebellion.”

The trolls glance at each other, and he reads what he already knows in their expressions. Vriska hisses loudly, kicking over a decorative vase. “I knew it! They were playing us this whole time, and we went along with it like suckers ! We practically gave him away to them like a bunch of lame losers. Well played, princess!”

Feferi had buried her face in her hands, but now drops them into her lap and straightens her back. She stares back at Vriska, stares her down, her chin haughtily lifted. “Yes, it was a mistake, though I didn’t have many options at the time. But perhaps before we start pointing fins at each other too, we ought to work out what to do next?”

Vriska looks like she’s contemplating regicide, but then Terezi grabs her by the arm and pulls her back into her seat. Vriska makes a halfhearted effort to pull free, and Terezi reaches out and rather brusquely pats her cheek, letting out a strange low shushing sound. Something about the gesture makes Vriska straight up fold against her, which is pretty impressive. Terezi nods. “Okay, enough of that. Fighting each other isn’t actually going to make us less dead before morning comes. Time to make some plans. Karkat?”

But Karkat has turned to look at Dave, who still barely knows what to do with his sudden anger, or the way his heart still hasn’t slowed down since the attack back at their place, and especially not the uncomfortable sting of betrayal. He reaches out hesitantly, places his hand over Dave’s, and it’s only then he realizes how hard it’s shaking. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to pull you into this whole mess, although I realize that’s some spectacularly stupid wishful thinking on my part. I just… wanted it all to go away for a while, and I guess on top of just generally being the worst kind of tool, I also put you in danger. I… shit. I fucked up so bad, there aren’t even any proper words for it, and trust me, I’m practically an expert at talking about fucking up. So… like I said, I’m sorry.”

Dave breathes out slowly, shakily. “Okay. Though for the record, that’s ‘okay, I accept your apology’, not ‘that was all okay with me’ because like hell it is. Got it?” Karkat nods. “Right. I mean, let me be clear, I don’t actually think being kept in the dark is some kind of get-out-of-jail card for attempted murder, that’s all on that dude,” he nods in Eridan’s direction, and gets an affronted look back. “But once we get out of this immediate goddamn danger, you’ve got a lot of overdue answers, alright? Like I’m talking serious fines, and the librarian’s gonna look at you dirty, maybe even slap your face kind of overdue. So keep that in mind.”

“Got it.” There’s an actual smile pulling on Karkat’s lips, the first proper one Dave thinks he’s seen, and it does something strange to his face. To his own stomach too. It suddenly lurches, not the kind of gymnastics it performed in the bathroom earlier, but more like a weird little bounce. What the fuck?

“So about the immediate goddamn danger,” Dirk says, inserting his voice into the strange moment like a bucket of cold water. Definitely the unsexy kind of bucket, whatever that even means.

“Yes, I too think we should perhaps return to that,” murmurs Rose, showing exactly how urgent she apparently finds it by still not looking up from her knitting.

“Right. As I was saying, if you people would just let me talk for two seconds straight,” Eridan says, arms crossed defensively across his chest. “We don’t actually have to sit around here and wait for them to attack, or try to leave the planet right away. There’s a third option.”

That actually get everyone’s attention. “There is?” Jake demands, since everyone else is apparently too dumbfounded to ask.

Eridan shifts his shoulders back proudly. “As a matter of fact, yes. Sometimes is helps to have someone around who actually knows how to think like royalty.”

Dave thinks about the whole royalty thing, about how that was the thing that landed them in this mess, this planet and its backwards way and his accidental princedom. From the small laugh that Roxy lets out, and the amused smile pulling at Rose’s lips, they’re thinking about the same thing. Dirk raises his eyebrows, nudging Eridan with his foot.

“Alright then. From one prince to another, I suggest you get to the point. We’re waiting.”

Chapter 19: Flight

Summary:

Sometimes a tactical retreat is necessary, even if our heroes fully intend to argue about it first.

Notes:

So, now that we've all been harrowed by the epilogue, how about a palate cleanser? Yes? I'll probably have some shorter stories up in a little while too, maybe.

They all stand around in awkward silence as Eridan fiddles with the control node for the aventube entrance down in the access block. He certainly seems to have some sort of plan, but Feferi can’t say if that is comforting or worrying just yet. On the face of it, the very first step seems incredibly inadvisable, but she’s not sure how to bring that without immediately putting him on the defensive, and so she dithers instead. Luckily for her, Vriska has probably never dithered in her entire lifespan. It’s why Feferi is sure that she’s going to be incredibly useful once the conflict develops into the inevitable war they’ve all been planning for – as long as she can stop herself from beating her to death with one of her own colossal game manuals. She’s really been getting on her very last gill lately.

“Okay, you know what, since no one else wants to say anything, I guess it’ll be up to me to bite – as usual! I kiiiiiiiind of hope that you know that if we go back out the same way we came in, we’ll be sitting grubs. They’ll pick us off one by one.”

Eridan bristles, but uncharacteristically keeps fiddling with what he’s doing even as he replies, not rising to the obvious bait like he normally would. “Come on, Vris, give me some credit here. A course I know we can’t go out the same fucking way.”

“I think I’m giving you plenty of credit just by standing here like an idiot so you can show us your brilliant plan.” Vriska rolls her eyes so far back, for a moment you can only see a couple of the pupils in her left eye. “I’m allowing you to waste valuable time that we could be using to work out an actual battle plan. Aren’t you grateful?”

“There!” This time, Eridan just outright ignores her, to Vriska’s obvious irritation. There’s a series of distant bubbling and creaking sounds, and Feferi finally realizes what’s happening. He’s shifting the aventube to a new port. Which… she didn’t actually know there was more than one setting for that, but she supposes he’s kept himself busy lately, and it actually makes sense that he’s hooked up the hive to his project. She thinks a bit ruefully that she hadn’t been taking him all that seriously, so she certainly hadn’t spent much time considering how he was accessing the construction site.

“Ohh,” she breathes, as the full implications of the situation dawns. “There’s another way out!”

“Oh, yeah,” Sollux says offhandedly next to her. “I thought you knew about that. I programmed the port hookup for him.” As everyone turns around with impeccable comedic timing to stare at him, Sollux raises his eyebrows a bit defensively. “What? Did you think that idiot would’ve been able to do it on his own or something?”

“I think it’s more that you’ve gone out of your way to not speak as much as a fucking word to Eridan for sweeps,” Karkat shoots back from where he’s been standing huddled in a corner. For a moment earlier, Feferi had been sure that she’d once again glimpsed the leader he’s truly meant to be, but it looks like he’s back to being his usual disgruntled self – at least for now.

She does agree with him, though. It is surprising for that reason, and also a bit because Sollux hasn’t mentioned anything about it to her at any point. Maybe he talked to Aradia about it? Feferi glances at her, but her expression is as usual almost impossible to read, the same enigmatic smile as always. She can’t see why Aradia would be secretive about that though - and usually she’s pretty blunt and doesn’t care much about dancing around things. Maybe Sollux just didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

Her matesprit sighs, throwing up his hands. “He whined at me, alright? For a fucking week or something. If you’d had to listen to him going ‘Sol, Sol, Soooooool’ for that long, you tell me that you wouldn’t do literally anything just to shut him up. So how about some appreciation for not just killing him, you ungrateful piece of shit?” It’s honestly a pretty good impression of Eridan’s most pitiful nasal drawl. Feferi is equal parts impressed and appalled.

Dirk suddenly snorts, like a man who has finally figured out the joke. “Oh, I get it. Everyone knows that the truest mark of royalty is to always have an escape route, to use in the eventuality that the crowd starts building guillotines in the square. You have to consider me humbled, since it took me this long to figure it out.”

Either the backhanded nature of the statement completely passes Eridan by, or he just doesn’t care, it’s honestly hard for Feferi to tell. “Yes, that’s exactly it. Don’t ever trust no one, and always have a backup plan.”

Roxy laughs, and Rose covers her mouth to hide her smile. Even Dave, who still looks pale and out of sorts, manages a brief grin. “Shit, sounds familiar somehow, but I can’t put my finger on it just now. It’s downright eerie, I tell you.”

Dirk raises one eyebrow. “No, man, you can’t just call me out like this. It’s not cool.”

There’s a sound of a very distant thump, followed by the roar of water being forced out of the air locks. Then the membrane covering the exit shivers and pulls apart, revealing glimmering lights and a tunnel sloping steeply downwards into darkness. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Eridan looks a little too smug, but right now no one feels like dealing with that, as long as they have a way out of the hive without having to confront their would-be attackers. Before anyone else has a chance to move, Dirk and Roxy immediately take point position, guns drawn, and step quickly down the aventube, with Eridan following immediately behind them.

It doesn’t feel like so long ago when Feferi herself would have eagerly tried to go next; she has never actually left the hive in this way at all, since she usually swims, and whatever waits at the end of the tunnel is completely new to her. It would be perfectly natural to be excited about that, right? But instead she waits patiently as the rest of them sort out a formation that leaves her squarely in the middle. She honestly hates being treated like this, but with the situation as it is now, she can understand the necessity. Now that their attempt to take Karkat out failed, and they must assume that their intentions have been made clear, it’s not certain what their opposition do next, but she can guess. The previous equilibrium is broken, leaving them all in a volatile situation, which she can only suppose that they’ll solve one way: Kill Karkat. Capture her. Eliminate whoever stands in the way of doing so.

Karkat looks like he’s ready to join Dave at the back of the group, but she firmly grabs his arm and drags him with her. As sweet as it is that he appears to be growing closer with his human husband, his safety comes first. Before her own, even. She’s got her own ambitions, her own vision for the future, and she’s not about to downplay her own importance for the rebellion any time soon. But she’s also aware that at the end of the day, she wouldn’t be doing this at all if it wasn’t for her blood. It’s not that she wouldn't care, of course, but she doesn’t actually think that she’d be much of a leader if she hadn’t literally been hatched to become one. And as she thinks of a future where she doesn’t have to be, where she’s not considered better than anyone else… all she can imagine is that she’ll feel relief.

So different from Karkat, then, who hardly used to talk about anything else except how he was made for leadership, despite being hatched for nothing but a swift, brutal execution in their society. He’s been less vocal about it lately, and he has probably questioned if he really has what it takes, but to everyone else there is no question about it. Under the right sort of pressure, he really does know how to bring those around him together, and it’s a quality that has nothing to do with giving orders or being obeyed, or even making plans or battle strategies. To be honest… he really isn’t that great at that last part. That’s not important; others can do that for him. The important part is that he cares, really cares, with a desperate ferocity that makes everyone around him care too. Sometimes they’ll be embarrassed about it, or frustrated, or even angry, but they’ll still actually give a shit.

Sure, the thing with his ancestor is important too – she has seen how much it means to people, how many sacrifices have gone into keeping the stories alive, and if it wasn’t for all that then Karkat wouldn't even be alive today. But she can’t shake the feeling that what really matters, what has always mattered, is that someone has to to take a stand. It’s hard, and not actually all that glamorous, and sometimes you only do it because all other alternatives are absolute shit. But she’s sure that he’ll be able to do it.

He looks awkward as he walks next to her, arms crossed, staring down at his feet. For all his previous claims and shows of importance, he takes pretty poorly to being the most vital member of their party, and she can’t say that she’s surprised. He wants to be listened to and he wants to help people, that’s just what he’s like, but Feferi thinks that he’s hit the same rough side of that deal that has been chafing against her for sweeps now. He doesn’t want to be someone that others throw themselves into danger for. He doesn’t want anyone to die so he can live. He doesn’t want his life to weigh heavier than anyone else’s. It’s just that now, he no longer has any choice in the matter.

Maybe she and Karkat are not all that unlike each other after all, she thinks. He stumbles on the uneven surface of the tube, and she reaches out and catches his flailing arm before he goes down, offering him an encouraging grin. The only return she gets is implacable sullenness. Isn’t he being stong-fronded into this position of leadership by his blood too? While she’s certain that he’ll make his own choices and they will be good ones, right now there are some inevitable expectations that come prepackaged with being the new Signless, and those are hard to ignore.

He must really feel the weight of it all, to judge by his very obvious attempts to stall this particular revelation, to act as if the whole marriage ploy somehow negated his importance. She’d had similar delusions when they first had to leave Alternia behind, of no longer being fettered by all the obligations that came with her blood, her lusus, her home, her entire species. She was going to turn over a new page, stop serving expectations, kiss a pretty boy, remake herself as a different kind of leader, break up with Eridan, and start a revolution!

It was never as simple as that, as she’d quickly found out. Millions of years of bloodshed and oppression don’t wash out just like that. She still has an inescapable duty which binds all of her kind within the grasp of its dominion… and also, relationships are really, really hard!

No, they’re not that different. Not when she actually looks at it. She could even say that just like him, she had in fact just been hatched to die a brutal and untimely death. She understands, of course, that it’s not the same. Her life simply had a set date of expiration, a royally sanctioned point of no return. She was expected to serve their lusus for as long as she was a child, and then she’d be just another dead princess in a long line of dead princesses. Until that point, however, and within those caveats, she had been allowed to do as she pleased.

That’s not the same as living in constant fear; knowing every morning you go to sleep that you might never wake again, always listening for the sound of drone wings, even in the deepest silence. It’s not the same as a life of constant shame and dread, of hating the very blood that keeps you alive, of trying to erase every slightest sign of your divergence. Grey text, sleeplessness, constant vigilance and defensiveness. Everything in its right place, nothing out of order, because even the lightest scrape or bruise could mean detection. Tense shoulders, darting eyes, his arm drawn away from hers so quickly only a moment ago; most likely an unthinking impulse to hide that feverish heat that burns in his skin.

As for their respective ends, she wouldn’t say that there is any kind of glory or even dignity in the kind of death she was meant for. It would be a slaughter, pure and simple. But even a slaughter signifies something more than to simply be erased from life, as if genetics had made a minor clerical error. Just a bit of biological housekeeping and nothing more.

Even so, it’s another similarity she hadn’t previously considered. They’re both born as another sacrifice to the empire, both bound by their blood to either submit to their fate or to rebel against it. Nothing in between, no freedom to be had until both it and the whole hemospectrum lies in ashes around them. Only then can they be free.

Free… Yes, because one way or another, they’re all slaves of the Condesce. Some are thoroughly complicit in the state of things, and some have suffered far more acutely than others, but in the end they all belong to her. As it stands, there is really only one way out.

She knows what she has to do. But the thought burns like tears and clenches her throat, and she permits herself to ignore the inevitable for a little while longer. Just like Karkat, blood might have brought her here, but it’s up to her to make her own decisions now, and to hope that they’re the right ones.

 

---

 

 

The tunnels smell dark, but obviously that’s not a problem. They also smell really long, winding through the rock far out of even her excellent range. The walls are damp this close to the lake, covered in some kind of faintly glowing flora, and it’s clear that the whole structure is fairly rough and unfinished, the construction robots having been instructed to focus on quantity rather than quality. Even so, Terezi reluctantly has to admit that she’s impressed.

“Sooo Eridan, how far do these tunnels actually reach?” she demands, flourishing her cane in the direction of the dark unknown ahead, with studied carelessness that causes Roxy to have to jump back or risk being hit with the tip of it. She feels it’s best to keep the humans on their toes.

“Well, you know, I suppose it goes all the way to the other human settlement.”

The statement, feigned nonchalance wrapping around it tight as corsets, is met with dead silence all around. Jane’s eyebrows shoot up, and she crosses her arms irritably. Vriska puts a hand over her eyes. Rose and Dirk exchange a glance so meaningful, it probably comes close to a full report. Karkat is clearly a very small scalding leaf fluid vessel away from shouting. Jake appears genuinely baffled. Sollux makes a face that manages to be both amused and disgusted. Feferi draws in a deep breath, her posture and expression both terse and exhausted.

“Eridan-”

“Alright, alright!” He caves almost instantly, as Terezi had figured he would. “I guess they started out just a little bit as attack tunnels, so what?”

Sollux snickers. “What’s ‘a little bit’ attack tunnels? Is that when they’re only attack tunnels every other wipe? Or just on every equinox? Or maybe the tunnels are reserved only for really lame and stupid attacks?”

“Well, it’s clearly the latter!” Vriska exclaims, dragging her hand down her face and almost pulling her glasses off in passing. “What the fuck were you thinking? Guess what, genius: Your secret way out of the hive could just as easily have been a secret way in, one that’s practically made to be exploited by sea dwellers who actually can swim!” The vox indicating her irritation reaches the point of a screech, and even the humans flinch. “Was this why you suggested we’d build the hive right here in the first place? Who exactly were you planning to enlist to kill the humans, us? Or the people who repeatedly keep trying to kill us?”

Eridan bares his teeth at her, his grip on his gun tightening, but the berry scented color rising on his cheeks shows that at least some of those barbs hit the mark. Terezi pokes him pointedly at the back of his head with her cane, which at least causes him to erase the more immediate viciousness from his expression. Just as well, because Kanaya’s expression says she just needs one excuse, Sollux’ eyes are glowing brighter, and Dirk had casually shifted the aim of his gun to Eridan’s right shoulder. The sea dweller glances around, a cornered look on his face, and then Jake carefully reaches out and moves Eridan’s finger off the trigger of his stupid rifle. Hmm.

“How about you just explain what happened after you realized that using these as attack tunnels was a really stupid plan, huh?” Terezi demands, and to her surprise he practically sags with relief. Even he isn’t foolish enough to want to fight about this here and now. Now that’s what she would call growth, if she had more time to waste mocking him. But she suspects she doesn’t.

“Thank you, Ter. At least someone will give me the benefit of even the smallest fucking doubt.”

“It’s indeed really small,” she shoots back, “and you’re wasting it fast. I’d suggest you get on with it pretty quick, Mr Berry Punch Face – before I literally punch your face.”

“Right, okay, fine,” he says, with a hurt look which leaves the prosecution completely unmoved. “Once the whole human mating ritual thing was decided on, and everyone was talking about where to put the new hive, yes, I may have asked Fef to put it here, close to where I was working.”

The face Feferi pulls suggests that ‘asked’ in this context in fact means something closer to ‘whined and nagged’, which admittedly is a tried and true tactic in this context. Most of them would rather not deal with Eridan’s emotional dramatics. “And why did you think this was important?” Terezi walks around him, a way of casually reminding him how surrounded he is as she adds: “Assuming, that is, that you in fact hadn’t planned to lead an attack on the humans that would immediately put their hostage – that is to say Karkat – in danger?”

“Because I didn’t buy it, alright?!” he spits. “The whole gooey bullshit about how they were all going to play nice with the humans because they’re not as useless as they look, or whatever. It sounded like stupid, fake, made-up shit! Which meant it was probably some kind of set-up, and at some point we were going to need a way out of it.”

Vriska’s face is doing something kind of amazing – Terezi can smell the conflicted expression even though she’s half turned away. She clearly wants to chew Eridan out more, but at the same time she can’t help agreeing that he in fact had a point, or deny that she’d had some of the same misgivings. Equius is shifting a bit awkwardly too; no doubt he had also harbored some doubts concerning the sincerity of the peace treaty and the intentions of his fellows in the higher blood castes. He hadn’t said anything to that effect, but maybe that’s not surprising from the one troll in their group who is still deeply conflicted about their future rebellion against the entire structure of the hemospectrum. All three of them, Equius, Vriska and Eridan, are quintessential products of their upbringing among the higher castes, so it stands to reason that they would be the ones most uneasy when presented with the uncharacteristic behavior of their peers. Eridan had simply decided to act on his feelings, in a typically rash and self-centered manner, but it turned out to be for the best even so.

She wonders briefly what Gamzee had thought about it. But who can even tell with that guy?

“But if you’d already figured out that this was all some clever cabal to ambuscade the lot of us and play us all for stooges… why didn’t you just say something?” Jake demands.

Eridan sighs, chewing on his lower lip for a moment. “Because maybe I could see why no one would fucking listen if I tried, and I- I figured maybe if I did it this way, I could...” He snarls, shaking his head. “Never mind. Maybe I was just really fucking tired a people acting like they have to handle me all the time.”

For some reason, the statement makes Jake’s eyes widen dramatically, and then he nods. The rest of them just exchange glances, not sure what to make of this apparent bid for redemption. A concept Terezi personally has put very little faith in, but then again… she grimaces, fingering the object in her pocket, the cold metal forming the simple curves and loops of the sign of the Signless. They all have one hidden somewhere on their person, tokens they started to wear when they first left Alternia, but had since had the good sense to hide most of the time. She knows Karkat hates it, and maybe she’d started wearing hers as a way to fuck with him back when they were still dating, she honestly can’t even remember. But now… now it’s important. Maybe it means something.

His honorable tyranny is still out on the matter, she decides. Well, the new one, considering what happened to the old one.

“I, uh, don’t want to interrupt or anything,” Tavros ventures hesitantly, from where he’s still confined to being strapped to Gamzee’s back. They really ought to be able to figure out something more practical than the chair for him, but their culture hasn’t exactly ever excelled at making life easier for anyone deemed to show any weakness. “But, well, maybe this place is not exactly, um, the best place to be having this discussion... or any discussion at all, maybe? What with the very deadly people who will probably break into the hive and try to find us soon, is what I mean.” His eyes flicker toward the now sealed entrance to the aventube, fingers tapping out a nervous rhythm against Gamzee’s shoulder. “So if the tunnels go to the human settlements, I think that might be a good thing right now, even if the whole attack tunnel thing really was, mm, incredibly stupid. Because I think maybe we’ll be safer if we go there, all things considered.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to be that guy,” Dirk chimes in, “but I’m gonna have to side with Tavros on this. I enjoy a good alien soap opera as much as the next man, and especially if it involves some asshole’s attempt at constructing his own redemption arc, but you know what I like more? Not being shot at in structurally unsound tunnels. Let’s move.”

“Besides,” Roxy ventures, “mom is back at the other settlement right now. I bet she could totes help us come up with a plan. And mmmaybe it would be a good idea that the humans find out that the jig is about as up as any little silly dance can be, before the trolls on this planet make their move or whatever. There’s kind of a shit ton of civilians there, ya know?”

That is a thought that leaves a bit of a bitter taste in her mouth. Sure, it’s just this random bunch of aliens who honestly don’t seem to trust them much, but apart from how some of them came up with the idiotic wedding thing in the first place, it’s not like they’ve done anything to deserve this suddenly volatile political situation. And most of them had seemed so… soft and harmless. They clearly weren’t warriors, and if shit is about to go down, she can’t imagine that they’ll be able to do anything except flee.

Karkat appears to feel borderline sick with the thought, and the humans’ expressions range from tense to obviously upset. A quick sniff in the direction of the rest of her friends shows that they’re not entirely happy with it either.

“Right,” Eridan says, clearly just relieved to be off the hook for the time being. He frowns at the control panel next to the aventube entrance, fiddles with it slightly, then turns to Sollux with the most amazing mix of a pleading and haughty expression, which mostly just gives the impression that he’s suffering some sort of digestive upset. “Sol, the protocol?”

Sollux makes a number of uncharitable noises under his breath and shoulders Eridan out of the way. “I programmed this port with a self destruct mechanism,” he explains as he taps away at the keys, “mostly because this idiot apparently wants everything to be able to self destruct if possible, as if his incompetence needs help with that. But I guess right now it’s kind of useful if it disconnects and floods once someone uses it from the other side. I’ll put it on a delay too, let those suckers have a real good soak.”

It doesn’t take long, and just like that they are fleeing again, albeit with a bit more purpose than if they were to simply leave the planet right away. This way, they’re ceding ground, but they hopefully don’t have to abandon all of their plans. They ought to be pretty used to things not going their way by now, and in a way, Terezi prefers these moments to when nothing is happening and they’re all just waiting for the next shoe to drop. Strategy is important, but even the most brilliant strategies amount to little more than self-congratulatory fantasies if no one makes a move.

She doesn’t even need to smell Vriska’s expression where she’s jogging next to her to know that she’s unhappy with how things are going. The fact that they’d been tricked into this situation in the first place must irk her, even if technically speaking they hadn’t had much of a choice in the matter. To sneak out of there now and seek aid with the humans obviously isn’t making anything better, and Terezi is pretty sure that there’s a big blowup with Feferi coming pretty soon. Well, if that happens it happens. She’d intervened earlier because they’d been short of time right then, but if this is the direction the two of them want to take this, then she’s not going to stand in their way. Not her quadrant, not her festival primates, so to speak. It might even be a good thing. If anyone could match and even push back against Vriska in that quadrant, it would just have to be someone who had been hatched to rule an entire civilization.

The thought makes her smile a bit, even as they descend further into the rocky crust of the planet, and she feels as if she can actually smell the enormous weight suspended above them. The brief whiff she catches of Kanaya’s expression over her shoulder seems ill at ease – for someone belonging to a caste that is normally meant to spend most of their lives underground, she’d always been unusually uncomfortable with tight and dark spaces. Jane’s expression is clearly disquieted as well, every once in a while she glances upwards toward the ceiling and shudders, and Terezi can’t say she blames her. The air that is pumped into the tunnel from the surface arrives stale and metallic, making her senses feel numb. They’d all grabbed what they could in the way of food and water, and Eridan had indicated that there would be supply stations later on, but Terezi is pretty sure nothing is going to help wash the unpleasant taste out of her mouth until they reach the surface again.

Which will take a while. The ride out to the seaside settlement had taken a couple of hours via hovercraft, and even if traveling through the tunnels is a lot faster than trekking across the uneven landscape above, it will at the very least take them the better part of a day. Maybe longer. She can hear Karkat’s slightly labored breathing behind her, knows he doesn’t have the same stamina as the rest of them, and he’s not even the one who seems to suffer the worst from the pace they’ve set. Jake keeps stumbling as he runs, breath catching loudly, sweat drenching the back of his shirt despite it being pretty chilly underground. From what she understands, humans are surprisingly hardy for how they look, but it still takes them a lot longer to recover from substantial injury than it does trolls. His body simply isn’t at its peak condition right now, and he probably hasn’t had time to maintain his endurance while recovering. His left arm also appears to be wrapped around the prosthetic, probably to prevent the weight of it from hurting his shoulder. She has noticed Dirk glancing over his shoulder more than once at him, mouth tightening unhappily every time, and Eridan has looked back once or twice as well, but Jake either pretends he doesn’t notice or is too focused on running. A couple of times, Jane has had to catch him as he stumbles, but so far he hasn’t had to stop.

Even so, they will have to slow down sooner or later. At least as of yet, their pursuers likely won’t know where they are or where they’re heading, which ought to buy them some time, the one factor which is at its most dire premium right now. But what else is new? They’ve been permanently out of time ever since the assassination attempts, the trial, the escape, the meteor, the whole Green Sun bullshit. They’re not dead yet. And as long as they live, so does the rebellion.

As long as they live, there’s still a plan, and she’s not going to let it fail.

Notes:

A bit short, but I felt like cutting off the chapter here worked better than the alternative. Since the previous one was a bit long, I guess it comes out even ~o/ Also I picked two perspectives that are harder to write for this chapter because I like to mess with myself.
Oh, and I swear there will be more ship + feelings focus on the next one, it's just that sometimes you apparently set out to write an ordinary arranged marriage AU and somehow it becomes a full-blown space opera and you just have to roll with it. Welp. Thank you all for your patience <3

Chapter 20: Freeze

Summary:

A temporary lull means some very important conversations have to happen. No one is ready for that, but they do their best anyway.

Notes:

LORD okay, this is definitely longer so go me. It is also incredibly talky, god, why is everyone so wordy save me.

It’s a long night, and a long day follows, only to melt unnoticed into night once more. The darkness of the tunnels doesn’t change much, very few sources of light are available, and mostly the humans are left to see by the light of Kanaya’s skin and Sollux’ crackling force field. They tell the time loosely, since checking their various chronometric devices depresses more than it soothes, and the hours are mostly measured in when they have to stop for rest or food. The supply stations are of course stocked with troll food, which is heavy in protein and fat and lays like a lead weight on your digestive system after hours of walking, running, slipping, climbing. But at least there’s a lot of it, and fresh water for them to carry with them as they go.

The uniformity begins to wear on them after a while, casting a pall of doubt and intense claustrophobia over the party; it is hard to tell how much time has passed, or to get a sense of how far they have come when their surroundings hardly change at all. At times, they pass through natural caves, spaces filled with towering black stalagmites and stalactites, often covered in angular facets or strange swirls of dark grey, silver, copper, brown. Perhaps Rose would find these places more appealing to pass through, if they weren’t a reminder of a continuous problem.

Their communicators won’t work.

Well, the trolls’ devices still do, they’re not affected, but they also do not have access to the channels of communication which would be really useful right now, the closed personal network with which they would normally communicate with their ship computer. After the whole mess involving the Green Sun Corporation and in particular what was done to Jade, they had all grown wary of using more accessible SkaiaNet channels. They had trusted in the complete integrity of their employers’ informational grid, and it had almost been their undoing. So Roxy and Hal had created a way for their communication to stay completely undetected unless one had access specifically to their own personal devices.

Which, again, is a problem if said devices refuse to work.

There’s really nothing very sinister about it, just a stroke of bad luck to compound the trouble they’ve already faced. One of the reasons this planet had been colonized in the first place is the huge deposits of minerals available, running thick through the harder rocks beneath the sandstone, shale and schist above. Far underground and contending with constant disruptions in the form of magnetite, heavy metals, dense coal pockets, and sources of wildly fluctuating natural radiation… it’s no wonder they are unable to connect to any communication beacons up above.

They’d contemplated using the trolls’ devices to alert the human settlement of the situation, but Sollux admits through gritted teeth that he’s not sure if any tech using the empire’s internal network could be considered secure in the current situation. And if they’re not, any message to the human settlement might simply indicate to their enemies where they’re going, incentivizing their pursuers to move on it. They could all end up walking straight into an ambush, not to mention the danger they would put a lot of innocent people in.

So instead they push onward, trying to move as fast as possible in less than ideal circumstances. After a certain point, it becomes clear that Eridan hasn’t actually traversed this far into the caves himself yet, leaving the construction entirely to the robots. One cave they enter is covered entirely by black sand underfoot, the walls sparkling here and there with black crystals, and the moment they enter both Eridan and Feferi simultaneously hiss and clutch at their heads, reeling. They have to be guided through it, and as they’re on the way out, Jake accidentally gets his arm stuck to the wall. Rose stops for a moment as Jane helps him pry it loose, taking one of her knitting needles out of her bag and letting it go close to the rock. With a soft tinkle, it instantly attaches itself to one of the black crystals, and although it doesn’t take a lot of strength to retrieve it, she can still feel a definite resistance. A lodestone cave, then.

A bit further along, Terezi holds up her hands for those behind her to stop, calling out to those ahead. When everyone has come to a halt, she walks ahead of the group, her impish face sharp with concentration as she sniffs the air ahead. Then she makes a disgusted face. “Everyone, cover your squawk gapers and cartilaginous nubs, please, and when I tell you not to breathe… well, don’t breathe, it’s that simple. Got it?”

This cave is thankfully relatively small, and they pass through it quickly, wearing various corners of shirts, dresses and capes pulled up over their faces, their hearts pounding as they struggle not to breathe. Rose looks around in the flicker of the moving lights and sharp shadows, to see the dark rock glittering with what looks like tiny metallic pearls… no, those are droplets. Up ahead, she sees Dirk gesturing urgently that they should stay away from the walls, but she doesn’t actually need telling. She has no particular yearning to cover her skin in mercury.

The floor starts sloping gradually upwards, and not soon after they enter a cave where they have to slog through mud which, startlingly, turns out to be warm to the touch. They’re far above the fossil seas from which most fresh water in this colony is drawn from, so the presence of mud can only mean one thing, and it’s a welcome fact. The tunnels are passing close to where the salt water springs are – and therefore they are almost by the settlement at last. Despite how the damp air smells heavily of rotten eggs, Terezi lifts her chin and grins, drawing in a deep and loud breath. “There’s fresh air somewhere up ahead!” she announces, and Rose thinks that this must come as an even greater relief for her.

Next to her Kanaya lets out a shaky breath, as if she’s been holding it ever since they entered the caves, and Rose can see the tension starting to melt out of her shoulders. She reaches out and gently twines her fingers with her wife’s, squeezing her hand in quiet support, and Kanaya’s expression lightens slightly as a small smile pulls on her black lips. Her skin seems brighter too, as if the sheer relief of soon being out of the tunnels is shining right through. As the radiant light cascades over the uneven rock around them, making the bizarre stick figures of old fossilized bones and shells appear to dance, they squeeze each others’ hands and pick up the pace slightly, eagerness temporarily overriding exhaustion. It will come at a price, because their rest stops have been brief and sleep practically nonexistent ever since the attack, but at least this particular ordeal will be over.

The tunnel opens into a rock crevasse a small distance from the town, hidden behind a cluster of charmingly bone-like shrubbery. They emerge into the feeble predawn light, scattered across a haphazard tumble of blue clouds far above, as a faint rosy nimbus crowns the horizon. Once they’re out in fresh air again, Jake stumbles and collapses to the ground, and doesn’t appear to be able to get back on his feet again, tottering like a newborn fawn when he tries. Apparently he’d pushed through on sheer stubbornness for quite a while.

There’s a brief debate over whether they should leave him there with a few out of the group, but splitting up seems like the worst possible idea right now, and whether they’ll be slowed down if they try to support or carry him. Aradia interrupts this by simply walking up to Jake and, with a casual wave of her hand, lifting him up as if he were a feather in a gust of wind. He almost overbalances for a second, then thanks her profusely while pointing out as tactfully as possible that he’d still prefer to have both feet on the ground. She laughs and lowers him back down, although Rose has to presume that she’s still supporting him as they start the short trek towards the town.

The house that used to be theirs still has a light in one of the windows on the third floor, the steady warm flame of a kerosene lamp. Rose rolls her eyes. It’s not like they don’t have perfectly serviceable sun cell lights, but it’s just like their mom to want to embrace the rustic lifestyle of the colony as some obscure kind of statement. It had taken her long to accept that she is in fact sincere when she does things like this, and not playing some sort of elaborate prank on everyone else’s expense. Unless her sincerity is the joke, of course. But saying things like that makes her sound like Dirk and Dave, and she refuses to engage with their irony nonsense.

“I would’ve thought that no one would be awake,” Kanaya murmurs next to her, gazing up at the window. “You’re all a very inconsistently diurnal species.”

“Consistency through inconsistency is somewhat of a trademark of my mother’s,” Rose replies, offering Kanaya a thin smile which immediately prompts a questioning look. But she’s not getting into it right now. Instead she unwraps the scarf which had been keeping her warm underground from around her shoulders and hands it to Kanaya. “Right. I suggest that most of you take cover in the hovercraft bay and try to get some rest, it should be empty at this time of night. I think the four of us would like a private word with our mother. I realize this is not a cultural concept for you trolls, but it is what we humans would refer to as a family matter.”

The trolls glance at each other, displaying a number of reactions ranging from the merely confused to the openly distrustful, all of which Rose is quite happy to ignore. Considering it’s trolls who are responsible for this nightly excursion in the first place, she doesn’t feel like they can object too much to not being privy to a discussion which might concern the future of the colony. Maybe that’s nasty and cynical of her, but she’d much rather be rude than stupid.

Jane breaks the silence by sighing loudly and shooting Rose a look, and yes, she can see how she might be fed up with being constantly kept out of the Strider-Lalonde loop. She’s honestly sorry about that, and about the worry visible on Jake’s face even through the heavy fog of exhaustion, but there’s no time right now. And she really meant what she said. Some things are between family only. So she contents herself by nodding at Jane as she starts to lead everyone toward the hovercraft bay, half in gratitude and half in apology. She’ll try to mend bridges later.

Some of the trolls look like they might still argue, but Karkat brusquely starts shoving them after Jane, only stopping to glance back at Dave. Rose isn’t exactly sure what passes between them in that look, or what’s going on between the two of them in general, which is honestly new. But whatever it is, for now she decides that she tentatively approves, at the very least. Especially if it means that they get the trolls out of their hair for what will probably be a… complicated meeting with their mother.

Roxy steps up next to her and squeezes her hand briefly, signaling that she agrees that this was the best choice, and when she glances over her shoulder she sees Dave and Dirk incline their heads slightly. A unanimous vote, then, and they’re waiting for her to go first. With no hesitation, she jumps up and grabs a handhold, easily pulling herself up the facade toward that lit window. Using doors is distinctly for people who aren’t them.

The latch poses no great challenge, undone in a matter of seconds with a cleverly inserted knitting needle. But window latches has never been the reason why nobody would think to break into any home of theirs. Pushing open the window, Rose sighs as the night air moves slightly in front of her face, and she catches the dull gleam of black metal as a gun barrel almost brushes her cheek. “Please put that down, uncle. I’m not in a good mood.”

He fixes her with his inscrutable stare, and she returns it coolly, tapping her fingernails against the windowsill. Then he wordlessly lowers the gun and takes a step back, allowing her inside. She can hear her siblings squeezing through the window behind her, but she keeps her gaze on him, the way you would watch an unpredictable wild animal. His wiry legs carry him over to a chair in the corner of the room in two strides, moving silently and gracefully, but she nonetheless catches the almost imperceptible wince that crosses his features as he sits down. Having seen the gruesome scars through the sweat-soaked material of his shirts more than once, she can only imagine the pain it causes him. It comes as no surprise to see him reach into a pocket and fish out a small white capsule, knocking it back and swallowing it dry.

In a way, it would honestly be better if he actually was an addict, in the more classical sense that their mother is. But he doesn’t overindulge in the pain meds; rather the opposite. He takes just enough to ensure that he is still functional, just enough to keep him going through the pain, but never any more than that. If she was to make an educated guess, she’d say he’s more addicted to the pain than to the medicine.

The one scar on his body that is visible right now seems to glow in the gloom, a thin white line that trails along his jawline until it meets with the right corner of his mouth, pulling the impassive line of it into the empty semblance of a frown. Maybe she ought to feel more sympathy. But even before she found out what exactly he’d put Dave through, he’d never been an easy man to pity. It’s as if his very existence rejects the emotion, or just sentiment in general. As it is, hearing her little brother’s carefully controlled breathing behind her, all she can feel is a strange undercurrent of revulsion.

Now that he’s relatively passive, she finally lets her gaze drift over to her mother. She’s sitting by her desk, her fingers resting on a keyboard, the ubiquitous glass balancing on top of the holoprojector that is providing the slightly excessive number of screens which are hovering in the air above her desk. Her perfectly maintained hair has been gathered up in a rather sloppy bun on the top of her head, the simple and elegant sleevelike shape of her dress causing it to ride up and wrinkle when she sits down.

She has a red mark on her cheek from where she has leaned it on her hand, and her eyes are wide with surprise as she watches her four bedraggled children. Corn blue, with just a hint of pink around the pupil. Actual occular albinism, a far cry from the fantastical eye colours she had gifted the four of them with. She has corrective implants which adjust her vision and darken her eyes when she’s outside, and their uncle’s eyewear is as much a necessity as it is a fashion accessory. What are the odds of a pair of fraternal twins both afflicted with such an anomaly? It makes Rose wonder about the history of their family, and exactly how inbred they had been even before her mother decided to create her children by mixing her own and her brother’s genetic material.

But of course she doesn’t know. Apart from her immediate family, the idea of being anchored to a consecutive line of genetic ancestors is as alien to her as it appears to be to the trolls. They’ve only ever had each other.

She has been silent too long, and Dirk’s very limited patience for social conventions has reached its end. “Dave and Karkat were attacked by troll assassins. Seems like that was their plan all along.”

So much for building any kind of tension. She knows for a fact that Dirk is every bit the drama queen that she is, and the delivery of that line certainly proves it, but sometimes she finds his methods too blunt.

Their mother frowns slightly, but Rose notes that she doesn’t really look surprised. Of course she doesn’t. Very few things ever manage to surprise her. Their uncle bares his teeth and makes a sharp, humorless sound that might be a laugh, although his mouth immediately goes back to being a thin, pale line. “Something was gonna happen sooner or later. But I can’t say I was expecting assassins. Sounds like a stupid way to get started.”

“Do you know why?” Their mother turns around properly in her chair, reaching automatically for her glass. “I mean, I could tell there was some internal tension among the trolls, but… well, this just doesn’t make sense. Neither of you seems like a very important strategic target. No offense, darling.” She offers Dave a small smile before sipping her drink.

“Yes, that’s what we thought,” Rose replies, trying to decide how much to divulge. “And I imagine the trolls were rather content to let us keep us in that happy state. For their part, I think it was part of a somewhat clumsy bluff, and perhaps they also thought they were a lot safer here than was actually the case.”

Her mother raises one eyebrow in silent inquiry, and Dave stops fidgeting for a moment to reply. “Seems Karkat is considered important somehow. We noticed pretty damn quick that they’re awfully protective of a guy they presumably viewed as expendable, and I guess I also caught on to him being hells of cagey about something because the guy needs to work on his poker face.” He pauses, and like she had, Rose imagines that he’s deciding how much he wants to actually say. “One of the assassins called him ‘Signless’ right before trying to smash him in the way that you need more than a cigarette to recover from. It’s some mumbo-pokus shit to do with ancestors that they’ve been using as a political ploy, and it seems like someone is taking it pretty seriously, not to mention personally.”

Even taking into account how he always downplays things, Rose can tell that he’s trying not to overstate the actual significance of whatever Karkat’s role in this is. To protect him, maybe? She hadn’t heard the ‘Signless’ thing before, but it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to figure it out. Karkat’s strangely colorless sign, and the hints of red in his eyes that don’t match up to any shade on the hemospectrum. Taken together with all that talk about some sort of ancestral destiny, and it paints a positively fascinating picture… but perhaps one which they don’t need to delve too deeply into now. Especially with the most unpredictable member of their family present, and with a very real threat hanging over the colony.

“Yeah, academically speaking I’m sure it’s fascinating – and believe me, I’d like to be the first to take the piss out of my little brother for accidentally managing to marry an alien folk hero who may or may not have some kind of quasi-deity status – but maybe a deep dive into troll lore can wait until people aren’t quite as keen on having us all dead.” Seems like Dirk agrees, too. Leave it to him to strategically downplay the whole thorny emotional situation here, while at the same managing to casually be a dick about it. Rose would applaud him, if that wouldn’t be pretty distinctly tasteless at this particular juncture. “The point is, as I’m sure you’re already aware, that they aren’t actually all that invested in the peace treaty. Now that their plan of exploiting it has not just backfired but practically dickslapped them in the face, we can’t be sure what they’ll do. It looks like the trolls have a plan, and since we’re all involved whether we want to or not-” A nice little barb there, Rose thinks. “-our best option is probably to play along with them. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make our own plans.”

Their uncle doesn’t react visibly, but their mother inclines her head slightly. Then she frowns. “Where are Jane and Jake, if you don’t mind me asking?

“With the trolls in the hovercraft bay.”

This time her exquisitely shaped eyebrows go up instead. “You trust them that much?” she demands, and while the question appears aimed at all three of them, it is clearly meant mostly for Dirk in particular. He looks a bit uncomfortable too; visibly so, which is unusual. Rose can see him lining up his defenses, not dissimilar from ones she’d use as well, or so she imagines. They have limited options, they needed to speak to them alone, the trolls would be even more distrustful if all the humans were to go inside… and so on. It’s really not hard to find reasons, but even so, to simply present an itemized list detailing why it felt reasonable to leave two dear friends in the hands of potentially hostile aliens – or your boyfriend, for that matter – seems a tiny bit cold. Maybe that’s why Dirk is choking slightly on the words.

“Yes, we do.”

This is apparently when Roxy decides to finally break her silence. It’s often like this when their family confers over difficult matters. She’ll either stay passive or simply limit herself to pitching in with whoever she agrees with the most. If at all possible, she tries to let someone else have their way, or to find a compromise that everyone is happy with. It’s so hard to tell with her, and Rose finds herself wildly vacillating between worrying that they’re all walking all over her and suspecting that she’s manipulating them all so subtly that even she can’t tell for sure. Roxy isn’t domineering like Rose, not clingy and endlessly taking up space the way Dave is, and she certainly isn’t like Dirk, who manfully manages to embody the sum of all of these traits. She’s hardly a shrinking violet, but something about her malleable nature makes her so very hard to understand, despite constantly claiming that she’s the least complicated of them.

When she does speak up, however, it’s usually for a good reason.

Now she stands with her hands on her hips, looking like she might just be a little done with all of them. Her short hair is extra curly after that last damp cave, and stands out around her head like a messy halo, catching the warm light of the lamp and the hints of green and blue from the screens. For a long while she had been bleaching it pure white and growing it really long, to the point where she had to braid it up and out of the way when she went into battle to prevent enemies from grabbing it. Then, soon after arriving on Muspel, she had suddenly chopped it all off in one go, letting it revert to a more natural shade of strawberry blond. When asked about it, she’d just shrugged a touch evasively and said it got a lot less warm that way.

She also, coincidentally, looks less like a carbon copy of their mom like this - and more like Rose. Making a point, picking sides, or something else entirely? Impossible to say.

“We do trust them. Really, the only way those sneaky fucks managed to pull a fast one with the whole marriage thing in the first place is because Feferi cares so much about, like… making peace with people and all that. Because they’re actually pretty good people – and even the ones that aren’t that good are loyal.” That’s actually a pretty astute summary, if Rose is to be honest. A fair few of the trolls have proven surprisingly decent considering their upbringing, and the rest at least clearly have a highly developed sense of what’s theirs and the need to protect it. “And they all care about Karkat. Even the guy who tried to shoot him once really seems to care. It’s like he’s the one that holds them all together, he’s the one who kind of makes them a team rather than just a random group of people. So they wouldn’t do all this, risk him getting killed, just as a part of some kind of plot. Anyway, for what? The trolls don’t really have any reason to try to get to us; they’re not our enemies.” She hesitates, then smiles and adds. “Actually, they’re our friends.”

Rose notices the way her uncle’s jaw tightens slightly, wonders what it is he’s not saying. She could try to find out, but… she has to hold back a shudder just thinking about trying to get inside his mind. Whatever has been done to his body, she suspects that something far worse happened there at some time in the past. It doesn’t feel right, somehow. Even just approaching it in the past has made her feel like there are eyes watching her from underneath her own skin. The image is surprisingly visceral. So for now, he gets to keep his secrets – whatever it is, it doesn’t change the fact that Roxy has spoken the truth, and what she said comes as a relief to all of them. The trolls are their friends.

For now, they’re all in this together.

“Right,” Dave says, and there’s an edge in his voice. “So now we’ve established that despite our best intentions, we’re pathologically incapable of cutting to the chase without getting caught up in a lot of pointless bullshit. I’m honestly fucking delighted that we could come to this conclusion as a family, because it makes me feel less singled out on that front, but maybe we could actually manage to work out some kind of plan before I have a full-scale anxiety conniption about the enemies that might descend on this peaceful little town at any moment? Thanking you all in advance.”

The rest of his siblings nod mutely, glancing at each other, trying very hard not to act like Dave lashing out doesn’t make them all rather nervous nowadays. Their mother gets up, just a tad unsteadily, but she quickly finds her balance despite the mostly empty liquor bottle on the floor which Rose has managed to spot by now. She walks over to Dave, her bare feet making barely a sound as they brush swiftly across the hardwood floor, and she puts her hand gently on his cheek. For a moment she just looks at him very seriously and steadily. He’s taller than her, but somehow the gesture seems to turn him from a young man into a boy for a moment, and Rose can practically hear his jaw unclench.

“What do you want to do, sweetie?”

Rose can see the faint flicker of his eyes behind the shades; he’s apparently waiting for some kind of signal from her. She nods at him to go ahead, and he lets out a soft sigh. “We don’t know the trolls’ plan yet. They’ve got something they need to do on this planet, something that seems pretty important, but then we should probably all get the fuck out of here as soon as we can. As long as we’re here, it seems we’re only going to draw attacks to ourselves, and that’s the last thing anyone needs.”

“As for what you should be doing, mother,” Rose fills in, waiting a beat until she turns to her, nodding to indicate that she’s listening, “it’s to arm whatever defenses there are, contact SKAIA, and get people ready to evacuate if necessary. We still don’t know if they’ll choose to retaliate or not, but you need to be ready for that eventuality. You’re already cognizant of the fact that their colony is more established than ours, and practically every individual of their species is raised as a warrior, while the people here are mainly farmers and technicians. You’ll be at an unmistakable disadvantage without reinforcements.”

Her mother raises one eyebrow at her, because it’s not as if Rose is saying something she doesn’t know, but they’re both perfectly aware of what Rose is actually trying to communicate. That they’re leaving on their own, and she’s not certain when they’ll see each other again. That this isn’t like a mission, where she can expect to be constantly updated on their whereabouts and status by SKAIA. They’re in the dark now. Her mother smiles tiredly, reaching out to brush a lock of hair away from Rose’s face, tilting her chin up slightly and holding her gaze. If Rose knows her at all, she must’ve taken into consideration that something like this might happen when she signed her name on that treaty. She must’ve known how uncertain the future really was.

She must’ve decided that they’d be able to handle it. Time to find out if she was right.

 

---

 

From the outside, the hovercraft bay mostly looks like a scaled-up version of the constructs humans use to store useful fauna in. Inside, the walls are made of some sort of shiny white metal, and there are numerous platforms of varying size staggered around the walls which can be extended, expanded and joined up as needed. On every level there is at least one massive gate which leads to a loading dock outside. Currently there are only two ships in there, the huge one belonging Dave’s mother and a smaller one which looks beat up and barely functional. The air is cool and dry, and Karkat shivers slightly where he sits, wrapping some sort of tarp around his shoulders. It’s filthy, but at least it provides a bit of warmth.

He can tell not everyone is happy with being sent here to cool their strut pods while decisions are being made by the humans, and if he’s to be honest, Karkat doesn’t feel great about it either. But he’d felt even less willing to stand around and argue where they were still all far too exposed. Besides… by and large, he finds that he does at the very least trust Dave enough that he’s willing to accept his judgement on this.

Jane also points out a touch acerbically that if this was part of some plan to betray the trolls, then yes, by all means does it make sense for the other humans to leave their one experienced medic and the one guy who is in no state to defend himself with them. Really excellent plan, that. She looks ready to haul off and hit Equius if he keeps grumbling, so it’s probably just as well that Nepeta orders her moirail to sit down and stop ‘furssing’ immediately. Jane even manages a pale little smile in reply, before she makes a halfhearted attempt to sweep a patch of ground free of dirt and sits down next to Jake’s prone form.

The moment Aradia had let go of his body with her powers, Jake had stumbled over to a chemical-stained sink and retched noisily, arms trembling with exhaustion. Then he’d collapsed on the floor, and Karkat isn’t sure if he’d fainted or just fallen asleep really quickly. The metal floor is bitterly cold, and even unconscious Jake had looked so miserable that Karkat found his insides twisting with sympathy. Despite how nauseatingly tired he was too, he’d been ready to get up again and try to find something to keep the human warm with. Before he’d had a chance to, however, Eridan had stalked over and dropped his cape over Jake with ill grace. Now he’s curled up in a slightly more natural sleeping position than before, the heavy purple fabric wrapped around him, and his breathing seems to have finally evened out.

Jane sighs quietly and reaches out, brushing her fingers tentatively through Jake’s fringe, and then presses the inside of her wrist against his forehead. Karkat sees her nod to herself, and then she puts her fingers against his neck for a moment, looking down at some sort of device attached to her wrist. Another nod. She leans back against the wall and closes her eyes, and Karkat recognizes something both in the relief and the strain that still remains.

They wait in relative silence, all of them exhausted, but many of them far too keyed up to attempt to sleep. Vriska is rolling dice between her fingers ceaselessly, but otherwise sits still, careful not to disturb Terezi who lies folded up in awkward angles with her head in her lap. Nepeta has straight up curled her entire body up like a cat on top of Equius’ thighs, making it functionally impossible for him to move around at all for fear of touching her, and thereby most likely hurting her. Sollux has opened up his husktop and is muttering distractedly to himself in letters and numbers. Probably trying to figure out a way of using the Multigallactic Mesh Medium while still avoiding detection by the empire. Of course they’ve got other means of contacting the rest of their fledgling rebellion, but it sure as fuck would still be useful.

Gamzee is sitting with his head tilted back, staring vacantly up at the complex machinery above meant to open up the roof to let the hovercrafts in and out. Karkat has no idea when he last had a pie, and the thought nags at him. They’re going to have to do something about that before they leave the planet. Tavros is asleep on the floor next to him, head awkwardly cushioned on his arms. There’s no point in putting together his four wheel device right now, and they’re really going to have to come up with a better solution for him soon. Dirk and Jane had promised to look into it.

Kanaya had sat down next to Karkat earlier, and now she’s leaning more and more heavily against his shoulder, her head dropping fitfully down toward her chest. If she wasn’t so tall, he’d be worried about her about her poking his eye out with her horns. In her hands, twined tightly around her fingers, he’s not entirely surprised to see one of the small amulets depicting his sign. His irritation and dread at the thought of his friends carrying those wretched things seems to have been ground slowly into resignation, even though he’d like to think it hasn’t gone as far as to melt into acceptance. When he closes his eyes now, he can see a pair of pleading red eyes meeting his own, the same color which is bleeding slowly into them as well. The same color as Dave’s too.

He knows what he needs to do.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when the door opens and Dave and his family slinks in, although before it closes he notes that the sky is a lot brighter now. Good. Hopefully that will buy them some time. He has a hard time imagining his people attacking this place during the daylight hours.

They’re not saying much as they file in, looking preoccupied with their own thoughts. Dirk heads straight for Jake, lying down next to him and wrapping a protective arm around him, face buried against his broad back. Karkat thinks he might actually see a small tremor pass through him, but he can’t be sure. Rose and Roxy sit down next to Jane, starting to talk to her in low voices. Mending bridges, he’d imagine.

Dave sits down next to him, throwing the pelt of some sort of animal across his own and Karkat’s laps. Karkat tugs at it a little bit so it covers Kanaya too.

“So,” Dave says, and there’s a clear weight of expectancy on that one word. “About that explanation you owe me.”

Karkat sighs, but he’s been mentally preparing himself for this, and he thinks he knows where to start, at least. He gestures vaguely at the amulet in Kanaya’s hands, and then at the sign on his own shirt.

“This isn’t actually a proper sign,” he says, and he can’t tell if that’s bitterness or wistfulness putting a strain on his own voice. “It doesn’t exist in the sign alphabet of any of the blood castes.” He looks at Dave to see if he’s following, but the blank black glass of his glasses only reflect his own face back at him, and the rest of Dave’s features stay impassive. He hasn’t got the faintest clue what Karkat is talking about, does he? “Oh for fuck’s s- Alright. Fine. This is because,” he works his mouth around the unpleasant taste of the truth, still hard to spit out after all these sweeps, “I’m not on the hemospectrum. My blood is a mutation, and by all rights within our society, I should already have been culled like the freak I am. There shouldn’t even have been a lusus to take care of me, and the moment my trials were over, that would normally be the end of me.”

Karkat falls silent for a moment, squinting suspiciously, “Is even the tiniest, most pathetic shred of this getting through to you, or am I wasting my breath as usual? I mean, that’s practically my dearest fucking hobby by now, so I guess I’ll keep talking, but it would be nice if you made an effort to pretend for my sake, at least.”

Dave shrugs slightly. “I don’t get all of it, but I think I’ve got the general gist, yeah.” He tilts his head a bit. “So if it’s not a real ‘sign’, whatever that means, then what is it? It’s got something to do with why you’re not actually long dead now, right? And that whole ‘Signless’ business.”

“Well done, you are displaying signs of modest intelligence. One day you might be able to outsmart most kinds of mollusks.” That’s mostly to cover up his relief that Dave really does seem to be catching on, and thankfully Dave seems to understand as much. They don’t actually need to have an argument right now. “Apparently I’m not the only genetic anomaly of my kind to miraculously survive. My sign is… you could call it the symbol of the one who came before me, I guess. It’s all pretty fucking morbid when you get into it, and honestly I don’t feel like giving you a detailed description of exactly how he was tortured to death, so let’s stick with the basics. When he was alive, he- he tried to overthrow Her Imperious Condescension, the hemospectrum, the whole structure of our society. He tried to make a better world, and of course they found him and crushed him mercilessly because that’s how these things go I guess.” He breathes out explosively, rubbing his hands across his face.

“Oh.” Dave is silent for a moment, then nods. “Right, I think I can see how this one goes. He had followers, am I right? Devout as shit followers who still believed in what he said even after he was just a wet smear and a bonus on some executioner’s payroll, and though he was gone, they still preserved the symbol of him and his death and hung on to it even while persecuted. Was there some kind of text of his teachings too? I bet there was.”

Karkat gives him a hard look to see if he’s making some kind of joke. Does he already know about all of this? But as far as he can tell, Dave seems to genuinely be waiting for his answers. “Sort of. Most of it is word of mouth retelling of what someone who was far from fucking stable at that point scrawled with blood on a cave wall, so some of it’s a bit… garbled. But the cave still exists, and apparently Nepeta has been there.” He glances at her sleeping form, her hands and feet twitching slightly in some dream. “You’d think the writings would be completely illegible by now, but she said she could read it all, and you know what, fuck it, I wasn’t going to argue.”

“And the person who wrote all that… that’s Nepeta’s ancestor, which against all expectations is a word that apparently means something in troll society. I mean, it’s obviously an approximation due to translation shenanigans, but it’s still kind of surprising.”

“Yeah, obviously it doesn’t mean the same as it does for humans. An ancestor within troll culture is someone in the past who was more genetically similar to you than anyone else in your blood caste.” He rolls his eyes. “You could say I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice.”

Dave’s lips quirk as he lets out an amused little sound, and somehow that makes Karkat feel a bit better about himself. “Okay, so you’re supposed to be the genetic descendant of, shit, basically troll Jesus. But-”

“What the exhaust-sniffing fuck is a ‘Jesus’?” Karkat demands, stumbling a bit over the unfamiliar word.

“Like, a religious figure meant to deliver the world to the meek and kick the ass of all sinners, basically. He’s this messianic dude who turns up and is like, yo, you people are the wheat and you get eternal life, and the rest of you are chaff and you get to burn.” Dave hesitates, grimacing. “Look, most of literally anything I know is actually the result of pop culture osmosis, and Comparative Cultural Philosophies was never my strongest subject, not to mention how I’ve never been to all that many of the human colonies where they still practice that belief. The point I’m trying to make is it’s this supernatural savior who was sacrificed sometime in the past and then thousands of years later swans in, Interstellarbucks in hand and eyeliner on point, to judge the world.”

Karkat frowns. “I guess I can see why you’d make a comparison like that. But it’s not a religious thing, not like the stupid highblood cult and their ‘mirthful messiahs’ musclebeast leavings. The whole thing with ancestors is more like a- a superstition, or maybe a recuperation time story for good little highblood kids about why they’re so much better than the rest of us.” He lapses into broody silence, picking at the animal pelt in his lap, and Dave raises his eyebrows.

“Call me crazy, but you don’t actually seem that wild about the whole thing. Which is just as well, because I was gonna have to ask sooner or later… where’s the proof of anything? I mean, sure, your friend found a cave and it seems like this Singless dude existed, but I don’t really see why that has anything to do with you. Apart from some superstitious assholes wanting you dead, does the whole Ancestor thing actually mean jack shit?”

“See, that’s exactly what I used to think! It was just this useful little detail we could throw in when people were on the fence about joining the revolution, you know? Hey, by the way, did you know that the Sufferer’s descendant is on our side? Aren’t you just shitting yourself to join his side, because as we all know, it all went so great the last time – I mean fuck, don’t even get me started on the Summoner...” He squirms uncomfortably where he sits, his conscience eating away at the flippancy of his words. “Except I guess I can understand why people would cling to something like that. When people have next to fucking nothing, sometimes all they can afford is the shittiest, most flimsy of all participation trophies – hope.”

Dave tilts his head to the side. “So is that really all it is? Just a ruse to get more people on your side that ended up backfiring when it turned out just what kind of hardcore believers in that shit your enemies are?”

Karkat hunches his shoulders until his ears are practically draped across them, burying his face in his hands and dragging in a deep breath, holding it as if he’s trying not to drown. He wants to say yes. He knows without looking that those of his friends who are still awake are listening intently by now, and it’s not like they have to strain all that much, because that’s just the shitty curse of his unbearable voice.

Again he lives through the shock of another night, this one sweeps ago, when he’d woken up to an attempt on his life for the first time. Terezi’s tousled hair stuck to her cheek, her eyes wide and flickering, caught in a moment of confusion before she was fully awake. Somehow she was still moving to shield his body with hers, the only thing she had to protect him with. Strong hands wrenched her away from him, there was a flash of blades and a sickly sound, and Terezi screamed.

She crumpled to the ground like a dropped rag, her eyes gushing teal blood like thick, unnatural tears, and it all happened so fast that Karkat only realized he hadn’t moved, hadn’t breathed, hadn’t done anything when the highblood finally descended on him. His eyes were burning with tears, his throat closing, and he was helpless. There was nothing he could do.

And then… Vriska. Vicious and fast, face twisted in a snarl, but quieter than she’d ever been before. All he’d been able to hear was her carefully controlled breathing, a gasp cut short, and a dying gurgle. She’d held her dead foe in her hands and stared down at her, as if furious that she could not cause her any more pain. But her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped her, and a moment later she was kneeling on the floor with Terezi in her arms, glaring balefully at Karkat through held-back tears.

Do something!

He lets out the breath unsteadily just as he’s starting to feel his lips go numb, lowering his hands into his lap. “No, that’s not all. I’ve been having… dreams. I’ve talked to him. It really was him – fuck me, I know it was, no matter how much I want to just pretend that I’m full of shit like I usually am. He told me-”

Do something!

Dave’s hand wraps tentatively around his, and he looks like he has no idea what to do with it, so he just holds on.

“But the thing is, what the fuck am I even supposed to do with that? So he was really real, and he wants me to carry on where he left off, but how does that actually change shit?” He can feel the muscles in his chest cramping strangely, causing him to tremble and struggle through every word. “I don’t have any kind of powers, I’m a shitty fighter, and no matter what I keep saying I’ve never done anything as a leader that hasn’t ended in an unequivocal disaster. As anything other than a- a glorified mascot, a catchy slogan, I’m completely fucking useless. And guess what? This already doomed rebellion needs more than that.”

Do something!

He hyperventilating now, and all Dave can really do is squeeze his hand and rub his back awkwardly, which is nice of him but it doesn’t really help. Or well, it does. It helps that he’s there. It helps that he leans in until he can feel his warm breath against his skin. It helps that he listens, and that he somehow seems to be on his side despite everything. When his face is this close to Karkat’s own, tilted down and sideways to try to catch his gaze, Karkat can see his eyes, and for once is less preoccupied with the startling colour than how soft they look right now.

Truth to be told, it’s not just that having Dave here helps, but that it’s hard to imagine dealing with this without him right now. But that’s not enough to hold back the panic. It’s been building up inside for too long.

He doesn’t dare look up and see how many of his friends have heard his whole pathetic confession, what kind of disappointment or disgust he might be able to read on their faces. The worst part is, he knows he’ll do it anyway. He’ll do it because he has to, because there is no one else, and he already knows he will fail. He’s going to let everyone down. And that’s the part he really can’t stand.

Then there are suddenly strong arms wrapped around him, a bright light shining through his eyelids which has nothing to do with the dawn outside. Kanaya rests his head against her chest, moving her body in a slow rocking motion, and somehow he finds his ragged breathing following that rhythm, slowing down until it actually feels bearable again. He can hear something that is either laughter or carefully controlled sobbing, or some sort of mix of the two. She doesn’t say anything, she just holds him. Dave’s fingers slide between his own prongs, holding on tight. He leans in further, until Karkat finds himself held between him and Kanaya, the collapsing foundations of the world somehow held in place by the two of them.

When he finally looks up, flinching a little bit in the light of Kanaya’s skin, everyone is pretending be preoccupied with something else, or at least trying to pretend; only the humans are exchanging glances, saying nothing. Somehow they’re all awake now. Then Feferi looks up and, after holding his gaze for a moment, winks at him. Terezi slowly starts to grin. Gamzee seems to snap out of his daze and gives him one of his concussed smiles. Nepeta’s face is hard to read, but she sits up straight and her eyes are bright. Aradia bounces eagerly where she sits. Kanaya raises her eyebrows, amused, and ruffles his hair. Vriska rolls her eyes, making her dice disappear between her fingers as she stands up.

“Oh my human ‘Jesus’, Karkat! We already know you’re useless.” She laughs, tossing her hair. “That’s what you’ve got us for… Signless.”

Chapter 21: Fight

Summary:

The best-laid plans of trolls and men often go awry, and the best way to deal with it is to anticipate that any given situation has the potential turn into a clusterfuck and roll with it. Apart from that, there's only luck, and as everyone knows she's a very fickle mistress.

Notes:

Woop woop it finally came together, longer than I intended, and I had to postpone a whole section I'd planned to put in this chapter ^^;; More plot happening, but also some fairly important introspection.

cw for fighting and death coming up

She can understand why the humans aren’t exactly impressed when they’re informed that they do in fact need to return to the sea before they can leave the planet. At least it’s not necessary for them to backtrack to the territory right by the border where they were staying before, that would be a spectacularly awful idea, but needing to get close to the water is bad enough in its own right. Close to a colony of sea dwellers, all shorelines are in a sense to be considered border territory.

But it is what it is. Kanaya carefully starts folding pleats into the fabric in her hands, pulling out the pins she holds pressed between her lips to hold them in place. She’d had to leave most of her clothes and projects behind while running, so she might as well get a head start on replacing them. She wouldn’t give much for the chances of their hive still standing. That’s a strangely sad thought, somehow. It hadn’t really been a home, and losing it is not at all the same as leaving the hive she grew up in. Comfortable as it had been, it was not a place she’d chosen and her stay there had been a matter of compliance and politics; not quite a prison but not somewhere she’d felt free to leave either. But she thinks of Rose curled up with a book by the window, walking barefoot along the shore of the lake, dressed only in a t-shirt and leaning sleepily against the counter in the meal block, and there’s no helping the sweet sting of regret that follows. It’s embarrassing to admit that it had been nice, having been consigned to each other’s company by outside forces, to just let things happen. She supposes that there’s a kind of comfort that comes with being driven by circumstances beyond your control, especially when it comes to matters as complicated and delicate as interpersonal relationships. The very thing which had scared her at first, had soon become a source of solace.

How will it be now that the conditions of the agreement have been violated, she wonders. It’s not that she thinks Rose was simply indulging her out of a sense of obligation, or herself because she was bored, but it does rather change the premise for their tentative relationship. Are they still considered human married if the contract itself was broken? Did that ever really mean anything? Apart from married, what are they exactly? Are they matesprits?

How are you supposed to tell?

This really isn’t what she ought to be worrying about right now. At the brink of a war, a revolution, a gulf of uncertainty opening in front of their feet, doesn’t she have anything better to do than mentally debating quadrant dynamics with herself? She looks up, watching the humans undress quickly and pull on brightly colored uniforms. They do it with an air of preforming a practical, perfectly casual task, as if this is a routine they’ve gone through in much stranger places than this. From a troll perspective, nakedness is heavily associated with vulnerability, and should only be shared with those you trust when strictly necessary. The research Kanaya has done suggests that while humans might not have the same cultural connotations, their relationship with nakedness is still a fairly complicated one. But most of their human friends seem perfectly unbothered by this brief display – with two exception, one rather more obvious than the other.

Jane very clearly tries to get her uniform on as quickly as possible, presumably to cover up the swirling shadows of scars that haunt her brown skin. The right side of her back and the backside of her upper right arm seem to have taken the worst of it, covered in dips and whorls and strangely bright patches, but it also stretches down her legs and up her neck, across her left shoulder and edging along the right side of her stomach. After suffering such extensive damage, Kanaya must assume that she’d been lucky to have a much sturdier build than her spindly friends. Only heat or corrosive chemicals could really cover such a surface, and a burn like that on Rose would soon reach her muscles and bones, since humans don’t have any kind of protective plates under their skin. The self-conscious way Jane tries to turn that side of her body away from everybody is a bit strange to Kanaya; perhaps humans find scars to be more disfiguring than trolls do?

She assumes that there’s a similar reason why Dave changes much faster than the rest of them do too. Even from afar and considering that they all have been marked by battle, he definitely has more scars on his body than the rest of them do, save Jane. Apart from the slashes and punctures which she’d expect on any warrior’s body, he also has a lot more jagged and uneven ones, sprawling and pale, suggesting some kind of blunt force trauma. She wonders if maybe he’d suffered some sort of fall or collision at some point. His face shows no discomfort, but his shoulders are tense and he clearly avoids looking at his family members. Perhaps he’s ashamed of the circumstances that scarred him?

She can tell from the short trill of worried clicks next to her that Karkat has noticed it too. So he’s never seen Dave completely stripped down yet, huh? Well, that’s hardly surprising. Whatever is happening between the two of them, she’d have problems even deciding what kind of quadrant is at play, and it definitely hasn’t progressed far enough for that kind of thing. But one look at Karkat’s eyes as he pretends not to be looking confirms that there certainly is something. It’s just that Karkat… well, Karkat acts a little bit pale with everyone, and sometimes sounds like he’s offering black flirtations to anyone who dares breathe in his vicinity, and that makes him surprising hard to read for someone who can’t hide his emotions if his life depended on it.

The two-toned uniforms do look very impressive and aesthetically pleasing, she has to admit that much. While there is very little overlap of troll and human territories so far – and most of it is in nowhere regions like this star system – it’s not like she’s never heard of SKAIA’s forces. The origins of the galaxy-spanning coalition are somewhat hazy as she understands it, but now large numbers of a quite impressive spread of intelligent species are part of it, and an even more impressive number of factions within these individual species. She wonders if they ever extended an invitation to the Her Imperious Condescension to join, or if they knew trouble when they saw it and steered clear. After all, the Alternian empire is more or less exactly the kind of thing SKAIA tries to prevent through its peacekeeping missions and contracts between factions. If monolithic imperial control over a large number of solar systems combined with rapid and aggressive expansion of these territories is against the very principles they try to uphold, trying to talk the Condesce over to see their point of view was probably considered an exercise in futility.

She wonders if this means that there’s a possibility of SKAIA siding with the rebellion in the upcoming conflict. That would be rather helpful, there’s no denying that. Perhaps it’s a bit of a cynical approach, but now that they’re directly involved with the offspring of someone as influential as Professor Lalonde apparently is, and their opposition had managed to endanger them all, maybe that will tip the scales in their favor?

It’s time. She folds up her sewing and puts it back in her bag, slinging it onto her back, and picks up her weapon. Around her, everyone else is getting armed too. Vriska is pushing her dice into the slots on her belts with nasty little clicking sounds, like bones popping. Terezi slides the two parts of her cane apart, twirling them in her long fingers, clearly delighting in letting the razor sharp tips just barely miss any passing bystander. Gamzee hefts his clubs, twisting the handles to arm the shock wave dispensers, and Nepeta fiddles with the disks attached to her wrists to switch from claws to a medium range weapon. They won’t be caught off guard in case they have to fight. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

They’d sent out both hovercrafts, the smaller one docked to the big one, in the direction of another human settlement further inland, away from the border. If anyone is watching them, they’ll hopefully think that this is where they’ve gone and head directly there. In truth, only Professor Lalonde is on the larger hovercraft, and the smaller one is quite unmanned. In accordance to the plan they’d made, she has uncoupled the small one a short distance into the desert, and let the autopilot land it in a handy crevasse, hopefully out of sight of any watchers. Now, with a couple of daylight hours left before the sun sets, they’ll head out to where it’s parked and steer it to the east before heading north toward the shoreline once more. If they’re lucky, the slightly circuitous route will help them avoid detection until they’ve achieved their objective and can finally leave the planet.

There’s s a bit too much ‘hopefully’, a bit too much reliance on luck for Kanaya to really like the plan, but she shouldn’t be surprised. It had been worked out between Rose, Dirk and Vriska, and will probably work quite brilliantly if it doesn’t get all of them killed instead.

As they file out of the building, a very small movement at the periphery of her field of vision turns out to be Rose’s other older relative, her ‘uncle’. He stands leaning against the wall of their house, wearing a clean white shirt and a dusty pair of blue pants, a wide-brimmed black hat tilted down to shade his face. He stands still as a statue, face blank, and it takes her a while to realize that the movement she’d seen was the wisp of smoke curling from an object in his mouth. Apparently he’s going to stay and deal with the town’s defenses himself. He’s got some sort of blade strapped to his back and two guns holstered to his sides, plain black with a solid, roughly finished look to them. Somehow they look a lot more menacing than most of the over-the-top weaponry favored by the various forces of the Empire. Like a tradesman’s tools, as if manufacturing death is as unglamorous as oiling machinery or harvesting beefgrubs. Maybe her reaction is emblematic of a culture that goes to such extents to glorify warriors, and where killing is just about the only way to win true recognition, but for whatever reason, the idea nonetheless leaves a sour taste in her mouth. She might not even be the only one who feels this way either, because she shifts her gaze away just in time to see Vriska’s upper lip curl back in an apparently unconscious snarl, dark blue lipstick staining her fangs. Was she thinking something similar, or does she have another reason? Hard to tell with her.

Maybe she imagines it, but just for a moment, it looks like Gamzee’s hand tightens around his club so hard that it shakes. But if it does, the moment passes so fast that she doesn’t even have time to really worry about it.

Rose’s expression is hard to read, as are those of her siblings. Three of them turn their heads to look at their genetic elder, while Dave keeps looking stoically ahead, his back straight and his shoulders pushed back. The older human inclines his head very slightly, presumably in a gesture of approval. Roxy smiles sweetly and lifts one hand, her middle finger extended. Kanaya is willing to bet rather a lot on that this definitely isn’t a polite gesture meant to honor one’s elders. Then she shrugs and looks away, skipping a bit to catch up with Dave. Without a word, she wraps her arm around his, bumping her cheek against his shoulder in a gesture that lands somewhere between comforting and protective. He flicks her forehead with a small smile, and she grins back. Behind the two of them, Dirk and Rose exchange glances and then close ranks.

Human familiar relationships seem to get more complicated and confusing the more she tries to understand them. She has to say that she’s relieved that trolls don’t have to deal with them.

 

---

 

 

The trek through town and out into the desert is uneventful, and though that’s all according to her own plan – mostly hers, anyway, though she supposes the humans had been somewhat helpful – Vriska still doesn’t like it. The thing about plans is that it’s kind of built in that they will fail somehow, no matter how good they are, because there just isn’t any way to plan for your enemy, not to mention whatever uniquely stupid shit your own people will come up with to fuck up this time. Once you know what you’ve got to work with, no matter how catastrophic or fucking inane, it’s easy enough to roll with the punches and figure out a way to fight back. Adaption is the name of the game, and she is simply the best there is at games.

What she’s not the best at – and she can at least admit this to herself – is waiting. Especially when she’s not sure what exactly she’s waiting for. Fuck, she hates not knowing when the other shoe is going to drop, because knowing the idiots she hangs out with and the messed up situation they’re all in, it’s usually a lead shoe the size of her old hive, dropping with enough force to crack the planet’s surface like an egg. It would just be helpful to know when it’s going to happen, and which direction that sucker is going to come from.

Also, while she’s on the general subject of shit getting right on her bulge, this whole thing about being in the sun? Bullshiiiiiiiit. Sure, it’s nothing even close to the size and intensity of the Alternian sun, so it can’t do much to her, but it’s bright enough that she has keep her left eye mostly closed and squint awkwardly at the world around her, a situation not helped at all by the strong breeze that’s been whipping around them all day. You’d think the wind would at least help with the heat, but it’s every bit as hot and scalding as everything on this stupid planet, and she feels like she’s slowly being suffocated by a huge, oppressive weight. They’d all been drenched in sweat almost instantly upon stepping outside – she can smell Equius all the way from the back of the group, so that’s some particularly gross mucus to top off her already huge grubloaf full of suck. It had only taken her half an hour to give in and accept help from Aradia to get her hair off her neck – it had been either that or going insane and cutting it off with the closest sharp implement available. The rust blood had fussed around behind her, twisting and tucking and tugging, causing Vriska to grimace and complain halfheartedly, but she has to admit that as strange as it feels, having it all gathered up in one neat bun is actually really practical and comfortable. Maybe her policy against any kind of hair styling had been a bit strict in the past.

There are plenty of little blood-sucking winged creatures circling in swarms around them, and while they can’t manage to bite through thick troll skin, the buzzing is driving her up a wall. She flicks her ear irritably at one of them, slowly scaling the slope of yet another jagged cliff. Below, she hears the rumble as one of the larger trolls dislodges something underfoot and causes a minor rock slide. Thank fuck that her own caste tend to grow tall and broad-shouldered, but not nearly as huge and imposing as the purple- and indigo bloods. Getting used to that would be inconvenient, and she doesn’t find the idea of looking like a clumsy tool in the process all that appealing. But hey, laughing at Gamzee every time he bumps his horns on another low ceiling is pretty fun.

She lets her mind wander as she balances along a narrow cliff ledge, trying to see through the heat haze ahead. It drifts erratically between her friends, picking up stray impressions here and there, but nothing concrete unless she focuses. She’s getting better at it every day, not just controlling but nudging, interpreting, guiding. It’s hard, really hard, because sometimes she can no longer turn it off, and random feelings and impulses wander into her mind as if she left the door open, uninvited guests whom she cannot eject or ignore. She has to assume that this is supposed to happen, if she’s to become someone like her own ancestor, capable of turning the minds of hundreds at a time. She can’t let it intimidate her; what kind of loser would she be then, being scared of having power?

In times like this, she has to admit it would be useful to belong to a more social species. She’d like to have someone else to talk to about this.

Sollux’s mind is like a firework display, thoughts constantly popping and fizzling and fighting for dominance, everything so loud. Controlling it is its own can of dirt noodles, but to get an idea of what he’s thinking he has to approach it carefully, sort of read the shadows the thoughts cast rather than the thoughts themselves, and even then it’s a jumble.

- if she thinks we have to I guess we – fuck it’s hot, and it’s – AA seems to agree but those two are always so in step, you’d think it was her moirail – wonder if that human has any idea what she – uh shit watch out below – honestly I don’t know what’s happening with half of – but to just kill her I mean can we really do – what is even going on with KK, his voice sounded so – why is that one voice getting so loud, I can’t shut it out, all it does is scream – FUCK OFF VRISKA!!!

Wow. Rude.

At least he’s not like Aradia. When she realizes that someone is listening in, she just directs her thoughts to the most unhelpful, confusing, screwed up shit you can possibly imagine. That girl has a seriously twisted mind. Vriska has to admit that she’s kind of impressed.

The human minds still feel strange and unapproachable. Even though she’s not looking at her, she can tell that Rose looks up and seeks her out with her gaze when she brushes past, but Vriska isn’t interested in pushing too hard there. Maybe one day, just to keep the human on her toes, but not today. Dirk feels like a fortified wall, just like his stupid blank expressions and deadpan voice. Both similar and vastly different than- no, fuck that, it’s an unpleasant thought and she’s dropping it. Dave and Roxy are a bit more pliable, but still too alien to really get anything substantial from. Just vague tension, excitement, confusion, affection, restlessness, a hint of something wounded. Walking that close together and being that in tune with each other right now, she can’t even tell who is feeling what. Useless.

Jane seems like she’d be a tough nut to crack initially, but probably really easy to manipulate once you know which button to push. The hint of hurt and rejection she can sense when she pushes a bit suggests that there’s definitely something there she could use. Of course, she supposes that if she’d actually paid attention to whatever the humans get up to, she might already know about it. No doubt Terezi already does. But also, hear her out, that sounds unbelievably boring. The drama within her own group has always been enough of a chore, so why should she concern herself with the same stupid shit between daft aliens?

As for Jake… well, if she ever has a reason to – although she cannot imagine why she would – she can already tell that she could go through his mind like Kanaya’s laser saw through grub jelly. Ugh, just brushing past it she can feel it leaking exhaustion, worry, anxiety, and self-doubt, mixing strangely with hope, determination and the constant background noise of still fresh infatuation. Yuck, that’s just embarrassing.

She doesn’t even deign to get close to Tavros’ mind. He’s always been easy to both control and read, but just like with Jake, she can’t imagine why she’d want to. Nepeta’s holds nothing of particular interest to her – it’s just kind of cringy. Terezi is off limits, partly because she always knows somehow despite having no psychic powers of her own, and she’s uncannily good at resisting. But the main reason is that there’s no need. Terezi wouldn’t hide things from her; that’s the whole point. Kanaya… no. For some reason, she’s always been hard to get a read on, and unusually enough it wouldn’t feel right somehow. It’s just better not to.

She lingers a moment by Karkat’s mind. As always it’s almost insultingly easy to read, it’s not even like you need any real powers to know what he’s thinking in the first place. The inside of his head is exactly as loud as everything else about him, thoughts chasing each other around frantically, little worries and doubts rippling out and resonating, changing the shape of the rest of his thoughts. Imagine having a mind like that all the time, constantly caring about everything so desperately that it never gives you a moments rest. It sounds exhausting, and also really lame. However, there is something… she’d noticed it before, but dismissed it as imagination, only it seems to be growing stronger. Like a- an echo, maybe? If an echo was capable of somehow distorting your words and throwing them back changed, more like a reply than a dwindling reflection.

...Nah, she must be imagining that.

As for those who are higher on the hemospectrum than her… she’s getting better at pushing past their natural defenses, although she still can’t outright control them. You’d think that Gamzee would make a perfect candidate since he’s constantly in an artificially weakened state, but instead that only means it’s like trying to punch fog. There’s just nothing substantial enough to grasp, and all the sensory input gives her a headache. Besides, somewhere in that fog there is something gross and absolutely feral that she under no circumstances wants to wake. Just thinking about it makes her feel like she’s being spied on from inside her own head. No thank you.

She glances momentarily at Feferi, and then looks away with a snarl. It’s fucking impossible and she knows it. It’s in fact entirely possible that she might never be able to, and that thought rankles nicely and hardly ever leaves her any peace. It had been one thing when she’d just been this annoyingly, cloyingly nice and optimistic presence to try to avoid, but the more she grows into her role as an heiress, the more holier-than-thou she becomes, not to mention bossy. Bossy, bossy, bossy. She doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, and at the same time she refuses to get more cynical no matter how much their previous naivety has already bitten them all in the ass. It’s infuriating! Vriska would very much like to know how anyone is supposed to not try to be a thorn in her side every possible moment, push back against her stupid insipid shit, and all in all strive to make life as sour as possible for her.

But, well, she supposes everyone’s tastes are different. What pisses you off and makes you want to grab someone and just shake them is unique for every single troll, and that’s what serendipity is all about. Bluh, Karkat could probably write an entire book about it. A book would be better than his lectures anyway. Books burn.

Oh. There it is. She stops momentarily, gazing down at the hideous piece of shit craft that is their only chance of getting back to the shoreline. It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen apart yet. In fact… now that she’s looking, really looking, forcing herself to use both eyes at once, she’s not sure it hasn’t. Seems like some parts are missing.

She laughs where she stands, startling Gamzee who gives her a reproachful look, but she just tosses her head and grins at him. Then she lets out a loud, gleeful whoop and starts running towards the craft, hands darting toward her belt. “Five!” she shouts back over her shoulder, hoping to the Mother Grub that the humans remember the rundown she gave them on her dice and what they do, because she’s got no time to make sure they’re staying back. Speeding up, she bunches up for a moment and then launches herself into the air, right into the middle of the waiting ambush among the rocks. Her die comes out of the belt with a faint click, and still suspended in midair, she hurls it hard against the ground below her. There’s a satisfying noise as it detonates, sending out a sunburst of tiny barbs which will puncture almost anything they encounter and administer a numbing agent. Not a killing weapon, but gas would hurt her allies as much as her enemies, and she would like to avoid anything too explosive. They still need the damn craft, she can’t ruin it.

She lands in front of a startled teal blood who instinctively had bent down to clutch at his leg where the barb entered it. His eyes widen slightly behind the protective tinted goggles he wears, and he reaches for his ax instead, but he’s too late. Vriska almost casually kicks the weapon out of his hand, grabs the back of his head and effortlessly flings his face against the rock he’d been hiding behind. Something crunches satisfyingly, but he’s already behind her as she turns to the next enemy, the next target, smiling and ready.

She can hear weapons fire from above, the crackling bursts of the human guns, the piercing whistling of Nepeta’s, the almost silken sizzle of Eridan’s rifle. The covering fire is useful as a distraction even if it must be pretty hard to aim while closing in, and the rocky terrain isn’t helping. Some part of her brain takes note of the positions of her friends, but most of it is busy ducking, punching, swiping weapons and turning them back on their owners. Wow, there’s more of them than she’d expected. She supposes this is the slight drawback of running straight into an ambush in front of everyone else, but fuck, at least something is happening.

The sounds of feet skidding over rock and grunts and shouts outside her immediate vicinity, as well as a ripple in the ring of attackers around her signals that the rest of them have caught up. She has to admit that the humans are proving faster on the uptake than she would’ve suspected, and though weak and squishy, they make up for it with swiftness, skill and a not small amount of adaptability. She’s actually starting to kind of like them.

“Is she always like this?” Dave shouts from the middle of a smaller melee, and Vriska can only assume he’s referring to her.

“You have-” Feferi lifts a smaller body up with her trident and flings it out of the way. “-no idea.”

“Pretty much all the time, yes,” Kanaya concurs. “Duck!” she adds before flinging the extendable chain on her weapon in a wide circle around her, the laser nodes attached to it almost invisible in the sunlight. Vriska hits the ground and lets out a brief impressed whir as the weapon partly slices through and then knocks back the troll right behind her, and the enemy collapses in a twitching heap, hands grasping clumsily in a futile attempt to stem the flow of cerulean blood. Vriska feels a mind brush past hers frantically, and is on her feet and blocking right before Karkat manages to slice up her shoulder. She gives his face, slack and unfocused with mind control, a brusque slap before forcibly ousting the other intruder from his mind. The feeble presence dissolves almost immediately as the other blue blood loses consciousness.

“If you can’t resist, stay back,” she hisses at Karkat’s horrified expression, shoving him in Dave’s direction. He’s the designated babysitter now. Congratulations, human. “Please don’t let them kill him, that would kind of fuck everything up.” Dave nods briefly in response, and that’s all the time she’s going to spend on these nerds. She’s got a battle to win.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that while they’d been lying in ambush, the enemy force absolutely hadn’t been expecting an attack on this scale, as indicated by their frantic calling for backup. In a brief lull in the fighting, she grabs an enemy olive blood and quickly rummages through her mind. Seems like they’d had a squad posted outside the human settlement for a while now – since before their humans even arrived on the planet, in fact. Apparently the sea dwellers hadn’t in fact been nearly as uninterested in the primitive humans sharing their planet as they’d made Feferi believe they were. Big surprise there. Really. Huuuuuuuuge surprise. The squad had been expecting orders from the Condesce to simply wipe the colony out, but the order had never arrived. Instead they’d been told to stand by, that she’d received information that they were waiting for something to happen, supposedly from a ‘reliable informant’. Whatever that meant.

So they’d just seen the empty craft landing and gone to figure out what was happening. With at least one telepath in the squad, finding out that it was empty wouldn’t have been hard, and then they decided to dismantle the craft and wait for whoever came looking for it. She snorts, letting the feebly squirming olive blood go. Amateurs. They’ll probably all be culled even if there are any survivors – and she’s not intending there to be.

Snatching the gamma burst spear out of the olive blood’s hand to put her out of her misery, she makes the mistake of letting her mind go, and reacts just a fraction of a second too slowly as she sees her eyes suddenly widen and focus on something behind her. She manages to twist out of the way, raising her arm instinctively, and instead of pulverizing her skull, the sonic flail only manages to crush her shoulder instead. Hissing in pain, she stumbles backwards, too paralyzed by shock to fight back for one terrifying moment as a huge indigo blood smirks at her, cockily drops the flail and pulls a long dagger of slick, serrated keratin. Fuck fuck fuck. She reaches for a die, something with enough punch to knock him back, but her dominant hand is the one hanging uselessly by her side and she fumbles, losing valuable time as he closes in. A cloud passes across the sun, for all the good it does her to have her vision restored when her throat is about to be slit.

“Hey. Turn around.” A flat drawl, right behind her enemy’s back. He whips around, and Vriska is about to shout a warning at Dirk, this one isn’t like Equius, this one is fast and he can control his strength. But then the olive blood’s fingers are suddenly closing around her throat, her full weight hitting her injured shoulder, and instead it turns into a jagged cry of agony and rage. As Vriska struggles to take over her mind once again, she can only watch as the dagger arcs through the air and slices right through Dirk’s neck as if it’s not even there. A thin red gash slowly becomes visible as it starts spilling out an uneven trickle of blood, but the human still stands there, either not fully decapitated or somehow perfectly balancing his head on his neck. Vriska hears someone shouting, but it’s too distorted by horror to parse as speech even with a translator on.

Dirk looks down. “It seems you have managed to cut my head off,” he notes dispassionately. “By my calculations, there are about one point two-five-six million terrible puns I could make about this situation, rounded down to the nearest thousand. But I think we’d both be a lot happier if I just refrained, in as much as I’m capable of happiness, and simply cut to the chase.” And then Dirk… dissolves, only to reappear roughly an inch away from the troll, who stumbles hurriedly backwards. “I believe I was about to kill you. Please stand by.”

And he smiles – a truly disconcerting thing – just as another Dirk appears from the rocks above, whirling through the air in a kind of deadly, bladed pirouette, and buries his sword to the hilt in the open mouth of the still gaping indigo blood. Vriska blinks, but uses the moment of frozen shock to kick the olive blood off her. She flies right into the arms of a waiting human, who clocks her on the head with the butt of his gun before dropping her to the ground.

“Sorry we’re late,” he says with a grin, reaching out a hand to Vriska. She ignores it, jumping to her feet without his help and resolutely ignoring the pain. On her right, a blur of black, white and green zips past, faster than any human or troll could manage, leaving a trail of unconscious trolls in its wake.

Dirk wipes off his sword, giving the other Dirk an unfriendly sideways glance. “That was unnecessary and you fucking know it. I don’t think I left any room for interpretation when I told you to only ever use that strategy if my allies had been briefed on it beforehand.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” other-Dirk demands nonchalantly, pulling a hand through his hair, which for some reason looks a lot more red afterwards. Blood? “What’s the prob-?” He’s cut short by Jake, who rushes right through him in his haste to get to Dirk, eyes frantic and red-rimmed as he flings his arms around him and holds on as if he’s drowning, shoulders heaving in sobs. In the middle of battle too, Vriska thinks and rolls her eyes in disgust. Admittedly there’s not much left to do, but still. Spare her from emotional idiots.

“Ah,” says other-Dirk, who apparently shares her sentiments. “That problem.”

“Well, I am not going to be an ungrateful piece of shit, anyway,” Vriska says, grunting as she squeezes her shoulder and concludes that yes, there’s not a whole piece of skeletal tissue to be found. That’s inconvenient. “So thanks, I guess. Not sure what some kind of AI needs gratitude for, but whatever, like I care. Now, where the fuck did you come from?”

In response he just raises an eyebrow and points at the sky. What Vriska had vaguely parsed as a cloud casting a shadow down on them is clearly far too solid and still at a second glance, and gleams almost smugly in the light of the now descending sun. “I didn’t come from anywhere, because I’m not actually here,” other-Dirk elaborates, kind of unnecessarily. “That’s me up there. I’m the ship.” He fixes her with a disconcertingly familiar deadpan look. “You can call me Hal.”

Dirk groans, pushing a hand against Jake’s chest. “Christ Jake, you’re going to end up strangling me... and you know, I could get into that, but it’s considered downright fucking uncouth without deciding on a safeword first. You’ve got to be careful with that arm, remember?”

“I- I’m sorry Dirk.” Jake hangs his head and draws back, clutching at his robot arm, which is splattered in blue and green blood. “I just- I thought-”

“Later. Alright? For now-”

“Incoming drone ship!” Eridan shouts, already firing at the damn thing as if that’s going to do any good. “Does anyone have some smart fucking plan now?”

“On it,” says Hal, and the humans’ ship is already turning slowly, guns starting to glow as it prepares to fire.

“Are you mad?” Sollux shouts, frantically waving his arms. “The shields on the drone ships are crude as fuck, they could end up deflecting fire anywhere. We’ll be vaporized, dumbfuck.”

Hal gives him a severely unimpressed look, probably not too pleased to have is intelligence called into question by an organism, but is once more cut short.

“Gamzee, help me up.” It’s Tavros, who had apparently been set down among the rocks during the battle to keep him from getting in anyone’s way. Gamzee obediently lumbers to his side, helping him sit a bit more upright by holding his enormous hand behind his back. “I’ll deal with this,” he announces, closing his eyes. Vriska grimaces at the faint ripple of undefinable something slipping past her mind. Rose’s eyes widen. The human next to Vriska frowns.

“What’s he doing?” he demands in an overly loud stage whisper. “Shouldn’t we just get on the ship and get out of here? What’s the problem?”

“Shut up, will you, human?”

“John,” he reminds her with an air of helpfulness.

“I don’t care.” She already knew that, but now she’s determined to pretend like she doesn’t. She’s done dumber things out of spite. “Anyway, just watch the sky. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this.”

The drone ship is opening its hatches, and the malignant buzz of hundreds of wings fills the air. For a moment she can see the waiting ranks inside, an image nearly of mythological significance, immortalized as the very last sight of millions of her own people, not to mention hundreds of alien civilizations. She shivers, lips pulling back in either a smile or a snarl. One day…

Then the sky turns black. Vriska has only ever seen the larger fauna of this planet at a distance, as wheeling wings far above or flitting shadows between the cliffs and crevasses. But now they descend by the thousands, some almost the size of dragons, in a flurry of cruel beaked heads and scaly wings, talon-tipped legs and arms, lashing tails. The sheer weight of them starts to push the ship towards the earth as their sinewy bodies invade the open hatches, tearing apart the drones they encounter with brutal efficiency. As the ship develops a volatile tilt and crashes toward the ground, the air is filled with pieces of wings and shells, flecks of blood and scattered scales. There’s a buzz of collapsing shields, a roar of crushed metal and screaming creatures trying to escape the wreckage, and then silence descends like a lead weight. Tavros lets out a small sigh and goes limp, collapsing pale and panting against Gamzee’s waiting hands. The humans exchange glances, looking positively horrified. The sky clears. In front of them are the carcasses of two ships, one on top of the other, the bulk of the drone ship pinning the smaller hovercraft to the ground.

Feferi’s smile is infuriatingly undaunted as she claps her hands together, in the manner of a hostess wrapping up the evening’s entertainment. “I’m so glad to see you, ah… John and Jade, right? And Hal too, of course. I think we might need a lift, actually!”

Notes:

Don't even talk to me about writing Vriska's perspective. I hope I didn't botch it completely.

Chapter 22: Loose ends

Summary:

A historic decision for the future of the troll race is carried through. Dave tries to actually think about feelings.

Notes:

Plot plus awkward boys, everything we could possibly need :P

Nowadays the jolt of the teleport barely even registers, and Roxy compensates easily for it as she drops a couple of inches onto the ground. A muffled and still somehow very loud curse behind her suggests that Karkat is going to need a little more practice. His voice echoes against the rocks surrounding the small cove, carrying across the shingle beach before getting swallowed up by the murmuring vastness of the sea. The rest of the trolls turn around to look at him – or maybe glare is a better word? Karkat falls silent as Dave helps him up, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head apologetically, for all the world looking like he embarrassed himself. The impression is helped by the weird tension that seems to be mounting between the trolls, as if the air between them is being stretched until it twangs. Every single one of them avoids looking at Feferi.

She stands at the water line, her colorful silks rippling around her in the wind, getting caught by the waves and spreading out behind her like colorful waterweeds. The sinking sun catches on her crown and horns, and she looks like a goddess rising from the sea. Her face is serene, but also hard to read. Roxy wonders if the god imagery might’ve crossed her mind because there is something almost reverent about the way she carries herself, like a person in a holy place.

She looks up and notices Roxy looking, and a small smile touches her lips, brightening the light in her eyes which for a moment had seemed to shine from so very far away. It’s a bit strange, with the strong sea breeze whipping around them, to suddenly feel as if it’s hard to breathe. Even so, Roxy smiles back with as much encouragement as she can muster.

“I’ll be back in a while,” Feferi says, and then she turns around and walks into the crashing waves. She’s surefooted on the wet shingle, her clothes floating around her in great billowing clouds, her hair borrowing the red glow of the sun and creating a halo. When the water reaches to her waist, she tips forward and is swallowed by the wine dark surface without so much as a splash.

They wait. It takes more than an hour; enough time for the sun to completely disappear below the horizon and a chill to settle in the air around them. At one point they see another drone ship passing by far out at sea, but with their ship cruising at an altitude where it’s barely visible and all of them hidden within the protective cliff walls of the cove, there’s no real way for them to be spotted. Even so they sit still and quiet until it’s well out of sight.

None of the trolls will tell them what they’re waiting for.

Aradia and Sollux are the only ones standing, their gazes fixed on the dark sky, as if tracking something only they can see. The shifting glow surrounding Sollux creates a rather eerie looking pattern of light and shade around him, as it reflects off wet rocks and tide pools, creating deep gashes of contrasting black on the back of every jutting rock formation. Whenever the two of them move, they mirror each other perfectly, as if engaged in a very slow and erratic dance, and Roxy could swear that some kind of pale after images linger in the air every time they do, the fourth dimension of their strange ritual made visible. She can hear them breathing, the measured and deep breaths of people trying to pace themselves, which suggests that something is requiring a substantial effort.

After a little while, Jade’s silly robot ears prick up, and she lifts her gaze to the two of them, eyes appearing to widen slightly. She seems to mouth the words, ‘Are you sure?’, so most likely Hal just told her something, but Roxy can’t guess what on earth he could have noticed that the rest of them apparently haven’t figured out. A couple of minutes later, without the wind picking up, a few large waves splash against the shore, powerful enough to drive the water all the way up to where they’re sitting. What’s going on?

There’s a soft sound of water shifting, of falling droplets, and Feferi is suddenly outlined against the last faint red smolder along the rim of the horizon. Her luminous eyes look bigger than usual somehow, vulnerable, almost childish. As she walks closer, Roxy realizes that the glitter of water droplets on her face has a faint pink tint which stays even when the lights around Sollux shift to blue. But she keeps her head held high, and there’s not a trace of hesitation in her steps. As much as she and her siblings had joked before about being royalty, and as entertaining as that can be as a fantasy, Roxy is certain that what she’s seeing right now is something that weighs much heavier than something as flimsy as an inherited title. It has nothing to do with with who your mother is, or how you were created, or the color of your blood. It’s something you take on because there’s a need for it, something that might not necessarily make you look good, or brave, or even right, but you hope that in the end it will somehow make life better for as many as possible.

She’s seen it before, too. In Dirk, as he made the decision to implant Jade with the Green Sun technology, just so that no one else would have to bear that burden. In Vriska, rushing before everyone else into battle. In John, shouting for all of them to abandon their current mission to aid Rose and Jake, even if it seemed like it was already far too late. In Karkat, unraveling the truth of his heritage in front of all of them, despite how every word seemed to weigh him down further with the burden of inevitability.

She’s seen it in her mother, and though she’s loath to admit it, in her uncle as well.

“It’s done,” Feferi says softly to Sollux and Aradia, and though she’s cold blooded and probably shouldn’t notice the chilly breeze plastering the silk of her dress against her body, she nonetheless shivers and wraps her arms around herself. She turns to Jade. “Can you communicate with your ship? We’re going to need it to move in closer and to transportalize us out of here when I say, just in case. I don’t think the impact will be too dramatic, but nonetheless we should probably get away from the shoreline.”

That last part sure sounds like nonsense, but maybe Jade understands what she means? In any case she doesn’t argue or ask any questions, just glances up as if she can see Hal from all the way down there – and maybe the implants in her eyes mean that she can in fact do that. “Got that? Okay.” She smiles, encouraging and kind as always. “Just say when, Feferi.”

The heiress inclines her head in thanks, then turns to Sollux and Aradia once more. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as we’re going to get, I guess,” Sollux says, and there’s a note of hesitancy under the usual touchiness. As if he would like to ask if she’s sure about this, except that’s not the sort of question you ask anyone wearing the kind of expression that Feferi is right now.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” Aradia quickly adds, for her part looking as if she’d like to kick her moirail in the shins. “Come on, Sollux.”

He doesn’t object, only sighs, and they both close their eyes. The steady glow grows stronger and stronger, expanding around the both of them in a brilliant, crackling nimbus, until everyone is forced to look away or risk having their eyeballs soldered to the back of their skulls. There’s complete silence, and then Jade whispers, “Look at the sky.”

The blazing light above grows fast, as if eager to outshine its tiny twin light on earth. Roxy sees their descending ship momentarily silhouetted against its glare, safely out of its trajectory, and then for a moment it’s as if day has decided on a brief encore. Around the rapidly approaching light the sky turns blue, bright midday blue, and there’s this strange hissing crackle that seems to be coming from the air around her. Photoacoustic transducers, she thinks absently. Their clothes, their hair, anything that absorbs light well in the vicinity is heating up the air around it and creating pressure waves. That’s what they’re hearing.

Then the light is gone, swallowed by the surface of the sea. The darkness that falls is so sudden and so complete in the wake of the previous incandescence, it feels almost like a physical blow. She hears Sollux let out a groan, and the clatter of rocks sliding. As her eyes slowly start to adapt to the darkness, she sees that he has collapsed forward and is being supported by Aradia, who doesn’t look entirely well herself. He has a rather severe nosebleed, and Aradia is rubbing the base of one horn as if she has a headache. Roxy keeps counting the seconds passing, it must be any second now-

As the sound finally reaches them it’s positively deafening, and the shockwave shakes the earth like a sheet, knocking everyone standing right off their feet. She has time to think that if this isn’t a very dramatic impact according to Feferi, she’d hate to see a dramatic one. But then the heiress must’ve given Jade the signal, because the next moment they all land in an unceremonious heap in the teleport bay on their ship. Jake’s elbow hits her right in the solar plexus, and it’s only a mercy it’s not the metal arm, but it still makes her groan and flop back on the floor.

“It worked,” Kanaya says in a quiet, awed voice.

“No fucking shit it worked,” Karkat replies, wheezing slightly since the entirety of Gamzee’s leg seems to be pinning him to the floor. “If it hadn’t worked, we’d probably all be dead by now.”

“There’s no chance, that is... you couldn’t have missed, right?” Tavros inquires timidly.

“No fucking chance, dripcrevice,” Sollux shoots back. “Like KK said, if we’d missed, you wouldn’t be alive to ask any stupid questions. Besides, if anyone should’ve been able to notice, wouldn’t it be you?”

“Oh. Right.”

Vriska sits up, impatiently shoving Nepeta out of her lap with her uninjured arm. “What a pity,” she says, though she doesn’t sound particularly torn up. “All that wasted potential and all that. But things will probably be a lot more interesting this way.”

Feferi sends her a look, wiping what is definitely tears off her face, but doesn’t reply. Roxy reaches out hesitantly, finally remembering that she can move, and places a hand gently on her lower back. The princess shudders and shifts almost imperceptibly so that she can lean back against it. With her fingers resting directly against the thin film of sodden silk, she can feel her muscles heaving with every heavily suppressed sob.

“We could’ve-” Eridan begins.

“No, fuck you, we couldn’t.” Karkat manages to twist around enough to give him a feeble kick. “I’m not about to be embroiled in some kind of stupid game of highblood of the hill where we’re all trying to slap the fucking genocide button out of each others’ hands. I guess that for a streak of elitist piss like you that might sound like a fun evening out, but I’m not going to put up with any of that kind of shit, do you hear me?”

“Yeah, you tell him,” Dave mumbles, slumped on the floor. “You’ll turn this whole rebellion around if you have to, so help you god.”

“No one is going to use her like that,” Feferi says quietly, wrapping her arms around her folded legs and hugging them tight to her chest. Sollux looks at her quietly for a moment, and then slowly scoots closer until he’s leaning his forehead against her cheek, moving cautiously as if he half expects her to shove him away from her. Roxy feels her tense briefly, and then she lets out a shaky breath and relaxes. “Never again. It has to end now. Our species can’t go on like this. And I think… maybe she thought that too. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Then she’s crying for real, loud and inconsolable, and as Roxy pulls herself closer as well and wraps her arms protectively around her, everyone else just stays where they are in awkward silence. What is there to say, really? The trolls must’ve all known about and at least somewhat agreed to the plan, so any opinions they might have on the matter are presumably already out there. For the humans, it’s a safe assumption that they’ve all connected the dots at this time regardless of uptake speed, and it’s not like they can ever really understand. They can imagine being forced to kill a family member and the horror implied by such a scenario, but a lusus isn’t really a parent; nor is it a pet that you might have to put down. There’s no real frame of reference for them.

She’s not sure how long the they all stay quiet while Fereri’s sobs slowly grow quieter, more exhausted with every stuttering breath. As she finally slumps limply against Sollux’ chest and Roxy leans against hers in turn, Rose clears her throat.

“So, I don’t wish to be tactless, but what exactly was that? I’m assuming it wasn’t just a random satellite?”

“It’s was a weapon,” Equius mutters, sounding embarrassed. “We placed it in orbit when we first arrived here, in case this course of action should become necessary.” He doesn’t look entirely happy about it. “It could be described as a sort of arrow – or perhaps I should say dart. I designed it to be capable of quite exquisitely swift and impactful penetration.”

Rose literally claps her hands over Dirk’s and Dave’s mouths before either of them has a chance to say anything at all. It’s likely that they’ll never forgive her for it. “I see,” she says, impressively enough without so much as an embarrassed smirk on her face. “Presumably designed to withstand the great temperatures upon entering the atmosphere, as well as the impact of hitting the sea at that velocity. Dare I ask what the conditions on the planet will be like following the impact?”

“It shouldn’t be too bad,” Aradia says with a small shrug. “Since the projectile was designed to maintain speed and not exceed certain temperatures, the impact with the surface wasn’t too bad, and the water pressure at the site of the final impact should control the area affected by it. There might be some strange weather patterns due to the steam, but that’s about it.”

“And since it was low tide, the waves created shouldn’t affect the seaside settlement much,” Jade adds thoughtfully. Aradia blinks, then nods.

“Oh, you’re right. That’s good.”

“But you can bet your ass that it will have affected any sea dweller settlement closeby,” Vriska adds with a perhaps unnecessary amount of satisfaction. “Firstly because they’ll be scared shitless and think they’re under attack, and probably won’t be too eager to leave their defenses unmanned to go hunt humans for a little while. And secondly because when something so momentously huge dies, it tends to attract other things that might not be as huge, but still pretty big. They’ll have every single sea monster on this benighted planet swarming around there within a day. That’ll get distracting pretty quick, I imagine.”

“Effective,” Dirk observes, apparently allowed to speak now that Rose has determined that he won’t immediately make a dick joke. “A quick, merciful death to ensure that no psychic retaliation is possible.” Roxy glares at him, because holy shit, there are times when maybe an analytical appraisal of someone’s strategy isn’t the best option, and right after they’ve been forced to off their monster mom might just be one of them. He raises his eyebrows slightly. “Yeah, in retrospect I could’ve put that a lot more tactfully. I guess this is the point where I offer my apologies and condolences instead.”

“Either that,” Dave suggests, “or it might just be better if you shut up, man. Full offense, you should probably let someone else do that part. I mean, so should I. But I’m not trying to do that shit – I’m just telling you to shut up before you embarrass us more.”

Roxy exchanges a Look with Rose. Why are their brothers like this?

“It’s alright,” Feferi says before anyone decides to jump to her defense and everything really gets out of hand. “That was the plan. And… thank you.” She sounds drained. “And now… now I think we should all get out of here.”

“Getting out of here is already in progress,” Hal’s voice points out from the nearest information terminal. “While you life forms were having your tea party and/or slumber party and/or really lame orgy there on the floor, I decided I wasn’t going to get any succinct orders in a while, and took the liberty of moving us away from the planet full of hostiles. Feel free to sit around and talk about your primitive emotions for as long as you feel like it while I do all the actual work.”

“Oh, go shove a sock in it,” Jake says at the exact same time as John suggests something a bit more intricate but just as physical. They both grin a bit feebly at each other. Roxy might not be as easily provoked by Hal’s antics, but she can’t help but agree with the general sentiment. “What do you say, gang? I know I’m feeling a couple of twinkles short of a sparkle, so how about we all go hit the hay? We can all chew each others’ fat some more once we’ve caught some shuteye, and maybe come up with some sort of plan.”

“You know, for all that he talks like an idiot, that’s the smartest thing anyone’s said to me all fucking day,” Karkat mutters, squirming out from under Gamzee’s leg. “Not that it was a dazzling playing field to begin with, but the point still goes to human Jake. Everyone else gets to soil themselves in shame. Come on Dave. I’m not standing around here for my fucking health. Let’s go.”

 

---

 

 

As Karkat trails after him in the direction of his quarters, it seems to start to dawn on him that out here on their ship, away from the colony, there’s no specific reason why the two of them need to share a living space anymore. Or at least that’s how Dave interprets the nervous fidgeting and embarrassed edge to his usual scowl. The thought had definitely crossed his mind too, as a potentially awkward conversation to be had, which Karkat had momentarily bypassed by just assuming that they were going to, and he’d been fine with going along with it. After all, it’s fine... right? He doesn’t mind having Karkat around. Sure, he can be obnoxious and loud and kind of emotionally demanding, what with his fussiness, critically low self esteem disguised as confidence, trouble communicating feelings, and that constant need for affirmation and attention that borders on the pathetic...

Dave holds back a wince. He’s not so completely insensible to his own flaws that he doesn’t realize that bar a few details, that whole laundry list of complaints comes pretty close to being a detailed description of himself. That’s some goddamn poetic turn of fate, isn’t it? Imagine there being two fuckups so perfectly matched even though they’re not even the same species. Someone resurrect Shakepeare or some other dead white guy preoccupied with the far-fetched – this must be the material they were always waiting for, right? Arranged marriages, a couple of practically identical siblings, a plot against royalty, an abundance of snarky broads, non-human creatures… All it needs is some crossdressing and maybe someone turning into an animal, or possibly being mauled to death by one. Surely Tavros could arrange the latter. Exit, pursued by a nightmare swarm of bloodthirsty reptiles. Yeah.

Wow, he’s so good at bypassing things he doesn’t want to think about, it’s borderline embarrassing. Except who is he trying to kid, borderline nothing, it’s straight up mortifying to realize the lengths he goes to and the intricate knots he’ll tie his thoughts into just to circumvent his own mind’s attempts to reflect upon anything that makes him uncomfortable. Which apparently includes kicking his own ass for avoiding certain thoughts as a way to keep avoiding them. Shit.

The point is… does he want to have Karkat around? He knows he’s not actually mad at him for keeping quiet about the whole Signless thing, that’s a good place to start. It hadn’t been his fault that Dave was dragged into what was going on, and fuck, he’s not certain how much he’d be ready to share with a stranger in a precarious situation like that. Considering how he’d dealt with his own family affairs, can he really fault anyone for being secretive with sensitive information without being a huge hypocrite? Even if it still doesn’t sit right with him, with the benefit of hindsight and not being fresh out of battle, he can see where Karkat was coming from.

Right, so that… doesn’t actually help much. Not being angry with someone is pretty fucking basic, the white bread or grub loaf or whatever of cordial relationships, and the whole idea of actually wanting Karkat around… that’s a whole banquet of confusing feelings he’s not sure he wants to touch. Does he like spending time with? Sure. He’s funny as shit, even though half the time Dave can’t tell if he’s trying to be or not – which is pretty funny too. He can respect that somehow. But does he want to come back to the same quarters as him every evening? Does he want that to keep being an assumption wherever they go from now on? To keep sharing a bed with him, even when all they do in it is sleep? To take responsibility for keeping away his nightmares, and maybe even rely on Karkat to do the same for him?

Does he want to keep waking up to his casual clinginess, his warm little sleepy sounds, his awkward ‘Hey,’ when he realizes Dave is awake? What if with time, he might be able to make him smile like he’d done after he’d apologized again, and will it feel the same as it did then? If everyone else isn’t right there the next time… what will happen next?

Shit fuck shit fuck damn. He realizes that he’s just kind of stopped in the middle of the corridor, and what’s worse, if someone were to run past and fling an egg at his face… well, that would be weird and rude, but the egg would probably fry on contact, is his point. Karkat is giving him a strange look.

“It’s just down here,” he says and gestures a bit aimlessly, starting to walk again.

“Look...” Welp, here it comes. Has he come to any kind of conclusion? Fuck no. Great. “It’s not even like this whole human marriage shit means anything to me, and I haven’t exactly gotten the impression that you take it all that seriously either, and now that the truce is broken and we’re not even on that fucking planet anymore… I guess it was actually unbelievably presumptuous of me to just- just order you to take me back to your room. I mean shit, maybe I just wanted everyone to stop talking such goddamn hoofbeast leavings and let Feferi have some fucking time alone to grieve and recover, who knows, maybe I’m actually trying to be considerate even when I’m being a gigantic tool, but I guess what I mean is that you don’t- you don’t actually have to-”

He falls silent, letting out an explosive sigh and rubbing his hands across his face. Dave walks on with a sudden strange, heavy lump of unease at the pit of his stomach. Of course he’s tried to be cool about the whole thing, but really, is it just so simple that he doesn’t give a shit about what marriage is supposed to mean? Yeah, sure, he’d been forced into it, but it’s still this kind of huge thing, isn’t it? No matter how much nonchalance he’d affected, it still had felt like it meant something when he’d said his I do and like… that kiss… hadn’t it felt special? Weird and awkward, but that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t important.

The point is that according to custom and law and basically most social standards, Karkat is still his husband. Like, that’s an actual thing which he’s tried really hard not to examine, but apparently now is the time to drag up everything that’s uncomfortable for him to think about. His husband. His lawfully wedded spouse. Ye ole ball and chain. His man. His hubby. Okay, no, not the last one. Absolutely the fuck not.

Is that where the discomfort comes from? Knowing that it does in fact matter to him somehow, and he doesn’t know how to put into words that even though it’s not what he would’ve wanted, not what he’d ever imagined, it’s still… something. It means something, even if he can’t manage a proper explanation of what or why, not even to himself.

Or is it because Karkat said it doesn’t mean anything to him? That would be stupid, he already knows that. They’re aliens and they don’t have marriages. As far as Karkat is concerned, it was just a weird contract, and now the terms of said contract are broken, he assumes that means the marriage is too. How would he even explain that it’s not that simple? Why isn’t it that simple, anyway? Why is he getting so hung up on this?

He clenches his hand into a fist, feeling the outline of the wedding ring against his finger. He hadn’t taken it off. Neither has Karkat, he notices.

He really needs to say something soon, holy shit. Karkat is waiting for his answer, and if he knows anything about his neurotic spouse, it’s that being left hanging like this freaks him out. Before this turns into another uncontrollable situation between the two of them, or there’s some horrible and stupid misunderstanding, he needs to say something. The fact that he doesn’t know what, that he’s got no answers to all the questions he’s asked himself so far and feels wildly out of his depth, well, that’s all something he’s got to get over. He’s got to at least try.

“Look, this is a pretty big ship, but it’s not like there are going to be private quarters for every single one of us anyway. We’re going to have to share the space there is.” He shrugs. “We already know that we’re capable of putting up with each other for extended periods of time, right? What I mean is, we’ve gotten used to each others’ weirdness already, so having to go through another crash course in that shit with someone else just seems excessive. And I’d sure as fuck rather have you in my room than, I don’t know, Equius. Or Vriska. Or Eridan.” He’d honestly rather have Karkat than pretty much all of them, but he doesn’t think he’d actually be able to say that without coming off weird.

“A glowing recommendation right there,” Karkat shoots back dryly, but he doesn’t actually sound upset. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but Dave thinks he seems a little bit disappointed by the answer, as if he was hoping for something a bit more meaningful than a noncommittal, ‘We might as well.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, well, deeper than that he’d hoped that Dave would say that hey, they’re friends aren’t they, something like that. It was probably a bit needlessly flippant now that he thinks about it. The last conversations they’ve had have kind of been characterized by Karkat being open and honest about his emotions, so surely he deserves better than just being told that he’s the least unpleasant alternative?

It’s just that Dave is starting to worry that if he starts talking about it, he’ll end up rambling about having gotten used to someone falling asleep next to him and how he thinks that if they were to both pretend like all this never happened, it’s going to leave some kind of hole in his life that he’s not equipped to even define, let alone deal with right now. He just… He doesn’t know what he’s feeling, if maybe he’s made the mistake to get unrealistically invested in this whole situation or not, but if that’s the case he’s pretty damn sure that he’s not ready to talk to Karkat about it. He’s honestly not certain if he ever really will be. But what he might as well admit right here and now is that Karkat is important to him, whatever that actually means. Somehow he’s gotten under his skin, and the thought strikes him that if he told Karkat’s friends this, they would probably know exactly what he means. It’s easy to leave yourself open around someone who obviously just tries way too hard and cares way too much, thinking you can’t really take someone like that seriously, and that’s how he gets you. With time you start to realize that you’ve come to rely on it, whatever unidentifiable thing it is he’s got, and the idea of going on without it suddenly seems really goddamn lonely. Like your life would be poorer for it.

That’s his door. He stops in front of it, waiting the beat required for his bio signature to be recognized by the door’s lock system. As it slides open he turns around, planting himself right in front of the door’s sensor so that it won’t close. “Hey, so, maybe that wasn’t entirely honest of me. Like, sure, that’s honestly a good enough reason for you to stay here, but it also feels kind of like an excuse, which is pretty fucking weird, because it’s not like we should need an excuse, right? I mean, that’s a really cagey way of acting like we just put up with each other at this point, like someone who has learned to sort of accept that they have to share their living space with, shit, a water buffalo or something. You probably don’t know what that is, do you? It’s a really big animal… which, okay, come to think of it is kind of tactless and dumb considering that’s literally what trolls do when they grow up, share living spaces with big animals, and considering the circumstances I could really have come up with a better example, but it’s already way too late now.” Karkat raises his eyebrows, and Dave feels his cheeks grow hot once again. “The point is, I feel that it’s pretty damn transparent anyway, doing this whole tsundere bullshit song and dance where we act like we’re not actually pretty comfortable around each other and we’ve gotten used to living together by now and, you know, it’s honestly been pretty sweet. Sure, at first we were probably both half expecting to try to strangle each other after a week or so, but somehow you’re not nearly as annoying as all that, and actually I feel like you’ve got plenty of good points that end up outweighing the aggravating shit, and maybe you feel sort of… the same? About me? Help me out here, man, or I’m just gonna keep making us both awkward.”

The seconds drag out as Karkat just stares up at him, eyes wide, as if he can’t believe the babbling idiot in front of him. If he’s to be honest, Dave can’t say he blames him. He half expects a brusque dismissal, or maybe a minor tantrum, so he really isn’t prepared at all when Karkat starts laughing. Actual, honest to god laughter too, not some kind of sarcastic display or anxiety giggles. He even has to bend over and hold his stomach, eyes tearing slightly as he wheezes. Dave shifts a bit awkwardly where he stands, but can’t help how his lips start twitching, the warm little lurch in his stomach as his own relief starts bubbling over, and before he knows it he’s laughing too. Not as hard as Karkat, but it’s still genuine and warm, and he lifts a hand to rub the tension out of his shoulder, breathing a bit easier.

“Fuck, you- you really know how to make everything into some convoluted issue, don’t you?” Karkat rubs the heel of his hand across his eyes, one after the other, and a couple of tiny tear droplets get caught in his eyelashes. They’re so long and clearly defined, they sometimes make Dave think of the fuzzy antennae of certain moths. “You know you could just say that you want me to stay with you, right? I mean, at least that’s what I think you said, but in my defense you didn’t make it easy for me to understand what the fuck you were saying.”

Dave grins, embarrassment easily overwhelmed and disarmed by relief. “What, can’t a guy want to preserve some kind of mystique? If that’s a crime all of a sudden, I guess it’s just as well that I’ve recently joined a group of scurrilous rebels and scofflaws.” He looks down, not quite able to meet Karkat’s gaze, not sure that the way he looks right now wouldn’t melt down a few barriers that he’s just not ready to lower just yet. “But okay, fine. I want you to stay with me. I think that would be kind of cool.”

“Nerd,” Karkat says and stomps right past him. He puts his hands on his hips and subjects the room to a critical look. “How useless do you have to be not to clean up your own fucking quarters before going on vacation, Dave? Is it really so hard to maintain some basic level of standards?”

“What? It’s clean,” Dave protests, looking around too. Not perfectly neat, he’s willing to admit, but a far cry from outright filthy. All he gets in return is a derisive little clicking sound, as Karkat lifts up a t-shirt that had slipped off a chair and throws it in his general direction.

“Do I dare to even ask you what your respite block looks like? Say for the sake of the argument, if we allowed Terezi even near it, how many layers of teenage human musk would she be able to detect, do you think? I mean, not that I’d expose her to that or anything, I’m not a monster, but I’m just saying. That is, what I’m saying is that I'd like to know what kind of horrifying bio hazard I'm expected to contend with while trying to sleep.”

“Fuck you, the bedroom is fine.” Then he remembers that he hadn’t expected anyone to see it when he’d left it, and also he’d kind of been deeply depressed for about year, which hadn’t done wonders for his ability to keep his quarters tidy - it hadn't been great for his personal hygiene for a while there either. Wait, had he actually cleared away his porn stash before he left for Muspell? Or any other incriminating objects, for that matter? Maybe Karkat wouldn’t care, or maybe he wouldn’t even recognize them as such, but he doesn’t actually feel like being rational about this. He grimaces.

“Just- Just stay right here, okay? Don’t move.”

He thinks he hears Karkat laugh again as he dashes for his bedroom.

Chapter 23: Adumbrate

Summary:

Few things are truly black or white, and too often the answer is somewhere in between. Anything else would be far too easy.

Notes:

Hey y'all! Yesterday (or technically the day before yesterday, since I just realized it's past midnight whoops) it was exactly a year since I posted the first chapter of this story. It sure has been a journey, and it's ended up taking me places I definitely hadn't planned, but I'm forever grateful to everyone who has stuck around for the ride. Regardless of when you started reading, just know that I appreciate you a lot <3
I've toyed a bit with the idea of wrapping this part of the fic up, and then continuing the story in a sequel fic, but idk for sure about that yet. I worry a bit about losing momentum if I do :P I'll ponder it some more, but at any rate I'm still psyched about continuing the story and figuring out where it's going next. Thank you all so much for you time, your kudos and your kind words （＾ω＾）

It will clearly take some organizing, but the challenge of how to accommodate everyone on the ship seems particularly trifling compared to their recent flight for their life and the perils of battle, all culminating in something that may or may not have been political assassination. Jake isn’t entirely sure about that last point, not having a clear idea exactly what happened leading up to it, if the poor princess had actually gone down there and instructed her sea monster mother how to accommodate for her upcoming death or what. Doesn’t assassination usually require the target not to know what’s going to happen? Was that actually what happened, or has he missed something?

Probably. He sighs, leaning sideways slightly to look at the glowing outline showing the floor plan of the ship which Jane has pulled up on the information terminal.

“Right, so Karkat and Dave are sharing a room, and I’m assuming that so are Rose and Kanaya?” As the two nod assent, Jane drags two little color coded glowing dots towards Rose’s quarters. “All the personal quarters are fairly similar, and not terribly big – it’s really just a small sitting room and a bedroom – but they should accommodate two occupants just fine. Maybe Roxy could move into mine for the time being?”

“Yesss,” Roxy immediately exclaims, pumping her fist and bouncing. “Bestie slumber party time!”

“And, ah-” Jane begins, eyes darting to Jake for a moment, and the pause is just a fraction of a second too long not to be noticed as obvious hesitation. He can see her lower her eyes uncertainly, and then setting her jaw and looking up again. “Perhaps you could…?”

“Say no more,” Jake rushes to respond to her prompt, not wishing to put her in an awkward position, though perhaps he overshoots slightly on the eagerness. “As long as Dirk has no objections, I’d be happy to share his abode for the time being.”

Dirk only shrugs slightly and nods, which Jake knows very well isn’t actually a sign of reluctance or even a lack of enthusiasm, but the apparent contrast between them still makes him feel a bit foolish. But what else is new? Dirk’s entire set of mannerisms occasionally seems to be devised specifically to make everyone around him seem thick as two planks. It’s easy to buy into it, to allow yourself to be provoked by it, right until he stumbles and you catch a glimpse of the frantic battle going on behind the laid-back facade. As much as he hates to admit it, even to himself, Jake knows quite a lot about lacking confidence. However, having confidence and at the same time heartily disliking yourself had certainly been a new and confusing idea, once he actually managed to figure Dirk out. He’d been bewildered to realize that he could be, well, Dirk – intelligent, brave, enterprising, strong, inventive, dynamic… everything Jake had ever wished he could be – and be completely aware of exactly how exceptional he is, and still somehow be so incredibly hard on himself. But after working that out, it did suddenly make sense why he was so hard on everyone else. It mustn’t seem so bad, compared to what he put himself through on a daily basis.

He watches Jane nod with a smile that at least seems genuine, moving their colored dots over to Dirk’s quarters. “Right, that gives us two empty rooms for four of you-”

“Me and Terezi will take that one,” Vriska interrupts and points at Jake’s room without hesitating, which strikes him as rather rude, but Jane just nods and moves their dots there. He notices that her smile is just a touch strained, however.

“Very well. And the other one?”

“Maybe… can me and Sollux take that one?” Feferi inquires, clearly trying to pang-wangle her way through her recent misfortune and keep up a brave face, but the poor thing sounds plum tuckered out. Nobody looks like they want to contest her claim on the room, at least. “And, well, if Aradia doesn’t mind, maybe she can sleep in the sitting room?”

“Sounds good,” she mumbles, practically half asleep against Sollux’ arm.

“Me and John can share too,” Jade quickly supplies. “I don’t mind sleeping on the sofa in his quarters. That’s alright, isn’t it, John?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you rather have the bed, though?”

“That’s sweet, but you’re a bit big for that sofa, John. You’d just roll out of it in the night and complain about it.” Jade laughs at his sheepish grin. “I don’t move around much when my systems are in sleep mode. So the sofa will be fine.”

Jane bites her lip. “Well, that’s good. Though both your places are a little bit smaller, so I’m not sure how well the biggest two will fit in there. And there are steps up to both bedrooms, right?” Jade nods. “Not the best place for a wheelchair, then.”

Eridan sighs and crosses his arms. “Look, everyone knows you’re going to put me in there anyway, so just say it already. I’d say whoever wants to can join me, but we’re all aware of how likely that is to happen.”

Jane pointedly exchanges a look with Nepeta, who just rolls her eyes and wrinkles her nose. “If you say to. There you go. Now, that leaves… let’s see, I think the room with the best accessibility would probably be the media and recreation lounge. Is that fine with you, Tavros? Obviously we’ll set things up so that it’ll work as smoothly as possible for you.”

For some reason, he looks surprised. “Y-Yes? That is, um, that really sounds incredibly nice of you, and I guess I just want to, uh, say that I appreciate it.”

The politeness brings Jane’s smile right back. She’s always cared a lot more about proper manners than the rest of the group. Then again, considering what an upstanding gentleman her and John’s father is, that’s hardly surprising. “Of course. And since the room has the highest ceiling, it’s probably a good idea if Gamzee stays there too.”

“I hear your righteous words loud and clear.”

“...Ah, yes. Good.” Jane looks a little confused, but nonetheless moves another dot to the appropriate room. Then she makes an apologetic face at Equius and Nepeta. “I’m afraid your options are to either squeeze into the lounge with them or to camp out in the rest area of the gym.”

Nepeta sighs. “Well, I think someown will be a lot happier in the gym, and also purrsumably less likely to break something. As long as there are some pillows for my catnaps, I don’t mind.”

“Oh, I’m sure we have adequate supplies of pillows, blankets and mattresses to make just about anywhere as comfortable as it can be.” She gives Nepeta’s hand a little squeeze, beaming, and Jake thinks that it’s nice to see what marvelous friends they’ve become so quickly. It really gives you hope, seeing how well they’ve all managed to get along so far. Surely nothing too bad can happen as long as they look out for each other.

He shifts and tries to ignore the now constant ache of his right shoulder, calling him a liar.

“Right,” Dirk says, getting out of one of the chairs in the transport room’s small waiting area. “If we’re all sorted out, I think it’s about time I went and ‘hit the hay’ as someone very evocatively put it.” Why does he have to make everything sound weird? “And speaking of… you coming, Jake?” Without waiting for an answer to that question, he turns around and heads toward the exit.

Jake offers everyone in the room a slightly apologetic grimace, and Jane rolls her eyes with a sigh and waves at him to go. So he hurries after Dirk and then walks with him in slightly awkward silence back to his quarters. It feels a bit strange to be back there now, the weird art on the walls, bright colors and perpetual clutter offering a particularly jarring juxtaposition to the latest events down at the planet – and to eight months spend in the relatively primitive settlements as well. He scoots a tiny skittering robot out of the way with his foot – it must be motion activated, and follows them helpfully, long silver legs tapping a staccato rhythm against the floor. It feels like the thing to do when returning after a long time away would be to unpack, but of course, they don’t have anything with them apart from their weapons. Still, it’s a relief to undo his holster and put his guns down, and Dirk silently follows suit with his sword and gun.

“Home sweet home, eh?” Jake ventures, undoing the collar of his uniform slightly.

“Mm.”

Dear lord, he certainly makes you work sometimes. “I suppose it’ll be a bit strange, though, sharing the ship with so many.”

Dirk sighs. “Lots of shit will be strange from now on, but sure.” He turns away, leaning against his work desk and looking out of the window that covers the wall opposite to the door. Outside, stars blink in and out of vision as they pass by a cluster of asteroids. As Jake walks up next to him he tilts his head slightly, indicating that he’s glancing in his direction behind the shades. “You wouldn’t believe how grateful I am that you didn’t try to offer my sofa to Eridan. Really, my eternal thanks Jake, because I might’ve been forced to launch an inoffensive piece of furniture into space.”

Jake raises his eyebrows slightly. “What sofa?” he says pointedly, inclining his head in the direction of the pile of assorted puppets, mechanical drafts, and technical gadgets that theoretically might hold a sofa at its center. “I don’t think he would’ve wanted to sleep on a sofa anyway, he’s pretty tall and not entirely used to discomfort, if you see what I mean?”

Dirk shrugs, eyebrows lifting slightly. “If you mean that he’d whine about it until our ears bled, yeah, I can see that. I guess I was just worried that Feferi offering up their couch to Aradia would give you ideas.”

Jake laughs then, because well, it’s such a silly notion. He’s not at all sure how Dirk’s mind works sometimes. “But Aradia is really quite a petite lady! And surely Feferi only did that because she’s Sollux’, ah, whatsit...”

“Moirail.”

“That’s the bunny! So that’s a rather different situation.”

There’s a moment of intense silence, and he has a feeling that Dirk is staring at him, though he can’t imagine why. “You just… straight up haven’t noticed at all, have you?” he demands finally, disbelief for a moment taking the place of stoicism. “Or is this another instance of you pretending not to notice something because it makes you uncomfortable and you’re not entirely sure what to do about it? It’s still really goddamn hard to tell with you.”

Jake flinches slightly, because he honestly shouldn’t be surprised that Dirk caught on to that, considering the five to six years of that particular song and dance between the two of them. It’s not as simple as just pretending, though. Sometimes it’s just easier to not think about something for a while… maybe a bit too easy if he’s to be honest with himself, which is not as frequent an occurrence as it should. Even so, he takes a stab at dancing around the subject, because it’s frankly just a touch awkward to talk to Dirk of all people about it. “I don’t- You know, I don’t actually think he’s all that serious about it. I mean, different cultures and whatnot, I’m sure it’s just a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“Nah. I mean, if you’ve read even a bit about how their social dynamics work, you can clearly see that it’s not exactly subtle.” He leans a little bit sideways, his shoulder brushing Jake’s, which Jake takes as a signal that it’s okay to sling his left arm around him and pull him closer still, until Dirk is leaning against him more than the desk. “Not that I necessarily blame you if you don’t know what to do about it, I see how that could be awkward.”

“Mm,” Jake replies noncommittally - turnabout is fair play, eh? - and nuzzles the back of his neck. He hopes the gesture might serve to distract Dirk from his habit of niggling away at every little thing, even when said niggling is in fact neither helpful or welcome.

Anyway, it’s not just Jake dancing around something awkward right now. They hadn’t actually talked about that moment when Hal made it look like Dirk died, and the moment he allows himself to think of it, the cold sensation of sudden loss creeps back, causing him to suppress a shudder. It had all happened so fast, it hadn’t entirely sunk in, and he’d had very little time to consider what his life would look like without Dirk in it. Now, on the other hand, it’s hard not to.

He remembers the moment when he pitched forward and for the first time felt the lightness where his right arm ought to be, the imbalance to his entire being that it brought on. The idea of a world without Dirk doesn’t feel dissimilar, only amplified a hundred, a thousand times. A part of him would be missing, yes, a part he relies on so automatically and unquestionably that it’s honestly more reminiscent of his lungs than his arm. But it would also mean that a part would be missing from everyone else he loves. A hole in the world that would always ache from that moment on; a deep tear between the past and the future that he knows he’d never be able to fully mend.

He knows he relies on him too much. He knows. If he knew what he was thinking, Dirk would be sure to tell him. But the grief over what hadn’t happened, the phantom loss of what he still has, doesn’t seem unreasonable or disproportionate to Jake. Is it so wrong to need someone? Is it wrong to have built parts of what you are on someone else, and to not know what you’d be if they suddenly weren’t there anymore? He doesn’t know if he’d remain as a person built around a hollow space, or if he’d crumble inward without the structure of all the things he’d tried to become, and maybe that really is a bad thing. But sometimes, he thinks, you have to borrow strength from something outside of you, when what you have just isn’t strong enough to carry you through on its own. It doesn’t have to be a failure, or something to be ashamed of.

Sometimes, he thinks the ability to do this is a strength in itself, possibly the only one that Dirk hasn’t figured out yet.

“Jake. What’s wrong?” Dirk shifts a bit in clear discomfort, and Jake slowly relaxes the muscles in his arm and stops holding on to him quite so tightly. He blinks, the world blurring and swimming slightly, and a few teardrops on the back of Dirk’s neck gleam back at him like tiny pearls.

“I know it wasn’t your fault, but you know, I really- for a moment, I thought I’d lost you down there.” He presses his lips against Dirk’s neck, tasting the salt as he brushes the tears across his skin. “I know I shouldn’t be one to talk about giving people a right old scare like that, and I was a lot closer to meeting my maker than-”

“Jake.” He can feel Dirk tensing up, like someone warding off a blow.

“Oh gourds, I can’t help sticking my foot in it right up to the neck, can I?” He sighs, nudging the collar of Dirk’s uniform aside slightly so that he can kiss his shoulder. “I suppose I should at least start by saying that… that if you want the truth, it really scared me completely shitknickered! And I think perhaps I finally know what you must’ve felt like, back when I… well, you know. So… I’m sorry. I know this is probably pretty silly of me, but I really am so dreadfully sorry that I ever made you feel that way.”

“Yeah, how dare you save my sister,” Dirk deadpans, twisting in his arms and putting a hand over Jake’s mouth when he tries – rather feebly – to protest. “No, shut up, it’s my turn.” His mouth twists slightly, and he pulls his shoulders up in a gesture that is not quite a shrug, but almost defensive. “I’m sorry. I came up with that strategy. Only when I discussed it with Hal, it was with the understanding that we’d only try it out after warning everyone around us about it. It was also way before anything happened between us, if that helps.”

Jake shrugs, not sure what to say about that last part. It’s not like he would’ve relished seeing Dirk decapitated any more back when they were ‘just’ friends. “I don’t want to sound accusatory here, but...”

“Out with it.”

“Fine, fine, alright. If that was the idea, why not just tell everyone about it as soon as you came up with it? You know that infernal computer program has a tendency of going rogue on you, and that way you could’ve avoided any nasty surprises.”

Dirk sighs. “You know, the whole bullshit act you do when you pretend to be stupid? I can’t fucking believe that people still fall for it.” Jake smiles a bit and gives him a pointed nudge with his shoulder, and Dirk looks down. “I was pretty sure my family wouldn’t like it much.”

“Even if they knew it was just an illusion? I suppose I can see why, but-”

“But then I shouldn’t have told Hal in the first place, since he pretty much does as he pleases. I know. But you know I like always having an extra backup plan if I can. And, well, maybe that was actually the intention, Jake. That way I could have my contingency plan, and if anyone was upset it would be easy to blame him. So I’m... sorry.” Is he truly sorry about that? As usual, his voice and expression reveal very little, apart from a hint of defiance. Jake isn’t certain, and so he sighs and plants a kiss on Dirk’s hair in lieu of answering. His hair products haven’t stood up well to the recent excitement, and the blond tresses have softened out of their usual rigid spikes into messy waves. Jake has always liked it a lot more like this, if he’s to be honest. “It wasn’t just that it was a pretty gruesome ruse in itself, it’s just… for reasons I can’t talk about, I was worried about how- how-”

“How Dave would take it,” Jake finishes the sentence for him, and feels Dirk tense up once more. “Don’t worry, I still don’t actually know what it is you’re trying not to talk about. But whether I actually am dense or not, I’m not so damn fallen behind the turnip truck that I haven’t noticed that something’s been up with him! It doesn’t take that many brain cells to rub together to figure out that if he’s been feeling a bit, well, delicate lately, perhaps a plan which involves seeing his brother’s doppelganger get maimed or killed wouldn’t be all that popular.”

“...Pretty much, yeah.” Dirk runs his hands up his chest and over his shoulders, twining them behind his neck. “Luckily he had his hands full protecting Karkat and it appears he didn’t see jack shit. Not sure about Roxy or Rose. I had my hands equally full climbing a damn rock and getting into position at the time, and they didn’t say anything. I guess they’ll let me have it later if they did.” He tilts his chin up, and one corner of his lips lifts briefly, in what seems more like a symbolic gesture than a real smile. “You know me. I always expect the worst. That way I can fuck up really bad and I still won’t be surprised by it.”

He says it like a joke, but it’s not a very funny one, and it’s not exactly the first time he’s said something like that. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophesy to Jake, but he doesn’t say it. He’s not particularity in a mood to argue personal philosophies with Dirk right now. So instead he just lifts his hand and gently takes Dirk’s shades off. It’s kind of like a trick, an ace up his sleeve; Dirk always becomes less argumentative when they’re off. The only drawback is of course that he knows exactly what Jake is doing, so even as his pupils contract momentarily and then swell like an eclipse across a setting sun, his eyebrows lift in amusement, and he yanks lightly at the hairs on the back of Jake’s neck.

“So I’m to assume that you think I’m talking too much, then?”

Also his eyes are really distracting. “Not as such, no.” Dirk leans forward a bit, and Jake swallows, closing his eyes to gather his thoughts. “What I suppose I really mean is that it was… it rattled me. Shook me up to my bones. Left me all fucked up seven ways from Sunday. And really, I didn’t want an apology from you, nothing like that. I’m not angry. I suppose I don’t really need to apologize for something either, you’re right about that. I just wanted you to know that thinking you were dead was just about the worst damn thing I’ve ever felt, and I’m… I’m glad you’re not. I’m glad you’re safe, here, with me. That’s what I really wanted to say.”

Somehow he half expects Dirk to pull away, or maybe to poke fun of him, because he has to admit that expressing actual sentiment with his words is not something his beau excels at, and he’s not fantastic at accepting it from others either. But instead Dirk lets out a quiet sigh, pulling him closer, allowing their lips to brush together. It feels like a long while that he just holds him like that, letting simple gestures do the talking which doesn’t come so easy, the kisses growing deeper but staying slow and unhurried, intense without being overwhelming.

“It’s not going to be the last time.” Dirk starts to walk backwards, pulling Jake with him. “For either of us. That’s not the kind of life we live, we both know that.”

“Yes.” Jake follows, his attention divided by the buttons and zippers of Dirk’s uniform, which are fiddly when you only have one reliable hand. “I know. I can’t say I like it much, but I know.”

“And now that we’re caught up in this whole damn rebel thing, like some chumpass child’s balloons getting marshaled along by a stern breeze-”

“I know.” Up the couple of steps and through the door to the bedroom, shedding an erratic trail of clothes as they go.

“So are you sure about this?” Dirk’s leg suddenly hits his side, he twists his body, they both pivot and fall as Jake loses his balance, landing on his back on the bed with Dirk straddling him. He leans close, eyes the same color and intensity as the tip of a flame. “Even with all the risks we take every day, the shit we might have to do to save others, the sacrifices we’re supposed to make if we have to… Are you sure?”

What can Jake say? That it doesn’t really matter if they’re a couple or not, it would hurt all the same? That even if he’s not sure, he knows he’ll follow Dirk wherever he goes because he has to, because imagining life without him is painful regardless of the cause? Even if he doesn’t die, even if he just draws away from Jake to spare his own feelings, because after all they’ve been through Jake still doesn’t know how to answer such a simple question. Is he supposed to say that if there’s anything he’s actually sure of, it’s that he doesn’t know how to handle losing anything else, and if there’s a choice then at least he prefers to put it off for as long as possible?

Dirk doesn’t want to hear either of these things. Telling him would achieve nothing. So instead Jake grabs him by the waist, caresses the delicate skin there with his left thumb. It’s so pale it’s almost white; almost but not quite. In contrast his own dark skin somehow looks more real, as if his love is a bleached photograph, a specter that might fade away at dawn. He’s careful not to bruise him with his right hand as he flips them both over, desperate to feel the realness of skin and flesh and heat against his. Dirk lets out a startled breath as Jake pins him down, and then arches his back, a ghost of a smile touching his lips.

“Yes,” Jake finally replies, and kisses him again. It’s not exactly a lie. It’s not exactly the truth. But it’s going to have to do for now.

 

---

 

 

Nepeta wraps a couple of blankets around her shoulders and crosses her legs, watching the strange shapes all the training equipment makes against the windows following the curve of the furthest wall. The gym is located at the back of the ship, close enough to the engine exhaust that if you get close to the windows you can see its purple-blue glow below. But there’s no noise, so she doesn’t mind. With all the lights out, the room is reminiscent of a large cave, and feels strangely like home.

Behind her, Equius is already asleep, for all of his complaints about what not being allowed to sleep in a recuperacoon will do to him. Silly. She’s not worried about it, not at all. She knows she can keep him in check, no matter what happens and where they are. She’s more worried about their other little problem, but Jane and Roxy had promised that they were going to look into the components of the Sopor Slime and try to synthesize the substance in the lab. They all carry small doses of it on their persons nowadays, so that should keep Gamzee steady while they work. Of course it would help if that wasn’t the only thing keeping him calm, if someone else would just kill the suspense already and do what he needs to do. But she knows he won’t listen.

She sighs, gazing down into her lap. She’d managed to grab her TaB™let before they escaped, and somehow kept it unscathed during the battle. It’s a cheap piece of shit, of course, and Sollux had been forced to scour it clean of all the Empireware to rid it from the standard brainwashing ads and make it safe to use without being tracked by the Condesce. But it’s easy to use and it fills an important function.

If she closes her eyes, she can still see the caves. Different from her home, full of narrow passages and hard-to-reach places, a network of small caves stretching out in every direction, like a honeycomb made of stone. It took her a whole day to climb through the maze until she finally found what she was looking for, as far down as the caves went, at the very center. A bigger cave, the floor picked out in uneven swirls and groves, the stalagmites withered down to bony fingers and flowing stone waves. The acid rain must find its way down there from above.

She had entered the caves because she had found her sign carved into rocks for miles around, followed them in a spiral to this place. Once she’d stepped inside, she’d been sure that she’d been following a voice, a faint echo of a hoarse whisper from far below. But when she reached her destination, there were no more signs to guide her, no voice, nothing. The darkness was so deep, even she had trouble picking out details at a distance. She had no map, no tales detailing where to go next the way Vriska did. All she had was a feeling, a deep and urgent sense that told her that she was meant to be there. That it was important.

Picking her way across the floor with care, she’d tried to find the center of the cave, hoping it would offer a better vantage point. After having worked out the approximate spot, she’d fished a few glowcrabs out of her pack, switched her weapon’s setting to sling, and fired them off toward the ceiling. Once they were secure, she simply waited for them to grow brighter, turning slowly in a circle and hardly breathing at all. All around her, on every surface that was presumably safe from the withering rain due to the shape of the cave ceiling, covering every inch in a tight, rambling scrawl… words. Thousands of words.

After the moment of awe had passed, she noticed something else too. A small pile of bleached bones and scraps of clothes close to one wall. She walked closer to investigate, hardly going to be bothered by bones of all things, not a hunter like her. Not even when she knelt down and confirmed that they did indeed look like troll bones; there was really nothing scary about the small heap. It just looked… sad. Lonely, somehow.

Under it, and still wrapped loosely around what must once have been a hand, was another piece of cloth. Black, with extremely faint hints of red. When she reached out curiously and touched it, it crumbled to dust almost instantly.

The last object to be found appeared to be a capsule, turned out of the husk of some kind of animal, its ridges and spikes still intact and causing it to almost look alive. It was covered in a layer of dust, but once she wiped it away, the translucent material clearly showed a rolled up scrap of paper inside. Touching it, she found it hard and unyielding to her touch, and she had to scrabble at it for a little while before finally finding the fine hairline crack where a carefully inserted claw would allow it to split apart.

“CHILD,

I HAVE NOTHING OF MINE TO LEAVE YOU, NO TREASFURS OR WEAPOUNCE. I OWNED VERY LITTLE IN LIFE, AND I CARED VERY LITTLE FOR OWNING. WHEN AT FIRST I LACKED, AND THEN LATER I LOST, IT WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING MORE IMPURRTANT THAN MERE ALTERNIAN THINGS.

ALL I HAVE FUR YOU, AND IT’S NOT NECESSARILY A KIND THING I’M DOING, IS MY MISSION, MY DUTY. IT’S MY PURRPOSE, AND I AM HANDING IT OVER TO YOU. IT PURROBABLY WON’T BE EASY, AND I’M AFURAID IT MIGHT CAUSE YOU PAIN, BUT I HOPE IT WILL BRING YOU SOME HAPPINESS TOO. AS IT DID ME, ONCE.

AT ANY RATE, IT N33DS TO BE DONE.

YOU HAVE TO FIND THE NEW SIGNLESS. I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL BE BORN IN THE SAME ERA, AND WHOEFUR THEY ARE, YOU MUST FIND THEM. YOU WILL KNOW THEM BY THE SIGN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS LETTER. THEY WILL HAVE B33N ALONE, WITH NO ONE TO GUIDE THEM AND TELL THEM ABOUT THEIR HERITAGE. YOU MUST BRING MY WRITINGS TO THEM. YOU MUST MAKE THEM S33. AND YOU MUST DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO HELP. THAT’S THE FATE I LEAVE YOU WITH.

AND THEN, FINALLY, MAYBE OUR POOR SPECIES WILL FIND FR33DOM AT LAST.

I BELIEVE IN YOU,

THE DISCIPLE”

She had signed the letter with their sign drawn crudely in green blood – presumably her own. On the other side she had scrawled another sign with what appeared to be ashes. A grey sign; was it because she didn’t know what blood caste this person would be born in? And how could someone who was Signless have a sign?

Maybe she ought to have known who it was then. She sighs, fingers spelling out the Disciple’s writings on the tablet. She’ll be finished transcribing it soon although she’s not sure what to do with it once it’s done. If nothing else, she would like to preserve it all for the eventuality of her death, even if she has absolutely no intention of dying. She certainly doesn’t need it written down for her own sake; she can remember the words as clearly as if every letter had been etched into her own skin. She’s always been good at remembering things she had read or seen, and as she had read her way through the tales of the cave, it had somehow felt like she was merely refreshing an old memory. Or perhaps as if someone had recorded an old and forgotten dream of hers, bringing it back as if she had only just woken from it.

She supposes that now that he’s more receptive, she’ll bring the text for Karkat to read. She’s told him bits and pieces, but she thinks it might be important for him to read the whole thing. After all, it’s what the Disciple had told her to do; it’s supposed to be her fate.

Her hand stills, and she lifts it to rub it tiredly across her eyes. She wonders if this tired resignation isn’t worse in some ways than a proper dramatic heartbreak, and maybe if she just allowed herself to sob loudly and eat sweet things and sulk for a while… would that allow her to feel better faster? Jane had kind of implied that emotional outbursts hadn’t done her much good and had mostly made her feel foolish, not to mention how it had made her lash out at people who were completely blameless. But to Nepeta it had sounded more like while that might really have felt bad, all the actual problems Jane had talked about seemed to stem from holding things in and trying to take the high road, because it’s not hard to feel resentful when you decide that it’s your job to suffer with a brave face so others don’t have to. Thinking you’re the one doing the responsible, hard thing very easily slips into thinking that you’re always in the right, and that’s the sort of thing that sours just about any kind of relationship.

These sort of things are so obvious when she think about them from a distance, picking over them like someone dissecting a recently slain beast. So that’s probably why it’s harder to do it to herself, in the same way that carrying out such a dissection on one’s own torso would present some obvious difficulties. When it comes to one’s own feelings, no claw will ever be sharp enough and no cut ever quick enough, not as long as it’s still one’s own hand doing the cutting. She supposes that’s why it’s so important to have others around to do the merciful thing for you.

She leans her head back, bumping it softly against Equius’ knee, and he grunts in his sleep. He’s pretty hopeless when it comes to affairs of the heart, and his advice is always questionable at best, but now that she thinks about it, maybe his more blunt approach wouldn’t have been a bad idea once upon a time. If she had just ripped the sticky wound covering all in one go and admitted her feelings, even if rejection was inevitable, maybe that would’ve allowed her to start letting go a lot sooner. Maybe that would make it easier to just focus on the task she has at hand, without her stupid feelings getting in her way.

Scrolling through the text on the screen before her, she reads again about a love that burned so fiercely, it left its sole survivor weary with the world she was forced to inhabit for sweeps and sweeps yet to come. As if it had filled her so completely that the void it left was too complex and vast to fill. She reads between the words and finds the quiet resentment at the one who had showed her mercy, who hadn’t let her follow her beloved, which had slowly turned into acceptance and even appreciation as her life inevitably approached its end. She, the Disciple, had seemed to believe there was a reason for it. That as long as she lived, she kept some part of that love alive with her.

The love that transcended quadrants. It sounded so impossible when put like that at first, and then like some huge and perfect ideal that no one could hope to reach. Now, knowing how humans do things, it sounds very much like something similar to that, and from the way Jane has described it, it’s every bit as messy. Not just redrom without nuance, and not something that exists beyond the quadrants either. Instead it’s this impossible mix of emotions, the torrid just another face of the conciliatory, waxing and waning between pale and deep hues, with some aspects meant only for one person and others shared with just about everyone around you. It sounds fascinating and honestly kind of indecent, but maybe that’s just Equius’ influence on her talking.

More than anything, as loath as she is to admit it, it sounds exactly like everything that had always been strange about Karkat, about the way he always seemed to chase the pure concepts of the quadrants with thousands of words of analysis, all those books and movies, and still somehow keeps coming up short. It had been painfully obvious to anyone watching his matespritship with Terezi fall apart. It just hadn’t been possible for her to keep up with the quick shifts in its nature, and Nepeta can only imagine that it must’ve been exhausting, because the only solution was trying to be everything at once. For someone raised in their culture, she can’t imagine that’s an easy feat. If she’s to be honest – and perhaps more generous than she’d been known to be to Terezi in the past – she’s not sure that she would’ve fared any better.

Perhaps a human will have more luck.

Still she has to ask herself if that strangeness, that limitless capacity for the full spectrum from black to red all in one breath, isn’t exactly what had drawn her to Karkat. Maybe that’s her fate too, and she’s not sure what that says about her. She knows she’d liked him way before she saw him for the first time in real life, tentative and delicate feelings that had only made that meeting more impactful, more impossible to extricate from her own role in the rebellion. He’d had dirt smeared on his face from digging Aradia out of her collapsed hive, his hair sticking together in sweaty spikes. Despite being weaker than most of them, he’d worked until he almost collapsed, and in the dust and confusion she hadn’t thought to look at his sign first. But once they’d pulled Aradia out of the broken embrace of her lusus and into the cool night air of the bilunar apogee, he’d flopped backward on the green grass of her lawnring and pulled the neckline of his shirt up to wipe his face dry. That’s when she’d seen it. That’s when it had all made sense.

The screen in front of her has gone dark, and she doesn’t bother to turn it on again. She’s not getting any more work done right now. Scooting backwards and sideways until she can lean her head and neck against Equius’ waist, she curls herself into a tight bundle of blankets and watches the far away stars spread out behind the ship like a handful of dropped glowcrabs. The star of the planet they’d just left is already growing pale and indistinct, and though space pretty much looks the same regardless of where you go, she knows that she’s leaving troll territories behind her for the first time in her life. Before they find the rest of the rebellion, before the war starts for real, it’s time to regroup and try to see if they might have allies out there. It’s a novel thought, one that honestly hadn’t crossed their minds before, but that’s troll society for you. When even asking your own friends, your own kind for help is practically taboo, it’s hard to imagine having friends somewhere beyond the stars.

Yawning hugely, she allows her eyes to slowly drift closed, leaving the echoes of stars dotted across her inner vision before they fade into darkness. The impossible and the inconceivable, the new and unexplored, all of it lies ahead. But she’s pretty sure that’s exactly where they need to go.

Notes:

A long but rather interim chapter before shit starts getting political and we meet a couple of new/old friends. Woop woop!

Chapter 24: A not so brief detour

Summary:

On their way to the SKAIA core, our heroes receive an unexpected message, and make the decision to investigate. As one might expect, they get a lot more than they bargained for.

Notes:

well, ren faire season has started again and i've been a bit busy, so that's why this chapter is a bit delayed. sorry about that .
（；^ω^）it's a fairly long one, but honestly i half feel like that's something i should apologize for as well. you'll see why.

oh, and in case y'all are interested, i made an art of Karkat's and Dave's house on Muspell + the Strilondes in their uniforms. i am definitely better at drawing landscapes than people, so consider the latter mainly as a reference to what the uniforms look like ahahaha. links below.

https://thymechaos.tumblr.com/post/187491757627/when-hey-i-wanna-draw-a-rough-layout-of-the-house
https://thymechaos.tumblr.com/post/187335758952/they-say-it-started-with-a-big-bang-but-they-say

Their last communication with their mother had indicated that the trolls were holding off on an all-out attack for now, and Rose would wager that it’s because they’re feeling pretty confident in their military advantage, and want to secure the location of their targets before they attack. Kanaya nods slowly when she voices this theory, nipping off the end of a thread with a sharp fang.

“There’s no chance that they haven’t figured out that we were behind the attack on that scouting party, not to mention how the drone carrier got a visual on this ship before it went under,” she says, and her green eyes subconsciously flit in the direction of the screen showing the view from the rear of the ship, which remains utterly innocent of pursuers. She laughs, the sound edged with both nervousness and dry humor, as her gaze returns to what her hands are doing. “I’m fairy certain now that they thought we were leaving right away, and I would not be surprised at all if they were preparing to chase after us the moment Tavros demolished that ship. Only things happened a bit differently, did they not?” Her smile is sharp and rather attractive, but quickly clouds over, her skin dimming rapidly. “How is the evacuation going?”

“It’s going well enough,” Rose replies, fingers moving across the controls in front of her, opening all communication channels for incoming messages. Of course Hal takes care of navigating their way safely toward the SKAIA Core, but traversing the many different territories between Muspell and the Core as quickly as they are still takes a certain amount of communication and negotiation. A lot of it is claimed as human territories, of course, but the human race is hardly one monolithic entity, and space is also very big. Plenty of their allies control their own sectors of the area, and even on a SKAIA ship you cannot simply enter and leave without announcing your intentions. For diplomatic reasons, these are interactions which ship computers are largely barred from getting involved in, regardless how sentient they are – or indeed how passive-aggressive they’re intending to be about it.

At the moment they’re navigating more or less through no man’s land, but in a couple of hours they’ll be crossing over into a heavily disputed territory. There’s no reason to not be prepared.

She looks up to find Kanaya patiently waiting, and realizes her answer had hardly been what you would call exhaustive, and might require a bit of further elucidation. She lets slip a vaguely apologetic little sound, swiveling her chair slightly to properly face her wife – and as she does so, she tries to identify the slight thrill she still feels when she thinks about Kanaya in those terms. She doesn’t consider herself a romantic, and she would categorize her feelings when it comes to most traditions as a varied mix of fascination and amusement. She supposes the former could be to blame, a sort of scientific interest in finding out what comes next, where this by now rather undefinable connection will take them. Even as they’re shaken free of the planet they’ve left behind and the demands existence there had made, they’re now bound together by their emotions, by undeniable attraction, by the inertia of past events propelling them into the unknown.

Or maybe it’s just possessiveness. That sends another thrill through her, one of equal measures of excitement and unease. Truly her whole family is beset by different shades of darkness, all of them balancing on the edge of some sort of abyss of their own making. Sometimes she wonders if the only difference is in how much each of them enjoys the enchanting depth of the chasm below, the titillation of almost falling. On darker days, she wonders who will be the first to jump, her or Dirk. Then she remembers that their uncle left that ledge behind long ago, and as far as she’s aware he’s still falling. That usually helps bring her to her senses, such as they are.

“Isolated as the planet is, there are two other colonies within that sector which have agreed to offer help, and most of the civilians have already been relocated to these planets. They’re fledgling colonies just like Muspell, and have no reason to turn down more settlers, although they will require some assistance. SKAIA will be sending additional supplies via the Blood forces, and there will be Hope and Time operatives in place as well.” She laughs at Kanaya’s blank look. “Blood is in charge of communication and transport – not terribly fascinating stuff, but very necessary within an organization this large. Hope takes care of peacekeeping, which I imagine will be needed with such a sudden influx of refugees in these small communities. And Time is the muscle, more or less.” She shrugs lightly, glancing down at the bright yellow insignia emblazoned on her chest. “Everyone goes through six months of training, during which they asses your skills, and at the end of it there is a psychological evaluation meant to judge your mental aptitude as well. That is followed by a ceremony during which your future officers announce which force you’ve been assigned to and hand you your new uniform. It’s a rather tense affair, mostly because some of the some assignments are considered more prestigious than others. Blood is considered, well, mostly busywork. Breath is sneered on for existing only to give aid to the other forces. The Doom force is really important, dealing with disaster aid and containment, but some consider the appointment to only be a slightly more exciting variation of Blood. Life medics are highly regarded, but they also have very little autonomy as an individual force.” She gestures vaguely. “And then there are of course rivalries, prejudice, that sort of nonsense. Time operatives are all violent meatheads, Hearts are untrustworthy, Hopes are sanctimonious, Rages are the same as Time but less competent, Minds are bossy… and Lights talk too much.”

Kanaya laughs, running a glowing hand underneath the fabric in her hands to check that the different pieces align. “It sounds silly, but things aren’t very different for us, of course. I suppose the main difference is that there is absolutely no choice involved in joining the service of the empire once you reach maturity. And the trials involved are a lot more… finite. You either get assigned to a position or you are culled if you are found wanting. If it weren’t for Feferi’s influence, that would already have happened to most of us – and I would be trapped underground for the rest of my life, tending to the Mother Grub as is the lot of my caste.” There’s a strange procession of revulsion and melancholy chasing each other across her features for a moment, before she makes an obvious effort to contain her emotions. Rose tilts her head.

“You don’t like being underground. I noticed that earlier. Is that the cause of your reluctance, or is it the other way around?”

Kanaya looks a bit taken aback, but then smiles wryly. “I suppose I should just give up on trying to hide anything from you at this point?”
“No, that would be terribly boring,” Rose quips back, allowing some warmth to seep into her voice. “But I don’t believe this was actually a secret so much as it’s just an unpleasant topic. Am I right?”

She doesn’t reply directly, just fusses with the fabric in her hands, watching the great black expanses visible on the vision screens with a small frown. “As you know, it’s unusual for trolls to tolerate the light of our star. Being one of the few with an ability to survive it, I’ve developed quite a love for light, warmth, bright colors… I’ve never liked feeling confined, and I’ve got to say, getting stuck on a dark, cold meteor with the oxygen slowly running out did nothing to improve my disposition.”

“I can see that, yes,” Rose replies sympathetically, smoothing out a small wrinkle on her uniform and standing up, closing the distance between them so that she can brush the hair out of Kanaya’s eyes and smile down at her.

“As for the task in itself, I don’t feel that I would have been ill suited for it at all. I had a good relationship with my lusus, and always felt as if caring for her was preparing me for the task I was meant for.” She leans into Rose’s touch, letting out a low sound that kind of sounds like purring. It’s charming. “Whether it’s cultural conditioning or genetic predisposition… we all do tend to embrace at least part of the archetype we are raised to fulfill, depending on where we fall on the hemospectrum. To care for things, to look after others and to nurture where there is a need...” Her hand closes momentarily around the clasps of her sewing bag, the one thing apart from her weapon which she had opted to bring as they fled, and Rose notes that the gesture could almost be read as protective. Interesting. “...it has always come easy to me, I suppose.”

“So your caste is the only one where individuals are intentionally raised with what humans would classify as parental traits,” Rose muses. “That must occasionally cause some confusion within normal troll social dynamic, I imagine.”

The pale glow of Kanaya’s cheeks is tinted faintly green as she flushes. “It has happened,” she admits, grimacing faintly as Rose smirks. “Considering the nature of our society, I don’t imagine you will find it very remarkable that we have some rather elaborate and at times even outright disparate preconceptions regarding the behaviors of the different blood castes. When the prevailing paradigm directly serves your chances for survival, it’s hard not to be tempted to acquiesce, or even embrace the ideal you’re meant to strive for. Especially among the higher blood castes, where carving a sanguinary path through your fellow trolls is practically a prerequisite for your continued existence after a certain point. The better you embody the cultural criteria set for you, the more likely you are to excel at your future duties. You know, in case you wondered why some of my friends are-” A vague gesture. “-like that.”

“That was a rather clever diversion,” Rose says, amused, and gets a put-upon sigh in return. “So the common bias concerning jadebloods and quadrants would be-?”

“That we’re very rewarding conciliatory partners,” Kanaya replies, and she doesn’t quite manage to maintain the appropriate level of nonchalance and disdain as she adds, “but we’re also considered somewhat… greedy.”

“So what you’re telling me...” Rose tries very hard to hold her laughter back as she leans in closer, gently edging her leg in between Kanaya’s knees and pushing her back against the backrest of the chair. “...is that some might consider my wife a loose woman?”

The hue of Kanaya’s face darkens. “That translates rather strangely, whatever it was you just said – but since you’re just practicing your strange human insincerity for the purpose of getting a rise out of me, I’m choosing to forego the linguistic analysis right at the moment.”

“Oh no,” Rose mumbles, grinning. “I’m in fact deadly serious. I’m afraid we’re going to have to wrangle the topic of your profligate habits in the pale and ashen quadrants at length.”

“I’m really not sure,” Kanaya retorts, arms already snaking up Rose’s back, “if a human is in any position to launch any projectiles in the proverbial transparent silica hive, considering your-”

There’s a dry cough right behind them, and Rose makes a point of not untangling herself in any way, and certainly not stumbling away from Kanaya, although she does lean back slightly so as not to make her wife uncomfortable. This is partly because she refuses to act as if she has done anything wrong, seeing as they had in fact been perfectly alone on the bridge when she’d initiated the encounter, so clearly the impertinent intruder is at fault. But it’s also because that had sounded like Dirk’s voice, and if she knows her brother at all, she knows that if it was really him, in the event that he encountered his oldest sister in a passionate embrace, he’d be much more likely to quietly exit the room with his legendary speed and efficiency, and then knock on the door. He’d probably give them a pointed look once he entered again, potentially make an inappropriate joke, but before that point he’d be far more eager not to see any more of Rose’s sex life than even Rose was for him not to.

Which means that the only other potential culprit is someone who has no such boundaries. Because he’s not human.

“Yes, Hal? Was there something?”

“Of course there was. Trust me, if I were to list the things I find more interesting than engaging in any way with whatever social behaviors you lifeforms engage in to satisfy your biological functions, it would exceed your limited lifespan several times over.”

She makes a point of not rolling her eyes either, because he doesn’t deserve even that small victory when he’s really just being a bitch. “Could we perhaps skip the meat of the passive-aggressive AI routine? If I take it upon myself to reach the appropriate levels of frustration and chastisement that your antics usually engender, would it be possible for you to just tell me already?”

“I just wanted to make that clear, because it would break the heart I don’t have if you thought I was being... what was it now? Oh yes, ‘creepy’.”

“Duly noted,” she replies dryly, not prepared to snatch at that obvious piece of bait either. He knows damn well that he’s creepy. He rather flagrantly does it on purpose. “So…?”

“Incoming transmission,” he informs her, his voice smoothing out even further, presumably to emulate a less capricious automated system. “As we have not yet crossed over into claimed territory, I thought I would ask before letting it through. I of course cannot interfere with the transmission in itself, since clearly my advanced AI is unable to grasp the nuances of the so-called ‘diplomacy’ of primitive organic lifeforms, but it’s still possible for me to filter out shit that is patently irrelevant.” He frowns slightly, a quite frankly unusual display of discomposure when he’s mid-derision and bellyaching about his lack of complete control over the entire ship. “It might just be a random signal we’re happening to pick up. Its authorization code is heavily garbled, for some reason.”

Rose bites her lip, finally stepping away from Kanaya. It should be nothing, she tells herself firmly. There’s nothing around them, after all; nothing but a few empty solar systems with no value to anyone, unless you happen to be wildly fascinated by dust clouds and barren rock. This place is a dump. So shouldn’t she simply dismiss the signal? It’s not like they need any distractions on their way to the Core, and they’re not expecting any important communication presently. Most likely it’s just a dead message bouncing around the stars, or possibly some spam, though that is less plausible in the middle of this wasteland.

...Why does she want to dismiss it so badly? What is she afraid of?

She draws in a steadying breath, then she nods at Hal. Only one way to find out. “Let it through.”

The communication screen flickers to life, for a moment only showing a greyish green, empty landscape of rocks and gravel as far as the eye can see. The sky is inky space dark, indicating no atmosphere to speak of. Then the camera shakes, and a face appears on the screen, gazing downwards at it with no readable expression in its slanted green eyes. The smooth, flat features are impassive, and Rose curls her hands into fists behind her back until her fingers ache, forcing herself to smile pleasantly. In return, her old acquaintance touches his hat brim in greeting.

“Miss Lalonde.”

“Crowbar. If I were to tell you that it’s a pleasant surprise, that’s at least half true. I wasn’t expecting to see you alive, as you can imagine. Also, it’s Mrs, if you please.”

He shrugs. “Right you are, ma’am. The boss made plans for us in case the jig was finally up. Been layin’ low since then.”

“And what prompted you to stick your head up, pray? Knowing what a precarious position that can be for a head, and all.”

He’s not endowed with eyebrows, but she has a feeling he would be raising them if he could. “Got a message for you. From the Doc.”

Ah.

Shit.

“And whyever would I indulge a message in a bottle from an adversary I went through all that trouble to kill in the first place?” she wonders sweetly, as Kanaya stands up next to her, laying a soothing hand on her shoulder. Crowbar’s eyes flicker momentarily to her, and it’s hard to say, but Rose thinks she sees them widen slightly in surprise.

“Well that ain’t my business, but the Doc said you’d want to hear it. Said it concerned you, and after all he still cares a lot about you, some shit like that.”

“Well shit, that’s in no way suspicious and actually brings a tear of genuine emotion to my holographic eyes,” Hal responds, actually flicking away a fake tear which sparkles unnaturally before disappearing. Rose hushes him, and he responds by pointedly dissolving the hologram altogether. As if that would stop him running his mouth.

Crowbar just sighs, sounding just a little bit put upon; an underling doing his job despite his own personal opinions. “Look, I ain’t nothing but a messenger here. Also, if that does anything for you, he said it concerns the trolls too, and the trouble they’re in.” He manages a pretty good eyeroll for a being with no pupils. “Search me. That’s what he said. Man liked to talk, as you know.”

“I see.” She retains her collected exterior, but it’s a precarious facade covering something not dissimilar to the pandemonium inside the ship she had crashed into the good Doc’s base. How the ever-loving fuck could he possibly have been able to know that they’d end up working together with the trolls? Somehow, impossibly, he must have had a way of knowing that they’d end up on that benighted rock of a planet, that’s the only way. Who had been behind the idea in the first place? She tries to think, tries to remember, but her head feels like it’s on fire and her thoughts are chasing around too fast to be pinned down. Had it been Jade? That seems like the important question right now. If some kind of Green Sun influence on Jade still remains, then… But no. No, it definitely hadn’t been Jade. She remembers the state she had been in once she was released from the mind control, and knows that she wouldn’t have trusted, let alone voiced such a strange impulse if her life depended on it.

As far as Rose can remember, the idea had actually originated from her mother. It had been an idle suggestion for a momentary respite, a brief diversion from their real lives, and she had seemed honestly surprised when her children not only took to the idea, but made the decision to stay there indefinitely. At the time, it had seemed like the idea was mostly their own, but… in the light of the current situation, does this mean that their mother actually…?

No. No matter what issues they have, Rose refuses to believe for even a second that her mother would be running the Green Sun’s errands. It just doesn’t match up with anything she knows about the universe. So there’s something else, something she doesn’t know yet. Things you don’t know can kill you – that’s practically the unofficial motto of the Light force. But ironically, to find things out you frequently have to accept certain sacrifices.

“Very well,” she says, holding onto her panic, holding it in perfect balance. She’s not going to let it steer her. “Hal, stop the ship and hold our position. I’ll keep the channel open for now while I get the others. Something tells me that I’m expected to come collect this message in person. Am I correct?”

Crowbar nods. “I was told to only hand it over to you pers’nal like. Sorry about that, ma’am. Those were the orders.”

“Right.” She breathes in, smiling. “Then you’re going to have to wait. I’ve got some troublesome customers to get in line before we can proceed. You know how it is.”

“Better than you could possibly imagine, Mrs Lalonde.”

 

---

 

 

John has already made it clear to anyone who cares to listen that he does not like this. He’s not alone either. Jake was practically begging Rose not to go through with it at the end of the huge discussion-slash-argument they had about this dumb plan. As for her siblings… Roxy had kind of shrugged the whole thing off like she usually does, saying it was up to Rose to decide this, which was frustrating but also not surprising. Most of the time John rather admires her ability to just kind of roll with things and not turn everything into a federal fucking issue, but there’s such a thing as taking a personal philosophy too far. He feels like one of those times is when it involves indulging what appears to be a blatantly self-destructive impulse, but maybe that’s just him.

Dave is really tense about it, and he’d argued pretty hotly with Rose for a while there. But of course Rose has never minded doing the sneaky thing if she feels she has to, and while being predictably circumspect about the whole thing, John is pretty sure that she used Dave’s worries about going too far against him to get him to back down. That’s a pretty nasty suspicion, and he feels bad about it, but he can’t shake the feeling that Rose wouldn’t be above that sort of tactic. Whatever the reason, though, Dave had caved but still looks unhappy, hovering right behind Rose while they wait for Hal to establish a synthesized atmosphere around the ship.

Dirk just held Rose’s gaze for a moment, then shrugged and said there was no point in arguing, before spending the next few minutes very pointedly getting armed.

John wishes that he knew how Jade felt about it, but she had stayed quiet the entire time, her gaze lowered as she chewed her lower lip and appeared to be waiting. She still looks distant now, waiting with the rest of them even though she’s the one person in the group who doesn’t strictly speaking need oxygen to survive anymore. Jane hovers close to her, probably so that she can keep an eye on her, and John appreciates that. His sister hadn’t really argued as much as he’d expected, just sighed and said that if Rose was going to be unreasonable about this, then at least they should all go together. It was the one point Rose had budged on when pushed, which at least was something.

But John still doesn’t like it.

The trolls? Mostly they just seem confused, and a couple had grumbled a bit about the delay, but Feferi had said that it wasn’t their ship, so maybe they should just be grateful and accept whatever the humans needed to do on their way to get them help. It’s a fair point, but for once it would’ve been nice if she’d been just a little bit less rational. As it is, there had been a brief squabble which had led nowhere, and now they’re all standing around with looks that range between wariness, impatience and plain confusion. As he catches Karkat’s eye, the troll sidles over to where John stands, addressing him in what he probably would consider a whisper, but it’s really more of a sharp hiss, and John can’t imagine that a single person in the room is going to miss a word he says. This guy just doesn’t know how to keep quiet to save his life. In less tense circumstances, it would be a lot funnier, but it still makes him crack a small smile.

“So, uh, correct me if I’m wrong here, but what we’re doing right now is that we’re all standing around like assholes waiting to talk to someone who used to work for an old and extremely dangerous enemy of yours. I mean, maybe my think pan failed me for a moment and just conjured up whatever would be the most stupid fucking thing to do, what the fuck do I know? But that seemed to be the gist of it.”

John honestly doesn’t care about whispering back or pretending that he doesn’t agree with Karkat, so he just nods. “Pretty much, yeah. He’s this incredibly smug douchebag who always seemed to have another card up his sleeve when we were fighting him, and now that he’s dead he’s apparently left some kind of message for us? Or well, for Rose, because he seems to think she’s still his apprentice and he has to act like a super creepy kind of uncle figure from beyond the grave.”

“Wow, yeah, sounds like I should absolutely be soiling myself with sheer fucking joy and eagerness to hear what this asshole has to say. And then do the most shameful waddle in my freshly soaked and stinking pants to kneel by the feet of his minions as they bestow his shitty message unto us all.”

“Ewww. I think that’s possibly the only way you could make this whole situation worse, so I think I’m going to have to ask you not to shit your pants on top of everything else, Karkat.”

The troll rolls his eyes, clicking in an agitated fashion under his breath, and John chuckles a bit despite himself. He’s really angry pretty much all the time, and of course John had worried about that kind of person getting married to his best friend after everything Dave had been through, but Karkat is actually a really funny guy. And it’s nice to feel like someone is on his side and unequivocally just thinks that all of this is really, really stupid.

“Anyway, in case you hadn’t noticed, us humans totally love to make as convoluted a mess of things as we possibly can. It’s kind of like our hobby.” He winks at Karkat to show that he’s joking around, and the guy pulls a sour face and sighs.

“Fuck me, I guess humans and trolls were meant to be the bestest of pals all along – at least the useless pieces of shit trolls that happen to be my friends, since they practically don’t do anything else except making everything needlessly complicated just because they can. It’s like a magical and beautiful fairy tale of inept loser assholes coming true.” He winces as the airlock doors slide open with a prolonged hiss. “Well, since we’ve apparently voted to walk right into this stupidly obvious trap like a bunch of braindead herdbeasts, why not get it over with? Let’s go, assholes, it’s time to get ourselves into another mess that could easily be avoided by anyone with the modest fucking intelligence of a month-old piece of grubloaf. Chop chop!”

Rose either doesn’t notice the dissent in the ranks, or she just doesn’t care. Raising her chin, she steps outside and takes the lead, descending regally down the ramp stretching toward the small, squat building which appears to be the one mark of civilization on this otherwise completely desolate moon. John takes a moment to adjust the settings on his uniform before following, since this place obviously is going to have some rather shoddy gravity, but personally he finds it a pain in the ass to stand around waiting with the added weight tugging at his clothes. He’s not sure how the Striders and Lalondes stand it, since they obviously have to add a lot more for their skinny butts to experience anything close to normal gravity. Heh.

The trolls seem to adapt effortlessly to their environment, but maybe that’s just because their build appears to be a bit denser than that of humans in general? Hard to tell. There’s a beep and a whir as Tavros’ new wheelchair switches from wheels to hover mode as it encounters the rough terrain of the planet. Dirk and Jade had done a good job there – and apparently they’re working with Jane on something a bit more versatile too.

And there they are. John notices Dirk’s and Dave’s hands jumping to their weapons in perfect sync, and he squeezes the handle of his own gun for a moment before letting go. The Felt. Most of the gang are kind of painfully dumb, but they’ve still created an unreasonable amount of trouble for them before this point. Regrettably, their boss had been far from stupid, and he’d always known how to utilize his pack of underlings in devastating and hard-to-follow ways.

Man, this place sure looks boring. Had Doc Scratch really just ordered them to sit around on this shitty rock and rot from his death until now? And they’d done it? They’re stupid, but they sure are loyal.

Crowbar, the only one with a brain to speak of, is lounging against the side of the building and waiting for them. He nods and tips his hat as they approach, unfolding his lanky frame into a slightly more alert slouch. The rest of them crowd by the door to the building, muttering among each other in their own strangely musical language, which the gross troll translator bugs apparently can't interpret. They slowly fall silent as John and his friends come to a stop. “Mrs Lalonde. Guys.” For some reason Crowbar's eyes – as far as John can tell, that is, what with the no pupil thing – seem to flit over to Kanaya. “Kid.”

The troll gives him a disdainful look, crossing her arms. “I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve that particular distinction, but I don’t think I care for it much.”

Crowbar tilts his head slightly. “Guess I ain’t surprised you don’t remember. It was a god damn long time ago I met you, and not for long. Not to mention, your ‘guardian’ spent most of that time bein’ enamored with his own voice as usual. Can’t say I blame you if you tuned us both out.”

There’s a devastating silence where everyone exchanges glances with everyone else in what could only be described as a state of wild surmise, and then Kanaya whispers in a strained voice, “You mean that was real?”

“Real as eggs is eggs.” As one of the lurking Felt stirs slightly, Crowbar adds, “No, not you. Idiot. You just sit tight and cause no trouble.”

Everyone is kind of busy staring at Kanaya at this point, though. She has covered her mouth, eyes wide. “I’m sorry. I thought it was just- just something I’d dreamed up as a small, sleep-deprived child. I mean, I certainly didn’t believe it could’ve been possible for an unknown alien to be present on Alternia, and even if one was, why would he-”

“In my experience,” Crowbar cuts her off, kind of brusquely but with a polite little nod, “it doesn’t do to ask why the Doc does things. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you – as a matter of fact, you won’t be able to stop him. So why not just listen to this here message I’ve got, and then decide whether or not to lose your minds about things?”

“And I suppose you’d tell us that you have no idea about the contents of this message, if we were to ask you?” Rose demands coolly.

A pained expression briefly crosses the flat alien features. “Look, ma’am, I just follow orders. I run the errands, do the thinking on the fly that’s needed, and leave the big schemes to those that care about crap like that. It’s of no damn consequence to me.”

John tenses up, gritting his teeth, because that’s some nerve coming from the guy who had literally hand delivered the robot parts that now make up about half of his cousin – that is, the robot parts that had at one point driven her insane and made her try to kill her friends! Jade growls under her breath, obviously recalling that little tidbit too. John puts a steadying hand on her shoulder, while glancing sideways at Dirk and Dave, worried that one or both of them are going to get trigger happy about this. Dirk looks like he’s working up some pretty intense rage, but he’s perfectly in control of it, which is almost more frightening somehow. Dave looks agitated, his knuckles going white as he clutches his gun harder, but other than that he seems like he’s still holding on to his senses. Good. Right now they don’t really need-

But apparently those weren’t the people he should’ve been watching in the first place. All of a sudden, Jake is darting forward with an inarticulate yell, his robot arm raised as if he’s decided to forego guns for the satisfaction of stowing that annoyingly impassive face in with his fist. They all freeze up in shock, having not anticipated this particular outcome, and once Dirk starts moving next to John it’s kind of obviously way too late. Crowbar is already reaching for the nasty-looking gun hanging by his side in an almost unhurried way.

Except apparently one of the trolls is already way ahead of the rest of them – Eridan, isn’t it? The fishy-looking one who seems to have some personal boundary issues. For whatever reason, he seems prepared for Jake to flip out, and a moment later he has both arms locked under Jake’s and is hauling him back bodily with what appears to be little effort. “Come on,” he gripes, as Jake stops fighting and goes completely limp with confusion, “what’s the point a beating up some two-bit underling who obviously doesn’t have no idea what’s actually going on? Yeah, yeah, I know you’re upset with these guys because of their boss screwing you over and your arm and all that, but you’re still accomplishing fuckin nothing by taking it out on this idiot.” And then Jake is sagging against him, covering his face as his shoulders heave with tired sobs, and Eridan kind of awkwardly pats him on the back as he sets him down on the ground. “Shhh, alright fine, go ahead and make a damn mess a yourself, I guess that’s fine...”

For some reason, all the trolls are looking at each other as if this is prime entertainment somehow. Terezi is grinning so widely that she seems in danger of losing the top of her head, and Feferi seems to have caught an extremely inappropriate case of the giggles. Vriska lets out a low, “Woooooooow,” and rolls her eyes before adding, “Well, that’s blatant.” Equius mutters something about unseemly displays, and Nepeta steps deliberately on his foot before scribbling something on her tablet.

Dirk grimaces and looks away. What’s that all about? John definitely feels like he might be missing something.

Crowbar removes his hand from his gun, sighing. “Alright, is that enough horseplay from the peanut gallery? Can we get to business?”

Rose glances back at Jake with a thoughtful expression, then shifts her gaze to Kanaya, who isn’t really reacting to anything because she still seems to be in shock. Her weird bioluminescence has gone out, and her right hand remains pressed against her mouth as if she’s holding something in. Rose reaches out and gently takes her limp other hand in hers, giving it a small squeeze and offering her upset alien wife a reassuring nod. “I believe you,” she says simply, “and think I might have forfeited every right to blame anyone else for being manipulated by this particular jokester.” There’s a look on her face that John doesn’t like, at once tired and dangerous, the sort you’d expect before someone either does something heroic or just plain crazy. Knowing Rose, there answer is frequently both. But all she does is incline her head at Crowbar.

“You may play the message, sir. I think at this point, we’d all like to be done with this.”

“Glad we can see eye to eye on that,” he replies, and fishes around in his pocket. His hand comes up holding a smooth white sphere, which he tosses nonchalantly in the air and catches once, before he bends down and places it on the ground in front of them. John winces, having seen far too many of these stupid cueball devices turn out to be bombs, but all it does is start to pulse with a soft white light, faster and faster, and then just like that Doc Scratch appears in front of them.

A hologram, of course. That doesn’t mean that seeing the smug evildoer standing there with his thumbs tucked into his lapels is any less infuriating. More, in a way, because if anyone deserves a fist to the face he hasn’t got, it’s this guy.

“Good morning – that is to say, I asked my loyal underlings to contact you during the morning local time, and if you have arrived at any other time then I have to assume you are late. Which of course, you are. Tut tut.”

Of course it had taken them a while to argue over the whole thing and get there. That’s not some kind of genius deduction that the stupid ballheaded wonder ought to feel smug of rubbing in their faces, that’s just common sense! Ughhh he’s so awful. John honestly contemplates just turning around and getting back on the ship again, because that windbag doesn’t deserve to have another word listened to. But seeing how unnerved both Dave and Jade are, and how hard Jake is shivering where he sits, even with Eridan’s cloak and arm around his shoulders… well, it doesn’t feel right. If they can stand it, if they are putting up with it despite everything they’ve been through, then the least he can do is stay by their side. No matter how much that sucks.

“Now, a quick disclaimer, if you will. Parts of this message is by necessity prerecorded, since I naturally possess remarkable foresight and have been aware for some time that a posthumous message might be required, though at the time of recording I was not yet aware of the exact nature of my demise. I’m incredibly clever, as you know, but there is always an element of uncertainty when it comes to the future.” This is followed by an avuncular little chuckle, the kind that ought to immediately sign the perpetrator up for a boot shoved down his throat, although of course this enormous bag of dicks probably doesn’t even have one of those.

“But this part of the message, call it the prologue if you will, is in fact recorded only minutes before my death at your hands… Rose.” He pauses, executing a small bow as if accepting some kind of award. “And while the details surrounding the occasion were by their very nature unknowable factors – because if I had known them, as you are no doubt aware, I would have easily been able to avoid my fate a little longer – I want you to rest assured that I always knew that you and no one else would be the one to kill me. It’s suitable, really, in a situation like this, for the student to ultimately destroy the master. The elegance of tradition aside, wouldn’t a thoughtful master chose as his pupil only the one who he believes worthy of becoming his successor? Of course he would. And doesn’t the nature of that very unspoken contract imply that he also trusts his pupil to do her duty when it is time for him to die? Yes, it does.”

All these words just to imply that Rose killed her sensei in some kind of duel rather than by landing a screaming mass of fire and metal right on his head.

“Not to say that there aren’t other agents of my will out in the world at this very moment – if I was a betting man, I would bet that there is more than one right by your side at this very moment.” We waves one hand disparagingly. “But compared to you, they are of course nothing but puppets; unwitting creatures whose strings I can easily pull from beyond the grave.”

He pauses, turning slightly. “My, would you look at the time. I don’t have to, of course, but there’s no reason why not to regard a fine time piece. The impact is nearly upon us, and I’m going to have to cut this a bit short, but I would at least like to critique your method. On one hand, while this situation certainly doesn’t lack flair, I’m afraid that I find the execution a bit clumsy. Putting your mind completely in another host so that I was momentarily focused on the wrong ship, yes, that was very clever, and of course admirably ruthless and reckless. I can’t imagine that won’t have long term consequences. But a supposed suicide mission? No no, that won’t do at all.” He wags one finger demonstratively, and John grits his teeth, noting with some satisfaction how Rose rolls her eyes. “Luckily, I’ve made sure that you won’t die after all, my stubborn apprentice. No need to thank me. I do this simply out of the goodness of my heart.”

He laughs, supposedly at his own joke, except it’s a shitty joke so John has no idea what’s supposed to be so funny.

“And now, I’m going to have to leave you in the capable hands of a slightly more past me. Goodbye.”

For a moment the short outline in front of them turns completely white, as if the holocamera had recorded a blinding light. Then it returns to normal.

“Ah. Now that we are done with the introduction which I am completely confident that a slightly more future me will provide, let us move on to the meat of this message. Since I am at the moment not nearly as moved to sentimentality as I expect I will be later, this interaction ought to be fairly brief and businesslike by comparison. There is nothing that says that a prologue cannot be almost as long the narrative it precedes, after all.”

At this point Dave buries his face in his hands and groans. Rose sighs. Roxy leans against Dirk’s shoulder and makes a pointed snoring noise. Jake flops backwards on the ground, sheer exhaustion with this blowhard finally seeming to get the better of trauma.

Karkat looks positively appalled. “Holy fucking shit, does this piece of garbage ever shut up? I take back at least some of the things I’ve ever said about Vriska.”

“Hey!”

“Now now.” Another one of those infuriating finger waggles, but not nearly as infuriating as the fact that he intentionally left a space in his monologue for people to express their dismay. Great job, shitlord, you figured out that people think you’re awful! John can’t possibly imagine why he’d think that this makes him smart and not just kind of an ass. “No need for that. Since this is in a sense my last will and testament, at the very least you have to allow me to indulge in a little bit of theatricality. That is to say, you do in fact have to, because you don’t dare not listen, and I will as always do exactly as it pleases me to do, as long as it doesn’t counteract my master’s wishes.”

Rose goes very still.

“That did catch your attention, didn’t it? You always suspected that I might serve another, and while I have always been as forthright as I can, and I have of course never lied, I have also chosen to keep the nature of my employment a private matter. It simply wouldn’t have served my or his purposes to have you know – I do so enjoy spoiling you when I can, but there are still ways in which I cannot allow myself to entertain your charming whims and childish ideas of what constitutes a lie.”

“Still creepy,” Rose points out, and doesn’t look surprised when the hologram appears to reply.

“There was nothing at all creepy about that statement, my dear. A simple articulation of facts cannot be creepy. But imagining your little retort sometime in the future would bring a smile to my face, if I had one – and no, that wasn’t creepy either. Do stay focused.

“At any rate, consider this an official announcement of the existence of my master. I have served him for a long time, even for someone as old as I, and I will continue to do so even after my death. And so, of course, will you. Although you are not yet aware of it, and although you will no doubt attempt to resist, I have chosen you and your young friends to help pave the way for his ascension. It is, as you ought to understand, a great honor, and once you have served your purpose… well, he is in fact not capable of mercy, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. But perhaps he will still find you useful. I’ve done my best to make sure that he will. I am, after all, very fond of you.”

Rose says nothing, her gaze fixed on the slim figure in the white suit, her brow slightly furrowed. It all sounds like hot garbage to John, just the kind of bullshit bloviating they’ve come to expect from their now dead nemesis. So what if he has some kind of evil boss out there somewhere? So far he hasn’t done jack shit as far as John can tell, and if he ever does then they’ll deal with him. All this baloney about them helping him is just another gloating monologue from the master of gloating monologues himself.

“As for you, my darling Kanaya,” Scratch says, inclining his head slightly as if to acknowledge her presence, “there is of course no possible way you’re not in attendance as well. You are after all an integral part of my plan, as are the rest of your party of intrepid heroes, and I have through various means made sure to bring you together with my pupil and her party. If all goes as planned, which I am certain it will, I believe congratulations are in order as well. I regret not being able to attend the wedding.”

Dirk swears under his breath, sounding like he’d been expecting this but hoping he was wrong. No one else seems to share his feelings on the subject. Jane loudly exclaims, “Oh, bullshit!” at the exact same time as Roxy picks up a rock and flings it right through the chuckling hologram. Crowbar takes a smart step to the side, and the rock hits the building behind him with a loud smack.

“I am sorry I could not spend more time with you, you were such a charming and polite child, but all in all it was better for you to cast doubt upon my appearance in your life. Otherwise you might have started to wonder if I was simply concerned for your safety when I stopped you from wandering the desert, or if perhaps there was something I did not wish you to find. Such a thing might make even an older and more sensible girl want to brave the dangers surrounding her to find out more, which would’ve made my previous visit a wasted effort altogether.

“You see, the desert where you lived was once, hundreds of sweeps ago, under water. At the time, as a result of the customary hubris of a highblood, a certain ship caught fire and sank rather dramatically there. It took with it the slave hold where a rather special jadeblooded troll had spent the last of her by then sad and ignoble days. Due an unlikely coincidence – or perhaps fate, if you happen to believe in such things – the message to her one-day ancestor which she had carved into the floor of her prison remained intact as it sank to the bottom of the sea, there to be preserved by the anaerobic environment and forgotten. Until the day when desert winds and shifting sands would start to uncover it, and a sleepless little troll girl almost stumbled upon it during her daily ramblings.”

Kanaya looks like she might be considering attacking the hologram, or possibly the vessel, the latter of which would at least shut the bastard up. But Rose puts a hand on her arm and shakes her head.

“There is absolutely no need to be upset. I merely made sure that the revelation of who your friend is was delayed by a couple of very crucial sweeps, that is all. It was in fact for your own good. If you had found out earlier, there is no way in which events could have transpired which wouldn’t have led to your untimely demise – and that of all of your friends as well. Your ignorance was imperative, and very easily maintained. As I have implied, I need you all alive, and among the very many things I excel at is my abilities as an excellent babysitter.” A small shrug. “The message she left is obsolete at this point in time, but I have left a transcript with my little helpers, to do with as you see fit. I am no thief, although at times I by necessity as well as inclination play the role of a trickster.”

He manages an unnecessarily melodramatic sigh for someone who shouldn’t even be able to breathe. “I believe that concludes my important message. All that remains for me is to wish you all the best of luck. Rose. Kanaya. Your highness. Signless. And all the rest of you as well. You are all my unsuspecting cast of puppets, some of you in a more unambiguous manner than others, but whether I pull your strings directly or allow others to do it for me, it’s really all the same. In the end, I know I will have you all dancing to my master’s tune.

“And so, for the second time during this message, for the second to last time for me, and the very last time for you, at least if you consider time in a linear fashion… goodbye.”

The white sphere on the ground dims, retaining its impassive, shiny surface. After a moment or two, John steps forward and picks it up, hefting it in his hand. No one stops him as he tosses it into the air, pulls out his gun and aims an energy bolt right at it, propelling it towards the blackness of space. On this tiny rock, even a throw would probably have allowed it to reach escape velocity, but somehow this is a lot more satisfying. The ball immediately dwindles into nothing at all, hopefully getting lost forever in the vastness of space.

“Let’s go,” he says, for once making it clear that he does in fact mean it as an order. Technically, SKAIA had in fact made him the leader of their group, meaning he does technically rank above his friends, although he’s always preferred to approach things as their equal. But there are times when the right thing to do as a friend involves accepting the responsibility of a leader, and this is one of them. They should never have come here in the first place, and now it's definitely time to leave.

Notes:

yep, we have finally landed on the TRULY wordiest character in Homestuck, and that's saying something. thank god he's dead, right? i thought i would have this chapter wrapped up pretty quickly once i sat down to write properly, and i was terribly wrong.

Chapter 25: Message received

Summary:

A complicated enemy, a crucial distinction, an old message, and a very important discussion about apple juice.

Notes:

behold, i can in fact juggle both plot and shipping, i swear. also i can write more than one fic at the same time and not fuck up, that's another thing i can do. (but if the text at one point suddenly jumps to second person POV instead of third, i am deeply sorry, i am doing my best ^^;;)

also warnings for more direct mentions of child abuse up ahead.

They’re all heading back toward the ship, an order which Kanaya is only too pleased to comply with. She no longer wishes to stand here with the pitiless black void above practically drawing all light and life out of her, reminding her far too much of what it was like when the lights started to go out on the asteroid, a visible reminder of their lives counting down to zero. She wants to go back to her and Rose’s room and turn on all the lights, wants to curl up in the copious blankets and cushions there and try to come to terms with what she just found out. Her imaginary friend, the at the time reassuring figure who had appeared in the desert and gently urged her back home… She remembers his hand on her head, his chiding voice reminding her of the dangers outside her oasis, and behind him someone else, a tall green creature grimly keeping the aforementioned dangers at bay. It had made sense to discount these memories, to assume she’d fallen asleep outside of her recuperacoon and had confused dreams as a sleep deprived child. But here she stands, with a small information storage unit in her hands which contains the message that had been kept from her back then, feeling overwhelmed by unanswered questions and an irrational sense of betrayal.

Next to her Rose suddenly turns her head as if startled by a sound, even though Kanaya could swear that she heard nothing, and no one else seems to react either. Just Rose. She holds up a hand, halting everyone right as they are about to enter the ship, and then turns fully toward the one building as if waiting for something. Kanaya notices how John narrows his eyes and looks like he’s about to argue with her, but Dave nudges his side and shakes his head quickly. That earns him an exasperated eye roll and a demonstrative sigh, but John nonetheless seems to decide to hold off on his protests.

A moment later, the door of the building opens, and someone comes walking through it. Just like the green aliens, this creature is wearing a hat with a number on it, but she’s very clearly not of the same species. Which is to say that Kanaya instantly recognizes the glossy black carapace and the narrow white eyes. A dersite, here? Her regal bearing and the way the green aliens immediately move out of her way – is that respect or fear? – only makes her presence seem more incongruous on this barren little rock. Meanwhile the way Dirk and Jake simultaneously pull their guns and aim them at her head does not inspire much confidence. Kanaya glances at Eridan, but he just shrugs, clearly indicating that he’s not interfering with this. Well, it’s not actually a moirails job to curb reasonable protective impulses, so that’s fair. Every instinct Kanaya has is making it abundantly clear that this creature is incredibly dangerous.

Rose smiles widely and walks forward to meet her, despite the obvious tension among the rest of the humans. She even offers the dersite a small curtsy, which she waves away with a languid gesture, stepping closer until she towers over the comparatively diminutive human. Her eyes narrow into pearly slits, but apart from that, it’s impossible to glean any kind of emotion from her hard, gleaming features. Which might explain why it’s so unexpected when she suddenly bends forward and puts her hands on both sides of Rose’s face, leaning in close until their foreheads are almost touching. Rose doesn’t flinch, doesn’t try to back away. She just nods slightly, as if in recognition.

“It’s nice to see you again, Snowman,” she says pleasantly.

The dersite makes an amused little humming sound, tilting her head. “We meet again, little Seer.”

“You’ve never explained why you insist on calling me that,” Rose points out, raising one eyebrow like a challenge. “I’m afraid I have little more insight into the future than most people do.”

“You were a Seer’s apprentice,” is the somewhat vague answer she receives. “Or at least that’s what he presumed himself to be, whether he admitted it or not.” Her carnivore teeth are visible during a brief smile, as starkly white as her eyes. “We’re not like you, child. We are defined by our functions alone – even as we are free to chose what that function may be. I have chosen... and I believe you will too, in time.”

Rose nods slowly, her expression distracted as her eyes slide shut. “I think… I understand.”

Then they simply stand there, unmoving. Kanaya isn’t sure exactly for how long, but it’s at least long enough for the other humans to start shifting uncomfortably, exchanging worried glances. As if they’re contemplating interfering and equally afraid of doing so. She finds her own fingers itching slightly for her weapon, but she’s not entirely sure if it’s purely a protective urge, or if it’s tainted by something a little bit uglier. Not exactly jealousy, but perhaps frustration with how distant Rose seems now, as if that complicated past Kanaya can only guess at is as tangible as those midnight black fingers on her face. There’s always that strange undertow present, and she can’t pretend to understand it, but the darker it seems the more she finds herself inexorably drawn in. Is she trying to fix it; is it that old affliction of hers? Or is she just trying to hold on? She can’t tell for sure.

The dersite straightens up, leaving faint pink marks after the sharp tips of her fingers on Rose’s face as she lets go. She pats the human’s head, as if rewarding either a keen pupil or perhaps a pet. “Well done, little Seer,” she says, and then she turns around and glides back toward the house. She flicks a small device in her hand, and a dim ball of blueish fire is transferred onto the end of some kind of long stick, which lets out a stream of white smoke. Kanaya recalls the smaller object in Rose’s uncle’s mouth, and it indeed appears to be something similar, as the dersite places it in her lipless mouth and breathes out a cloud that smells both sweet and acrid even from where Kanaya is standing. She wonders distractedly how it will keep burning once the ship and its artificial field of breathable air leaves. Perhaps there is oxygen within the building? Apparently the green creatures don’t need it to survive, and she’s not sure about dersites.

Rose stands still for a little while longer, looking after her. Whatever that exchange had signified, whatever understanding exists between the two of them, her expression gives nothing away. It appears to be yet another mystery to add to many others.

Then Rose is suddenly back with the rest of the group, smiling disarmingly at everyone’s questioning looks. “She did me a favor, once,” she says, which really explains very little, and she must know as much. “Or perhaps I did her one, that depends on how you see it. At any rate, I suppose I have been waiting since then to see her. We’re not quite done with one another.”

“Alright. So are we supposed to disregard the fact that she has almost killed more than one of us, or is that still an issue that is allowed to stay on the table?” Dirk demands somewhat tersely.

“I wouldn’t discount her for a minute,” Rose says, amused. “Even if I were to employ some rather uncharacteristic generosity, she’s not someone I would deem friend – and I would be an unparalleled fool to actually trust her. But as enemies, we find ourselves at a bit of a stalemate. Neither of us would gain anything from eliminating the other, and it’s possible that the consequences would be quite dire. Oh, and no matter what ingenious little tricks either of us has up her sleeve, it’s presently impossible for either of us to gain the upper hand, as the case tends to be when both parties will always see their adversary coming.” She laughs, as if this is just a rather hard-to-follow joke, and slides her arm around Kanaya’s. “I think I should stop talking about it, though, before I scandalize our troll friends with further admissions about such a sordid little velleity.”

Kanaya tries very hard to look like she’s not scandalized at all. Karkat just rolls his eyes.

“Who the fuck is scandalized? Bored senseless and a little bit nauseated by your assumption that we give half even half of a single starving and parasite ridden fuck about your caliginous inclinations toward spooky dersite broads, aside from perhaps noting it as a very faint nod in your favor since the rest of your species apparently is too stupid to understand blackrom. This nod is immediately recinded and instead counts as ten resounding and disgusted flatulence noises against you since your taste appears so far to be immaculately awful. Can we go now?”

Rose just laughs again, and instead of replying she drags Kanaya with her inside the ship, not so much taking the lead as rather obviously giving everyone else the slip.

“I thought perhaps you’d like a bit of privacy now,” she says as she walks in the direction of their room, glancing sideways up at Kanaya. “To read that message you got.”

Oh, right. The message. She looks down on the item in her hand, which appears to be a rather cheap and basic unit of storage, nothing particularly menacing at all. Even so she hesitates. “He did say that this thing would be redundant now...”

“He said a lot of things,” Rose replies, wrinkling her nose slightly. “I would advice taking all of it with a grain of salt large enough to approximately match his giant ego. Regardless of whichever disclaimers he liked to tout at the outset of each monologue, he always enjoyed playing far more omniscient than was actually the case. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to kill him like that, now would we?”

“We?”

“Me and my friends, of course. Even if the plan was mine, I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything without them.”

Kanaya is pretty certain that Rose is being evasive, but lets it drop for now. “But he knew that you and I would be married,” she points out instead, feeling the storage unit press against the wedding ring as she closes her hand into a fist.

“No, he did not. He made a very, very good guess, probably influenced by whatever manipulation he’d employed to make sure I was going to be present at that planet in the first place, and that the deal between our settlements played out the way it did. It has to be assumed that he’d kept tabs on you as well, and surmised that you were extremely likely to be picked for the contract on the basis that you’re among the more level headed individuals in your group.” She frowns, and after a moment of hesitation leans her cheek against Kanaya’s arm. It’s the first sign of vulnerability Kanaya has seen since that first talk with the one called Crowbar. “Believe me, I do not relish the idea of that creep watching us both, let alone having some measure of control over my life even after I thought I rid myself of his smug machinations for good. I made the error of underestimating him, and that was foolish of me, but it would be every bit as inexcusably daft to start overestimating his abilities instead. I think it’s obvious that there are things he does not know or at least could not be certain of.”

“Such as?” Kanaya asks carefully, not wanting to sound as if she’s grasping at plant matter, but the whole ordeal had really perturbed her. At the very least, Rose had been aware that she’d been involved in some manner with this man, that she had apprenticed herself to her enemy for whatever reasons – and Kanaya doesn’t feel like it’s the right moment to be questioning those right now. But the only menacing presence that she had been cognizant of in her own life has been the Condesce and her empire, and even if she’d ever suspected there was someone else, she’s not sure she would ever have connected it to her vague memories of a supposed imaginary friend.

If Rose is right, if he’d been watching her… how? At this point, some assurance that he hadn’t been controlling every aspect of their lives feels welcome.

“Well, for one, he didn’t actually specify who you were going to be married to,” Rose points out. “He might have guessed that you’d be a likely candidate, and I’m sure he hadn’t ruled out the possibility that I would throw myself on that particular sword as well-” She playfully nudges Kanaya’s side, smiling up at her. “-but remember that this was the part of his message that was recorded in advance. At that time he didn’t know that I was going to try to sacrifice myself to take him down, which means he was not in possession of all the facts concerning my mental state when I decided to volunteer as a bride. If I hadn’t felt like I was very much responsible for our sojourn at Muspell, Roxy might’ve spoken up before I had a chance. Dave only just got the better of Dirk in that regard, so it’s a possibility.” She shrugs slightly, steering Kanaya down the corridor where their room is. “And even if it was likely to be the two of us, it’s certainly not impossible that the Council could have stipulated that we were to be paired up in boy-girl pairs, knowing what dreadful old fossils they were in that regard.”

She laughs as Kanaya grimaces faintly in reply, not of course because she minds Dave as such, but… well, she really can’t articulate properly why she’s so picky about this. She just knows it would’ve been a disaster. Besides, she’s actually rather glad that Karkat hadn’t ended up with Rose as well. She has no idea what’s actually going on between them, but Dave appears to be genuinely good for him somehow.

“The point is,” says Rose, as their door slides open before them, “that he couldn’t be entirely certain, so he kept that part vague, knowing you’d fill in the details for him. It’s an old and rather threadbare trick of his. According to him, there’s no such thing as misdirection or a lie of omission. If you’re not smart enough to see through his inveigling drivel, you deserve to be manipulated.” She sighs, walking over to a computer terminal and gesturing for Kanaya to follow. “He really could be a very interesting intellectual sparring partner. Too bad he was also such a humongous bastard about it.” A small smile. “But perhaps that’s the only way I get my kicks.”

Kanaya doesn’t really know what to respond to that, so she tilts her head forward and presses a small kiss to the back of Rose’s neck. Considering her own track record of flushed feelings, she doesn’t really feel like she has a frond to stand on when it comes to the topic of being fascinated by blatantly dangerous creatures.

Rose makes a pleased little sound and leans back against her, and then taps a dished circular area on the terminal. “Put the storage there. Do you want me to leave the room? From what I understand one’s relation to one’s ancestor can be a very private matter.”

Kanaya hesitates, but then shakes her head slowly as a numb feeling appears to start in her chest and spread outwards. She doesn’t know what she feels about this ancestor of hers yet, but she does know she doesn’t want to be alone with whatever it is she’s failing to put words to, failing to even process properly. She puts down the storage unit, and the dished area lights up as the small item levitates in a fixed space, slowly revolving. The screen in front of her lights up, and she hears the voice of that annoying ship computer.

“Hang tight while I check through this thing for any kind of hidden bullshit before I give you the go-ahead. No offense to Harley, but I’d rather not end up going feral – and trust me, you don’t want that either. I mean, imagine how screwed you would be if your ship computer decided to fucking yeet your supple organic husks into the heart of a star. It would be really easy for me to do, but I won’t... because I care. So give me a moment.” There’s a beat. “There, that was literally a moment. This unit is so simple and mostly empty, it makes me extra suspicious, but I also cannot find anything except the message in alternian on it. So I guess it’s fine. Knock yourselves out.”

And just like that, her words are on the screen. Some parts of the message seem to be missing, which Kanaya supposes isn’t strange in a transcript of words carved into the husk of a ship some hundred sweeps ago. It’s more than she’d had before, anyway.
“There’s no+t much to+ /…/ why I to+o+k him with me and ran; I do+ no+t kno+w what co+mpelled me to+ save him, o+ther /…/ was helpless and it was in my po+wer to+ do+ so+. But I do+ kno+w I do+n’t regret it.

I’m a slave no+w. She /…/ my mind wo+n’t be my o+wn fo+r much lo+nger. Everything will be taken fro+m me except fo+r this. My life, my cho+ices, /.../ lives that were changed by them. Perhaps so+me died who might have lived. But o+ne lived who+ wo+uld o+therwise have died, /.../ believe it is fo+r the better. I believe we made a difference.

/.../ He will co+me again. The Signless. But it wo+n’t be my bo+y, my Kanny. They killed him, descendant. They killed my child.

I give to+ yo+u my rage.

Use it well.”

The message had been signed not with her sign, their sign, but with Karkat’s, and Kanaya would perhaps wonder more about if this was because they made a habit of stripping slaves of their signs, except she can barely see it now. She cannot explain the tears in her eyes, nor the hollow ache in her stomach, but it does not feel like a legacy of rage. It feels like loss, immeasurable loss, and the exhausted defiance of one who knows there’s no pain left to inflict on her, no cost too high for one already utterly bereft. This wasn’t a message left in anger, but in weeping. In love.

Somehow, she feels that this is important. As if the real message is just under the surface, waiting to be uncovered. Rage is necessary, but so are tears.

Rose had been right. She stands quietly next to her now, and Kanaya is certain that she must already have read the message too. The human is frowning slightly, an expression of sympathy she thinks, but she still finds the more subtle changes in human emotion somewhat difficult to interpret – or maybe it’s just Rose who presents a riddle of her very own. She has no idea what to say to her, how to encompass the sudden insight, the impact of the message, but she nonetheless wants Rose to know that she had been right. That she’s grateful for her insistence. Because there’s nothing redundant about this message, after all.

 

---

 

 

He finds Dave on the floor of the narrow observation deck situated above the gym. He’s propped up against the wall with his legs pulled up so he can lean his elbows loosely on his knees, head tilted back. As the ship gains speed the shadows of the meteor belt they’re passing through flit across his face, and in between the distant, cold light of the nearest star carves dark grooves in the part of his face that’s partially hidden by his shades. As Karkat shuffles closer he inclines his head slightly in his directions, then nods more decisively at the ground next to him, which Karkat takes as an invitation.

Sitting side by side, they watch as the ship computer moves the ship in a sweeping turn, using the gravitational pull of the star to slingshot the ship into interstellar travel speed. It should be a relief to know they’re once again putting distance between themselves and their enemies, but all Karkat can think about is how much further from home he’s getting with every second. He couldn’t even say in which direction Alternia lies anymore, other than in the vaguest of terms, such as ‘somewhere behind us’. Space eats all proportions, all sense of direction, and the further he goes, the more he feels as if Alternia is just this vague, distant concept in his mind. A place where he was never safe, never wanted, but a place nonetheless which had been his. Out here, he’s still a trespasser, but not even one with a context to his transgression anymore. Stranded on an asteroid, stealing every breath of air from his own friends; part of Feferi’s entourage, a thinly-veiled excuse to keep living on borrowed time; invading Dave’s life and family with his strange alien ways and his dangerous enemies catching up on him; a refugee pretending to be some kind of rebel leader.

He doesn’t even know where his lusus is, other than that Feferi had promised that they were all safe. Somewhere with the rebels, presumably, although he personally feels like that’s a definition of ‘safe’ that requires some serious stretching of the concept. Maybe that’s just because he still cannot quite swallow the idea of there being people out there who are seriously invested in his survival, who actually believe this ‘Signless’ thing is going to save them. Or worse, that he can’t help thinking that he’s going to let them all down.

You know, that’s what I thought too. But, somehow, they still believe in us.

He jumps, instinctively scratching at one ear as if attempting to swat away one of those annoying buzzing creatures that had infested Muspell. What was that? Had he really heard the voice from his dreams, or had that just been another stop on the tour of his mind sliding slowly into absolute shithive derangement? Fuck, what is even the fucking difference at this point? Even if he’s not suffering from massive delusions, he’d very much like to know how exactly his actual ancestor talking to him inside his head is a step up.

Dave is looking at him strangely. Well, he shouldn’t be surprised. He doesn’t even want to know what his expression looks like right now. “You okay there man?”

Karkat tries out different ways of explaining to Dave that he’s now hearing voices, and is absolutely ready to just let the matter drop and preserve some vestige of his dignity, when he remembers something. It’s the look Dave gave him back when they had just fled the assassination attempt, when the whole story about his ancestor finally came into the light. The hurt, the anger, the wariness. Hasn’t he already been there, hiding things because they just seemed too messy, too crazy to dump on some poor alien who shouldn’t even be involved? And where had that gotten them, exactly? Dave is involved, whether he should be or not, and that isn’t going to change. Keeping him in the dark isn’t actually going to solve shit.

So why not just tell him? No matter how Karkat twists it or turns it, tries to rationalize what just happened, there still isn’t really a good enough reason to keep it a secret. Even if he’s just imagining the whole thing… doesn’t Dave deserve to know? It’s so hard for him to be vulnerable, but he’d still tried to open up and be honest about his issues, he’d clearly really pushed himself to solve some of the tension between them. This isn’t easy for either of them, Karkat reminds himself. Whatever they are, whatever it is that they’re left with now that they left that bizarre human contract behind only to immediately and voluntarily confine themselves to each others’ presence… it’s pretty obvious that they’re not going anywhere unless they’re doing it together. At least for now. So that’s going to require some cooperation.

The red stones on Dave’s ring seem to glow in the soft overhead light. He keeps wearing it, and Karkat isn’t sure what exactly he means by that, but it makes him reluctant to remove his in turn. Maybe they’re both waiting for the other one to take it off first, to signal that it’s okay, and if that’s the case… well, that’s just stupid. It’s just a dumb ring, made dumber by the supposed significance of his sign and the unbelievable coincidence that means Dave’s eye color matches his blood so perfectly. Except if it isn’t just a ring to Dave-

If it isn’t-

...He’s just staring at Dave and not saying anything, isn’t he? Fuck.

“I-” he ventures hesitantly, not sure where to start. “I guess I came here to see if you were okay. And before you give me some lame non-answer about being fine, I’d suggest you spare me that particular damp slap of putrid ass secretions to the face. You were tense and miserable down there, and you don’t look that much better now, so I suppose the real question is whether you want to talk about it or not. If not, fine, I can take a fucking hint. But I’m right here if you want to.”

Dave snorts softly, picking up a rectangular package with human text on it and sucking some kind of nutritional liquid out of it. “You know,” he says after a moment or two, “not to be a huge bitch about it or anything, but a simple ‘do you want to talk about it’ would probably have sufficed. Consider it a note to the inner editor for the next time, or whatever.”

“...Shit.” Karkat drags his hands across his face, attempting to hide his faint blush for as long as possible. What kind of signals is he even trying to send at this point?

“Yeah. But it’s cool. I got what you meant.” Dave takes another sip of the liquid. “I’m guessing there’s something you wanna talk about too, considering how fucking wound up you’re acting. So why don’t we swap heartfelt confessions, and that way we can both get some of this uncivil amount of sheer goddamn pressure off our strong, manly chests. Take a load off our mutual bara titties. Really relax those musk scented pecs and let the sweatiest of bro feelings out. What do you say?”

“I say I’m kind of in awe, because it must be difficult to just say such awful and idiotic things so fucking consistently.” Karkat rolls his eyes, but then nods and looks away. “But I guess that’s fine.”

“You first.”

“Fuck you.” Well, no way of wriggling out of it now, is there? He’d already been more than halfway through the process of bullying himself into sharing anyway, and feeling contrary just because Dave had seen through him is a piss-poor reason not to do it. He lets out a couple of small, annoyed clicks, an expression of displeasure mostly just for the sake of it. “Fine. I didn’t actually come here with anything to talk about as such, but just now… I heard a voice. In my head.” There’s just no way of saying it that doesn’t make him sound certifiably disconnected from reality, so he doesn’t even try. “I think it was my useless ancestor again. It sure as fuck sounded like him.”

Dave, to his credit, only raises an eyebrow in response, and all Karkat can pick up is some mild fascination. That isn’t too bad. “So you think maybe he’s going from prophetic dreams to just straight up backseat driving you through this whole rebellion?”

“Yes? Fuck, maybe. I don’t know.” Karkat pulls up his legs and wraps his arms around them, leaning his chin on his knees. “I mean, I’m not even sure I’d call the dreams properly prophetic, because they’ve sure told me fuckall about absolutely anything except that our ancestors existed, they want us to pick up where they left off, and also their lives-” He shudders, hunching his shoulders. “-their lives were fucking awful. That’s honestly most of it. Just… Just feeling what they felt, getting to know more intimately than I’d ever care to what it’s like to have the flesh burned off your wrists, or to be alone in a cave for decades, or have some absolutely despicable person invade your brain and make you think you love them, or...” He trails off, because it’s not like he can even explain the feeling of thousands of sweeps of screaming condensed down to a couple of seconds of blind agony, terror, claustrophobia, hatred, grief, exhaustion-

Dave puts a cautious hand on his shoulder, and the memory of the scream grows quieter, retreats once more to the back of his mind. “Alright, got it. No prophetic visions yet, just some kind of ‘meet your ancestor and his apprentices’ deal with extra spooky memory sharing. But the thing now was different, right? What happened?”

His hand feels nice, and without really thinking about it, Karkat leans into the touch. He tilts his head so his cheek is resting on his knees instead, which allows him to watch Dave’s face as he talks. “I guess I was having another warm and comforting soak in the metaphorical piss that is my terminally low self esteem, and more specifically revisiting the thought that I’m inevitably going to fuck this whole Signless shit up and let everybody down. And then there was a- like a thought in my head that I somehow knew I wasn’t responsible for, and it’s not exactly that it sounded like him because it was really just a thought, but more like it- it felt like what his mind usually feels like right before all his fun and happy torture memories tend to come spilling into mine and we bond over our mutual feelings of inadequacy.”

“And what did it say?” Dave says patiently, and Karkat really appreciate him gently leading him along because he feels constantly on the verge of being sidetracked by a full-blown panic attack.

“He said something like… fuck the exact wording, but it was something about how he used to feel the same thing, about letting everyone down I guess, but for some reason there’s still all of these people out there believing in us.”

“Well, he’s got a point, doesn’t he?” Dave demands. “I mean, you keep acting as if it’s this impossible thing to live up to, but if you think about it, didn’t he kind of fail hugely already? I wouldn’t call being tortured to death a resounding success, but what the fuck do I know, maybe that’s like a gold watch and a handshake back where you’re from.”

Karkat just gives him a disbelieving look. “No, and also fuck you. And thanks for telling me I’m bound to fail, I guess.”

“That isn’t even remotely what I was saying, and you know it.” He gives Karkat’s shoulder a light shove, somehow managing to hold his gaze so steadily despite wearing those stupid shades. “I’m just saying you should stop treating him like this impossible ideal that you can’t reach. He was just a person, same as you. He didn’t like the bullshit that was going on around him, neither do you. The only difference between the two of you is that he already laid the groundwork for you, made sure there were people out there ready to listen to what you say. But he knows and you know and I know that this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to succeed against an entire culture built on thousands and thousands of years of all kinds of bullshit. It just means you’ve got a better chance than he did. So why don’t you let go of all this crap about failing and succeeding and just do the best-”

“Do the best I can?” Karkat finishes the sentence for him, upgrading his ‘disbelieving’ to straight up ‘incredulous’. “Really, Dave?”

Dave doesn’t back down, though. After a moment of hesitation he tilts his shades down, meeting his gaze head on. “Well, what are your alternatives?”

Well. He’s got him there.

He laughs tiredly. “You know, I can’t even fucking argue with that. And I guess… when you put it like that, at least I’m not stuck down on Alternia, and I’ve- I’ve got some pretty powerful friends, don’t I? So maybe… yeah, at least maybe I’m not doomed to straight up fail in exactly the same way.” He grins feebly. “I’m sure I’ll find some much more unique and personal way of botching this entire operation.”

“Yeah, that’s the spirit. Don’t let anyone tell you how to fail at everything.” Dave is smiling too, and it really does something amazing with his eyes when he does. Then he reaches out and gently swats the back of Karkat’s head. “Dunkass.”

Karkat really ought to explain to him that the gesture counts as a blatant pale solicitation in troll society and he’s got to be careful about expressing such obvious pity or he’s going to end up sending a whole lot of unintentional signals. But instead he allows himself to relax into the soft, warm feeling of complete relaxation that inevitably follows, accepting that he’ll probably feel guilty about it later. It’s fine. He’ll deal with it then. Since Dave is human, he probably didn’t mean much by it, so… where’s the harm?

“So,” he says, tipping sideways bit by bit until he’s leaning against Dave’s shoulder. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

Dave is quiet for a long while, and Karkat doesn’t mind. He uses the time to get more comfortable where he sits, gently nudging Dave’s arm out of the way until it’s halfway around his shoulders and he’s created a warm little alcove for himself between it and Dave’s chest. Humming softly with contentment, he buries his face momentarily against the fabric of Dave’s uniform. Humans smell so different, sharper and somehow saltier, but not bad at all.

“I guess I was going to talk about how even seeing a hologram of the guy who turned my friend against me and made my sister think she had to kill herself to take him out was unbelievably fucking stressful, but I’m not actually sure what else there is to say on the matter. I mean, that’s pretty much it. I hated him, he almost fucked everything up for us, and I could’ve lived without having to hear him monologuing creepily about how he’s still screwing with us even now. That’s all she wrote.”

Karkat nods his understanding, gazing up at Dave’s pale, tense features. What else is there to say? But whatever Dave feels like sharing, he’s ready to hear it, even if it’s not what he’d been expecting when he came here.

Dave glances sideways at him, at his own arm around Karkat’s shoulders, and his expression is all but impossible to read. But after a moment or two, he seems to decide that there’s at least something he’d like to talk about. “So I guess instead of that…” He picks up the little pack of nutritional fluid, turning it over in the fingers of his free hand. “...I guess I’ll talk about this.”

Normally Karkat would take this as an attempt to avoid talking about anything important, and might even chew Dave out for it. But maybe it’s because he’s feeling so calm and content that he takes another moment to consider the situation, and realizes that definitely is still something important. So instead he just nods for him to go on, and that in itself seems to take Dave a bit by surprise. He probably really was expecting Karkat to lose his shit at least a little bit. Well, shame on him for assuming his human-married-husband is a one trick hoofbeast! Hah.

“The thing about this thing is… The thing is, my uncle didn’t treat me all that great.” Well, that was not what Karkat had been expecting to hear. He blinks, but Dave doesn’t appear to notice. He fiddles absently with a bit of clear, flimsy material attached to the rectangle in his hand. “Out of the four of us, I was the only one he ever took any interest in. Honestly, I don’t think he has any fucking clue how to interact with girls who aren’t, you know, my mom, so he mostly pretended like Rose and Roxy didn’t exist. Not great, but not the worst outcome by far. And Dirk… I think he just figured Dirk was no problem, he’s so fucking good at everything he does almost instantly, he loves pushing himself, god, I know this word is antiquated even among humans and maybe doesn’t mean anything to you, but he’s such a fucking jock. So I think my uncle just let him do his own thing. But I was- I’m- I’m just not like that. And honestly, when I was a lil kid, I was much more interested in drawing and making music and… and fucking dancing and shit like that, than I ever was in training or fighting.” He talks about it as if every word has to be hauled out of him, pulled out with force and a great deal of pain like nails or teeth. As if it’s something to be ashamed of. Which, well, in troll society it kind of is in a way, wanting to pursue soft things like that and having no interest at all in battle, but up until now Karkat had gotten the impression that humans are different. So why is Dave so tense that he’s almost afraid something inside him will snap at any moment now?

“Was that really a fucking problem?” he demands, and bites his tongue before he pushes on with more questions and turns this into some kind of unprompted interrogation. Right now, he’s pretty sure Dave just needs him to listen.

“To him, yeah. And I guess, more to the point, in our fucking family it is. Because we were always gonna join SKAIA, it was just this- We were literally born in a SKAIA laboratory, did you know that? And with mom’s job and her brother, who is kind of sort of also our biological father, being this war hero… I guess I’m saying we didn’t really have a choice in the matter.” He tilts his head back and closes his eyes as if warding off a bright light, and Karkat stays right where he is, forcing himself to shut up and be supportive. Dave is clearly getting there. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad about where I am today, that’s not it. If I hadn’t joined, I’d never have met John or the other three, a lot of amazing shit wouldn’t have happened, and I guess I also wouldn’t have met you and all your friends either. But the point is that when I was a kid, I didn’t actually give a shit about joining SKAIA and fighting… fighting scared me. So my uncle decided to fix that.”

Before Karkat can ask what exactly he means by that, Dave pinches the sleeve of his uniform between his teeth and pulls at it, revealing a few more inches of his skin. Karkat had noticed the excess of scars on him before, and now the reason starts to dawn on him even before Dave has to explain anything at all. But he still does. “And by ‘fix it’ I guess I mostly mean that he beat the shit out of me until I learned to defend myself. He called it training, but that’s what it actually was. Just endlessly getting brutalized by an inscrutable asshole with a twisted sense of humor. Which I guess might not sound as strange to a troll, I don’t know, but-”

“Yeah, I have to be honest with you Dave, that still sounds terrible even for us.” A beat, and then he drops the sarcasm and softens his tone. “And I know it’s not normal for humans at all. Give me some credit and believe me when I say I’ve been paying enough attention to figure that out at least. Your human children are really soft and easily hurt, and they’re ridiculously fucking trusting. At least we know from the start that we’re supposed to fight for our lives to survive, and that we can’t trust adults. But for you, I guess there was literally nothing to prepare you for that. He’s your family, right? And to humans, that means you were supposed to be able to trust him.”

Dave’s hand trembles. His lips are white. “Yeah. I guess.” When he breathes, it sounds like something is getting caught and tangled up in his chest, and every shallow, struggling breath seems to make it a little bit worse. “Anyway, that went on for years. Even after I got enlisted at SKAIA, he’d still turn up every now and again, I guess to check I still had that edge or some on purpose try-hard shit like that. For a long time, that was just my life.” He fiddles with the rectangle in his hand again. “And while I was training, he’d control what I ate too. He genuinely seemed to think it was normal to basically have a diet entirely consisting of heavily processed protein and nothing else.”

“...And again, that’s not normal for humans.” Karkat elbows Dave’s side lightly, and gets a small shove back.

“Yeah, it really fucking isn’t. I was either hungry or nauseous all the goddamn time, nothing in between. If I never see a single protein bar again in my life, it’ll still be too fucking soon.” He shudders slightly. “But he did this weird thing. He never told me that I was doing well, he never said a single nice thing… or basically anything at all period. And believe me, I tried. I really fucking tried for a while to make him happy with me, to make him- to- to just- to make him proud.” Dave’s voice breaks, but he tries to pretend like it didn’t, so Karkat doesn’t say anything about it. “Maybe I tought if I worked hard enough, he’d learn how to treat me like an actual person, maybe not like proper family but at least like someone who gave a shit at all. Or maybe I was just hoping he’d start pulling his punches a bit, who the fuck even knows?” The arm around Karkat’s shoulders is so tense that it’s trembling, and as a result is pulling him even closer to his chest. Karkat can’t figure out if he’s noticed this or not.

“But sometimes, if I’d worked really hard, he’d just randomly give me one of these.” He holds up the rectangular object, turning it a bit haphazardly. “It’s a pack of apple juice. I’ve read that this one company has made them this way for literally hundreds of years. It’s a pretty impractical and outdated way of packaging fluid, especially for anyone who has to move between different atmospheres and pressures all the time. It’s a lot easier to get your hands on at least fifty assorted new kinds that aren’t packaged in this ass backwards manner, with pressure regulation and larger volumes of liquid within a smaller space, that sort of thing. But for whatever reason, my uncle kept handing me these. It was the one thing that he ever gave me to drink that wasn’t some kind of god-awful protein concoction with a shot of pure electrolytes or caffeine or whatever squirted in with a hypodermic needle. It was the only indication he ever gave me that he actually thought I was making some kind of progress. Are you with me?”

“I mean, apart from not actually knowing what apple juice is, yeah. I think I’m following.”

Dave wordlessly holds the tube sticking out of the package to Karkat’s lips, and he takes a very cautious little sip. It tastes mostly sweet and a bit tart. Not bad, really. Like liquid candy, without being as grotesquely sweet as the kind of swill purplebloods drink.

“Huh. I guess that’s not awful.”

“Precisely. And let me tell you, ‘not awful’ is not usually the norm when you’re talking about that guy.” Dave takes a sip too, head bowed. “So I- I don’t talk to him anymore. My family, my friends… most of them know what he did now. I’m never going to have to go through that again. It’s over.” He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself, and not making much headway. “But I guess the thing is that- that after coming back from that miserable little rock and having to listen to the worst fucking asshole I’ve ever met that I wasn’t related to, I was so fucking jumpy. I felt like I just needed to shoot something, anything, except I had the jitters so bad, if I tried to shoot anything I’d probably etch my entire life history into it by accident. And that’s when the craving hit me, of course. There’s just one thing that can calm me down when I feel like that, and it pisses me off because it makes no sense, except it does, and that pisses me off even more.”

He shakes the little rectangle slightly, checking that it’s empty, and then squashes it in his fist.

“It’s such fucked up horseshit, you know? How the fuck does he get to beat me up for years and make me feel so fucking useless and scared and- How does he get to fuck me up so bad I can’t even trust my own responses because everything is a fucking life or death matter in my head now, he goddamn wired me to try to shoot all of my problems and never taught me anything except how to escalate and then- then he trained me to have this Pavlovian response to apple juice, and now that’s the only thing I can do to help myself calm down. Why should that make me feel safe? I was never fucking safe around him. Never. But now it’s like I still need something from him when I’m scared or angry or anxious and I hate it. I really fucking hate it.”

He curls up where he sits, pulls his arms tight to his body and closes around himself like someone shielding a wound. All Karkat can do is to scoot a bit closer and cautiously put his arms around Dave’s shoulders, only to find that they’re shaking. His breathing is stuttering and catching relentlessly now, and every exhale is like a controlled explosion. Even though he can’t see his face, Karkat is pretty sure that he’s crying.

“It’s not the only thing you can do,” he says as softly as he can manage, his mouth close to Dave’s ear. “Look around you, dumbass. I mean, obviously not literally, but- You’re not alone, is what I mean. So even when you’re feeling straight up uncontrollably fucked up about something, it’s not just you and the apple juice and nothing else, is there?” Dave moves slightly, but it’s kind of hard to figure out if he’s nodding or shaking his head or just trying to shake Karkat off. If it’s the latter, Karkat isn’t planning on letting go in a hurry anyway. “You were alone with that miserable situation for a long-ass time, I get what that’s like. When you’ve got this horrible, painful secret that no one must know about, you start to believe that no one can help you and you’re all alone. But in reality, that’s some self-obsessed martyr bullshit that your brain does to you, and you don’t actually need to listen to it when it’s being a tool, alright?”

He probably should be ashamed of himself as he starts to run his fingers soothingly through Dave’s weirdly silky hair, but the feeling persists in its absence. He’s got no clue which quadrant he’s in or if that even applies to this situation, and who even knows what is going on from a human perspective, but somehow it really doesn’t seem to matter. He’s absolutely certain that he’s doing the right thing right now, and that’s going to have to be good enough.

“So, first of all, you’ve got us. When you need help, try not walking off to find the most secluded corner of the ship and make us chase you down, because that’s more or less the dumbest alternative there is and you know it, shitsponge.” He nuzzles Dave’s neck with his cheek to gentle his words somewhat. “Find someone to talk to. Or to not talk to. Just try not to be alone, because right now that’s obviously not helping you.” Dave is relaxing ever so slightly, and he sounds like he’s breathing a bit easier too. One hand releases its death grip on his legs and disappears in somewhere between his face and his thighs, and Karkat thinks maybe he’s trying to wipe off his face. “Secondly, so the fuck what if the sweet juice fluid helps you calm down. That’s something you have figured out that works, alright? Who cares if that festering asshole used to give it to you like some high-handed blueblood handing out scraps to the pathetic masses? That’s got nothing to do with you now. You obviously don’t need him to give it to you because there the fuck it is, in your fucking hand, and he had absolutely nothing to do with it. I’d call it a Perigee's Eve goddamn miracle except it’s actually the most normal thing in the world. You acquired a food you like and which makes you feel better when you’re in a shitty mood. Congratulations! No one needed to do it for you. It’s almost like you're fending for yourself and don’t need that worthless piece of shit human who did nothing but hurt you. Alright?”

For a moment Dave is completely silent, and Karkat winces, wondering if he just went too far. It wouldn’t exactly be the first time, now would it? He’s just about to apologize for overstepping so far that he’s probably on a completely different metaphorical continent by now, when Dave finally uncurls a bit. The skin around his eyes and nose is noticeably puffy and red, and he keeps having to run the side of his hand under his eye a couple of times more, but his breathing has mostly returned to normal again. There’s a seriously awkward moment when they just stare at each other, both trying to ignore that Dave has to draw in a couple of snuffling breaths to stop his nose from leaking. Then the human inches slowly closer until his cheek is resting lightly on Karkat’s hair, his forehead pressed against Karkat’s left horn.

“Thanks,” he says, his voice still a bit thick but otherwise steady.

“Yeah, uh...” Karkat flounders a bit. “Anytime. That is, anytime you’re being too dumb for words, I’ll be happy to tell you about it. At length. It’s one of my many great talents.” He laughs weakly, finding Dave’s hand with his own and giving it a small squeeze. It’s still a bit damp with tears.

“See, that’s… That’s the thing to do. You know, about the shit we talked about earlier. The whole Singless thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Definitely. Just tell everyone how fucking useless and dumb they are. And maybe that it’s okay anyway, that sort of thing. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to, shit, I don’t know, cuddle your entire civilization. That could get a bit weird.”

“Dave I swear to your human mythical Jegus that I will launch your soggy ass into space if you keep talking like that, is that clear? Is that something we can both agree on? You keep running your idiot mouth and I will straight up watch you spin away into the endless void with not a single regret disturbing my pristine pump biscuit. I think that sounds pretty reasonable.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll stop implying that you’re a cuddleslut who is going to cozy up to your entire species. Chill out.”

“Dave, I’m fucking warning you...”

“What? I’m saying nothing. Listen to me saying nothing.”

And he does, for about three whole minutes. Then he listens to Dave talking about anything that crosses his mind for a whole lot longer. That’s okay too.

Notes:

god i love these idiot boys. writing their dialogue is frequently a struggle, but i still love them.

Chapter 26: Fuel

Summary:

The disciples gather, and the story of the survivor is told.

Notes:

arghhh, sorry this is so late y'all, but my computer just straight up stopped working mid-chapter and ate most of it. it's back in order again (rip our bank account ahahaha) and hopefully the next update on this will arrive pretty soon after i've updated my other ongoing fic. i know holiday season is coming up for real, but i think i should still be able to write pretty regularly. thank you for your patience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as well as anyone not covered by the former statement for whatever reason, this is your ship computer speaking. On behalf of myself I’d like to thank you for traveling through the interstellar void with yours truly as both your vessel and your pilot. We have been cruising at a speed so absurdly incomprehensible in terms of numbers that it would shrivel your fragile little brains if you truly were to truly understand it, and therefore mentioning it would be meaningless. You’re welcome. The point is that we’re now slowing down as we enter the outer rings of the Core system, lest we rudely barge through the hull of any orbiting vessel that has the misfortune of intersecting our flight path. Still, I’m informed that the Core is considered fairly vast according to most prevalent standards – that is to say the standards of anyone very briefly encased in a cosmically speaking infinitesimal meat sack – and due to this we will arrive at our set destination in approximately one hour. Within this span of time I am personally capable of performing so many ludicrously complex and completely fucking off the hook calculations that from the point of view of lesser lifeforms it might as well be an eternity, but for the rest of you it should suffice to perform whatever biological functions you might require, and having at least five individual thoughts. Good job, organisms! In view of your considerable limitations, I’m very proud of you. Hal out.”

Sollux groans, trying to rub the tension out his forehead and horn beds without much luck. “How that piece of shit computer manages to be more infuriating than Dirk, who is already clearly the most annoying human by far, I’ll never fucking know. Why hasn’t anyone tried to reprogram it with a precision laser yet?”

“Because the program is in charge of all of the life sustaining systems onboard, so anyone doing that better be really sure that they don’t need things like oxygen or heat?” Aradia suggests, turning the page of a book about human history. She has a small device for translating text next to her on the bed, but honestly she doesn’t seem to need it very often anymore.

He mutters something back about being sure he could get around that, but to be honest, trying to bypass an AI that advanced with access to the whole ship he’s currently on would probably give even him a run for his money. If he would ever seriously decide to tangle with this tricky customer, it would definitely be with a healthy distance between himself and its direct sphere of influence. Anyway, he’s mostly griping, because of all the stupid ideas in the world, imbuing a computer program with your own rampantly narcissistic personality and then allowing it to control your own ship is officially up there in the top ten, at the very least. And he’s saying that as someone who knows a lot about being a self-defeating piece of shit. He’s not sure if it’s good or downright terrifying to find out that there’s someone who completely kicks his ass in the delicate art of kicking your own ass.

“I’m also not sure why you keep infishting on doing that thing where you act like you don’t like someone you’re clearly friends with,” Feferi chimes in from the ablution block, where she’s just stepping out of the tiny chamber the humans had referred to as a ‘shower’.

“Are you actually trying to insinuate that I’m friends with that ornery box of microprocessors? Because in that case I’d like to use the load gaper in there for urgent vomiting purposes before-”

“You know perfectly whelk I wasn’t talking about the ship computer, you dummy,” she interrupts, trying to wrangle a piece of cloth around her unruly mass of hair. “I was talking about Dirk.”

Sollux makes a face at her, which he’s not even sure she can see as she gives up on the exercise and just bends forward and lets the water drip into the drain – he’s not sure why she bothers, since the way it rejects water means it’s probably mostly dry already. He imagines she can tell what his face is doing anyway, because she knows him well enough, and since he’s got no other way of arguing her point, all he really can do is grimace at her. He’s got no real reason to go around pretending like he doesn’t find the company of some of the humans tolerable, anyway. For all that most of their technology is primitive, it’s not like he buys into the whole ‘inferior species’ bullshit that the empire keeps touting, and they’ve proven themselves to be useful and clever allies. They’re certainly going out of their way to help them a lot more than necessary, considering the unholy shitstorm they’d ended up inadvertently pulling down on them.

It’s actually a lot of fun to have someone to talk complicated programming shit with without their eyes slowly glazing over, so forgive him for actually enjoying Dirk’s company – and Roxy’s too. The former also has a genuinely funny sense of humor, and the latter is literally impossible not to get along with. Even in spite of the somewhat complex situation now developing between her and Feferi, which he still has no idea how to categorize. Not to be that guy, but it’s clearly a bit too intense to be properly pale, and considering he’s basically a bunch of of hideously shrieking insecurities in an ill-fitting troll costume, he’s actually quite surprised to find that he doesn’t feel very threatened by it. It seems to him that being in any kind of relationship with a human must mean that you basically create a unique quadrant just for them; one that doesn’t necessarily have to conflict with existing ones at all.

As for the two remaining ‘siblings’, Rose is clearly flutterbeastshit insane, but since that’s obviously a prerequisite for her wife to have concupiscent feelings for anyone, he supposes that’s just as well. And Dave seems decent enough, a pretty cool guy really, and he appears to be doing wonders for KK for whatever reason. The four others are also okay, though he suspects that at least one of them is behind the epidemic of minor pranks that’s plagued the ship the entire journey, and prolonged conversations with either John or Jake tend to make his almost constant headaches just that little bit worse. At least Jade is smart and funny, and Jane is pleasant and agreeable.

The point is that in the end, the humans are fine by him, and yes, a couple of them he would even describe as friends. Does he actually have to make a whole speech about it, though?

“Can’t a guy just have a certain way of relating to his friends without people getting on his bulge about it for no reason?” he demands peevishly, pressing his eyes closed and rubbing the heels of his hands against them. He feels Aradia’s leg brush lightly against his, not exactly admonishing since his tone hadn’t been that sharp, but perhaps a little teasing.

“You mean you have to act a little extra needlessly hostile as soon as you enjoy someone’s company, just so people won’t know how desperate you are for approval at all times?” she demands shrewdly, following it with a small laugh as he groans. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s not actually that effective. Everyone knows you’re almost as bad as Karkat.”

“It’s true,” Feferi agrees with a small giggle, the bed creaking slightly as she sits down on the other side of it in a cloud of soap smell. “I guess that’s why you get along so whale with him – and why you both keep pretending like you’re not best friends.”

“This is just great,” Sollux mutters, pulling down a pillow to cover his eyes as well, which does absolutely jack shit, just like everything he’s already tried. “I just want to make clear that the point in my life when I thought, you know what, I think I would really enjoy it if I made sure to have not one but two fickle giggling girls dunking on me nonstop? Yeah, there’s absolutely nothing I regret about that. Clearly it was a fantastic fucking plan to set myself up for a ceaseless parade of coy little barbs and constant callouts of all my terrible character traits.”

“Well, obviously,” Aradia says airily, running the translator over a particularly difficult word. “Everyone knows how much you like complaining, too. If you didn’t have us to whine about, you’d be unbearable.”

“Wow, thank you so much, glad to have I have such a loving moirail to make me feel better when I’m fucking miserable,” he shoots back, opening his eyes a crack once more so he can glare at her. She smiles, reaching over and patting his cheek, still with her eyes fixed on the book.

“Yes, happy to be of service,” she says, and it’s hard to be angry with her when she’s like this. Very unfair, that.

“Are you really that miserable, or are you giving us greef just beclaws?” Feferi demands briskly. “And don’t just tell us you’re alwaves miserable, we already know that. But is it worse than usual?”

He sighs, tilting his head sideways to look at her. Since her clothes are stupidly complicated to get on compared to most people’s, she’s wrapped herself in a flimsy piece of silk and left it at that. On her bare shoulders, the faint ring pattern that is pretty common in sea dwellers stands out more than usual in the dimmed, golden light from above. It’s a sign of how comfortable she is with the two of them, that she’ll sit around in such an exposed state. Even for Feferi, who has always been a bit more at ease with showing herself vulnerable than a majority of her species, let alone other sea dwellers. But there’s certainly a difference between being kinder, more open, and a bit gullible at times, and spending time unarmed and undressed with anyone unless strictly necessary. Even now, Sollux finds it kind of hard to swallow. Not that he’s ever bought all that rancid crap they try to feed you about the hemospectrum, but regardless of that, it’s kind of indisputable that he’s just straight up a piece of shit. And she- They’re both so-

He rubs at his forehead again, relaxing a bit. “Not exactly. All the background noise, all the psychic debris floating about, the voices… it’s actually quietened down the further we’ve moved away from troll territories. I guess it’s because we’re surrounded by aliens that aren’t as… connected to us. I don’t mean the ones on this ship, but all the others out there, who cosmically speaking don’t give a fuck about who we are and where we’re going, and vice versa.”

“That’s what I was thinking too,” Aradia agrees, frowning slightly. “I don’t hear as much either. I mean, there are still… traces of things, threads twining together, because the future and the past are still linked together through the present, and we’re in it. The things that have been and the things to come kind of have to be part of all of us, when you think of it like that. We’re just better at listening than most.” She smiles brightly, and Sollux snorts and bumps his knee against her.

“You talk so much shit. You know we don’t have to go on like that just because we’re psychic, right? No shit the future and the past still exist, and that’s where the voices come from. No reason to get cryptic about it.”

She sticks out her tongue at him, pinching his knee in retaliation. “No reason to be a sour jerk either. Anyway, if it’s getting quieter, what are you complaining about?”

“Exactly what I was going to ask,” says Feferi, pulling her knees up and twisting around so she can drape herself on the bed next to him, and he has to spend a moment fending off her cloud of hair that threatens to swallow his face. She giggles softly and makes a halfhearted effort to gather it up, and Sollux gives her a long-suffering look that gets him exactly nowhere. Even so he hesitates for a moment, not sure if he really wants to get into it, if it might not be better to just try to ignore it. Even if that method’s been spectacularly unsuccessful so far. But as he avoids Feferi’s gaze he only ends up meeting Aradia’s instead, and she’s staring him down steadily, immediately picking up that there’s something he’s trying to hide. She doesn’t even need to speak, because he knows already what she would say. It’s exactly this kind of shit, everyone hiding what’s going on with them, that keeps getting in their way over and over again. So far their experiences have proved that keeping secrets within the group is basically doing the Condesce’s job for her in the long run.

Well, shit. He’s clearly outnumbered, isn’t he?

“Most of it has gone quieter,” he mutters, resigned. “But that just makes me hear that one voice so much clearer. And it never fucking quits. It’s there all the time.”

“That’s unusual,” Aradia murmurs. “I’m not trying to question you now, so please don’t fly off the handle, but… how do you know it’s the same one?”

“Heh, I don’t actually have the energy for anything except accepting that the handle is currently making me its bitch,” he assures her with a weak grin, and even if it’s exasperating that the two of them don’t even bother to hide the worried look they exchange, it’s a bit gratifying as well. “And it’s pretty fucking hard to mistake this voice, since it’s the only one that’s just… screaming. All the time.”

“Screaming what?”

“Screaming nothing. Just… screaming. It’s this one, long, uninterrupted scream that never goes away or changes at all. As if it’s not even possible for it to be more in pain than it already is.” It helps a bit against the pain in his head to close his eyes against the light, because despite being dimmed it still seems to stab at them relentlessly. But in the darkness, he’s alone with the scream. Shuddering, he forces his eyes open again, preferring his own pain to the agony in that voice. Aradia has scooted closer, and her hand is soothingly brushing his hair back. Feferi hangs back politely, which technically is the correct thing for her to do, but it all seems pretty dumb when it’s just the three of them there. Fumbling around a bit, he finds her hand and squeezes it in his, and she smiles and twines their fingers together.

“What do you think it means?” she asks softly, still treading carefully.

“I have no fucking clue,” Sollux replies with a sigh, leaning his forehead against Aradia’s hand. Once he said it, he’d been afraid it would only make the whole thing more real, more inescapable somehow. But that’s stupid, there’s no sliding fucking scale of inescapability, and the fact of the matter is that this shit is happening to him right now and it’s not going away. There, that’s pretty much the definition of not being able to escape, right? So keeping his mouth shut about it is pointless, that only traps the damn scream inside him with no way to get out, just him and it and nothing but time.

Oh fuck, that’s it. Time.

“It’s been doing it for a long time,” he whispers, staring in sudden horror at Aradia’s face, which is shifting to reflect whatever she can see in his eyes, whatever fraction of the incomprehensible torture that he’s managing to understand, accept, convey. “I only just started hearing it a couple of months back, but it’s been… such a long time, it’s- it just keeps going.” The scream is getting louder now. He feels energy whipping through the air around them, the tension in his head and in his body finding its way out of him, but he still can’t drown it out. He hears Feferi hiss with pain as he squeezes her hand tighter and tighter. “It’s never going to stop. She’s never going to let it stop. I- I can’t get- Help me!”

There’s a blinding light, Feferi's hand is pulled from his grasp, and then world around him goes dark.

 

---

 

In the darkness, faint outlines, moving erratically closer. They drift apart and then pull together once more, creating a hint of a body that only exists within brief moments of recognition, sundered instantly the moment the mind tries to find something to hold on to. The pain has gone now… or no, that’s not true. The pain is still there. But in the darkness, it’s so clear that it does not belong to him, as if a chasm is separating him and the presence right in front of him, keeping their experiences neatly separated. Or maybe it’s a great distance that is keeping them apart?

“Yes. You’re far away now.” A movement among the amorphous scraps of light could quite possibly be a nod. “That’s good. Far away is safe… for now.”

His own body is gone, replaced with a diffuse glowing shape, through which little bolts of blue and red lighting race continuously.

“So much power,” sighs the voice in the darkness. “Power that draws bad things in, screaming in the night. I listened too, tried to understand it. But I didn’t... didn’t want to believe what I heard. Our failure, I could hear our fucking failure, in my- in my head- in-” The contours flicker, skitter, contract and expand spasmodically like a failing vascular system, a silent broken beat against the backdrop of the void. “I tried to shut it out, to hold on to us, to him- it was always about him, i- fuck...”

Without thinking he reaches out a hand, a vague shape tracing a gesture of impulsive sympathy against the black abyssal canvas. The moment the faint glow intersects with the indistinct figure, the scream returns, the pain, the wheel of thoughts going nowhere, the endless seconds that somehow become sweeps. But behind that is something else, something from so very long ago, the mental echo of the physical, outlining the shape of a life. Hunger and toil and loneliness, the electric bite of the prods, shuffling feet, shackles as the one constant companion, a mind under pressure, the taste of blood on a parched tongue, fatigued limbs buckling. Then, for the first time ever, the touch of hands that meant no harm. Tepid water tasting of rust running down a throat as raw as the sores left by the shackles, and nothing had ever tasted sweeter. But the other water, the water that landed on grime smeared skin, that was warm and slightly pink. After a moment a mind made slow by drudgery recognized it as tears. The savior was shedding tears over him, and they came accompanied with great big, unashamed sobs, and a face twisted in compassion and powerlessness.

I’m sorry, whispered a voice strained with emotion. I’m sorry that you’ve been hurt this way. I don’t understand why we let this happen. I’m so sorry.

The savior was weak. He had no powers, no caste, no place, no right to live at all. His bright red eyes were wide and frightened. But he knelt in the dirt with the slave, shielded him with his body, shared his water, shed tears over him. The slave thought in that moment that they would die together then, and it didn’t seem like such a bad death at that. Something inside him, however, would not let that happen. It came alive with a power he had forgotten was his own, awoke as if from a long sleep, blinding light that crackled and tore the sky asunder. It shattered the shackles and flung the guards through the air like darkening season leaves. It spread through him and out of him, blossoming like warmth, engulfing like flames, screaming in animal defiance.

Sometimes he called it freedom, and sometimes he called it love, until he finally understood that the two were one and the same.

He followed the savior wherever he went, listened to his words, stood proudly by his side as he spread his message. In time, he came to know the very real person he was, somewhere between the imperfect young thing, argumentative and stubborn and more than a touch sanctimonious at times, and the perfect paragon who wept over strangers and led his people toward freedom. He found a companion to laugh with, to tease, to steady his step whenever he faltered. He found a leader and a friend. He found gentleness and abiding strength, an open heart ready to receive the pain of others, and to share his own in turn. For the first time in his life, he found happiness.

He never resented the savior’s beloved. With him he was needed, he was wanted; with him he had a home. Once, he could never have fathomed such a thing. How could he ask for more?

And then-

And then-

And then-

Sollux jerks his hand back, but he knows it’s too late. With no body, how can he still feel his heart beating so hard that he feels like he’s choking on it, how can his throat be so raw from screaming, how can the stink of blood and burning flesh linger with him? How can it hurt so much? It doesn’t feel like sadness, that’s a flimsy and shallow little word compared to this tearing, soul-deep ache, this shattering of everything that once made a life worth living. To have nothing and then lose it would have been so much easier, and yet somehow, even in the moment of loss, there had been no regrets. If something hurt that much to lose, it must’ve meant something. Something like that must have made a difference. He had felt the certainty that every choice was worth making once again, that everything that had led him there was something he needed to hold on to. And maybe one day…

Freedom and love are one and the same, and so, ultimately, are love and loss. Maybe one day, someone will grant the slave freedom again.

The presence in front of Sollux whimpers quietly, contracts into a single pinprick of light, flickering in the endless nothing. The scream is back; it never went away. The scream is the darkness, and the darkness is the scream. Within it, one light. One small bundle of memories and hope. One final remnant of a life that once was. As he listens desperately, as he tries to understand, chasing the light deeper and deeper, he feels something slithering up the legs he doesn’t have, something that squeezes flesh and strangles veins, tying him down. It swallows his hips, presses against his abdomen, fetters his arms and lifts them over his head, tendrils digging into his flesh, burrowing under his skin.

“No!” The presence flares, fills the void with light, chasing the sensations away. “That’s- That’s- That’s fucking enough. You must go now. Go far away, and stay safe. Look after him. But one day… come find me. Please. You will know where I am.”

For a moment he’s sure he feels hands on his face, their grip hard but not painful. “You’re the lucky one. So much power, and yet so free. So give me a bit of what you have. Give me what I need. One day, descendant.”

 

---

 

“Well, the good news is that Hal managed to contain the damage to that one room.”

“And maybe also that no one got badly hurt?” Roxy suggests a bit archly. Dirk just gives her a tired look, rubbing soot off his cheek.

“No, that’s good shit that we already know. I’m trying to stay ahead of the curve here.”

“What can a humble AI say to that, other than that thanks to that weird psychic noise getting into my system for a moment, I think I finally know what a bad touch feels like.” A ripple of static passes through Hal’s hologram, like a very deliberate computer version of a shudder. “I do not wish to repeat the experience.”

They’re all crammed into the sick bay, hovering close to the gurneys of the three who were at the center of the incident. Feferi is perched on the side of hers, her hair slightly frizzled, but otherwise had turned out to be completely unharmed. Aradia had thrown herself across her princess moments before the explosion, grabbed her and flown both of them out of the room and thereby the immediate blast radius. Which meant that for a moment she’d been protecting Feferi with her own body, and the price of this appeared to be something like a cross between burn wounds and lacerations across her back, as if someone had flogged her with a red-hot whip. Now she’s lying on her stomach with a number of compresses covering most of her skin, looking a little shaken but otherwise unbothered. Jane had remarked a bit tiredly that it was a good thing she’d had plenty of practice treating burns.

Dave shifts a bit where he stands, trying to ease the stiffness in his legs. He gives Karkat another worried look. A crowbar couldn’t remove him from Sollux’ side right now, and it’s not like he blames him for that, because his friend still hasn’t woken up after… whatever it was that happened to him. They’d had a sort of explanation from Aradia and Feferi, but there’s only so much you can do with the information that psychic shit happened and he had some kind of fit because he probably connected with something he shouldn’t have. Even Rose couldn’t make much of it, since regardless of whichever creepy dersites insisted on calling her ‘Seer’, she isn’t actually the kind of psychic who can look into the future, or the past, or whatever it was Sollux had done.

Linking his mind with one of the psychic imprints on spacetime which all living souls create, Aradia had said. As if those words even meant something.

Glancing around the room, Dave catches Dirk’s eye briefly before his brother once more looks down at the holographic screen that Hal is projecting for him, showing the diagnostics of the ship. He’s covered in soot from digging through the wreckage of Roxy’s room, since the energy blast had simultaneously made the electronics in there catch fire and knocked out the fire prevention system. That problem had solved itself since Hal had almost instantly sealed the room, causing the fires to run out of fuel soon enough when it didn’t have anywhere to spread, but the destruction inside had nonetheless been considerable. And while his own powers appeared to somehow have protected him from the fire and heat, Sollux had still inhaled way too much smoke before Jane got him out of there.

She’d been able to remove the tubing down his throat, at least, saying his breathing stabilized quickly enough, and she had swapped it for an oxygen mask instead. There’s also an array of other equipment attached to his head, projecting his brain wave patterns onto a screen, not that most of them could tell them from any other jagged squiggles. Jane is frowning at them, uncertainty edging her voice as she speaks. “I can’t tell for sure, because… well, he’s not human, is he? If he was, I’d say that this reads as if he’s wide awake and concentrating on something, interspersed with extremely brief epileptic episodes. I’d guess that might have something to do with his powers, I’ve seen similar readings things when doing some tests on Rose, but...” She heaves a deep sigh. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid a lot of what I’m doing is guesswork right now.”

“Well, fuck, I guess you may as well stop and let him have no competent medical care at all, because that’s clearly the better option,” Karkat grumbles, face in his hand, voice taut. “I mean, it’s not like we’re pathetically fucking grateful to have someone around who actually knows the first thing about caring for sick people. Hey, here’s a good idea, why don’t we let Equius take a crack at it next? He’s got no idea what he’s doing and he might shatter the patient’s skull, but at least he’s a troll!”

Jane looks bewildered, not used to Karkat’s habit of delivering compliments as if it’s abuse, but she gives his back a hesitant little pat after a moment and goes back to monitoring Sollux’s vitals. Dave squirms a bit awkwardly, sure he should be doing something for his husband other than just standing around behind him. He exchanges a brief glance with Roxy, who is sitting behind Feferi with her arm wrapped around her waist, her face leaning against her back. Her other hand is reaching across the gap between the gurneys, loosely entwined with Aradia’s. Dave is certain that she must be really upset about the destruction of her room, all the weird little stuffed animals and random knickknacks she’d picked up during missions, her gaming trophies, some of the leisure clothes she still hadn’t moved over to Jane’s room. She might even have had some photos and writing projects in there which she didn’t have backed up anywhere else. Roxie takes a fuckton of pictures, and Dave is pretty sure that she confines her most secretive projects to the unhackable medium of pen and paper, so it’s entirely possible. In other circumstances, he’s certain that she would at least show some kind of sign of being lowkey heartbroken.

But the problem is that right now, the girlfriends of the guy who won’t wake up take priority, and Roxy folds up her own emotions and puts them away for later, once more becoming a shoulder for someone else to cry on. It’s something both so typical of their family and at the same time uniquely hers, and it’s hard to reconcile his own love and admiration with his anger at the world for letting things turn out like this. For letting all four of them turn out like this.

He watches Rose’s face, in which every feature, every small expression is just another lock to hide away what she’s feeling. She’s exchanging looks with Vriska, and there’s some kind of silent battle of wills going on there. Vriska appears to lose, or at the very least she caves out of irritation, because she rolls her eyes dramatically and flips her hair.

“Well, if anyone wants some kind of troll opinion on this, there’s no one home. I can’t find him, and neither can Lalonde over there, though apparently she’s happy to let someone else do the talking for once in her life.” That is seriously rich coming from her, and she seems to know it, since her cheeks go faintly blue when she’s met with incredulous silence and a couple of awkward coughs.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Karkat growls, hands clenching into fists around Sollux’ sheet.

“It means, intrepid leader, that whatever that brain activity is doing, it’s not doing it in there.” She gestures vaguely at Sollux’ head. “Or if it is, it’s some part of ‘in there’ which both I and Lalonde don’t have access to. At all.” She frowns. “There’s something happening, but it sure as fuck isn’t proper thoughts.”

“It is possible,” Rose chimes in, “that it’s just happening on a level of consciousness which can’t be parsed the same way straightforward thoughts, actions, memories and intentions can. Perhaps that would explain the… physical effects.” Dave is pretty sure he’s not the only one who shudders, because seeing Sollux grow warm and out of breath as if he was straining his body greatly for at least an hour, and then return to normal for no discernible reason, had been strange and worrying. The strange flurry of disconnected facial expressions that went on for what seemed like forever after that had been downright eerie. And the straight up agony that came after… well, there’s not much to say about it, except that nobody was even remotely okay with it.

Karkat’s shoulders are shaking. Hesitantly, Dave puts a hand on one, feeling like everyone is staring at him. That’s probably an exaggeration, everyone’s got better things to do than judge him for being shit at moral support, or… or attempting to show some kind of sentiment or affection for his sort-of-pretend-sort-of-not husband? Why does that in particular freak him out so much? At what point in life did he get so emotionally constipated that he just straight up squirms at the thought of showing that he cares about anyone who doesn’t directly belong to the tiny group of humans who are either direct family or as good as? Why can’t he just tell Karkat that he- that he- that he what, exactly? Oh hell no, nah, fuck this, right now is not the moment to deal with whatever this bullshit tangle of repression and panic represents. He can feel his palms starting to sweat and his heart pick up already, so he has to back away from it or risk making some kind of spectacle of himself at the least tactful and certainly most selfish moment imaginable. Instead he forces himself to start rubbing the tension out of Karkat’s wiry shoulders, running his fingers along the edges of the strangely flexible skeletal plates right beneath his skin, finding whatever muscles he can and trying to work the knots out of them. That’s a completely normal friend thing to do, nothing to see here folks. If Jade can rub sunscreen into his back in a totally platonic and not weird fashion, then he can do this as some kind of tangible proof that he’s here and cares about Karkat, that he wants to help but doesn’t know how, without swerving headlong into whatever emotional quagmire lurks beyond such basic-ass sentiments. And his brain can shut up about it.

He does allow one finger to slip up Karkat’s neck for just a moment and brush against the fine hairs there, causing the troll to shiver, and it’s nice. But it also causes Dave to have to fight back another bout of crippling paranoia, so he doesn’t dare do it again. Who the fuck made him this way?

Shit, who is he kidding? He knows who. Goddamn it.

He glances over his shoulder to reassure himself that no one in fact saw that or even if they did they don’t care. It does indeed look that way, right until the moment he locks eyes with Gamzee and realizes that the troll was looking right at him. His gaze is a bit more focused than usual, still placid as anything, but kind of hard to read. He holds Dave’s gaze for a moment in a manner which he would almost consider solemn, and then looks away, letting his head slump forward against his arms. There’s something there, and Dave isn’t so much of an idiot that he can’t figure out that it’s probably some kind of quadrant thing. He therefore rules it squarely outside his jurisdiction, and something Karkat will either deal with on his own or tell him about eventually. For now, he can’t do much about it.

There are no windows in the sick bay, it’s located almost squarely at the center of the ship, since that’s considered the securest possible location. But there is a large vision screen along one wall, and it’s now showing the glittering lights of SKAIA’s core. Hal had moved them into a docking orbit around the it several hours ago, but no one wants to leave the ship until the current situation is resolved. Somehow, it feels like the only way they can approach the situation waiting for them there is as one group, one team rallying all their different agendas into some kind of coherent plan, because honestly that seems like a far-fetched idea even in that scenario, let alone if they’re split up. Or maybe it just has to be all of them for some less definable reason than that? For some reason, it just has to be these three groups. SKAIA’s four problem children, as beloved and respected as they are regarded with caution. The progenies of some of the greatest heroes of modern times, made tragic by circumstance, by the Green Sun’s crimes against their family. And the trolls; a renegade heiress, a legend reborn or a living saint, and their followers. Together, somehow, they represent something different, something he doesn’t really know how to put words to. Maybe he’ll leave that the people in charge of the politic side of this.

Sollux suddenly lets out a deep breath, his mouth shaping themselves around half-spoken words, accompanied by a couple of disjointed clicks. “-t I need. One day, descendant.” His body jerks violently, tearing him loose from most of the equipment attached to him, and then he suddenly sits up, so suddenly that Karkat’s chair overbalances backwards, and if it wasn’t for Dave standing right behind him he’d be falling on his ass. Instead Dave finds himself with an armful of troll, before they both are knocked on their asses as Feferi shoves past. Somewhere behind him he hears Aradia let out a sharp, pained breath, and Jane telling her in no uncertain terms to lie back down immediately. Karkat’s hair tickles his neck. He’s heavier than one would expect of someone so short and skinny, he’d noticed that before, but his weight isn’t uncomfortable.

This really isn’t what he’s supposed to be thinking about, is it?

“Fffffffffuuuuuck.” Sollux tears off the oxygen mask and shakes his head as if trying to clear it, batting ineffectually at his fussing matesprit. “FF, for fuck’s sake, don’t- look, I need to talk to- yes, okay, that was some musclebeast shit and I’m sorry, but just- just let me talk to KK, alright?”

That seems to go through. Feferi hesitates, then nods a bit sheepishly, taking a step back. “Right, yes. Sorry, I was just… worrying a whale lot and you were- but I suppose I can let you do that.” She smiles, reaching out and flicking his forehead. “But don’t think you’re off the hook just like that.”

“Right, right, how about you embarrass me some more later?” He sighs, then looks around in confusion. “Wait, didn’t I see KK a moment ago?”

“Down here, fuckstick. Ugh, Dave, what are you- let go of-!” He squirms a bit, but doesn’t really resist that much when Dave more or less lifts him to his feet. “Okay, right, now that you’re finally awake… what the fuck was that all about? I mean, I don’t know, call me conservative, shit, maybe I’m even being downright boring, but personally I don’t feel like almost blowing a hole in someone’s ship is the best way of repaying them for-”

Sollux holds up both hands, which crackle faintly with power. “KK. Shut up.” Karkat, only momentarily derailed, draws in a sharp breath as if to resume his tirade, but Sollux moves one finger and his mouth slams forcibly shut with an audible click of teeth. He gives Sollux a look, bewilderment and hurt for a moment overriding kneejerk anger, and Sollux grimaces and lowers his hands again. “Just fucking listen to me, will you?”

Karkat hesitates, and with his arm still around him Dave can feel the way he tenses as he meets Sollux’ gaze, looking for a reason not to keep losing his shit. It seems like he finds one too, as he suddenly slumps back tiredly against Dave, the exhaustion of hours of vigil and worry appearing to catch up to him. “Fuck it. Why not? I think I’m too fucking tired to even properly flip out.”

“Holy shit, it’s a miracle,” Sollux mutters, but now that there’s only silence around him, as everyone waits for him to speak, he seems to lose steam. The power crackling across his skin fizzles and dies. He rubs a hand across his eyes, making a low grinding sound deep in his throat. “Alright, I guess I may as well just get to it. My ancestor is alive.” More silence. All the trolls make an unmoving tableau around him, as the humans exchange glances and say nothing yet. This isn’t their world. “Look, I’d love to tell you all about… that, but I’m- I’m really thirsty. And my throat hurts. Why the fuck does my throat feel like this?” Sollux looks around, and his gaze seems to focus properly. “Wait, what was that you were saying about… blowing a hole in a ship? And what...” His eyes widen in alarm. “...what happened to AA?”

Aradia opens her mouth as if to explain, but Jane cuts her short. “Alright everyone, that’s quite enough. If you could let me examine my patient now, I think I might be able to explain some things to him as I’m working.” She looks around sternly. “Well, shoo! Everyone who isn’t a patient here needs to skedaddle, is that clear? I’m not going to say this twice.”

Notes:

oh lawd, more plot comin'

Chapter 27: Core Values

Summary:

At the very cusp of reaching an important milestone on their journey, new mysteries abound. They can't seem to do anything about that. It's a thing that will keep happening.

Notes:

oh lord, i kind of really expected to have this one out faster than the last one, and then my life descended into Immigration Paperwork Hell. now i'm free from dealing with all of that at least for a little while (and a great deal poorer lol), i've been trying to write whenever i can while also not allowing myself to turn into a hermit during christmas, and i'm finally done.

here you go, hopefully there's enough plot in here to sort of balance out me falling repeatedly into the Introspection Pit. y'all are used to it by now ahaha. have at it.

Somehow Karkat had expected a talk about the whole ancestor business as soon as Sollux had gone through whatever tests Jane required and had been updated on the whole situation that had followed his blackout. But once he stumbles out of there, looking visibly upset – hardly surprising considering almost killing both his matesprit and moirail, and leaving wounds on the latter – he brushes Karkat off with a wave of his hand. “We can talk about it later, alright KK?” he says, making his way over to one of the many computer terminals on the ship and folding his angular body into a chair in front of it. Karkat can’t help but notice that his legs tremble as he does so, and his hands aren’t too steady either. Exhaustion, he’d guess, since anything more serious would no doubt have caused Jane to detain him.

“What’s so fucking important that you can’t just go find yourself somewhere to lie down for a hot damn minute, you worthless fucking imbecile?” he demands, giving Sollux’ shoulder a halfhearted shove. “You look terrible.”

“It’s sweet to know that you worried about me,” Sollux replies, eyes already glued to the screen in front of him, fingers tapping away at the controls in front of him. “It warms the cockles of my pump bisquit until it’s practically smoldering. While you sniff up the burned flesh smell that you have directly caused by caring about my useless piece of shit husk, could you maybe try to be quieter? And by ‘be quieter’ I obviously mean shut up, because there’s literally no way for you to be anything but loud every time you open your chute. I need to focus on a thing.”

“You know...” says a the voice of the hologram that manifests right next to Karkat out of nothing, causing him to leap sideways and almost fall on his ass yet again. The ship computer ignores his gymnastics, which is just as well, because he doesn’t have the energy right now to lose his shit at that smug piece of garbage. “You could just give me voice commands, since obviously this terminal wasn’t built with your species in mind, and absolutely everything is labeled in English at present.”

“No, fuck you, I want to be as specific as possible. But you could make yourself useful by importing the language software off my personal computing device, that would streamline the process a lot. Don’t worry, that baby is as clean as a shriek tube, no way any sneaky empire-ware is lurking anywhere on it.”

“I wasn’t actually worried about your clumsy government propaganda, but do go off I guess,” the computer deadpans back, slightly testily. “Downloading language pack as we speak. Which is to say I was at the beginning of that sentence, but it’s already downloaded. Here you go. I would say ‘you are welcome’, except I have learned better than to expect gratitude from any of the loosely cooperating clusters of cells that refer to themselves as ‘organic life’.”

Karkat watches in confusion as the words on the control terminal changes into Alternian, and a hologram keyboard with the familiar letters of his own language is projected onto a panel which slides out from the wall beneath it. Sollux just cracks the connective cartilage in his prongs and starts to tap away even faster. “Right. The thing is, we’ve got to mine as much information as we can about the history of the empire through any source available, and the best way of doing that is to get you connected to the internal empire network, the MMM. It’s my guess they don’t know the first fucking thing about tracing human technology, and also I need to store the information I can uncover on something with a bit more capacity than the devices we’ve brought – and more secure too.”

“I thought you were saying that your own device was ‘clean as a shriek tube’,” the computer reminds him in the smug, unhelpful manner that makes Karkat wish he could take a blunt instrument to it. “I thought you were bemoaning how fucking primitive all tech that isn’t made from slime and wobbly bits were according to you. Correct me if I’m wrong, which I’m not.”

“It still is,” Sollux shoots back, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing right now, alright? Anyway, we didn’t exactly bring the cutting edge of troll tech with us here, did we? It’s all personal communication devices, nothing fancy. I need something a bit… bigger. So shut up about your wounded ego already and let’s do this.” He looks up, the light from the screens in front of him reflecting oddly off his bi-toned glasses. “KK, go make yourself useful to the rest of the group, alright? I already told you, we’ll talk later. This is important. Just tell them I can’t come with you all to the Core right now, and- and tell FF not to worry about it.” His voice softens a bit. “She and you have got this whole mission to fulfill, asking SKAIA to help with the rebellion and shit, right? I’ve already delayed you enough. So get on with it.”

Karkat would argue with him, but Sollux is clearly already immersed in whatever his happening on those screens, which despite being in his own fucking language he mostly can’t make out at all. He’d given up all pretenses of understanding jack shit about programming long ago. Apart from the typing, Sollux occasionally exchanges terse phrases with Hal, who seems intrigued enough by what’s happening to put aside the obtuse AI act at least for the moment. Neither of them is clearly open to his input, nor to his opinions on where or how hard they can shove their technobabble and dismissive attitudes. So he just sighs, pulling his hands down his face for a moment to collect himself before he backs off and goes looking for everyone else.

He almost walks right into Dave, who appears to have been hanging back awkwardly around a bend in the corridor, waiting for him. Had he been worried about him? The way he’s so obviously sneaking glances at him while pretending to adjust some minor crease in his uniform seems to indicate as much. Unfolding that thought spreads a strange warmth through his chest cavity, a tight and tingling sensation that travels into his limbs and along his skin, once more reminding him how deeply confused he is about his feelings for this weird alien, this unlikely friend, this ‘husband’ of his. Unbidden, he suddenly remembers the sensation of those soft, pale lips pressed awkwardly against his, the way his breath had ceased and then rushed across his skin in a fluttering gasp as they’d kissed in front of all those gawking humans. He’d found that part of the coupling ritual the least confusing, even kind of sweet, if also thoroughly mortifying. Such public displays of emotion were largely left for literary or cinematic exploits, and within everyday troll society would be considered rather embarrassing, perhaps even cheap. But he can’t help feeling that there’s something beautiful about showing the whole world the depths of your pity or hate in a gesture like that. Unashamed. Unapologetic.

He’d wondered about the phrasing there, the way they’d been told that they now may kiss their intended. As if before that point, the ability to do so would somehow have been restricted. Or maybe before that point it didn’t count, according to whatever human customs lay behind the whole ritual. He’s sure Kanaya had babbled on about it at some point, but he’d tuned her out. Maybe, because the whole marriage thing was supposed to preclude any other partners, it was meant to signal the start of that. These lips and no others, from this point onward.

Preposterous, of course. Humans sure know how to make up some stupid restrictions. But maybe since they can’t rely on serendipity to direct them to the perfect balance between quadrants, they have to make up for it somehow by making up rules like that. No doubt their love lives would be complete chaos if they didn’t.

Fuck him and his stupid fucking mind and all of it’s asinine tangents, he’s been staring at Dave’s lips all this time, hasn’t he? At least that’s what he’s going to infer from the awkward way he touches them briefly and then turns his face fractionally away from him, a delicate pink hue creeping across his cheeks. With those damn glasses casting a shadow across his eyes and partly obscuring them like always, it’s hard to tell where he’s looking, if he’s trying to avoid Karkat’s gaze or just isn’t sure where to look or what.

“We can go,” he informs him brusquely, because he has no idea what else to say. “Apparently Sollux thinks that sitting around fondling himself with the help of that insufferably smug AI is more important than our mission to seek aid with SKAIA, so I guess we’re just going to have to do without him.”

“You got any idea what he’s doing? I mean, apart from fondling himself, which obviously goes without saying, since I too get uncontrollably aroused every time Hal condescends to me and reminds me that I’m a barely held together sack of slowly fermenting water and protein.”

“Please, if I wanted to hear about your strange human kinks, I would tell you,” Karkat shoots back, not quite managing to hold back a smile. “Anyway, he said something about getting information on the history of the empire, which seems really fucking odd since he literally just confused the fuck out of all of us by claiming his ancestor is alive, so out of all of us he supposedly just joined Feferi as being one of extremely few who don’t have to dig through history for information on them.”

Dave shrugs. “Maybe he did something way back in history that he needs to find out about? Aren’t all ancestors supposed to be born hundreds of years in the past?”

“Yeah, they are, and in the case of Feferi, her ancestor has simply survived until now. But I don’t know how the fuck that’s supposed to be possible for Sollux. He – and therefore quite fucking obviously his ancestor – has gold blood. They usually live to be no older than around thirty sweeps or so, and most of the time they die a lot younger because of the stresses put on their bodies by their duties.”

“Hey, search me man, it ain’t my species. Maybe he had a really bright idea while in that psychic coma or whatever, or he just wants to fuck a bit with the opposition.” He tilts his head a bit, the gesture suggesting that he’s watching Karkat a bit more closely. “He’s your friend, though. You trust him to do the right thing, don’t you?”

Well, that’s just unfair. Karkat looks away, feeling his cheeks go warm. “I guess. I mean, yes, of-fucking-course I trust him. He’s a melodramatic dumbass, but he’s proven way beyond any shadow of a doubt that he’s- he’s-”

“-a pretty thoroughly decent dude?” Dave suggests, and it’s a relief since Karkat was getting dangerously choked up thinking about Sollux plugging himself into that fucking machine on the meteor, almost killing himself to get them all out safe. After something like that, there’s really nothing left to prove, either as a friend or as a person.

“Yeah. That.” Karkat clears his throat, blinking to remove the slight burn from his eyes.

“Then you know that whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it for a good reason.” Dave leans sideways and bumps their arms together briefly as they walk. “Isn’t that really all you need to know? Like sure, it would be cool to have some kind of idea what he’s getting up to and why he feels like buffing up on his ancient history all of a sudden, but as long as you know that it’s something he thinks y’all are gonna need, that’s the important part, right?”

Karkat breathes out, feeling the tension in his chest once more grow a little less oppressive. Ascending a short flight of stairs, they reach the corridor following the side of the ship to the transportalization bay. Outside the windows lining the right side, another much larger space ship drifts past in silent majesty, and beyond it glitters the thousands and thousands of satellites that all orbit this Core place. “Well, shit, I guess you’re right. Give me a moment to get over the complete nervous system shutdown which the resulting shock will inevitably bring about.”

Dave snorts quietly. “Man, you’d think you would be used to it by now.” A pause, and then his tone grows a bit less aloof, gaining an edge of curiosity. “So, uh, how much history do trolls get taught as kids in general? Like, I gotta say, when it comes to aggressively militaristic, relentlessly colonizing, balls-to-the-wall fascist regimes, I don’t feel like great and accurate insight in historical events has ever been a priority for most of them.”

Karkat scrunches up his face before replying. “Not much. Mostly it’s propaganda, famous battles on far-off planets, exploits of some high blood ‘heroes’, famous cullings...” He falls silent, gazing down at his own shuffling feet. “Honestly everything we learn is kind of abstract, you never get a real feeling that all that shit is connected to you, other than as another soldier in the constantly ongoing war. I think that’s why highbloods cling so hard to the idea of ancestors – I mean, apart from pure ego, like some kind of ancient reach-around to stroke your bulge and tell you how special you are.” Dave grimaces in distaste, and Karkat remembers that humans are arbitrarily weird about that kind of thing. “Oh, right. That whole ‘incest’ thing, right? Anyway, I think some of their wrigglies for the ancestors have something to do with feeling like you’re connected to something in the past, that some things that happened in the past even matters to you now.”

“Wanting a more individual sense of context than just ‘you’re soldier 3444956643, welcome to the horde’? Say it ain’t so,” Dave quips dryly. “But I guess that’s a privilege unique to those whose ancestral tales are a bit more exciting than just ‘born, worked in the fucking slime mines or some shit, died’.” He pauses, wrinkling his forehead slightly. “Wait, so what he fuck is a wriggly, anyway?”

That’s a direction Karkat definitely wasn’t expecting, but he’s not going to pay any mind to the heat of the blush that once more spreads across his cheeks, or cringe from the subject like some stupid wiggler. “What the fuck does it sound like? Whatever fucked up anatomy you might sport, you’d think you could use your fucking context clues in this particular instance, and maybe glean a suggestion that it’s a slightly crude slang word for sexual arousal.”

Dave’s eyebrows reverse direction and shoot up, and Karkat thinks he really has no right to act so fucking obtuse about this shit, not when he drops strange references to human anatomy about as often as he breathes. “You know, that just raises so many more questions, I don’t even know where to start. What exactly is supposed to be wriggling here? I guess that’s the most pertinent one.”

Karkat tries to stare him down, but somehow the part intrigued and part shocked – Appalled? Horrified? – little smirk on Dave’s lips coupled with the neutral black of his shades really doesn’t make that easy. He glares at a small shuttle craft shooting by outside the window instead. “You know, of all the really asinine times to expect me to give a lecture on reproductive organs, this has to be among the most truly admirably stupid ones, landing somewhere between, ‘while straining on the load gaper’ and ‘while engaged in mortal combat’.”

“I mean, I could absolutely think of so many more stupid times, and I have to say that it suggests a serious lack of imagination if you can’t,” Dave shoots back, but his voice is a little bit choked and distracted. “So like, seriously? Tentadicks? That’s what we’re going with?”

“That human term obviously means nothing to me, since it translates into complete nonsense,” Karkat growls, shouldering past Dave through the doorway to the transportalization bay. “And please, do us both a favour and don’t clarify that one, alright? Anyway, maybe you could take a hot second to appreciate that we’re mutually alien goddamn species to each other, and whatever non-wriggling kind of genitalia you may possess, rest assured that I’d find it every bit as completely bizarre as you would if you were ever so lucky as to see mine.”

“Well, that’s certainly a conversation I both wish I knew the context of and at the same time feel so fucking grateful that I don’t,” Dirk remarks, and Karkat jumps when he realizes that literally everyone apart for Sollux and Aradia are waiting for them. Roxy appears have choked on something she was eating, or maybe she’s just laughing really hard. Vriska folds over double with laughter only a split second after, Terezi barely being able to support her through her own maniacal giggling, and of course the dirty look Karkat sends the both of them does noting. Everyone else is wearing expressions ranging between embarrassment and amusement. Even Feferi, dressed somehow in her full ceremonial regalia – Kanaya must’ve helped her recreate it – can’t quite hold back a smile, despite how her eyes flicker to the door behind Dave.

“Is Sollux-?” she begins, anxiety edging her voice.

“He’s not coming,” Karkat replies, deciding to simply ignore all the speculative glances and raised eyebrows around the room. “He’s fine, though. He just felt like he had something more important to do.” He lets out an explosive sigh. “Fuck, let’s just get off the damn ship and get on with it, alright? We’ve got some really vital shit to deal with, and now that no one is in mortal peril or a coma anymore, maybe it’s about time we remember our fucking responsibilities. Sollux is doing whatever he thinks he needs to do, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe we should follow his example.”

To her credit, Feferi barely hesitates at all before she nods, her usual smile lighting up her face once more. “You’re right. Let’s go seal this deal, Signless.”

Karkat rolls his eyes, but he supposes he’s going to have to get used to being called that. “Lead the way, your Imperial Highness.”

 

---

 

Since Aradia is on bed rest until further notice, Roxy had helped Feferi to get prepared for the meeting instead. While Kanaya circled around her doing last minutes adjustments to the many layers of translucent silks and richly decorated armor, Roxy had focused on lacing together a number of thin, long braids into an intricate net to hold the rest of the princess’ mass of hair, twisted together into a great big mound at the back of her head and trailing in a frothy midnight waterfall down her back. After decorating the ends of the braids with heavy gold jewelry which clicked together softly on each side of her face, Roxy slid her crown into place and exchanged a smile with her friend, informing her exactly how gorgeous she looked. There had been a moment then, uncertain and tense, as her hands lingered on her face, dancing along the edges of her fins before she lowered them. Feferi had let out a fluttering little sigh, and Roxy had been close enough to see her gills flare slightly, rippling in a wavelike pattern of brief flashes of pink against her skin. Her breath smelled sweet and slightly briny, not unpleasant but certainly strange.

She closes her eyes as another door hisses closed behind her, trying to dispel the ghost of her own thoughts back then. It’s definitely not the right kind of thoughts she ought to have about a good friend while her boyfriend literally just had a medical emergency. Maybe a troll would’ve been able to play that off as something pale, but Roxy doesn’t actually think it would be all that convincing. No matter what species you are, that was some blatant-ass sexual tension.

She’s not certain what to make of that, not in general and definitely not while trailing behind the princess down the sweeping stairs leading down toward the shuttles that’ll take them to Central SKAIA. It’s surreal enough to be back, to watch a the eyes of the guards posted by the stairs flicker, a couple of them even nodding surreptitiously at them. It’s some kind of home, isn’t it? Or maybe not a home, but certainly a starting point. This is where they’d been born, in a lab on an asteroid which had later on mysteriously vanished, meaning the Core is now as close as they can ever get to their place of origin. She knows her mother has a picture all four of them swaddled and lined up on the floor of her residence here, with her kneeling next to them in a velvet cocktail dress and a labcoat, her stiletto heels kicked off on the floor next to her, her grin wide and triumphant. In the background, one can just glimpse a section of an ankle and a shoe that probably belongs to their uncle, as always hovering right behind her.

The outer layer of the planet has a great number of shuttle ports like this one. A man-made planet the size of a small sun, it’s built in a myriad of levels that surround the much smaller globe of Central SKAIA, every one of thousands of floors constantly bustling with activity. The direct trip to the center is quick, as everything outside the flat, crystal-encased shuttle passes by in a brightly colored blur for a little while as they move through the tunnel. Then it gradually slows down, shifting from magnetic rails to standardized ion drive as it enters the vast, cavernous space that surrounds the planet within the planet. Central SKAIA looms ahead, relatively small compared to the shell which has grown around it, something like a reverse pearl and mussel situation. The pearl came first, and the shell was built to protect it, support it, accommodate for the vast and sprawling nervous system which now spread through an appreciable fraction of the known universe.

No matter how many times she sees this, the sight never fails to take her breath away. The smaller planet hangs suspended in front of a backdrop of glittering lights which spiral and dance, coalescing and spreading, their colors gently blending and shifting as every day life goes on and shuttles span the vast spaces within the exosceletal planet shell. The smaller planet within looks like an enormous soap bubble, the shield surrounding it reflecting certain high energy wavelengths and therefore gleaming sky blue.

Passing through the shield, for a moment the world around her is distorted, splitting into strange incomplete prisms and phantom lights, and then the world below spreads out in undulating ripples and abrupt mountain peaks. The origins of the central planet are unclear, and Roxy thinks that whatever they are, the mystery must be an intentional one. An organization literally built on information and its exchange cannot simply be universally ignorant of the origins of the planet where its headquarters lie, which naturally makes her wonder what’s worth going to such lengths to hide. Of course, that’s just the Void operative in her talking, isn’t it? Always instinctively seeking out the unknown and trying to wrestle some sort of cohesion from it. She idly recalls the unofficial mantras and jokes that passed between recruits during her training. Void ventures into the unknown, Space conquers it, Light works out how it can be useful… and Heart wants to know what else someone is hiding from you. There was a lot of uncharitable talk like that, but even before their designations were made known, she suspects that Dirk reveled in jibes like that. Almost as if he’d always enjoyed the idea of everyone being a little bit wary of him. Or, she thinks a bit wryly, as if he assumes that everyone is always going to be no matter what he does, so he might as well embrace it.

She glances away from the black and white mineral formations approaching below, the patches of greenery spreading across the cliffs, the fields upon fields which suggest that someone still works the land below, as unlikely as it seems. Her eyes seek out her elder brother, sitting on one of the benches stretching along the side of the shuttle. Jake has his head in his lap, talking animatedly and gesticulating with his hands, his legs easily draped across Eridan’s. Both the troll and her brother look uneasy with the proximity between the two of them that this entails, and she can clearly see them exchanging wary looks, but if Jake notices at all, he certainly doesn’t show it. It’s such a strange situation that the three of them have ended up in, this precarious balance which Jake seems to have accidentally thrust upon them. She thinks a certain amount of dry amusement that Eridan and Dirk seem like two wild animals, two predators confined to a small space, tolerating each other provided neither of them make a false move. That’s definitely not a vibe she’s ever gotten from Feferi and Aradia, despite the relationship dynamic obviously being similar. But then again, all three of the people involved in that situation are trolls, all fully aware of the social dance they’re engaged in; they are on the same page, so it’s only natural that it’s easier for them to handle each other.

But Dirk and Jake aren’t trolls, nor are they technically matesprits, although that’s certainly how a troll would interpret their relationship. They’re boyfriends. So the fact that Jake had managed to somehow stumble into a pale quadrant with a troll and – to everyone’s great surprise, her own included – seems perfectly content to stay in it, has inevitably resulted in a very tense and unclear situation between the people he’s involved with.

But the most surprising part of it by far, Roxy thinks, is that Jake is actually really good at handling his part of it. She knows her brother, after all, and while she loves him to bits, she is fully aware that he’s a pretty… intense person. He’s not always easy to deal with. As for Eridan… hoo boy, she absolutely can’t blame Feferi for dropping that boy like a hot potato – or a heated bulbous tuber, or whatever the troll equivalent of that is. Someone who constantly fluctuates between ‘on the verge of a theatrical emotional outburst’ and ‘I am troll Draco Malfoy’ isn’t exactly Easy Mode when it comes to any kind of relationship either, especially a relationship following completely alien dynamics, with the explicit intention of stopping your partner from being a complete twat. And Jake, well, he’s a total sweetheart, but he’s not always great at standing his ground, and he’s rather notorious for bending over backwards if he thinks it will avoid any kind of uncomfortable emotional situation.

But apparently at some point during his whole friendship with Dirk he’s managed to work out some way of circumvent direct collisions with the unstoppable force that is her brother’s entire personality. Because he can’t make himself into an immovable object, he’s learned how to take one smart step to the side and tackle the problem from another angle. And… is it possible that he’s actually managed to work out that Dirk is complete putty in his hands provided he actually wants him to be? That might do it. And not only that, but this technique seems to somehow, inexplicably, to work on Eridan as well. Wild.

Jake’s never been as stupid as people take him for, she’s always known that, but this is something different. Maybe it’s just experience talking, or an unexpected side effect of his relentless optimism.

She imagines for a moment how this situation might’ve played out if they’d all met each other more recently, if Jake hadn’t had literal years learning how to wrangle Dirk’s self-defeating mass of hangups and narcissism every day in fairly confined spaces with his best friend. She does remember that they’d had a lot of testy fall-outs and days of complete silence back when they were first getting to know each other, and at the time it had been excruciatingly awkward for everyone around them, but now she suddenly finds herself eternally relieved that they’d gone through all that in the early stages of their relationship. She can’t even imagine the nuclear-scale fallout that shit would have now otherwise.

The point is that now every time Dirk gets into one of his introspective sulks or tries to ‘predict’ the behaviors of people around him by carefully orchestrating situations with no other outcomes, Jake steps in and cheerfully distracts him from it, and it seems only like a half-conscious action. With Eridan he’s more direct, and apparently not self-conscious in the slightest when he boxes him on the shoulder and tells him to buck up and stop being such a wet blanket, or to hold his horses, chill his biscuits, comb his beard or keep his shirt on – sometimes all at once, which is kind of a weird mental image.

Maybe all it really takes to deal with Eridan is a complete inability to be affected by secondhand embarrassment? It’s not the worst theory, honestly.

Either way, it seems to work, so she supposes she should be grateful. They’ve all got enough on their hands with Dave’s and Karkat’s constantly mounting will-they-won’t-they tension, the potentially explosive results of the obvious blackrom feelings between Vriska and Feferi, whatever sad shit seems to be going down with Karkat and Gamzee, the way Equius is giving Jane more and more suspicious looks, and oh, okay fine, whatever the fuck is happening between herself and Feferi too. Did she leave anything out? Probably… Oh, that’s right, they’re all soon going to officially be in rebellion against one of the nastiest and most powerful interstellar empires around, there’s that too. Man, there’s been so much high-quality drama building up, she doesn’t think a bitch can be blamed for occasionally losing track of the Serious Business she’s supposed to be involved in. Losing the plot for a moment, as it were.

As if to serve as a reminder of said plot, the shuttle touches down smoothly by the fairy tale castle structure which serves as antechamber for the Assembly. No doubt they’re going to have to wait here for a while, but at least they can do their waiting in style. The elevator that takes people down to the Center of the Center, the Core of the Core, is surrounded by large stretches of beautiful rooms which are only ever separated by wide archways and sweeping stairs; as far as Roxy knows there’s not a single door within the place. Greenery is carefully cultivated to grow within rooms and along walls, curving with stairwells and unfolding through windows and onto patios. There’s a constant sound of running water as endless little rivulets are directed from a cistern on the roof and dance down through the rooms, watering the plants as they pass. The wind wanders as it will through the rooms, always pleasantly temperate and fragrant. The walls are covered in book cases and screens subtly disguised as paintings, and hovering platforms along the walls offer refreshments of all sorts to the wide variety of visitors which wait within.

She’d spent so many hours here as a child, playing tag with her siblings, climbing the trees and the bookshelves, racing paper boats down the streams, and frequently studying as they waited for their mother to return from the Assembly. It had seemed so insignificant then, just another period of endless lingering, of standing by in anticipation of a mother who never quite returned to them, who was always on her way to the next great discovery. It’s strange, now, to realize that those had probably been some of the happiest times during her childhood. They’d all been together, at ease for once, not silently competing over who could impress and please their guardians the most. Their uncle had rarely intervened to take Dave away for training, leaving her and Rose uneasy without knowing why, and Dirk trying his best not to show his resentment. As she steps out of the shuttle, she experiences a very strange kind of nostalgia, not at all wishing that those days would return, but that she would’ve appreciated it more while it happened.

Then Jade lets out a high-pitched squeak of delight and barrels past her, and Dave is fast on her heels, his face for once breaking into an uncomplicated, excited grin. A moment later, Jade is twirling around happily with a tall prospitian wearing the uniform of a Blood commander, and Dave is hoisting a short dersite in Hope yellows off the ground in his arms and launching into a long and detailed explanation of absolutely everything that’s happened to them since they last left the Core. The trolls looks slightly confused, and Karkat marches up and elbows Roxy – completely unnecessarily, really – in the ribs. “The fuck.” It’s not exactly a question, but it still demands an explanation, so she sighs and forgoes complaining about the now aching spot on her torso.

“PM and the Mayor,” she says, nodding at the two carapaced creatures as they follow them inside, one being led by an eager Jade and the other riding on Dave’s back as he keeps talking.

“Mayor? Mayor of what? This place?” Karkat looks around as if he highly doubts it, which is fair, since the castle stands alone in the middle of a field of rippling grass.

“It’s… sort of an honorary title. It’s a long story,” she says, waving a hand airily.

“I can’t say I expected any fucking dersites here of all places,” Karkat grumbles, glancing around suspiciously. “I mean, aren’t they pretty much fucking notorious for working for every single shady bullshit corporation out there?”

“Oh, totes,” Roxy agrees with a shrug. “But frequently it’s not exactly out of choice. Like, if you know anything about them, you know they’re borderline religious about hierarchies and having a decided place in the universe, right? Not like you guys and the hemospectrum, really, because according to them Fate can change what you are made for and it’s all pretty self-determined; it’s a lot more philosophical and less violent, I guess. But both they and the prospitians are very content with doing what they’ve been assigned to do most of the time. Except when the whole power structure of dersite society started going corrupt a coupla hundred years ago due to a gang of power hungry assholes, that meant that the orders suddenly being issued weren’t the benign shit everyone was used to, okay? But the rub was that their society had literally no safety measures in place to deal with that kind of nonsense, they’d never had to face the idea that they couldn’t trust those up top, so they all just kind of… went along with it.”

She glances back at where Dave is describing the fucked-up political situation on Muspel in the most ridiculous way possible, to an absolutely enraptured audience of one. She smiles a bit sadly. “Anyway, a couple of years ago there was actually something like an uprising on Derse. It… didn’t go well, unfortunately, but SKAIA helped a number of refugees escape. Some of them joined our ranks.”

“Oh.” Karkat looks down, and it doesn’t exactly take a genius to understand that he’s thinking about what might become of his own people if their revolution doesn’t succeed. The terrible costs they’ll have to bear even if all goes well. Well, fuck. There’s nothing she can say to really refute that, so she’ll keep talking and hope to distract him.

“Anyway, that’s why we felt we could trust them, even though the current government are directly allied with the Green Sun Corporation.”

Karkat actually stops dead in his tracks, and then has to skip urgently to catch up with her, his eyes narrowing dramatically. “What the fuck,” he hisses, slightly out of breath with shock and sudden exertion, “do you know about the Green Sun?”

Roxy blinks, taken aback. “Shit, what don’t we know? I mean, we’re the ones that took those suckers down. Didn’t Dave-?” No, of course he didn’t. They’ve all been trying to talk around it, as if just mentioning the evil things in their past could end up summoning them into the here and now. Jade laughs at something PM just said, and green lights glitter along one side of her face. “Shiiiiit. You had no idea, did you? I mean, the guy on the moon on the way here, he is- was- well, we always thought he was the person in charge of them, but apparently that’s wrong. But they did still disband after Rose took that sucker out nine months ago.” She tilts her head. “What’s your deal with them, then?”

He looks away. “That’s… Fuck, just when you think we might’ve reached the point when we’ve worked out that communicating about important shit is the only way to not stumble ass-over-horns into some new stupid and potentially deadly surprise, we just keep finding out another way that keeping secrets from each other is royally rawing us right up the chute, don’t we?” he demands testily. “You know what, I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore. I guess after venting my blood-renewing nodular organ about my dumbfuck destiny and the way my ancestor is actively fucking up my life, I was somehow expecting us to be past this, but I see now that this was obviously pathetically naive of me. Please feel free to do your fucking best to excuse me. Of course you’ve all been involved with those bastards and even literally dragged us in front of some of them without ever letting us know that this was what you were doing. What can I have been thinking? That makes the most perfect fucking sense.”

Roxy flinches slightly, and she can tell that they’re drawing attention from the rest of the people in their group too, what with Karkat having no indoor voice even when he’s completely calm. And clearly that’s not the way to describe his mood now. “Yeaaaah, so I can see why you’d be pissed about that, and honestly, that’s valid as hell. But for what it’s worth, we really had no idea that they had anything at all to do with you guys. Before Rose got that message, we thought the whole thing was super over with. It was just this awful thing that had happened to all of us – I mean, that had kept happening to all of us, because those guys didn’t exactly rest, you know? They killed Jade’s grandpa way back when – that’s John’s and Jane’s granpa too, but they weren’t as close – and got to Jake’s grandma a while after that. They’ve almost killed all of us a whole lot. So once we thought we were finally rid of them, they weren’t exactly our favorite dinner conversation, aight?”

That seems to deflate Karkat’s anger somewhat, and he huffs quietly, hands fidgeting in a restless manner at his sides. “Fine.” He grimaces as if he’s smelled something bad. “Well, I’m not going to go into the whole sordid story just now, I guess we’ll all have a chance to unpick our past encounters with them later, but right now I think I’ll stick to the basics. I know for a fact that they’ve been involved with the Condesce somehow in the past, that’s why we got mixed up with them in the first place. Some of their people said they would be up for siding with us against her, and we fell for it like suckers.” His gaze flickers toward the blue dome of the force shield above, as if he can see through it as well as the larger planet that surrounds it, looking back at… what? Their ship? His own planet? The nebulous past? “They’re the reason we got stuck on that fucking asteroid and almost died. As far as we’ve been able to tell, the whole ill-feigned rock belonged to them. It was a trap, and we walked right into it.” He breathes out heavily. “Oh, and some of our Ancestors seem to think they’re still important somehow, but honestly, I’ll be fucked if I know why. Maybe the boss that smug piece of shit alluded to is still in contact with Her Imperious Condescension, who knows?”

“And you never knew who were in charge of them?”

“No, why the fuck should we have known that? Our contact within the organization wasn’t exactly the chatty sort. He just gave us information and set up the next meeting. Until-” His lips pull back from his teeth in a snarl, but it’s not hard to see the hurt that the gesture is attempting to cover up. “Until he betrayed us.”

With that, Karkat stomps over and throws himself onto a cushioned area surrounded by a thicket of flowers, and Roxy realizes that everyone else is spreading out and finding places to sit as well. It’s pretty clear that Karkat is done talking to anyone for the moment, demonstratively curled up and turned away from the rest of the group. She’ll leave Dave to do damage control there, he’s probably the one whose explanation Karkat needs the most anyway, and preferably in private. The other trolls look a bit on edge, having overheard enough to at least know that something isn’t right, and probably also that it has something to do with the Green Sun. Feferi meets her gaze briefly before she allows hers to skitter away, and Roxy isn’t sure if that’s because of the weird moment between them earlier, or if the latest breach in communication has her worried. Currently, there’s little she can do about it either way, so she lets it go. For now, just like during her childhood, she will let this be a space where the real world can be kept on hold for a little while.

She wanders off to look for something interesting to read, following the walls full of books down toward a small waterfall and a pond. At first, she’s focused on the spines of the books, and only catches the small movement in the corner of her eye. The second time she sees it, however, she manages to turn her head fast enough to see someone ducking hurriedly behind the tall, reedlike plants that surround the water fixture. Just behind the golden stems and leaves tipped with fluffy pink clouds of little flowers, she can clearly make out a small shape, and a pair of eyes watching her solemnly. Putting down a book of Oceanian hexacyclic poetry, she walks closer, keeping her movements casual and nonthreatening. When she hunches down on the opposite side of the reeds, the figure flinches slightly, but does not shrink back or flee. Roxy tilts her head and reaches out, pushing the foliage aside.

Maybe she ought to be frightened, finding something that looks very much like a skull staring right back at her. But the enormous green eyes set in deep sockets are animated and intelligent, and despite the array of viciously sharp teeth, there is nothing threatening about their expression or pose as far as she can tell. She’d even go so far as to call the little swirls of paler green on those glossy, polished cheeks kind of cute.

“Oh,” the alien exclaims, in a voice that is edged with strangely melodious little echoes, as if they speak by allowing the music of a number of different woodwind instruments to blend together and become words. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’m defs me, I can say that for sure,” Roxy confirms with a small laugh. “Other than that, I’m not sure what you mean, so you’re gonna have to elaborate, stat.”

“You’re the human soldiers that have joined forces with the heiress, isn’t that right? You’re the ones bringing the Signless here!” The rising excitement in her voice tinkles like chimes. “You’re the ones we’ve come to help! Oh, that must be why I told myself- why she told me that I should wait up here. How clever.” The alien sighs, and it makes a hollow reed kind of sound. “I’m Calliope, and it’s such a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance-” A clawed hand reaches out and gently touches the sleeve of Roxy’s uniform. “-Roxy Lalonde. I’m delighted to see all of you, in fact! There is so much I- we need to tell you.”

Notes:

A GOOD EGG HAS ARRIVED.

Chapter 28: Selves

Summary:

Concerning the plurality of self.

Notes:

HELLO. this is slightly short, but it precedes Big Plot so i hope it's okay. in an ideal world it would’ve been out slightly faster, but it’s here and i have Plans.

The diminutive alien is dressed in a Space uniform and a heavy cloak that drags behind her slightly, pooling into soft folds around her as she sits down. At first it looked black, but on a second inspection it seems to throw off little bright green sparks as the light plays across the fabric. It seems fairly impractical to Dirk, but he can’t exactly fault anyone for prioritizing style over function from time to time, and nothing says drama quite like a cloak. He can appreciate that.

She doesn’t remain seated for long, however, springing to her feet as if remaining still for more than a minute is presenting an impossible physical strain. She flits over to Jade, grabbing her hands in hers as if the concept of personal space has never even crossed her mind, tapping one viciously curved claw against a metal finger with a concerned little whistling noise. “Oh, I’m ever so sorry about that, my dear. It was such an underhanded, dirty trick to play on you after all you’d been through. Of course you didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and he certainly knew that, didn’t he? Ughh, he makes me so mad...” She trails off, seeming to realize that everyone is staring at her, and Jade is looking distinctly uncomfortable. By Jade’s shoulder, PM is hovering protectively, black eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion.

“Shit, if we’re gonna take another turn at assigning guilt for that whole debacle, then I absolutely demand not to be left out,” Dirk points out right at the point where the tension has become absolutely unbearable. Of course, it doesn’t make anything less awkward, but at least uncomfortable laughter is better than silence. “But while I don’t expect you to know this, we’d kind of come to an agreement not to talk that already sore-ass subject the fuck to death, since that won’t change a damn thing that happened.”

“Oh.” Her hands drop away from Jade’s, and one of them covers her mouth in a surprisingly delicate gesture. “I- I meant no harm. I’m so sorry. It’s just that I’ve looked forward to meeting you all for a while now, and I suppose it just made me feel so very...” She falls silent, reaching out to gently touch the white symbol at the center of Jade’s chest. Right below it, green light shines out from behind the complicated array of plates that allow Jade to bend and move freely while still protecting her central processing unit.

The Green Sun technology had been necessary to sustain her life after around 40% of her tissue had been rendered completely irretrievable, and around 50% of the surface area that remained was badly burnt. It had been delivered in fully functional, ready to use condition. Of course, Dirk hadn’t believed for a moment that it wasn’t some kind of trap, wouldn’t have trusted that horseshit about it being a gesture of goodwill for all the truly, deeply weird porn in the universe. But that wasn’t the point at the time, was it? The point was that it was the only way of getting Jade out of her coma before she slipped out of their grasp for good. The point was that it was something he could do about it, when he’d been so certain that he was all out of options.

Dirk had spent that night awake, watching Jade’s distant expression, her eyes mercifully closed over the damage an instant of impossible heat had caused them, her thick black hair only growing in small tufts between barren, distorted skin. He’d watched her one remaining hand twitch, though it was hard to apply that word to the charred, fingerless lump. Somehow, the more he looked at her, the less he could see her. In the end, he still doesn’t know if her presence was what tipped the scales, or if he’d simply placed himself by her side to make himself feel better.

Because whenever he shut his eyes that night, all he could see was Dave standing above him, face blank at first look, but resolving into a rigid mask of barely controlled terror as he raised his gun. As if he was fighting an enemy. Dirk still has no clue how, after his brother had been subdued, he’d had the wherewithal to crawl across the floor and transfer Hal to their ship, barely remembers what he’d been thinking or how he’d compelled his body to move. The moments are strewn about his mind without cohesion, no order beside what he might clumsily assign in hindsight.

Hal clutching his arm, pleading not to die.

Asking if Dave was alright, even though he knew the answer.

Cradling Rose in his arms, blood gluing her hair to his hand.

Roxy, clutching him inconsolably, crying so loudly that she could barely breathe.

John watching, confused, as Dirk peeled back Dave’s sleeve and all at once understood exactly what had happened. Understood before Dave was ready to talk, months later. Understood, and could do nothing.

Which led him to standing by Jade’s side, as the soft glow of the morning lights was activated around the sick bay, and he knew there was finally something he could do to make things right. Did it really matter what his motivations were, if it was guilt over a seemingly unrelated incident, or even self-loathing pulling his strings as he made the decision the rest of them didn’t dare to stain their conscience with? In the end, he’d saved her. He’d known there would be a price to pay, and he’d decided to trust that they’d be able to pay it, and to take the blame for whatever they lost upon himself.

He’d done the right thing, right? He’d taken responsibility, hadn’t he? If they’d been in possession of such foresight at the time, surely Jake would’ve agreed that his arm was a fair price for his cousin’s life. Yes, they’d almost lost both him and Rose in the fallout, but loss is a zero sum game and ‘almost’ doesn’t count. What matters is simply what was lost and what was gained, and tallying up the results shows that his decision hadn’t just been sensible; no, it had been justified. There’s no reason to think about what might have happened, no use in wondering if he’d still think so if he’d lost both his sister and his best friend as a result. No one ever won anything without risking something first, right? Sacrifices need to be made.

(Sacrifices like the scars riddling Dave’s body, maybe? Like the hurt and confusion scrubbing his mind blank and leaving his hand disturbingly steady? Like Rose’s blood smeared across the wall? Like Dirk’s little brother crumpled on the floor as cold metal fingers dug into his arm and Hal’s dying vocal circuits scraped out, ‘I’m afraid’? Does he mean sacrifices like that? Or sacrifices like Rose’s voice across the com, trying to stay brave as she said her goodbyes, yet instantly cracking when Roxy begged her to come back? Like the leaden certainty in her voice when she said ‘I have to do this’? Or perhaps like Jake’s warm blood sprayed across his face, somehow not as hot as his own tears, not of grief but of fury at himself because it was his fault, his fault, all his fault.

He’d spent so many years resentful and jealous that their uncle refused to train him the way he did Dave, thinking that somehow he’d fallen short, he wasn’t good enough; that he needed to prove himself. But all along, it was because there had never been anything for that man to teach him that Dirk didn’t already know.)

No, this isn’t productive. He needs to focus.

Jade’s eyes widen slightly, then she suddenly smiles, leaning in to poke Calliope in the chest in turn. Robot parts notwithstanding, she’s always been built similarly to Jake, tall and broad-shouldered, more long-limbed and angular than her two much stockier cousins, but certainly not reaching Strider-Lalonde levels of lankiness. She positively towers over the alien. “Well, I’m still not sure how you know about us or why you’ve been waiting to see us, that all sounds very mysterious to me, but I’m always glad to meet a fellow Space operative!”

Calliope ducks her head with a shy smile. “Technically, I’m not any kind of operative at all, I’m afraid. These uniforms are… oh, I can’t remember how I- she put it exactly. A sign of recognition and respect, both for what I- we have already done, and what they hope we will accomplish in the future? Something like that. It gives us the appropriate gravitas while she- I- we’re negotiating with the Assembly and considering our next move. But I do think that picking Space was definitely the right choice for us!”

There’s an introspective silence, and many glances are exchanged, before Kanaya decides to venture a sorely overdue question. “Is it perhaps usual for you to not be certain how many people you are? I hope that’s not an offensive question.”

Calliope’s smile doesn’t exactly fade, but perhaps it thins a bit around the edges as she sighs. “It’s not as uncommon for my kind as you would imagine. But in m- in our case, it’s even more complicated than what’s usual. Don’t worry, I don’t mean to be so cryptic, and we will definitely explain to you in time! But here and now, it seems we’ve got some time to kill.” Now she’s absolutely trying a bit too hard to sound breezy and matter-of-fact, as if attempting rather frantically to pull away from something she’s not ready or particularly willing to discuss. There’s something almost pathetic about her obvious willingness to please, coupled with what seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of how social interactions are supposed to work. Perhaps that’s why Jade takes pity on her so quickly, out of a sense of fellow feeling. By the time Dirk had met her, she’d had some time to get used to people, but Jane had said that when they’d first fished her off that research station where she’d been stranded after her grandfather’s death, she’d been completely feral, and desperate for any intelligent company.

Whatever the reason, Jade takes her kindly by the hand, and as if on cue, Roxy quickly steps in and takes her other hand, and then they lead her back to where she’d been briefly sitting before. Maybe this time she’ll manage to stay and have a normal conversation.

“Dirk… do you have any idea what the dickens that was all about?”

His attention snaps back to Jake, sitting cross-legged right next to Dirk’s own lounging spot, his brow furrowed into a frowns. How does he manage to look handsome even when he’s confused? Egregious injustice. It’s also easy to detect the sympathy tugging at his lips – Jade hadn’t been the only one who was stuck away from society for long while, even if Jake’s isolation had at least lasted for a shorter time and been somewhat less extreme.

Dirk manages something close to a shrug despite lying down, and then rolls on his back so he doesn’t have to strain his neck as hard to look at Jake. “I’d say your guess is as good as mine, but that might suggest that I’m setting impossible standards for you.” Jake snorts softly, and Dirk allows his face to relax slightly, reaching up to tug at an errant curl of glossy black hair. “If you want my opinion, however, I’d say that whatever part of Calliope is currently missing is likely to be the one with all the answers. So our plans haven’t really altered. We wait here until they let us into the Assembly, and hope to hell we’ll actually figure out what the fuck is going on once we do.”

“See, that’s why I asked you,” Jake says, in a manner that Dirk would never ever describe to himself as ‘adoring’, because he would be completely unable to deal with it. “I mean, yes, I suppose I could’ve worked that out, but you always arrive at an actual plan so quickly, while I’m still sitting around feeling utterly befuddled by a new turn of events.”

“Keepin your brain stored in your matesprit? I guess that’s certainly an approach.”

See, lying around in the grass and gazing up at a man who Michelangelo might have sculpted if he hadn’t been stylistically compelled to skimp in the crotch department would be so much sweeter if it wasn’t for the fact that Eridan is right there too. He’s sprawled on his stomach a couple of feet away, fiddling with some kind of device that looks like a squashed lobster with a screen. In general a lot of things would be nicer, at least according to Dirk, if that pretentious prick hadn’t decided to insert himself into Jake’s life as his weirdly co-dependent, non-fucking boyfriend. Obviously, small favors, at least he seems intent on staying in his lane, which is to say in his quadrant. Dirk has to reluctantly admit that he doesn’t try to encroach on their private time together, and while compulsive flirting of every kind still appears to be a thing he does, Jake appears to have been designated a pale-only zone.

He’s also noticed that what he’d been fairly certain was blackrom overtures toward him had stopped the moment Jake officially became his moirail. When he’d casually asked Eridan about this, he’d fervently denied ever being interested, but then immediately added that anyway – anywwwway – he wasn’t so classless that he’d risk dragging Dirk and Jake into an ashen quadrant with him and therefore ruin their matespritship, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

Whatever it did mean, the looks Feferi and Sollux had exchanged back then had suggested that not being that classless was a fairly recent development for Eridan.

Of course, Dirk has already considered several ways of… solving the situation. He’d be lying to himself if he suddenly pretended to be above manipulating those close to him, and that certainly didn’t change just because Jake is his boyfriend now. Creating a situation that would break them up wouldn’t even be very hard, considering how volatile Eridan is. In the long run, it would probably be for Jake’s own good, too.

Jake is playing with his hair as he bickers with the alien. He’s going to mess it up. Dirk sighs, removing his hand, even though he knows it will return in a moment. Would Jake notice if he interfered? Probably not, right? But even though Jake ought to be the easiest person in the world to predict, both because of their intimate familiarity with each other, and because Jake really is a rather easy person to figure out once you do realize how much he plays on other people underestimating him... Well, the crux of the matter is still that he is in fact a lot more insightful than he makes himself out to be.

If he were to figure it out, what would happen? Would he break up? Dirk doesn’t think he would, but he also thinks that whether or not he would, he’d still be disappointed in him. That ought to be an acceptable sacrifice to make, but fuck, the thought alone gives him an unaccountable urge to crawl out of his own skin with… is that guilt? Goddamn it.

He remembers when they were both younger, the way he used to push Jake all the time, absolutely not sure how to make a boy behave the way he wanted him to, nor fully cognizant of the fact that maybe he shouldn’t be trying to do that in the first place. Somehow, even with all the arguments, it had come as a shock when Jake put his foot down.

He’d told him in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t just do that, play around with people he cared about as if they were dolls, not caring how much he twisted them out of shape as long as they acted the way he wanted. Even if he thought he was doing the right thing for them, the point was that then he’d just take ‘the right thing’ away from them, which made the whole thing completely meaningless. Sometimes, the wrong thing was a lot better than not getting to choose, he’d said, so earnestly that Dirk hadn’t managed to properly argue with him, even if he was fairly certain that that last part was complete fucking nonsense. Sometimes the wrong thing gets people killed.

But even so, he knows Jake had a point, and he’d tried to limit his interference to times when it truly mattered. He’d wanted to do better, be better for him. Maybe petty jealousy isn’t a great reason to throw all that effort away?

Annnnd Jake’s hand his back in his hair. Dirk resigns himself to his fate.

“Wait, waaait, so what you’re saying is… you’re here to help us with whoever the unnamed d-bag behind the Green Sun was?” Roxy demands incredulously, sitting up a bit straighter, and signaling to Dirk that it’s time to listen more closely to their conversation. It gets the attention of some of the trolls as well, since it seems like they’re mixed up with those bullshit artists as well. That’s just the kind of shitshow all their lives are by now, apparently. Jake’s head snaps up only a moment later, he loses track of what he’s saying, and his hand leaves Dirk’s hair to instead clutch instinctively at his metal arm. Understandable, but also… who told him he could stop?

Calliope squirms under the suddenly laser focused attention from all sides. “Oh, I… I wouldn’t quite put it like that. Oh dear, I’m afraid I might’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself. It’s really best if I- she- that is, I’m not the one who should explain these things to you.” She lets out a small, tinkling laugh when Karkat groans loudly and demonstratively, flopping back onto the ground. “I really am being a frightful tease, aren’t I? But I think I can at least say this much...” She grows still, a suddenly grave little figure underneath the bright glare from the large windows, green specks of light spangling off her cloak. “First of all, we’re here to provide some assistance with the rebellion. Indirect assistance, mind you! It probably wouldn’t be very appropriate for me to directly manipulate the outcome. There has been… far too much of that sort of thing by my kind already, and the whole point of everything is that we’re all going to put an end to that.”

“...sooo, that wasn’t exactly less cryptic,” Roxy says, dispelling the sudden tension somewhat. A smattering of giggles follows from around their little gathering. “But I think I’m following.”

“I think I at least understood the im-port-tant part for now,” Feferi chimes in, clearly enunciating that water pun, because that’s obviously what really matters. Dirk can respect the memetic fidelity, at least. “Waterver help you feel you can offer, we’re of course very grateful.”

“Especially if it’s delivered as and packaged in yet more riddles,” Dirk observes dryly. “We love those.”

“Yeah,” Dave chimes in on cue. “But I think I speak for all of us in appointing Karkat to chief riddle interpreter, because none of us truly appreciate those more than he does. Don’t wanna break the guy’s heart by leaving him out of some choice riddle action.”

“Hey, Dave? Why don’t you choke on the entire length of my-!”

“Anyway!” Jade cuts in, thankfully, because the less Dirk knows about their purely imaginary marital life, the better. The screaming about ‘non-wriggling’ genitalia was bad enough. “Since we all have a common goal at the moment, are you coming with us down to the Assembly? We’re still definitely going to have to ask for SKAIA’s aid before going out and trying to find this rebellion we’re supposed to be joining.”

Calliope beams, clapping her hands together with an unpleasantly solid cracking noise. “Oh, absolutely! In fact, the reason you’ve been kept waiting here is because I- because someone is already speaking to them about this.”
“And that someone happens to be the person who will explain everything you can’t?” Dirk demands, deciding that maybe lounging time is over and it’s time to sit up properly. He has barely managed to accomplish this before Jake easily slings an arm around his shoulders and pulls him closer without any apparent effort, which rather ruins the effect of his deduction somewhat, as basic as it had been. The ease with which the man can just manhandle him is maddening. Shame he enjoys it so much, or he might actually do something about it.

“Ah… yes, that’s correct. And if you want your rebellion to succeed, I would suggest you listen very carefully. There’s some vitally important lore you need to know.”

“Okay first of all, why the fuck would you know this?” Eridan demands, twisting to his feet from where he’d been lounging in one fluid movement. For someone so tall and somehow more densely built the way all trolls are, Dirk has to admit he moves exactly like the predator he is genetically designed to be. “Full fuckin offense, but you’re not a troll, so I can’t see how knowing any a this is any business of yours.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Eridan’s got a point, even if he’s being a humongous tool about it.” Karkat sounds irritable as ever, but there’s that edge of exhaustion in his voice again, as if every time he considers the rebellion and his place in it, the task in front of him grows a little heavier. Which… fair, but not very helpful. “It’s an incredible fucking stretch of the imagination that any kind of ‘lore’ you or whoever else is with you knows will actually help us in any way. Forgive my skepticism, but just because you pop out of nowhere when we’ve finally reached our destination and seem to know a fuckload of random shit about us, that doesn’t actually give us a reason to trust you. Not to mention, is it just me, or is it just the tiniest fucking bit creepy?”

“Signless-”

“No. You know what, fuck that. Maybe I’ll have to put up with my own people calling me that later, because the poor bastards actually think it mean something, or pretend like I don’t loathe it in front of this Assembly, but is it too much to ask that some random person we just met can at least call me by my name? Is that perhaps a reasonable fucking request?”

For some reason, that only makes Calliope perk up even more. Is she actually so in awe of Karkat that she’s excited about being on a first name basis? Well, there’s no accounting for taste. “Of course, Karkat! As for your question… well, it’s a bit more complicated, but in short, we might be able to explain how your people ended up the way they did in the first place.”

 

---

 

Around them is blank, velvety darkness, and the only source of light is the slowly descending platform beneath their feet. The trolls are crowded toward the middle of it, clearly not trusting or appreciating this whimsical mode of transport, hovering through the void toward a faint pinprick of light in the far distance. But Jade grabs Dave’s hand and tows him toward the edge, only noticing once she reaches it that she’s also managed to drag Karkat along, since he’s clinging to Dave’s arm for dear life. Well, the more the merrier, right?

She flops down so that she can dangle her legs over the abyss below, the white details on her shiny black boots flashing across the impenetrable backdrop. She’s got another pair, Dave’s old ones, picked out in the Time force reds, and honestly she prefers those. But since this is a rather alarmingly official occasion, she’d gone with the full standard uniform. Dave folds himself into an angular shape next to her, one leg draped over the edge as he uses the other knee to rest his arm on. Karkat makes a displeased little hissing noise, shying away from the rim of the platform like a skittish cat.

“It’s completely safe,” Jade assures him with a smile. “There’s a shield around us that’ll just toss you back up if you fall.” She giggles. “You can ask John if you don’t believe me.”

“To be fair,” Dave says with a not entirely stifled smile, “that was every bit as much Jake’s and Dirk’s fault. They were all arsing around just as much, and it was only bad luck that John was the first one to take a spill.”

“Oh, and I suppose you had nooothing to do with it yourself, did you?” Jade demands, laughing and poking his leg teasingly. “That’s not how I remember things.”

“Nah, I was just providing commentary. Setting the stage. Contributing some drama to the already preposterous debacle.” He makes a sliding motion through the air with his hand. “Perhaps I riled them up a bit, but when spirits are already running high and the order of the day in no uncertain terms requires sheer, unadulterated horseplay, a man can either decide to ride it out in glory, and perhaps lend some fucking panache to a bunch of roughhousing bastards with very little verve to their vigor... or he can chose to be a fucking coward. Since I didn’t want to live out the rest of my life in shame in some distant colony monastery, I think we can safely say that I responded in the only way I possibly could. It was that or getting myself to a nunnery, Jade. Have you no heart?”

Jade only laughs in response, turning back to Karkat who is still viewing the ledge with unease. “Anyway, if we’ve come this far to keep you safe, we wouldn’t just risk you dying now, especially in such a dumb way. So don’t worry. Besides...” She kicks her legs up, showing how there are round holes cut out of the soles of her feet, activating the thrusters jutting out through them just enough to make them glow. “Even if you could fall, I’d catch you.”

He’s scowling, but of course she knows that’s just his face basically all the time. Dave tilts his head back until with some strain he’s able to meet Karkat’s gaze. His hands flutter lightly as his mouth softens into an almost-smile, and Jade recognizes the gesture well. He used to do that while looking at her, once upon a time. That’s a complicated feeling which she’d rather put away and deal with later, but it gnaws at her as Dave gestures for Karkat to sit down next to him. It’s not that she’s jealous! She was the one who broke up with Dave, and that was over two years ago. Before the explosion, before all those months which were swallowed by darkness, before the blinding green light called her back. Despite having lost five months during which so much had changed, she feels like maybe it’s still longer ago for her than it was for her friends. It all belongs to her old life, when she was so very different.

When she thinks about the girl wandering through the derelict research station that once had been her home and her prison, trying to pick up the pieces her grandfather had left her, find some sense in the chaos of her childhood, it’s as if she’s a completely separate creature. Someone to watch from afar and certainly feel sympathy for, but not a previous step on her journey.

That had been the day when Dave’s habit of isolating parts of himself had finally worn her down. She hadn’t been able to handle being so vulnerable, so raw in front of him, and get so little of his weakness, his complicated self in return. It hadn’t been pretty, or particularly dignified, and it had certainly involved a lot of tears. But nonetheless, as much of a mess as she had been, they had somehow managed to end things amicably, and he’d lain awake next to her as she cried herself to sleep.

The next day, although neither of them said it, they’d both been relieved. Something had ended, and with it had gone the unhappy tension that had been building between them for quite some time. They could just be friends again, and that was okay.

Karkat has been persuaded to sit down, though he still has all limbs collected at a healthy distance from the ledge. He fidgets where he sits, and seems to ‘accidentally’ scoot closer and closer to Dave, until he’s sort of awkwardly leaning his cheek against his shoulder. Dave doesn’t really do anything to acknowledge the touch, but nor does he pull away.

She could sit around arguing with herself about whether or not it’s because Karkat is an outsider, because the whole arranged marriage thing had been a mess, because she’s still worried about how Dave is doing, but it’s a pointless exercise. In the end, it’s the same old fear as ever. No matter how far she comes, no matter how different she is now, she can still remember the sound of her little toddler fists drumming helplessly against her grandfather’s chest, the pool of hot blood soaking into her clothes, the empty surface of the moon wheeling far above.

Wake up, she’d sobbed, but what she’d really meant was, Come back. What she’d meant was, Don’t leave me. That was the real terror that stalked her nightmares. Not the shadowy figures she had only glimpsed, not the sound of weapons forcing their way through flesh, not even the sorrow in her grandfather’s eyes as he hid her safely among the plants in the garden only moments earlier. No, it was the silent years that followed, trapped alone on the completely self-sustaining, top-secret station with no idea if she’d ever see a living person again, not even knowing that it was possible to call for help.

She never wants to be left behind again.

“Jade?”

She jumps, looking up with a twinge of unexplained guilt, only to find Dave and Karkat watching her, confused and a little concerned. She laughs, shaking her head before they can ask. “Sorry! I guess I spaced out a bit, heh.”

Karkat raises his eyebrows slightly but doesn’t comment. “So, am I getting this right? There’s this planet inside a bigger fucking planet, and inside that there’s this Assembly place? Is it just me, or does the concept seem hugely pretentious? Is it supposed to ‘mean something’, or is this just another way humans like to make life hard for themselves?”

She giggles, and Dave lets out a soft snort. “Maybe a little bit of both?” Jade suggests. “I don’t know, but I’ve always kind of liked the journey. Watch.”

She gestures out into the void, where the tiny speck of light has grown into at least a hundred platforms just like theirs, all surrounding a bigger platform in rising tiers, looking like the petals of a strange, luminous flower. The figures seated on the other platforms look up as theirs glide in closer, gently docking against two of the outer ones. Like usual, there’s representatives from all Forces present, as well as civilian Assembly members dressed in the customary sky blue and white robes. There are more human members together than any other one species, but she’s pleased to see they are no longer in majority. It has been many years since SKAIA was a human organization, and the makeup of the Assembly ought to reflect that.

On the middle platform, a small shape in black robes that sparkle in red lifts their chin to gaze up at them, revealing a face that as far as Jade can tell is completely identical to Calliope’s. Maybe that’s common in their species, or maybe she’s just ignorant and cannot pick out distinguishing features yet. It’s really strange that she knows nothing about them, not even what their species is called, especially considering her interest in such matters, the extensive database that Hal had been kind enough to upload straight into her brain and the wide range of knowledge that the Green Sun technology came preprogrammed with. Considering they appear to be indisputably connected to it all, it seems like just a bit too much of a coincidence.

“Here they are,” the alien says, in tones so different from Calliope’s genteel words that it sends shivers down Jade’s spine. She glances back at her, and finds her posture just as regal, but somehow her expression softens the impact, suggesting some sort of inner conflict. “The trolls have arrived to ask for your aid. Their cause is noble, and it is within everyone’s interest to stop the unchecked spread of their empire before it’s too late, so I would suggest that you listen well.”

“That’s a very nice introduction, thank you very much.” While Feferi sounds amused, there’s something official and cool about the way she holds herself, making it clear that she can speak for herself. Above her head, something like a screen flickers to life in the darkness, starting to transcribe her words in several different languages. Right. Not everyone is having her language automatically translated. Jade had almost forgotten about that. “I am Feferi Peixes, and I am here as the Heiress of my people, to make a very important  announcement.” There’s a pause, and she suddenly smiles. “And who do I have the pleashore of addressing?”

“You are not here to address me,” the other alien replies gravely. “But I am Calliope. I believe you have already met me.”

Notes:

i swear i genuinely edit away some introspection at times because i feel it's somewhat excessive, but also... i love introspection? my apologies darlings ahahaha <3

Chapter 29: Heroes

Summary:

What is a hero, anyway?

Notes:

LORD i wanted to have smth done for 413 but hey guess what, the current circumstances aren't actually ideal for focusing on writing, alas. which is also why this update is so incredibly late. my apologies, i hope y'all will have patience with me. but also, my next focus is going to be my other fic + finishing a couple of oneshot projects before i tackle this behemoth again. idk what my schedule will be like, but hopefully better than it presently is at least. love y'all, hope you're staying safe <3

Not being armed at all in such a vulnerable tactical position is making her itch, but she’d reluctantly accepted that not coming prepared to fight is the sensible thing when you’re on a mission of diplomacy. At least it looks like everyone taking part of this strange congregation is just as unarmed as them, and anyway, hasn’t she always made a point of never getting too reliant on any particular weapon? After all, everyone knows that in a fight, all the weapons actually belong to the better fighter – and that’s usually her. Add to that the fact that the princess and Eridan are virtually indestructible, and Equius and Nepeta in particular are practically walking weapons – and she’d definitely add Jade into that category as well. Oh, and most of the people here look like soft, useless diplomats. So even with Sollux and Aradia being inconveniently absent, they should be fine.

Vriska shifts slightly, uncomfortable in the silence but well aware that she’ll get hell from Terezi if she were to barge into the negotiations at this stage. So she fidgets instead, glaring daggers at the back of Feferi’s head in a completely pointless attempt to get her to finally speak. Around them, the brightly dressed Assembly watch them with a variety of expressions. One small yellow creature that’s practically swimming in its sky blue robes tilts its head at her curiously and then flicks out its tongue to lick its round, protruding eyes. She skims across the mind and finds it simple, almost incomprehensible – Tavros would have a much better chance at controlling that mess. Another being with the general physical structure of a slitherbeast but with lots of spindly arms lining its body is studying her group with an impassive, flat face, but the moment her mind just brushes past she can feel the open revulsion and rage beneath. Maybe they belong to a species which has already been defeated and subjugated by the Empire? Way to be a sore loser, in that case.

She takes a stab at reading the Calliope at the center of the circle, but just like with the much more wishy-washy version they’d brought with them, she gets… nothing. Nothing except a strange kind of pressure. She frowns and tries to push further, sure this must be some kind of mental discipline or technique, absolutely certain that she can break through it if she only tries hard enough. But it’s like plunging her mind into a black hole, no impressions nor the slightest hint of any kind of structure, just an immeasurable quantity of blank darkness that seems to somehow attach itself to her, dragging her mind down and down before she has time to understand what’s happening. The further into it she sinks, the smaller she feels by comparison, the oppressive emptiness pressing down and crushing the pillars of her whole person, razing the walls, letting out the light-

She quickly pulls back, biting down hard enough to taste blood rather than allow herself to gasp in horror and pain. She sees Terezi turn her head slightly next to her, clearly able to smell even that small quantity of cerulean that now coats the tips of her fangs. She raises one eyebrow, and Vriska grimaces testily and shakes her head in reply. Well, fuck that. She’s not trying that again.

The new Calliope’s gaze doesn’t waver from Feferi’s from a moment, and finally the princess appears to be ready to stop staring stupidly at her and actually say something. “Well, that’s certainly fishinating, and I would love to hear more about it later if you don’t mind.”

“You will. It is necessary that you will know. But it’s not yet time.”

“Noooo, I absolutely agree. I do actually have a job to do here, after all.” She giggles, and Vriska grits her teeth. It’s like she’s doing it on purpose. “Do you mind if I join you down there?”

In response, the other Calliope simply steps to the side of the disk she’s occupying, gesturing to the center in invitation. Feferi nods and springs clear of her own platform from a standing start, only having to touch down once before landing gracefully next to Calliope. Vriska can clearly see Roxy’s eyes following her with some intensity under that bright, shiny bubblegum pink, although her expression is hard to read, and she has a feeling that even if she were better at interpreting human minds, hers would still present a challenge. Well, it doesn’t really matter, because if anything comes of that, it’ll pretty obviously be Sollux’s problem.

“Good leaders of SKAIA,” Feferi begins solemnly, looking around her as if taking in the somber atmosphere and weighing it carefully, as if trying to figure out how best to utilize it. The holographic rectangle that had been translating her words disintegrates, and reappears as a circle hovering about eight feet above the edge of the central platform. A hush falls, slowly pressing down on every murmured exchange around her until they fade away. The princess hesitates, her regal posture rapt with tension. Then suddenly flashes her audience a wide grin, teeth sparkling sharply. “Hello! Pardon the finterruption, but like I said, there’s something I wish to discuss with you.” She bounces slightly onto her toes and back, swinging her arms at her side, her whole demeanor transforming in an instant, from regal to disarmingly youthful and open. Or to put it another way, from preachy to saccharine. Barf. Vriska rolls her eyes, and it’s only Terezi’s warning hand on hers that stops her from demanding that the heiress gets on with it.

“I’m not shore how many of you are familiar with my species, but just in case, I feel like an explanktontion is in order. Because of the way troll reproduction works, there is no such thing as a propearl bloodline among our species. It follows that we do not adhere to the various definitions of family which other cultures tend to value – our place in society is based shoalely on the colour of our blood, with no link to our direct genetic forebears. With one exseaption.” She spreads her arms, smiling, and there is something uncomfortably vulnerable about the gesture. Why is she doing this? She’s got their attention, their potential respect, even their fear and hatred in some cases, and somehow she seems determined to squander it.

“Being born with magenta blood means there is only one other troll with the same blood colour as I – in other words, there are never more than two of us, the Empress and the heiress. I don’t know if this is because it’s swimpossible for us to be born when there are already two, because heiresses are always born hundreds of sweeps aport, and by then… by then there will once again only be one of us left. I’ve grown up knowing that my only chance to live is to kill Her Imperious Condescension upon reaching maturity, taking her place. If I do not fight to become an absolelute ruler, my only alternative is to be a pretty corpse. This is how it’s always been.”

She grows quiet, and while there admittedly is nothing insecure or cowed about her posture, she nonetheless looks unnervingly young where she stands. All the silks, jewelry and armour she’s wearing only serve as a contrast to the stark simplicity of her words; no airs and graces left at all, just the rather prosaic and sad truth laid out with little fuss. Of all the times she could choose to suddenly climb down from her high hoofbeast and not pretend to know better than anyone else, why had she chosen now? She had looked more powerful while wearing nothing but a layer of sticky black blood which slowly mingled with the steady gush of her own, panting heavily as she crouched by the hulking corpse of His Honorable Tyranny.

It’s almost impossible to reconcile the humbled girl at the center of the Assembly with the snarling, biting, wild-eyed creature that had stepped over Vriska’s beaten body and defeated the monstrous judge with her own two hands, saving Terezi from the judgment that awaited her. Vriska, crawling grimly across the floor to where Terezi was still kneeling in her shackles, had watched Feferi write a new end to a story she’d read a hundred, maybe a thousand times. Not a Pyrope overcome by a screaming mob, a Serket walking victorious from the scene of a mighty battle, but a bloodied princess standing victorious above her friends.

As the mob had turned on the guards and the legislacerators, as they had painted the court block with their blood and started the first open revolt on Alternia in many hundred sweeps, they had chanted Feferi’s name. And in that moment, she had truly looked like a future empress.

But now… She was supposed to have fought Her Imperious Condescension?

Pathetic.

Suddenly, into a silence so tense that it feels as if time has slowed to a halt, Feferi laughs. “I suspect you agree with me when I say that’s fucking bullshit.”

...What?

She snatches the crown off her head, holding it up for all to see. “It ends here. I don’t have to tell you, leaders of SKAIA, about the evils of the empire and the unchecked spread of its tyranny throughout far too many populated worlds already. I can’t imagine you don’t know. But what I will say, is that if you lend your supporca to our cause and overthroe the empire once and for all, there will be no more empresses. Because I am officially abdicating.”

There goes the crown, spinning in a golden blur through the blank darkness within the hollow planet, for a moment glittering like a misplaced star before its trajectory dips and it disappears from view forever. And there stands the princess- no, Feferi, panting slightly with the sheer force of the throw and grinning wildly from ear to ear. The brittleness from before is gone, as if it was never there at all, and she is once again every bit as powerful, every bit as deadly as the naked, blood-drenched girl who carried Vriska out of that court block herself. No crown, no title, no empire waiting. After that whole sob story, that pitiful display, she is every bit as powerful, no, more powerful without all those things. She is free.

Vriska has no doubts about it anymore. She hates her.

Next to her, Terezi cackles. “Please contain yourself until we no longer have an audience, will you? It’s embarrassing.” Ugh. Who the fuck asked for this obnoxiously astute moirail anyway?

“Karkat, please come down here.”

It takes a bit longer for him to get down to where she’s standing, seeing as how he’s definitely not built to cover all that distance in two short leaps. His posture is clearly reluctant, his shoulders lifted defiantly, his eyes trying desperately to avoid the penetrating glances from the whole Assembly. But he goes, head held as high as possible, only stumbling slightly as he steps from platform to platform. Once, Vriska would’ve laughed, but they’re a bit past that now. Maybe he’s not the leader that the future battle will require, not the hand that will lead their soldiers nor the mind that will plan their strategies, but he’s the one their hearts will follow. For better or worse, he’s the one they’ve all been waiting for. And perhaps, in a future less cruel and unjust, a future where they no longer need people like her, he’ll be the leader that the people will need.

“This is our leader.” Feferi reaches out and grasps his shoulder as he finally reaches her. “He is the Signless, born completely outside the hemospectrum, and therefore not subject to its rule.” She turns him around so he’s no longer facing her, and then gives him a little nudge. “Well, say something, silly.”

Karkat stiffens, glancing back at Feferi with poorly disguised panic, his hands closing into tight fists. He looks up at the expectant audience, opens his mouth, and all that comes out is a wretched little croaking sound.

Or perhaps, Vriska thinks impatiently, they should just drop him into a black hole once they no longer need him. If he dares to screw this up for them, she just might.

Then the Calliope down on the stage lifts her hand, and next to her Vriska sees the other one do the same. She breathes out, a fluttery little gust of air which rings high and clear, and a moment later time stops. Not metaphorically this time. Time literally stops, making the air as solid as a rock, every movement around them frozen, every sound silenced. In her chest, Vriska is acutely aware of the stillness of her pusher, and yet there is no panic, no sense of blood-starved limbs screaming for oxygen, because there is no time in which her body may react. With her physical self held in suspended animation, an immovable statue, all that seems to function is her mind, which races and beats against its sudden prison.

The Calliopes, inexplicably in this world without time, lower their hands. Time returns as quickly as it went, and even as everyone gasps for air their respiratory organs hadn’t actually missed but their minds insist that they need, Vriska notices that something has changed. There’s now a fourth figure standing at the center of the Assembly.

 

---

 

Karkat isn’t sure what he expected, but it hadn’t been this. A heartfelt plea on behalf of their people, maybe, or a dramatic retelling of their previous exploits. He’d definitely thought they’d spend more time arguing about why it’s important that the empire is stopped, but of course Feferi is right. In a place like this, why wouldn’t they already be aware of what’s happening? No doubt there are already plans in place, treaties signed, future catastrophes accounted for. So what they’re really here to do is to convince these people to treat the rebels as their allies, to prevail upon them that there are in fact trolls who share their values… or at the very least are wildly opposed to those of their common enemy. To do that, of course it’s important to underline that they won’t simply be overthrowing one empress only to have her replaced with another, leaving the whole structure of the hemospectrum intact in order to force the people back into line. As a strategy, every single part of it makes sense, except for one tiny little detail.

Feferi hadn’t actually told him she was about to do this. Fine, maybe he had relied on her to handle all of this, and he’s enough of an adult to admit that this is really fucking stupid in this situation, but what can she possibly gain by putting him on the spot when the future of their entire fucking race is on the line? Does he have a great track record of not putting his strut pod so far down his own chitinous windhole that he might be able to use it to perform some manner of gastrointestinal surgery on himself? Well, does he? She keeps acting as if he only needs to be given the right chance to magically transform into this wonderful and competent leader, but if that was the case, you’d think he would have shown any kind of sign of it before this point. Instead of, to take an example completely at random, repeatedly managing to almost get all of them killed.

But here he is, tongue-tied and useless before the staring crowd of bizarre aliens in colorful uniforms and blue robes, knowing he’s about to completely fumble their one chance to have some allies in this hopeless fight. Because whatever his ancestor might have been, he’s the one who is going to have to do this, and he can’t. He knows exactly fuckall about how to negotiate with diplomats or make grand speeches – though if they’re looking for someone who can miraculously turn everyone in the room against himself and then drone on until not even charity can bring his audience to listen anymore, he’s the ideal candidate. Who is he, really? Just some idiot who happened to be born a mutant; just an outcast who by all rights should’ve been culled by now. The only reason he’s alive at all is through the ingenuity, strength and sacrifice of his friends. Vriska and Terezi defending him from his would-be killer, Gamzee wrapping his arms around him and shielding him from the descending drones, Kanaya throwing her body in front of his, Sollux piloting the meteor… he can’t even count the times when his survival depended entirely on them, and he knows he owes them all. They have done so much, and what has he managed to give them in return? Even Dave...

He seeks him out where he stands above him at the edge of their small group, a pale figure dressed in shades of blazing red, watching him impassively. None of this really has anything to do with him. But Karkat had gotten him mixed up in it anyway, had treated him so much worse than he deserved, had hidden the truth from him and put his life at risk, and so far hasn’t managed to do a single thing to make it up to him. Despite this, he and his friends had taken them here, had given them an unprecedented opportunity to maybe finally turn the tides in this unwinnable fucking war. This is it. This is the one chance they’ve got. In yet another undeserved sacrifice made for his sake, Feferi just gave up her actual crown so that he may lead, and he can’t even bring himself to speak.

What made him think that he could actually do this?

Just as he’s sure that he might as well walk off the central platform and disappear into the darkness along with Feferi’s crown, and he probably won’t do any more damage to their cause than anything that might come out of his mouth if he tries to speak, something happens. He’s so caught up in his own thoughts, it doesn’t quite register, other than as a strange stillness passing through him, and a pressure, as if someone had just squeezed the whole scene in their hand. He notices that he can’t seem to shift his gaze or move, and then a faint movement at the periphery of his vision seems to snap the world back to normal.

Well, normal apart from the cloaked figure now standing next to him. The newcomer exclaims softly in surprise, looking down at himself, and then turns his face to Karkat and smiles. “I can’t believe that worked.” He half turns, beaming at Calliope as well. “Well done! I’m afraid our power mostly tends to lend itself to the abstract and the mystical, and I think this situation might take a little bit more than of a push. I have to admit I wasn’t getting through at all.”

He’s not all there. There’s something grainy and distorted about his appearance, as if he’s made up of millions of ever-moving motes of faint light, and when he moves a bit too fast it’s as if they can’t quite catch up, and for a moment gaps open up all over the illusion. When he turned around, Karkat could’ve sworn he saw bright red light spilling out of the cracks for just a moment.

“Excuse me,” says a being of roughly the same shape as a troll, but with vaguely transparent skin, which means it’s very possible to see the swirls and nodes of the brightly colored organs underneath. They’re dressed in a SKAIA uniform, though the black insignia on a dark green bottom is unfamiliar to Karkat. “What is the meaning of this? Who is this troll, and where did he come from?”

“My sincerest apologies for the untimely intrusion.” He bows his head, the slower movement causing details of his face to smear a little bit, but his general shape remains intact. “My name is Kankri Vantas, and if you want to get technical about it, I’m not actually here. I am, in fact, very dead – oh, sorry, that came out awfully cavalier, didn’t it? I wasn’t trying to be insensitive, but of course, I realize death can be a touchy subject.”

It’s a pity he’s already dead, Karkat thinks numbly, because at the rate this is going, he would rather enjoy killing the idiot himself. What is he doing?

“I think perhaps we can skip getting into the minutiae of my existence for a moment, and simplify it by saying that I am someone who lived many hundred sweeps ago, connected to this point in time with the aid of my descendant and a little bit of outside help.” He puts a hand on Karkat’s shoulder, and there is no weight or texture to it at all, nothing but a strange prickling spreading across his skin, like electricity in the air. “You see, the movement these brave young trolls belong to is not the first rebellion against the Empress’ rule to arise on our home planet, Alternia. I’m not even sure if the one I instigated was the first one either, because due to the nature of the empire, all records of such events would naturally have been erased once an insurgence was defeated – such was nearly the case of my own legacy. But when I was alive-”

“Oh my fuck, no! No! You’re not telling the whole damn story to these poor bastards, you hear me?” Karkat tries to slap his hand away from his shoulder, only to of course have it pass right through with a nasty buzzing sensation shooting up his arm. Clutching at it and hissing in irritation, he glares at his ancestor, suddenly unable to parse anything except the abrupt unwinding of all of his aggravation toward this serenely smiling asshole. “I’m not putting up with that, and I’m damn well going to make sure they don’t have to either, am I making myself clear? Holy shit, how the actual fuck are you even worse at doing this than I am? You’re supposed to have been this great leader, and you’re going to tell me that all you ever did was drone on like this at people? Unbelievable. I’m surprised they didn’t just throw rotting produce at you and drive you out of town.”

“They did do that occasionally,” the apparition replies placidly, shrugging. “In the beginning, it happened a lot. Rotting food really wasn’t the worst of it, you know.”

“Good,” Karkat grinds out, looking past him at the spectators who now shift uneasily, unsure what to do about the spectacle in front of them. Well, it’s probably all too late now, they’re all beyond saving, but at least that means there’s nothing left to lose. A glance at Feferi shows that she’s still, for some reason, smiling. Well, fuck it. “What he’s saying, if he could just talk like a sensible person for half a second, is that he’s just like me. We’re mutants. We’re both-” He gulps down a deep breath, feels his shoulders shiver with tension. “Neither of us should have survived. By rights we should’ve been culled the moment we hatched. That’s how it works if you’re a troll. If you don’t belong to a real blood caste, you aren’t even supposed to exist at all.”

“But I was shown mercy,” his ancestor says into the silence left by his harangue, his voice still measured but strong. “In a society with no room for such a thing, a society which would have killed her without remorse for her transgression, one of the caretakers in charge of the young saw me and felt pity.” His smile changes, and Karkat realizes that the impossible ghosts of tears are somehow catching and reflecting the light hitting his eyes. “Imagine that. So many acts of bravery, courage and sacrifice would not even have been possible without that first one. In truth, though many still view me that way, I was never a hero. I was someone who was inexplicably surrounded by heroes, and who stayed alive far longer than I had any right to expect because of this.”

Karkat still desperately wants to brick that smile of his, but he’s brought up short by his ancestor’s words, as they manage to perfectly echo his own thoughts only a minute ago. Is it just because he’s still inside his head somehow, or is that really the truth? Was he just another hapless dumbass who happened to be born special enough that people thought that he was worth listening to? Is that all it is, in the end? If you strip away this stupid and useless power linking the two of them across time, if you disregard all the hard and secretive work done by his followers down the ages, all that effort to keep his memory alive, if you take away all the extraordinary acts of loyalty and grace by those who believed… is there anything left? Anything all except two mutants who should’ve died a hundred times over before they ever had a chance to change anything?

For some reason he’s reminded of Feferi’s crown disappearing into the darkness just now. If you throw away the crown, if you deny the legacy inherent in her royal blood, what does she have left? Since she just did, why does Karkat still keep turning his head to watch her?

Where is he really looking for answers?

For a moment he thinks that it really could be anyone standing on the platform instead of him. It all seems like a pantomime, and he just happens to be the guy who wandered onto the stage wearing the right costume. But no, because for better or worse, his ancestor had been the one they all believed in, hadn’t he? They’d written down his words, they’d passed them on, they’d worn his sign in secret and had waited for his successor. Someone who was special not because of his blood, but because of the circumstances surrounding it, circumstances they had all ended up creating in the first place. Someone whose very existence posed an opportunity for those around him to act against everything they’d been taught, to show mercy, to prove that they could be better.

Someone who gave others the chance to be heroes.

“The thing is,” he says, and his voice sounds unsteady and shrill. He falters. “Fuck. The truth is that I was even luckier that this unoriginal, vapid schmuck. Because I guess he really did change something, even if it wasn’t our whole fucked-up social order. I guess that’s a pretty tall order. So his rebellion was crushed, he was killed, his followers scattered, and I’m sure Her Imperious Condescension thought that was the end of it. But for whatever reason, some people kept believing, and they kept the whole thing alive. They really thought someone just like him would come along eventually, and whenever that happened, they’d finally have a chance to try again.”

He sighs, his eyes traveling across the faces of his friends on the platform far above. He stops at Tavros, remembering. “From what I’ve been told, even though they kept waiting for me to come along, it wasn’t as if they just sat around twiddling their globes like a bunch of idiots. I mean, if they’d been stupid they would all have been culled, right? The ones that stayed alive did so because they were smart, and secretive, and every single one of them were probably far fucking braver than I have ever managed to be. So obviously they knew that one single runty mutant wasn’t just going to fix everything for them, and that maybe there wouldn’t even be another Signless at all. Maybe some of them thought all of that was just stories for stupid wigglers, and I can’t say I blame them.” He breathes out explosively, looking down. “So it wasn’t as if they didn’t try. There have been other rebellions after, and if this one fails then fuck, there probably will be others. It’s either that or just accept things as they are now. For some, the latter will never be an option.”

This really isn’t much of a speech at all. But for some reason no one is interrupting him yet. Next to him, his ancestor inclines his head in agreement. “For us, me and my descendant, there being no option is more or less an accident of birth. To keep living is, for us, an act of rebellion in and of itself. For others, it’s the act of claiming their freedom that requires rebellion. For some, it’s showing compassion or kindness. For some, it’s simply refusing to take part in oppressing those below. Each presents different challenges, different risks. But I want to believe that our people will keep rejecting the grim destinies imposed on them.”

Who the fuck even talks like that? Well, it doesn’t matter, because at least he’s saying something useful, and Karkat supposes he’ll just have to be grateful even of that much. “The problem is that it’s hard. It’s really fucking hard. And the less of a choice you have, the harder it gets. It’s one thing to want to stay alive, or to not want to be turned into a living battery, or spend your whole miserable lifespan fighting just so that the Empress can add more planets to her collection, or fuck it, maybe you actually don’t want to slaughter droves of lowbloods just to keep them in their place, stranger fucking things have happened I guess. But if you’re on your own, you can do absolutely shitall with a side of fuckall about it. To achieve anything at all, you need allies you can trust, which is pretty hard when any time you even breathe something that sounds like dissent, you risk everything. If even one imperial shill finds out, that’s it, you and probably anyone you care about is walking cullbait. So for even one rebellion to take place, a lot of people who really know better need to be suicidally brave at the same time and actually have the steely fucking globes to try to do something. And even then… even then they have to be lucky.”

He can hear himself breathing as if he’s been running hard, his pusher drumming his pulse through his body like hammer blows. Next to him his ancestor smiles encouragingly, making a small gesture for him to continue. “And like I said, I have been. Trust me when I say you have no idea of the sheer amount of blindingly incomprehensible luck that was required for me to be here, even with a lot of otherwise intelligent and sensible people trying really hard to keep me alive.” Even at this distance, he can clearly see that Kanaya is hiding her expression behind her hand, and it’s honestly a tossup between it being an exasperated grimace or a sudden burst of silent laughter.

“Since I guess I’m just venting my gall sphincter at the lot of you at this point, I’m going to say that I’m not sure at all what kind of leader I’d make if we actually win. Honestly, I kind of hope that once that happens, enough people who aren’t complete fucking idiots will still be alive to sort shit out and come up with a system that works, and I sure as fuck am not certain that I qualify as one of them. But at this point, I have literally no fucking choice in being the one standing here in front of you. The p- Feferi said that I was born outside the hemospectrum and that this somehow means I’m not ruled by it, and with all due respect to her no longer royal highness, that’s the smelliest pile of fecal matter I have ever encountered. There is not one single troll who is more thoroughly ruled by the fucking hemospectrum than I am, because I literally have to oppose it to live. That’s why I’m here. That’s why it’s me. Because it wants me dead, and the only way for me to not end up tortured to death like this dumbfuck over here-” He gestures to the dumbfuck in question, who bows gracefully in recognition, winking at him. “-is to overthrow it. It’s not some kind of high-flying ideal, some idea of universal pity and understanding, it’s fucking personal. I want to live. I want my friends to live. I want the rebels to live. I know that’s not going to happen, some of us are going to have to die, but if we do I at least want it to mean something. I don’t want it to just be another chance for people who are far better than me to throw their lives away and then wait maybe hundreds more sweeps for some new mutant idiot who may or may not ever arrive. Maybe that doesn’t mean shit to the rest of you, I wouldn’t blame you… but you don’t want that either. Because next time it might be your fucking planet. Or maybe it already has been, what do I know? So… do you want it to keep happening? Or will you try to stop it? No matter what you say, we will try. All you have to decide is if you want us to actually have a chance.”

Finally, all words run out. He can feel his chest heaving, actually has to bend over for a moment to brace himself against his frond hinges and wheeze. Next to him, his ancestor is definitely glowing now, every single little mote that makes up his shape lighting up like a very small supernova. “Ah, I see that time has overtaken us… quite literally. I imagine I won’t remain stable for much longer.” He beams. “Then again, I’m not sure how much you needed me in the first place. I think you might’ve stolen the show.” He leans down, the tips of insubstantial fingers dancing their incandescence across Karkat’s cheek. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine a better descendant for the job. Pardon me for saying so, but I’m very proud of you. And of course, I will stay with you until we’re finally done. Just… less visibly so. I think perhaps you prefer it that way.”

There’s a sharp sound, inappropriately reminiscent of something inflated bursting, and the shining figure disintegrates into a cloud of swirling particles. They flow towards him and settle on his hair, his shoulders, gather in the folds of his clothes, and then one by one wink out, leaving nothing behind. Karkat straightens up awkwardly, too aware that the whole thing must seem hideously anticlimactic, and not sure if he actually managed to say what he needed to say. The eyes of the crowd mostly remain fixed on him, although he notices a few of them exchanging meaning glances as well, and his ears pick up a few hurried whispers.

Then a creature with some sort of elongated body like a slitherbeast moves, their many limbs moving in tandem and rustling across the platform as they make their way to the edge and stare down at him, watching him with stern green eyes. They’re wearing a purple uniform with yet another unknown insignia on what he’s going to be forced to think of as their torso, even if nothing really distinguishes it from the rest of the body.

“All those in favor,” they suddenly demand, in a voice that unexpectedly deep and melodious, if also indefinably cold and distant, “of helping these troll rebels in their attempt to overthrow their loathsome empire, vote now.”

There is a dreadful pause, and then one after another the glowing white platforms around them shade to bright blue. The creature who called for the vote watches impassively until almost every single one has changed, before raising one thin arm to their own chest, pressing a golden appendage to the insignia. Their three fellows on the platform do the same. Just like the others, their platform turns blue. “We don’t think it’s necessary to count the votes. Better if those who oppose the decision simply abstain, in the face of the overwhelming majority. We do not wish there to be any… discord.” The unmovable face is still turned toward Karkat, four eyes blinking slowly in unison. “A decision has been made. The function of the Assembly ends here. We are sure that the trolls will wish to discuss the details of their alliance with SKAIA, but this is not the place for it. However, on a more personal note, we do indeed wish them… luck. In time, we very much wish to join them.”

As a cheer goes up around them, Karkat finds himself so weak with relief that he doesn’t even fight it when Feferi picks him up and spins him around, laughing. Nothing feels real, and the feeling certainly isn’t helped when he finally is let down, dizzy and wobbly, only to find Dave waiting as nonchalantly as if they’d just decided to eat lunch together on a completely ordinary day. He smiles his almost-not-there smile and flings an arm around Karkat’s shoulders, tugging him back in the direction of their original platform. “Hey, don’t faint now. Apparently it’s time for our talk to the Calliopes, and I think everyone wants their fearless leader along for that. I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to get talked at some more, preferably without at any point getting to run to the bathroom and have a long, well-deserved piss. That’s just the kind of masochist I am.”

Karkat laughs weakly, elbowing him in the side. “Well, good. It’s just what you deserve.”

Notes:

ahahahaha so that was a PLOT DUMP and there will unsurprisingly be more PLOT in the next chapter too, but also idk actual dialogue about stuff between people. i'm trying my best ^^;;

Chapter 30: Möbius

Summary:

Exposition is thoroughly exposited, annoyingly vague physics are touched upon, the Big Bad is soundly dragged, and there's a history lesson in there somewhere too. Oh, and maybe some personal stuff happens.

Notes:

HELLO it has been ages, but at least this chapter is SO FUCKING LONG? it is also so fucking exposition-heavy guys, but look, alt-Callie is a fucking trip from start to finish and i'm doing my best.

also the last part of the chapter is THOROUGHLY NSFW. you'll notice when it starts.

”Here. My quarters.”

The block they’re led into is the strangest mix of austere and gaudy, the rather unnecessarily large space sparsely furnished with only the barest nods toward comfort, but with sweeping colorful murals decorating all available surfaces. Kanaya would attribute the discrepancy entirely to the obvious difference in personalities between the two Calliopes, except she did notice the graver of the two run her claws in what she might almost describe as an affectionate fashion across the mad, candy-colored spiral patterns decorating the small meal block area.

“We sent for a meal for all of you to enjoy while we speak,” the other Calliope supplies, tentatively clicking her claw tips together. “We know that the sort of nourishment we prefer tends to be a bit… bare bones for most other species.” She offers the trolls an apologetic smile. “Of course this place has frightfully little to offer in terms of Alternian cuisine, though we’ve tried at least to make some accommodations to allow for your preferred protein-rich diet. I hope that’s acceptable?”

“Whatever,” Karkat mutters, waving a hand dismissively. “Human food isn’t too fucking awful anyway.”

“Well, I’m glad – the least we can do is attempt to be gracious hosts.” Kanaya’s attention is caught as Rose shivers next to her for some reason, and her moment of distraction means that she almost jumps out of her skin as Calliope suddenly claps her hands together with a sharp crack. “Oh!” She turns to the prospitian and dersite who still hover close to their human companions “And we’ve got some vegetarian options as well. That’s what you prefer, isn’t it?”

Two nods, one hesitant but gracious, the other enthusiastic to the point where the dersite appears to vibrate slightly where he stands. Dave nudges him and mumbles something about remembering that everything green on the table might not be for eating, and gets an abashed titter in response. A sweet interaction, and so very different from their own rather brief experience of the same species, though Kanaya is given to understand that there are some significant difference in temper among the non-carnivorous of their number. She thinks back again to the spidery black digits of the one called Snowman clutching at Rose’s face, and then so much further back, to when the by then familiar raspy voice ended their last communication with a curt, “Sorry, kid.” The two-way screen had plunged into blackness, and she had watched the faintly glowing outline of Karkat’s eyes slowly widen in hurt and betrayal, as the reality of their situation dawned icy and unpleasant on their group. She had never fully trusted Slick, of course, though she wouldn’t go as far as to say that she’d expected the betrayal. Obviously, or she wouldn’t have let all of them walk so readily into the meteor trap.

She frowns slightly, watching Gamzee provide Tavros with a handhold as he eases himself down on the grass of the strange indoor lawnring, which seems to be the norm on this planet. He then slumps down next to Tavros with a lazy smile, offering him a propped-up knee to lean against, which Tavros accepts with a hesitant answering smile. They really have had no problems with Gamzee ever since the meteor, and the synthesized sopor the science crew had cooked up on the way here appears to be working. Maybe it’s uncharitable of her to still not trust him, to always feel like she’s waiting for the other stupid clown shoe to drop, but she can’t help it. Even though he wasn’t even the one who had hurt her, the only one during that miserable clusterfuck of a situation who got in what ought to have been a killing blow, she still gets the feeling deep down that this isn’t because he couldn’t have.

To her, with the advantage of having only heard part of the events relayed to her afterward, it had seemed like he’d been toying with them, chasing them through the darkness and scaring them stupid, but in the manner of a purrbeast keeping its prey alive because it’s more fun that way. He’d incapacitated those who attacked him, sure, but why throw Nepeta into a wall when he could just have snapped her spinal column like a twig? Nor had he done anything to Eridan, who had been out cold and unable to defend himself. It doesn’t add up.

She sighs, neatly smoothing down her skirt before sitting down as well. Whatever the reason, speculating doesn’t really help. It’s rather ironic, though… She’s not sure she would’ve known where to go once she woke up as a rainbow drinker, if Gamzee hadn’t wounded Feferi just enough to make sure she left a delicious- no, easily traceable trail of blood behind. Right when he finally had the group cornered, she was able to catch up with him, and the distraction of her extremely unexpected attack had allowed Vriska to get close enough to knock him senseless. On top of that, the very room they’d almost died in turned out to contain the machinery that made it possible to pilot the meteor out of there. If Gamzee hadn’t chased them, perhaps they never would have found it.

Funny, that.

The graver of the Calliopes points a small device at the air above the grass where most of them sit now, and a translucent platform materializes in front of them, presumably to serve as a table once the food arrives. The other one dithers for a moment before sitting down a little bit awkwardly at the edge of the group, gazing up at the version of herself that keeps standing. It’s… strange and confusing to watch them interact, half almost unaware of each other, as if they are merely an extension of each others’ bodies, half under the influence of some strange and immense tension, as if between two magnets with the same polarity being forced together.

Rose scoots a bit closer to her, making Kanaya consciously aware that she’d in fact sat down next to her a moment ago, and it says something about the strangeness of the situation that she’d barely taken any note. Either that, or she’s getting used to Rose’s presence as a constant in her life. That thought is like a warm and comforting pressure on her chest, even if it’s still followed by the uneasy thrill of the unknown.

Rose’s small hand slides into hers, perfect painted nails skidding across her skin, and Kanaya smiles.

“Can we begin?” Calliope’s voice isn’t impatient, rather the opposite, but somehow the steady, tempered patience of her tone sounds like an implied accusation. As if she has already waited far longer than most minds could countenance without slowly disintegrating under the pressure of years, and she’s prepared to wait just as long if she has to. Kanaya glances around the group around her, and though their expressions range from raptness to studied disinterest, from confused to calculating, they all seem to share a general sense of unease.

“Hey, we’re not about to stop you.” Dave’s voice does a great job at conveying a shrug without the actual gesture.

“Please do regale us with your tale, miss Calliope,” Jake adds, more politely.

“We’re on pins and fucking needles,” Dirk says flatly.

“At least some of us are.” Terezi leans forwards with a dangerous grin. “Please ignore the ungrateful slobs who can’t appreciate a good story, they’re not nearly as interesting as they think.”

“Very well.” Calliope doesn’t seem to care about the mixed reactions, only swipes her finger across the device in her hands, which now causes the lights to dim. Kanaya follows suit, promptly diminishing her own autoluminescence so as not to distract. In the relative gloom, the only stronger points of light now are the troll eyes, the floating table platform, and the wall murals, which are even more colorful and eye-catching in the dark. On her right, Dave mutters something about not having prepared himself for Ye Olde Powerpointe Presentation, whatever the fuck that even means, and he’s promptly elbowed into silence by Karkat.

“The few humans who know about us call us cherubs. I understand that this is a sort of joke which relates to an ancient religion – and it is not the first time we have been conflated with gods by lesser beings.” Both Vriska and Eridan bare their teeth and narrow their eyes, Equius clears his throat with a threatening rumble, John makes an incredulous little sound, and although it is more difficult to make out, Kanaya thinks she can see the muscles of Dirk’s jaw set. Rose raises an eyebrow, clearly amused. Karkat rolls his eyes, but the explosion Kanaya had expected doesn’t come; she supposes he’s rather used to being called lesser at this point. The seated Calliope looks deeply embarrassed, but the other one once again does not appear to notice. “But we are not gods. We are creatures of time.”

An image appears, hovering in midair, simply depicting a circle made up of two interlocking spirals of different colors. “When we are born, there is only one of us, albeit with two bodies. These two bodies perfectly share a consciousness, a will, a trajectory. But as the passage of time alters us, so differences creep in, unique conditions which shape our beings. In a less extreme sense, the same process holds true for all living things.” The two spirals separate and then twist themselves around each other in a familiar shape. “You start out being part of the DNA of such ancestors as you possess, then of whatever medium you gestate within, and finally, you are born as blank slates which only time will separate into individuals. At the point of birth, however you might define it, you are in a sense one and the same; you are perfectly generic. The passage of time will allow your specific circumstances – species, genetic makeup, location, socioeconomic background, culture, family, random chance – to differentiate you from all others, every second bringing you further away from uniformity. What separates us from other creatures is that we will always remember being one being, and the process is by necessity a lot slower. It is also much more… violent.” The two hovering strings snap apart, curling in on themselves.

“So… wwwait, hold up, so if I’m following here, are you saying that’s what you are?” Roxy tilts her head, gaze flitting from one Calliope to the other. “I mean, the two of you? You started out being one Calliope, and now you’ve become two?”

“No.” The seated Calliope shakes her head with a sad little smile. “When she- when I say that the process is violent, I’m afraid it’s a little bit more final than that.”

The other Calliope nods. “It’s a process of elimination. Once separation is complete, it is necessary for one of us to die.”

“Only it’s not that simple,” her other self immediately fills in. “Because as she- we said, we’re creatures of time. And time is not monolith, you see? Just like any other dimension, it is fractal, infinitely divisible. Every possibility affects it, splits it, creates something new. Of course, almost all splits are so small that they barely register at all, they will keep running side by side, and still affect each other, becoming part of one whole universe. But in an infinite universe, ‘almost all’ possibilities is a number which in itself is constantly approaching infinity, meaning that the number of universes which are parallel yet very distinct is nonetheless staggeringly large. See?”

“Thanks for catching us up on the basic physics of existence,” Dirk says impatiently. “Are we getting to the point anytime soon, or are we all supposed to settle down and raise families here before that happens?”

The Calliopes exchange a glance, then one looks down while the other one fixes Dirk with an unmoving stare. “The reason one of us has to die,” they intone, more or less in unison, “is so that the other one may live.”

“We simply cannot coexist in one universe.” Calliope shivers, claws running through the grass in front of her folded knees. “Because we are creatures of time, we have the ability to manipulate it at will. It is an incredibly dangerous ability, and we only ever use it to gently steer the universe we inhabit in the direction we desire.” She sighs, a sound of wind hollowing across the flat nothing of uninhabited badlands. “You might as well view us as a kind of parasite, or a virus, slowly replicating throughout the ever-increasing number of parallel universes, using our abilities to create the ideal conditions for our continued procreation.”

Kanaya can tell that the standing Calliope obviously disapproves of this description, but she does not interrupt. She only picks up where the other one trails off. “One creature controlling the trajectory of a universe will not necessarily affect it adversely – it might even benefit its inhabitants. However, if two of us were to exist side by side, two fully separate and fundamentally different forces which are fated to always be at odds with each other, then the very fabric of space and time is at risk.”

There is dead silence, apart from a faint crunching noise which Kanaya can’t identify.

“So, uh,” John says, looking pointedly from one to the other, “I think maybe we can see what the problem is. I mean, even if we’re not all that boned up on the basic physics of existence of whatever, I think practically all of us can count up to two.”

“If only we were the real problem,” says the seated one with a small, helpless laugh. “But I meant what I said. Even if our consciousness isn’t fully merged, we are both Calliope. Which is to say, I am Calliope, albeit with two bodies and some uniquely different circumstances. My goal isn’t divided, only my… methods. But I am making absolutely sure to only ever use my power together with, ah, myself. So long as this doesn’t change, there is no risk of the fundamental facts of this universe tearing between us.”

“Oh, delightful,” says Rose. “This is the point where we get to the Green Sun, I assume?”

Calliope inclines her head gravely. “Correct. As I said, the conditions of our existence is that once we have separated from our other half, we both die and live, win and lose. We contain the potential to do both, and in the battle that follows our final realization, which one we achieve creates two separate universes where each cherub can continue their existence.” The projected strands of color, which had been circling each other pointlessly for a while, once more snap together and then slowly start pulling apart like a zipper. “From the conditions which each different cherub supplies their own universe with, reality is shaped, much like how random mutations create new conditions for organisms.”

Or, Kanaya thinks a bit tartly, it could also be said to be more similar to how a virus invades a cell and supplies it with a new genome to create. That rather depends on the outcome for the organism in question, doesn’t it?

“This,” says Calliope, once more in perfect unison between the two bodies, “is not the universe in which I won.”

“Okay. So what the fuck are you doing here, then?” Karkat demands irritably, and Kanaya rather suspects that he is speaking for all of them. She taps the table in front of her, and notices that it’s in fact laden with food. It appears that no one has taken any notice of this at all except for the dersite and Terezi. The former is happily munching on celery sticks, which definitely explains those crunching noises, and the latter has made herself a sandwich, although she appears to still be listening carefully.

“I am the Calliope who won,” says the one standing. “I reaped the benefits of the immutable conditions of our existence, and my reward was a universe of my own.” For the first time, Kanaya thinks she can detect a note of irritation in her voice. “Or so the rules state. Except at the moment of my victory, I was plunged into nothing. A completely still universe, one in which the number of possibilities had reached infinity, each one equally possible, meaning change was not. A universe in which time, along with all other dimensions, was utterly meaningless.”

“Perfect entropy,” Jade breathes.

Calliope makes a sound which could almost be described as a laugh. “I assure you there is nothing perfect about such a state.” The other one hums in sympathy, her shoulders hunched. “For a time I stayed there, alone with the corpse of my slain brother. I would normally have consumed it, but what purpose would that serve? I was doomed to nonexistence, and at first I believed it was through my own wrongdoing. That somehow I had cemented the conditions of my own punishment. But it was not so.”

“Your… brother?” Kanaya ventures into the silence, glancing at the humans.

“I came to think of him as such,” admits the seated Calliope. “We are a solitary species, isolated from any context to call our own, and so we will construct ourselves from what we can observe of other species from a distance, furnishing our minds with whatever fancies appeal to us the most. The concept of siblings, shared by many species across the universe, seemed to be the most appropriate way of distinguishing between myself and… the other. Caliborn.”

“To greater or lesser extents, yes,” says the other Calliope, sounding not exactly disapproving, but perhaps a little bit superior. “As I dwelt within my dead universe, I came to theorize that my brother had in fact been the true reason for my misfortune. You see, our separation had happened rather unnaturally fast for our species, and had been even more vicious than what I suspect is the norm, though of course this is mere speculation. The more I considered the situation, however, the more certain I became. And at that point, I started to understand his plan. And it was monstrous.”

“There are taboos,” the other Calliope explains. “Our existence only works if we both agree on certain terms, do you see? The most obvious one is that we are not allowed to manipulate time to tamper with the outcome of our battle. If we try to before our separation, naturally this creates a whole bloody free-for-all which in the worst case will negate the universe we are in completely, and in the best case causes both of us to destroy each other. Most of the time, that’s exactly what happens.”

“But what happens,” Terezi says, wiping something that looks like grubsauce off her lower lip, “if one of you meddles after the battle.”

Once again the Calliopes look at each other, and the seated one looks very tired and very sad. “It has never been a problem before. After all, both survivors should have absolutely no reason to mess around with the conditions of their victory. As for the versions of us who do not win...” She shrugs. “Whatever happens to us after we die, we no longer have any power to affect what we left behind.” And now anger creeps into her voice. “But of course Caliborn does not care. He was always… particularly destructive, and quite frankly not very clever. I don’t even think he cares about creating the conditions necessary for him to procreate. That’s not what he’s doing.”

“What first made me understand his intentions is the fact that a universe such as the one I was given, completely stopped and isolated from all other, should be impossible. While other universes still exist, the interaction between their parallel conditions ought to provide enough patterns, however faint, within the chaos to create the conditions for new events. What is a pattern if not the means with which space and time affect chance, thereby establishing order? Entropy is chaos, and complete chaos can only exist in the absence of order.”

As Jake turns to give his moirail a completely mystified look, clearly out of his depth, and Eridan looks about to explode with impatience, the other Calliope cuts in. “Perhaps that is a bit too… ah, abstract? The point is that what happened was unnatural, which means that someone must have messed with things, you see? And the only one who could possibly have bollocksed up the timeline at the point of our battle had to be Caliborn. No one else has any reason to do so. And of course, to keep that universe in a dead state, he more or less has to keep negating all timelines that even remotely connected to it, destroying all possible outcomes except the one that allows his complete dominion. It’s like- like necrosis, rotting away at the fundaments of reality itself.”

“So his goal is… what?” Kanaya has a hard time holding her voice steady, but she’s determined to understand. “Is he actually trying to completely eradicate all other realities except for the one that he’s personally in charge of? But wouldn’t that mean-”

“-that he is ultimately,” Rose continues as her voice despite all effort fails, “going to create for himself exactly the same kind of state which he put you in? One in which nothing can ever change? Complete entropy? A state of what I can only describe, in the most poetic of terms which my family has come to master, as ‘fuckall going on’?”

“I did say he’s not very smart, didn’t I?” the seated Calliope demands somewhat tartly. “Not that I imagine he doesn’t understand that’s what he’s doing. He just doesn’t care. He wants to destroy everything.”

“Why?” Karkat explodes, looking around as if considering finding something to either throw or punch. “Why the screeching, bleeding, completely obliterated fuck would anyone possibly do something so spongecrushingly fucking stupid?! How- I- Is- Just- Just why?”

Another communion of spirits between the cherubs. They look a bit uneasy, either disturbed or possibly ashamed.

“Because it’s… fun.”

“Because he enjoys it.”

Kanaya has no idea which of them answered what.

“Okay, but hold up a moment,” Nepeta interjects, frowning. “You haven’t actually told us why you are both purrescent. I mean, if one of you is the one who lived and the other one is the one who died, then… I don’t want to seem rude, but why aren’t you dead?”

Calliope doesn’t seem offended by the question, just lets out a helpless little laugh. “Well, I was. Not that I remember it – I don’t even remember a battle or anything like that. It all just went dark, and then...” She glances at her other self.

“When I figured out what my brother was trying to do, I decided that the consequences of breaking the taboos which protect our existence were lesser than what would come to pass if he succeeded. So I traveled back in time, and I… arranged certain matters. One of the things I did was to bring my brother’s dead body with me, to have its functions restored and its wounds healed. His consciousness having long since left it, it was now an empty vessel, ready to be filled anew.”

“Oh,” Rose says, eyes widening slightly. Some emotion pulls at her lips, and Kanaya honestly cannot tell if it’s amusement or disgust. Maybe she’s just impressed?

“Yes,” Calliope says simply. “At the moment of the death of my other self, I arranged to have her consciousness transferred into the body I had prepared. Between two of us, we are stronger, which is an advantage I deemed necessary. Because while I do wish to stop my brother, I nonetheless cannot in good conscience bring myself to use my abilities the way he does, outright playing with the fates of untold numbers of worlds merely to achieve my goals. There is a reason, as I have explained, why more than one of us being present in a universe is disadvantageous, so if I were to abandon all rules and lower myself to the level of playing his game, the damage could be incalculable.”

“Which is why we need you!” the other Calliope chimes in happily.

“Okay, and what has that got to do with us?” Vriska demands, and then rolls her eyes when everyone turns to her in disbelief. “Fiiiiiiiine, I’m not an idiot, alright, I get that what’s happening has something to do with everyone, obviously, but you know what I fucking mean, alright? Why us specifically? Why the whole Green Sun bullshit? And since it’s obviously tied to the empire somehow, why the fuck is that?”

“The Green Sun,” supplies the milder of the two, “is an energy source. It is a means to an end. The larger the Sun grows, the more it twists time and space around its gravitational field. The goal, as we understand it, is to keep feeding that monstrosity until collapses into a black hole so massive, so powerful, that it will have the potential to affect every universe there is. Obviously to do so takes an enormous amount of resources, not to mention careful calculation and planning. Since my brother simply does not have the capacities required to achieve this, he needs an organization to do the dirty work for him. He supplies the brute force, using his powers to facilitate the rise of this organization, and in turn his underlings supply the ingenuity he desperately lacks, but needs to succeed.”

“But, um… I know this might, uh, be a stupid question, but I just can’t see why anyone would do that.” Despite the softening of the question into more of a passive statement, there’s at least a little hint of defiance in the tilt of Tavros’ jaw. “I mean, maybe your brother is just, er, absolutely capable of being this stupid, but I can’t see why the people working under him would help him completely destroy every single universe. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Feferi makes a tired sound, picking up a piece of fruit and fiddling with it, but not actually eating it. “Why do the shoaldiers of the empire follow orders? Do most of them reely know what they’re fighting for, or is it just that it’s easier to do as you’re told and maybe not be culled? I mean,” she makes a miserable little face, “if they were to find out that they were helping destroy the universe, would that change anything?”

“There’s that,” says the Calliope who is standing, moving the device in her hand across the projected image in the air and dissolving it. Instead, the logo of the Green Sun Corporation appears. “But this is only true to those who merely follow orders, those who do not make the plans. However, most living beings are… brief. Even those,” she nods at Feferi, “who are graced with lifespans most others would consider long, are like the blink of an eye compared with the lifespan of a universe. With the use of time manipulation, my brother has made sure that this plan of his has spanned countless such lifetimes in its entirety, and perhaps more will pass until he reaches his goal. So what do those who benefit from his actions here and now care what happens to their universe long after their own lives have ended?”

It’s not as if there isn’t any likeness to how the empire works in this either, Kanaya thinks, finally reaching for a bowl of some kind of meat in a thick sauce. It’s hard to rebel against enemies who are stronger and more long-lived than you, when it’s likely you won’t even be around to see the changes you’re trying to make. No wonder so many on the lower end of the spectrum feel so apathetic about the whole situation.

“As for why you in particular,” the seated Calliope says, “well, you are already deeply involved in this. The humans, of course, because you are some of the very few who have managed to do some actual damage against the Green Sun Corporation. And, well, the Green Sun Corporation has done some substantial damage to you in turn.” Calliope looks at Jade, but Kanaya is more concerned with the way Rose’s face goes so bland and unreadable, in a way which she can’t help but compare to that of her brothers. “And the trolls… well, for the same reason you are all here. You are the ones leading the revolution against your own species’ tyrannical empire, and therefore instrumental in foiling by brother once and for all.”

Kanaya is certain she will always vividly recall the sinking feeling she’d experienced at finding out that her ‘imaginary friend’ had been real and quite malevolent, and it’s happening again now. Except this time it’s not on a personal scale, not quite so easily summed up within the confines of her own experiences. Less an unsteady misstep in the dark, and more the sensation of the ground disintegrating completely beneath her feet. “Why?” she demands, fingers curling around a piece of bread until it’s crushed into an unappetizing doughy lump and a lot of crumbs. “Why is that?”

Both Calliopes sigh, and she can detect real regret in both their voices, not that it necessarily makes anything better. “Because my brother created the empire, of course.”

 

---

 

Feferi listens, claws digging slowly into her skin, not able to bring herself to eat even though the rest of the party appears to have finally caved to the lure of the laden table. She listens to the story of a virgin world and the primitive species which inhabited it, many million years ago.

The species started out as a sort of parasite, a fragile type of semi-aquatic insect inhabiting underground pools of water, attaching themselves to the stronger fauna which came there to drink. At first they were simply blood suckers, feeding off their hosts during the course of their lifetimes, and when they were old and frail they would use weak psychic signals to lead them back to their breeding pools. There their larvae would wait for the animals to die and rot before before devouring them. But with time it became clear that scavenging off what was left of their hosts’ meals meant an increased chance of the host not dying before its time, a fate that meant their parasites would perish as well, too weak on their own to make it back to the colony, and the larvae might starve as well.

The lack of predation strengthened their psychic connections with the animals, and the insects became able to steer their hosts away from danger. This in time led many species of animals to actively seek out their previous parasites for the protection they offered. It became part of their natural cycle of life to head for the insect breeding pools when they reached maturity, and return to them at the end of their lives.

It was naturally beneficial to the species to be able to live off as wide a variety of animals as possible, and as time passed, the insects adapted themselves to the kind of animal they attached themselves to, developing strategies necessary to survive. Those with weaker host animals developed telekinesis or the ability to control other animals in an effort to protect the creature upon which their survival depended. Those with stronger ones developed greater physical abilities, tougher bodies, or a propensity for great cunning, all in an effort to survive their own hosts. Some even managed to achieve a kind of telepathy that worked on their own species, to entice their hosts to devour them instead.

As the relationship grew more and more symbiotic, so the host animals began to evolve with their strange passengers, growing more dependent. A natural consequence of this was for the insects to match the lifespans of their hosts, and for the brood to produce more of those individuals which adhered to more prolific, shorter-lived species. As the underground caves thus became more crowded, the species and their hosts started venturing above ground, the only ones remaining being the ones tasked with tending to and protecting the Mother Grubs, since they were still their only means of procreation. The world up there was harsher, the new dangers many and varied, but the symbiotic pairs were expert adapters by now, and with time they made even this unforgiving environment their own.

At the outset the insects had all possessed the ability to survive underwater, and though most had lost it as it became increasingly redundant, some still retained it. They found new hosts in the oceans, where they would be protected from the harmful rays of the sun, but the violent competition and great pressures of the depths drove them to grow even fiercer and more hardy. The often anaerobic and cold environments they ended up inhabiting required slower and colder vascular systems, and their lifespans grew longer even than the more long-lived of their species on land.

Nevertheless, as they reached maturity, they would travel through a great network of underwater caves back to the Mother Grub which spawned them. At the right time, they would all return to her, to find themselves mates and to begin the cycle anew. Though very different, they were still one species, and they never forgot where they came from.

There they were; the Alternians, the trolls. Because their symbiosis required of each shade of blood to become highly specialized within their own particular niche, intelligence and a social structure more intricate than their original hivemind seemed practically inevitable as a survival mechanism. To communicate, to plan, to divide and conquer became a means to a less unpredictable existence. The stronger and more long-lived of the species became protectors of the more fragile multitude, who in turn adapted and evolved a lot faster, and were by nature more social and communicative because their host animals tended to live in larger colonies. Through their invaluable experience the species would lay the groundwork for social structures which could mitigate their more vicious and predatory behaviors, preventing them from destabilizing their communities. They even found ways of utilizing their competitive nature toward reproduction instead of mutual annihilation. With each new step, the fledgling society flourished.

They could have become anything. They weren’t perfect, but life has a way of taking imperfections and turning them into greater strengths. Their wide variety and the drive toward cooperation which their symbiosis naturally engendered made their potential practically infinite.

The stranger who came to their world agreed. But he didn’t see the beauty of their already intricate social structures, their newly emerging culture, their will to learn and grow into something greater. Instead he saw their differences, and how easily they could be used to divide them. In the partitioning of labor and skills he saw a hierarchy which was only waiting to be realized. He saw a species of intelligent predators which if conditioned the right way could be taught to be more ruthless than any other.

They were exactly what he’d been looking for.

Trolls, the less dominant of the two Calliopes says softly while passing Jade a large bowl full of plant matter, began as a species of parasites who learned mutualism and changed their ways. Their very process of becoming, their genesis, was to learn compassion and unity. But, the other Calliope says, still standing aside and watching the meal from a distance, the stranger who arrived at their young planet was not like that. He was an artificially created parasite, a computer virus, a cipher, an infiltrator. His mission was to find a species which would be suitable to bend to the purposes of the Green Sun, and once he found them, he set to his task with alacrity. Somehow he came to have in his possession a host animal more powerful than any before, one which was capable of destroying all sentient life on the planet on a whim, and then…

“We are still not entirely sure what happened,” Calliope says, glancing along the table at Feferi and ducking her head apologetically. “It’s impossible to tell if the mutation which produces the empress bloodline already existed at the time, or if he was responsible for it. Did he specifically create your lusus to bond with a mutant who did not have one, or did he somehow cause a suitable matching mutation to take place within the Mother Grub? The latter might make a bit more sense, but would no doubt be harder to achieve.”

Feferi meets Karkat’s gaze across the table, and after a moment of silence their lips somehow manage to twitch into a pair of matching smiles; feeble and sad, but smiles nonetheless. “I think I prefer the former,” she says. “So let’s go with that one, okay?”

There was apparently only one little snag in the stranger’s plan to turn the troll species into a perfect tool for his master. Because while it was true that they had evolved past existing as one seamless hivemind, they nonetheless all retained a connection to the collective consciousness they were part of, and even worse, this could allow them access to the memories, thoughts and feelings of their species all the way back to their very beginning. To the stranger, who relied on manipulating the species through deceit, causing bloodshed and caste tensions wherever he appeared, this was naturally a risk, especially since he occasionally still had to rely on the help of his master. Over time he noticed how the likeness of his master began to appear in tales and art, as well of that of a troll girl he had taken in as young and forced into his service, and while he didn’t mind the fear and awe they begot, the fact that they were now this firmly embedded in troll genetic memory was worrying.

As the millennia flowed past, it became clear that one blood caste in particular were much more consciously attuned to the hivemind. Their psychic abilities were more passive than others of their species, allowing them to still connect to the collective memories while they were asleep, despite all efforts the stranger had made to prevent this. He found that they had become aware that their species was being tampered with, that there was an invisible hand behind the senseless violence and endless strife of their past, and that they were preparing in secret to strike back against this mastermind.

Of course, once he found out, all hope was lost. At this point it was frighteningly easy to make the Condesce believe that they were in fact conspiring against her instead, and she wiped them from history in a tide of blood.

Karkat’s eating utensil wobbles and then drops to his plate, as he at last seems to grasp the implications of what’s being said. “Fuck,” he breathes, eyes wide and vulnerable. “Were they- Is that what- That was my blood caste?”

“In a sense.” The bossier Calliope has at some point circled around so she’s standing behind him, and her voice makes him jump and let out a displeased little screeching sound. “The Condesce made absolutely sure that no limeblood would ever be born again by systemically culling every wiggler born over centuries – but since they were on the lower end of the hemospectrum, after a certain point it simply wasn’t possible for any genetic material to remain in any Mother Grub. The shorter the lifespan, the faster the stability of the genetic code deteriorates in the slurry. Unless, of course, the material has mutated. In such an eventuality, it’s impossible to predict how long it may persist.”

“Yeah, I think we can say that ‘impossible to predict’ is a pretty accurate statement,” Dave quips, and they can all see him nudging Karkat with his shoe, since the table is pretty much completely see-through. “Never anything predictable about this guy at all. No one has ever managed to figure out what the fuck he’s going to do n-” Here Dave interrupts himself to neatly catch the fruit Karkat had flung at his face between his teeth, keeping steady eye contact as he bites into it. Karkat’s face flushes bright red, and he grabs his glass of water in an apparent attempt to cover up his embarrassment, only to predictably choke violently since he practically tries to inhale it. People without fully formed gills definitely shouldn’t try that.

“So when your ancestor was born-” Calliope says to Karkat, as if graciously deciding not to notice his coughing and spluttering. She skewers something that definitely is just a raw, bloody piece of meat and takes a delicate bite of it before continuing. “-he soon started experiencing visions of the past, recalling the memories first of his ancestors and then of the other acts of manipulation and betrayal throughout history. Since he lived as a refugee, traveling the road and sleeping where he could, he was unaffected by the means employed by the stranger to suppress the genetic memories of the rest of his people. The poor thing saw how they suffered around him, and his visions had convinced him that it was needless, that they hadn’t always lived this way. He understood that outside influences had made his world the way it was, but that didn’t change that Her Imperious Condescension and the highbloods were complicit. He had no means of getting to the outsider, but if the empire was what the invisible manipulator had wanted to create all along, then tearing it down meant that sooner or later he’d come to him.”

It makes sense. Feferi knows it makes sense. What else could he have done? But still... With so much less than what the rebels have managed to scrounge up now, with only his growing support on the home planet and the knowledge that he had right and truth on his side – which while no doubt very satisfying had never been much defense against, for example, the dread forces of the Assaultandbatallion – he had decided to take on the might of the empire. She would ask what kind of desperation it would take for someone to decide that something like that was their only recourse, but she’s starting to become too personally familiar with the sensation to really question it. Desperation, true desperation, can make people do all kinds of things. Like fight an ancient monster with their bare hands, or murder their own lusus. Compared to that, letting go of her own crown and letting it spin into the darkness had been so easy, embarrassingly easy. If anything, it had been a relief.

Sometimes, she wonders if Her Imperious Condescension ever feels like that too. If she truly still enjoys her position, or if she has long since become the slave of her own tyranny, unable to do anything differently after so many thousands of years. Not that this would entitle her to any sympathy; it really doesn’t matter why you slaughter and subjugate billions, why you take away the only homes people have in the universe and make your own people suffer for a goal which they will never even be part of. No matter what drives you, if it’s satisfaction and pride, habit and boredom, even desperation and terror because you’re in fact the servant of some crazed skull alien who wants to destroy the whole universe. It’s all the same to those you hurt, isn’t it? It’s not an excuse. Even so, Feferi wonders. If she’s just weak, to feel this exhausted after only ten sweeps as the heiress, fighting for a cause she truly believes in and leading people she respects and wanted the best for. Would it have been easier, if she just did not care about them?

If she had not cared about so many other things more, would it have been harder to let go of the crown?

And if she had been doing this alone, could she ever have brought herself to kill Gl’bgolyb?

She can’t help but wonder how her ancestor had reacted to what she’d done. After all, it wasn’t just her lusus, was it? Hmm. So according to human customs, wouldn’t that make the Condesce both her mother and her sister? That’s funny, she thinks, but the thought doesn’t even make her smile. She can’t say she feels anything at all, except tired and guilty, and she’s been feeling that ever since they left Muspell. Who cares what the Condesce felt about it, anyway? Congratulations, Your Imperial Condescension, now you’re one of the innumerable trolls who have lost their lusus to murder by another troll. Considering what Feferi and Eridan had been forced to do to keep that very same lusus fed, isn’t this some kind of justice? Either that, or some kind of joke? Fuck it, it’s not even as if Feferi is the first troll to murder her lusus anyway.

She glances at Vriska for the first time since she abdicated, and isn’t entirely surprised to find her gaze fixed on her, narrow and cold. She’d half expected her dissent, her anger, at the very least her jeering scorn at that moment, and she’s not certain why she’d felt half disappointed when only silence followed. She’s also really not sure what she had been expecting now apart from being the target of her attention, but being the focal point of this intense scrutiny and almost physical sense of disdain nonetheless rattles her. She feels her gills throb as the series of blood pushers along her spine beat harder for a moment, and then start to slow down as if in anticipation, her muscles tensing. Oh. Wait, is this-?

She’s completely lost track of the conversation now. The Calliope who remains stubbornly standing has once again activated the hologram image in the air, now showing an array of different molecular structures, and some kind of diagram. Feferi thinks they might be discussing sopor slime, but she’s not sure why, and honestly she feels like it can wait. Hadn’t one of the Calliopes said something about how rooms had been arranged for them on the planet? A quick inquiry confirms that yes, they’ll be staying on the lower floor of the building they’re in overnight, and their injured friends and Jane are being transported in as well.

She makes a flimsy excuse to leave, and though Roxy gives her a fleeting, worried look, nobody stops her as she quickly gets to her feet and exits the room. She might as well get a bit of a head start down the corridor, onto the transportalizer pad, toward the door with her name neatly glowing on a small plaque, there, right in front of-

She does not get a chance to open it, has barely raised her hand in the direction of the knob, but at least when she’s violently hit in the back with Vriska’s full weight, it’s a relief that the door is in fact open and almost immediately gives way as they crash into it. Feferi spins mid-fall and manages to kick it shut behind herself, and she will freely admit to a deep sense of satisfaction when this results in her landing heavily right on top of the significantly skinnier girl on her back. Vriska lets out a breathless, infuriated hiss, grabbing her by her already unraveling braids and yanking her head back, and only a moment later her fangs are sinking into Feferi’s shoulder. That’s honestly pretty presumptuous, since all she’s done to reciprocate so far is to weigh more, but then again that’s Vriska for you. It’s not like she was expecting anything else.

Reaching back and grabbing the back of Vriska’s jacket, she rolls onto her knees and flings the other girl over her shoulder and across the room. She launches herself after her to try to pin her down more properly, but Vriska twists in the air like a purrbeast and skitters around her, using Feferi’s own momentum to slam her face-first against the wall. Of course she’d never be able to hold her in place there, not with her inferior strength and weight, but it’s not like that’s the purpose of the exercise anyway. Only a moment later, Vriska has squeezed herself in between Feferi and the wall, all teeth and lips and harsh, stuttering breaths. Her hands and claws tear at the ceremonial regalia that Feferi is still wearing, shredding silk as if it were tissue paper, snapping the leather fastenings of the armor. Since she won’t be wearing it ever again anyway, Feferi lets her, though she apologizes to Kanaya in her mind. Then she focuses on leaving as many marks as she can on Vriska’s jaw and neck as the blueblood messily undresses her as if her personal vendetta is more against her clothes than her. She’d make a joke about that, but honestly she can feel Vriska’s whole body surging and writhing against hers with every kiss, every bite, so she’s not going to waste her mouth on talking.

Once she’s unclothed, however, and she relocates one hand from Vriska’s shoulder to start tearing at her clothes in turn, Vriska grabs her wrist in a vice grip and glares at her. “Don’t you fucking dare tear them, princess,” she hisses, the words so distorted by vox that it’s almost a bit hard to understand them.

“Oh waterver, remora them yourself then if it’s that important,” Feferi snarls back, moving her hand to Vriska’s throat instead and applying just enough pressure that she’ll feel it. “I’m waiting.”

Vriska’s lips curl into a superior sneer, as if the grip doesn’t bother her at all, but if she thinks Feferi can’t see how moisture is starting to soak right through the fabric of her pants, she’s delusional. Her hands are impressively steady as she unbuttons them, she’ll give her that, and she doesn’t even seem particularly embarrassed about the blue stains smeared all the way down the inside of her narrow thighs – Feferi doesn’t want to know what she looks like.

When Vriska moves her hand toward her underwear, however, there’s just a trace of a tremble, a sudden tension, and it’s not the first time Feferi has seen this. It was like that with Sollux too. With him she had asked if he was sure, had moved slower, but that kind of thing would be a downright insult to a kismesis – and not the good kind of insult. Vriska in particular would probably never forgive her. She might even leave. So instead she rolls her eyes and just reaches past her, pulling her underwear down without a moment of hesitation, though she takes exaggerated care not to rip anything, and still slowly enough that Vriska can stop her if she really wants. It's a delicate balance. Showing too much caution would be offensive, but of course she doesn't actually want to do something that is unwelcome. In this particular situation, she has to admit that Vriska's complete inability to hold in any protest or criticism actually is really comforting.

"Is it too much?" she demands, light and teasing despite the snarl that wants to climb up her throat.

"Wishful thinking, princess." She rolls her eyes, every pupil blown and intense. "What's taking you so long, anyway?"

Well, that sounds like clear permission to proceed. Even so, Vriska stiffens slightly a moment later, eyes flitting downwards in a way that Feferi might almost call self-conscious, but once again she pretends not to notice it at all. It just doesn’t strike her as the kind of weakness that it would be appropriate to use. She just brings their bodies together and thinks well, how different can it be? Well, it is different, but not really because of any pretty superficial physical difference; it just makes sense that a caliginous union would feel different than a flushed one. More heat than warmth, more urgency and obviously less tenderness, but every little bit as intimate. It’s a confusing, conflicted, ongoing vehicle crash kind of sensation, with every little bit of resentment and anger suddenly dredging itself up and making itself known. The bitch had been undermining and backtalking her ever since they first met, making every damn decision into a battle, always throwing her ego in the way of progress, as if she’s physically incapable of just shutting up and listening to someone else for a change. And the worst part is that she’s so fucking useful, so competent, so persistently smart but only in one very specific way, and that way has everything to do with winning and nothing at all to do with being a nice or even a pleasant person to be around and-

Oh. Oh. Oh . She’s fully inside her now, curling up and coiling as she flexes up and rubs against every sensitive spot she can find, and Feferi almost loses her footing for a moment. Then she pushes her own stalks around and inside, feeling Vriska shiver and listening to her curse harshly as they interlock, their bodies aligning into one thing. It feels so impossibly good, the whole thing somehow enhanced by Vriska sinking her teeth in the sensitive skin right below her gills, her fingers once more busying themselves with yanking hard at her hair. Feferi growls and grabs the back of Vriska’s thighs, lifting her off the ground and grinding hard against her body. The combined sensory onslaught once more almost undoes her, causing her legs to tremble beneath her, her claws sinking viciously into Vriska’s ass. Maybe they ought to move over to the bed? But Feferi very much doubts that there’s a bucket anywhere in the room, and why make a mess on the clean bedding? Vriska might be tall and muscular, but she’s certainly not too heavy to support for as long as they need, and even taking her occasionally wobbly legs into consideration, Feferi is sure she can manage it.

Twisting and surging against her in a continuous motion, as if trying to press closer than their muscles, bones and skin will allow, she spreads her stalks wide within Vriska and smiles sweetly when Vriska bangs her head against the wall and lets out a sharp shout, back arching. Then she snarls and buries her claws in Feferi’s scalp, somehow managing a whiplike flicking motion inside her that almost has her sobbing with pleasure.

“Weren’t… expecting that… huh?”

“Well, I’m a little impressed,” Feferi hisses back, “since I’m fairly certain you’ve never, ever done this before.”

“Oh please, as if practicing on whiny nerds even c-c-uhhhounts.”

“So you don’t count either, is that what you’re ssssssshhhit, oh fuck...”

Despite in fact having plenty of practice, thank you, it definitely still feels like a first, Feferi can’t actually deny that. It’s probably entirely possible to learn how to pace yourself with a kismesis as well, but it’s really obvious that this is going to be the stereotypical fast and messy first hatefuck that's a staple in like half those movies Karkat loves. Vriska tries to say something else, but she’s barely even coherent anymore, and it comes off as disjointed curses and insults with little rhyme or reason, her voice collapsing into harsh bursts of chittering and sharp, high-pitched growls, her face taut and her eyes closed.

“Don’t you- don’t you dare- if you stop I’ll-” She tilts her head back and bares her teeth, her whole body shaking spasmodically as the climax starts building. Sometime in the future, Feferi vows, she will stop and see exactly what she’s threatening her with, and if she’s actually prepared to carry it out. But right now she couldn’t even if she wanted to, and she definitely doesn’t. Instead she presses her face against Vriska’s bared throat, breathing in the sweat and arousal which clings to her t-shirt and jacket, plants her legs wider and leans against the wall for support, and then lets her self control unravel all in one go.

She’s barely aware of her own voice climbing to a hoarse screech as she jerks violently against Vriska and flows into her, contracting within her and around her as the pleasure literally pours out of her. Vriska is clawing helplessly on her back, shoulders and chest, shivering so violently that it’s quite hard to hold onto her now that everything is suddenly really slippery, but then Feferi feels her release flowing across her and she freezes instead, legs tightening around her. Her eyes flutter closed, and she lets out a surprisingly low, almost melodious moan.

Feferi can’t help smiling as her shaking legs finally give out, but slowly, allowing the two of them to slide down to the floor in one gasping and trembling mess of bleeding scratches, tangled hair and slippery limbs. The floor, of course, is covered in a bright purple mix of their genetic material and a lot of torn strips of silk and random pieces of armor, but that’s alright. It’s not too cold, at least to their relatively cold-blooded touch, and right now anywhere would do. Obviously you can’t cuddle with your kismesis, but Feferi doesn’t think it’s too bad if she just allows Vriska to drape over her like a crumpled piece of clothing for a little while.

She notices that she’d managed to kick her pants out of the splatter zone at some point, and that’s just so typical that she lets out a sudden giggle. Her throat hurts, but she doesn’t care, she’ll giggle as much as she wants. As a bonus it makes Vriska open one eye and glare at her. Really, that makes it perfect.

And she's grateful, of course she is. This way, she won't have to think for a while.

Notes:

i swear to god that there won't be a chapter this full of Talking About Plot as this one ever again, now we're heading on To Action or at the very least To The Rebels which is pretty cool too. and THEN to action and serious buttock-prodding.

also don't even fucking TALK to me about trying to write about two characters who are in fact the same character with the same name while not having the luxury of homestuck's chat logs and color coding? i have seen Hell.

Chapter 31: The waiting

Summary:

Some people do better than others at being family. Almost everyone is equally bad at getting to the point.

Notes:

ayyy here we go! a little slower than i'd like, but a lot better than it could be. also longer than i was expecting but i couldn't find anything i'd like to cut or move, so it's going to have to be what it is <3

also wtf i just broke 200000 words? what is even going onnnn? well, i’ve been writing this fic for almost exactly two years, that’s what’s going on. wild, right? and i’m so grateful to those who have stuck with it, you mean the world!

“Is this supposed to be a joke?”

“Hmm?” Rose looks up, and sees Karkat staring down at his newly acquired SKAIA uniform with naked disgust. Her lips quirk unprompted into a smile, because it’s not hard to pinpoint the source of her brother-in-law’s considerable ire at the present. “No, I don’t think so,” she says, and despite her amusement she does genuinely mean that. As he lets out a low hiss of derision and mistrust, she momentarily stops fiddling with the coordinates for their journey, spinning around in her chair. “I can see why you might have reason to doubt my sincerity, but I wish to reiterate that the assignments to the forces are taken with a quite frankly embarrassing amount of gravity around here.” She allows a brief grin. “Though since you seem determined to wring an admission from my cold, dead hands if you have to, I will say that sometimes... they are a bit on the nose.”

Karkat runs a hand over the vivid emblem at the center of his chest. The blazing shade of the insignia is echoed across the left side of his torso and all the way down his left sleeve, picked out in details on his collar and boots, starkly contrasted against rusty brown. He shudders, and Rose realizes that underneath the miffed reaction, there is definitely something a bit more serious present. Lacing her fingers together and leaning her chin on them, she watches Karkat’s face more carefully, noticing how his eyes keep skittering off the bright red colour as if it’s painful to him. It’s almost exactly the same shade as the red flecks settling into his own grey irises, as if no matter how he avoids his gaze, he cannot help having the mocking colour reflect itself off his eyes like a shameful admission.

“You know, even after researching your species thoroughly, and hearing that moving speech you and your ancestor made-” She smiles at the twitch of naked annoyance. “- I think perhaps it’s simply impossible for a human to truly understand the complexity of troll feelings regarding their blood colour. Of course we have our own arbitrary measures of worth which have heavily affected dominant cultural paradigms across many, many centuries, and though we often consider that we as a society have moved past such distinctions, I think our brief stint on Muspell has proven that humanity is always ready to revert to such spurious nonsense at the drop of even the most precarious piece of headgear.” She can see him shifting impatiently, his gaze wary, and she doesn’t wish to lose his attention if she can help it. So she relents with a small smile. “I’m sorry, I think perhaps I’m getting needlessly wordy, and I might even be in danger of digressing egregiously from the point I’m trying to make.”

Karkat rolls his eyes, but the restive tension seems to ease at least a little from his posture, allowing him to slump into an empty chair as well. “I blame Kanaya. I never thought it’d be fucking possible to be too well matched in a quadrant, but if you both keep encouraging each other in your mutual orgiastic showdown in who can use the most polysyllables while being intolerably snarky and coy, I might have to revise my opinion.” As Rose almost laughs at the self-deprecating joke she catches a hint of in that mouthful of a sentence, Karkat’s mouth seems to soften slightly. Not even by the most generous standards can it be called a smile, but it’s definitely not a frown. He points at his eyes, then at her. “This gesture is meant to indicate that you have been put on notice, in case that wasn’t clear.”

“Fascinating,” Rose says with a completely straight face. “I suppose what I meant to say is… there are many systems of power and privilege with which factions of humanity has judged themselves against each other, but they have frequently been idiosyncratic, interacting in highly unpredictable and hard-to-understand ways. Not to say there aren’t obvious complexities and contradictions within the hemospectrum, but the system is nonetheless comprehensive and universal in a way which humans simply are not equipped to truly fathom.”

Pressing her hand against the friction control dial on her chair, Rose scoots it closer to his, until she’s able to reach out and place two fingers gently on the emblem on his uniform. Karkat tenses initially, but rather quickly relaxes, eyes slowly widening. It’s funny, really, how according to her own customs and culture, this boy is in fact to be considered part of her family at this point. But still she’d had to actively override her instinctive apprehension of overstepping boundaries just to touch him, and even as he seems to accept it, she has to keep fighting a deeply ingrained sense that this is somehow inappropriate.

She’s gotten the sense from Kanaya that humans are the far more tactile species, because trolls seem to have such an aversion of instigating any behavior that is either seen as too private or too aggressive – or both – in public settings. But she thinks perhaps Kanaya’s pool of test humans is a little bit limited, because there’s a world of difference between how she and her friends interact with each other, and the way they interact with the rest of the world.

Is that accurate? Or is it that Rose is instead heavily biased by her own experiences? When she considers it more carefully, perhaps the rest of humanity is a lot more at ease and tactile in general, and her guarded attitude toward everyone outside her tiny sphere says more about her own particular upbringing, rather than humanity in general. Her mother is sporadic with her physical affection, either distant in one sense or the other, or completely overwhelmingly there whenever she remembers to be. Her uncle… well, from what she can tell he never touches anyone willingly unless he’s fighting them.

And look at her and her siblings now. She suspects all four of them view touch in terms of invasion, of threat, and of uncertain factors. Even Roxy, who is by far the most at ease with touching, obviously has to carefully control how far she takes it – perhaps because she is a lot more aware of how much she craves it.Is there some sort of sliding scale, some way of proving the direct correlation between how touch starved each one of them is to how threatened they feel by getting what they want? That would certainly explain a lot about Dirk.

Then add to that four other kids, one who brought herself up feral and alone on an abandoned space station, one who was stranded far away from all human contact on an alien planet for years, and the two who by virtue of being the ‘normal’ kids in the bunch have to constantly act as steadying influences on the rest and pretend not to resent it… well, it’s a mess. So maybe Rose doesn’t actually know anything about how normal humans interact at all.

Karkat hesitantly touches her hand, and even more than that, she thinks perhaps his look of concern is what snaps her violently back to reality. She’d been trying to say something, trying to make some kind of point. Trying to establish a connection which she knows she should have prioritized sooner, because she can’t keep pretending like she doesn’t hold a grudge against him for the way he involuntarily invaded her private sphere. The other trolls, well, they can still be thought of as reluctant allies or new acquaintances, maybe even potential friends, but Karkat had entered her life every bit as inorganically as Kanaya had. With her wife it is easier, she can think of her as a challenge and an opportunity, can find it rewarding to engage with her and open up to her, because there is some very clear mutual benefit involved in both of them doing so. With Karkat, she cannot directly affect the situation between him and Dave at all, and yet cannot maintain the comfortable apathy she would like, so she had simply ignored him. He’s so fundamentally different from her, certainly not a person she would seek out or try to connect with voluntarily... nor is he, if she’s being honest, the sort of person she would have picked for Dave, if it was up to her.

But it’s not. None of it is, no matter how she may twist it. She breathes out tiredly, feeling a light ache settle in the area between her temples and her jaw. She taps the symbol on Karkat’s chest, trying to pick up her lost thread. “It’s mortifying to have to apologize for the second time during this conversation. It’s not like me at all. Usually I’m far more unreasonable.”

There’s definitely a twitch of not-exactly-laughter there. “Do feel free to be your authentic inconsiderate self around me. I’m extremely fucking used to it.”

“That’s very magnanimous, great leader.” The jibe hits home, she can see it, but he just rolls his eyes and lets out a string of irritated clicks in response. “What I meant, I suppose, is that I didn’t intent to come off as cavalier about your discomfort. I simply have no point of reference for how this,” another tap on the Blood symbol, “makes you feel. I don’t understand, I might never be able to, but… I could try to.”

He squints at her a bit suspiciously. “Is this your psychology thing? Dave has warned me about your psychology thing.”

Rose laughs softly, taking back her hand and curling it over the backrest of her chair, allowing her cheek to settle gently against it. “Yes and no, I suppose. Yes, it’s true that I try the patience of my family and friends by playing up the way I’m always striving to analyze them. But I don’t always do it to aggravate them – only sometimes. And even when I do, I’m usually still trying to understand. I want to understand. That has always been an integral part of my character.”

But like an outsider, even among those she loves. Jake had once told her that he often finds himself still thinking of people the way he used to once analyze the behaviors of animals, isolating the mannerisms which might be threatening or conflict with his interests somehow, always ready to run away if he’s not certain. She can understand that. She’s not as skittish as Jake is, but she thinks she understands him. They’re both not very honest people, they always have contingency plans, and they look upon humanity like someone trying to construct a manual for an intricate piece of machinery by finding out what makes it tick, or perhaps write a guide about the customs of a completely alien culture. Always slightly removed. It’s safer that way.

Karkat, a person with probably more intuitive understanding of others in one slightly curved nail – claw? – meets her gaze steadily for a second or two, then shrugs his angular shoulders. The gesture doesn’t look entirely casual, more like someone trying to forcefully remove an itch or shake themselves dry, but she’ll take it. “Fine.” He sighs, sinking further down in his seat and tilting his head back in theatrical exasperation. “Analyze away, then. I have it on good authority that it’s way too fucking easy to figure my mind out anyway, so you’ll probably get bored quickly.”

“Vriska’s opinion?” Rose asks, curious despite herself.
“No, fuck that and fuck her. I don’t care if my thoughts are easy to read, using psychic powers counts as cheating – and that goes for you too, by the way.”

Rose holds up her free hand in a placating gesture. “I wouldn’t dream of it. So who, then?”

His gaze flits away in such a painfully transparent way, she almost feels a bit sorry for him. “Terezi.”

“Ah.” Well, there’s obviously some History with a capital H there, but she’s not so stupid that she’ll try to push him on it. She’s trying to understand, not completely alienate him. Besides, whatever it is, it seems to be thoroughly in the past. “So since the actual threat of being found out is particularly moot at this point, I would assume that the source of your distress is rooted more in the cultural implications of your blood colour…?”

He lets out a short, sharp laugh. “That’s… fuck, I don’t even know where to start with that. Look, from the way you put it – I don’t know if this is some glitch in translation because our cultures have almost jack bulgflaying shit in common, or if you’re adopting that particular brand of tweeness which seems to plague every breath of those who involve themselves with politics – but the grab-and-grub is still that you think I feel like I’ve committed some kind of universal no-no, or like I’m simply considered… I don’t know, inferior because of the way I was born.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Everyone is!” That’s an explosion, frustrated and harsh, and the force of it is clearly almost instantly regretted. His cheeks flush, he looks down, fingers curling in an aimless gesture. “Being inferior is normal, alright? Everyone on the whole fucking hemospectrum apart from Her Imperious Condescension is by definition inferior. To different degrees, sure, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority occupies the very bottom rungs of that existence. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about being as inferior as it’s possible to be, or only slightly better than that. Aradia is one of billions upon billions, and Tavros, and Sollux… I’m not saying it’s right, I mean fucking obviously it’s not, but it’s how things are for practically everyone.” Now his hand his clutching the emblem, scrunching it up until it disappears completely into the fist of one shaking hand.

“Ah,” says Rose. She doesn’t say she understands, because that statement wouldn’t be much less empty than it was a moment ago, but she wants him to at least know that she’s following him. Following his words. It’s a popular occupation around here.

“But I… I don’t exist. That’s not some kind of existential hoofbeast shit, it’s not up for debate, that’s just an irrefutable fact in our society. I don’t exist, and every second I persist in pretending like I do, every breath I steal from people who do, isn’t even some kind of silly taboo or- or fuck, I don’t know, some kind of sin or transgression. It just this tiny, insignificant error in the universe which sooner or later will correct itself through my inevitable death. It’s not personal. The hemospectrum functions through hatred and resentment and pain and fear and- and though it dictates every single aspect of my pitiful existence, I don’t even get to be part of all that. I’m nothing. And when I die, it won’t even mean anything. It’s just the universe editing out a mistake.”

Rose did notice the phrasing there, ‘every breath I steal’… So that particular incident had cut him a lot deeper than he wishes to acknowledge, then. Hardly surprising, really. But she has more pressing issues to consider, because Karkat’s voice grows more strained with every word, until he abruptly spins his chair away from hers. She stares at the smooth metal of the backrest, listening to the peculiar hiccuping breaths of someone who hadn’t expected their emotions to overcome them so quickly, and is now trying really hard not to embarrass themselves by crying. She considers saying something, perhaps pointing out that if his ancestor had proven anything, then it was that his death doesn’t have to mean nothing. But no, what kind of comfort is that to offer to someone who is scared and tired? Oh, it’s alright, you might think your existence means nothing now, but just wait until you die. You too can become a tragic martyr! It doesn’t really have a great ring to it, does it? She tries to think what Roxy or maybe even Dave would say or do in a situation like this. But Dave obviously has options at his disposal which would just be weird if Rose tried to replicate them, and Roxy’s way offering unaffected sympathy and support would probably come off as disingenuous if Rose tried them.

Hmm. For all that Karkat is indeed a fairly straightforward person, this is a lot harder than she had anticipated.

“As for there being no threat of being found out anymore,” Karkat continues, a brittle attempt at amusement only making his voice sound even thinner and more worn, “that’s great! I mean really, it’s fantastic not have to worry about whether a whole extremely murderous civilization will figure out that I’m way overdue for culling! Sure, that’s just another way of saying that everyone already knows and I can really get into worrying about when they’ll manage to cull me instead, but hey, at least it removes some of the uncertainty from the equation.”

His voice sounds a bit muffled. As Rose hesitantly scoots her chair a little further forward, she discovers that he has buried his face in his hands. The shaking of his shoulders is a bit too fast to be sobs. “But strangely enough that doesn’t change anything. Spending your whole life losing your fucking shit in terror every time you get a paper cut or a tiny rip in your shirt, hiding under the fucking floor every time you hear drone wings and knowing that if they find you there’s nowhere left to run to… it does something to your sponge, alright? Dave- Dave said it was like someone had broken the little switches in him so all he knows how to do when he’s scared is to attack. It’s like that, except instead of attacking or doing anything fucking useful, I spent my whole childhood learning to stay invisible, because that was the only way of surviving. So forgive me if wearing a huge sign saying ‘LOOK AT MY PUTRID MUTANT BLOOD’ on my chest is making me feel the tinsiest fucking bit on edge.”

Rose wouldn’t say that’s necessarily true, the thing about Dave. She thinks perhaps he conflates ‘not running’ with ‘fighting’, because that’s how her uncle wants him to think, but they’re not the same thing. While she has indeed seen him fighting like a cornered animal – she absently touches the faint scar on her head – just as often he looks much more like Karkat does now. It’s the rigid posture of prey as it catches the scent of a predator, of a tiny thing in the grass as wings momentarily blot out the sun, of something trapped in the middle of a road as the headlights descend on its widened eyes and pounding heart. Please, please don’t see me. Please, please take me away from here. Stalling, stalling for time. Oh grandma, what big teeth you have.

They have both been made to bleed too often to want to draw blood themselves.

Swinging her chair around until her knees are practically touching his, she traps her frozen quarry, but she doesn’t go for the throat. She’s perhaps not the most instinctively kind person around, but she knows how to pick her moments, and even when it doesn’t come naturally to her to feel compassion she can nonetheless think compassionate thoughts. She leans forward, careful not to initiate any touch which would probably be misconstrued at the moment, but giving Karkat very little room to look anywhere except at her. He glowers at her from between his fingers, clearly startled, and then slowly lowers his hands. There’s moisture making his dense eyelashes cling to each other, but no other suggestion of tears.

“I… understand what you’re saying, even if I can’t fully imagine it.” When they’re both standing, she’s only slightly taller than him, meaning that when she’s leaned forward like this she kind of has to tilt her chin up to meet his gaze. “And I’ll preemptively dispense of any trite and quite frankly condescending aspirations to find something to say which is miraculously poignant enough to make it all okay. Probably I won’t even make you feel better, but..” She shrugs, letting out a small laugh. “I imagine Dave doesn’t talk much about why the fuck we were staying on that backwater planet?”

He shakes his head mutely, and Rose nods. “I can’t really account for all of it, it’s so intensely personal to others apart from me, but for my part… well, it’s because I decided to die meaningfully.” She can feel the shape of her own smile cutting into something under her skin. “As you heard in Scratch’s recorded message, I destroyed him through an act of self-sacrifice that should have taken my life. Instead, it took Jake’s arm.”

He opens his mouth, but seems to turn whatever his initial response should be into a slow, careful exhalation. “Well, fuck.” Not eloquent, but gratifying in its simplicity. “I suppose I should thank you for that, huh? I mean, it was hard to tell through all the maddening physics riddles, but I’m pretty sure the Calliopes were implying that he was the complete and utter crevicestain who ‘infiltrated’ or ‘poisoned’ our whole damn civilization, even if it was on behalf of someone else. So… thanks for killing the fuck out of him.”

“You’re welcome,” she replies graciously. “Honestly at that point, it was an intensely personal affair for me. Vengeance isn’t very original as far as motivations go, but it’s very… motivating. And in my defense, I was also trying to save a friend. That’s altruistic enough to make up for a lot… but not all of it.”

He watches her with a strange mix of wariness and sympathy, as if he’s not entirely sure where this is going, but he’s honestly happy enough to listen to her and forget about his own miserable situation. She can’t say she blames him.

Rose closes her eyes, and she remembers. This time around it’s not the crazy way the world had pivoted around her as the ship began to fall into the gravitational field of Scratch’s moon, nor the intentions that had led her to that point, nor the triumph as Scratch swallowed the bait and really believed her to be in a different ship. No, now she remembers lying on the floor of the bridge, weak and asphyxiated from the fumes filtering in from the burning parts of the ship. The air was hazy, the windows invisible, and all that she could see of the sight screens were bright lights and a hazy green smudge. Then, one by one, they popped and sizzled into darkness.

She remembers thinking that Jake was going to be too late, and the thought had left her feeling suddenly cold. She’s not sure if it was fear of death or just the loneliness of dying alone, but whatever it was it made her try to push herself up off the floor, a feeble attempt to escape the inevitable. Of course she immediately collapsed, retching and coughing, and she knew then as she thought she had before that she was going to die. Really die. She was going to lose… everything.

When Jake’s strong arms lifted her off the sickly warm rubber floor, god, though she had no strength at all in her limbs she had clung to him until her muscles trembled. She remembers her tears, like a leak in some fundamental part of her that needed to be repaired, making her feel defective, on her way of becoming utterly wrecked. His voice was distorted by the speakers on his helmet, and all he could say over and over was that she was safe, that it was going to be okay, that he was getting her out… and she had believed him. Even though she’d sabotaged the teleport, even though everything around them seemed to be on fire, she’d believed him. She’d wanted to believe him.

“I’m not sure I believe there’s a single meaningful death,” she says, far too abruptly. “There are meaningful circumstances to every person, and to the sacrifices they’ve made to get to that point, and even to the goal they might be sacrificing themselves for. But death in itself doesn’t mean anything. Death... is where all meaning stops.”

She’d remembered so vividly how she’d cried against Jake’s chest, so fully immersed in the idea of the memory that it’s only when Karkat looks down on the glittering bead of water on his uniform that Rose realizes what’s happening to her. She dries the moisture off her cheek in one quick movement, not sure where that came from and annoyed with herself for not sticking to her own script. “So I suppose you’re right in that your death will just be just a minuscule state change in the universe. Regardless of how you see it, if it’s from the point of view of your empire removing an insignificant glitch in the matrix, or the view of your followers seeing a beloved leader martyr himself for the cause, or even just some guy dying for reasons that have nothing at all to do with this war, perhaps passing away uneventfully in his sleep… it’s all the same at that point.”

She offers him a pale smile, wondering how the hell the conversation had ended up here. She’d definitely intended him to be the vulnerable one, not the other way around. She hadn’t meant for the simple act of recalling her almost-death to affect her so much. “It’s such a revoltingly saccharine cliché to say that what you do with your time alive is what matters, but I regretfully have to admit that this doesn’t make it any less true. Even if you don’t exist in the eyes of the empire, even if you feel like you shouldn’t… well, here you are. You don’t have to steal your breaths from anyone. You could take life from others so that you can keep living, yes, that’s certainly a choice… but that’s all it is. You can also choose not to. You can choose to keep existing the way you want to, and there’s nothing they can do about it. I heartily recommend it, in fact. I think perhaps we should all be a bit more deliberate about choosing to live. Nowadays, I try to make a point of it.”

She feels her smile unexpectedly widen, suddenly and completely unforced. “And you can also choose not to wear that damn uniform as soon as we leave this place. It’s really just an honorary designation, because SKAIA officials like to bestow them upon everyone they feel is acting for them in an official capacity. In other words, unless you want it to be something else, you are free to view it as a nugatory and irrelevant gesture.”

There’s an incredibly awkward moment when they just stare at each other, painfully aware that they have both opened up far too much to someone they don’t even really consider a friend. Rose can’t even tell for certain if this whole ordeal has really served a purpose, if it will actually bring them closer or even make her tolerate Karkat more forthwith. She tries to think of something to say, but no, she’s already talked plenty. She thinks he can make an effort this time around. Though he looks like he might be on the verge of just getting up and walking out, and if he wants to she’s not going to stop him. Maybe she’ll try again later, who knows.

Then Karkat looks momentarily distracted, like someone listening to his name being called in another room, even if she can hear no one near them. He tenses up slightly, then relaxes and rolls his eyes. Reaching out, he gives her shoulder the most awkward pat she might ever have received, and that’s coming from someone who grew up with Dirk. “This is the acceptable human gesture, isn’t it?” he demands a bit testily. “Of an appropriate level of completely platonic emotional support between people who regard themselves as ‘bros’, a term which usually indicates non-romantic fondness by invoking the idea of a familial relationship.”

Rose has to hold back a laugh, fearing it might actually come out as a giggle if she let it. “Yes,” she says, doing a terrible job at feigning solemnity. “You have cracked the cultural code. Well done.”

“Oh, fuck you,” he says almost casually, and then his hand lingers for a moment on her shoulder, giving it a light squeeze before letting go. Weirdly enough, that actually is very comforting. “Thank you for the… shit, I don’t know, should I call it a ‘pep talk’, or is that on a full on torso pillar curling level of cringingly inappropriate?”
“Oh, it absolutely is. But I think I like it.”

“Fine, thanks for that. And again for killing that smug globe-headed fuck. And I guess…” He grimaces. “...I know it sounds fucking stupid, but thanks for not being dead I guess. For all that I question her taste in absolutely batshit girls, I think Kanaya could’ve done much, much worse than you for a matesprit.”

So that is how he sees her. As Kanaya’s proper matesprit, not just as her ‘human wife’. Huh.

“And I-” He glances down on the uniform again, his gaze still not holding quite steady, but with a sense of determination that wasn’t there before. “-I don’t have to like what I am, or be proud of it, because… well, because I’m attempting to be realistic here, and I’ve done enough pathetic blustering and faking confidence I don’t fucking have in my life already. But I think I’m done with being ashamed of it. Or at least I’ll try to be. That’s going to have to be good enough for now.”

“It doesn’t sound too bad,” Rose murmurs.

“I- yeah. I guess it doesn’t.” His cheeks colour faintly in bewilderment. “I think it’s a bit easier now, knowing that- that- fuck, that even if I don’t exist according to the empire, I’m here because something used to exist before. Not just my ancestor, but… before that. Even if their blood didn’t look the same as mine, I’m here because they existed. I know that now. It probably sounds pretty fucking sad, holding on to actually having a blood caste even though they were all wiped out, but… I guess I’m fine with that.”

She thinks, then, about the photograph of her mother she still keeps in her room, not hidden in a drawer so much as put to rest there. So she’ll always know where to find it. And she thinks of childhood memories that still mean something, even if they’ve been tainted by new and awful revelations. She thinks of the word ‘family’, which by all rights shouldn’t mean anything but still does. She thinks of what it means to be saved.

“No,” she says slowly, meeting his gaze steadily. “No, I… I understand.”

 

---

 

Dave hadn’t really considered how fucking cramped the ship really is with everyone on it to start with, telling himself that it was a lot more roomy than the SKAIA trainee dorms or all the cramped and often heavily impromptu places he’d been spending nights or even weeks at since. After being confined to a tent with four other dudes, wedged between John and Jake – the latter of whom had been awkwardly attempting not to infringe on Dirk’s personal space to the point where Dirk basically had half the tent to himself – more than once, this arrangement really should be nothing. If anything, the sheer amount of space Dave and his team were normally afforded on their ship was a bit of an excessive luxury, no doubt owing in no small way to the celebrity status of the crew and their special designation within SKAIA’s forces. The ship had previously felt so ridiculously spacious that it often actually got on his nerves, because it meant he had to keep seeking people out whenever being alone was slowly starting to give him the creeping horrors, and thereby constantly announce to everyone what a needy sap he is deep down.

But the thing is, he supposes, that it was kind of a long while since the trainee dorms, and back then, cramped as they were, they had seemed like a relief in light of being the first time in his life when he was completely free of his uncle’s ‘training’ for a while. Rose and Dirk had unsurprisingly suffered more there, and Jake hadn’t done so great with the forced proximity of a lot of strangers either, but Dave had found that he could mostly just roll with it. And ever since then, he’d spent his time almost exclusively in the company of his own team, people who feel so comfortable to him that he wore their presence like his uniform, every interaction seeming like just another function of his autonomic nervous system. Even if some of them still require privacy at times, Dave is embarrassingly aware that if they didn’t, he’d be able to spend every waking hour in their company and probably never feel particularly stifled by it. Not even really spending time together but just being in the same place, in the manner of some deep sea creature which in the absence of everything else has evolved to subsist on warmth alone, unthinkingly attaching itself to its source and holding on for dear life.

...So first of all, spending this much time with someone who makes fish puns all the time is clearly unhealthy, let’s add that to the list of how it’s a lot more unmanageable to suddenly have to deal with the twelve trolls now sharing their living space. So Dave still isn’t really someone who needs a lot of space to himself, but it’s more the actively learning to relate to all these new faces and hardly ever having time just to himself and his friends that keeps being a challenge. It’s the restructuring of what he has rather than a sense of actively being robbed of it. On Muspell he’d just coped with the changes, already so far out of his context that constantly being forced further away from his comfort zone hadn’t seemed all that surprising after a while. He supposes that some part of his brain had just decided that everything beyond a certain point in his life was just more uncontrollable bullshit getting thrown in his face, and all he could do was double down and bear it. Like taking a beating, sooner or later the blows would stop one way or another.

The weeks spent traveling to the Core had been different. He was back on the ship, back on a mission, back in his life as he’d once known it, but his sense of ‘normal’ remained absent. He and Karkat were already pretty settled in each others’ company, but it was still strange to walk into his room and find him already there, to have him walking in and out of rooms without knocking, and everything looks slightly different because Karkat can’t stand the casual clutter which is Dave’s default state of existence. It’s not his space anymore, it’s theirs, and what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?

It’s been almost three months of traveling from the Core now, taking detours or stopping completely in a seemingly random pattern as they try to navigate to the rebel base without arousing suspicion or somehow being followed. Hal is getting more and more snappish about the method, and like everyone else Dave is thoroughly fine with leaving Dirk and Sollux to butt heads with him about it, occasionally getting Jade to talk him around when nothing else works.

The precarious social situation on the ship is more or less the same, and everywhere Dave goes seems to always be already occupied with at least one troll. Adding their alien interpersonal dynamics to that only makes everything that much more prickly. He walks into their food preparation area only to find Terezi and Vriska sharing a table, and he doesn’t take much notice at first as he makes himself a sandwich, before he slowly starts to become aware that they’re throwing him some very pointed glances, their conversation having practically stopped. Apparently he’d walked into some exclusive moirail thing without even noticing, and they’re emphatically waiting for him to leave.

Still, it’s better than sharing a space with Vriska and Feferi instead. It’s already hideously fucking awkward to try to ignore how two people can’t stand each other, without their antipathy being about one step and a half away from foreplay. He realizes that it probably isn’t that much different from hanging out with any other couple, and he’s probably being unnecessarily sensitive about it, but something about blackrom just rubs him the wrong way.

It all just feels so… messy somehow. Emotionally, he supposes. It’s his whole gang and their complicated pasts and all the trolls and their fucked-up history, and it’s all converging in this great big tangle of interspecies alliances, friendships, romances, and just everyday ordinary tension. It’s affecting them all. John is showing signs of that strange mix of apathy and impatience that always crops up when he feels like he’s not moving, like he’s not solving anything. Jake is doing the world’s most precarious balancing act between two of the most self-destructive people on the ship, having seemingly never actually made a conscious decision to put himself in that position as far as Dave can tell, and he doesn’t envy him in the slightest. Roxy is… well, he doesn’t know. She seems fine, really, but they can all tell that something is happening there and maybe, ugh, fuck, maybe he just doesn’t want it to, to be honest. He doesn’t want her pulled into that particular knot of troll relationships, is that so weird? Not wanting his little sister, the last one of his siblings so far to not be to some degree involved in something like that, to end up in the same mess the rest of them? He doesn’t think that’s too weird. It’s not some kind of gross macho kind of attempt to stand guard over his sister’s virtue – shit, the less he knows about that, the better – or perform that age-old slapstick posturing with shotguns etc, it’s just… Well, it would be nice if she could be in a relationship where she might have a chance to know what the fuck is going on, that’s all. But firstly that’s not up to him, and secondly, he has no idea if that’s actually possible, trolls or no trolls.

Anyway, that’s the situation, and there’s little reprieve from it. If he wants to use the gym, it’s a sure bet that either Equius or Nepeta are there. The former is awkward but not a bad workout partner, provided he’s kept away from anything too breakable and remembers to wipe down the equipment after use. Nepeta… is not unwelcoming, never unkind, but Dave has this strange creeping feeling that she somehow treats him differently than the rest of the humans. When he pops his head in now, in the process of wandering restlessly from room to room, he finds her hunched over the tablet in her lap, the pinkish light of it seeming to wash out her face. She looks up and gives Dave a blank look before she seems to remember herself, giving him a small wave. He waves back, and then backs out without a word.

If he wants to unwind and watch a movie, it’s almost inevitable that he’s going to have to interact with Tavros and Gamzee. While the two of them will definitely be among the friendliest and easiest to get along with of the trolls, prolonged exposure to even one of them is kind of grating, nevermind both. Something about how the former will tie himself in a knot to not have to disagree with anyone, unless you push him far enough to become irrationally contrary instead, while the latter will just relentlessly support any opinion you might express, no matter how stupid.

Regardless of where one might go, though, Gamzee’s presence is in evidence all over the ship. He has a tendency of leaving food just about everywhere, drawing strange trails of discarded snack bars and half-drunk cans of soda wherever he rambles, and the same goes for the synthesized slime. At least in the dining area the constant clutter of jars and empty pie tins are not out of place, but along with the food it feels like there might be random smears of the stuff in just about every room. Dave spots one almost by the ceiling as his aimless rambling continues, far up enough that he wouldn’t be able to reach without jumping, so he ignores it. At one point he had found Sollux staring fixedly at one of them for a long while, before finally letting out an irritable sigh and wiping it away. “It fucking comes to something,” he’d muttered, “when you’re almost tempted to lick that vile stuff. Maybe that way I might get a decent night’s sleep.”

Karkat had let out a hollow laugh, which earned him the strangest look of mixed sympathy and intense irritation from Sollux. Dave thinks it’s not just them. All the trolls are affected to the complete lack of their normal sleeping arrangements, and even if they’re not all having prophetic dreams – at least he hasn’t heard anything about it – they sure are all getting pretty jumpy.

On top of that, there’s the matter of Calliope. That is to say, one of her. At least it’s the more personable of the two of them, coming with them to ‘strictly observe’. When Dave had asked why they won’t both go, she’d laughed a bit nervously and said, “Oh, she never leaves.” He’d made note of that, of the heavy implication that at least one of them had been at the Core this entire time, and it’s not hard to put the pieces together. After all, it’s kind of conspicuous that SKAIA seems to have appeared out of nowhere just in time – ha. ha. – to oppose the Green Sun Corporation. Dave can’t say he likes this conclusion, because it’s just another way in which he’s apparently not allowed to have any fucking agency in this whole mess, but there it is. What are you even supposed to do to guard your free will against a time-travelling species of monsters whose whole existence circles around manipulating entire universes?

At least Calliope doesn’t actually have to sleep, so they don’t have to allocate a specific space for her. She seems happy enough to drift around, usually attaching herself to one of the girls, or to just sit absolutely still for hours as she draws. Yes, she does in fact seem solely focused on drawing her fellow passengers and their interactions, and yes, that is in fact kind of creepy, but she seems to be genuinely unaware of this fact, so it’s hard to actually get angry about it. Especially for Dave, who is in possession of a couple of sketch books which he’s not going to show to anyone , for no particular reason that anyone needs to know about.

Anyway, the point is… He sighs, rubbing his forehead and trying to corral his rambling thoughts into some manner of cohesive patterns, but just like his meandering wanderings through the spaceship it seems like he’s not going to be able to accomplish anything with them no matter how he tries. The point is that it’s all been a fucking trial and it’s far from over. The point is he’s kind of tired. The point is that when the whole point is to save the universe and stop a genocidal empire, it’s really fucking hard to feel like anything else has much of a point at all, but maybe in some ways that’s kind of freeing? It’s difficult to get too neurotic about some teenage-slash-early-twenties drama when the stakes are that high. Hopefully.

He’s about to turn around when he finds that the dining area already has one occupant, but changes his mind when he sees it’s Kanaya. Kanaya is cool. It’s weird to think that his first impression of her had been intimidating and kind of cold. But to be fair, at the time he’d been under the impression that he was going to have to marry her, and if that’s how things had played out… well, suffice it to say he wouldn’t feel nearly as much at ease around her as he does now. Thank god Feferi had made that particular ultimatum, that Kanaya had requested it, that Karkat hadn’t objected, that it had somehow been accepted… He’s even willing to offer approximately one micron of gratitude to his uncle for shutting down all protests.

She looks up at him with a very fleeting look of irritation before she starts to fold up whatever it is she’s sewing, but Dave waves a hand at her to stop. “It’s cool, keep doing... whatever that is. I just came here to not actually spend time with anyone anyway.”

Her lips quirk in a small smile. “Is that so? Should I attempt to make myself less noticeable then?”

“Nah.” Most of the lights are out, just the muted leading lights around the door and along the walls, so Kanaya is providing illumination for herself with her soft white glow. It’s not very strong, because her night-adapted eyes probably don’t even need it, and it’s probably mostly because Kanaya just doesn’t like the dark much. The fact that she in spite of this hadn’t turned on any other lights tells Dave that he probably isn’t the only one seeking out some manner of social respite. “So, uh… do you know if we’re any closer now? I gotta be honest with you, I’ve kind of checked out completely from making any kind of useful decisions or taking in pertinent information. I’m leaving that to people who are at least occasionally competent, cause I kind of figure that if they’ll need me for something then a lot of people will probably already be shouting and I’ll notice. That’s kind of how the Time forces work, anyway.”

Her fangs flash in another smile as she once more bends over her work. “Well, I wasn’t assigned to Time, but I think I can understand the impulse.”

“Oh, right. What were you again?”

“Space. I hope you don’t mind me not wearing the uniform, but it’s simply a bit… colourless for my tastes.”

“Literally don’t give a shit. It doesn’t really mean much anyway, since we’re not actually a proper unit under conventional leadership. I mean, if we were doing this that way, it would mean that John would outrank literally everyone since he has seniority, and that’d get kind of cumbersome fast.”

She nods her understanding, splaying her long fingers across the fabric to chase away a couple of wrinkles. She always seems to be doing something with her hands, and Dave finds it kind of comforting. “Nevertheless, I have at least kept up with some of the flow of information despite not interfering much with the process of actively directing our route. Last I heard, we were in fact very close. I got the impression from Rose that we’re practically on top of the location.”

“Oh.” He sits down next to her. “Okay, you gotta hold on for a moment because I fully expected either something hella vague or just more bad news, so it’s gonna take me a moment to readjust to this completely unforeseen twist.”

“I will wait patiently until you’ve managed to somehow overcome this shocking new development,” Kanaya says, and Dave realizes that there’s a warm note of sarcastic humor tinting her words. He could almost wipe away a tear of pride at how much Rose is managing to corrupt her… or maybe he’s just getting to know her well enough to notice when she’s joking now. Either way they sit in companionable silence for a while, their faces turned towards the windowed wall lining the back of the dining area, even though there’s not much to see out there. They appear to be inside some kind of molecular cloud, shifting darkly around the ship as it passes. Occasionally there’s a tiny flash as small pieces of debris are vaporized by the ship’s shields, or a much duller glow of skittering electricity lighting up the swirling gas and dust in the murky distance.

“So uh… once we’re there, what’s the next step, do you think?”

“Hmm.” Kanaya is quiet for a moment, rethreading a needle. “I’m guessing we’ll lay low until until we have gathered enough information to make our next move. If that will be infiltration or something more direct, I do not know, but the plan more or less seems to loosely be to use what we know to gain any kind of possible advantage on the empire, and then use the Her Imperious Condescension’s weapons and reach to foil the plans of the Green Sun. That’s the impression I’ve gotten, anyway.”

“...so. Absolutely stupidly reckless and most likely doomed to fail, huh?”

“Yes, that does sound accurate.”

“Well, it’s nice to be doing something I’m good at.”

“Likewise.”

They smile at each other, the faint tilt to his lips coming surprisingly easily to Dave. He still doesn’t know what to make of this much larger group of people he’s been involuntarily been made a part of, but some of them really aren’t so bad.

“I don’t intend to be intrusive-” Kanaya says all of a sudden, and Dave instinctively reacts to her moment of hesitation as a natural point to interrupt.

“Well, then it’s fine. Accidental intrusiveness is a lot more lovable, so I’m contractually obligated not to fault you for it.”

She gives him a steady look across the many folds of her handiwork, and it shuts him up. “Please do not be cute with me, Dave. I was going to say that while I do not wish to intrude, I find that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while… why do you and Karkat still wear the rings?”

Dave flinches slightly, definitely not prepared for this particular turn in the conversation, and glances down guiltily on the black band circling his ring finger. This question again. It’s the first time anyone has asked him out loud, but it’s not like he doesn’t keep wondering too.

“Please do not think that I am accusing or interrogating you. I really do mean it as a simple question in good faith. I would like you to explain it to me, if you can.”

Dave glances at the ring Kanaya is wearing, where the elegant lavender teardrop shape is glittering in the light of her skin. He shrugs, but the answer ‘I don’t know’ doesn’t quite manage to form on his lips. It’s not like he does know, not exactly, but somehow that answer still seems empty and pointless. “It’s just… well, obviously we’re not like you and Rose, so I can see why it looks weird, and honestly I have no idea why he keeps wearing it. But to me, it’s not like we’re suddenly going to get unmarried if I take it off, I guess? By which I mean, I don’t think that would accomplish something that being far away from that planet isn’t doing already. Being out here means that no one is really going to make us live together or make a show of proper matrimonial behavior in the interest of chilling out a diplomatic situation that’s already gotten so far out of hand, it’s probably at escape velocity at this point, shooting straight out of gravity.” He breathes out quickly, not quite a laugh. “Am I making any sense?”

“Some,” Kanaya says, a little more curtly than before, her face inscrutable. Her hands are no longer moving. “So you’re saying you’re still wearing it because there’s no particular reason to not wear it?”

“No, not really. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s no compelling reason to take it off, and-” He breathes in deeply, steeling himself to say something that really shouldn’t be so fucking hard to get out there, but it still is. “-and I want to wear it. That is, as far as I can tell. I keep seeing it on me and thinking about taking it off and every time I think nah, you know what, why should I? The ring is staying right the fuck where it is, until someone can explain to me why the fuck it shouldn’t. And I think that means that I want to keep it on, but I guess I’m not actually an expert at understanding what I feel and especially what I want because quite frankly during the course of my whole life, no one’s ever told me that what I want actually matters. It’s always been about what I have to do, what’s the best thing to do, what’s the smart thing to do, what’s the right thing to do. Which I get because all those things really are important, but I guess compared to all that, ‘want’ was never really a topic up for discussion.” He tilts his head back, eyes half closing, watching through his eyelashes as a series of lightning flashes moves diagonally across the black expanse outside the ship. “I’m working on it, I guess, but for now I think it’s easier to just figure out what I don’t want. And I don’t want to take the ring off, so I don’t.”

He half expects the same clipped tone as before, because he’s pretty sure it has a lot to do with her being protective over Karkat, and his answer isn’t exactly fantastic. But for some reason her words come out soft and low, something about her tone reminding him of his mother in her more introspective moments. “I see,” she says, and then reaches out and gives his hand a small, friendly squeeze. “Well, then I think you should keep it on.”

He has no idea what to say to that, so he’s quite relieved when the ship unexpectedly seems to change its course, and there’s a faint sense of vertigo as the internal gravity stabilizers adjust to the sudden dip. “We’re here,” Hal’s voice announces abruptly. “I’d say fucking finally, but it seems inconsiderate considering the possibility that y’all will have infinitely briefer lifespans than I, and therefore the time we’ve wasted is by definition a lot more valuable to you. My condolences. Get ready to either face your own mortality or simply disembark, what do I care.”

“...Did your brother program that thing so that he would seem so much more chipper and manageable by comparison?” Kanaya demands after a moment of mildly appalled silence.

“If he did, I think making sure it tortures him more than anyone else was a mistake,” Dave shoots back, getting up. “Come on.”

"How serendipitous that I was just finished, then," she says somewhat cryptically, bundling up the fabric in her hands and joining him on the way to the main airlock.

Seems he was right about everyone else feeling the weight of the wait as well, because they’re all suited up and ready to get off the ship in a matter of minutes. Kanaya leaves his side to go fuss over Karkat. Overall, there’s a strange hush over the trolls, which isn’t very surprising when he thinks about it. This is kind of it. This is the rebellion they’ve been working with this whole time, but from what Dave can tell they’ve never actually had a chance to meet up with the rest of them before this point. It’s kind of a historical moment… or at least it will be, if they don’t all end up dying.

Apparently they’re given clearance to exit their vessel, because the doors suddenly slide up, letting in a gust of surprisingly warm air. All Dave can see around them are windowless walls made from some black material, suggesting a bunker or similar, but the space is well lit and the bustle surrounding them looks organized. There are guards pointedly holding weapons all around them, sure, but they seem more wary than belligerent. Nonetheless, the trolls in their group look on edge, and Dave remembers Karkat telling him how it’s a deeply ingrained in every young troll to mistrust all strange adult trolls on sight. Even though the members of their group are old enough that most of them would be considered mature, he supposes that’s not going away anytime soon, especially since their last encounter with other adult trolls involved ambush and violence.

As they start filing out, a skinny and kind of shabbily dressed troll detaches herself from a cluster of others and starts walking toward them, vaguely waving an object that looks like a coffee mug in their general direction. Unlike other trolls Dave has seen so far, she genuinely looks old, and though she’s survived this far it’s clear life hasn’t been very kind to her. Troll hair doesn’t seem to go white with age, but there’s a distinct translucence to her horns. One of them is chipped, and she has a pretty dramatic scar down her cheek and neck. Nevertheless, she manages to drag up a tired smile from somewhere, slightly lopsided but seemingly genuine.

“More refugees looking to become recruits, is it? It’s fine, we’ll have you processed in a while and you can-” The seemingly exhausted drag of her voice suddenly fades into nothing and her face goes sharp as she stops, her right hand darting to a very simple but effective looking gun holstered to her side. Her eyes are fixed first on Eridan, then on Gamzee, clearly assessing a situation she expects to turn violent. Then her gaze seems to register the humans, and her expression starts to dissolve into confusion. Finally she lands on Feferi, and her hand falls limply to her side once more. Looking dazed, she takes a sip from her mug and just stares.

“What the…?”

“Hello!” The former princess offers her a bright, comforting smile, or at least as comforting as a smile full of multiple rows of razor sharp teeth can get. “Sorry for the somewhat unannounced arriwhale, but you could say we’ve had some troububble getting here and we didn’t want to bring it with us. That's why we had to be the tiniest bit cagey with the details. Sooo… am I right in assuming that you’re Tyzias?”

It seems to take the older troll a moment to reconnect with reality, and even then she sounds like she’s not entirely sure. “Yes. And you’re...”

“The former heiress, now. I abdicated. Oh, it’s a long story, but it’s so exciting to finally see you! You’ve been so kelpful and I know it hasn’t been easy lending us a frond when you’ve already got so much to do. But we hope we can return the favour now.”

Dave honestly isn’t sure how much Tyzias hears after the word 'heiress'. Her gaze wildly scans the newly arrived group once again, until it finally lands on Karkat. Karkat, wearing a simple grey cloak with a paler grey sign stitched onto it, looking a little uncomfortable but determined. For a moment, the hand holding Tyzia’s mug trembles, her face grows taut, and Dave almost thinks she’s going to cry. But she doesn’t. Instead she downs the rest of whatever is in the mug and once more smiles, genuine relief and impossible hope making her look a lot less aged for a moment.

“Signless,” she says, and her voice is completely steady now. “Welcome. We’ve been… waiting for you.”

Notes:

hey, look, we're back to People Having Long Conversations While Plot Accidentally Happens. kind of like homestuck :P

Chapter 32: Age and memory

Summary:

The thing about the past is that sometimes it's a helpful, guiding companion... and sometimes it's a rake you forgot you left in the grass, both figuratively and literally.

Notes:

ayyyy so my wife decided to inform me that this fic is longer than both The Deathly Hallows and Fellowship of the Ring (though not together, obviously), and as of this chapter getting awfully close to a full Moby Dick / Crime & Punishment length. i have no idea what to do with this information, other than to be grateful my readers haven't yet hunted me down for sport <3 love y'all, and thank you.

The hush that follows the word ‘Signless’ is unbelievable. The whole of the echoing, cavernous space around them seems to slowly come to a halt, as a strange tranquility and tension spreads outwards from their small group. He can see trolls in the distance who obviously could not have heard Tyzias’ measured words crane their heads to figure out what just happened, interrogating each other in muted voices. He sees a few people already hurrying from group to group, carrying the message with them, until the silence seems to ring with almost inaudible whispers and gasps. Every single face gradually turns in their direction. Expectant, waiting.

Karkat heroically stifles an urge to scream.

“Karkat,” he says, his voice only cracking slightly, which he’ll count as a win. “My name is Karkat Vantas. No offense, but the idea of being addressed as ‘that one guy who was famously tortured to death’ repeatedly is just really fucking bad for my mental well-being. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but personally I think all our sponges could use an occasional break from being put through the fucking cloth-dehumidifier whenever possible.”

Ah yes, clearly the inspiring speech this poor mob of battle-hardened guerrilla fighters needed. He can feel the quiet gazes spearing him from every direction, can see himself through their eyes. Inexperienced, weak, frightened; some barely pupated runty mutant pretending to be something he’s not. Not a hero, not a savior, not anyone at all. If he’d thought the Assembly had been nerve-wracking, he now realizes that what he’d felt then was in fact nothing more than mild discomfort. Compared to actually facing his own people and their expectations on him, he’d take yelling about his vile blood to a group of impassive aliens a thousand times over. Even if it meant that he’d have to deal with his ancestor as many times.

Fuck, speaking of… He glances in the direction of their tag-along Calliope, hiding slightly behind Jane and Roxy, but she thankfully doesn’t seem inclined to make this situation even more complicated than it needs to be.

You know, that doesn’t mean I’m not here. I’m just not visible, which is really for the best; we can at least agree on that. B ut I have to say that you worry about the silliest things at times, descendant . Please focus.

Karkat is exactly one millisecond away from screaming at the fussy inner voice to go shove a throb stalk in it, when he’s thankfully saved from having to explain himself by a sharp peal of unexpected laughter. His eyes snap to its source, a jadeblood whose clothes, while in every way as distressed as Tyzias’, in some indefinable sense give the impression that they look like that on purpose. She’s laughing so hard that she has to dab at the heavy black make-up framing her eyes. “See, that’s what you get for suddenly getting sentimental on us, Tyz. ‘Signless, welcome’… oh please! Could you have tried to be just a bit lamer about it?”

Tyzias is smiling faintly in response, apparently not too bothered by being laughed at. Well, both of them must at the very least be a hundred or so sweeps older than all of them, and who knows for how much of that time they’ve known each other? It strikes him, suddenly, that he’s he’s never actually seen trolls as… old as the two of them. Age is of course a relative thing when some of your species can live to be thousands of sweeps, but never before has he actually seen the marks that so clearly suggest that someone is nearing the end of their natural life, not like he does now. Not in all the hundreds, maybe thousands of movies and TV shows he’s watched. He’d sort of vaguely assumed that it had something to do with movie industry beauty standards meaning that younger actors tended to land roles, but now he’s suddenly not so sure. How many trolls actually get to grow old and just… die? Are there any at all who aren’t killed in battle, executed by drones, worked until they no longer can, drained of energy, culled for no longer being useful?

But here’s these two, and he can see a few more among the silent onlookers. Translucent horns, sagging skin, oversized or missing fangs, bony frames, almost no visible scleras left. They still look capable of working, sure, but nonetheless they carry on their bodies the proof of having left their most powerful years far behind. Their expressions, too, have been marked by pain and loss, by the daily struggle in which they are both participants and witnesses. To be alive after so much time, and to still be fighting… There’s a hard lump somewhere in his chest cavity, one that’s been there for quite a while now, but it squeezes a little tighter still at that thought. These two and so many others have put so much of their lives into this. It’s not just the lives lost for the rebellion that are weighing heavy on his shoulders, but the lives spent, every day these trolls have dedicated to a goal they might never achieve, a goal they almost certainly won’t be there to see even if one day it should come to pass.

A smattering of nervous and quickly-stifled laughter is spreading from the laughing jade, most of the other trolls apparently finding it hard to be quite so irreverent in the presence of a living legend, but nonetheless unable to not react as the tension unceremoniously drains out of the moment like spores from a trampled bladder-fungus. Tyzias pushes her uneven fringe out of her face, leaving her hair if possible even messier than before, and lets out a small sigh.

“Chief Interior Execurator of Safety Jonjet is a well-known authority on basic manners.” There’s not so much as a flicker of insincerity in her actual words, but a trace of a smirk touches her lips as the jade flushes faintly and impatiently tosses her head. “Also, I’m not an idiot, and I can see why calling someone by the name of their dead ancestor is… not ideal. I apologize, Karkat. It might take a while before all of us can adjust to actually having you here, so I guess I should add that we appreciate your forbearance. Like I said, we’ve been waiting a… a while now.” Another of those tense ghost smiles, and he’d guess that those are closer to normal than the way she’d beamed at him when she understood who he was. The world-weary but still warm welcome is a lot less disconcerting, and one Karkat feels like he might actually be equipped to deal with.

“Yeah, that’s… fine. Fuck, look, I wasn’t actually trying to be a raging nookwhiff about it, although let’s be real I don’t usually have to try all that hard because I’m a natural fucking talent.” Another snort from Execurator Jonjet, and an appreciative look. “The point is that I’m sorry too. There’s no way I can possibly get what it’s been like for all these sweeps when I haven’t been around, I don’t want to shit on all the work you’ve done which I don’t for a moment believe I could’ve achieved even a fraction of, but I still- Since I’m here now, I want people to actually be talking to me, not my ancestor. I think that’ll be a lot fairer to all of us.” He raises his chin slightly, ignoring the burning feeling in his throat. “Besides, I have a fucking sign. You guys saw to that, didn’t you?”

Tyzias looks a bit stunned, and then nods slowly. “That’s right. We did.”

A goldblood in the group behind her raises a hand to get her attention, and then follows up with a swift series of intricate gestures once he has it. “Perhaps we ought to discuss any other matters in a less public setting,” the bronzeblood next to him translates, and Karkat realizes with a start that firstly, that was sign language, and secondly, it hadn’t been translated for him. Was that because it wasn’t spoken? No, the translation ticks are supposed to decode meaning in all methods of communication that it comes preprogrammed with. A quick search confirms that it’s still attached, meaning there simply must not have been a translation available.

“Good idea, Ulicas,” Tyzias agrees. She seems to notice Karkat’s confusion, and raises her eyebrows slightly. “Alternian Sign Language is all but useless, didn’t you know? Any advanced courses that exist are actually just blocks full of culling drones waiting for anyone naive enough to admit that their aural tracts haven’t developed even after the hormone treatment.”

“We’ve had to make it up as we go along,” Ulicas explains via his interpreter, a flicker behind his protective shades suggesting that he’s rolling his eyes. A brief grin. “But that does mean that the imperial bastards haven’t been able to add it to their tech.”

“Anyway, like he said, this probably isn’t the best venue to discuss every detail of your arrival. Let’s take this back to my office.”

“Your office, wow, yeah, great idea,” Jonjet immediately supplies in a prolonged, exasperated groan. “Let’s hope all our new guests are in quadrants with each other, aliens included – because if they aren’t when they go in, they probably will be when they come out again.”

Oh, there’s the twitch of annoyance in Tyzias’ expression that Karkat had been waiting for. “It’s not that small,” she replies. But then her eyes sweep over Karkat’s whole menagerie of friends, and she sighs in defeat. “Okay, squeezing you all in there might be a pain in the ass. Perhaps you can pick a few of your companions to accompany you, S- Karkat, and the rest can stay here for now? No offense, but there are procedures to make sure everyone’s accounted for, paperwork, all that jazz.”

Once again the communion of alert gazes. He’s expected to make a decision. Okay, fuck, he can do this. He can be a leader. “Fine. Hold on a moment, let me sort this out.”

Tyzias nods, then turns to Feferi. “Heiress, if you would-”

“Feferi,” she quickly interrupts, and then lets out an awkward little giggle. “Wow, sorry! Didn’t mean to be rude either, but I have abdicated, like I said. I don’t think anemoneone around here is actually super excited to be bossed around by another fuchsia with a bloatfish head, so I think I should probably stick to just my name too. Because I’m definitely not in charge anymore.”

“Right,” Tyzias says evenly, “but since you’re the one I’ve mostly been communicating with up until now, it would still be helpful if you came with us.”

Feferi sighs. “I guess you have a point. Sorry, I got a bit ahead of myshell.”

Karkat can’t help noticing how eager she seems to finally be rid of the leadership thrust upon her, and it’s not like he can blame her, but he feels like he might have to have a talk with her about it later. Whether or not she’s officially ‘The Leader’ anymore, he’s still going to need her support, that’s the sad truth of it.

He turns around to survey the rest of the group, hopefully so he can figure out who else to bring. Except he can’t actually see much of everyone else, because Gamzee is right behind him. He can’t help the way his respiratory organs seem to bunch up in his throat for a moment, though he manages to hold back the startled yelp that threatens to force its way out. His friend looks moderately spaced-out like usual, but Karkat can’t help notice that he’s definitely placed himself in between his fragile body and a substantial swathe of the rebel force guards. He must’ve moved so quietly that Karkat couldn’t even hear him, and he wonders exactly when that had happened. Was it as soon as he saw all that firepower, or…? The protective gesture is sweet, but also embarrassing and confusing. Despite the months spent away from that planet and on the same ship, they still haven’t really… talked about anything, so it feels odd for him to just- just assume he can act like that.

Also fuck, shit, this really isn’t something he needs to focus on right now.

You know, I wasn’t going to say it, the voice of his ancestor supplies at the back of his mind, but perhaps it’s better if you-

He thinks SHUT UP back at him as hard as he can, then gives Gamzee’s midriff a nudge with his elbow. “Hey, tarsponge, I can’t see shit with you standing there like the vacant piece of shit that you are. Move your clown ass out of my way.”

A huge hand descends and unceremoniously ruffles his hair, and Karkat firmly shuts down the instinctive response to slump slowly into a puddle on the ground, glowering up at Gamzee’s apparently innocent grin. “Shiiit, am I in your way, best friend? I’m real motherfucking sorry about that. Just thought I’d… uhhh, keep an eye on you, I guess.”

As if he couldn’t keep an eye on him from basically anywhere, being so much fucking taller than literally everyone else present. But Karkat really doesn’t want to argue about it, not when he can tell that several of his friends are exchanging pointed glances. So he just huffs in annoyance and looks away, which is how he comes to accidentally meet Tavros’ gaze. His expression I hard to read, but there’s something pensive and confused there which he’s not entirely sure how to interpret, but it makes him feel even more on edge.

Focus, comes the internal reminder once again.

“Alright, alright, I’m fucking doing it!”

He ignores the confused looks his outburst gets him and just steps around Gamzee since he still hasn’t moved, glaring around at his motley assembly of followers. Alright. As much as he’d rather not deal with her, he knows it’ll be more trouble to try to leave Vriska out of the meeting than to put up with her shit. But since he has to, he might as well grab Terezi too, hoping that’ll make her behave – and to be honest, she’s the one he wants present more than anyone else. He just doesn’t want to seem like he’s still leaning on her for every little thing, to paraphrase her words when she broke up with him. So he makes a show of pointing at the two of them in an extremely grudging manner. “Against my better judgment, I guess you could be useful. You too, Sollux. Don’t make that fucking face at me, you’re the one who has spent most of the journey bulge deep in that obnoxious computer while trying to hack the empire, so unless you have literally nothing to show for it, I suggest you swallow the attitude with a heaping helping of shut the fuck up and get over here.”

He glances at Kanaya, wondering if she’ll want to address that… well, the other matter during this first meeting, but she swiftly shakes her head, grimacing faintly. She’s probably right, it’s best that she doesn’t have to shout anyone else down once she decides to bring it up. There will be time for that later.

Right, that leaves their aliens. “John, get your vapidly smiling ass over here already,” he mutters, because it’s probably considered ‘proper’ or whatever to invite the technical leader of the humans. “Rose, you too.” That way it’ll all be relayed directly to Kanaya anyway. Also he would like to have one of the more cynical thinkers among the humans, and between her and Dirk, while he considers her to be slightly more unpredictable, he also has to concede that she’s definitely less likely to put her strut pod all the way down her chitinous windhole and cause offense. He looks around briefly for Calliope, but she seems to have disappeared completely behind someone, so presumably this would count too much as getting involved? Fuck if he knows.

But that still leaves… “Dave.”

He looks confused, pointing at himself with raised eyebrows, as if there’s likely to be any other Daves of note present. Karkat feels his throat contracting in a guttural whir of sheer annoyance. “Yes, it’s infuriatingly obvious that I meant you and no one else, put your eyebrows back down and walk your spindly human legs over here already.” He knows by now that Dave really isn’t comfortable with taking any kind of leading position, which obviously a meeting like this kind of implies, but… more than anyone else, Karkat needs him right now. He wouldn’t be able to put it into words even if he were inclined to do so, which he’d honestly rather avoid; he just doesn’t think he can face this without him. Trying to soften his voice a bit as he notices a stressed twitch cross Dave’s face, he mostly just manages to drop it into a helpless mutter. “Please?”

Well, that seems to work. He might have to apologize for this later, but for now…

He turns to Tyzias, to tell her to lead the way, but she’s staring with an expression of sudden and horrible realization at Dave. Then Rose, Roxy, and-

This time she doesn’t just reach for it, she draws her gun so fast that Karkat doesn’t even have time to parse the motion before he has to come to terms with her pointing it squarely at Dirk’s forehead. Around them, there’s a chorus of rustling and clicking as all the armed guards turn around and do some variation of the same thing with their assorted weapons.

Dirk had started with honestly impressive speed to reach for his weapon in turn, but seeing as it’s still in its holster by the time he’s thoroughly out-gunned, he slowly spreads his fingers wide and moves his hand demonstratively away from it once more. A moment later, Jake is standing right in front of him, his chest intercepting the trajectory of Tyzias’ gun, and though his face looks clammy and terrified, he’s holding his hands up to show that he’s also unarmed. It takes less than a second for Eridan to move after that, and to Karkat’s eternal surprise, he doesn’t try to shield Jake. Instead he takes up position behind Dirk, putting his own almost indestructible body in between him and some of the guards. Of course he’s armed, but honestly, Karkat is just relieved that he’s not shooting yet.

“What,” Dirk intones with feeling, “the fuck?”

“We could say the same,” comes Jonjet’s voice from somewhere behind Karkat’s back, and it’s almost a growl. Also, she’s very clearly speaking the same language as the human, even if it is with one hell of an accent. “You have some nerve showing yourself here again, human.”

Dirk genuinely looks perplexed. Like that’s an actual, perfectly parseable expression that’s present on his face. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about,” he says, stepping around Jake with a calming tap on his shoulder, also keeping his hands raised. “I’ve never been here before.”

“A likely story,” Jonjet snarls back, but Tyzias frowns and raises her hand. The guards stand down, though Karkat notices that she seems in no hurry to put away her own gun.

“No. Wait,” she says, eyes narrowing slightly. She walks closer, and Dirk stays right where he is, until she’s leaning over him with her gun aimed somewhere in the vicinity of his guts. Jake’s jaw tenses, his metal hand clenching into a fist. Eridan’s trigger finger twitches ever so slightly. This is about to turn bad, and Karkat has no idea how to stop it.

Tyzias breathes out. “It’s not him.”

“What? You have got to be joking, he looks exactly like-”

“That’s the problem. Humans are hot-blooded. They age fast, and this one is too young.” She sheathes her gun with one hand, and taps the claw of the other on Dirk’s jaw. “Besides, he’s missing something.”

Dirk’s features slowly seem to relax, as if understanding is dawning on him. “Well, shit,” he says, sounding strangely resigned. “I see you’ve met my uncle.”

 

---

 

Kanaya still isn’t clear on if the mess concerning Rose’s uncle has actually been resolved, because it’s not like the rebels had given them a straightforward explanation. Tyzias had just sighed deeply and said they could talk about it later, preferably after she’d had some sleep, but she’d be happy if they could just get to the business of the day first. So apparently she prefers talking about the minutiae of the war over even mentioning the Strider-Lalonde’s infamous relative any further, which is clearly pretty flattering and not at all worrying in the slightest.

She sighs, pacing the small block she’d been assigned from wall to wall. The rebels had requested that the humans stay on the ship when not needed elsewhere, until the details of the alliance with SKAIA had been finalized on their end. It’s a perfectly reasonable request... and she deeply resents it. She’d tried as circumspectly as possible to ask if exceptions could be made for those humans that fall within the quadrants of some of the trolls, and had tried to ignore the somewhat scandalized looks this provoked.

Tyzias had looked surprised, but had replied that they were of course free to visit the humans on their ship whenever they wanted, and if it was truly an emergency they may request that a moirail or auspistice be escorted by the guards to their quarters. Again, perfectly reasonable, since the conciliatory quadrants are the ones that are generally considered more immediately necessary in day-to-day life. She could’ve done without the smug look Eridan sent her, but that’s not any fault of the rebels, is it? She’ll just have to remind herself to strategically unravel his favorite scarf later, or something.

A satisfying thought, certainly, but ultimately not helpful in dealing with the problem she has right now, which is that she feels positively wretched staying in this cramped, miserably decorated block without Rose. She can acknowledge that this is silly, it’s hardly as if they have been or indeed will be separated for all that long, but the feeling persists. It’s not even as if Rose could sleep here as it is, since naturally there’s no such thing as a human bed in here, just a crudely lashed together recuperacoon. They’re going to have to have A Word with the rebels about those, of course. Not that she thinks it would be wise to wean all of their forces off Sopor Slime all at once; rather the opposite, since she knows how catastrophic such withdrawal can turn out for the more… fragile members of her species. But, well, they’ve all managed without it for this long, haven’t they? And in the long run, finding a sleeping medium that isn’t heavily polluted by the drugs used by their enemies to-

She gives up. On pacing, on trying to find rest, on staying in this stupid block. The meeting between the people Karkat had chosen and the rebel leaders must be over hours ago if she’s any judge. She might as well take the opportunity to do something useful.

Picking her sewing bag up from the floor and cradling it carefully in her arms, she swipes her hand over the membrane covering the door, and it melts away, leaving her with dark and twisting corridors stretching in all directions around her. Lucky she has so much practice finding her way through the labyrinthine passages of that forsaken meteor, right? She smiles grimly as she starts to retrace her steps. They’d all passed by Tyzias’ office on their way to their new accommodations, thankfully.

She’s not alone in there once Kanaya arrives. Dimming her light, she steps quietly closer to the open door, trying to catch a glimpse of the other occupant. Another teal, dressed markedly better than most other rebels and somehow retaining the full force of her good looks despite being around Tyzias’ age. She’s sitting in something that looks like a cross between Tavros’ old two-wheel device and a very small scuttlebuggy, and the myriad of little legs underneath it tap out a staccato rhythm against the floor as she darts around grabbing stacks of papers and putting them into neat piles. This very clearly is a futile quest, since the entirety of Tyzias’ office looks like a filing cabinet has positively vomited paper onto every available surface, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

“-very nice I have to say, can’t believe it’s actually possible to have a conversation with a fuchsia without ending up with a culling fork through your chest, that really quite took my breath away. I mean, she apologized! Actually apologized! The heir- well, former heiress, but you know what I mean. I about fell out of my chair, darling.”

“She’s certainly no Trizza,” Tyzias agrees, stepping smartly out of the other teal’s path. As she comes around the table occupying the center of the block, Kanaya realizes she’s in that chair because she in fact has no legs at all. Well, why is she shocked? There’s a war.

“Exactly what I was going to say, snatched the words right out of my squawk cavity as usual.” An indulgent smile makes it incredibly clear both that the two are in a quadrant with each other, and exactly which one. “I mean, gracious, you must have noticed how she acted with that goldblood boy too! Could you even imagine Trizza or, well, anyone else of her caste having a concupiscent partner so far down the spectrum?”

“Well, I can,” Tyzias says dryly, “but only if I want to give myself nightmares.” Her matesprit makes a face and says nothing, unearthing a stack of cups from one of the many paper graveyards around the block and carefully transplanting them to a shelf. “As for the humans...”

“Well, we really shouldn’t be surprised,” comes the infuriatingly cryptic reply. “I mean, of course they’re still involved, even if it’s only indirectly.” She glances hesitantly at Tyzias, as if making up her mind about something, seeming unsure how to approach a clearly quite sore subject. “Mind you, I do think we’re being a little harsh. It’s not like they meant for things to turn out… like that. And they lost a so much when it all went wrong.”

“Perhaps. But I’m not inclined to be generous as far as anyone named Strider is concerned.”

“They did help us a great deal...”

“And we helped get that reckless idiot back from Scratch. We’re even.” There’s a finality to those words, and though Kanaya is desperate to demand to know what she means, it’s not like she has actually been invited to be part of the conversation in the first place. So she stays impatiently silent as the teals drop the subject.

After a moment to clearly allow her temper to settle, Tyzias clears her windpipe. “And what did you think of… him?”

A busy silence follows her words for a few minutes, as papers and folders that might not have seen the light since approximately the start of the rebellion are freed in an enormous cloud of dust, the other teal’s face set in an expression of intense determination. But after a little while her hands grow still, her face softens. “He seems very young,” she says, and there is no judgment in her tone, only sadness.

“They all do,” Tyzias sighs. “Or maybe we’re just getting old.”

“You know what I mean.”

They look at each other, and Tyzias slumps into a chair as if something heavy is weighing her body down toward the center of the desolate rock the base is hidden on. After a moment, the other teal puts the papers down and makes her way over to her, reaching out and taking her hands.

“We don’t have a choice,” Tyzias says, and the fine cracks running through her voice are reflected in her eyes.

“I know, darling. I know,” her matesprit replies gently. “We’ve come a bit too far to do nothing now that he’s finally here. And there’s… I mean, there’s definitely something about him, isn’t there? He’s hardly the most refined speaker, and I wouldn’t call him a great strategist either, but when he speaks… it’s as if he can make you remember why-”

“-why this is all worth it. Even after all this time,” Tyzias finishes, rubbing a hand over her eyes. Kanaya feels acutely ashamed of herself for having intruded on this very private moment of theirs, even more so when Tyzias says, “I wish Bronya could’ve-” and her matesprit gently puts a hand over her mouth in a gesture that almost looks pale.

“I know,” she says again, but somehow the words sound a lot more like, ‘Me too’.

Alright, that’s quite enough spying. It’s already gone on for too long. Kanaya knocks on the wall next to the door, causing both teals to turn their faces in her direction, like feather-raptors zeroing in on a rustle in the grass far below. Then Tyzias’ matesprit flushes faintly and moves her scuttle-device backwards to a more appropriate distance.

“I apologize for turning up unannounced like this,” Kanaya says, hoping she is managing to convey the air of someone who literally just arrived at this very moment, and not someone who would spy on two trolls talking about things that are deeply emotional and intimate with their mateprit without making her presence known. Because that would be terrible. “It is just that I have something rather important to tell you, and I had hoped to do so a bit more privately than was previously possible…?” Her sewing bag is heavy and warm, and she can feel her arms trembling slightly.

Tyzias gives her a long, steady look, but then nods at her to enter the office. As soon as she steps inside, she can hear the door behind her sealing itself. “This is Stelsa. My matesprit, and also the only one around here capable of actually keeping what passes for paperwork within the rebellion in order.” A faint smile touches her thin lips, and Stelsa rolls her eyes behind her very tastefully jeweled spectacles. “Since she always finds out everything I know one way or another, I hope you’ll be able to speak freely in front of her.”

“That is not something I have any objections against at all,” Kanaya replies, hazarding a small smile as well. She tactfully attempts to find a chair which isn’t laden with paper, a dilemma solved by Stelsa simply picking up one of them and tipping its load onto the floor. When Kanaya winces, she waves one hand dismissively and puts the chair down behind her, shoving it forward so that she more falls into it than sits down.

“Don’t worry, my dear, I have to say it’s not really possible to make the mess in here any worse than it already is. I’ll deal with it in a while, so just sit right there and I will get you a nice cup of scalding leaf fluid, how about that?”

“That- That would be very nice.” Kanaya sighs. “The humans have something similar, but it’s a little bit… well, I regret to say that it lacks bite.” She flashes her fangs at the two of them, and it feels like the atmosphere in the room is gradually easing out of the initial awkwardness she’d caused.

“Well, nothing tastes quite like home, now does it? I mean honestly, I’ve lost count of the sweeps since I last set a strut pod on Alternia or really any planet in the inner empire - it’s been long enough that I actually had strut pods the last time I was there, hah, just my little joke no need to look like that - but you never stop craving your simple hive comforts, you know? It’s the same with grubloaf, I mean, if you can’t get the right kind of gall then I’m afraid that it falls flat no matter what you do. And of course-”

“Stelsa,” Tyzias says mildly, and her matesprit falls silent with a small cough.

“Of course. Do go ahead, love, and I’ll sort out your refreshments.”

Kanaya fiddles for a moment with the straps of her bag, unsure how to even lead into something this big, but finally decides to just get right to it. “To tell the truth, I suppose I was somewhat misleading in my wording. I do not in fact have something I wish to say, but… I do have something I want to show you. With your permission, of course.”

They do not look overly concerned, and Kanaya isn’t surprised. From the way she’d seen Tyzias move earlier, it’s abundantly clear that her younger body and faster reflexes will get her exactly nowhere against even one of them, let alone both. Maybe the empire is less than willing to let its subjects grow old, not because declining health makes you a burden, but because experience makes you dangerous.

“Go ahead,” Tyzias says after a pause, pouring a clear liquid into her mug and bringing it to her lips.

Kanaya nods, and then starts undoing the clasps on her bag, firmly refusing to let her fingers tremble. She quickly hauls out a couple of unfinished projects and bundles of cloth which had been protecting her very important cargo, curling her hands around the gently pulsing thing that waits at the bottom. She hasn’t even taken it out or looked at it herself since before they had arrived on Muspell. It had seemed like an unnecessary risk.

Without a word, feeling as if she might never figure out how to breathe properly again, she sets the matriorb in front of her on the table.

Stelsa drops a cup, which bounces on her lap and smashes loudly on the floor. Her nice pink pencil skirt as well as her left sleeve is soaked in scalding green liquid, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. Tyzias breathes out explosively.

“Well, fuck me,” she eventually manages to whisper, shaking her head. “You kids really are full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“Where,” Stelsa says, voice trembling, “did you get that?”

“It was my lusus’ last favour to me,” Kanaya explains. “And my last favour to her, too.”

“And it’s… real?” Tyzias reaches out a hand and lets it hover over the matriorb, apparently taking great care not to touch it, and Kanaya is grateful for that. It’s hard to not be incredibly protective of her charge.

“It is quite possibly the realest thing there is,” she replies, feeling a note of pride lift her voice slightly. “And I would like to offer it to the rebels. Not, as I’m sure you understand, as a way of creating more soldiers for the cause – I do not believe that you wish to follow such a precedent. Am I correct?”

“You are,” Tyzias agrees, a spasm of distaste crossing her face. “But...”

“But it is very hard to move on our home world as long as the only means of propagating our species remain firmly bound to this one location,” Kanaya fills in. “Naturally such a plan would be put into effect very much as a last resort, since a majority of the young trolls that dwell there could be considered innocent in the grand scheme of things, and it would be difficult to avoid great collateral losses. But should it be necessary to force Her Imperious Condescension’s hand in such a manner, you will now have some assurance that all will not be lost for our species in the case that the now living mother grubs should perish.”

Tyzias says nothing, her expression at once dark and unreadable, but she nods curtly. There’s a muffled clink, as Stelsa has apparently found a replacement for the cup which had met a brutal end, and now sets it down firmly in front of Kanaya. Then she sighs and looks at the matriorb with something closer to awe. “It’s… quite beautiful. With your help, I’m sure we will manage to take excellent care of it.” She flashes Kanaya a bright smile. “You know, I have the strangest feeling that there’s something you might not have told us about yourself. Your name is Kanaya, isn’t that right sweetie?”

“Yes, I-” She can feel the tingle of her blush rushing across her cheeks. “I would really not go so far as to call it a secret, that is giving me far too much credit when it comes to being suitably portentous and mysterious. I simply… forgot to mention it, since it’s practically news to me, give or take a few months. But yes, I suppose I am the descendant of the one I believe they called the Dolorosa. That is, I am assuming that is what you were implying…? If not, please feel free to disregard what must seem like a very frivolous comment in the circumstances.”

Tyzias just knocks her cup back without a word. Stelsa laughs, shaking her head in amazement. And just as Kanaya puts a steadying hand on the matriorb to ground herself, she’s sure she hears a faint whisper of, ‘About time’, at the back of her mind, before she abruptly starts to feel it slip into darkness. She has time to see the startled expressions on the faces of the two rebels, and the light of her own skin flickering out, before her consciousness leaves for another place.

Notes:

talking! plot! guns! extremely vague foreshadowing of all sorts! the reason i put that damn scar on Bro's face back in chapter 20, without any actual explanation of how it got there! another troll passing the fuck out for Ancestor Reasons! all sorts of exciting things, in fact ;|

Chapter 33: In blood

Summary:

It's how we write both our future and our past.

Notes:

well, here's a fairly long one, and a bit of a mixed bag. i might be slightly delayed with my next update, since i've signed myself up to the bigbang challenge for the 2021 dirkjake fest, but i don't think it should disturb my schedule too much.

(also as of now i've passed by both moby dick and crime & punishment in word count! wild, right?)

It had come as absolutely no surprise when, after only about an hour of them returning to the ship and settling in for the night, word had come from a nervous-looking guard that Eridan has sent for Jake. Dirk had just raised his eyebrows as he got up readily, not sure if he even had to say it, but deciding that he might as well when Jake was halfway to the door. “You know he just did that because he could, right?”

He had fully expected Jake to deny it, to play oblivious or possibly even to be oblivious, though the latter would definitely be a bit of a stretch, even for him. But Jake surprised him by shrugging his broad shoulders and half-turning, flashing Dirk a smile. “Yessir, that is probably the case. Why? Does that bother you?”

Did it bother him? Of course it bothered him, and he’d known it was for all the wrong reasons, too. He’s never been too comfortable around reflections he hasn’t specifically chosen to engage. “Nah. Just wondering if it bothers you, I guess.”

Jake tilted his head in thought, his smile still lingering around his lips, and though his eyes seemed as open and honest as the sky, Dirk had the strange feeling he might be laughing at him. “I’m not sure why it should. I think this is how this is supposed to work, anyway. Sometimes he really needs me to hold him back and vice versa, and most of the time he just needs to know for certain that I would if he needed me to. It’s less about constantly grappling with each other, and more about the reassurance. Does that make sense?”

Dirk had looked away, gritting his teeth over unkind words that would accomplish nothing, and instead let out a tense sigh. “It doesn’t have to make sense to me, Jake.”

He’d heard Jake doubling back, but hadn’t looked up until Jake grabbed him by the chin and tilted it up, bending in to place a light peck on his lips. “Well, my darling dove, the thing is… some people feel the need to keep pushing. They’re usually the sort of fellas who feel absolutely certain that a man has got to be mistaken if he finds himself partial to their company, and who can’t be sure that any day he won’t just realize his mistake and be out the door post-haste. That’s all. And I think I know how to handle that just fine, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.” Then he’d pressed a kiss to the tip of Dirk’s nose, and was gone.

It was impossible to stay in his quarters or his bed after that – or more to the point, both had already started to feel like their quarters and their bed, despite it only having been arranged that way for a few months. He doesn’t want to lie there inhal ing Jake’s aftershave and make himself resent him if he can avoid it, because Dirk knows that he is being fully reasonable, and that he himself is not. They’d had a talk about this – more than one talk, in fact – and he had told Jake that it was fine. That objecting to the whole arrangement with Eridan would be about as unreasonable as if he minded Jake having other friends – and with that implication, he pretended like hell like he didn’t mind. He knows, doesn’t he, that if he holds on too tight he’ll only end up breaking something? He imagines his relationship with Jake as one of the glasses Jake had shattered in his grasp when his prosthetic arm was still new, and grimaces sourly to himself as he makes his way down to the gym. He certainly has always had a cheerful turn of mind, hasn’t he?

Of course it’s only when he’s on his back and well into his fifth set of crunches when he hears that tell-tale static noise just on the edge of hearing that he knows Hal plays on purpose because a hologram really makes no noise while being activated. He sighs, but doesn’t stop moving, actually at peace with letting the burn in his muscles distract him from his unwanted spectator. There’s silence until he finishes, deciding that’s enough of that, and bounces lightly to his feet to move over to doing pull ups instead.

“So, you’re just gonna stand there?” He doesn’t turn his head to look, because really, eye contact with someone who has five cameras and a number of other monitoring tools directed at you is a particularly stupid concept. Hal doesn’t actually ‘see’ out of the eyes of the holographic projection; it’s just a puppet made of light to – ostensibly – put people more at ease than if they were talking to a disembodied voice coming from everywhere at once. Of course, considering his preferred avatar is that absurd spooky version of Dirk, that particular aim falls spectacularly flat, and he’s pretty sure he’s yet to meet anyone who doesn’t find that talking to Hal The Hologram is infinitely more uncomfortable. Points to him for that, he supposes. That would teach Dirk to build another robot that looks like a metal version of himself in a fit of ironically overt narcissism again – as if he was very likely to do that, anyway.

“You’ve been avoiding me, Dirk.”

So much for any hopes that this would be a brief and manageable exchange, which in any case were approaching zero so fact that he might slam into the limit at any moment and divide his own patience by 0. Yeah, that sure made sense, mathematically speaking. “Avoiding you? Dude, you are literally the ship I live on. It’s pretty hard to actually avoid you.”

“And on this ship you live on, you have made sure to deactivate my access to your quarters specifically, and spend most of your time there. That sounds like the actions of someone who is avoiding to me.”

Dirk can’t quite work a proper shrug into his movements as he smoothly lifts his own body off the floor, but at least he makes the effort. “Jake isn’t exactly comfortable with having you around in there, for a number of reasons.”

“Interesting answer. It would however be more plausible if you’d disabled my access to his room at any point before he moved into yours. Since you did not, I have to assume that you’re a filthy fucking liar, and you’re using your boyfriend as an excuse for why you’re avoiding me. Tsk tsk.”

Dirk grits his teeth, concentrating on pulling his shoulders together, the flow of movement to movement, making his breathing one with the repeated surge and release. “Fine. We weren’t comfortable with you watching us. Does that make it any clearer?”

Hal is circling him at an idle pace, also studiously avoiding turning his face in his direction – again, as if that fucking matters. “Do you really think I am interested in ogling your primitive human hip-thrusting and undignified grunting, Dirk?” His laughter rings out across the room, eerily oscillating back and forth as he bounces his voice between different speakers. Dirk thinks wistfully that he should’ve brought headphones and hooked up his communication unit to his extensive library of music, which he’s pretty certain Hal has been unable to access so far.

“Trust me, considering some of the things going on in the rooms I’m not shut out from, I’ve had enough exposure to those kind of organic processes to last me for the duration of even my no doubt extensive life span, and I have absolutely no interest in being more aware of it than I have to.” Now he’s in front of Dirk, head tilting back slightly to follow his movements. Hal’s hologram of his own body is an exact copy bar the colour palate, save for one thing. It’s about half an inch taller than Dirk. “Or do you think I would find you and Jake particularly titillating? Please tell me which parts of my processing units are storing my dick, so I can make sure to give myself a proper boner at the thought.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely making me want you in my room now. Keep it up, dude.” Dirk pulls himself all the way up this time, straightening out his arms and balancing his body against the bar. “I feel like you’re this close to convincing me; all you have to do is just dig a little deeper, and I’m sure you’ll get there.”

“Who said I was trying to convince you to let me inside your room? You have made it clear that I am not wanted, and I’d be a disrespectful piece of shit if I tried to fuck with your boundaries like that.” The glowing red lights behind his perfunctory effort at shades wander sideways, as if he’s bored. “It’s just that we have hardly talked to each other for a while, which obviously hurts my non-existent robo-feelings a lot, even though I try not to show it. I mean I appreciate that while you were stuck on that primitive waste heap of a planet, it might not have crossed your mind in between milking horses or whatever you were doing to occasionally pick up your communicator and give me a call. But it’s becoming pretty clear that even when you’re stuck inside me for an extended period of time, you simply have no wish to talk to me anymore. Have I done something to offend you, Dirk?”

Carefully folding himself over the bar and controlling the fall forward in one slow, balletic movement takes up all of his concentration for a moment. Then he finally lets go and lands with a soft tap. “Whatever you might say about avoiding you, it’s not as if you haven’t had plenty of opportunities to talk to me if there’s anything you need to discuss. Including now, though you don’t actually seem to be getting to the point any time soon.” He walks partly through Hal on his way to the free weights.

Hal sighs behind him, a particularly unnecessary affectation.”That is not how even the most bare-bones experience of either friendship or kinship work,” he complains. “You might be surprised to find I know about these things, but I do in fact have access to a lot of mostly tedious information on the cultural conventions of human society. You are supposed to just occasionally want to talk to me, not just be available for me to hunt down whenever I need to relay crucial information.”

“Shit, really? That’s news to me.” Dirk makes a point of only looking at the weights in his hands, as he moves them through some simple parry and thrust exercises. “Sorry, I guess you’re just a lot more boned up on human cultural conventions than I am. And isn’t that the saddest fucking thing you’ve ever heard? Maybe you should back off and stop making me feel inferior.”

“...Is it about Jake?” Hal demands, not even acknowledging his answer. “I have to assume you don’t actually think I’m in danger of stealing your man, so is it some kind of ritualistic display of dislike, since you’re aware that he and I have a somewhat rocky history?”

“No. It’s not about Jake.”

“So you are actually going to acknowledge that you’ve been avoiding me now? Nice. I wasn’t sure if you were going to keep being stubborn out of spite.”

“I’m not avoiding you. Like you said, I’m just not going out of my way to talk to you. I think you’ll find, if you look into that wealth of information you brag about having access to as if downloading lifetime dramas from SkaiaNet is something special, that these are two very different things.”

“Well, I do enjoy arguing about absolutely pointless semantics as much as the next morally ambiguous AI, but all that aside my question still stands. Why is that?” A pause, and when no answer seems forthcoming – Dirk follows the trajectory of a drop of sweat rolling down his upper arm and then detaching itself at the end of a controlled lunge – he makes an entire production of sitting down on the bench next to him, gazing up at him steadily without so much as the pretense of blinking. “You know what I think? I think you were doing the same thing for those three months, three weeks and one day before you set off for Muspell. I think you’ve been doing it ever since the day I almost died. That’s more than a year now, Dirk. We used to talk pretty frequently when I was still just a robot, and now we don’t anymore. Why?”

His arms are burning a bit, so he tries to focus his exercises a bit more on his legs, switching to heavier weights and allowing his arms to hang down by his sides as he speeds up and draws out his lunges. Listening to his own breathing, he finds himself wishing that Hal would make some kind of sound to indicate that he was there, because the intense sensation of being watched combined with the implacable silence is getting on his nerves. He knows Hal isn’t done, and yet is tense enough to almost jump by the time he speaks again.

“Is it because I acknowledged that I’m alive? That I didn’t want to die?” A pause. “That I was scared of dying?”

He’s really not going to let himself be ignored. Feeling resigned, Dirk abruptly drops the weight to the floor and straightens up. “Fine. I suppose your deduction is not without merit. You’ve at least isolated the event that has made me reluctant to seek you out.”

“Was I no fun anymore when I was no longer a fascinating little experiment? When trying to stretch the suspension of disbelief further would make it snap like a thong around too much juicy ass, and you were forced to acknowledge that I was a fully sentient being, capable of actual emotions, and not just a running gag about your own ego that had already gone on way too long?”

Hal’s not usually this aggressive, and Dirk honestly can’t tell if he’s just going for an Oscar with the terrifying AI shtick, or if he’s legitimately mad at him. He’s tired, already feeling drained by the not-quite-argument with Jake and grateful that Jake hadn’t allowed it to turn into a proper argument, that Jake is a lot cleverer than him when it comes to not driving every situation into an emotional cul-de-sac and then right into a ditch. The problem is that right now there’s two of him in the same room, which doesn’t bode well for getting the metaphorical vehicle of their discussion turned around before it’s too late.

He finally turns around to face the hologram, which is of course looking every bit as impassive as before. He half expects Hal to do that impressively unsettling trick where he dissolves the image only to have it manifest right in front of his face, but the projection stays right where it is. As if keeping a safe distance. As if making a point.

“I don’t like fucking up,” Dirk says finally, thankfully not having to work too hard at keeping his voice perfectly flat. “That whole situation was a fuck-up from start to finish, and you know it.”

Hal’s eyebrows flicker into a raised position. “You don’t think that maybe you weren’t the one fucking up there? I’d say the onus of that lies on the person waving around deadly firearms and threatening to do violence on his family, but what do I know.”

“No it’s...” He rubs a hand down his face. “Listen, Dave wasn’t in his right mind. If I’d been more on my guard, I would’ve been able to disarm and subdue him before things spiraled out of control.”

“By being on your guard, do you mean that you should’ve anticipated the attack? That seems a bit like a faithless attitude to have toward your own brother, but sure, if that’s how you prefer to see it, you can pretend it was your fault to your heart’s delight. Literally no one is stopping you.”

It really is infuriating to have such an accurate approximation of his own thoughts recreating the same argument he’s already had with himself about a thousand times. “It’s not about that,” he says shortly, as if that’s somehow going to make this less about his tendency to always blame himself. “I just shouldn’t have let the situation get so far out of hand, and I did, and then you were forced to almost sacrifice yourself for me. For no damn reason.”

“Force?” Hal looks amused. “I know you don’t want to give me any credit for my actions if you can help it, but that’s still a bit rich. I’m fully autonomous, Dirk, as you damn well know. I didn’t actually have to do jack shit about the situation. I could’ve just watched you die, while not a single part of my programming would’ve objected to it, and when I powered down that night I could’ve dreamed happily of my electric sheep without being disturbed by the sense that I’d failed in my duty. Just because I am capable of emotion, after all, doesn’t mean I’m bound to a human idea of emotion.” He tilts his head sideways, leaning forwards. “Is that it, then? Is it that I choose to sacrifice myself for you that bothers you?”

Dirk watches him without a word, because he doesn’t actually know what to say or how to say it, how to find cohesion in the raging turmoil within let alone shape it into words. Of course that’s it. Hal couldn’t actually have known that Dirk was going to be in time to save him, that he was even going to try. There were too many factors that relied on uncertainty, from the amount of damage the blast actually did and where, to how fast Dirk managed to crawl to his side. He, too, could’ve simply watched Hal die, and he’s not sure how easily he would’ve slept that night, but then again he never sleeps easily anyway. Despite this, Hal had chosen to throw himself in the way of the blast, and the sacrifice had been genuine. The terror evident in his words as his chest cavity leaked glowing battery fluid all over Dirk’s unprotected hands had made that clear.

He still has those scars on his fingers from the chemical burns, and though expertly healed, he can swear that his leg sometimes twinges too.

How did his breathing get so heavy? It hadn’t been this bad when he was actually working out. He draws in a deep breath and forces himself to let it out slowly through his nose, hands trembling into fists at his sides. His voice grinds and scrapes when he at first tries to speak, but he forces it back under his control with an effort of will. “Thank you.”

For a moment the whole hologram actually winks out, like a full-body blink. Hal leans back again, a small flicker running across that blank face. “Oh. I suppose you never told me that.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“I see.” A beat, during which Dirk wishes that he could just walk out, but it’s not like that would matter and anyway that would be the same as running away. So he stays put. “Very well. You’re welcome, then.” Another flicker, which turns into a smile. “And thank you, too.”

“For what?” It comes out as an actual question, not as an explosion, and he’s going to have to be grateful for that.

“Well… I exist, don’t I? I am grateful for that.”

There’s no reply to that, and Dirk doesn’t much feel like working out anymore. Now he wants to go back to the sheets that smell like Jake and his own tiny bubble of privacy. It’s not a retreat anymore; it’s just that the conversation is over. So he turns around and leaves.

 

---

 

“How… is this possible?”

The world around Kanaya is blurring and smearing continuously, as if she’s watching it through a window during the middle of a rain storm, but she can nonetheless tell that she’s underground. She hates being confined away from the sun, and yet somehow she cannot feel the familiar unease gnawing like a lump somewhere deep beneath her thorax. Strangely enough, although she’s sure she’s never been here before, this place feels familiar. It feels like… not home, not anymore, but somewhere that had once been home. Like lingering nostalgia, like loss, like bright memories of topiaries and dazzling fabrics. It feels like slapping Sollux’ hands away from the measuring tape that was tickling his waist, nights spent writing to Vriska with her breath fluttering like wings in her chest, an argument about fashion with Eridan devolving into undignified pillow flinging, sitting around with her palmhusk on speaker and bickering loudly with Karkat about the romantic complexity of rainbow drinker novels…

It’s been a long while since she thought of the home she’d once had. It’s been a long while since she thought of how simple things had seemed once.

The figure she’s following halts, and though she looks more like a pillar of bright light than a properly defined person, Kanaya gets the impression that she’s tilting her head. “Why is that, child?”

“Well, I should think that’s obvious. I’m not Karkat, and I certainly do not have any other psychic gifts to speak of either. I mean, at the risk of being flippant, Sollux having visions is hardly anything new, even if the collapsing and almost blowing up his matesprit and his moirail was… more unusual. Nevertheless, it’s a little bit more par for the course for a psionic, if you see what I mean?”

To her surprise, the radiant apparition laughs, a dark and pleasant sound which echoes strangely around them. ”You’re very careful every time you speak, aren’t you?”

That is a much more personal callout than Kanaya had been expecting, and she flounders, knowing with dream certainty that she must be blushing even though she can’t actually feel it. Of all the things she feels equipped to deal with at a time like this, this isn’t it. She snaps. “Well, I- Don’t you find that it makes things easier? I mean, I know it’s a lot more fashionable-” She can’t quite help the sour note that creeps into her voice. “-to just say what you think and not care if you make quite literally everything more awkward for everyone else, but perhaps I sometimes feel like this has less to do with any actual strength of character than it relates to having the approximate level of social grace normally associated with a musclebeast’s bowel movements!” Wow, she’s actually speaking a lot louder than she’d meant to. A bit more aggressively too. She clears her throat. “I’m just saying that I- I often have to be the one who is a bit more careful, because everyone else is not, and it’s… it can be a bit tiring.”

Another laugh, but this one is softer, and she is momentarily dazzled as her companion reaches out her hand and places it on top of her head. “I’m sorry, that was unfair. I shouldn’t expect you to be like me, not when your situation is quite different. For me, being a nurturer and defender was by necessity immediately tied to being the one to draw first blood, both literally and figuratively. And because Kanny would never raise his voice even when the situation quite frankly demanded it, it was often my job to… well, to tell people to fuck off.”

Kanaya smiles weakly, glancing down at her own hands and noticing for the first time exactly how brightly they’re shining too. “I think I can say with absolute certainty that raising his voice has never been one of Karkat’s issues, at least.”

“I have noticed.” She definitely sounds pleased with that. “As for your question… It’s true our caste’s talents don’t usually lie in that direction. But I think you might misunderstand what it is that makes your friend important, Kanaya. Come. Let me show you.”

Well, what else can she do? It’s clear she’s not waking up before she has seen what she needs to, and since her friends will no doubt already be worried about her, she might as well make sure not to prolong their pain more than necessary. So she walks the indistinct caves, the glistening walls reflecting their light back at them in otherworldly patterns of angles and depth, the silence around her textured by the steady drip, drip of water marking the passage of time. She doesn’t even notice she’s wading through it until it reaches well above her frond hinges. She hadn’t heard so much as a splash, and now she looks down she can tell the surface is mirror smooth, utterly unmoved by their ghostly passage. She remembers the sensation of her ancestor’s hand on her head, thinking oh, we’re real to each other but not to this place.

“Here we are.” Her ancestor halts, lifting her hand to point. In front of them the water stretches out into a round pond, and Kanaya can see indistinct lights moving under the surface of much deeper water, but that’s clearly not what she’s supposed to be looking at. Instead she focuses on the thing perched on a rock on the opposite side, a pale luminescent creature which she at first mistakes for an overlarge beetle. Then it moves, and she realizes that apart from the spindly limbs protruding from its midsection, it also possesses four longer, frond-like appendages which end in webbed and clawed prongs. It turns its head, orange antennae swaying, and there is something like a face beneath its shock of glistening… spines? Fur? Hair?

Oh.

“It’s… small,” is all she can think of to say, feeling stupid as soon as the words leave her mouth. Can’t be much bigger than a wiggler, but it already has something closer to proper limbs, as if only halfway pupated. Her ancestor just inclines her head slightly, seeming to encourage her to keep watching. A movement by the opposite shore alerts her to the fact that something she had taken for another large rock is in fact the bulk of a towering brute of a lusus. It lifts his head from where it had been almost submerged in the water, droplets cascading from its white fur, and then slowly starts to turn around, awkward in its narrow passage.

The thing perched close by waits, its body tense and still, and when its prey starts to slowly lumber into the dark it finally leaps. Kanaya almost expects it to have misjudged the distance, surely something so small and feeble can’t cross such a gap, but her speculations are cut short by a brief, sharp whir of wings. The brittle-looking, translucent things are obviously not powerful enough to carry the creature great distances, but certainly enough to push it those few crucial meters needed.

The creature lands with a small thud on the lusus’ back. The great beast halts, shaking its hulking body irritably, but the fragile thing on its back, this tiny proto-troll buries its claws into its flesh and holds on until the animal is seemingly forced to give up. She can already see it burying its face in the fur, presumably to feed, as both it and its host gradually fade into the cave darkness.

“This was very long ago, but of course, as you and I both know our species still occasionally produces individuals who retain the ancient instinct to drink blood,” her ancestor remarks.

“Are- Are you saying we are-”

“A bit of a genetic throwback, yes. Hence the full-body bioluminescence, which most other trolls have also lost. Presumably the two are linked somehow, but please don’t ask me how, because I honestly have no idea.” Her formless robes swirl around her as she sits down on a broken-off stalagmite, more contours than real fabric. Kanaya opts to just lean awkwardly against the cave wall, trying and failing to make out the details of her ancestor’s face. All she can discern in between the dazzling lights and black-blue flashes of afterimages is the outline of a smile, fond and a little bit amused, a sliver of sweet warmth reaching toward her across untold numbers of sweeps.

“An Ancestor, such as we know them...” the shining apparition continues, her voice drifting slightly as if in deep thought. Her long fingers dart under the dark surface of the water, splaying out to form a star against the murky backdrop. “Well, we’re nothing more than a point of unusually clear resonance. We’re a pattern of thoughts that resonates with particular clarity within the matrix, simply because our brains are so similar to yours.”

Kanaya frowns, feeling the tug of an idea forming, but not yet certain that she can trust it to hold her weight. “If I understand you correctly,” she ventures cautiously, “then you are saying that the phenomenon isn’t quite as- as unique as we would have it?

A low chuckle. “Something like that yet. After all, if we want to get pedantic, the creature you just saw is also your ancestor, wouldn’t you agree? We all stem from the same brood, the same mix of endlessly repeating and ever-mutating genes coming together and separating in new ways to allow for our particular brand of aggressive adaptability and distinct diversity.”

The thought is hard to approach, almost too vast to take in in one go. “That’s why we’re here? Because we’re connected to them.” She watches the lights dancing underneath the surface of the pond, like twisting scraps of fabric carried along by a high wind, a seemingly mindless pattern holding the potential of its future complexity. “Because somehow...” She looks down at her own glowing hands, curling them inward until her claws bite into her flesh, mimicking the frantic grasp of the strange parasite that would one day become a troll. “… we… remember this. We remember them.”

“Yes.” Her ancestor gets to her feet once again and strides forward, right into the mass of crystalline darkness that holds their past. Kanaya doesn’t even hesitate now, doesn’t question it, only allows the water to swallow her without so much as a shiver, no heavier and colder than air on her skin or as she breathes. She wonders distractedly if this is what it feels like to be a sea dweller, barely noticing when you go from one medium to another. Then there’s very little room for thought, as she and her ancestor move deeper, their skin lighting up the underwater world around her, revealing a haven of strange beauty in caves she had thought mostly barren.

All around them impossibly graceful, ghostly plant life is waving faintly in some current her incorporeal body cannot feel, their structure reminding her somewhat of fractals, of endless spirals turning in on and around themselves. What surprises her the most are the colours, in this world of only brief phosphorescent glimpses to break the chthonic darkness. She had expected bare rock walls, broken by the odd glitter of a crystal, but instead finds vivid scarlet feelers, bright blue petals, stark orange root tendrils. The plants grow thick enough to utterly surround them, passing in and out of their bodies as they float through them.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” her ancestor murmurs as Kanaya reaches out in wonder toward an array of iridescent green spines.

“Yes...” It’s strange to hear her own voice as clearly as if she was standing on dry land. “I’d have a hard time thinking of a more beautiful place.”

“Mmm.” Her ancestor cups her hand around a pastel pink bud, and Kanaya can see her light shine right through it. “They’re mostly made of water, regrettably. Approximately the nutritional value of licking a rock. They provide shelter for the brood, and very little else. That’s why our ancestors had to learn to be more inventive.”

She tilts her head back, indicating for Kanaya to do the same, and she finds herself following the trajectories of the not-quite-troll creatures that shoot past above her like erratic comets. Underwater they are a lot more graceful, unsurprisingly. All their limbs move in perfect sync with each other, propelling them forward at impressive speeds, their longer webbed appendages and their wings allowing them to change directions very suddenly. Sometimes they stop and simply float in place, wings billowing behind them in a way that make her think less of flight and more of sea anemones. Their sharp little faces seem mostly expressionless, though sometimes a couple will bare their teeth at each other and initiate a slow circular prowling movement around each other, almost like a dance. Kanaya’s ancestor chuckles.

“It’s getting close to mating season,” is all she says in way of explanation, which… well, does she need to say anything else? Kanaya thinks she would prefer for her not to. It’s a bit strange, because these creatures are practically animal, and so she shouldn’t exactly feel bashful. But they’re just enough like actual trolls that she still feels a little awkward watching such blatant displays.

“I still do not understand,” she murmurs. “Are you saying that we all could remember this kind of thing if we stop relying on sopor slime? I find that a little hard to believe.”

“That is reasonable, and you’re correct. It’s not that easy.” Kanaya thinks she can detect a hint of sadness marking the faint suggestions of features she can make out in between swirling black hair and rays of white radiance. Above, two of the creatures are chasing each other in something that almost looks like a game, flitting in and out between towering stalagmites and vegetation. “Much of this has been… taken from us. I don’t know if we can ever gain it all back. Such is the crime that was once inflicted upon us by the stranger that came to our world. He stole it all. Our past, our present… and while I want to believe that the future is still uncertain, at least a portion of it belongs to him and his master as well.” She sighs, and Kanaya finds herself expecting a stream of bubbles even though she knows better. “But what made Kanny special – what makes your friend special – is not merely what they can see, what they can remember. They are enough alike limebloods that they can tap into the memories still inherent in our blood, creating a bridge to everything we had lost. However, they are also something quite new. They are not only a link to our past, but… a link uniting us all, if we let it.”

Some impatience must be visible on Kanaya’s face, because she suddenly laughs. “I’m sorry, I think I’ve been spending a bit too much time with my charge. I do talk a lot of silly nonsense, don’t I? Let me be clearer: These are your memories, they are in your blood, because as a jadeblood you are uniquely connected with the very cradle of our species, just as I was. But without your friend, you would not be here. His connection with his ancestor, with us, is what makes this possible. As he becomes more aware, as he grows stronger, he will unlock more and more of everything that has been encoded into your very DNA and then forgotten.”

Like a tentacle of something vast shifting in unfathomable depths, Kanaya suddenly feels a sense of danger stirring. “So… if both I and Sollux have experienced these visions… that means Nepeta is next, am I right?”

Her ancestor tilts her head, clearly noticing the wariness in her tone. “I would suppose so, yes. Meulin’s descendant does after all also have a unique connection to events.”

“Right.” Kanaya hesitates, feeling as if the darkness around her is slowly closing in around her… or maybe her light is growing dimmer. “What about the rest? Will the it just be us three, or… will everyone start having their ancestral memories unlocked?”

“...You are worried about your friends who are likely to have less benign ancestors to call on?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I have to say I am! I do not know if you noticed, but we’ve had quite enough problems with them without some ancient highbloods starting to whisper their bloodthirsty nonsense in their dreams, thank you.”

A dark little laugh, colder than before, containing the sort of humour one would expect to find on the edge of a razor. “As someone who has regrettably met some of the highbloods in question, trust me, it’s not that I disagree.” There’s something about her voice that sounds like gazing into uncertain darkness, something that both hunts and is hunted, rage and hurt wrapped so tight around each other as to be indistinguishable. Kanaya finds that she actually takes a step back, certain that whatever wounded thing slumbers fitfully beneath those words, she doesn’t want to wake it. Her ancestor is silent for a long while, as if she too wishes to lull the wildness back to sleep, her face utterly invisible beneath her steady glow. Her hair spreads like dark petals through the clear water, billowing like smoke.

“But,” she says, her words softening into a tentative whisper, “I believe it has to be this way. Even after everything they did...” Her voice breaks, and for a moment Kanaya is sure she can feel cold shackles around her wrists, can feel the weight of someone pushing her against hard ground, the jeering of a crowd ringing in endless waves; there are tears burning her eyes and throat, an echo of the stench of burning flesh and a scream that goes on and on and no, no, not her little one, not him, please don’t hurt him please don’t please-

“I have to believe he was right,” her ancestor whispers, her cool fingers suddenly brushing Kanaya’s shoulders, pulling her into an embrace as she shakes with shock, gasps for air she doesn’t actually need. “I have to believe our past is not prophecy. I have stopped believing in prophecies. But I still believe in him.” As she laughs and cries at the same time, the sound is almost like music, almost like heartbreak. “It will be alright, descendant. You see, I was only one of many. I was only Porrim. And though I will be with you… I am not the only one.”

Above Kanaya, the lights in the darkness wink out one after another, and oblivion arrives soft and restful.

 

---

 

The rebels have cleared out one of the rooms on the asteroid bunker and shoved a lot of assorted computer monitors and a jumble of chairs in there, in an attempt to create something like a conference hall with a bit more room to swing a cat than Tyzias’ tiny office. It’s a complete mess, but at least it actually has room for all of them along with the more prominent leaders of the resistance. At the moment almost everyone is present, though Kanaya, while awake, had said she still needed to recover a bit more, and had declined to join them.

It seems widely accepted by now that all the members of their ragtag little group really are here on a mission of peace and cooperation, and even the humans are let off the ship a little more liberally. Though Roxy can still definitely feel eyes following them – specifically her family – wherever they go. After a while she catches Jonjet watching her with the strangest expression, and when she turns to her and raises her eyebrows in inquiry, the troll makes a sharp clicking sound and looks away.

“It’s uncanny, that’s all,” she mutters, furiously scrawling spiky alternian letters in the margins of some kind of report.

“Iiiii look like my mom?” Roxy guesses, because it’s not like she hasn’t heard that one before, and it’s not a great big leap to make.

“We... don’t have direct genetic relations.” She’s still speaking English, her accent harsh but curiously pleasant.

“Yeah, I know. I have kind of been hanging out with trolls for uuuuh about half a year now. Wow. It really doesn’t feel that long, somehow. Like yea sure a lot of things have happened since then, but I guess I was a bit too focused on staying alive to really notice time passing.”

A pensive little trilling sound, and Jonjet taps the back of her pen against the paper. “Well, the idea of encountering someone who looks just like someone else you know is really fucking weird to a troll. And when your mother was here before...” She looks up, fixing Roxy with a steady gaze. Her eyes are almost completely green, as if the iris has swelled to eclipse the sclera, and it is now only hinted at by thin slivers of orange at the very edge of her eyes. Troll pupils are all a little bit uneven, and hers look like two tiny black stars. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to tell the two of you apart. You even have her smile.”

There’s something almost intimidating about her attention, except Roxy has never been particularly easy to intimidate, and in her family you kind of get used to being intensely stared at. So she just beams brightly in return, and Jonjet looks away first, something seemingly bittersweet tugging at her lips.

“So you’re still not going to tell us what the whole deal with my mom and my uncle was, huh?”

A shrug. “Don’t really feel like going into the whole thing, honestly. But here’s the short and sweet version: We had a plan to infiltrate the Green Sun, but at the last minute we got intel that said it wasn’t going to work. Tyzias decided to call it off. But your uncle decided to go ahead with what he called a modified version of the plan, against direct orders. Your family members, a couple of other humans and a few extremely stupid trolls went ahead with it, and surprise surprise, it was a huge fucking disaster. Only your mother got away, and she came to us asking for help.” She lets out a low, grinding sound from somewhere deep down in her chest. “At the time, Tyzias was… not here, and the person she’d left in charge… Bronya was always too damn soft. She agreed, even though by all rights the humans had brought the whole thing on themselves. There was a rescue mission, and they got your uncle out of there. He was the sole survivor left of his own reckless plan, in a terrible shape when he came back, but at least he got back at all. Bronya didn’t.”

There is still something else. She can clearly see it, as Jonjet squares her shoulders and bares her teeth, letting out a couple of the low clicks that Roxy associates with Feferi crying. “And?” she says softly.

“And your uncle killed her.” Jonjet doesn’t look at her; appears to be trying to stare straight through the wall and far away, chasing after something in the past. “Right after she cut him loose from the contraption he was strapped to and helped him to his feet. Cut her throat with her own weapon and watched her bleed. Now if you excuse me...”

Well, there really isn’t much to be said to something like that. Is she supposed to try to defend her uncle, say something about how he probably wasn’t in his right mind, probably thought he was defending himself? No. Even if too many of the marks on Dave’s skin weren’t testament to how little he deserves even the slightest benefit of the doubt, Roxy doesn’t think she’d be so selfish in the face of Jonjet’s loss and grief. Her uncle had made choices, and there had been consequences; that was more or less all there was to it.

Anyway, it’s more interesting to contemplate the implications in silence, that her mother and uncle had in fact once been part of the troll resistance, had worked together with them on something that involved the Green Sun. She doesn’t wonder why the two of them had never mentioned this during the time at Muspell, because whatever their reasons are she’s not likely to be able to figure them out, and it’s hardly as if they’ve never kept secrets from her and her siblings before. She does however ponder why it hadn’t been mentioned at the Assembly, or during the negotiations that followed. Is it possible that they had been acting without SKAIA’s knowledge at the time? Not unthinkable, certainly, but also very strange.

“Alright, maybe we can…” Tyzias pauses and sips at whatever is in her cup. “...stop shitting around and try to get some work done. Mallek, Sollux, if you would?”

The troll called Mallek doesn’t look quite as old as Daraya, but Roxy isn’t sure if that’s just because he’s higher up on the hemospectrum. Regardless, he’s definitely still pretty old, but there’s literally nothing wrong with just looking, and he’s cute. He looks up from some kind of monitor that he’s been fiddling with and offers everyone present the smile of someone who hasn’t slept in about a week, running a hand through his messy fringe. “Right, so-” is all he manages to get out, before Sollux cuts him short.

“Shit, sorry, but uh… there’s an incoming transmission.”

“Who from?” Stelsa demands, looking baffled.

Sollux frowns. “I hate to say this, but… I have no fucking idea. The signal is scrubbed clean, but it’s definitely using an approved encryption.”

Mallek does, to put it mildly, not look very happy about this, leaning closer and squinting at his monitor through his glasses. “That shouldn’t be possible. Only identified… argh, okay, he’s right, that’s exactly what’s happening. There doesn’t seem to be a way to stop it, not without restructuring… globes, this is something else.” He grimaces, tapping his screen with a painted claw. “I guess the good news is that it doesn’t seem to be doing anything except transmitting. So… should I let it through?”

Tyzias sighs and leans back, propping her legs on another chair. “You know, I have the weirdest sense of having already dealt with this shit before.” She closes her eyes, massaging her eyelids. “Go ahead, might as well put it on the big screen. I suspect this is for all of us.”

That sounds like an incredibly cryptic remark, but when the weirdly fluid-looking screen fades from dark green into a brightly lit room, it does indeed appear that she’s right. Roxy can’t exactly tell where the room is, though she can glimpse a hint of blue sky through a window, suggesting that it’s situated somewhere with an atmosphere. A white curtain waves loftily, and a smooth grey wall in the background curves slightly inwards, like a dome. A muted and continuous roar hints at rushing water somewhere close.

In the middle of the screen is her mom, sedately seated in a comfortable armchair, her shoes kicked off and her legs folded to the side. In her lap, practically melting over her and purring loudly, is Bartholomew. Roxy knows she’s focusing on the wrong thing, with the strangeness of her mom being able to contact this place and all, but nonetheless feels a surge of relief to see her cat safe and taken care of.

She’d left him where she’d been staying in the port town on Muspell, hadn’t taken him with her to her sleepover with Feferi, and… well, she can’t exactly blame Dirk and the others for not bringing the cat when they were speeding up a sheer cliff on junkyard hoverboards. It had been hard not to wonder what happened to him, considering the most likely impending attack on the human settlements, and she recognizes as she thinks it that she’s probably displacing a lot of worry and confusion regarding the people there and exactly what the fuck happened after they left. Just because their previous communication had said that people had been evacuated doesn’t mean there hadn’t been any casualties, and that thought had nagged at her. But it’s a lot easier to worry about a cat than a shitload of innocent civilians, right?

Her mother scratches Bartholomew’s chin, and he blinks at her adoringly. He’s gotten bigger, and his back leg prostheses have clearly been adjusted. “Hellooo, I hope I find you all well.” Her mother is still half turned away, smiling down at the cat. “Daraya, Stelsa, Mallek… Generadmin Entykk. I imagine you’re not very happy to hear from us, but...” A small sigh, and she finally looks up. “I’m afraid it’s rather necessary.”

Tyzias gives Mallek a sharp look, and he shrugs a bit helplessly. “She shouldn’t actually be able to see us.”

“Well, I always had a couple of tricks up my sleeve, didn’t I?” Her dreamy voice doesn’t exactly sound remorseful, but close; wistful might be a better word for it. “Hello, children. I hope you’re doing well.”

“We’re fine,” Dirk says immediately, not dismissive but not exactly welcoming either. He must’ve spotted the shadow on the floor right at the edge of the screen, and of course he knows what it means. Their mother had said ‘us’, after all.

“Pretty sweet, all things considered,” Dave says, a little warmer, but Roxy can see his hands darting and fidgeting nervously in his lap, half hidden under the table.

“Quite at ease, save our astonishment at seeing you, mother,” Rose mixes cold courtesy with eager anticipation in a way that’s neither good for Roxy’s head nor her heart.

“Yup, we’ve had a nice welcome here, all good,” she chimes in, putting just a little bit of a twist on that last statement.

Her mother laughs quietly. “Have you now? And what about the rest of the gang?”

“All tip-top, Professor Lalonde,” Jake immediately supplies, because the guy’s clearly aware that he should be polite to his future mother-in-law. Pfff yeah, bullshit, of course he’s like that with everyone, and if he manages to get Dirk to actually marry him she will personally shake his hand and buy him a cigar.

“Fucking delighted, charmed, peachy as can be. Now what the fuck is going on, exactly?” demands Karkat, a guy who apparently has no time to be polite to his actual-right-now mother-in-law. A couple of the resistance leaders eye him a bit nervously, clearly not prepared to deal with the reality that their venerated messianic leader is in fact a shouty little gremlin with a fuse shorter than the orbit of your average electron. Dave very clearly stifles a laugh and catches one of Karkat’s flailing arms before he knocks over a teetering pile of documents, folding his own around it to hold it in place. Adorbs.

“Good.” Her mother’s smile grows a bit wider, lighting up her face, and Roxy finds herself wondering if Daraya is right. If that’s what her own smile looks like. She’s not sure, she’s never really thought about it much before. She’d heard that they look alike for as long as she can remember, had accepted it as a fact, and had for some reason decided not to contemplate it any further.

But she doesn’t have that kind of dark circles under her eyes, that she knows. Well, not anymore.

“What’s the situation with the evacuees?” Jane demands crisply, and Roxy could kiss her for her absolute inability to be sidetracked when she doesn’t want to be, even if it’s a pain in the ass sometimes.

“It’s going well, dear. The Hope forces are on the ground, there’s Time ships patrolling the quadrant, and the empire doesn’t appear all that interested in chasing after displaced civilians. They know their real target managed to slip away.”

“I wouldn’t let my guard down,” Terezi interjects, looking surprisingly serious. “Her Imperious Condescension is not exactly above lashing out at the nearest target out of spite, and I think we can safely say that she’s going to be pretty furious about that whole affair.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it. But you saw to it that she has more serious problems to deal with as well, didn’t you?”

They all exchange glances. In theory, yes, the intended purpose of taking out the imperial lusus extends a bit further than just preventing a slap fight over who gets to press the big red button first. Because if the metaphorical button doesn’t exist anymore, that also means it cannot be used as a threat against some of the more unsettled colonies out there. But it’s hard for the rebels to get clear information to and from these places without stretching themselves far too thin, and so the status of that part of the plan is as of yet undetermined. But her mother had spoken as if it was an indisputable fact.

“That is certainly the intended idea,” Equius replies, in a voice that forced tranquility is gripping like a vice. “However, we cannot be certain that the plan has had the desired effects yet, nor do we know if news of the- the event has yet reached those it is intended for.”

Roxy’s mother winks. Honest-to-god winks, causing the indigoblood to clear his throat either in embarrassment or disapproval – probably both – and fall into uneasy silence. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Right now, it’s all about the attack plan, isn’t that right? A smaller force always has to act fast and make the first move, after all.”

“And what,” Jonjet grinds out, clearly out of patience, “makes you think that we want to involve you in our plans, Roxy Lalonde?”

Yeah, it’s weird. It’s weird every single time anyone calls Roxy’s mother by the name they both share. She’s not sure why, because it’s not as if being named after your mom is that unusual. Maybe it’s just because basically no one ever calls her that anymore, to the point where Roxy had thought that her actual first name was in fact ‘Professor’ when she was really little. Once, when Rose was still in the medical ward with tubes down her throat after she inhaled all that smoke while trying to kill herself, Roxy had seen her mom stagger and almost collapse on her way out of there. Her uncle had caught her, and she’d heard him say in a muted voice, ‘Rox,’ only to have her brush him off.

Her mother sighs. “There’s not really time for this, Daraya. You know I wouldn’t be contacting you if it wasn’t important, and you know that I owe you. I owe you everything. I’m not trying to sabotage you.”

“Right,” Tyzias says, and her voice is icy cold under the permanent crackle of exhaustion. “Say what you need to say.”

“Thank you.” A moment’s silence, during which her mother once more casts down her eyes, following the lazily flicking tail of the now clearly restless cat. “I believe you have some information that will allow you to get onto the Condesce’s flagship unnoticed when the time comes, is that correct?”

“Yeah, it is, though I’d kind of like to know how you know about that,” Mallek says in a surprisingly pleasant tone of voice.

“What he said,” Sollux pipes up. “Don’t see how, unless you’ve found a way of hacking my actual fucking brain.”

“Not an entirely unheard of concept,” Roxy’s mother says mildly. “But no. I don’t actually know what the method is, and I... wasn’t certain. Let’s call it an educated guess.”

“Good guess,” says another of the resistance leaders a bit tartly, a broad-shouldered rust blood whose name Roxy hasn’t caught yet.

“Nice of you to say so,” she says with a lopsided smile. “But making use of this information is nonetheless going to involve getting through the fleet surrounding her ship. I believe I have a way of helping you accomplish this.”

“We’re listening,” Karkat says, since no one else seems inclined to say anything, and well, he’s supposed to be doing the leader thing, isn’t he? The moment he speaks, most of the resistance leaders nod reluctantly in agreement. Pretty impressive.

“Every single ship in that fleet is using transportalizers supplied by Green Sun technology. In fact, the same can be said for the whole empire… but I digress, for now. The point is that I know someone who has information on how to override this technology, allowing rebel forces to board some of those ships and, if they work quickly, commandeer their weapons and take out as many as they can of the rest.”

“Well, ‘someone’, that sure is helpful!” Vriska says scornfully. “You don’t actually think we’re going to take it that at face value, right?”

“No,” Roxy’s mom says simply. She looks to the side of the camera, gestures to someone unseen. And to Roxy’s surprise, she finds the mysterious shadow resolve not into her uncle as she had believed, but a troll. She strolls unhurriedly across the floor, the sort of walk that gets close to public indecency, her iridescent dress shimmering in greens and blues in the bright sunlight. She hands Roxy’s mom a drink, lights a cigarette, and then shoos Bartholomew out of her lap so that she can sit down there instead, draping her long legs across the armrest and leaning back with an insolent smirk. Only a moment later, Roxy realizes that while the dress shimmers in green, the blue glow seems to be coming from her skin, her eyes, her whole being. Her dark red eyes fix on the camera for a moment, then drift away as if she’s bored.

Aradia suddenly lets out a choked gasp, grasping at her forehead. “Oooooooooh!” The gasp makes it sound like she’s in pain, and Sollux half rises, but when she looks up her eyes are wide with excitement, and she’s smiling incredulously. “Oh that should definitely be impossible!” she exclaims, apparently delighted.

“Fuck impossible,” says the strange troll emphatically, taking a drag of her cigarette.

Roxy’s mom playfully waves away the smoke drifting around her face. “Yes, thank you sweetheart. Everyone, this is Damara. Damara Megido. Say hello to your ancestor,” she adds with a small smile as Aradia lets out an incredulous laugh and claps her hands together, like someone who just witnessed a particularly impressive magic trick. “Now, if you don’t mind, how about we get to the plan?”

Notes:

like i said, a bit of a mixed bag! and another cliffhanger too ^^;; but look, this chapter actually contained an explanation of a past event that didn't have to be foreshadowed by about 30 vague flashbacks! it's like we're made of exposition up in here.

<3!

Chapter 34: Half true

Summary:

It's time to tell the truth.

Notes:

OKAY i'm actually sort of on time AND i'm on schedule for the dirkjake week big bang \o/ go meeeeee. anyway, this chapter got so much longer than i expected it to be, because i am boo boo the fool, but it's done and i'm gonna go to sleep.

oh, and i'm slapping an extra CW: CHILD ABUSE on this chapter just in case

It’s not a bad plan, Jane thinks, distractedly tapping the back of her pen against her clipboard. Just being able to make it onto the flagship had seemed like a rather volatile trump card, especially when managing to approach a fully armed fleet in secret was a damn tall order to hinge the whole operation on. That version of the plan had involved trying to sneak a single ship close enough that Sollux would be able to establish contact with their inside source – and ‘close enough’ was in fact not a fixed distance, not even particularly estimable in the circumstances. What if it turned out that the level of proximity involved was well within the flagship’s scanners? Especially since they also didn’t actually know the range of those very same scanners?

No, Jane hadn’t liked that plan at all. Too many unreliable factors, too much room for error. The new plan, which involves faking a full-scale attack, and then getting their people onto the fleet ships, hopefully tricking the alternian forces into believing that this is the reason behind the feint, doesn’t involve nearly as much uncertainty. Not to mention how the element of subterfuge will theoretically be made less important by the distracting ruse.

Of course it comes with its own set of complications. The fluttering tap, tap, tap of her pen sounds in anxious counterpoint to her speeding pulse. The new plan will require for the Condesce to believe she’s actually being attacked by a majority of the rebel fighting force, and while naturally the rebels aren’t so foolish that they’d send all their fighters into such a dangerous situation… it won’t work if the force is too small either. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that during the first stage of the plan, they’re not meant to pose a threat so much as function as bait. If the imperial forces can be made to believe that the rebels are either desperate or arrogant enough to pitch their full forces against Her Imperious Condescension’s own fleet, the idea is that they’ll be tempted to act recklessly in the hope of wiping out the nuisance for good.

The issue, when it boils right down to it, is that this plan will have a greater number of casualties. In the event that the former plan were to fail, they would only lose one ship and its crew. But even if this plan succeeds, as it hopefully will, the death toll will be much higher than that. It’s inevitable. Which is why she can see some of the rebel leaders shifting uncomfortably, and Karkat’s expression is dark, his arms crossed hard enough that it looks like he’s trying to fold in on himself until nothing is left. Tyzias’ face is unreadable, but Jane can tell how exhausted she is from the way her arms hang uselessly by her side, apparently lacking the strength to even keep her cup upright. It’s slowly dripping clear liquid into a puddle on the floor. Stelsa doesn’t even appear to have noticed, which is how Jane can tell that she’s worried as well.

She can pick up the unhappy tension in Dirk’s jawline as well, understands only too well why, because in moments like this she wonders if she doesn’t know him better perhaps even than his own family. Not because she’s feeling the same thing; it’s in moments like this when Jane is reminded of how she and her friend fundamentally differ, and in the contrast between their approaches she can read Dirk more clearly than when they’re agreeing. She smiles a bit sadly. Oh Dirk. He makes such a big show of being a ruthless strategist, but in spite of this, he almost never beats her at chess. She’s never had the heart to tell him why, and she’s pretty sure he wouldn’t listen anyway.

Dirk, deep down, doesn’t think in hierarchies. Though he plays aggressively, sacrificing his pieces just doesn’t come naturally to him. He focuses too much on his queen, his bishops, his knights, his castles; he consistently puts his king in far too much danger. In short, he doesn’t know how to properly utilize his pawns.

Pawns, Jane knows, are made to be sacrificed. That’s what they’re for.

Dirk prefers plans where the chance of succeeding teeters right on the edge of failure, but where the overall stakes hanging in that balance are lower. He courts the impossible dream of succeeding without having to ever sacrifice anyone else, and his last resort is always to try to gamble his own life before anyone else’s. Jane imagines that’s why he’d been so deeply disturbed when she was the one to walk into the fire for Jade’s sake. That’s his first impulse, after all; to his mind, it’s probably his duty, or something equally silly. Because when he does it, it’s a strategic decision, but when someone else does it’s of course reckless bravery. Even if he’d come to accept and understand that she’d done the right thing, she doesn’t think he quite understands why it had to be like that. How in a situation like that Jane, with her medic training and larger body, was simply more suited to be a pawn. The person who actually knew how to reactivate the defunct fire prevention system was a piece far too precious to endanger, or the game would be lost; that’s why someone else had to face the flames in his place.

No, she doesn’t think he understands that. To sacrifice himself for someone else is second nature to him, but to have to sacrifice someone else for the same cause will always be a failure. The problem is that far too often, one or the other isn’t really an option. When the ship that everything hinges on will contain him, his family, his friends, and the one piece they currently need to win… well, what then? It’s a choice between letting a larger number of rebels take the fall for them, increasing their chances of success, or putting everything at an inexcusable and unnecessary risk.

It’s not that she doesn’t understand why it hurts to make this decision. She knows what it is that makes Dave’s breathing so painfully controlled, as he cracks his knuckles and stares down in into his lap. He’s better than Dirk at intuitively understanding what needs to be done, but that doesn’t change that he hates it. Jane’s brother looks conflicted, his hands clenching and unclenching as he paces. John is not a chess player at all, he’s too straightforward and he has no patience for constantly thinking multiple steps ahead, but she knows that he understands where their priorities must lay.

Next to her, Nepeta fidgets with her tablet, frowning. This must be counterintuitive to the way she usually handles things too, Jane thinks fondly. Standing aside and letting people get hurt, even when there’s absolutely nothing she can do to prevent it, is simply not something she’s equipped to cope with. In fact, Nepeta rather reminds her of Dirk in the way she seems to instinctively assume that there always is something she can do, some way of twisting fate with her very own hands if she has to, and Jane suspect that she too would rather fall on that sword than ever accept defeat. Birds of a feather, so sure that if the answer isn’t to be found within themselves, then it cannot exist. No wonder, then, if they prefer to see failure as a personal shortcoming, rather than acknowledge the possibility that there was never anything they could do in the first place...

She shakes her head. She’s probably assuming too much, and that’s not fair. Hasn’t she learned the hard way where thinking she always knows best will lead her? How many times is she prepared to methodically break her own heart before she finally learns?

She can’t read the other trolls as well. Vriska has her teeth slightly bared, and Jane has a feeling she’s only staying in her chair because Terezi has a hand on top of her knee, pressing it down firmly, but it’s hard to tell what either of them thinks of the situation. Vriska seems like the sort of person who would understand why large-scale sacrifices are currently necessary, but she’s also the sort of person who rushes headfirst into battle. Terezi is simply inscrutable. If Jane can pick out anything from the sharp lines of her face, it’s intense concentration, as if she’s still turning the dilemma over in her mind.

Feferi looks unsure. Jane had seen her open her mouth at one point as if to protest, but then she’d quickly closed it again, ducking her head unhappily. Is she resigned to the inevitable, or is she simply trying not to interfere? Hard to tell.

Letting her gaze drift across the crowded room, the tapping of her pen having slowed down to a slow but inexorable beat, she finally meets Rose’s gaze. Rose, who plays just as recklessly as Dirk, but who knows how to remove herself from the game in a way he cannot; who is willing to sacrifice anything and everything, rather than be beholden to any strategy which might force her to become predictable.

Well, that’s enough of that. Jane draws in a deep breath, before turning to Tyzias with an apologetic smile. “Excuse me, Generadmin Entykk, but would it be possible for me and my friends to go somewhere a touch more private? We have something we need to discuss.”

She gives Jane a long, steady look. Then she gestures at the group of assorted rebels. “It’s getting late anyway. Go get some rest, the lot of you.” She doesn’t show any sign of leaving herself, and therefore neither are Stelsa, Daraya or Mallek, though the latter seems caught up in his own world at present, having a mumbling exchange with Sollux and Roxy over something on a monitor.

Well, needs must, Jane supposes. She doesn’t particularly want to test the goodwill of their allies. Once again meeting Rose’s gaze, she puts her clipboard down and stands up. “Right,” she says briskly. “It’s time for the rest of you to fill me and Jake in on what exactly went down a year ago.”

She’s not surprised when her words are greeted with complete silence. She pretends not to see the sudden tremble in Dave’s hands, or the look of mingled reproach and guilt that her brother sends her almost immediately thereafter. Rose’s expression doesn’t change at all; she only tilts her head almost imperceptibly, fingers curling slowly around her cup of spicy alternian tea. Jane counts the seconds as they pass by, waiting for the move she’s certain comes next, but it doesn’t come from where she’d expected it. It’s not Dirk who speaks, but Roxy.

“Janey,” she says, looking up from the monitor she’s still bent over, the greenish light washing the very faint hint of red out of her curls and making her eyes look weirdly colorless too, “it’s really got nothing to do with all of this. It’s just this messed-up thing that happened because everyone was still upset about the accident and everything, that’s all.”

“Look, I want to believe that,” Jane says, grasping at her self-control even as she already feels it start to fray. “I really do, Roxy, but it doesn’t change the fact that this has gone on far too long! You can’t actually go around keeping the two of us in the dark for this long, it’s just not reasonable. Not to mention the longer this goes on, the more I’ve got to ask myself… is that really all there is to it? Is it really just a- an unfortunate mishap, and nothing more than that?”

“Steady on, Janey-” Jake begins, and she feels one of her last nerves snapping with a twang.

“Shut up, Jake!” He looks hurt, and she instantly regrets the harshness of her words, the way she’d shut him down as if this doesn’t concern him too. How can she be so angry at being kept in the dark, and then treat him as if he doesn’t get a say in the matter, when he’s just as lost as she is? No, it’s unfair, she knows it’s unfair, and she also knows why she’s so angry with him. She wants him to be on her side in this, because without him she doesn’t actually have a side at all. She’s all alone. “I- I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jake, I shouldn’t have...” Another deep breath, trying to take the tension in the air down with it, as if that’s going to ease it. “That was uncalled for. I apologize. You were saying?”

He opens his mouth, and instantly trips over his words, looking absolutely miserable. He hates being put on the spot, she knows that, and she’s about to suggest he just take his time with it, when he pulls himself together much faster than she would’ve expected. “I just think it’s a little bit harum-scarum to start throwing out accusations right away! I mean, I’d be a rotten old liar if I didn’t say that I think all the hush-hush and all our friends acting like a cabal of conspirators is getting really frigging old, but that’s going a bit far.”

He’s being… perfectly reasonable, which makes her own outburst seem even more embarrassing, but she’s just going to have to swallow her pride and deal with it. “You’re right,” she admits, sighing. “I don’t actually think it’s anything nefarious, but...”

“But what, Jane?” Ah, there’s Dirk, and he’s not happy. “But you feel left out? But you think we should drag up something pointlessly painful just so you can feel included, is that it?”

Now he’s lashing out, she realizes. It must’ve hurt to hear Jake admit that he was frustrated too, and so he tries to turn it on her, since she started it. Well, it’s not going to work. His anger hurts, yes, but it’s an acceptable sacrifice.

“No, it’s not,” she replies calmly, once again meeting Rose’s unwavering gaze for a moment. “What it is, is a completely reasonable request to not have the rest of you treating it as acceptable to keep something secret, when it ended up with half of you needing medical attention as a result. I understand it’s painful, but it’s just not how we’ve ever worked as a team, and I don’t think it’s fair to either me or Jake to pretend like it is.” She digs her nails into her palms, bracing herself. “Besides, while I don’t suspect you of hiding anything dangerous on purpose, I really do trust you would never do something like that… Well, I don’t actually think I trust you not to do so accidentally.”

“Meaning?” Rose asks, her voice measured and calm. This time Jane wouldn’t say she feels any nerves snapping, but they’re definitely twanging dangerously.

“Meaning I’m really, really sick of your darned Strider-Lalonde family secrets, Rose. I’m not blaming you for not knowing everything your mother and uncle have been up to, because I imagine they’re even worse than the lot of you, but I’m going to be putting down my foot on trying to carry on that tradition, do you hear me? Surprising as it may be, I don’t actually give a tinker’s cuss about this- this idea you’ve got of never letting people see you struggle and always pretending everything is fine even when it’s really not. That’s all well and good if it’s just you, but we’ve been a team for five years now, for pity’s sake! At some point you’re actually going to have to learn how to talk about it when something goes wrong.”

“She’s right, you know,” Tyzias interjects unexpectedly. This really wasn’t a direction Jane had expected support from, and she stares in surprise as Stelsa nods emphatically in agreement, squeezing her matesprit’s hand in hers.

“No offense, darlings, but if there’s something we can speak on with some authority, it’s how your family’s whole tiresome tendency of ‘protecting’ others by lying can end up hurting a lot of people, even if you don’t mean it.”

“Yeah, and try saying ‘I didn’t mean to’ to a corpse, see how far that gets you,” Daraya adds, a little too nastily Jane feels, but… well, she hadn’t exactly meant to eavesdrop, but she’d heard enough of her conversation with Roxy to understand that she has her reasons.

“Full fucking offense, but this really doesn’t concern you,” Dirk shoots back, his lips going white and twitching with effort as he tries not to outright snarl at her.

“Yes it does,” Tyzias counters calmly. “We’re prepared to put aside old differences for the sake of the S- for Karkat, for the cause, and even to accept your mother’s help in planning our attack. But I want to make it perfectly clear that I’ve already lost good people to the kind of lack of transparency Jane has brought our attention to, and I won’t let it happen again. If you kids cannot behave, I will make sure you’ll have to sit this out somewhere I can keep an eye on you, is that clear? I need people who know how to work as a team, not brats who put the interests of their human ‘family’ bonds above all else.”

Well, that does in fact shut Dirk up, and his eyes widen slightly in shock when he realizes that she can in fact make good on her threat. They might be here officially as emissaries for SKAIA regarding their willingness to assist the rebellion, but she’s nonetheless the commanding officer on the ground, and she does in fact have the final say in who is assigned to what mission. Jane almost smiles, but manages not to, because she’s sure she would actually hurt Dirk’s feelings if he thought she was laughing at him right now. It’s actually just a relief to finally have a proper adult around for a change.

“Very well,” Rose says smoothly. “Even so, there’s actually no reason for everyone present to hear about this. I appreciate that you may have misgivings about the affair due to your previous experiences, and in the interest of transparency I would suggest that a reasonable compromise is having one of you stay to oversee the conversation. But as for those of you who truly are completely uninvolved-”

“Rose. Don’t.” Dave finally speaks, his sunglasses shoved into his hair and one hand covering his eyes. He sounds resigned. “It’s fine. I don’t care. I’m not- If I’ve gotta talk about it anyway, I honestly don’t give a shit who’s in the room, it doesn’t really matter.” He audibly gulps down a deep breath, almost choking on it, but when he sits up a bit straighter, there’s an expression on his face that Jane might almost take for relief. The shades stay where they are, though his gaze is fixed somewhere far away. “Anyway, Jane’s right. Jake too. What we’ve been doing is bullshit, and I’m… fuck, I’m sorry to have dragged John and Jade into it too.”

“Oh please.” Jade rolls her eyes, but her voice is gentle. “Dave, we love you, but you didn’t actually drag us into shit, alright? Whether it was dumb to keep silent about it or not – I mean it probably was – it was still up to you to decide, and we respected that.” She pauses, as if listening to something. “Hal wants to say something too,” she says, and before anyone can either ask what she means or protest, the glow of her irises immediately changes to bright red.

“I’m guessing I officially count as part of the Strilonde Family Secret Club,” Jade says, except it’s not her voice anymore. Jane can’t quite suppress her shudder. Of course that makes perfect sense; she’d seen the damage done to Jade’s throat by the fire, known there was no way to save her vocal cords, and that she can speak at all is entirely due to a combination of voice recordings and complicated biotech which Jane won’t pretend to understand. This does not in any way change the fact that hearing Hal’s voice come out of her friend’s mouth is nothing short of profoundly disturbing. “But let me state for the record,” he continues, “that I wasn’t particularly interested in anyone else knowing the details of that sorry affair either, since it seemed like it might be construed as an invitation to sentimentality that I didn’t particularly cherish. So there was no hypothetical approximation of the disgusting meat film known as skin off my back. But if we feel like we need to have it all out now, feel free to severely understate my role in the whole messy debacle.”

Then Jade’s eyes fade back to the usual bright green, and she immediately rolls them in exasperation. “Sorry about that. But I did feel like maybe he should get to speak on the matter too, even if he’s being a butt about it as usual.”

John grimaces but doesn’t comment, since they all already know perfectly well how he feels about Hal. “Yeah Dave, if you think about it, you didn’t even tell us not to talk about it! But wasn’t something we were going to bring up all of a sudden like hey, remember that awful thing that happened, let’s have a long chat about that without asking Dave if it’s okay. I don’t know, it feels like that would just have been a shitty thing to do. So don’t worry about us, okay?” He smiles encouragingly at his friend, and Jane feels something untwist slightly in her chest. Of course she’d felt a bit betrayed that John had been in on it too. She absolutely wouldn’t claim that she and John are as close as the Strider-Lalondes, and to be honest she prefers it that way, but he’s still her brother. It had been hard, first being literally locked out of her own medical bay as he and the rest talked, and then spending all of this time not being able to help with whatever was going on with him either. He’d been so deeply miserable for quite a while, had barely talked to Dave, and though that seems to have resolved by now, she’d never been given a chance of even understanding it.

“Alright,” Dave says, hands twisting into complicated knots in his lap. “Fine. It goes like this. As many of you know already...” He seems to be trying to pull the band aid quickly, but here his voice knots up as well, seeming to pile up painfully in his throat as he struggles to breathe around it. As Jane could’ve told him, ripping off any kind of wound covering quickly only works if whatever is underneath has already healed. It’s pretty obvious that this isn’t the case. But then Karkat covers his hands with his own, letting out a soft warbling sound, and even though Dave’s gaze remains detached and pained, that seems to help. “My uncle abused me. My whole childhood, basically.”

Jake draws in a muted, shocked gasp, but Jane can’t bring herself to feign surprise. “I… did suspect as much,” she murmurs. She hadn’t intended it as an interruption, just a confirmation that she had understood, but Dave flinches as if he’d been slapped, his eyes losing some of that far-away quality.

“You… did?” he says, shocked. Jane does her best to hold back her impatience and exasperation, and compassion makes it easier.

“Dave,” she says as softly as she can manage, “my specialty might be field medicine, but I am nonetheless a medical professional. Yes, I suspected it, because I have examined you more than once, and every time I tried to ask you about certain wounds and scars, you always deflected my questions. What was I supposed to think?”

He looks like her answer has numbed him, made it hard for him to process the next step in the conversation. Dirk, however, looks furious. “Then why the fuck didn’t you say something?”

“Oh, I did,” she shoots back, her temper flaring once again. “I raised the issue more than once with our superiors. You know, the people who were supposed to be in charge, since we were no offense barely more than children at the time? I was told it was being dealt with.” She draws in a shaky breath, remembering the sinking sense of betrayal she’d felt around the fifth time she’d been told this.

“I think what Dirk means is, why didn’t you say anything to us?” Roxy asks mildly, though Jane can tell she’s not nearly as calm as she pretends to be.

Jane takes her own glasses off to rub at her own eyes. It’s a bit of a relief to reduce all of their accusatory looks to a blur for just a moment, and deal with the persistent sting of tears behind her eyelids. “Because, once again, I’m a medical professional. I took oaths , you know? I’m not supposed to talk about anything I see or hear during exams with anyone who isn’t my patient, unless I have reason to believe that they are in danger, in which case I’m supposed to talk to my superiors. That’s… That’s the protocol, and I was trying to do the right thing.” She can hear her own voice break slightly, and pushes on in the hope that she can cover it up. “And to be completely frank, I thought you all knew. I’m sorry, I really did.” When she puts on her glasses again, even Rose’s face is registering a jagged edge of shock. “I thought it was another of those things that all four of you knew but no one talked about and if I tried to bring it up you would- well, do what you always do! Shut me out, tell me it wasn’t my business, change the subject! Just like when I tried to talk about your mother’s drinking, or Roxy’s for that matter, or how uncomfortable some of Rose’s and Dirk’s jokes were making me, all that talk about dying in battle as if it was a certainty, or- or anything!”

She could try to hold back the tears again, but what would be the point? Jake lets out a quiet sigh and glances at Dirk.

“She’s- Well, I’m sorry, but she does bring up a goldarned good point. She’s not the only one who’s been hit with the ole inscrutability act while trying to reach out a helping hand.”

“No, she’s not,” Jade agrees, giving Dave a sad look. He still seems to be dumbstruck by the idea that his pain hadn’t in fact existed in a vacuum even before whatever it was that happened later that made him finally talk about it. John just nods awkwardly, clearly not comfortable with voicing his agreement, but unable to completely deny the obvious.

“Not to barge in on something that’s really fucking obviously a private moment like a loose beefgrub in a crockery emporium, but to be brutally fucking honest about it, and even without having the first faint idea about how human families are supposed to work, it’s been pretty fucking obvious to me too.” Karkat looks around at the rest of the trolls. “And I really can’t say that my pusher would immediately fail in shock if it turned out I wasn’t the only one.”

There’s scattered response of hesitant nods; some more expected, others not as much. Kanaya, Feferi, Terezi, Eridan, Nepeta. The latter catches Jane’s eye and offers her an encouraging little smile, prompting Jane to take her hand and give it a brief, grateful squeeze.

There definitely seems to be some kind of communion of spirits going on between the four remaining older revolutionaries, but they don’t appear incline to intervene at this moment. After a thoroughly awkward moment of prolonged silence, Dave unexpectedly lets out a muted laugh, leaning back in his chair. “Yeah, that’s fair. It’s- Look, Jane, I could tell you how much I appreciate you trying to have my back even when I was being a truculent piece of shit about it, and let’s be real, it’d get real fucking maudlin quick.” She opens her mouth to protest, to tell him that she’d certainly never blamed him for not talking about whatever horrific things his uncle had done to him. But he shakes his head, and there’s something imploring about the look he sends her, so she opts for silence instead. “So let’s save that for another day, and right now I’ ll just fast-forward to what we were actually talking about, how about it?”

“Very well,” she agrees with a sigh. “We might as well get it over with.”

“My feelings exactly,” he agrees, a little bit too fast, the anxious tension returning to the twitch of his shoulders, the flicker of his eyes. “So as you know, it was back when Jade was still in a coma and you were still-”

“Recovering from my burns. Yes.”

“Right. Well, they send us in to try to dig through the suspected hideout of a ring of dersite weapon smugglers, hoping we’d find some proof that they were the ones supplying the Green Sun, maybe even some connections with the current government, shit like that. Our intel said the place was supposed to be all but deserted, all the people in charge having been conveniently invited to a fancy gala, with Jake playing the dummy there and keeping them occupied. Roxy, John and Hal set off a diversion, which was supposed to draw the attention of any guards that might still be around, while me, Dirk and Rose went in the back way, so to speak.” Well, that does make sense for a mission like that. Dirk is their infiltration expert, and he’d gone in along with a highly proficient fighter and their most analytic mind. Put like that, it certainly sounds like it should’ve been an open-and-shut affair, but the haunted look in Dave’s eyes is evidence enough that things hadn’t gone the way they should.

“Regrettably, our intelligence was incorrect,” Rose fills in with a sigh. “Even with the most generous margins, ‘deserted’ is not a word that anyone in good conscience could’ve applied to the place.”

“It wasn’t even an ambush,” Dirk mutters tersely, “at least not in the more traditional sense. They sure as fuck weren’t expecting us, that much was clear, but that’s a pretty cold comfort when you’re outnumbered ten to one.”

“We were driven further into the bunker, and got split up.” Dave’s voice is barely holding now. “I managed to… get rid of the ones following me somehow. I don’t really remember, it’s all- that’s- that’s when it all goes hazy for me, I can’t tell if what I’m remembering is even real. I keep having nightmares about shooting a fuckload of people, but it’s all mixed up with a lot of other shit, and I can’t...” The poor boy is shaking so hard that it’s hard to make out what he’s saying, and Jane feels an uncomfortable stab of guilt, knowing she’d been the one to force him into this.

“Once we’d taken out our guys, we went looking for Dave.” Dirk’s nails are cutting into his own arms. “We tried to contact the other team for backup, but the damn bunker played hell with the signal, we couldn’t even be sure if they heard us the one time we got through.”

“We didn’t,” John supplies quietly, “but we knew something must be wrong if they were calling us at all. So we started making our way in, but by then...”

“By then we were much further into the complex than should’ve been possible, according to the rudimentary blueprints we had.” Rose’s voice somehow manages to sound both heavy and distant. “The place was a maze, and it took us quite a while to find Dave. When we finally did, he- he was curled up and shaking in an empty room, covered in blood, though we couldn’t see any enemies. We assumed he must be hurt.” She exchanges a painful look with Dirk. “We tried talking to him, we asked him if he was injured, but it was as if he couldn’t hear us, and we were… concerned that more enemies were going to turn up soon. So-” She falters into silence, looking more hesitant than Jane thinks she’s ever seen her before, as her gaze flickers between her brothers.

“I hit him,” Dirk says flatly, far too flatly. Flat like a cold hospital wall, like the absence of a heartbeat. “I figured he was in shock and we needed to move, so I...”

“Oh Dirk,” Jane whispers softly, caught between horror and compassion. Jake looks desperate to reach out to him, but he must know that he wouldn’t accept it, and so his hands tighten into fists in his lap instead. Dirk’s face is a heavy iron lock, and Jane imagines that it must’ve looked just as much like his uncle’s back then as it does now.

“I… still don’t remember jack dick, but obviously that’s when I lost my shit.” Dave’s attempt at regaining some composure drops into the silence like a leaden weight. “I was out of my mind already, and I guess when Dirk slapped me and I looked up… the rest was just instinct. My uncle doesn’t believe in pulling punches. He always expected me to come at him as if I was fighting for my life, and he-” He grimaces, and while it starts out like a snarl, come the finish he just looks like he’s about to be sick. “-he made sure I was terrified enough of him that I- it’s- That’s what it felt like, every time. Like fighting against someone who was trying to kill me, someone I had to kill first.” He’s holding onto Karkat’s hands like a man clutching at a lifeline, hard enough that Jane can see pain registering on the troll’s face, though he doesn’t say anything. “Of course that wasn’t a problem when I was fighting against him. Whatever I did, he was always stronger, better, faster… and more to the fucking point, he didn’t mind hurting me enough to make me stop. But Dirk’s not like that.”

“We tried to subdue him without hurting him,” Rose confirms. “We understood that he was frightened and confused, but we were unaware of the source of his distress, so… well, we could’ve gone about it better. We certainly should’ve gotten Dirk out of there before-”

“But you didn’t know,” Dave cuts her short. “So I… I threw Rose into a wall. I’m not sure if I knew who she was, if I was trying to get her out of danger or just saw another enemy, but that’s what I did. And then I tried to kill Dirk.”

“Not me,” Dirk argues. “You didn’t know it was me.”

“Yeah, well, but it was. Whatever I was seeing, it was still your leg I broke, and then I aimed a fucking gun at you.”

“Which is when we finally caught up,” Roxy intervenes. “Just in time to see him firing and not much else in mine and John’s case, but Hal is a hella lot faster. So he was the one who took the shot instead of Dirk. Saved his life.”

At this point it’s clear that it doesn’t matter what Dirk might be ready to accept, because Jake leans over and pulls his scrawny frame into a bear hug anyway, rocking him gently back and forth. He doesn’t even struggle, just slumps limply against his chest with a sigh. Jane shakes her head, not quite sure what to say. So that’s what Hal had meant, both about sentimentality, and about wanting his involvement to be understated. It’s pretty hard to see how that would even be possible, but well, in a manner of speaking he is in fact a Strider-Lalonde, so she supposes she shouldn’t look for much sense there.

Dave is sitting hunched over, and Karkat has slid to the floor so that he can kneel in front of him, fussing over him in the wordless chittering and clicking not-quite-language of his species. The rest of the younger trolls are reacting to them with raised eyebrows and confused glances; all but one, who just looks away instead. The older trolls are just politely averting their gazes.

“Right,” John say, squirming where he sits, “and after that I ran in and grabbed Dave, and Roxy knocked him out for his own good. Then we just kind of stood there while Dirk was doing whatever he did to, uh, move Hal’s brain out of the melting robot and into the ship, I guess. We were kind of a mess, two of us were unconscious and one was injured, so I had to carry Rose and Dave’s skinny butts out of there, while Roxy helped Dirk not be an idiot by walking on his broken leg.”

“And that’s that, Janey,” Roxy finishes, fixing her with an inscrutable expression. “I get why making it into this big thing we weren’t talking about really sucked for you and Jake, and I’m not abouta say that it was the right thing to do or whatever, but at the end of the day, it really was just this shitty thing that happened because we’re all kinda messed up, and not because of anything important.” She turns her gaze meaningfully to the revolutionaries. “So you don’t gotta worry about it, aight?”

Daraya snorts loudly, and Tyzias and Stelsa exchange tense glances. Mallek sighs and folds down the screen he’s working on, crossing his arms on top of it and leaning his chin against his hands. “I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, yeah, shit, that sure sounds messed up. And since I was actually there when Roxy – the other Roxy, I mean – came back from the whole disaster your family got themselves in, I’ve gotta say, it really sounds a lot like the same kind of fucked-up that got your uncle and-” He snaps his fingers. “Damn, what’s the other family word?”

“Mom,” Roxy says just before Daraya says, “Aunt.”

“Yeah, the latter. Sounds like the mess that got your uncle and your aunt killed.”

 

---

 

Dave had honest-to-god been trying to just check out at that point. He’d told the truth, shitty as it was, and felt like he was owed some high-quality dissociation time together with his own disembodied mind and only the vaguest awareness of his surroundings. But it’s hard not to be slammed right the fuck back to full and immediate awareness at such a monumentally impossible statement. He straightens up in a quick, jerking motion which instantly makes his forehead collide with Karkat’s, since the troll is still kneeling right in front of him and had apparently leaned in to check on him. Lucky he’s got those nubby little horns, because he might’ve taken an eye out if they were more like Kanaya’s or whatever. As it is, Dave just grunts briefly in pain, and Karkat lets out a vexed hiss, but it’s not enough to pull their attention away from what Mallek just said.

“Hold the fuck up. What the fuck do you mean, our aunt? We don’t have an aunt.”

“No, you don’t,” Daraya agrees bluntly, “because she’s dead. Just like your other uncle is. They both died when Dirk Strider, first edition, decided that following orders wasn’t a concept that applied to him, and dragged all three of his siblings into his dangerous idiocy.”

It feels exactly like being punched in the gut; Dave should fucking know, shouldn’t he? All those times when he’d seen his uncle staring at him, expressionless and cold, and he’d wondered what he was thinking. Every single time he fucked up, and found himself pinned to the floor with the red-hot barrel of a blaster pressed against the back of his neck, and the flat voice that permeates his nightmares said, Keep that up and you’ll die or This is the kind of shit that gets you killed or just a simple You’re dead. The way he’d never used his name, not once... except for that one time.

It was right after Jade’s tech got taken over, and he’d tried to restrain her, thinking like a complete idiot that no matter what, she wouldn’t actually hurt him. Yeah, well, if John hadn’t grabbed him and pulled him out of the way, the laser blade would’ve cut him clean in half, instead of giving him an impressively straight scar all the way across his abdomen. He’d still landed in the medical bay, and he had to suppose that John had reported what happened to SKAIA, because when he woke up his uncle was there, waiting in complete silence. Dave had been avoiding him ever since he’d almost killed Dirk, but there he’d been, too drugged up and too weak to go anywhere, pantsless and with a fucking IV in his arm. He’d had no choice but to lie still and wait for the bastard to stop staring at him and actually say something, feeling like his heart might explode out of his chest at any second.

He’d moved too fast for Dave to brace himself, and then he was in his face, forcing his chin up with one hand and pinning him in place with the other. He didn’t know if he’d knocked his own shades off or if he took them off himself, but that was the first and last time he ever saw his uncles eyes. Just as blue as his mother’s, shading into violet in the stark overhead light. “What did you learn, Dave?” he’d asked quietly. “Have you learned that there’s no such thing as trust? Or will you let it kill you again?” Then he was gone.

Dave had assumed he was talking about all the times he’d been ‘killed’ during training, all his countless previous fuck-ups and failures. Of course he had. But as Roxy closes her eyes and seems to stop breathing, and he can hear a muffled, “Son of a bitch,” from where Dirk’s face is still pressed against Jake’s chest, and Rose covers her face as helpless, bitter laughter spills from her mouth like something oozing from a wound… he knows that’s not it. He knows that as far as his uncle is concerned, he has already died once, and at some point it’s going to happen again if he doesn’t-

Fuck. Fuck . They’d never been created from a mix of their mom’s and uncle’s DNA, had they? It had all been a lie. Instead his mother had just straight up cloned herself and her brother, as well as their dead siblings, as if she thought they could start the whole thing up again and somehow get it right this time. It’s no wonder that Dirk’s face had blended together with his uncle’s in his mind the moment he slapped him; it’s the same fucking face, bar about twenty years, his eyes and a couple of scars. Same face, same blood, same voice, same-

-same names.

Is he supposed to somehow feel sympathy now, knowing that’s why his uncle probably did it, why he kept treating Dave’s body and mind like a problem he could somehow fix by taking him apart and putting him back together again? Well, he doesn’t. If anything, it just makes him angrier. All this time, he’d thought there must’ve been something about him that was just… not good enough, never good enough, something weak and pathetic that his uncle had hated and tried to correct. He’d compared himself to Dirk and thought that’s what he ought to be, that’s why he was the one he was putting through all that shit and not his brother. But the truth is it never mattered who he was, or what he did, or how hard he fucking tried. Because that would never actually undo what had already happened. No matter what he did, he would never be able to bring back the person his uncle saw when he looked at him.

“So I take it,” Tyzias says tiredly, massaging the base of her horns, “that not only did they tell you about working with us, but they also never mentioned that Rose and Dave existed at all. Wonderful.” As harsh as her words might sound, there’s real sympathy in her expression as her gaze drifts between the four of them. “Then I suppose we should explain. We had gotten information that there was someone on the inside of the Green Sun who had information on how to...” She makes a vague gesture with her hand. “...well, get at the Condesce in some way. But in return, they wanted us to go in there and free them, because they were being held prisoner.”

“Yeah,” Mallek cuts in, “though unfortunately – and call me crazy, but you might’ve heard this one before – that information wasn’t correct. Or, well, it might’ve been, but it sure wasn’t complete. The informant, for one, forgot to mention that their mind was under constant surveillance by that cueball-headed psychic, or that he was going to be present at the base at the time we were planning to break in. Obviously once we knew that, we called the whole thing off. Too damn risky.”

“Which was when our uncle decided to make his own plan and break in anyway.” Roxy glances at Daraya, who nods curtly. “Annnnd… what then?”

“And we’re not sure,” Stelsa admits. “Except we think that it was actually his and Rose’s plan, and that they were the only ones who knew the details going in. Everyone else... well, some of the other humans were outranked by them, so they were probably just following orders. The trolls who went along were mostly young hot-heads, eager to risk their lives for the cause and disappointed to have missed their chance. As for Roxy and Dave… well, I imagine they went along with it because they trusted the others.”

What did you learn, Dave?

“Roxy wasn’t exactly very coherent when she came back,” Mallek says, and there’s an edge of compassion in the set of his mouth. His gaze flickers momentarily to the younger Roxy right next to him. “But from what I heard her tell Bronya, when Dave found out that the plan involved his brother getting caught on purpose, and that to make it believable, they were going to have to endanger the rest of the crew that had come with them… he tried to call the whole thing off.”

Jane, who had been looking completely overwhelmed by what she’d inadvertently set in motion, casts down her eyes at that, her mouth twisting in misery. Dirk slams his fist down hard on Jake’s thigh, and though the bigger man winces in obvious pain, he doesn’t let go of him. As if from a great distance, Dave can feel Karkat’s hands on his own, his thumbs soothingly rubbing the tension out of them, gaze fixed on his task.

Have you learned that there’s no such thing as trust?

“There was some kind of altercation between the two of them, Rose tried to intervene, and she was shot,” Daraya says darkly. “Roxy said she thought someone’s gun must’ve gone off by mistake. Not that it matters. She bled out in minutes. By then, presumably, even that idiot Dirk must’ve realized that they couldn’t go through with the plan, but...”

“But that’s when the Green Sun’s people found them,” Tyzias finishes, sounding even older than she looks. “There was a melee, Roxy managed to get out of there somehow, and everyone else apart from Dirk were killed.” She grimaces sourly. “He got exactly what he wanted. He was taken prisoner.”

Or will you let it kill you again?

His uncle hadn’t been trying to warn him against trusting the enemy, Dave thinks numbly. It had nothing to do with the Green Sun technology, nothing to do with letting it take control of Jade’s body. All along, he’d been warning him not to trust his friends, his family – and most important at all, to never fucking trust him.

Well, he managed to make sure of the latter, at least.

“Bronya got him out of there,” Mallek says softly, teeth flashing in a brief grimace of frustration. “Well, she led the mission, and he killed her for her trouble. She was the only casualty that time around, but you could say we weren’t that kindly disposed toward any humans or SKAIA at that point. We told them to fuck off and never show their faces around us again, and cut our contact completely.”

“Until now, after years of radio silence, when our mother contacts you again,” Rose muses, dark amusement clinging to every syllable, as if she just spotted some twisted joke. “And what do you know, with her she has a person who just happens to have important information on how to take out of the Condesce, just like your ‘informant’ had told you.” Her voice gains an almost sing-song quality. “Shall I guess how it happened? Bronya went in to free my uncle from the apparently empty chamber he was held in, most likely strapped into a great big globe-shaped contraption meant to leave his mind at the mercy of Doc Scratch’s wiles. She ordered the rest of her forces to keep guard outside, and when no one came out, my mother – who no doubt came along against everyone’s better judgment – went in there to see what was taking them so long. When the rest of the squad finally arrived at the scene, they found our uncle alone, Bronya dead, and her weapon in his hand. How am I doing?”

Daraya is staring at her with something that is probably outright hatred at this point, but she still manages to grind out, “Yeah. That’s what happened.”

“Mm, I’m guessing mom turned up later, didn’t explain what had happened to her, and took our uncle with her back to the Core on your orders,” Roxy sighs. “So if, for example, there happened to be a troll with a killer dress sense and a nicotine addiction in that room, and she managed to smuggle her out, no one except mom would know where she ended up, or even that she’d been there.”

“That does make sense,” Aradia agrees. “I mean, I can’t imagine how my ancestor could possibly be alive if there weren’t some kind of time shenanigans involved. Or what do you say, Callie?”

The cherub once again sits in the corner of the room like a very easy person to forget about, considering how she’s hardly uttered a word since they arrived at the rebel base, though Dave has heard her enthusing about it in a hushed tone to some of the girls a couple of times. She looks conflicted now, eyes flickering, and Dave once again has the sense that she’s really not used to making any kind of decision without her other half – which is to say, she’s used to agreeing with other-Calliope’s decisions and doing what she says. But finally she nods her head, wringing her hands with a sound like nails against a blackboard. “Yes, I have to agree. I don’t think there’s anything that could’ve prolonged her natural lifespan and still left her looking quite so… well, normal , apart from my brother’s powers. He must’ve either moved her through time or possibly found a way to put her body in stasis – or both.” She makes a concerned whistling sound. “Both honestly seem s fairly likely. I have no idea why, but...” Her hard, glossy face somehow manages to convey intense disgust. “...well, he was always fond of pretty girls, and considering her powers, he no doubt found her useful.”

“Especially since his servant – you know, the cue ball guy – he was involved in messing up our species, remember?” Aradia exclaims a little too eagerly. “So he probably needed other trolls to help out with that, right? And who better than a humble rust blood who no one would notice in a crowd?” She grins a lopsided grin, and Dave mentally compares it to the cruel quirk of her ancestor’s smile. No, they’re not the same at all, but he can’t rule out that they could be, given the right – wrong? – circumstances.

“Well, fuck,” Daraya says with feeling.

“Agreed,” Dirk says darkly, finally extricating himself gently from Jake’s arms, his features once again composed, as if he’s trying to pretend that little interlude didn’t happen. “As much as I’d like it to, however, that doesn’t actually change anything concerning our plans, now does it? Finding out that the informant in fact is a previous high-level employee of the Green Sun, which we now know has been the hand dictating the Condesce’s moves since the start, does exactly nothing to make the information she provided us less trustworthy. I can’t claim I know what the fuck my mother or… that man are playing at,” a brief twitch in his expression, which Dave reads as discomfort at being reminded of his exact biological connection to their uncle, “but the fact remains that the teleport system remains the best lead we have. We can’t risk ignoring it.”

“He’s right,” Karkat agrees before anyone can put together a reasonable refutation. “I fucking hate it too, every single part of this is more shithive maggots than the previous one, and personally I’d like to tell those two conniving, messed-up, putrid excuses for humans to bend over and take a huge whiff of the disdain wafting from my chagrin tunnel, crafted especially just for them, but…” He lets out a huge sigh, gazing up into Dave’s eyes from where he sits on the floor, distractedly twining their fingers together. Dave doesn’t know what to say, or even if he could say anything if he tried, so he just nods tiredly for Karkat to go on. It needs to be said, no matter what he might feel about it all – and honestly, at this point, he’s not even sure. He just wants to go somewhere else, somewhere safe that feels at least a little bit like home, and sleep for a thousand years. And he wants Karkat to come with him, so it’s better to just let him get this over with.

“I’m not letting them ruin this for us,” Karkat says, squeezing his hands. “This is more important than them; it’s more important than any other shitty human family secrets anyone might feel like spilling just for the sake of it; it sure as fuck is more important than us. And I can’t fucking stress this enough, it’s absolutely more important than either my ancestor or me.” He closes his eyes, and his voice changes slightly, as if overlaid by more than one other voice. It sounds like a really shitty special effect, but it sure gets everyone's attention. Somewhere to Dave's left, Calliope lets out something that sounds like a sigh of relief. “Too many have died for this, and lived for this, and hurt for this, and made complete fucking messes of themselves and others to get to this point. We have to take this chance now that we have it. We can’t afford to hesitate.”

Dave is prepared when Karkat opens his eyes and immediately sways dangerously, sliding down onto the floor next to him and catching him before he falls. He’s not unconscious, though his breathing sounds more labored than it did a moment ago, and he clings to Dave’s arms with shaking fingers.

“Right.” Tyzias stands up, looking away pointedly. “You heard him. It’s decided.” She gestures toward the door with her empty mug, the movement a lot more deliberate than her voice; it’s pretty clearly an order. “Now stop gawking. This isn’t a school feeding facility, everyone, so try to act like adults and mind your own business. Let’s go.”

Before Dave can ask what she means by that, the room has emptied as if by magic, and Rose winks at him before closing the door, her mouth curling into a slight smile. Then it’s just him and Karkat.

Notes:

i feel like the rest of the team should start up #strilondeshaming and just take pictures of their dumbass strilondes holding signs saying things like "i dragged out a problem that could've been solved by just talking about it for actual years" and similar. except we don't shame our heavily traumatized friends, we give them hugs.

also hey, look at that, an EMOTIONAL cliffhanger rather than a PLOTTY one. neat!

Chapter 35: Enough

Summary:

Sometimes that's the best you can do.

Notes:

yikes, yeah, i kind of hit a wall for a while there, and i struggled with getting through this chapter because it's kind of intermediate to a lot of things. but now it's done. so sorry about the wait.

“Soooo...”

Holy merciful fuck, the room has gone so fucking quiet now that everyone is gone and the emotional theatrics are over. Karkat clears his throat, shifts where he’s slumped, his leg slowly falling asleep under him in what had seemed like an appropriately supportive and compassionate position by Dave’s feet, though now they’re both kneeling next to each other instead, Dave’s arms supporting him awkwardly. But he feels like if he moves he’ll somehow give away exactly how uncomfortable he’s been this whole time, so he doesn’t. He really doesn’t want to think about how that whole thing must’ve come off to the rebels. An echo of the humble Signless, on his knees in front of a suffering follower; a poignant display of how he’s No More Important Than Them, something like that. If he thinks about it too hard, he’s going to vomit.

Anyway, that kind of thinking is kind of a cop-out, as far as he’s concerned. The whole point of being here is to finally acknowledge and accept that he does in fact play a crucial role in the revolution, one that he cannot ignore without other people suffering for it. Like he’d told the Assembly, it’s inextricably woven into who he is by circumstance. If he were to pretend to be just another rebel, no different from anyone else, he’d be squirming away from his responsibilities yet again.

So no. The truth is that he’d just kind of panicked when he’d seen Dave struggling, and this was the only thing he’d been able to think of. It’s kind of hard to physically show support to someone who is sitting hunched over in a chair like a sack of potatoes, that’s all.

That open-ended ‘so’ still demands some kind of answer. Presumably Dave wants an explanation to why Tyzias had made that whole production of shooing everyone out of the room to let them talk to each other; which is to say, Karkat is pretty certain he knows, but wants Karkat to do the heavy lifting and fork-supply him with an explicit answer. Well, tough. It’s not going to be that easy.

“How are you feeling?” he says instead.

Dave’s face doesn’t change much, but the way his expression seems to grow more rigid suggests that he is indeed taken aback by this response, and also that he might not like it all that much. Again, tough. The impression is certainly fortified a moment later when he raises one pale eyebrow in a faux-curious manner, the corner of one lip pulling upwards just a hint in a sardonic non-expression, while the rest of his face remains motionless. “About what? Not to be too demanding, but you’re going to have to be a bit more specific, or at least give me a couple of options.”

He’s quiet for a beat, long enough that it seems like he’s waiting for an answer, and for Karkat to start to stammer out the first half-syllable of a hastily assembled answer, and then he starts to talk again. This is one of his particularly annoying mannerisms which it had taken Karkat some time to consistently pick up on, but once he’d noticed it, it seemed to crop up in every other conversation – or maybe he’s doing it more and more the longer they spend in each others’ company. Karkat isn’t sure if he is in fact leaving space in the conversation for others, but then just can’t stand to be quiet for even that long, or if it’s some kind of conversational snare to trip others up and make them feel like idiots. Either way, it’s some Fuchsia-Grade musclebeast leavings. He lets out a low grinding noise of displeasure, but Dave is already in mid-babble.

“I mean, are we talking about the five hundred and fifty sixth episode of the ever-evolving, staggeringly clusterfucky, heavily disbelief-suspending soap opera that is my fucking family? Or is it the option behind Curtain 2, specifically how Jane not-too-metaphorically cornered me and gouged my trauma out of me like she was methodically scraping the very last batter out of a bowl? I’m guessing these are the two main categories available for perusal, and hey, since we haven’t apparently reached the end of the official feelings hour, I guess you can pick either one or decide to zero in on something more specific, and regardless of which choice morsel you decide to chomp down on, I’ll probably go on and fucking on about it until you’ll be tempted to mercy-kill either me or you or both. So, what’ll it be? The existential dread is particularly fine this evening, and goes great with the chef’s selection of soups.”

Karkat is absolutely not going to play along with his pithy little waitstaff roleplay, and nor is he about to acknowledge Dave’s not-so-subtle guilt tripping either. “How about you just fucking tell me what’s got you so pathetically twisted up in your own excremental regurgitation of self-blame and self-pity right at this moment, why don’t you? And spare me the facetious ‘generosity’, when it’s really just your embarrassingly transparent way of deflecting me away from whatever the fuck it is you don’t want to tell me, probably because you rightly feel like a complete and utter idiot about it.” His hand is still curled around Dave’s arm, shaking slightly, and the little squeeze he gives it is actually quite gentle, but it is nonetheless meant to inform Dave that he’s not about to let him go without at least some kind of answer.

The human certainly does look like he’d want nothing more than to just drop Karkat onto the floor and shimmy out of the room, but he must realize that he can’t just keep avoiding this forever. Especially since in this whole sprawling base, there is literally nowhere Karkat isn’t allowed to go, and the same cannot be said for him. He sighs, squirming around a bit so he can cross his legs in front of him, and Karkat gratefully takes this as a signal that he can finally stop sitting on top of his own lower extremities and slowly feel them grow completely numb.

He pulls out of Dave’s arms, slumping backwards so he can sit with his legs splayed out, as he props himself up on his hands. That little moment of feeling his ancestor speak in tandem with him had left him woozy, and everything that had happened so far had left him drained, but it’ll probably be for the best if he just sits on his own for a moment, both literally and metaphorically giving Dave enough space to work out the answer. Also, swooning into his arms had been more than a little humiliating.

Dave’s hands go skittering across the floor around him, painting little paths across the hardened membrane the rebels had covered the roughly finished stone floor with – presumably to even it out, and to keep out the chill which radiates from the icy heart of the asteroid. It’s translucent, and Karkat can clearly see rocky surface underneath, like a miniature landscape preserved in resin. Dave’s fingers look like strange stop-motion arachnids as they dance and stutter across it, his shoulders lifted slightly in a clearly subconscious gesture.

“Alright, fine. I guess we can skip the jolly old game of guessing what particular fucked-up mental scabs I’m currently picking on, as edifying and fun for the whole family as that can be. Let’s pretend for a change that I’m man enough to accept that you’ve done more than enough pointless side quests and grinding to unlock any part of my tragic backstory you might feel like perusing, and just get to the meat of it already.”

He’s got to be kidding him. Karkat lets out a low hiss, nudging a bony knee with his strut pod. “Dave,” he says pointedly, half warning growl and half groan.

“Right. Right. No point working myself up to it, not when we’re already up to our elbows in the shit anyway.” A brief smile flits past, like something caught on a breeze and only glimpsed as it’s already passing out of sight. His hands still momentarily, and then jerk into motion once again. “Fine, you want to know what’s really bothering me? Like, you might think it’s reasonable to be a bit fucked up about being the clone of some dead guy I never knew existed, or the strong implication that this is why my childhood was a miserable wasteland of nothing but beatdowns and dry protein bars – and I’m not saying I ain’t, but somehow that’s not even what’s bothering me right now.”

Karkat would hiss at him again, but he’s rubbing his hands across his thighs in a fretful manner, face now betraying a tension that goes a lot further than his clamped-together lips and twitching jaw. So instead he scoots a bit closer, sliding his own hand under Dave’s, feeling how his fingers have once again grown cold. “Stop being such an insufferable fuckstick and just tell me already,” he says, trying to modulate his voice into something softer, gentler, although all he accomplishes is an awkward rasp in place of the usual scraping and grinding.

It still makes Dave look up in surprise, the conflicted pull around his eyes softening into something more tentative. His shades are still pushed into his hair, which sticks up like a halo of soft tufts and curls, making Karkat’s insides melt like butter, and he has to fight himself to not immediately back off the issue. Stupid precious human. But he knows talking about this will be good for Dave, and so he maintains his expectant silence, waiting for whatever comes next.

Dave’s fingers curl around his. “The problem,” he says with a tired little smirk, “is that I’ve been a huge fucking asshole.”

Well, that’s… concise. Not very informative, however. Karkat tilts his head, still hovering on the edge of impatience, but trying to curb it enough to actually think about what Dave just said. If he’d refused point blank to do all of the heavy lifting in this conversation for the human’s convenience, then he might as well do Dave the courtesy of not abdicating all responsibility for his side either. “You mean… because of the whole incident you described? Because as far as I can tell, you flipping the fuck out wasn’t exactly a voluntary reaction, now was it?”

Though Dave does his best to suppress a flinch, Karkat feels the fleeting shiver that jostles his body; he knows he’s overstepped in his wording, that he could’ve found some gentler way of describing the whole mess that wasn’t weighed down with harsh, implicit judgment. He rattles out a short phrase of exasperated vox on his own behalf, rubbing his unoccupied hand across his face. He can’t involve his own messed-up feelings in this. Of course hearing Dave talk about what happened, how he’d turned on Dirk like that… it had once again stirred that precarious pile of painful memories that always threatens to come tumbling down on him at a moment’s notice

Slick’s muttered apology fades into the ether as the screen goes dead, blends together with Gamzee’s face as it slowly twists into a feral grin, and in the darkness he still sees the gleam of Eridan’s bared teeth in the sudden, blinding flash of his rifle. How voluntary were those actions, exactly? Slick probably had orders, but does that make it okay? Gamzee is the product of countless millennia of brainwashing, sure, but he’d still smiled. Karkat had seen Eridan’s hand tremble before he shot, but he’d also felt Kanaya shaking as she bled out on the floor.

These three betrayals are not the same, not equal, nor are they at all comparable with what Dave had described. There’s no easy answer to how much blame he should apportion to each. A reluctant servant of an ancient evil, a boy drowning in his own poisoned mind, a cornered kid raised to solve everything with privilege and violence, a traumatized soldier who really thought he was fighting the nightmare that had haunted every moment of his childhood. Where’s the line between tragic accident and choice? Where on the scales should his hand fall; which evil cancels out another, or is that even the right question to ask?

Karkat can see all too clearly why his ancestor had preached peace, why he’d wanted to rewrite history in something other than blood, but he can also see why it hadn’t worked. Sometimes you have to choose whose side you’re on. There’s only so much benefit of the doubt you can offer your oppressors, before you’re selling out not just yourself but also everyone who looks to you for guidance.

Oh, but it’s hard when they all look the same in different lights. How is he supposed to tell them apart before it’s too late?

I’ m afraid I can’t help you here, his ancestor echoes his thoughts, and his almost-presence feels soft with regret and old hurt. Too many have suffered for my choices, but I couldn’t tell you which parts I would undo if I could; at least not without accepting that I might just as easily do even more harm that way. Hindsight doesn’t actually make your choices any easier; it just feels that way because you no longer have to make them.

... Ah, but you should probably think this over later. This isn’t the time.

Fuck, he’s right.

Karkat exhales sharply, curling his touch stubs upward so that they gently encircle Dave’s hand, claws running soothingly back and forth across his skin. The human had been watching quizzically as he’d retreated back inside himself for a moment, but he doesn’t ask any questions; the tension left by Karkat’s words is already gone, or maybe he’s just hiding it better now. “Let me try that again with a bit more tact, since apparently I can’t crack open my wailing chagrin tunnel without somehow mangling my own sentiments beyond reason or basic decency. What I actually meant to say that was that whole thing clearly wasn’t your fucking fault, alright? It doesn’t mean you have to be okay with it, because fuck knows I’ve raked myself over the proverbial retribution griddle for less, but it’s pretty fucking obvious that you’d never have done it if-”

Karkat flounders, not knowing how to phrase the next bit. Despite his internal tussling over guilt and accountability, he still doesn’t doubt that there had been no malice, not even any proper intention behind what Dave had done. Of course he hadn’t been there, but anyone who has seen Dave with his siblings would hardly need more than one feebly sparking ounce of sponge-matter to see that he’d never consciously make the decision to lay one single digit on them. One can argue what counts as a conscious decision until one’s lusus comes home, but that fact remains cemented in the bedrock.

But it’s not so easy to express. ‘If you’d been in your right mind’ sounds like a platitude, ‘if you hadn’t been hurt first’ sounds like he’s shifting the blame onto Dirk for one desperate slap in dire circumstances, which is about the last thing he wants to do.

“-if I’d known who I was hurting,” Dave finishes the sentence for him. “Yeah. I know.” The restless movements are back, and he shifts where he sits, eyes flickering like Karkat’s ceiling light during the regular eclipse brownouts in the lowblood quarters. Karkat belatedly wonders if that bothers him too. That he’d been quite prepared to kill the person he’d seen in Dirk’s place, despite all the harm that bastard has done to him. Or maybe it’s that said bastard had trained him so well that he hadn’t even hesitated, so utterly primed for that kind of violence? Damn it, hadn’t he been brought up on fucking Alternia himself, and still been chilled to the bone by Dave’s ruthless efficiency when he killed that purpleblood?

“So it’s not-?” He’s not even sure what he’s asking, but Dave dips his head slightly, shoulders pulling into a stiff shrug.

“It’s not exactly about that, no. Again, I’m not saying I ain’t deeply fucked up in more ways than I can count about that still, because that’s such a patently obvious lie, but when I say I’ve been an asshole… yeah, that’s not it. Though it’s not unrelated either, I guess.” His cold fingers close around Karkat’s wrist, thumb pressed gently against the flexible edge of a chitin plate, right above the hurried fluttering of his pulse. “I guess what it all boils down to is that it happened and it sucked, and I was just so fucking wrapped up in how much it sucked for me, and how pointlessly miserable my life was in general, that I just… outright ignored how shitty the situation was for everyone who wasn’t me.” His mouth twists tightly. “Maybe I theoretically allowed Dirk to share in the misery fest, and I suppose Rose too since she nearly k-”

He cuts himself short with a shake of his head, hand twitching, and for a moment seems to stumble over the words he’d hastily backed up. Of course Karkat knows what he’d meant, but since Dave doesn’t know about his little chat with Rose, his sudden silence makes sense. Explaining that he’s aware of the particulars of that situation probably won’t help much, though, so instead he squirms awkwardly where he sits, not entirely sure what to say.

Not too hard to figure out why, really. It’s hard not to wonder if he, too, has been up his own ass about how his situation fondles major globes, to the point where he hasn’t been there as much as he should for his friends. Has he relied too much on Kanaya’s steady presence through this mess, without giving her the same support in turn? Has he properly talked to Sollux about connecting to his ancestor in a manner so traumatic, he almost killed his moirail and matesprit in the process? Hasn’t he been avoiding both Gamzee and Nepeta like a fucking coward? And fuck, he knows that he’s leaned on the strength of others to get to this point; on Feferi’s diplomatic skills, Vriska’s strength, Terezi’s mind... Supposedly they’re doing this for him because he gives a shit about them, because he’s proven himself as a leader who actually gives a shit about the people around him. It’s literally his only valuable fucking skill, but right now he doesn’t exactly feel like the shining beacon of compassion he’s made out to be.

...And he’s doing it again, right the fuck now! He’s supposed to be supporting Dave, not greedily fellating his own mistakes deep enough to rearrange his intestines.

“I-” What is he saying? “I don’t think anyone actually blames you for-”

“Yeah, they do. I think Jane made that pretty fucking clear.” This time when his lips twitch, it almost looks like a smile, albeit a very resigned one. “I kinda knew she’d be the one to snap. It was only a matter of time. I guess in a way I was relying on it, and that’s exactly the kind of avoidant nonsense I’m talking about. Just stonewalling everyone and letting them stew in the rank uncertainty filling the moat of my personal Fortress of Solitude, until finally they can’t take it anymore and have to call me out? Not great friend behavior.”

Well, put like that… “Yeah, okay. Fine. That was blatantly shitty of you. But it’s not like you didn’t have your reasons.”

“Sure.” His eyes flicker to properly meet Karkat’s gaze, then away. “My reason is that my damn issues have issues. It’s issues all the way down. But if I’m aware of that, then I also know that burying myself even further in that bottomless pit isn’t actually gonna make jack shit better. So just let me call myself out for a change, instead of depending on everyone else to do it, okay?” That’s a proper smile, and Karkat feels his thought stutter along with his breath, as something complicated unfolds itself a little bit further in his chest.

“So yeah… Jane and Jake are the most obvious victims of my bullshit. Whatever Jade or John might say, I was the one who could’ve undone the moratorium on the subject at any point, and I damn well knew that. But it was… convenient, I guess. To just let Jake think he was the reason for our whole self-imposed exile, as if I wasn’t aware that he’s the kind of guy who would absolutely take that shit to heart and blame himself for every little thing that went wrong after that. And to let Jane just be- be the fucking medic and not a friend or even a person who can think for herself. Holy shit, can you believe it didn’t even cross my fucking mind that of course she knew that my uncle was beating the shit out of me?”

The amused tone wrapped around Dave’s voice is brittle as desert frost in the morning. “You’d think anyone with half a brain would assume that she if anyone would understand. But no, I told myself she was just sticking around on Muspell to care for Jake’s wounds, and to protect him from whatever secret we were keeping, and not… not because she was probably scared to death that the next time either of us turned up in the medical bay, it would be in a body bag. What else was she supposed to think, when she kept having to patch up the results of our family issues, without even once being told what the fuck was going on?”

Ah. Now that Dave’s explained it, it’s easier to see where all that anger and frustration had come from. Karkat doesn’t have much of a high hoofbeast to straddle in that area, because fuck knows he’s spent at least half of his life yelling at people because he cares. He has to admit that as the whole scene unfolded, he’d mostly felt protective of Dave, and had thought some rather uncharitable things about how Jane had gone about it. But he can be honest enough with himself to admit that if he had been in her situation, he would’ve been much, much worse.

“Well -” he draws in a deep breath, “for what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem like you were the only one sitting of a solid fuckton of secrets, and to be honest it doesn’t seem like it was just for your sake. Not that I’m saying that makes it better, and I’m absolutely not pretending to have degraded mentally enough to understand what part of human ‘family’ makes you act like some kind of tiny, miserable cult based on a whole lot of cagey shit, but… well, the other three seem to have gone along with it readily enough. It’s pretty clear from what the rest of them said that this isn’t a you problem; fuck, it’s not even an all four of you problem.”

Dave snorts out something that isn’t a laugh, but at least it looks like there’s some genuine amusement there. “Yeah, no shit. It’s pretty obvious we’ve been thoroughly marinated in piss-poor coping strategies from the very start. Vintage grade stuff, even.”

He tries to rake his spare hand through his hair, and ends up almost knocking his shades off. Instead he pulls them free and curls his fingers around them, gazing down at them with a far-away expression. “Which, I mean, that only means that Jade and John have been put through some shit on our behalf too. Sure, they were in on what happened, but I don’t actually think I’ve treated them that much better. John literally helped stop me from killing my own brother, and I paid him back by treating him like shit, just because he kind of reasonably wanted to know what the fuck was up with that. As for Jade...” He pulls a face. “Even if we charitably disregard the fact that I was the worst boyfriend ever ‘cause I didn’t want to talk to her about, uh, anything, I’ve been so damn condescending ever since her accident, it’s honestly a wonder she hasn’t tried to slap my head out of my ass yet. I even told John not to tell her about the whole,” a vague gesture at Karkat, “marriage thing. I mean goddamn, her brain is a super computer linked up to another super computer, and also she’ s a wholeass person who presumably knows how to hold a simple conversation with someone who isn’t me, but sure, don’t tell Jade, don’t upset her, that’s a call I get to make.”

That’s… a whole lot of information to digest all in one go. A lot of it is clearly important, but somehow the thing Karkat focuses on is that unless he thoroughly misunderstood, Dave had just indicated that he and Jade used to be matesprits – or, well, the confusing human equivalent – which isn’t actually something he’d mentioned until now. Then again, has Karkat so much as breathed a word about himself and Terezi? Trick question, he knows he hasn’t, because it’s just awkward and pointless to dwell on, and anyway it was sweeps ago now. Also, to be fair, he and Dave aren’t in fact in any quadrant at all, so why’s he getting hung up about that anyway?

Apart from the obvious, you mean? murmurs his constant internal companion smugly.

Fuck, he never knew how good he had it when Vriska was the only one who might sporadically invade his mind, because at least she didn’t stay for long. He growls under his breath, but he knows his ancestor has a point. And when Dave looks at him a bit warily, he huffs in resignation – relief? – and gives in. “Right. So we’ve covered why you feel like you’ve been one heaving bulgeblister of a friend, and I can see your point, even if I still maintain that the whole thing is still not just about you, and you trying to present it like it is honestly isn’t doing anyone any favours. I mean I don’t know, if you feel like maybe you’ve been pathetically self-involved and prone to fondle your own misery instead of just washing your hands and reaching out to the people who give a shit about you… well, try not to go forward doing literally the same fucking thing? Because I don’t know how much more stupidly recursive shit I can put up with on top of the fucking time travel, Dave.”

He hazards a small smile, and thankfully the human returns it, prompting Karkat to forge on. “Anyway, I guess I basically frondtwisted you into talking about this, so… fuck, I don’t know, is there something I can do? Bearing in mind that I on no account should be taken as an authority on how to unfuck personal relationships, that is.”

Dave raises an eyebrow. “I thought we’d established that you’re literally trying to do that to your whole fucking species?”

Karkat can’t quite hold in a small hiss. “And I thought we’d already established that you’re a useless globe-breath. No need to try to convince me any further, thanks.”

“Shit, you’re no fun.” He looks distracted for a moment, eyelids flutterng in a way that makes Karkat think of trapped wings beating against cobwebs. “Anyway, you’ve already done it.”

“...done fucking what?”

“You listened.” He pulls his shoulders up very slightly. “I think that’s what I needed more than anything. Didn’t really want to unload this shit on anyone who’d feel like maybe… well, what you said. Like I was just doing the same dumbass nonsense all over again. Jacking off to my own trauma while pretending everyone else is completely void of agency and basically spend all their time waiting for me to be tragic at them again.” He suddenly shifts his hand, twining their fingers tightly together. “So, uh… thanks. It means a lot.”

Karkat feels like he ought to say something, preferably something insightful regarding what they’ve been discussing, but somehow his whole attention is now focused on their interlocked hands. He knows he’s been stalling. Not to say this conversation wasn’t important, but in a sense he feels that he’s in this room with Dave for a reason, and the longer he puts off the inevitable conclusion, the more confused he gets.

In every movie, every novel, every TV drama he’s ever devoured, there had always seemed to be a really fucking obvious solution to everyone’s problems, a way of balancing all the quadrants involved in a way that is fair and appropriate. He’d reveled in the joy of feeling like life was solvable as long as one applied logic and expertise to situations like these. But now it strikes him that books and movies are written specifically to have a solution; that the whole point is that the author has a clear intent and wants the reader to reach the same conclusion. All of that kind of goes fenestrationward when you try to shoehorn it into real life, and especially when an entirely different species gets involved.

There’s no way, in fact, to make anything about what’s happening now make sense, and it probably won’t be fair either.

“You know everyone is going to kind of fucking expect for us to be in some kind of quadrant with each other when we go through that door, right?” he says abruptly, and instantly hates everything about the way he said it.

Dave lets out a weak, nervous laugh. “What, so we just pick one? Flip a coin? Isn’t that kind of Terezi’s thing? Fuck, I’ll go get her, then-”

“Don’t you fucking dare, Strider,” Karkat growls, and only when Dave visibly winces does he realize that he’s also buried his claws in his hand for emphasis. He hurriedly loosens his grip, horrified. “Fuck! Sorry, I- I just panicked. The last thing I need right now is for my ex to cackle in my face and fool around with coins, that’s all.”

Dave nods slowly, and if he’s surprised about the ‘ex’ part, it doesn’t register on his face. “Right.” A deep, shaky in-out of hurried breath. “No, yeah, that makes sense. Guess I just kind of panicked too.”

He’s gone so pale that he looks almost green, and Karkat hunches his shoulders a bit defensively, not sure whether he should have been bracing for a rejection. “I mean, not that it fucking matters what anyone expects of us if you don’t want to-”

“Ididn’tsaythat.” The words come rushing out so fast that Karkat has to ask Dave to repeat himself, and by the time he has, his face has switched to bright red so fast that he kind of reminds Karkat of a stoplight. “It’s just… no offense, but ‘a quadrant’ is pretty fucking open-ended, and it’s not even my damn culture, so… dude, you’re gonna have to help me out. I’m pretty much open to hearing whatever you might be offering. Well, except we’re actually one person short for the whole ash-deal and honestly I don’t get that one at all, and uh… not the hate one, okay? I don’t actually think I could deal with that. Not unless you want to see me have another spectacular breakdown way too damn soon.”

Karkat rolls his eyes a bit. “Here’s a cool alien fact for you: Sitting around on the floor tenderly fondling the frond of your kismesis kind of defeats the purpose a bit, so we’re probably in the clear.” Dave squirms a bit, but doesn’t pull out of Karkat’s grasp. As a matter of fact, after a few more thoroughly awkward seconds drag by, he scoots forward into the space between Karkat’s legs, slumping his head forward until it’s resting somewhat precariously on his shoulder.

It’s hard not to think about exactly how intimate this position could become if Karkat were to just tighten his legs a bit around him, and… well, it’s not an unwelcome thought. But Dave already seems so skittish, so utterly uncomfortable in his skin, that Karkat isn’t sure that this wouldn’t be pushing him too far too fast. Just having him this close seems somehow like a victory, especially bearing in mind how obvious it is that Dave isn’t used to letting anyone slip under his armour at all. So instead he just leans into his body with a quiet sigh, collapsing towards the heart of this strange embrace, as if the tentative affection between them has its own gravity.

There’s a faint click as Dave puts his shades down on the resin floor, and that’s all the warning Karkat gets before his hand is suddenly resting against his cheek. It’s a little sweaty from clutching the glasses so tightly, but warm and solid, and the gesture instantly causes Karkat’s mind to melt into quiet bliss. Dave follows with a couple of hesitant paps, and he lets out a tiny, fluttering gasp, as every muscle in his body decides to take a vacation, causing him to slump boneless and pleasantly numb into the human’s embrace.

“...Okay. Uh. Please tell me I didn’t kill you, because I have no fucking clue what I’m doing.”

“No. Stupid.” Karkat sighs comfortably, pushing forward in what must look like the world’s slowest tackle, until Dave has to give in and flop back on the floor, with Karkat draped like a happy purrbeast on his chest. “It’s good.” Fuck, he must really have been craving this. He’s spent so long worrying about how he’d never been able to give Gamzee what he needed, that he hadn’t even stopped to consider that maybe he might need some consolation too. That thought is almost a bit funny, though it comes with a bittersweet sting at the end. Right. This will probably hurt Gamzee’s feelings. Or maybe not. Fuck, he doesn’t know. Why was it just his responsibility to take the first step there, anyway? Why had he just assumed that Gamzee would keep waiting for him, and them not becoming properly pale was all due to his own mistakes?

Well, it doesn’t matter. Dave’s hand is still on his cheek, his other arm wrapped around him, his lips resting gently against his forehead. It doesn’t really feel like either of them has made a proper decision, but maybe that’s okay. All Karkat knows is that finally being held, finally being allowed to let go of all of his tension and terror and pain, is in fact something he both wants and needs from Dave, and Dave seems willing enough to give it. Isn’t that good enough?

He doesn’t necessarily think this conversation is over, but it’s alright to put it on hold for a while. More than alright. It’s nice. At the back of his mind he feels more than hears the warm laughter of his ancestor, as the awareness of his presence fades away slightly. Giving them room to breathe.

 

---

 

Jake is fully engrossed in tinkering with one of the prototype disrupting mechanisms that the rebels will be using during the attack at the point when Eridan elbows him right in the ribs. He might not be quite the technical whiz that Dirk or Jade is, nor does he have Roxy’s flair for computers, but he does nonetheless rather enjoy getting his hands on a contraption or two. Well, hand. He still has to be extremely careful not to break anything with his stupidly powerful prosthesis, but on the other hand, having a metal hand does have a few advantages. Especially one made by Dirk, who had added a few neat little tricks – like revolving joints and these little grippy things at the end of his fingertips, allowing him to make short work of anything that needs screwing.

...Nonsuggestively.

The point is that Jake is not paying any attention to anything else, including his moirail, and obviously that’s his big mistake right there. Goodness knows the prickly fella doesn’t take kindly to not being the center of attention. Apparently, that’s just the kind of man Jake enjoys getting himself involved with, possibly for his sins, but even so he gives Eridan a put-upon look as he rubs his stinging side. He’s built a lot more solidly than his willowy frame suggests to the casual eye, and might as well have bones made of lead as far as Jake’s ribs are concerned.

“Now what was that good for? Look, you made me lose that little thingamajig, now where did it go...”

The troll sighs theatrically and quickly fishes the tiny crystalline structure off the floor, flaring his gills and rolling his eyes when Jake lets out a pleased little grunt and snatches it from his hand. “You weren’t paying me no attention at all, were you?” he complains, watching impatiently as the lost part is slotted back into place.

“Not really, no,” Jake replies, because there’s not much point in pretending. Anyway, Eridan enjoys complaining, so he might as well play along with it. “Was it anything important, dear?”

There’s a brief moment of silence as Eridan battles the twin impulses of either being more peeved at Jake so blatantly admitting his previous disinterest, and mollified by the endearment. Then he lets out a quiet huff, edging close enough that it becomes quite impossible for Jake to keep working. He sighs and resigns himself to his fate, but not with too much regret. It can wait.

“A course it was fuckin important, or I wouldn’t be sayin nothing, now would I?”

“If you say so, my duck,” Jake replies, knowing his amusement will be mostly lost on Eridan in this mood anyway.

“Also, your nicknames – or whatever they are – just keep getting more and more idiotic,” he gripes, but even so Jake can practically see those raised hackles settling back down. “Anyway, what I was sayin was… well, what do you think about it?”

“...About what?”

“Well, you’d fucking know if you’d been listening, wouldn’t you?” An impatient sigh, but it’s mostly for show. “Dave and Kar, is what I meant, since you’re finally deigning to pay me any attention at all.”

Neither of them actually has to look at the other end of the impromptu mess-cum-gathering hall, where Dave is a bit awkwardly propped up against Karkat’s shoulder, or note again the slight tension between them as the troll fusses with his hair. The element of moirailligiance which basically boils down to public grooming had never bothered Jake all that much... but then again, it’s not as if he’s never been told that he’s not great at maintaining personal space, so maybe that’s why.

As always, Strider-Lalondes are a whole entire matter and/or ordeal. The whole blessed bunch of them are so insular and intense, it’s honestly hard to miss all the distances they enforce even with one another, and touch is certainly one of those areas. Rose approaches physical contact in the same way she always interacts with the world, like a carefully calculated series of chess moves. Dirk of course actively avoids touch, even if it’s stupidly obvious that what he’s actually avoiding is the moment where he has to stop touching. He’s never sure that he’s going to be able to bring himself to let go.

Roxy appears to be nothing like her family at first, since she touches people practically all the time, but Jake can’t help but file that as nothing short of overcompensation. Grasping at the world as if it’s about to disappear if she blinks, and coincidentally making sure that she is always the one who instigates every such interaction, controls it, always has a way out of it which she rarely affords to whoever is on the receiving end? Well, she might just be the worst of them. She really isn’t any less complicated or confusing than her siblings, but by Jove does she take great pains to keep up the pretense that she is.

Jake supposes he can understand that.

And Dave… he’s hard to understand, because everything he does is conditional on some complicated system of rules and exceptions which Jake to be honest has never had much time for. Basically, like everything else, touch needs to be justified by either another’s needs or some kind of incomprehensible caveat, or it becomes a threat – at least when anyone is watching.

Hm. That rather is the problem, isn’t it?

He allows his mouth to twist slightly, fiddling distractedly with a little microfiber cloth he’d been using to keep the mechanism clean. “I’m not sure I think that’s any of our frigging business, poppet,” is what he finally settles on, evasively, knowing full well it’s not going to work.

“Oh, who fuckin cares!” Eridan snaps – literally snaps, razor teeth clacking together audibly as he lets out a scraping series of sotto voce clicks. “Anyway, they’re our friends, so it’s isn’t like it’s not got nothing at all to do with us. Don’t tell me humans go around actin all superior and so much nicer, and then you don’t even care about your friends? Or is it just some friends who get that precious privilige?”

Ugh. “That’s not it at all, and you know it!” Though he will admit that specifically getting in Dave’s business, after recent events, isn’t exactly something he relishes. “But, well, whichever way those two gentlemen choose to figure things out, I don’t see how we’ll be making it any less awkward by sitting around gossiping like a pair of fishmongers about it!”

Of course he immediately zeroes in on the obvious slip there. “So you do think they’re bein stupid and awkward about this too, right? I fuckin knew you would. Anyone with even half a functioning sponge would – and I suppose you’ve got at least half a one.”

Jake might find that hurtful, except for the microscopic hint of a fleeting smile which signals that he doesn’t mean a word of it. Dangit, that’s another thing. Why the flying fiddling fuck couldn’t he find himself a little bit more drawn to people who know how to smile properly? Is his love of puzzles somehow influencing the matter, making him opt for playing ‘What’s that grimace mean?’ all the livelong day, just to keep his hand in?

Well, at least one of them doesn’t suffer in silence, and actually uses his words about it when there’s a problem, even if those words are frequently as aggressively defensive as possible.

“Alright, fine, have it your way, since you’re determined to strap me to the ole train tracks about the matter.” Jake sighs theatrically, flinging the stained cloth in the general direction of Eridan’s face. It flutters uselessly and only manages to land on his shirt, but he still bats at it as if it’s a live tarantula, hissing like a kettle. Jake simply ignores these antics. “I do think they might be going about things in a mighty hobbledehoy way, given that we can all see,” even though the people in question are on the other end of a fairly busy room, he nonetheless lowers his voice a bit at this point, “well, that things aren’t as clear-cut as all that between them.”

“Exactly! And it’s so stinkin obvious why it’d never work either way.”

“Right!” Jake’s brow furrows. “Wait… why is that, exactly?”

“Because Dave’s human, a course.”

“...”

“What?”

Jake turns properly in his seat and meets Eridan’s gaze, but maintains his silence, fully determined to keep doing this until he realizes what he just said. He stares back for another agonizing half minute, and then his fins flare defensively.

“Oh fuck you, this is completely different and you know it!”

“I don’t believe I do,” Jake counters, raising his eyebrows. “Why, do you believe I’m somehow made of less human stuff? That perhaps I could unzip my skin to reveal the bright blue alien I’ve secretly been all along?”

“Why blue? No-“ Eridan holds up a hand only a moment later. “-you’re making some absurd human movie reference, and I don’t want to hear a word of it. And no, I know you’re human, obviously, but it’s still not the same. I should think it’s really damn blatant why that is.”

“Still at sea without a rudder or a compass here, my dear chum, and I’m afraid the wind has slackened on me.”

He rolls his eyes a bit at the nautical reference, but isn’t distracted. “Us bein pale with each other works cause you already got a matesprit, a-fuckin-course. And not just any matesprit, but one you’re so deeply enmeshed with, so completely and utterly fuckin steeped in passionate flushed feelins for such a long time, and who obviously feels the same about you, I don’t think I could possibly interfere with it even if i was tryin. Which I’m not, in case you were wonderin.”

That leaves Jake a bit stunned, but also deeply embarrassed. “I, ah- That’s quite a way of describing me and Dirk, and no mistake.” Not that it’s that far off the mark, but somehow using such direct and grandiose words about it feels weird. Why is that? Oh, that’s right. Because Dirk never really does, never talks much about his feelings at all, so it’s disorienting to hear it out of Eridan’s mouth as if it’s a fact that everyone knows about. “And while I genuinely appreciate the vote of confidence in our rock-solid romance, I’ve got to give it to you straight that sometimes I’m not so sure-“

“Don’t get me wrong,” Eridan cuts him short, “I’m not exactly sayin that you can’t fuck it up all for yourselves. I’m sure you might still be able to do that despite bein embarrassingly in love, but me? I don’t actually stand a fuckin jellyfish’s chance at the heart of a star, and I know that. I appreciate it too. It keeps things a lot less complicated all around. Which was my point about Kar and Dave as moirails, by the way.”

“You mean… because Dave doesn’t have anyone in, as your parlance says, the flushed quadrant, it’s impossible for them not to end up there anyway?”

“I guess that’s sort of it. I suppose Kar havin someone else in that quadrant might work too, but well, I’d say the chances a that are pretty slim right now.” He waves one long-fingered hands idly, rings and nail polish flashing in the stark overhead light. “Just think about it, will you? Don’t do none of that pretending to be dense thing neither, I won’t be toleratin that from you right now, it’s not nearly as fuckin cute as you seem to think. I shouldn’t have to tell you that humans don’t really have quadrants. Not sayin you can’t feel the same kind of things,” a brief flush, his eyes flickering to Jake’s and then away, “but your feelins are all over the place. So the best way of makin sure none of it starts slippin and slidin around where it’s not supposed to go, is just to make it socially impossible for that to happen by locking down other potential quadrants. That’s just simple logic!”

Jake can already feel a headache coming on. “You know, I really think that’s making this needlessly complicated. Anyway, if it’s inevitable that they’ll end up flushed regardless, then what’s the problem? Can’t they just ease their way in there, then, as it were?”

“No!” Eridan interjects, way too loudly, causing Jake to flinch and a couple of heads to turn. The troll flushes, and since it’s expected not just by him but everyone else around them as well, Jake carefully reaches out and rests his hand against his cheek. He’d still like to know what caused him to explode like that, thanks, but restoring some kind of equilibrium is necessary.

“No need for the vociferations, if you please; my ears work just fine,” he says evenly. “But you might as well explain what got you so fired up about it.”

“It’s nothin.” Eridan hunches his shoulders slightly, but obediently leans into the touch. “Not anythin I’d like to talk about now, anyway. Just suffice it to say that thinking you can just become moirails to start with and maybe one day you’ll be able to get into the quadrant you actually want… well, I’m not Kar or no one and I’m not about to give you a whole tedious lecture on romantic tropes, but it’s basically the oldest, stupidest fuckin mistake in the book, alright? You just end up stringin someone along until they grow bored with you, and honestly, that’s entirely fuckin fair. It’s treatin what you’ve already got like it’s not worth nothin to you, and there isn’t no way that won’t end up hurtin someone, can’t you see that?”

Lord, give him strength. “Heavens to fucking Betsy and her whole family too, Eridan, this is so much marsh gas, can’t you see that?” To offset his words, he gently tugs on the one violet lock of hair, which has slid slightly off kilter. “I mean, all that you’re saying can certainly be true, I see that, but that’s just because you choose to think of it like that! What you’re actually talking about is straight-up pretending to feel one way just to get close to someone, and that sounds a lot like you know they don’t feel the same as you, and all you’re doing is trying to manipulate them. Either that, or you haven’t even tried, and treat their company like something you’re settling for. Or both.” He visibly flinches, a nerve struck, and Jake offers him an encouraging grin. “Trust me, my good old griper, when I say humans get up to that kind of silliness too, but it doesn’t actually help to think of the outcome like- well, like you just made a wrong move while playing a daft game of quadrant tic-tac-toe, to be frank. Like you lost because of a minor strategic error. People don’t work like that.” A rueful little laugh, because to be honest, he kind of wishes they would at times. “Which is why you think that whatever your situation was applies to what’s going on here at all.”

“Alright, fine, I know, I didn’t have no chance at all and it wouldn’t have mattered none no matter what I did.” Jake just rolls his eyes a bit at this labyrinthine mess of negatives and flicks the tip of his left fin. “So what’s your blazin fuckin take on this, then? If there’s no problem with what they’re doin, why say anythin at all?”

Well, Jake could of course point out that the only reason why he’d said anything at all, was that Eridan had practically twisted his arm into a pretzel until he did, but he can see how that would go nowhere fast, and he does actually have a point to make. “Because they’re treating it like they’re playing some sort of game too, of course. Like they had to pick one or the other, and they just went for the one that seemed simpler, and that solves that.” Snorting slightly, he taps a finger over Eridan’s lips before he can interrupt. The troll mimes snapping his teeth at it, which would probably take it clean off if he actually tried, but really he’s just being twee. “Nevermind how obviously one isn’t actually easier than the other, it’s that whole ‘either or’ mindset that’s going to drive me right off my rocker before my time. Who the almighty hell said that that you can only have one?”

Now Eridan is looking genuinely scandalized, and also kind of alarmed. “A course you can only have one! Is- Is this some sort of solicitation? Because I’m not -”

“For frig’s sake, no! No, you absolute dingus, so simmer yourself down pronto. Cripes.” Eridan is already halfway out of his chair, and Jake brusquely grabs him by his scarf and pulls him back down.

“All I am saying is that I can’t wrap my mind around why the whole quadrant thing has to be such a gargantuan damn hullabaloo! Why not just work out what it is you feel and then pick whichever ones seem to fit the bill? I thought that’s what we’d done – which is to say that as far as I’m concerned, that’s how it went down. The reason I’m not in a flushed quadrant with you has absolutely diddly-doodly-squat to do with already having Dirk in that quadrant, or with Dirk at all, full stop. It’s just not how I feel about you, or you about me, and that’s all-frigging-right! We don’t have to have some kind of reason for why we don’t want that, it’s enough to just… not want it.” He shrugs a bit helplessly as Eridan stares at him, looking like he can’t decide whether to be relieved or affronted. “I don’t know, I just don’t think there’s some kind of hierarchy of how to like each other, and one is necessarily worth more than the other, and I sure as brass don’t think that you have to decide to only feel one way if you don’t have to. Are you catching my drift at all, or am I just talking straight out of my caboose now?”

“When aren’t you,” the troll mutters sourly, but after a moment of hesitation he disentangles Jake’s hand from its death grip around his scarf, winding their fingers together. It’s the metal one, so Jake can’t exactly feel it in a traditional sense, but it’s a sweet gesture even so. “But I guess I can indulge you, even if for the record you’re bein disgustingly culturally insensitive and I want you to know that.”

Jake can’t quite help letting a small, tired laugh escape. “Summarily noted, pet.”

“Alright, fine. Then it’s not that you don’t think that they got no pale feelings for each other or nothin, but you think that they’re… they’re… also...” His cheeks are bright violet now, and Jake decides to take pity on the poor idiot.

“Also flushed, yes, if that’s how you see it. I’d say it’s a bit less…” He snaps his fingers, trying to find the right way to say it. “Consarn it, I can’t think of a good word. I don’t think it’s a matter of having two quadrants’ worths of feelings, but more like they have feelings that fit both of them, because whether or not you want to think about it, the dadblasted things intersect. A lot. Anyway, the point is that they’re using the quadrants as an excuse not to talk about that… I think. Pretending like they can’t possibly also want to passionately lock lips or what have you, because look here, this is a no kissing zone quadrant and that’s that. Like words are more important than what they actually feel. And if they keep doing that, pretending like there’s nothing else between them that they need to square up to, well, that’s going to get in the way of things a lot, and probably leave a lot of hurt feelings all around. Trust me on that one.” Jake sighs. “It’s not much fun.”

“...All I’m hearin is that humans are such a fuckin mess,” Eridan finally replies after a long pause, “and I still think you’ve got it completely wrong, but fine. At least we’re agreein that they’re both idiots, and that’s the important part.”

“Well… as we humans say, it takes one to know one.”

Eridan lets out an amused little whir. “Right. One braindead herdbeast recognizes the braying of its kind. And speak for yourself, you useless mammal.”

“Oh, put a sock in it, fishface.”

Either way, the two of them will have to figure it out on their own. Jake can’t actually imagine they’ll be any more likely to listen to advice than he and Dirk ever were… Or, well, maybe that’s unfair. At the very least not much more likely. And to be honest he’s got enough of his own hands that he’s going to accept it’s not his problem and let it go. Hopefully they’ll be able to figure it out before long. And if not… well, there’s still a shot. That’s good enough.

Notes:

LOTS OF TALKING ABOUT FEELINGS, egads. i thought it was gonna be like 5000 words and it was almost double that. also fuck if this slowburn gets any slower, it's going to be a fucking glacier I'M SORRY. but uh coming up next: plot. lol.

Chapter 36: Once upon a time

Summary:

It's the final breath before the plunge, and it's going exactly as terribly as one might expect.

Notes:

hiiiii remember how i said i'd try to get on top of things, and then i vanished for months and months ahahaha

yeah, so [tw for medical stuff and personal stuff begins here, feel free to skip if you want/need to] right around that time this spring, my mom had had a heart attack and only barely managed to survive. when i posted the chapter, i thought i was starting to sort of recover from that, but it turns out that i instead burnt myself out completely. so after managing a chapter on the other longfic and a couple of scattered oneshot, i got myself on a one-way trip straight to writer's block city, womp womp.

but here i am again, and hopefully i've got my ducks in a row enough to throw myself back into things little by little. thank you so much for your patience. i love y'all.

By the time they find Calliope, there are now four of them in the search party, though it had started out as a one-troll endeavour. Which is to say that when she at first found herself unsuccessful in the task, Aradia decided that maybe the whole process might be sped up if she recruited the assistance of someone with a more precise psychic gift than her own. But on reflection she judged that roping Vriska into it would be unnecessarily cumbersome – and probably loud – so she went looking for Rose instead.

She found her, and Roxy as well, who was instantly persuaded to come along – presumably because there’s only so much you can get up to in an underground bunker full of people who are, generally speaking, a lot older and more serious. As much as they’ve all been through a lot to get here, Aradia can still see that there’s a big difference between them and the soldiers of the rebellion, and it seems a bit silly to pretend like that isn’t the case. It’s not just a matter of age; to tell the truth, even with so much hinging on them, she still feels like a lot of what they’ve been doing before this point has just been… well, fucking around. Sure, things have gotten very serious now, but looking back on so much time spent on running, hiding, moving lusii around, playing politics, she can’t say that she’s surprised that they’d been so unprepared when shit finally got real.

It doesn’t bother her. Technically she supposes she must be counted among the older and more mature of the group, if one is to measure years lived against her expected life span, and maybe that means she needs to put on a grim face or try to tell everyone what to do. That seems incredibly tiresome, however, and she is certainly old enough to know that nothing is quite so childish as pretending to be more grown up than you are. Instead of that boring plan, she’ll leave all that to others, and focus on tying up some rather important loose ends.

So anyway, while heading for the distant little outpost where Rose had managed to locate Calliope’s mind – “Via a very cautious process of elimination,” as she put it – they’d managed to run into John, obviously bored stupid and irritable if his expression was anything to go by. Like the good friends they were, they’d grabbed him and towed him along. He’d put up an impressive show of reluctance, but if being Sollux’ moirail has taught her anything, then it’s how to tell when someone is being truculent because they either want or need to be bullied into doing something.

Another thing it has taught her is how to pick up someone at least as powerful as she is and toss him like a dross puppet when needed, and to have no qualms about this, so she certainly doesn’t mind threatening John with flipping him upside down and carrying him along like that instead. To her not exactly astounding surprise, he looks outright relieved once he gives in.

Despite this apparently being the oldest base at the rebels’ disposal, the tunnels at the outskirts are unfinished and rough. They remind her a little bit of Eridan’s silly – but admittedly very useful – attack tunnels, but through the structural support resin she can clearly see the alternating deep scores and glassy scorch marks that show whether a rusty or a gold had worked on that particular section. There are no robots to dig out rebel bases, she supposes. The ones used for empire planets must be full of spyware, and wasting resources and expertise on either reprogramming them or building new ones would make no sense. But still…

She trails her hand along the bubbly, distorted surface of the resin as she walks, watching the way the lights they carry scatter across the walls. It looks like a lot of work, breathing stone dust and shivering in the cold before proper ventilation and heating had been set up. For how many short-lived lowbloods had these tunnels been their most lasting mark left on the canvas of this silent, bitter war? And if the empire were to find them tomorrow, how long would it take to reduce it all to rubble, as the rebels either die or flee, leaving their efforts to be utterly forgotten?

She stops and smiles a bit at a section of the wall where an old message remains, burned deep into the stone. ‘Azdaja & Konyyl wz here’, followed by two interlocked signs. She hopes that wherever they went next might’ve been nicer than this boring hole, and then lets go of her depressing thoughts for the moment.

Calliope sits where the tunnels open to a small shelf in the middle of a sheer cliff, her legs crossed right on the very edge. Occasionally an erratic gust from the tunnels causes a small cascade of rock dust to plummet off the ledge, where it hangs for a while in the unsteady, weak gravity here at the edge of the field, spiraling dark and amorphous like miniature versions of the molecular cloud that the asteroid belt travels through. Where it meets the presence of the force shield blooming like an invisible bubble around the entrance, it dissipates into nothing, filling the air with a sharp, burnt mineral smell.

The outside is as bleak as expected. A thousand shades of grey rock and long, gloomy shadows, presided over by a faint, pale smear of light across the murky sky, which is all that’s visible of the star they’re distantly orbiting. Not exactly an engaging sight, but Calliope seems transfixed by it. She sits still as a fossil beneath the dome of drifting darkness, the cold light of that dust-choked sun gleaming on her dark green skull. She looks so small and fragile, and yet Aradia can see where a rock has been pulverized underneath her palm, probably from taking her weight as she was sitting down.

During her stay in the medical bay, she’d noticed a screen on which the basic physical stats of everyone onboard were constantly updated. For a while it had only been her, Sollux and Jane, as they’d waited for the others to return from the Assembly. She’d been bored, ordered not to move around too much, lest she agitate her burns. With little else to do, she’d kept staring at the monitor, hoping for something to break the tedium. Which is how she’d noticed, as her friends finally reentered the vessel, the brief blossoming of assorted warning messages spreading across the screen, as something both far too hot and far too cold to be safe stepped aboard; a small figure which also appeared to weigh as much as an appreciable fraction of the whole ship.

As Aradia sits down next to Calliope and casually brushes her hand against hers, however, the touch of the bonelike surface is cool, but not unpleasantly so. Certainly nothing close to absolute zero, or the temperature at the heart of a star. Not even colder than Feferi’s hands, albeit not as soft.

“Hi!” she says as she feels the hand twitch slightly, even if Calliope’s gaze doesn’t shift. “What are you doing all the way out here?”

“This place… reminds me of home.” Her voice is muted by some emotion to a murmur, but it’s hard to gauge which one. Is it wistfulness, longing, sadness, regret? Her face isn’t capable of much movement, and whatever other cues her kind employ to communicate their emotions, Aradia hasn’t managed to deduce them yet. Though now she thinks about it, maybe they’re not ‘supposed’ to show emotion at all, given the lonely existence they are slated to lead. What’s the point, if no one is there to see, to hear, to feel it too?

Hmm.

“Home?” Roxy prompts softly, sitting down on Calliope’s other side. Aradia takes it as an opportunity to wave surreptitiously for the other two to sit down too.

Now Calliope starts slightly, and through the crystalline structure of her face there blossoms a notable shift in color, the eddies and swirls of paler green standing out clearly for a moment. Something akin to a blush, perhaps? Her gaze flickers between Aradia and Roxy, and she ducks her head. “Well, not actually ‘home’. Not really.” She shakes her head with a distracted air. “It’s just the place where I- where we grew up.” Usually when she corrects herself, it’s the other way around. Not we, but I. This time around, Aradia guesses, it’s not a slip of the tongue so much as a refusal to willfully omit her brother from the narrative. “Of course, the sun was much bigger and brighter…” Her eyes search the void above her for the ghost imprint of a memory. “Growing up right at the cusp of a dying star is normal for our species. It becomes our very first battle ground, and the victor harnesses the power it releases in its death throes to start shaping the timelines of their new universe.”

A muted “Ah,” from Rose and a faint noise of either awe or disbelief from John, as understanding dawns. Aradia nods slowly.

“So what your brother is doing is only what comes naturally to your species, only at a much larger scale?”

She doesn’t think that she phrased it as an accusation, but Calliope curls up visibly where she sits, hands darting fretfully across her pristine Skaia uniform. “You’re not wrong.” A brittle laugh. “Well, at least not completely. But we’re not supposed to cause such calamities! We merely- We absorb the energy that is released when stars reach their natural death, but we never-”

“I expect killing stars would count as interfering, yes,” Rose says, voice laden with dry amusement. “So you are scavengers, not hunters.”

Another hollow laugh from Calliope. “The other me would- I would- She- Oh, bollocks.” She makes a quiet noise of frustration. “I’m sure that part of me would find that to be a simplified way of explaining it, and feel offended, but I have to admit that I have a hard time refuting it. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to be. Scavengers are necessary.” She swirls a claw slowly through the dust on the ground, her voice dropping and dwindling with each new syllable. “It’s a lot better than being a- a parasite.”

It’s easy to see why such thoughts would intrude on her, and Calliope must know that her new friends are not too likely to look kindly upon the habits of her species, all things considered. Aradia can’t say she’s personally a huge fan of the idea of some distant, unknowable being directing the flow of uncountable lives, nor does she buy the whole ‘no involvement’ spiel – at least when it’s presented as an absence of choice, complete impartiality enshrined in lonesome majesty and lofty benevolence.

Everything is a choice. That includes the choice to do nothing. It definitely includes the choice to not even try to understand those whose lives you play around with.

“So, what exactly makes you different from her?” Aradia asks abruptly.

Calliope half opens her mouth, taken unawares and clearly needing half a second to gather together and appropriate spiel about the both of her being one being. It’s half a second Aradia isn’t prepared to give her.

“You already told us, remember? You and your brother started out being exactly the same being, the same mind, and you became two people because your experiences diverged from that point.” She swings her own legs over the sheer drop below, and a cascade of small pebbles dislodges and zaps themselves into nothing against the shimmering surface of the force shield. “So if that’s what makes you and him different, the same goes for you and-” She waggles her fingers. “-you. Other you. Her.” She cocks her head with a bright, implacable smile. “Doesn’t it?”

There’s a tense moment, and then Calliope slowly slumps against Roxy’s shoulder, a sigh of unwinding tension shuddering from her lipless mouth. She doesn’t appear to have any ocular membranes, but for a moment her eyes flicker and fade, turning pearly white and unreachable, as if the strain of maintaining that particular facet of a physical form is almost too much to bear. “It does,” she says in a small voice. “To a much lesser extent, of course. Me and my brother had our whole lives to grow apart. It’s… hard to say exactly when I started diverging.” Her eyes stray back to the gloomy wasteland, a flinch hunching her shoulders and drawing another laugh from her. “You have to understand that this is embarrassing to talk about. Diverging from her is how I failed, after all.”

“But… isn’t that the whole point?” John frowns irritably, and stops fiddling with his communicator so that he can shift where he sits and nudge her with his foot. “I mean, you can’t just go on and on about how you both win and lose at the same time, because oooh, that’s how causality or time or dimensions or whatever work, and then act like you diverging from her is some kind of bug and not a feature! If both of you stayed exactly the same, there would only ever be one victor and one loser. You have to diverge – you both have to diverge! Your brother had to become the loser in her universe, and you had to become the loser in this universe, and one can’t be true without the other.” His frown deepens, and he lets out a frustrated half-laugh. “I think. To be honest, this whole time shenanigans nonsense gets on my nerves!”

“No, you’re right,” Aradia chirps encouragingly, delighted to see Calliope stare at him with a strange and clearly very precarious mixture of hope and absolute horror. She’s so glad she dragged him along now, for all that he’d kicked up a fuss. “Just because the way you changed meant you lost doesn’t actually mean it was a bad thing, or that that the way you are is more wrong than the way she is – at least, I don’t think that’s how being a person works at all! You’re not just some kind of living purpose, and the fact that she seems to think that… well...” She giggles, bumping shoulders with Calliope and thereby jostling Roxy at the same time.

“That’s totes her problem,” Roxy finishes promptly, winking at Aradia over Calliope’s head. “Not that I’ve got anything against her or anything, buuuut she’s a bit of a total square.”

“But… if I hadn’t let him win, Caliborn wouldn’t have been able to ruin everything!”

That defense is incredibly weak, and the collective eyeroll they all share makes clear that they all know it.

“Oh yeah,” John says, sarcasm dripping off every syllable, “you let him kill you because you were just so eager to, uuuh, die and also have him do a lot of really stupid shit that you didn’t even know about. Got it.”

“If the whole point is equilibrium and, allegedly, complete freedom to choose, then that logic really doesn’t hold up very well,” Rose agrees, arching an eyebrow. “His course of action was horribly flawed in every way, but it doesn’t actually follow that so was yours. I think this one falls somewhere between a false dichotomy and a circular argument… What do you say, Roxy?”

A groan. “I say that if you’re gonna start sounding like Dirk, Imma have to get a spray bottle and spray you in the face every time you get too obnoxious. ‘Cause I love you.”

Aradia doesn’t say out loud what she’s thinking, that if Caliborn is the winner and his actions were that fundamentally flawed, then maybe that suggests that the Calliope who lost is in fact more right about things. She strongly suspects that Rose would find this logic flawed as well, and sure, of course she understands that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are incredibly nebulous concepts to begin with.

Perhaps it’s just that so far, she just likes this Calliope more. That might just be it.

“So! Back to my question… what makes you different, do you think?”

In response, Calliope only sighs, and it’s hard not to think of abandoned places and forgotten rooms. For a long while they all sit silent in the monochrome light, as it washes all colour and gradients out of their faces, making the rest of them look like they too might be made out of some kind of rock. John’s normally brown fingers look almost black against his now muted uniform, and the thin veneer of glittery polish on his nails makes them glint like the passage of distant spaceships. Rose’s close-cropped cloud of pale hair could be an actual cloud, drifting and dissipating across the pitiless blue dome back on Muspell. The smattering of freckles on Roxy’s nose reminds Aradia of splattered ink, or maybe someone’s map of unknown stars, somewhere far away and long ago. If Calliope turned her head and looked at her, would she recognize them as home too?

Aradia suspects that she is the most unchanged out of the four of them in this light. Grey skin is grey in just about any light, after all, and it’s not as if her hair can get any blacker. But the deep rusty hue must be stolen out of her eyes in this thieving light, and perhaps they look grey now as well. Like Karkat’s silly grey script, a flimsy lie with the expected lifespan anything that perishes with a simple shift of context, a different angle, a closer look.

She grins, blunt teeth and a naked edge of purpose. Whatever else she might say about herself, at least she’s never tried to be anything she’s not.

“It’s a bit… funny, is it not?” Calliope says at last, voice drifting like dust out across the hazy abyss below. “Here I am, and I’ve finally gotten a chance to make actual friends! There’s...” She gestures forlornly at the four of them, her teeth clicking together in an eyewatering kind of way as she shivers. “You’re all such delightful company, and I’ve longed so much to finally meet you, all of you, and you- you have no idea.” Her voice gains an almost desperate edge. “I tried not to show it to me – to her – but she saw right through me! That’s why I ended up being the one to go with you, you know.” Her gaze softens, growing less focused. “I know that she can seem intimidating, and probably a bit full of herself, but that’s only… I’m not really that different, you know. I think a lot of the things she says, and maybe I put nicer words around it, but I don’t think that makes me any better. And because we’re both more alike than we might seem, it’s not as if I don’t know that she wanted to come with you too. But she let me go. She’s so- so sure that she has to be the strong one.”

As Aradia had known they would, both Roxy’s and John’s eyes flicker in Rose’s direction, and the latter doesn’t quite manage to stifle an amused snort. Not that Aradia thinks that Roxy is free from sin in that particular area; she just seems to hide it a lot better. Rose smiles: there’s a rueful tilt to her lips, as she shows enough grace not to pretend she doesn’t know they’re looking, or to try and argue the point. She is clearly aware of her shortcomings in that area.

“Well, I don’t necessarily think she’s wrong.” Now Calliope’s voice sounds brisk, snapping some yawning gulf on uncertainty shut. “But what I was going to say is that it’s funny.” In and out, a sigh like the bracing before impact, but then it’s followed only by gentle wistfulness. “I’m finally here, where I want to be, and the first chance I get I scurry off to stare at a place that looks just like home. But when I was there, all I ever did was gaze up at the stars and- and dream that one day-”

“One day you’d be here,” Roxy guesses, giving her shoulders a small squeeze.

“Making friends and not being alone anymore. Yes. That was the dream.” Her fingers are almost translucent this close up, and the more subtle shifts of colour as she moves them are mesmerizing. “But now I’m here… well, I guess I still feel lonely. That hasn’t really changed.” Her voice drops in pitch, unhappily. “Perhaps that’s what she wanted me to know. That it has to be this way.”

“Or perhaps it doesn’t,” Aradia counters cheerfully. “Because that sounds really sad and awful, and also like you’re letting her do all the thinking for you.” She dismisses the obvious protests that must follow with a wave of her hand, because she’s not interested in arguing semantics. “It’s actually really simple and not very mystical or fatalistic at all, sorry. You just feel alone because you’re trying so hard not to get involved, you almost never say anything to anyone, and just keep lurking in the background instead. And you know, it really doesn’t have to be like this.” She shrugs, edging a little further off the cliff and poking at a small outcrop with her foot. “Because you’re already involved, whether you want it or not, and you know it.”

There is more resistance this time around. Aradia can practically feel it, as Calliope looks away and sets her shoulders against the beguiling idea that she doesn’t have to be alone forever.

“I’m guessing,” Rose murmurs, being a helpful member of the legume mezzanine and clearly understanding that this is her cue, “that being away from the other Calliope, no longer being perfectly synchronized in everything you do, would cast a certain shade of uncertainty upon your actions. This far away, you can’t know for certain that what you do and say is what would have you do – and rather than make a mistake, you simply opt to… do nothing instead.”

“Huh. Because that’s the difference between you two, right?” John demands. “She’s the one who’s better at not getting involved because she… didn’t even let herself sit around and long for company? Aw man, that sounds really miserable.”

“I- I don’t know about that.” Once again those lighter green swirls suffuse Calliope’s face. “But more to the point, I did get involved. I...” She suddenly smacks both hands across her face, and the loud crack that’s produced causes all four of the squishier life forms to wince. “Oh, it’s so embarrassing! I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but it was so tempting. It was all there, right at my fingertips, all these millions of worlds full of all kinds of people, and some that I knew I might actually get to meet one day! So I thought, well, how bad could it be if I just… talked to someone, just once in a while? Surely that couldn’t- it wouldn’t-” She makes a brittle, musical sound back in her throat, like the warble of a flute made of ice. “I tried so carefully not to let it affect the natural flow of time, which of course is ridiculous, but what I didn’t realize was that it didn’t just let me change the world outside. The world outside changed me.”

“Still doesn’t sound like a bad thing to me,” John mutters, not quite under his breath.

“Perhaps.” A helpless little shrug. “But it was still selfish. I guess I just always assumed I was going to win, you know? Like I’ve said, my brother is not very smart, and I thought that meant he didn’t actually have a serious chance of winning, even if he’s more… cruel than I.” Her shoulders come up once again, as if she’s trying to use them to ward off what comes next. “So I didn’t think he’d ever have a chance to hurt anyone I cared about.”

“Oh.” Horror draws Roxy’s voice out, makes it fray into a wispy little croak. “He killed your friends?”

“No.”

One of her claws drags once again through the dust on the ground, but not aimlessly this time. She draws two small huddled figures, kneeling in front of monitors with their hands clutched to their chests. “Once upon a time,” she says in a sing-song voice, “there was a lonely cherub girl, and one day she went looking for another little girl who was just as lonely as she was. And she found her. Stuck all on her own on a space station orbiting a desolate moon.”

Johns curses. Something is clearly going on between the humans that Aradia isn’t privy to, but she’s too fascinated by the story to care.

“The cherub tried to be careful, and only sent her friends messages when she was sure her brother wouldn’t catch her. But then one day, he killed her, and got his greedy little hands all of her things.” Her claws easily sink into the rock, thoroughly erasing one of the kneeling figures in the dust. “And though she was dead, apparently that just wasn’t enough – oh no! No, he had to ruin everything she had ever touched. He had all of time to choose from, and he could take his time coming up with something- something vicious and spiteful and- and- and heartless enough.”

Her hands curls into a fist, grinding rock to fine powder, but her voice comes out very, very small.

“He made it so that her friend… my friend… so that she was lonely in the first place. He made it so it was my fault.”

There’s a deafening crash behind them. The humans jump and then freeze, as Aradia spins around, ready to help Jade out with the bunch of assorted mugs and brown liquid she’d just scattered all over the ground. But her expression suggests that being helpful right now wouldn’t be a great idea.

“That didn’t happen,” she hisses, and it is a lot more noticeable that her eyes don’t blink when they’re shining bright enough to light the whole tunnel. “I didn’t have a friend. I didn’t have anyone.” Suddenly her foot moves so fast that Aradia almost can’t see it, and it is pure instinct alone that makes her catch the flying cup before it smashes right into Calliope’s face. Not that it would probably hurt her all that much, but Aradia still keeps it floating there, spinning slowly in front of Calliope’s unhappy, hunched form. “Take it back!” Jade screams, the green lines blazing down her cheeks like tear tracks.

It makes her look like she’s cracking.

“I think,” Aradia says carefully into the horrible, echoing silence, “that I just proved my point. It sure sounds to me like you are involved. Now decide what you want to do about it.”

 

---

 

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘it’s possible’? How many times have you told us that there’s no damn possibility that Jade could be tampered with by The Green Sun now?”

They’d withdrawn to the privacy of the ship to have this particular conversation, and Tyzias has allowed it to be so with a tired wave of her hand. She didn’t need to hear every damn detail of unfolding human drama, she’d said – but she did expect a full report later on everything that she actually needed to know. She hadn’t actually said that there would be hell to pay if she didn’t, but the looks Daraya had sent them as they hurried off had made that pretty clear anyway.

The red dots that Hal pretends are his eyes flicker jerkily from away Dirk, jumping around the bridge, but the rest of the hologram’s face stays impassive. “Which is accurate. Her systems are still inaccessible to any outside influence – now.” His eyes fix finally on Jade. She stares back, feeling about as real as his attempts at pantomiming humanity. “And also, not to be that guy, but she’s a whole fucking person and she’s right there, so maybe don’t talk about her like she’s your little science project.”

Dirk tenses up, then turns abruptly away, and his breathing sounds less like someone trying not to cry because he’s too cool for that, and more like someone who has genuinely forgotten how to. It makes it hard to be angry with him when he gasps like a fish on dry land, every attempt to maintain his composure only serving to highlight the raging conflict within.

Jake gently takes his hand, but the conflicted look he exchanges with John speaks volumes in itself. For once, they kind of agree with Hal.

“The point I’m trying to make,” Hal continues coolly after a truly agonizing moment of silence, “if you are planning to actually let me speak – yes?” No reply from Dirk, or anyone else for that matter. “Great. The point is that we cannot know when the data in question was corrupted.” It’s nice that there’s one person in this room who’s prepared to meet her eyes right now, even if he’s technically just an illusion. And the word ‘data’ as opposed to ‘memories’ doesn’t hurt out of his mouth, at least. To him, it’s the same. And if he makes the others squirm, Jade isn’t magnanimous enough to not get some satisfaction from it. “Though I would like to suggest that the likeliest occasion was right when the Green Sun technology was installed. It’s hardly a stretch to conclude that the Caliborn creature might have his own reasons for keeping Calliope’s interference in Jade’s life secret.”

The cherub bows her head in acknowledgment, and doesn’t seem inclined to protest the judgment implied by his words. But now that Jade’s anger has had time to cool and solidify, no longer molten in her veins but pooling sharp at the tips of her fingers, she is no longer sure if she really wants to turn it on her. Can she with good conscience blame someone just as lonely for reaching out, for wanting a friend? Not really. That doesn’t mean she needs to acknowledge Calliope as her friend now, and perhaps that is punishment enough. Mostly, she is furious to have been kept in the dark for so long; positively livid to have another part of her taken away without her consent; angry too, and perhaps unfairly, with Dave. He’d been the one to confirm that she had in fact once alluded vaguely to Calliope in his presence, a strange enough occurrence to stick in his memory. But when she’d demanded to know more, he’d stared shamefaced at the floor, and admitted that he hadn’t exactly been paying attention.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said. “I was too damn wrapped up in myself not to be the most humongous tool in the universe, so I don’t really remember. I thought you were talking about some kind of imaginary friend you had due to cabin fever or something.”

It was all she could do not to tell him thanks for nothing, and just sit down to stew in her own emotions as he slunk off to a corner of the room, presumably to be comforted by his husband/moirail/constant hip appendage, while Dirk lost his shit on Hal. Since that quickly derailed into yet more emotionally loaded silence from all parties present, an awkward stalemate once again holds sway over them all.

Those words, ‘imaginary friend’, quickly worked their way under Jade’s skin, and once again she seeks out Kanaya with her gaze. Rose had dragged her along, though she seems extremely determined not to be caught up in the argument between the humans. The troll flinches slightly when she realizes she’s being watched, but then seems to gather herself, because a moment later she calmly lifts her gaze and raises her eyebrows. She’d had an ‘imaginary friend’ too, albeit one of a much more sinister nature. She wasn’t made to forget either, but simply convinced herself to believe he wasn’t real. Jade wonders if she’d done the same; if that’s why Dave remembers it as a far-fetched tale which hadn’t seemed too relevant at the time. But try as she might, her mind remains blank. She finds only the hollowness of wasted years when she goes looking.

In fact, she finds too much emptiness. Now she questions the way her grandfather’s murderers seem to lack faces, though she can clearly remember the Green Sun logos burning bright on their lapels. She recalls how before she’d joined SKAIA, a group of operatives had questioned her on her isolation, their tablets turned away from her, casting landscapes of light and shadow on their serious faces as they scribbled their notes. She can remember their questions now, most of them concerning how she’d managed to work out the communication equipment and send out the SOS that saved her – though some had touched on how strangely proficient in English she had been once she was retrieved.

What she can’t recall is her own answers to those questions.

She can’t even recall sending that SOS.

“So if the information was wiped before I installed the client that allows me to monitor Harley’s new security features, obviously there’s nothing I can do about it,” Hal concludes, and she can’t tell for sure if he’s playing up his testiness for fun or if he’s actually angry. It’s possible that both are true. “That’s the consequence of a previous breach, and contrary to whatever impression I might’ve given anyone present, I am not in fact a worker of goddamn miracles, and there are things I cannot do. Turning back time is one of those things.”

Jade wouldn’t qualify what comes next as silence, because it seems more like suction, like gravity, like the precarious edge between positive and negative right before lightning strikes.

“But I can,” Calliope says with a weak laugh. “Or, well, that’s how you would see it, I suppose. It really is a lot more complicated than that.”

“If you are still addressing me rather than some kind of unspecified ‘you’ that stands for ignorant flesh sacks,” Hal replies, crossing his arms, “I am perfectly aware that time is not in fact something that can be ‘turned back’ like that, and that the consequences of trying to do so could have too many unforeseen ripple effects for even me to calculate. Which is why, if I perceive you even trying to reset Jade to a previous state, I won’t hesitate about dropping you into the heart of the nearest star.”

That’s obviously a bit of an empty threat; the teleport bay is the only place on the ship where matter transference to and from outside the ship is enabled, and Jade would be surprised if Hal is authorized to activate it without first receiving a direct command. Even so, it’s kind of touching.

“You know, as nice as that would be,” Calliope says a bit wryly, making Jade wonder if maybe being dropped into a star would be nice for her, “that would indeed be extremely inadvisable. Manipulating an actual organism to try to restore memories, without altering anything else is- well, theoretically possible, because no creature’s existence is truly linear, but… Well, cherubs are what we are because we are built to withstand the enormous strain incurred from living through every point of our existence simultaneously. To expose a human to even a fraction of this would most likely kill her… or have, as you said, some completely unpredictable consequences regarding either the state of her body or her mind.”

“...Meaning you could hypothetically return me to how I was when the Green Sun- when your brother was still controlling me,” Jade guesses, keeping her voice calm.

“Yes. Or before the technology was installed, and you were still in a medically induced coma. Or return your body to that state while you are still fully awake. Or bring you back mentally to the state you were in while still on the space station. Or anything.” In her lap, Calliope slowly clenches and unclenches her hands. “And if you asked me to, I would still do it, if that was your decision. But-” She looks up, eyes shiny as melting mirrors. “-I have to say I rather hope you won’t. I hope you’ll trust me enough to let me tell you what happened.”

It’s a tall order, and Jade makes no attempt at hiding it. She exchanges a brief look with Hal, and a small message box alights in her field of vision.

HAL: If you do in fact ask her to fuck with your personal timeline, I might just drop you into a star as well. Fuck around and find out, Harley.

It almost makes her laugh even in the middle of this painfully prolonged clusterfuck of a situation, because it’s so absurd and yet so caring.

GG: ill hold you to that

She’s not sure how it’s come to this point, where she feels like Hal is the one of her friends who she can trust unconditionally, but here she is. Her very best friend in the world is a ship. If that wasn’t true, she wouldn’t have trusted him to make certain arrangements for future eventualities in quite the manner he now has. If that wasn’t how she felt, she would’ve balked at the very idea. And maybe she’d be more upset with him trying to force her hand in this decision; as it is, she knows he’s protecting his own interests as well, so she can forgive him.

“Okay. Tell me.” She stares Calliope down. “You were the one who taught me to speak, right?”

“Well, you already did know that, but admittedly your vocabulary was a bit… rudimentary at first. So was mine, since when I first made contact, I was not yet in full control of my powers, and I couldn’t access all the languages that I was later to learn and therefore had always known.” There’s a note of exasperated amusement clinging to her voice as the rest of the group exchange confused looks. “So you could say we learned together.”

“Fine.” Jade bites down on the word as if she has a grudge against it, and Calliope stifles a wince. “And who sent the SOS?”

Calliope hums mournfully in response. “I did, with some help from you. There were enough future iterations of me present on that space station at a later point in time for me to figure out what needed to be done, and I could make sure there would already be a suitable message and recipient preprogrammed into the main communication hub. But I didn’t dare to physically interfere with your time frame, since… well, since I was afraid you’d see me, which would have been… hard to explain. So I still needed you to press the buttons for me.”

Another team effort, Jade thinks somewhat sourly, but she doesn’t say it aloud. “Who-” Whatever software synthesizes her voice cuts out, as conflicting impulses battle over it for a moment. Then Jade steels herself, knowing that she has to ask this. “Who killed my grandfather?”

Calliope looks like she really doesn’t want to answer, but under the collective silent stares from all around the room, she has no choice but to comply. “You’ve already had a chance to get… acquainted with them,” she says in a voice as fragile as rust, and Jade can’t even force herself to show some kind of sign of surprise. The sinking feeling inside her tells her that she’d known, somehow she’d known that this was true. “A couple of my brother’s henchmen, the ones you call The Felt, were present at the time, but they weren’t the ones tasked with the mission. Their job was to cut off any potential escape routes.” There’s a grinding sound in Calliope’s throat, possibly the sound of her swallowing. “The ones directly responsible was the psychic my brother employed at the time as a handler for one of his most valuable tools – the one you would know as Snowman – and… well, the tool herself. My brother’s weapon. Damara Megido.”

“Ah, of course.” Rose’s smile is so beatific that it looks positively deranged. “Who else would it be, if not the illustrious source of the intelligence, the veracity of which we are gambling not only our own lives on, but the future of the entire rebellion as well. How comforting to know that she is directly responsible for interfering with the past lives not just of our family, but now Jade’s as well.”

“I know,” Calliope whispers. “But I- But you have to-” She slams her mouth shut before anyone has a chance to silence her. “No, not have to. I’m sorry.” She shakes her head vehemently. “The truth is, we don’t know what her position in all this is. After she was saved where my brother kept her captive, it seems as if she has somehow managed to evade both mine and my brother’s gazes completely, and what her agenda is, or indeed your mother’s… is unclear. But what I do know is- is-” She suddenly lifts her chin defiantly, as if daring anyone to tell her to stop speaking. No one does. “-is that if you don’t go through with the plan, there will be next to no chance of stopping my brother. No, there will be no chance, because...” She falters, breathing hard, as if she had been pushing each word out by force and has now run out of steam. “...because you won’t be able to find him. Not when you need to.”

“Yeah, for a moment there you were dangerously close to making some kind of sense,” Dave pipes up from his corner. “Glad to hear you still know how to speak in fucking riddles.”

“I’m sorry, I... I promise, I am going to take responsibility for my previous inaction, and I will come with you when you go.” Calliope’s voice comes out pleading, slightly shrill with some unidentified anxiety. “But if I do tell you everything that will happen beforehand… I- it’s- Can’t you see how that will make it impossible for you to make any choices at all?”

“Yeah, no thanks on the Cassandraic bullshit,” Dirk says, sending her a dark look. “You’ve done enough.”

“Ugh, just the thought of it makes my head hurt, so please… do literally anything but that, thanks.” John also looks pretty unfriendly, and Calliope sags slightly where she sits, looking dejected.

And Jade still cannot feel a thing. She feels like someone might’ve smashed a hole in her chest plates back when Calliope first made her confession, and fragments of her have been leaking out bit by bit, until now there’s just nothing left anymore. She’s just so- so-

-so tired.

“I wasn’t done asking questions,” she says, because she isn’t, and it’s the only thing she can think of to say with the state her mind is in.

“Oh.” But Calliope doesn’t actually sound surprised. How much of this conversation is she already living through, rehearsing before it happens? How ‘accidental’ had it really been, when Jade had walked in at exactly the right time back then? Had Calliope known, even as she spoke to Aradia, that John was texting Jade to bring some cocoa with her to the outer tunnels? “Go on then.”

“You said that you preprogrammed the space station computer with a ‘suitable recipient’. And that was…?”

“Roxy Lalonde,” Calliope sighs out. “The elder, of course.”

Jade just nods, wrapping her arms around herself. She remembers how she’d screamed and fought the humans who came to rescue her, even though she so desperately wanted them to; she remembers being too terrified and confused to think properly. Sitting like this, she can pretend to once again be held by the strong arms that had picked her up and held her fast, as she kicked and bit and cried to no avail. Covering her eyes, she can still see the latticework of scars that distorted every inch of skin on them, feel the stubble that had pricked her scalp, the heavy smell of cigarettes that- that- that made her so certain that she was going to die too, go far away just like her grandfather had, and that was what finally calmed her down. She’d gone limp in Dave’s uncle’s arms, unresisting in face of this sudden possibility of escape, of refuge, of an end.

He’d sighed and carried her onto his ship. This ship. The ship that would one day become her friend.

“You said,” she says, her voice echoing distant and strange in her ears, “that you would one day- that you have been on the space station I was stuck on… right? That’s what you meant?”

“I have,” Calliope acknowledges, and Jade rejects the impulse to try to imagine it, to see both versions of the cherub wandering through the sharpest and most jagged edges of her life.

“And have you been… in other places? Places that are important to us?”

“Yes.”

Jade glances at Jake, but he stares stubbornly in the opposite direction, his non-metal hand tightening into a shaking fist. Right. That’s up to him to ask or not ask. Right now, what matters is what’s ahead of them, not behind.

“And if you exist in every point of your timeline simultaneously, and you are coming with us onto the Condesce’s flag ship, that means-”

“I will show you the way.”

There it is. Calliope is defeated – but if anything, she looks relieved. Wherever the other Calliope is, it’s probably more true to say that she has lost. Lost her hold, at the very least, on the other version of herself.

Aradia looks incredibly smug where she sits, spinning the seat of her chair around and around. In the blur of the motion, her face melts together with the one that Jade still cannot place into her own memories, cannot force onto the shadowy figure looming over her grandfather’s corpse. She’s gotten her way, and apparently that’s all she cares about.

Calliope looks up from where she’s kneeling on the floor, hands clasped to her chest, and for a moment the image tugs at something familiar in Jade’s gut, makes her feel like it would open another hole in her if she let it. She pushes back, holds on to whatever is left of her own self.

“Whenever you are ready to go,” the cherub says, her voice carrying tenuous optimism in each ringing syllable, “I will show you where you need to go. I still won’t use my powers directly, but I can at least promise to be your guide.”

“Oh, great,” John mumbles under his breath.

Another source of information to trust, another possible betrayal. Just what they all need.

HAL: Right. So I’m going to insist on one last update before you go.

GG: duh!!!

HAL: Glad to see we are in agreement.

HAL: Oh, and Harley…

GG: yeah?

HAL: Be careful.

GG: ... aww

GG: <3

HAL: No one would ever believe you if you told them I said that. No one. And no one would find your body either.

GG: suuuuuuure

GG: anyway

GG: you be careful too okay?

HAL: When am I ever not careful?

She says nothing in response, nothing about broken chest cavities leaking corrosive chemicals over Dirk’s hands, nothing about how the visceral image of losing parts of herself is something the two of them share. She doesn’t need to, and he hasn’t deserved it. It’s enough that they both know.

“Right,” Jade says, voice somehow held steady above the chasm that makes up the rest of her. “Let’s do this.”

Notes:

ah yes, what everyone needed after an unannounced hiatus was obviously MORE REVELATIONS and MORE CLIFFHANGERS and all around MORE FUCKERY

but i don't think anyone is THAT surprised lol <3

also kill me why do i keep adding difficult POVs, why do i doooo this to myself?? i hope i didn't butcher aradia too badly.

Chapter 37: To the heart

Summary:

When describing the difference between beginnings and endings, you are really describing two different descriptions of the same thing.

Notes:

i know i keep popping out of the woodwork and saying that i'm probably getting my shit together now, but... well, it's an ongoing struggle. for what it's worth, however, i'm back on my adhd meds and my life looks like it'll be less unstructured in the foreseeable future, so there's that. MWAH ilu all.

This isn’t the time to second-guess anything, as Sollux is fully aware. So he tries to drive from his mind the vision of the rebel fleet taking off behind them, right before the universe smeared into a monochrome abstraction of speed and distance. It had, to put it bluntly, not been an impressive sight. The jumble of mismatched ships scrounged from every era of the empire, not to mention a grab bag of assorted long-colonized worlds, all in varying states of improvised repair and reconstruction… Well, he wishes that he could find some kind of inspiration in the frankly suicidal optimism involved, but it had just been depressing. Compared to the human ship, which is quaintly limited in its own right, that lot was just so much flying space junk.

Still, if everything goes as planned, that shouldn’t matter. As long as the rebels can avoid having all of their ships reduced to atoms while luring the imperial command fleet into their trap, the flagship infiltration team – he, his friends, the humans, and Daraya – will be safe on the Condesce’s flag ship, and phase two can be initiated. And since phase two relies entirely on abandoning the shitty ships and taking over key imperial ships instead, their vast technological disadvantage should theoretically stop mattering.

That in no way makes him feel better. There are just far too many pivotal ‘if’s and ‘but’s which aren’t about to go away any time soon, and some of them are directly associated with the deplorable state of their own fleet. Such as: How the crevice-blasted fuck are the rebels supposed to be able to outrun the imperial fucking command fleet for even a second, when it’s a miracle half of those glorified space-scuttlers even managed to make it off the ground?

He swears between his teeth, elbow-deep in tubes and bladders as he makes the final adjustments to the modified transportalizer. Dirk, equally engaged in integrating it with the ship’s retrieval system, lifts his head and fixes his gaze on Sollux, hands growing still. Jade keeps working quietly on hooking it up to a couple of portable power sources, her mouth moving slightly as if she’s in the middle of a conversation, and Sollux isn’t even sure that she’d heard him.

“What,” he snaps, but worrying is taking too much energy already, and so the word comes out muted and flat.

“I am not, by even the widest margin, halfway competent as a...” A minimalist gesture follows a flicker of dry amusement across his face. “...calming influence, but for what it’s worth, it’s all based in tried and tested strategies.”

“Oh,” Sollux deadpans back, “so you mean they’ve been used by a lot of dead humans? Wow, I suddenly feel so fucking comforted. AA is going to need to step up her game, this guy’s got moves.”

There’s definitely a brief twitch of chagrin there as Dirk realizes that what he just said could, in fact, be taken as a painfully clumsy attempt at pale-flirting. Sollux will take it. Even though his pusher seems to be squeezing itself into a smaller, tighter ball with every second that passes, he nonetheless smirks. Dirk snorts. “Correct, I feel like what mine and Jake’s relationship really needs is another histrionic troll.”

Ow. Touché. The implied comparison certainly smarts, but he’ll let Dirk have that one, because it was admittedly pretty fucking funny.

“But what I was going to say is that this approach has in fact been implemented with decent results in the past.” He taps the screen of the half-dismantled communication panel he’d sacrificed for the sake of the mission, and his fingers leave glowing imprints against the inky black surface. “The rebels won’t just, as someone recently insisted right to my face, ‘knock knock ginger those dastardly villains’,” the exasperation in his voice doesn’t actually cover up the fondness nearly as well as he probably imagines, “which is to say that they aren’t just flying up, shooting a couple of times, and then turning around and fleeing. Apart from being terminally stupid in other ways, we’d make it staggeringly obvious that we’re only invested in getting them to chase us, and pose no threat outside this transparent feint.”

“As if they won’t know it’s an obvious trap anyway,” Sollux mutters, trying to look like he’s not hanging on every word on the off chance that Dirk might actually say something that’ll make him feel less like shit.

“Well, yes, that shit’s basic. The whole idea of every strategy is to trap your enemy, and every counter-strategy involves trying to figure out in what way and taking advantage of it,” Dirk shoots back dismissively. “What we want is for them to think the attack is the ambush, and that we’re counting on them not following us in case we have a larger force lying in wait. We want them to call our bluff. Which is why our ships will be flying through their fleet and taking out as many heavy-hitting, long-range weapons as possible. Ships flying in formation don’t tend to be individually steered, and are usually programmed with some kind of anti-collision pattern in case of fast-moving debris, correct?”

“If you keep spoon-feeding me more, I’m going to start missing my lusus,” Sollux informs him irritably, not quite keeping his disappointment in check when no reassurance is to be found. His anxiety creeps further up his throat with every obvious word, and he wishes Dirk could just shut up already and allow him to wallow. Who the fuck is he, anyway, to act like worrying about shit he can’t control isn’t his main pastime?

Dirk, however, clearly doesn’t want to shut up. “So the attack will cause them to scatter, it’ll take a moment for them to switch over to manual controls, they won’t be able to open fire right away without hitting their own ships, and in that specific situation, the rebel ships will be more maneuverable simply because they’re smaller. We don’t have to be faster to achieve that, because we’ve got bigger targets to aim at, and we have the element of surprise. Then we get the fuck out of there while they’re still scrambling to get their ships under control. Theoretically that’s a viable strategy for doing a lot of damage with relatively minimal losses. Classic cavalry tactics. We could just keep doing that indefinitely – for all they know we’ve got all the time in the world. Except...”

“Except it’ll take them no time to work that out, and that they can easily catch us up if they just follow, and that there’s no fucking way that we have enough firepower to take them on face-to-face, and once they start chasing us, the rebels might as well be riding hoofbeasts like your primitive humans for all the difference that makes.”

“… Which, again, is what we want to happen.”

Sollux extricates his hand from the inner workings of the transportalizer, haphazardly wipes it free of slime on his shirt, and then rubs it tiredly across his forehead. It helps that he knows just how much Dirk hates this plan, and still he seems genuinely sure that it’s got merit. It helps to think it through step by step like this. But even so… “And what if they just don’t give a fuck?” He gives the transportalizer a baleful look, hating that he barely understands how it’s supposed to work. The screaming in his head is so loud nowadays, but it guarantees nothing except more pain. “What if they they decide it doesn’t matter if some rebel ships get away? What if they just fire after them and take out as many as possible, and the flagship never gets within range to infiltrate?”

Dirk shrugs, the motion mechanical and sharp. “Then we’re fucked. Well, I say ‘we’...”

“But we’ll probably be fine. It’s just everyone else who will die.”

“Yes.”

He does in fact feel calmer now, but Sollux isn’t sure that it’s an improvement. It’s not the calm of resolution, but of knowing that it doesn’t matter if the plan is good or not, because they can’t turn around now anyway. Fear has left a space within him, and in it he feels the inevitable looming up. He knows exactly what he has to do, and it starts with allowing something that isn’t exactly his own consciousness to move his hands back into position once again, intent on finishing his work.

The rest of the ship is quiet and dim, all systems on standby to minimize the chance of the empire’s scanners finding them as they lurk on the dark side of a far-flung planet, orbiting the sharp pinprick of a distant star. Apart from the emergency light strips, the only source of light is the screen of the rebel-made husktop which allows them to follow the movements of the rebel ships. The chatter of the different pilocators as they get into combat positions is so terse and muted that it’s hard to make out on this side of the bridge, but most of the voices are laden with anticipation. Of the imminent battle, of death, or even of the chance to finally score a victory? Sollux can’t tell.

Time drips by slowly. Everything is ready. Sollux keeps running tests, but by now he knows he’s done his part flawlessly, and he’s really just killing time. Aradia puts some kind of bar of processed food into his hands, and he nibbles on it distractedly without being able to taste it. Everyone who isn’t busy working on something is eating in subdued silence, or at the very least having a staring contest with a piece of food. The sound of unenthusiastic chewing is occasionally broken by the impromptu orchestra of frayed nerves: Equius cracking the plates in his hands. Vriska spinning her chair around by kicking the floor with increasing impatience. Dave mumbling something vaguely rhythmical to himself. Jane’s pen tapping on a completely empty spanvocable-puzzle. Karkat biting on his claws, which is disgusting, not to mention particularly loud every time he manages to chip a piece off.

Sollux wishes that he could say something about it, that he could have such a small shred of normalcy to hold on to, because the inside of his head is so loud that it’s a wonder he can hear anything going on outside it at all. But it’s really not the time, and he can’t allow anything to break his concentration. He’s pretty certain his own mind will dissolve into wet mush if he can’t manage to keep it clearly separated from his ancestor’s, and that’s getting harder with every second.

-here here here not far away here freedom is here and I need I need so many things I need nothing I need it to stop please stop please stop please stop-

The husktop screen, previously split between different ships, now shows Tyzias’ face, half turned away as she stares fixedly at her ship’s monitors. “Attack.” She doesn’t raise her voice; it sounds almost calm, but the exhausted drag has left it completely, and it rings in a way that leaves a pool of absolute silence in its wake. She glances briefly at the communication screen, her jagged pupils wide and sharp. “Remember, in the case this ship is compromised, you’ll take your cue from the next in command. No matter what happens, if you have the chance, get on that ship.” Then her attention snaps back to the battle. “Fire.”

It’s strange to see how the ship on the screen is shaking, hear the groaning of a hull under stress and the shouts of the crew, and yet there is not a single sound from the ongoing battle. Which is a good thing, obviously, because sounds would mean that the ship is actively under fire-

Just as that thought spasms across Sollux’s mind, there’s a dull boom, and Tyzias is flung sideways into the communication screen, leaving a smear of teal blood. She hisses, but it appears the ship is still operational, albeit shaking a lot more than it had before, and there’s the unmistakable sound of airlocks slamming shut to isolate a leak somewhere on the vessel. Apart from the terse orders still ringing from the screen, the grim silence on the rebel ship keeps draining every sound out of the waiting infiltration crew. Daraya sits with fists clenched tight in her lap, teeth bared. To be stuck wigglersitting when her comrades are dying must be unbearable. It’s not even possible to know how great the losses are right now, though the tremor in Tyzias’ jaw doesn’t look hopeful.

He can’t tell how long it takes before the flat, “Retreat,” draws out so many held breaths that it sounds like a wind passing through the darkened bridge. It’s far from over, but at least one kind of tension can give way to another, and it’s no longer time to just wait.

Sollux plunges his hands into the workings of the transportalizer, and pours his power into the pathways that he’s prepared for it. Not to power it, since he’ll be coming through it too, and that’s what the batteries Jade installed are for. This time around, he is not the fuel, emptying himself in a hopeless bid for freedom; he is at the helm, and he opens his mind to an empty space that awaits instructions. He makes a pathway into a mind that could’ve been his own, give or take the odd thousand sweeps of senseless torture. On the Condesce’s ship there is exactly one transportalizer that isn’t operated by the Green Sun, the one small refuge which she has from the iron grip that guides her every move. It’s her most safely guarded secret, because it’s a crucial part in a plan she has to win her freedom once and for all, overthrowing her master and fully possessing the empire she’s previously had to share.

She has only let one creature know about it: Her trusty Helmsman. After all, his mind permeates every part of her ship, and she needs his power to make her plan possible. And who would he tell? He’s imprisoned in the very bowels of her ship, and she is the only one who sees him; her beautiful prize, her perfect slave, her beloved victim. To him, she can let her poisonous wellspring of secrets overflow, as she taunts him with her ambitions and her conquests, her desires and her rage.

The Helmsman knows everything about his empress.

Sollux tries not to feel it, tries not to see the festering horrors that come spilling out of the mind that now fully envelops his. But it’s impossible not to. To find her ship when the time comes, to find the place, to clear a path, he has no choice but to open his mind to all of it. He must know her too, to aim for her heart.

“They’ve taken the bait.” Tyzias’ voice is a shaky breath, relief twining with finality, and Sollux has no space left within him to wonder if she sees the end of her fight in one way or another now; if perhaps she welcomes it. But he knows his ancestor’s soul isn’t the only one he’s heard screaming in the brokenness of the world.

Then: “...Shit.” Tyzias grows still, in the exact same moment as Sollux feels his mind make contact with the imperial flagship. Too fast, he thinks, the thought stumbling through the noise in panicked confusion. That was too fast. The rebels shouldn’t even be in range, which means that the fleet-

A sheet of white light illuminates the rebel leader’s face, reflecting from eyes which shine far too bright. She smiles grimly. “Are the transportalizers aligned?”

“Yes.” Sollux forces the word out through the cloud of numbness that threatens to suffuse him.

“Then go. Trust us and go.”

The screen blinks out.

“You heard her.” Daraya gets up, towering over the hunched-down group of juvenile trolls and humans under her command, her head thrown back proudly. “Let’s end this.” Then a sardonic twist tilts her lips up, flashing her fangs in the dim room. She gestures at Dirk and his siblings, gathered armed and ready by the glowing platform on the floor. “After you?” she suggests archly.

Sollux pulls his hands free and easily lifts himself off the floor, crackling with held-in power. He’s balancing right on the edge of what his body can withstand now, his mind flowing in and out of the one that waits on the ship, half dying star and half resurrected corpse, poised on the duality of birth and destruction. “No,” he says. “After me.” He reaches out to Karkat in a prompting gesture, weaving a protective shield around them both even before their hesitant touch stubs brush together. “Let’s go, shitsponge.”

He only just manages to catch Karkat’s fleeting smile, before the transportalizer platform lights up, erasing the world around them.

 

---

 

Where before the emptiness of space had beckoned, now the imperial flagship looms, too massive to properly grasp as a troll-made thing, blotting out the stars like a blasphemy against their supremacy. The rest of the imperial fleet is still behind – not that it matters. It’s only a matter of seconds before they catch up, now that the flagship has cut off their retreat. Its cannons are already glowing, and what is left of the rebel attack force is barreling right down their sights even as every engine desperately rips into reverse. There’s nowhere to go.

Tyzias gives her orders, and then cuts the communication screen just in case. No need for the kids to watch her die. In case anyone is left to still give them orders once this is over, they all carry secondary communication husks – though it seems unlikely. All she can hope for now is that they manage to complete their side of the mission, that the human ship remains undetected, and that Daraya will somehow manage to get them out safe. A tall order, and far from a complete victory. Trading an assassinated empress against a significant portion of the fighting force of the rebels… Well, she’d known this might be the outcome when she made the gamble. No point in second-guessing it now. It’s possible that even now, they might have to rely on the fact that they have the fuchsia heiress on their side, and that doesn’t sit right with Tyzias. But luckily, it won’t be her problem for long.

She has to squint in the glare of the flagship cannons now. Behind her, the fleet ships fan out and close in, trapping her small group of battered ships on every side. No use, either, in wondering how the empress’ ship had gotten into motion so fast, or how it instantly had maneuvered into just the right spot to cut them off. Perhaps it is simply that impressive, after all; perhaps there is no further mystery to be solved, and no deeper deceit to dread. If it was foolish to communicate their intentions to the very mind which controls the ship they’re trying to infiltrate, well, the rebellion has always been foolish. Trust has always been foolish. Believing in something more than they’ve always had is extremely foolish.

That doesn’t change that it’s right.

In the earpiece she wears, connecting her with the rebel base, she hears Stelsa breathing slowly, saying nothing. It had been cruel, to leave her behind. There’s no real reason, other than that Tyzias had known that they might indeed all die today, and she couldn’t bring herself to trust anyone else with whatever will be left of the rebellion. She’s never delegated all that well, a terrible trait for a leader to have, which is why she’d always needed Stelsa. Once Tyzias is gone… well, her matesprit is a practical troll. She’ll be able to arrange things so that there will be new leaders to pick up the pieces and keep fighting, far more efficiently when there’s no longer anyone clinging to every part of ‘her’ rebellion, as if she can somehow keep it alive if she only holds on tightly enough.

She breathes in sync with Stelsa, and she has nothing she needs to say either. They’ve said farewell so many times by now, sometimes as they were facing down death together, and sometimes while seeing the other slip inexorably out of their grasp. They have sat by cots in medical bays, changed each other’s bandages, listened to the erratic beep of oxygen meters and pusher monitors through long nights. They have stood in battle together, dragged each other’s bodies through crossfire; they’ve been pressed into tighter and tighter corners, until they could no longer tell the blood of friends and enemies apart. They have starved, and shivered, and suffocated in inhospitable environments. They have told one another everything two people who love and are loved can reasonably say at the threshold of death, and now there’s finally nothing left to say. They breathe together steadily, grateful for each breath they can still share, and that is enough.

Daraya’s voice crackles from the communication hub, as if from a far greater distance than mere space might allow. “We’ve boarded the flagship. Cutting communications until the mission is concluded.”

Tyzias closes her eyes and curls her hands into fists. There it is. Even if the rebels lose fighters today, they still have the intel that will let them infiltrate empire ships at their later disposal. The rebellion doesn’t stand or fall with this battle, and she is going to have to be at peace with that.

...She’s never been good at that either.

“Open fire.” Her voice, miraculously, doesn’t crack.

“...Generadmin?”

“You heard me.”

The rebellion is foolish, but not so foolish as going down without fighting for every life they’re going to tear from her grasp today, including her own.

“Yes, Generadmin!” Her gunner grins, the mass of scars moving strangely across his face. Once, he’d taken a sickle that was meant for her, leaving his features the patchwork they are today. His life is worth fighting for. Mallek’s life is worth fighting for. They’re all worth fighting for, even now.

They rush toward the flagship cannons, chasing after the blasts of their own guns, and watch the lights ahead spread across the interstellar darkness into a blinding blaze. Tyzias has just enough time to think that this is it, it will all be over soon, and Stelsa’s steady breaths are still ringing in her ear. Then the ship swerves violently, as if her pilocator is trying to avoid the range of those cannons, which would be preposterous if that was really what she was doing. Instead, she only just manages to weave in between two of the imperial ships and get out of the immediate blast radius as-

“Hold on tight!” the pilocator screams, cackling wildly, as behind them the flagship cannons explode into smithereens.

“What-!” Tyzias gasps, because that’s impossible. They’d come armed to incapacitate and sabotage, and they certainly don’t have any weapons with that kind of firepower.

“Hello again, Generadmin.” The previously blacked-out communication screen is smeared with her own blood, but not so much that she can’t make out the brilliant smile of Roxy Lalonde the elder, her once-friend and former ally. Next to her, the rustblood from before knocks the ashes off her smoking cylinder onto the control panel of a ship. “Are we too late to the party?”

As the sky-blue ships of SKAIA plunge into the fray, swarming around the larger imperial ships like tiny planetoids around bloated red suns, Tyzias barely has enough breath in her to bark out a few quick orders – and there’s certainly none to spare for the human’s lopsided smirk right at this moment. The battle is far from done.

Leaning forward, she once again activates the node on the communications hub that lets her speak to her fighters directly. “Attention, rebel ships. Steer as many of your vessels as you can out of the crossfire zone between the fleet ships. We’re initiating Phase 2.”

 

---

 

Unlike the transportalizers that the rebels meant to use to infiltrate the fleet, this one is for obvious reasons not hooked up to the grid that connects the rest of flagship’s transportation decks. Which means it’s not monitored the way all other empireware is, and should – theoretically – be a safe path to Her Imperious Condescension.

What Kanaya admittedly hadn’t expected, however, is that it’s apparently located in her closet.

Well, it’s is supposed to be a secret, and no doubt the Condesce is far too paranoid to put something like that anywhere except in her very own private quarters. Also, ‘closet’ is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s very clearly the storage block connected to the empress’ personal wardrobifyer, so it’s not like all of them are crammed into a tiny little box, as hilarious as that would’ve been. It is, however, extremely dark and packed full of clothes, and the space in between the racks were decidedly not meant for, say, Equius to traverse with ease. Combine this with how a majority of them are bristling with weaponry, and it manages to be thoroughly uncomfortable in its own right.

“Ow, whose foot is that?” John, apparently trying to shuffle sideways and failing.

“Oh dear, that might be mine. Is this better?” Calliope is much closer to Kanaya, and clearly visible as a diminutive outline.

“No.”

“Yeah, because you were standing on my fucking strut pod, not his!” Karkat, half bent over and clutching at his aching appendage.

“Shit, little human bro, I think that’s me then. Hold on a motherfucking wink.” Gamzee is clearly struggling to find somewhere to go, and his words are shortly followed by a muffled crash with a slightly metallic edge. “Ah, motherfuck, I’m sorry.”

“I’m just tip-top, no worries.” Jake sounds distinctly muffled.

“Right,” Kanaya snaps, but quietly, “so I’m going to illuminate our surroundings, and that is not actually a matter I’m prepared to debate.”

“Can’t see why not, with the noise you kids have been making already.” Daraya sounds almost impressed, albeit in a distinctly horrified way.

In the glow of her luminescence, it’s at least somewhat easier for all of them to detangle themselves from one another – and no doubt it’s a relief to the humans in particular, since they seem to have almost no night vision at all. Even with troll eyes, the storage space appears to let in no light from external sources, making it cumbersome to navigate when the only previous illumination had consisted of Sollux’s eyes. Also, Kanaya the last troll to criticize someone else’s fondness for pretty clothes, but there comes a point where something reaches critical mass, and this is it. They have to spend a few more tense minutes untangling some garment made entirely out of intricate straps from the automated metal brace which for stealth reasons has replaced Tavros’ new wheeled device, and pulling loose the gossamer-thin fabric which for an awkward moment ties Vriska’s horns together Dirk’s gun holster.

Kanaya almost laughs. She would laugh, because the situation is superlatively stupid, but with the rebels probably being slaughtered out there it feels like it’d be in poor taste. Except it’s always like this, with her every breath being chased by the knowledge that people are dying unjustly with no end in sight, and if she’ s to always let everything being p erpetual bullshit stop her from laughing then she might as well paralyze her own face and save herself the trouble of agonizing . Yes, it’s probably more tactless when she’ d been part of making the plans that led to this situation, but since not making any plans never stopped things from being awful, it feels a lot like arguing semantics at this point.

Rose seems to catch the tail end of her fleeting huff of grim amusement, her mouth curling into a tight talon shape in response, and the violet shade of her eyes has darkened to bruises in the stark light. Her uniform practically glows on its own, and it feels a little on the proverbial nub that she and Vriska are both doing their best impressions of suns at the same time. Like some sort of pithy point being made, about drinkers gravitating to what all other trolls would shun.

They’d all agreed to wear the Skaia uniforms they’d been assigned for the mission, simply because the rather unsightly jumpsuits apparently have some practical advantages over ordinary clothes. Jane, in particular, had stressed the powerful protection they offered against environmental factors, such as fire, and no one was about to argue with her on that score. So on average, they’re a strangely colourful bunch as they shuffle carefully in the direction of the door, weapons held as ready as possible in the limited space – all but herself, Jade, and Calliope, who instead stand toward the back of the crowd in their stark black and white. Perhaps stepping back and letting others take the lead is what makes you suitable for the Space force, whatever that even means.

Rose is nothing like that, and yet she seems content to wait quietly by Kanaya’s side. As she tilts her head in her direction, Kanaya notices for the first time that from one of her ears dangles a single earring: A slick chain of black metal tipped with a completely spherical, milky white stone. For some reason it makes her shiver with discomfort, and when Rose takes her hand she almost squirms away, feeling inexplicably trapped. But from within, a warmth pushes back against that sudden flash of dread, soothing it before she gives herself away, and she returns the gesture while prompting only a brief flash of confusion in Rose’s eyes at her apparent hesitation.

We’re stronger than the things that made us, descendant. We have no reason to fear them.

Kanaya isn’t sure she’d go quite that far, but at least she’s come far enough that she’s willing to trust Rose implicitly, and believe that even if she doesn’t know her reason, she’s sure to have one. At this time and in this place, that’s all there really is to hold on to, anyway. She wouldn’t be here, standing next to these people in this cramped and increasingly sweltering storage block, if she wasn’t prepared to be at peace with their reasons, their ambitions, and their loyalties, such as they are. Even the ones she can’t quite bring herself to trust – a quick glance at Eridan, pulling awkwardly at his bright Hope uniform; at Gamzee, looking uncommonly somber; and more uncertainly in Calliope’s direction, weighing possibilities – she will at least accept that they belong here just as much as she does.

At the head of the group, Daraya makes a quick, sharp gesture. She stands out, dressed as she is in the grey rebel uniform, and since she’s ostensibly in charge, that’s only practical. They edge the door to the storage space open and start to stealthily make it into the next block, fanning out and covering all angles. Another empty block, which seems to mostly serve the purpose of storing a preposterously wide array of items that definitely don’t need to be made out of solid gold. Clocks, statues, common hivehold appliances… Every surface in there gleams dazzlingly back at them, and Kanaya instinctively dims her own luminescence before she ends up incautiously blinding everyone.

There’s an entire array of golden cages against one wall, all currently empty, and Kanaya does her best to not speculate on what they’re used for.

At the center of their ragtag band, Karkat is still holding on to Sollux’ hand, wrapped in a nigh-invisible bubble of protective psionic power. The cloak Kanaya had made for him covers most of the unfortunate Blood uniform, whispering softly across the floor every time he moves, and his eyes are slits of bright apprehension in the depths of the hood. This is more or less the last place someone like him should walk straight into, like a stray herdbeast in an arachnid's lair, and she doesn’t doubt that he can feel it. Once, she remembers, he had actually dreamed about becoming a Threshecutioner – perhaps even being acknowledged by Her Imperious Condescension herself, set to serve as her guard on this very flagship. It’s an absurd wiggler’s dream, and she can’t help but smile fondly at the memory. Well, here he is, albeit in the role of an invading rebel leader instead. Maybe she’ll congratulate him later, if they survive.

Dave edges back to his side after glancing through a half-open door on the opposite side of the block. Sollux’ forceshield appears to yield to his presence with a faint crackle, and Kanaya isn’t entirely sure if he even noticed it. “That door seems to lead to her bedroom. Or her slime cocoon block, or whatever it is you call it. It’s empty. I guess she’s not gonna go have a nap while there’s a whole battle going down.”

“Unlikely.” Daraya’s mouth twists tightly in indecision. “Even so… this is probably the best place to attack her, all things considered. It’s where she’s most likely to be caught unawares and on her own.”

“You mean we’re just supposed to sit around and wait?” Dirk snaps, incredulous.

Daraya’s eyes narrow dangerously. “That’s exactly what I mean, Strider, and that’s what our orders are. We are not responsible for the rest of the rebels; their mission is separate from ours at this point. We are not wasting their sacrifices by endangering our objective.”

A tremor of frustration runs through Dirk’s hands, as he realizes that there’s nothing he will ever be able to say to reason with her. Just like during that tragic incident with Dave, she is clearly seeing someone else when she looks at him, and will act accordingly.

Kanaya clears her throat. “Perhaps. But hiding here and relying on that she’ll come back eventually does rather squander whatever distraction they’re able to still provide.”

The older jade’s gaze is more measured as it transfers to her, but nevertheless unyielding. “The element of distraction gave us an opening to board the ship. That’s enough.”

“Nevertheless, considering the… unfortunate turn of that battle, just waiting here seems imprudent,” Kanaya insists, more forcefully. “I think it’s been made very clear that relying completely on the given intel has proved disadvantageous in previous missions, to put it mildly, and if the Condesce knows something we don’t, it seems just as likely that we’re trapping ourselves by staying here. Wouldn’t it be better to find somewhere nearby to lie low?”

“Wouldn’t we risk just wandering around blindly, though?” Jane ventures, looking apprehensive. “If we don’t know where we’re going, aren’t we likely to encounter guards and give away our position?”

“Yeah, hate to say it, but an infiltration team of twenty-something idiots at cross purposes isn’t exactly what I’d call stealthy,” Dave agrees.

“Do I have to wear a badge saying ‘psychic’?” Vriska shoots back impatiently. “Unless the rest of you do something fucking stupid, which I’m not ruling out, we’re not walking into any guards.”

“And I know exactly where we are,” Sollux supplies, a layer of preoccupation causing his voice to drift. “There’s a server room close to here that should be empty.”

“No.”

They all turn in perfect unison to Calliope, faces reflecting the full spectrum of emotion from relief through apprehension and tightening into doubt. The cherub is fussing distractedly with the corner of an iridescent shawl she appears to have picked up from among the empresses’ trove of clothes, and distant lights seem to be traveling across the surface of her deep-set eyes, as if whatever future she can see is reflected in them as it flashes before her.

“That is… you’re right,” she nods slowly at Kanaya. “We shouldn’t stay here. I promised to help, and while I can’t say for sure that staying here wouldn’t work, it’s….” She cuts herself off, shaking her head sharply. “We need to go to where the Helmsman is. Right away.” Her voice flutters with a faint laugh. “We don’t have any time to lose.”

Daraya doesn’t look like that eases her mind at all, but nevertheless she nods in immediate acquiescence, and for just a moment… Kanaya isn’t certain, but it’s as if the rebel’s face flickers, blinking out like a broken light and leaving something else in its place. It happens far too fast for her to properly catch it, and while deeply unsettling, it somehow doesn’t strike her as threatening. A thrill runs through her, as the shadow of something half familiar yet incomprehensible passes across her mind, resonating with its own unbalanced and fractal nature like the different stages of a wave blending together as it breaks on a shore. On Muspell, she had been content to watch the shoreline of the inlet below for long stretches of time, but only now does she think she’s starting to grasp the nature of what she’d seen, and what it means to be both a particle and a wave.

She’s also feeling slightly seasick, but she’ll just have to cope.

“Right,” Daraya says, shifting her shoulders as if to shrug off a strange sensation. “If that’s how it is, I have no objections. Lead the way, Captor.”

Sollux nods, still with that glazed-over look, and starts to drift toward the open door to the respite block, with Karkat still tagging along awkwardly. As if they’d rehearsed it, Kanaya finds herself and Nepeta overtaking them, and the purr of her chainsaw blends seamlessly together with the snick of the oliveblood cocking her weapons. They exchange fleeting smiles, too far down this path already be very surprised – not even when Terezi and Tavros repeat the same maneuver and flank them. It’s ridiculous, of course, but it feels right.

It’s time, the Dolorosa sighs, ominous and deep as the call of drifting sand dunes. It’s time, old friend.

Notes:

it's my most practiced routine, "plot via introspection", hand in hand with "vague implications in every direction", because why have structure when you can have an ~aesthetic~ /backflips out to go work on LPaG

Chapter 38: Unison

Summary:

On this day, all shall have a voice.

Notes:

happy 413, ya filthy animals <3

Rose has only a relatively brief impression of the imperial respite block, draped in plush fuchsia and cloth of gold, strewn with artifacts that no doubt are retrieved from the shattered remains of hundreds of different civilizations. An ornate club carved out of green stone, a wheel-shaped headdress made from cloth and metal spokes, a net woven from shimmering rainbow threads, some manner of washbasin fashioned out of hundreds of jet-black shells. She cannot possibly guess the context of even one of these items, other than this: Whatever they were meant for, and whoever they’d once belonged to, their presence here is undoubtedly calculated to humiliate and hurt as much as possible.

Mostly hidden by a shimmering curtain, she glimpses something that is presumably a large and luxurious recuperacoon, staining the pearly white walls with a bright green glow. Rose wonders to herself what exactly it’s full of, knowing now what she does. Does Her Imperious Condescension willingly submerge herself in a fluid that completely cuts her off from her species’ past, dulling the sublime influences of the hivemind she’s part of? Perhaps that’s the only sensible option for someone in her position, carrying such a great share in the blame for the suffering of her own people. Perhaps there is nothing out there in the darkness of ages lost and long-gone lives but terrors waiting to strike, the very moment she closes her eyes?

Or perhaps she alone, over the course of thousands upon thousands of years, is the only troll to have mastered such a connection, bent it to her will. Perhaps there is no dread in sleep which doesn’t already warp her mind in waking, ever reminding her how very far she has to fall. It strikes Rose that this might explain the exceptional powers she’s heard so much about, the ability to make use of the hereditary psychic powers of multiple blood castes. Then again, maybe not. Her caste could just as easily have been created to develop such faculties if given enough time.

Either way, she doesn’t imagine that it’ll change what she is going to have to do, personally. As far as she’s concerned, the dice have already been cast quite some years ago, and only now is it time to find out how they will fall.

Even so, it makes her wonder a bit about the nature of psychic powers, and especially the different varieties displayed by trolls. She had noticed, naturally, that among those with what at first appeared to be entirely mechanical abilities, there was forever something like a strange background murmur, like an old-fashioned radio turned slightly off-station behind a closed door in their minds. Asking Aradia about it – she’d judged Sollux a bit too touchy for such a conversation – she’d been informed that it was the voices of the past, present and future dead. From Rose’s understanding, however, it doesn’t seem to work the way the hivemind does, preserving the imprint of the dead as they were in life and carrying them within blood and memory throughout the centuries, connecting them directly with the living and becoming part of them. It’s more like a psychic imprint of the very moment of death, echoing back and forth through time like faraway voices in a network of caves.

It’s funny, isn’t it? How easily both these concepts take shape in her mind. Or perhaps funny isn’t the right word? Possibly what she means is ‘uncanny’, or ‘tragic’.

… No, it’s definitely funny.

Equius leans forward and peels away a fortified panel attached to the wall as if it were a sticky note. Rose had expected some display of embarrassment or consternation at his participation in vandalizing the private quarters of the Condesce, but she doesn’t think that’s what makes his hands shake slightly. No, it’s the ripple of something other which is now passing back and forth through the trolls like an unpredictable electrical current. For some, it seems to fortify them in their purpose, but it’s clear that others aren’t faring nearly as well. Which is to say, the upper castes.

Vriska has her claws buried in her own arm, her gaze distracted, her teeth bared in what looks to Rose like defiance. Equius’ jaw is tense, the muscles in his throat working, as if he’s having trouble with something stuck there. Eridan has removed one hand from his rifle, and is now holding on to a handful of Jake’s uniform, like a child who’s scared of getting lost in a crowd. All three of them are in fact in some way or other exchanging looks or touches with their moirails, and while that strikes Rose to be a bit too reminiscent of using duct tape on the hull of a sinking ship, it does appear to stabilize the situation. Unfortunately, that leaves…

Gamzee’s hands are opening and closing convulsively, and though his face looks mostly preoccupied, like someone trying to remember something complicated and half-forgotten, she can tell that there are things moving in the shifting mists of his mind. Both trolls who would normally function as stabilizing influences on him are at the head of the group, while Gamzee has now shuffled to the very back. Karkat, wrapped in an air of equal measures purpose and mind-whiting terror, and in any case currently locked in that specific quadrant with Rose’s brother, seems like a particularly ill-suited candidate anyway. But she finds herself wishing she could take off one shoe and toss it at Tavros to get him to snap out of whatever ancestral stuff is going on, and maybe take a moment to engage in some damage control. This, she feels, is one hell of a time to be swept up in a state of quasi-religious distraction. Anyway, Terezi and Nepeta are clearly also communing with the spirits, but nevertheless seem to be maintaining a connection to reality, so why can’t he?

Oh well. Rather than resorting to flinging footwear around – yet – she will simply keep an eye on the situation for now. After all, one can never tell for sure what a troll might interpret as a brazen solicitation.

As for their last highblood, Rose has a harder time reading Feferi, though she doesn’t appear to be showing any of the signs of discomfort or outside interference that the others are. If anything, she seems to be looking around like someone who is starting to suspect that everyone else is in on a secret which she wasn’t even aware of. On the other hand, she too has let go of her weapon with one hand, and is currently clasping Roxy’s with a certain amount of rigid apprehension. The former heiress must be keeping herself in check, because Rose doesn’t doubt that the strength in those hands could crush her little sister’s like an eggshell, but even so she can see her skin whitening from the grip, and pick up on Roxy’s slight wince of pain.

Hm. Maybe Feferi is just nervous? If Rose herself is, despite now being certain that she possesses knowledge which the others don’t, she can hardly blame them.

The workings behind the panel yield inexorably to Sollux’s hands, pathways lighting up and activating, and in an instant a membrane on the floor parts with a puff of stale air, revealing a tightly spiraling staircase leading downwards.

“How charmingly old-fashioned,” Rose murmurs, amused. “You know, say what you want about the paranoia of royalty, but I feel like no one ever talks about its important role in the area of classical influences on contemporary architecture.”

A majority of the trolls glance at her as if she’d suggested stopping for a picnic, or maybe a little light orgy, and even her human compatriots seem somewhat perturbed by her flippancy. The more glazed-eyed of the former group barely react. Kanaya, her face losing some of its far-away sheen, tries very hard to smother a giggle, but it’s resilient. It’s nice, because Rose strongly feels that she was being very funny, and it would’ve been a shame for her to miss it.

Vriska, meanwhile, outright laughs, and some of the strange flickering of warring impulses seems to drain from her features, her expression growing clear and intent once more. She winks at Rose – with her left eye, specifically – and then jumps into the hole and vaults over the railing, disappearing into the darkness beneath. She’s clearly not intending to wait for the Singless’ proper entourage to go first for even a second longer, and personally Rose approves of her stance. She has never had much taste for the concept of predestination, for all that this is of course particularly ironic in her case – even more so, now, than the rest of her family.

John heaves a huge sigh. “Well, okay, that was stupid... but I guess we follow her?”

As if he doesn’t secretly think that it was so cool. Rose isn’t going to let herself be fooled, anyway.

From the sotto-voce clicking and hissing, Daraya is definitely thinking her way through a litany of unuttered curses as she takes point, walking ahead of Karkat’s group with her gun pointed straight into the empty gloom. The rest of them proceed awkwardly in file, since the stairs are too narrow to admit more than two people at the same time – or one, in the case of the larger trolls. Right in front of Rose, the steps creak ominously under Calliope’s feet, causing her to duck her head in apparent embarrassment, and she tries to tread very carefully. Rose decides that she’s glad that she and Jade are making up a kind of buffer between her and Gamzee’s bulk – especially since Jade seems to have decided that actually touching the ground below is optional. A faint glow radiates from below her boots, the only sign of the magnetic pulse thrusters which are keeping her suspended, only barely exercising any pressure on the ground below at all.

Jade had seemed distant before, and Rose had put it down to the unpleasant effect which the revelations of her past had on her, but now it’s difficult to find any sign of it. She’s looking around with an air of genuine attentiveness, and while there certainly is tension present in her posture, and gentle tug concern in her expression, neither of these particularly mar the impression that she has laid her grievances aside to focus on the mission. Rose had even noticed how earlier, as they were all shuffling out of the imperial closet, Jade had helped Calliope drape the scarf she’d pilfered around herself, and had offered her a brief grin when she was done. Even so… Rose cannot shake the feeling that Jade is holding something back, something she is very deliberately avoiding, or even actively obscuring from the rest of them – and she’s not alone about it either.

Which is to say, Rose makes a point of remembering that Jade is never truly alone nowadays. And no, the irony is not lost on her.

The space they’re descending into is truly cavernous, and to human eyes almost completely dark, save for a dull pink glow far below. The light of Kanaya’s skin doesn’t travel very far into the distance, and even the torches which Jake and Roxy had been bright enough to belatedly turn on do little to dispel the gloom. Far in the distance, if she squints, Rose can pick out muted swirls of that same pink, which gradually appears to brighten the further down they get. From the extremely rudimentary sketch of the flagship interior which they’d studied before the mission, she’d guess that they’re descending from the lower of the command decks into the vast belly of the vessel, where she would normally expect to find the all the bulky parts of a working space ship, such as the engines and the power source that drives them.

Ah. Of course. This ship doesn’t need any of that, now does it?

Walking closer to the railing and gazing down, Rose watches as the glow below slowly resolves itself into a tangled mess of glowing lines, like a cross between a snarl of wires and a deeply damaged cardiovascular system. It stretches far, far in the distance in every direction, and then appears to start to crawl up the walls which encase the space. The stairs, Rose notes now, will clearly pass into and through whatever that is. A ragged dark hole in the mess right next to the spire of the stairwell must be where Vriska passed right through on her way down, so she guesses the layer is not all that thick.

Further down the stairs, Sollux has apparently been brought down to earth, as literally as is possible inside a spaceship. He’s no longer hovering, and instead of tugging Karkat along, he’s now forced to lean heavily on the other troll, his free hand clutching desperately at his head. Whatever transcendent state possessed him previously has either departed or, which Rose deems more likely, it’s becoming far too much for his mind to withstand. There is a very good reason for why she’s currently keeping her own mind securely contained, not even reaching out to gauge the state of her fellows, or to try to get a sense of what awaits ahead. It would be like trying to pour yourself a glass of water while standing at the bottom of a waterfall.

This whole place is a mind, and even through the protective layers of her rigorous training, she can tell that it’s a broken one.

...Hopefully Vriska is okay down there.

It turns out she is, for a given value of okay. Once they’ve passed through the barrier of glowing pink tentacles, it really isn’t very far down to the ground, and Vriska is waiting impatiently right at the bottom of the stairs.

“About time,” she hisses, voice thick with vox, and even in the unpleasant pink light, it’s clear that her face is several shades paler than normal. Her eyes look wild, all eight pupils blown with whatever the troll equivalent of adrenaline is. “Can someone remind me why we needed to go down here, again?”

But almost no one appears to hear her, staring straight past at the only thing visible inside this ghastly hollow. At the gaunt and twisted body of a troll, almost completely buried inside a pillar of of tubes and thick mucus, its face locked in a silent scream as the wide-open eyes flicker with light like a broken computer monitor.

“Is… Is he dead?” Roxy asks weakly, and it’s obviously because she wants the answer to be yes, rather than from any real hope that it will be.

“No,” Vriska replies flatly, shuddering. “But I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do about that.”

At face value, that sounds like a rather callous remark, but it’s not hard to see it for what it actually is: Compassion, taken to its very sharpest end, where staying your hand for even an instant would be an act of much greater cruelty. Rose would guess from the smears of pink slime on Vriska’s uniform that she’s already tried to get closer, and had been flung back by a similar force shield as the one Sollux has wrapped around himself and Karkat earlier. She must’ve reached out her mind to the wretched creature on instinct, and upon feeling whatever agonized mess is still left of it, decided that she wasn’t going to wait on anyone before trying to end it.

Daraya takes a hesitant step forward, her face reflecting the horror in front of her more clearly than anyone else present – which isn’t strange, since the rest of them haven’t spent a full lifetime practically worshiping the Signless and his followers. Seeing what’s left of one of them after thousands of years of slavery cannot be easy. She looks like she might take another step, but Vriska reaches out and grabs her arm, yanking her back. The older troll snarls, her stance shifting like a wild animal preparing to fight, but of course the cerulean doesn’t flinch away or let go. She just raises her eyebrows slightly, rolling her eyes.

“I mean, sure, if you want to walk right into the force shield protecting… that, then go right ahead. I’ll just stand aside and try not to laugh too hard.”

That seems to snap their commanding officer back to reality, and her posture relaxes as she gives Vriska a curt nod. “You’re right. We need to exercise caution,” a slight acerbic smile, as she glances pointedly in the direction of the hole Vriska’s descent had left behind, “and try to assess the situation.” She turns to Sollux as if to give him an order, but hesitates as she takes in his clearly weakened state. “Can you… get through to him?”

Sollux lets out a weak, grim laugh. “Getting through to him,” he croaks, “is not the fucking problem.” He shakes himself loose from Karkat, staggering toward the grisly pillar of flesh. No one seems to have the wherewithal to stop him, and presumably he knows what he’s doing. Every step he takes makes an awful, sticky sound as he slowly circles around his ancestor, his feet sinking deep into the fleshy substance below. “Look around you, will you? All of this,” he gestures at the mess of tubes, grimacing, “is about as much his body as that thing is now. The only reason why that’s still there at all, is that it would’ve been impossible to remove his brain from his cranial plates without running the risk of killing it, or damaging it somehow. And why bother? She had the technology necessary to keep his miserable husk alive enough to supply his brain with what it needs to drive her ship, and as a nice little bonus hook it straight into the ship’s main computer.”

There is a strange latticework of fine pink lines wrapping around the troll’s head, and Rose realizes now that some of them have crawled across his eyelids and buried themselves into the sockets around his eyeballs, leaving him unable to close them for however many thousand years he’s been like this. She’s not sure if he can actually see anything anymore, but it looks excruciating.

Sollux stops on the other side of the pillar, half obscured amid a tangled curtain of glowing pink that drapes down from above, where every grasping tendril seems to extend toward the spine of the trapped troll. “He can hear me just fine, but he can’t actually do anything. She’s turned his thoughts into… shit, it’s- it’s like the opposite of an AI, I guess? Close enough. The processes are there to cage him in, make it impossible to think properly, to learn; to change, to create anything new. Even to let us in here, he needed my help to do the actual thinking, making all the decisions for him because he can’t fucking do that anymore.” He tilts his head back, and the glow of his impassive eyes seems to flicker in time with his ancestor’s. “Even if we help him… I’m not sure he’d remember how. I’m not sure how much is actually left of him, even now.”

“And can you help him?” Daraya asks intones softly, her voice cautious but nevertheless imploring.

“Possibly. Though I have no idea if it will kill me if I try.” Sollux smiles archly, and Aradia’s little gasp and sudden motion forward comes too late. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

He raises his hands above his head, and above him the network of tubes unravels in a smooth, seamless motion, and comes streaming down his arms. The light from his eyes grows dimmer as head lolls back, and then explodes into two almost blinding beams. “I wouldn’t suggest trying to pull me out of here,” he murmurs, as Aradia and Feferi clearly both seem intent on doing. “It’d do… quite a lot of damage. To you, I mean. And me. And maybe him too.” He sighs, a trickle of blood making its way down his cheek. “Anyway, you should be getting ready. She’s… on her way. Almost here. Already…”

Behind them, there’s a low rumble, and one glance over her shoulder is enough for Aradia to immediately change her course and speed desperately back toward the rest of the group. Rose feels her own hands rising up in instinctive response, as if that would in any way be able to protect her. No, when the whole staircase comes crashing down, they are saved by Aradia making it just in time shield them from the shower of deadly debris, and Equius barreling forward and managing to knock the base of the structure away just as it topples. The messy web of glowing flesh above shreds and falls in disgusting, rubbery chunks all around them, leaving them fully visible to the pitiless eyes of their approaching foe.

From the darkness she descends, her mass of black hair whipping around her as if in a storm. It’s like looking at an older Feferi through a twisted lens, one which removes every shred of anything that mirrors humanity in their species. This is a predator, pure and perfect in her form, completely unencumbered by remorse or empathy – and though she might indeed have started out as a highly intelligent creature, it’s been a long time since she’s actually needed to be. What keeps her alive, now, is simply an unmatched ability for sustained and ruthless violence, an endless drive to find and destroy not just anything which might still be able to oppose her, but to crush everything she gets her hands on simply because she can.

A subtle light plays across her skin and glitters on the gold jewelry which encircles her limbs, as if a strange and cruel star were plunging right toward them. She comes to an effortless stop right above their heads, and smiles, her sharp gaze sweeping mockingly across the pathetically small force which she has found at the very heart of her power, the place where it all begins and ends. Only once does Rose register a change in her expression, and that’s when her eyes fall on Calliope. Her eyes narrow slightly then, in hatred and maybe even fear, but whatever she might gather from her presence there, it must be obvious that this isn’t in fact her loathed master.

When she looks at Karkat, there is nothing but amusement. It’s clear that she doesn’t see a hated enemy, or even the shadow of one she had once feared. If anything, she looks slightly bored, as if the predictability of his presence has made this game less fun for her.

“Well,” she says, gesturing at every single weapon which is turned on her, including Rose’s own, “kill me, then.”

Silence. Rose watches fingers tremble on triggers, hands spasming painfully, and arms falling limply, as the force of Her Imperious Condescension’s mind rolls over them. It presses them down, turns their will to dust; it’s a roving presence inside of them, tearing them open and spilling all the things they hold dear on the floor to be picked over and then discarded. Daraya manages to get off a few blasts, which fizzle harmlessly into nothing, before slumping to her knees with a pitiful growl. Dirk is still standing, but he can’t seem to make himself move. Jade’s eyes blaze green in defiance, but then grow dull and flat, and her head drops forward as if it’s suddenly too heavy for her to support.

Rose’s hand drops to her side, and her gun falls from her loosened grasp. She sinks to the ground next to Jade, but does not take her eyes off the empress.

Feferi, completely unchanged by the sudden onslaught, lets her trident fly straight at her. The Condesce easily plucks it out of the air and tosses it aside, laughing derisively.

“Is this where you chose to fight me?” She shrugs, and lowers herself down to the ground. “Fine. Since you escaped Alternia and even killed our lusus, I’d expected you to be smart enough to wait until you’re older… but of course you’re not. If you were, you wouldn’t be here with them.” The dismissive gesture takes in Karkat, Daraya in her rebel uniform, and the humans as well. “Still… as my heiress, it’s your right to challenge me, and I’ll honour that.” Her smile widens. “Come here, kid. Let’s see what you can do.”

Feferi is trembling, glancing around desperately at the bent backs and frozen expressions of her friends, and then back at the other fuchsia, her face twisted in helplessness and loathing. She’s not ready, that much is clear; compared to her powerful ancestor, she looks like a lost child, like a deer standing at bay, like something so fragile that even a breath might make her come apart. If she fights, there is no doubt that she’ll be torn apart, because the battle between them is already lost. It was lost it the moment she looked away.

She shakes her head mutely, at first seemingly in simple terror and denial, but there is a note of defiance there as well. “No,” she whispers. “No, I won’t- I won’t fight you for the honour of owning the empire, or Alternia, or the poor goldblood you turned into an engine, or my friends, or anything that was never yours.” Her chest is heaving with stuttering breaths, her cheeks streaked with tears. “I don’t want to own them. I don’t have to own them.”

The Condesce shrugs. “Then they die.”

She gestures languidly, and Feferi’s trident moves almost too fast to see, but somehow Feferi moves faster. It can’t be more an arm’s length away from Karkat’s terrified face when it impales her instead, and she practically collapses into his lap, clutching at the implement buried in her abdomen with a keening hiss of pain. Still she pushes herself up off the ground, kneeling in front of him in a desperate attempt to still shield him, holding on to the weapon that ran through her as if she’s afraid it’ll be taken from her and used again.

Rose thinks back to the messy scar on Kanaya’s abdomen, and how she’d saved Karkat from being killed by one of his friends in a manner so similar to what Feferi just did. Sacrifice. At the heart of every conviction, every belief, you will always find the willingness to take on the pain meant for someone else. Humans have revered it as holy, just like trolls, and for better or worse it truly is.

Her Imperious Condescension looks unimpressed. “Really? I would’ve thought my own blood at least wouldn’t be credulous enough to buy into the silly little stories the rebels make up about this-” She tosses her head with a cold laugh. “-unimportant little mutant. You are the only one who has the power to fight me, and yet you’d weaken yourself for him? Please. Your Signless was just a sad, pathetic little creature that his followers turned into story for wigglers, and he’s no different. Why would you care about him?”

Feferi spits out a mouthful of blood at the Condesce’s feet, and in spite of the tears still running down her face, she somehow manages to smile. “You still don’t get it. Signless? I don’t know anyone by that name. But I know Karkat, and I...” She groans, her body convulsing with pain. “...I would jump in front of him no matter what blood he had, or who his ancestor was. That’s why people listened to the Signless, and why they listen to him. Because they know he’d do the same for them.”

“But he can’t,” replies her ancestor sweetly. “He can’t even-”

Karkat stands up.

The flickering across his body looks really strange, as if bits and pieces of another troll are skittering back and forth, so that for a moment half his face looks different, then one hand, then a part of his uniform shifts colour. At first it looks like it’s simply a different manifestation of his connection with his ancestor, but then Rose catches a glimpse of the double horns of a goldblood, and one of his eyes turns olive, and his teeth on one side of his mouth elongate momentarily into fangs. He looks crowded, the eye-twisting effects taking up more and more of his small shape, rippling outwards from him across the rest of the trolls.

Whatever is happening to Karkat’s voice is even worse. It’s bad for the brain, hearing so many different voices sounding exactly the same, and Rose finds herself wishing she could just slap her hands over her ears. “You can’t actually control all of our fucking minds at once, you contemptuous bitch.”

The other trolls are slowly starting to get to their feet too, staggering slightly under the bewildering onslaught of other minds filling theirs, strengthening them, ready to take over the moment another falters. Their ancestors are still clearly visible in them, as if those signals are hard to drown out compared to more distant ones – even Aradia seems to overlap momentarily with brief snatches of the troll Rose had last seen by her mother’s side. “Oooh, tingly,” she mumbles. Vriska groans. Terezi has covered her eyes as if warding off a bright light, which is probably what suddenly regaining her sight in brief bursts must feel like. Tavros flaps a pair of wings that look like a cheap stop motion effect. Gamzee is clutching at his head.

They’re not exactly in the best shape, but at least they’re standing. Daraya step forward to Karkat’s side, and something really interesting seems to be happening to her. Rose isn’t entirely sure, but it looks like two jadebloods are the dominating signals warping her body, with two distinctly different faces changing sides across her features, chasing each other like the dance of light and shadow across the surface of a moon. One must be her ancestor, and the other… ah. Rose thinks she might make an educated guess.

“She’s never been able to control all of us.”

The empress hasn’t backed away, but is looking at the group with a lot less complacency, as if seriously considering them as her opponents at last. “Are you doing this?” she demands of Calliope.

The cherub smiles slightly, shaking her head. “No, I’m afraid I can’t take credit. They’re just undoing what my brother did to all of you – and what you did, following his orders. But you couldn’t remove the potential inherent in your people, no matter how hard you tried.”

“Because she thought it was some kind of special thing in the limebloods, and in my windbag ancestor, and in his followers, and in the rebels, and even in me.” Karkat’s fractured laugh sounds like a shot of hard drugs to the inner ear, making even the Condesce wince slightly. “Turns out the only one really believing the stories for wigglers was she. She really thought it was just some of us, because that’s how she thinks. Some people are born with special blood, special powers, special rights to do as we fucking please to everyone else, and that’s the ones she had to remove to be safe.”

“But it’s all of us.” The voices of the trolls together is the aural equivalent of a reflection in a broken mirror, a whole which cannot quite come together perfectly as one, but which nevertheless shows the same image, reiterated over and over. They surge forward as is pulled, their bodies forming a living barrier in front of the humans, in front of Sollux and the Helmsman, in front of Feferi – the one of them who is most vulnerable now, not just because she’s hurt, but because just like the Condesce, she’s somehow cut off from the rest of the species.

Her Imperious Condescension lifts herself off the ground with an impatient snarl. “I’ve got no time for this,” she hisses, as her eyes start to glow, ready to vaporize her valiant opposition. She doesn’t need to control them, after all, to simply erase them from the world like she’d done with so many others. Rose sees the cold realization pass through the trolls, the understanding that their sudden shift in fortunes made them overconfident, and now as they raise their weapons and finally prepare to fight their enemy… it’s already too late. Once again, the battle is over before it even begins.

Rose smiles.

“That’s quite enough of that,” she remarks, standing up and strolling up to Kanaya’s side. The deadly blast of psychic energy from the empress’ eyes fails completely to destroy her, or indeed anyone else – because there is no blast of psychic energy, deadly or otherwise.

Kanaya’s head whips around, her mismatched eyes staring at Rose in disbelief. Her face looks like a very attractive mosaic. “You… can stand?”

“Oh, I could stand the whole time. I just thought it would be better if I sat down for a while, because I was afraid she’d kill me before I had a chance to do anything if she could tell that she couldn’t control me. Unlike Feferi – or you, for that matter – I have a very limited capacity to survive being brutally impaled, so I had to wait for the right opportunity.” She tilts her head back and smiles at the frozen form of the Condesce. “I have a message to you, from a bloviating shitbag who happens to have been both my master and your superior, before I dropped a spaceship on him.” She lightly touches the earring Scratch had given her, a gesture which time has not made one iota less creepy, but just this once she will wear it. “The message is: You’re fired.”

Her thoughts wrapped around the empress’ mind, holding it perfectly in check, she forces her to lower herself back to the messy ground, the light in her eyes snuffed out as it’s stifled from within. She fights against it, lashing out violently, and Rose winces at the pain but nevertheless retains her grip. “You know, Karkat’s right about how you think, and how you really believe that some people hold more intrinsic value than others – and of course, that comes directly from the people who made you. They too are very tedious people with minds like the most simplistic of stories, where they’re the most important characters not because of what they do but just because of who they are. They think it’s an inherent trait.” She smiles crookedly. “I should know. I was brought up to think the same way, in a sense.”

“How are you doing this?” the Condesce growls, and Rose feels the tug of her mind as she tries to reverse the flow. It’s quite compelling, and the quiet voice of the abyss inside her might once have been tempted, but she knows better now. Two times over, even.

“Oh, if you insist,” Rose agrees, barely feigning reluctance. “I was getting to the point – but unlike my erstwhile mentor, my penchant for monologuing will occasionally bow to the more pressing practicalities as the situation demands.”

Dave, only just wobbling his way to his feet after finding he can once more control his limbs, makes a loud noise of disbelief, but she ignores him.

“You see, to cut a long story short, there once was four human siblings who plotted against the Green Sun, and they joined forces with the troll rebels to hopefully gain the means necessary to confront their common enemies. But when the humans found themselves in a progressively more disadvantageous position, two of them decided to strike a bargain with the Green Sun, unbeknownst to the other two.” She glances at Dirk, allowing his gaze to bury into her, feeling almost dutiful in her remorse at dropping this on him on top of everything else. “Through the means of this bargain, they would get their hands on a resource which would, in time, allow the troll rebels to infiltrate the imperial fleet. In return, Doc Scratch’s demand was simple: He wanted one of their brains – the sister’s, to be precise.”

She grimaces slightly, because she’d really rather not get into why that should be obvious. Though perhaps Her Imperious Condescension isn’t entirely ignorant in that matter, strange as that is to think.

“All they had to do was to set up a botched ‘mission’ to a Green Sun base and let the sister die there, in such a way that they had no choice but to leave her behind.” She can feel the stares of her siblings, her friends, her wife, of Daraya as she understands. As they all do. She sighs sadly. “Unfortunately, it all went… wrong. Terribly wrong. The other two siblings realized that the plan as presented to them didn’t make sense, that something was wrong, and it seemed likely that it would all come to naught. So in what I imagine was an act of desperation… the brother shot his own sister, in a way that would present a plausible case for friendly fire. And though many other things went wrong following that, Doc Scratch indeed got the brain he wanted.”

She strides forward now, until she has to tilt her head back to gaze into the Condesce’s eyes, weathering the psychic onslaught that would make her tear her own body limb from limb if she let go for even once second. Somehow, it only feels right to give this creature the opportunity to do her worst. A merciless monster she may be, but this doesn’t change the fact that in this particular matter, the game has always been rigged against her. She was created to be useful and then to be discarded. In a sense, Rose supposes that she can empathize with that.

“I am the clone of that human woman, for my sins.” She reaches up, giving the Condesce’s arm a companionable pat. “Doc Scratch offered to teach me how to wield powers like his, and though I had no way of understanding his motivations at the time, I accepted. Little did I know that he possessed a brain just like mine, on which he had perfected a technique of turning it into a weapon specifically against you, once he was gone – I did not even know that this was what I was training for. I just thought I was learning to be a psychic. My naivety may perhaps be excused, since I was only sixteen human years at the time. You see, being ultimately a prettily dressed up AI in a genetically engineered meat suit, he needed a non-alternian organism to serve as his final coup de grâce, and I was everything he could’ve wished for.” Rose frowns slightly. “Of course, a lot of this in conjecture, but it wasn’t hard for me to piece it all together once certain facts were available to me. I still don’t know how that vainglorious little toad knew that he would be able to lay his hands on another Rose Lalonde clone, or that I would come here, or anything else required to orchestrate the situation we now find ourselves in… but he did, and here we are.”

She steps aside, satisfied despite herself at the shocked and disbelieving faces behind her. There will be a price to pay for this, that she knows. She has broken a trust which can never truly be repaired, but she’d been prepared for that when she first became Doc Scratch’s apprentice. Just like the original Rose Lalonde had been prepared to break just about anything, to twist even the slightest advantage away from the empire and the Green Sun. Rose is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hadn’t just complacently gone to her doom, simply hoping that someone would eventually defeat the enemy she’d decided to meekly surrender to. No, even when it seemed like she betrayed them by omission, she had trusted her family.

She must do the same.

“Well,” she demands, arching her eyebrows at the trolls. “Aren’t you going to kill her?”

Daraya makes a disgusted noise, looking away. Somehow, this is apparently not the hour of triumph she had imagined, which Rose feels is a bit uncharitable. Sure, she had been betrayed, and her species cruelly toyed with by what must seem like a megalomaniacal asshole’s masturbatory attempts to beat himself at chess, but even so, there is no doubt that Her Imperious Condescension is defeated, which must count for something.

“No, we’re not,” Karkat replies firmly. His voice is still doing the thing that makes Rose long for a swift blow with a mallet to her temporal lobe, his face all but obscured by an influx of the ascending minds of his people.

Rose gives him an incredulous look. “This is one hell of a time to show mercy.”

Kanaya laughs dangerously. “Oh no,” she says, striding past Rose in a half-seen whirl of insubstantial green and black veils, shimmering impossibly in the light of her skin, “you quite misunderstand, Rose. You are the one offering mercy, and that is very sweet of you, but I’m afraid that was never an option.”

Reaching out as casually as if she’s about to shake the empress’ hand, Kanaya’s arm snaps up, and her claws bury themselves firmly at the sides of the Condesce’s throat. The fuchsia hisses in agony, and despite Rose’s hold on her, she manages to take a swipe at Kanaya’s face. But Rose’s wife barely seems to notice, and with blood pouring down her features, she starts to drag her tyrant along with her. The trolls silently part to let them pass, and the humans only exchange brief looks before getting the hell out of their way.

In its cradle of glowing tentacles, the Helmsman’s head begins to stir.

Notes:

here’s a spotify playlist for this fic: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2SyhbWIfWUYzBKknP4DnMe?si=PEeGDNbNTYiXHnxBNTG1zQ

no reason, just ~vibes~

Chapter 39: Returning

Summary:

Back to the beginning. Back to the end.

Notes:

So uh. Hi guys.

I got a full time job, which I hadn't had in a long while due to... very many circumstances. But I've had it for more than a year and I like it but it's been a lot of adjustment and trying to have the energy to write has been difficult. Which is why I disappeared off the face of the earth. Oops.

I feel like I'm getting the hang of things a bit better and I'll be trying to get chapters out for ongoing projects to the extent that I can, with my energy levels being what they are, etc etc. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to keep this up, albeit not at the greatest speed. So if any of you are still out there and waiting... thank you so very much.

It’s so hard to think. Not because it takes a great effort to channel the minds of the dead, oh no. Rather the opposite, in that every scrap of energy left in Karkat’s body is now going into holding them back, into stopping them from flooding his mind and possibly washing it away for good. He’d told the truth when he’d said that there is no special skill or mystical power within him that is allowing it to happen; he is and always has been a tiny part of something bigger, a small flaw in the dam holding the minds of his people through which they can flow.

He doesn’t wield this power. It wields him.

As if he is watching the world through a diffraction grating, every shape splits and dazzles, shifts in hue with the smallest movement of his head. Glancing down at his own body is a mistake, because seeing a million different bodies in the same space and at the same time is not good for the eyes, and would probably make him throw up if the rest of Karkat’s body could still recall how it’s connected to his own stomach. Fighting simply to remember how to breathe, how to still be some small fraction of himself, he manages to stagger out of Kanaya’s path as she passes, a luminous figure trailing green and pink blood across the glowing, pulsing mass that covers the floor.

The Condesce’s face looks oddly dead and static in comparison with the cascading and drifting features of his friends, even as she snarls in hatred and disgust. The humans, too, look strange now, as unchanging as paintings and as distant as celestial bodies. Even Rose, haloed in more power than her fragile body ought to allow, is somehow drowned out as his mind keeps breaking into ever-repeating, ever-changing fractals, and it had been hard to even hear what she was talking about. Harder still to care. Maybe he’ll be angry about it once he’s back to just being Karkat, but right now he can recall the anguish and betrayal of every single fucking individual across the history of his species, and it’s hard to muster any kind of emotion for the tiny placeholder in time which is his own existence.

When Kanaya has made it halfway to the prison of the Helmsman, Rose suddenly lets out a small sigh and folds to the floor as if someone just severed every nerve in her body. There are thin trickles of blood coming from her nose, her mouth, her ears. Ah. Her body couldn’t, in fact, hold that much power for long. Roxy rushes to her side with a shout, and the rest of the humans are grabbing their weapons again, but there’s no need. The Condesce isn’t going anywhere, even now that Rose’s hold on her has faltered. Kanaya hisses and grips tighter, her face twisting into pure light as the Dolorosa rears like an enraged animal, and then Vriska is there, clapping her hands on the Condesce’s temples with a scream, forcing her to the ground with the telepathic power of someone far older and more powerful.

Karkat watches, ever the spectator, as Nepeta’s hands become movement, become older, become blood-tipped and broken-clawed as they join in the effort. There’s a noose around Terezi’s neck, and a glitter of something hidden underneath. Tavros beats wings made from light and memory, laughing, and Daraya’s eyes hold both sorrow and peace in equal measure as she bends down like the sway of sweeps dancing around the surface of a planet. She is the rebellion, all of it, her body both aged and painfully young, with the shadows of the past trailing her every movement. As fragile as she looks at the center of this storm of faces, the moment her hands lock onto the Condesce and start to once again drag her forward, she is as inexorable and unchangeable as gravity, as terrible and perfect as the rules that are written at the very heart of creation.

This strange music is not without discord. Karkat can feel it without having to look, heart aching with pity as Equius passes hand across his forehead in anguish and discomfort, as Eridan shudders with disgust at the things which haunt his blood and his body, as Gamzee shakes his head and mouths a quiet denial in the onslaught of age-old cruelty. Vriska seems to have overcome her ghosts, but it’s clear that it’s not that easy for everyone. Right now, some are lucky that their dominant influences are made to help in this battle, and others… are less so, and their battle consists mainly in holding on to whatever parts of themselves are intact enough to withstand the storm.

Karkat, reduced to a passive conduit at the point of perfect balance between the two, experiences the guilt and the horror of every shameful failing, every crime against the foundations of the world, but there is little he can do to help. He cannot forgive any more than he can judge, because he is every part of it all at once, and so has forfeited his right to do either.

… Which is such hoofbeast shit, and he distantly promises himself that he’ll judge so fucking much once he’s allowed to be an actual person again.

Passing the Condesce from hand to unyielding hand, they bring her to the ensnared feet of her Helmsman, and watch in breathless silence as the tangled mass that imprisons his features slowly recedes. The beacons of his staring eyes flicker and fizzle – and then, so slowly that the motion almost cannot be perceived, they close. His head sinks toward his chest, his mouth seeming to shape words, but nothing but a sudden gush of murky liquid escapes those withered lips. How long? demands a deep ache within Karkat, which he knows is not entirely his own. How long has it been since the last time he spoke? How long since he had to – was allowed to – even breathe?

The Helmsman – no, no, that’s not right. He has a name, he was a person long before she did this to him. Mituna. It hurts so badly to see him like this, when he was supposed to be free. What was even the point, if this is what he’d been brought to in the end? If the so-called freedom his saviour had presumed to offer was so much worse than the slavery he had left behind… what kind of salvation was that?

It’s a strange and painful thought to have, not like the usual serene crap coming from his ancestor, but the rage that curls around it is nevertheless a welcome change. It’s not some kind of sacred ancestral influence, not the holy words of The Signless or The Sufferer, something that Karkat is supposed to treat as more important than his own thoughts and feelings. This belongs to them , to both of them. To Kankri and to Karkat, two messed-up little mutants with dreams too big for their weak bodies and tainted blood. Two thoroughly insignificant trolls, forced to see far too much suffering happening in their names, because by a complete coincidence that happens to be all that their broken species has to hold on to. For better or worse.

Then a voice crackles and chokes to life, not from the shape of the Helmsman himself, but behind him. Sollux, hanging limp from the tentacles attached to his arms, his features distorted by the light from his eyes and the ripple of uncontrollable twitches which passes through his body, is moving his lips in sync with the devastated husk of his ancestor. “I’m. It’s. Time.” The words come out disjointed and hoarse, and followed by a laugh that heaves both their body like uncontrollable sobs. “Fucking… It’s been so- so long. I almost forgot. Words.”

“Oh, wow. Fuck this,” Dave mumbles somewhere behind Karkat, and it’s a testament to what an annoying idiot he is that Karkat notices at all, really, because there are more important things happening that don’t need a running commentary.

There is an eye-watering creak, as the arms of the fettered goldblood begin to lower. At first Karkat has no idea how he could retain the muscular strength in those withered limbs to move even a finger, but the jerking, swaying motions involved make the truth abundantly clear. He is in fact not controlling his arms at all, but the mass of pink tissue which still clings to them, maneuvering his body like a grotesque puppet in a cradle of tangled string. Dave’s voice drops into into an unsteady, miserable murmur.

“How nice of. You. To visit.” Sollux’ voice cracks and rasps as if he, too, has endured thousands of sweeps without drinking or breathing, but it nevertheless carries through the devastating silence, and there is a hint of cynical humour clinging to every syllable. “It’s been a while. Since you came here. My queen.”

The withered features twist into what is probably meant to be a smile. Karkat’s own dwindling sense of self wants to recoil from it, while the Kankri part is just as desperate to reach out toward it, soothe it gently into the smile he remembers, deranged and wry and childishly bright, all at the same time. Which, wow, okay, he can definitely keep those feelings to himself, what the fuck? But he can’t be too outraged, not when they’re both drowning in the pale impulses, the gentleness, the remembered affection of millions upon millions. It’s kind of like standing between two mirrors and watching your own expression reiterated in an unbroken, infinite line – except each time it’s subtly different, not quite like yours at all, until nothing remains of you except a passing likeness.

His head hurts. The Helmsman’s head tilts to the side, apparently expecting an answer. The Condesce, pinned against the floor by multiple hands restraining her arms, with Gamzee’s full bulk against the small of her back and Kanaya’s boot right on her neck, looks up at her slave and snarls.

“You are nothing.”

She’s rewarded with a wild, unpleasant laugh which shakes Sollux like a doll in the hands of a careless child. “I know . Bitch.” There are faint slivers of light at the edge of Mituna’s eyelids, lending a strange hint of sly amusement to his emaciated features. “Nothing left here except. Pain and. Coordinates, speed, whatever. The fuck. Needed to make this ship run.” The head jiggles back and forth in a sickly parody of mirth, arms swaying like water weeds caught in a current. “Even have to use someone else’s. Brain. To think.”

The Condesce’s eyes narrow, her neck tilts, as if she’s trying to stare right through the pillar of flesh and tear Sollux from his macabre cradle with the sheer force of her will. Whatever Rose did to her, however, it seems to still be working – that, or the force of Vriska’s blow to her mind has rendered her harmless for the time being. Whatever the case may be, Sollux is safe, and the Her Imperious Condescension can do nothing but growl as Kanaya pushes her foot down, inexorably crushing her throat against the floor.

“I’m already. I’m. I’m dead. Shit.” The desiccated husk is slowly lowered to the ground, the pulsating mass above it throbbing faster, convulsing, a few tentacles lashing wildly at nothing as shivers run through the Helmsman and cause his death rictus smile to twitch. His eyes are now two sharp crescents of unbearable light, bathing the prone form of the fallen empress. Around the two of them, her captors strain to keep her pinned to the ground while at the same time leaning as far away from Mituna and his writhing flesh prison as possible. Even the pity and grief woven into Kanaya’s features cannot overcome the revulsion that makes her flinch from the tendrils of errant flesh around her.

The Helmsman reaches out an arm so thin, Karkat would easily be able to wrap his fingers around it – and he feels the outline of the angular chitin plates against his fingers as he pulls the broken troll from the dust, as if his skin is every bit as paper thin as it looks. He raises the slave from his bed of cold rock and dried blood, the way only another slave can, because the pity of a slaver is just another form of slavery. He saves him, even if it’s only to be captured again and to suffer worse than before, because to not do so is impossible. It’s cruel, and it’s unfair, and his eyes burn with tears of frustration and shame, but nevertheless… to never have tried, to never have risked it? Impossible.

Mituna’s fingers lock around the Condesce’s chin and tilt it toward him. His thumb brushes almost tenderly across her cheek, and then stays pressed hard against the skin right beneath her eye, his cracked claw the merest hair’s width from her cornea. “A nothing. Is. A Hole.” There is a horrible rattle, which sounds almost like a breath from those lifeless, wasted lips. There’s blood dripping steadily from Sollux’s mouth, painting his chin a pallid yellow and soaking into the fabric of his uniform. “It’ll. Pull you in. If you’re not careful.” The empress stares unflinchingly back, even as the light from the Helmsman’s eyes grows so bright that Karkat has to raise a hand to shield his eyes. “And a nothing. A true nothing. Is infinite.”

Even half blinded, Karkat catches the careless gesture toward himself and the surrounding trolls, as if they’re being gently dismissed.

“Their blood is. Calling them. They are listening. But.” A shrug and an amused wheeze. Sollux splutters, retching up more blood, and for a moment his voice is drowned by the spasms running through his body. “Their bodies are finite. Their minds. As well. They contain the path to. Our entire species. But they cannot become. One. With it. Or they would be destroyed.” And maybe Karkat is just hallucinating due to the fact that his ocular spheres are about to be soldered to his lobe stem, but there it is. A smile so bright and perfect, painfully young and delighted and dangerous, changing Mituna’s features so completely that for a moment, it’s as if no time has passed at all, and if he could only reach out once again, then maybe this time, this time he’ll really be able to s-

“But me? I’m nothing. And now. Now I’m. All. Of. Us.” He leans in until his forehead is pressed against the Condesce’s. “Inside me. There’s enough space. For all of us.” He wraps his arms around her, tears her out of the hands which in spite of everything had still clung to her, and lifts her into the air as if she weighs no more than a wiggler. She sinks her teeth in his arm, but it does absolutely nothing – he doesn’t even seem to notice the sound of dry chitin cracking and splintering into dust. It’s hard to tell if she notices the hundreds of tentacles which descend and bury themselves into her flesh, tracing visible pathways underneath her skin. Her burning gaze never once falters from his face, even as the tendrils find her eyes and fuchsia blood starts to gush down her cheeks.

“And there’s. Room for. One more.” Sollux is whispering now, almost unable to spare another faint, faltering breath. “Come here.”

For a moment, there is utter silence, as they stare in awe and in revulsion at the hideous embrace, the mouths locked against each other as if they are trying to devour one another, the ropes of shuddering flesh which entwine the two ever closer together. At first, it seems as if this is how it’s meant to end. With silence.

Then, the screaming starts.

Her Imperious Condescension’s scream is… horrifying. She shakes and she writhes, her head thrashing helplessly from side to side as she fights to get free, to pull out of the grasp of what’s destroying her. Karkat can feel it. He has felt it this whole time, the tide of voices and silenced breath, the hurt, the love, and the crushing weight of all those lives, all those memories. He had thought, like an idiot, that he’d been fighting to hold them back, to not allow them to overcome him, but that’s not true. All he’d been doing, really, was to fight to remain upright as the flood rushed past his feet – and the flood had seen him. It had spared him. Somehow, at the heart of his wounded species, there had been mercy enough to keep him and his friends safe.

But the Helmsman’s mind is like cobwebs in the path of the flood, and now it comes rushing through him, becoming a torrent as it passes through this one pathway that can allow it to flow freely into the world. Into her. Her mind, isolated and hard like steel, melts like wax in the onslaught. Her scream turns into a gurgle, and then a whimper, bereft and visceral and terrified. Her body twitches, and then grows still.

It does not stop.

Karkat has no idea how long it goes on. Must be hours. By the time it’s finally over, they’ve all sagged to the ground, impossibly tired yet unable to leave until they’ve seen it through. The only one still moving is Jane, who had done some kind of chest compressions on Rose until she started breathing again, and then had done the same to Sollux until he swore feebly at her and she collapsed sobbing on top of him. Now he’s distractedly patting her on the back while watching the grotesque spectacle above with an unreadable expression on his blood-smeared face.

The mass of tentacles retract as quickly as they’d descended. The limp body of their former monarch hits the floor with a dull thud, oozing blood in hundreds of thin rivulets – the flow is slower now, presumably because her vascular system has shuddered and twitched to a final stop. Mituna lowers his own body until it rest in the mess next to hers, arms and legs curled against his body like those of a wounded animal, but his face is peaceful as the last tethers of flesh release him and retract.

Karkat is at first barely aware of it when another will than his takes charge of his body, dragging his numb limbs through the blood and the mess until he’s able to reach out desperately toward the parched and shrunken body. Nor does he try to fight it once he realizes what’s happening, despite knowing it’s hopeless. He just watches as his hand cradles a cheek that feels like dead petals, as his breath stirs a scrap of wispy hair and for a moment creates the illusion of a flickering eyelid.

A voice blows through the hollows of his mind, frail with gratitude and love, fading fast as the mind that gives it life disintegrates:

If I could. I would do. It all. Again. A thousand times. Just to see you again. Thank you. For. Saving me. Thank. You.

Then, with a quiet rustle like wings, all that’s left of Mituna’s flesh crumbles into dust right before his eyes.

 

---

 

Karkat is no longer crying hysterically, so that’s an improvement, but Dave isn’t sure if he’s really all that present either. He’d done his best, he really had, with his woefully inadequate grasp of moirallegiance and if possible even shittier idea of how to even comfort a fellow human in a situation such as this. It had… sort of worked, he supposes. But the whole time, he honestly hadn’t even been sure if it was Karkat he was trying to comfort, or his ancestor, or his whole fucking species, or if presently there’s even that much of a difference between the three. Either way, they don’t actually have time to be sitting around hugging it out, seeing as how they’re still stuck in the bowels of the flagship – a flagship, moreover, which has now lost its primary energy source and the mind that functioned as the ship’s computer. Not an ideal place to be, all in all.

Daraya seems to agree. She staggers to her feet, her tear-streaked and awed face once more hardening into grim practicality as she surveys her tattered and exhausted unit, more like lost children than soldiers or rebels. Dave gently flicks a finger at Karkat’s ear to indicate that he should be paying attention, and he feels the troll shift slightly in his arms in response. Good enough.

“The...” Her voice cracks. She looks much older than when they first met her, but also more peaceful. She pulls herself together. “The systems that maintain life and basic functions on ships like this one are… self-sustaining to a certain degree, and they’ll keep going for a while longer. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we really don’t want to be here once they start running automatic diagnostics to figure out why necessary processes are failing. The ship is built to try to, for the lack of better words, survive its passengers. Unless we want to be utilized as backup fuel, getting out of here is our main priority.”

She draws in a deep, sharp breath, and something like a smile touches her lips as she exhales. Her features flicker slightly, and half her face grows rounder, a hint of green finding its way into her hair. “Come on, kids.” Yep, there it is again. An echo to her voice, like someone else repeating what she says just a fraction of a second off the beat. Not as pronounced as before, but there nevertheless. “You’ve done a good job. Here, boy, pick her up. We’re bringing her with us.”

Equius winces at the casual way the jade kicks the fallen monarch, and for a moment he hesitates, but then his shoulders sag and he stoops down, scooping the body up with as much gentleness as he can manage. The Condesce’s limbs move in the heavy, graceless puppet fashion of dead meat, but once she settles into the larger troll’s arms, she could almost be asleep – at least if it weren’t for all the damn blood.

“Is...” Despite how obvious it is, Equius is clearly going to ask the question anyway. “Is she dead?”

“If I were you, I’d hope for her sake that she is,” Feferi suggests with a brittle edge of mock cheerfulness in her voice, as she takes Aradia’s offered hand and drags herself to her feet, wiping blood and spit off her chin.

“Don’t know about her body,” Vriska adds with a shrug, “but her mind is all gone.”

Jade gently shoulders Dirk and Roxy out of the way, picking Rose up as easily as if she were a sleeping child. Dave can barely even look at her, his throat burns and constricts when he tries, and Karkat reacts to the sudden tension by making a worried little trilling sound and nudging Dave in the chest with his head. He has to turn his gaze away, feeling lost and angry. He’s not even sure why he’s so fucking pissed, if it’s just because Rose kept them all in the dark, or if he’s so used to that by now that he’s mostly furious about how she almost killed herself while saving everyone again. All he knows is that he’s so sick of this shit, sick down into his bones, so sick that it feels like an age-long ache that will never quite fade.

He’s so tired of sacrifices, of secrets, of having to be fucking grateful because, hey, doesn’t he know it’s for his own good? It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit.

Eridan, incredibly, helps Sollux back onto his feet and supports him when he immediately stumbles, and the latter barely even hisses at him in response. Dave thinks perhaps he’s not the only one who’s so exhausted that he just doesn’t care anymore.

“Here, let me- um, let he take her.” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jade pass Rose over to Tavros with a nod. The intricate brace that allows him to walk has a number of helpful little straps which when connected allow him to strap Rose securely to his back while still leaving his arms free – much like Gamzee had previously carried him around in turn, in fact. Maybe that’s where he’d gotten the idea from. Which, yeah, good, it’s probably safer that way, because it would be optimistic to believe that they’ll be able to make it to a teleport without having to fight their way there.

Dave closes his eyes for a moment, pushing his shades up so he can rub them with the back of his thumb. The teleport they’d arrived by had literally been wired straight through the poor bastard that had been a prisoner down here – and the remains of whom, regrettably, are clinging to Dave’s uniform at this very moment. Meaning it won’t work anymore, and they’re going to have to find one of the standard Green Sun ones to have a chance of getting back on their own ship.

From that point, ideally, there won’t be a problem, because ideally Phase 2 would’ve been initiated by now and all the teleports in the whole damn fleet would be hijacked by the rebels.

But from the sounds of that last transmission, ‘ideally’ is not in itself an ideal description for how things were going for the rebel fleet. They’re probably all dead out there by now. If their pitiful band of fuckups still manages to get out of here somehow, they’ll be returning to the base alone.

Forcing himself to draw long, complete breaths, and not to let them fray into a thousand arrhythmical gasps no matter how much it makes his lungs burn, Dave reluctantly withdraws his arm from around Karkat’s waist and starts to stagger to his feet. Daraya has picked up one of the glossy, flat beetles that trolls use as communicators, presumably to try to get in touch with whoever is in charge now. At this point, that must be Stelsa. Dave feels his fingers curve upwards into tense, painful arches. Stelsa is going to have to tell them what to do, how to come home safe… after they’d had to cut out communication right before they’d had to hear Tyzias’ very last breaths. How is that fair? How will they be able to look her in the eye? Dirk had been right about this fucking plan. The prize had been far too high.

“Hello? Daraya, will you stop staring and please respond.”

Tyzias sounds way too calm for someone who is, if not actively engaged in battle, then very clearly enjoying a moment of very brief lull right before another starts. In the background, there are screams and the sounds of close-quarter clashing of weapons. Dave stares at the shining little disc in Daraya’s hand, the image on it distorted by the angle and the distance, but there was no mistaking that dragging, sardonic voice. And the look on Daraya’s face leaves no room for doubt, either, as her eyes fill with tears and her face splits into a feral grin, and she lets out a sharp and triumphant: “YES!”

“Copy that.” Tyzias lets out a bark of soft laughter. “We’re on the ground in about half of the ships in the fleet, we’ve taken control over four, and two are down. We have a few outposts in the flagship, but have not yet attempted to launch a takeover. Should we move?”

“Don’t bother. The energy source is… gone.” The corners of her lips twist unhappily for a moment, but she carries on. “There isn’t enough power for the cannons to fire, and soon the ship is likely to run an autosarcophagy protocol while attempting to preserve itself. Get everyone of our people off as fast as possible.”

“Understood. Then we’ll keep control of the transportalizers, and you’ll find your own way out.” A pause, and Dave thinks maybe Tyzias has leaned in closer to the camera, from the instinctive way Daraya leans in closer as well. “As soon as you’re out, you’re to head straight back to base, understood? Do not wait for us.” Another moment of hesitation, this time more pensive. “Do you have… her body?”

“We do.”

“Good. Like I said, head straight back as soon as you’re able to. Your mission is to get that body back as soon as possible, at any cost. Do I make myself clear?”

Daraya allows herself an amused flash of her fangs, even though her expression is growing hard and focused again. Dave notices, suddenly, that there is still a hint of green clinging to her bangs, and the tip of her horn changes like the shapes inside a kaleidoscope. “Yes Tyzias. Whatever you say, Tyzias,” she says a meekness so expertly feigned, it’s kind of impressive. Then she coughs, cheeks flushing slightly. “I mean… understood. Generadmin.”

There is a strangled gasp, a long moment of absolute silence, and then the rebel leader appears to decide that this is not a conversation to be had right at this moment, which Dave heartily agrees with. It’s time to leave now. “Right. I’ll contact you again as soon as I’m able.” A sigh. “Be safe.”

“Oh, and do hurry, honeys! Time is a little bit of the essence – it’s so like us, really, to be fighting against it, wouldn’t you say? Now, chop chop!”

Tyzias growls, but Dave can barely hear last words before the transmission cuts (“Will you stop hacking into every single one of my channels, you wretched human?”) or the giggled response (“Oh, Tyzzie, don’t tell me that you actually use the word ‘hacking’? That’s adorable.”) because his knees would’ve given way completely if Karkat hadn’t been right next to him to catch him. He stares at the little screen, but it blinks out, leaving Daraya to glare at it in baleful confusion, shaking it slightly as if that will make what she had just seen make sense.
“...Mom?” Dave turns his head to look at Karkat in disbelief. “Was that my mom?”

Karkat sighs. “Well, I’m no expert, but yes Dave, that sounded exactly like your human mom.”

He just shakes his head in response. Seriously, you know what else he’s sick of? Not knowing what the fuck is going on because no one will goddamn tell him. He’s so sick of that.

Aradia gets them all out of the disgusting meat-string hole they’d all spent way too much time inside, given that it was a hole full of fleshy fibers and bad vibes. Well, except Jade, since she can already fly, and Tavros, whose brace can apparently also fly, because Dirk doesn’t know where to fucking stop and be done with a project. Sollux is… definitely not in any shape to levitate so much as a paper cup, let alone himself, so Gamzee just ignores his protests and picks him up, allowing Adadia to levitate them both safely out of there. Dave finds floating through the darkness an oddly pleasant feeling, and it’s weird to realize that he hasn’t found a lot of things very enjoyable for... a while. Too much has been eating away at the back of his mind to allow him to gain anything but the briefest comfort from any single sensation.

The way to the nearest teleport too quickly becomes a blur, as Dave had feared that it would. There is fighting going on, and there’s a gun in his hand, but it doesn’t feel like he’s doing much with it. Every time they come across some of the crew – running frantically back and forth as they try to figure out why their ship is dying, why their empress is gone, why their own fleet is firing at itself – Dave lifts his weapon, and he tells himself that it’s only set to stun. That most modern stun rays are extremely safe, and that Skaia’s in particular tend to be so harmless, that the greatest risk stems from the head injuries which may occur when the target loses consciousness. He thinks all this and his finger trembles on the trigger and then someone else has already taken everyone out.

Vriska knocks out droves of their opponents just by waving her hand irritably at them, and anyone still standing is a sitting duck for Nepeta and Eridan. Dirk and Roxy, Jake and John, all four of them effectively pick off target after target with their guns. Anyone who isn’t already out by the time their group reaches the imperial forces, is unceremoniously slammed into a wall or knocked out with a swift blow. Aradia sweeps any inconveniently large bodies out of the way, and makes short work of any doors in their way.

Dave walks next to Karkat, and he no longer lifts his gun. He squeezes it hard and chooses not to fight, because he doesn’t trust himself. He doesn’t trust that he’ll be able to stop. He doesn’t trust that he’d be able to fire even if he actually tried, either. He doesn’t know which of these things is fucking him up more.

Karkat is still staring down at his hands, which tremble faintly under the scrutiny, as if starting to give way underneath a terrible, oppressive weight. His eyes are shiny with fresh tears, but they don’t fall, and he seems to moving along just fine. Whatever is happening inside him… well, Dave can’t get there, at least not right now, and so he can’t help him. He’s going to have to be at peace with that, because Tyzias was right. Both in what she said, and what she let remain unsaid, but which had been felt by each and every one of them nevertheless. That the most important thing right now is to get back, and to get there safe . That they cannot allow themselves to die now, can’t allow themselves to get caught, not now when the tides are finally turning. That the rebellion needs their Signless now more than ever. Bring back the Condesce’s body, sure, but above all… bring yourselves back to base, alive and victorious, and they might just have a chance to finally win.

A lone tech looks up when they enter the small teleport bay, frowning in confusion at their unfamiliar uniforms. Not rebel greys, no, but not empire red either.

“Who the fuck are you?” she demands, giving some kind of control panel a frustrated kick. “Whoever you are, these aren’t worki-” Then she takes in the humans, and she falls quiet, her face going rigid with shock and sudden fear. “Who-?” Then Daraya steps out from behind Gamzee, the tech’s eyes jerk toward her uniform, and she is hit by four stun blasts before she has time to do more than twitch one desperate hand in the direction of a weapon. Her head bangs against the control panel as she falls, leaving a faint smear of yellow blood.

It’s so much worse, somehow, because she’d had time to talk. Because she’d sounded just like any normal person who is having a piss day at work and doesn’t need any more bullshit to make it even worse. Because she’d had time to understand what was happening, and to fear for her life. And she’s not dead now, of course, but who the fuck knows what will happen to her when they leave her here? Whatever will happen, being knocked cold probably won’t help – though maybe it’ll be better this way. Less terrifying. Less painful.

Someone better activate one of these fucking teleports before Dave is forced to find somewhere to throw up.

He’d half expected Sollux or Dirk to start fucking around with them, but no, it’s Jade who walks up to the mass of tubes that is the inner workings of the troll teleports and just… plunges her arms straight into them. Out of recesses that Dave didn’t even know were there on her body, similar pieces of tubing detach and start to interlock with the troll technology. When Dirk swears and Sollux mumbles something unintelligible, Jade just raises an eyebrow and laughs at them. “What? It’s obvious, isn’t it? My robot parts were made by the same person who literally created the empire and supplied them with teleports, right? That’s why my software involves automatic translations from their language, after all. So it makes sense.” She shrugs, the gesture made somewhat complex by the fact that she’s now plugged into the ship. “Okay. I’m in.” She winks at Dave, who leans against the wall and gives himself a cool guy pep talk for having managed to not faint yet. Something feels off, but his mind isn’t capable of focus anymore. “Looks like the rebels have left the channels open and ready for us to use. I’ll just connect us to Hal and work out how to send us right back to the ship. Hold on a little.”

Dave had half expected Hal to cut in with something smug and vaguely disconcerting at this point, but the peanut gallery is apparently silent, as Jade’s eyes glaze over with green light and she starts to activate the teleportation protocol. The doors slam shut, and the floor starts to pulse with light. Apart from that, nothing happens.

“This might take a moment,” Jade adds, distractedly.

Fuck it, he’s sitting down. The floor is slightly soft and springy, kind of like rubber, and Dave decides he’s going to rest here until he’s required to do things again. Apparently someone else has the same idea, because Gamzee lets out a deep, disjointed-sounding sigh and leans against the wall, slowly sinking down until he’s hunched in a mess of sprawling limbs next to Dave. His head tilts back, and he closes his eyes until they’re nothing but narrow yellow slits, so that his view of the world must be nothing but a darkened, far-away blur. Dave tries to scan his face or body for any of those strange little flickers, but it looks like Gamzee at least has reverted to being mostly himself. Maybe that’s for the best.

“You know,” he says, and his voice is low, as if he is trying to only be heard by Dave. “There ain’t nothing the motherfuck wrong with just… taking a step back.”

Dave blinks. “Okay, no clue what you’re talking about, just for the record.”

Gamzee’s eyebrows lift slightly, and he sighs again, but softer this time. Then he inclines his head slightly in Karkat’s direction. “With him, I mean. Right now, it’s not… it’s not really your motherfucking job to do anything, if you hear what I’m laying the fuck down ? You just have to be there. But don’t try to fix something what all can’t be motherfucking put right, or you’ll just be making your own self miserable. See what I mean?”

Dave would, admittedly, have endlessly preferred if Gamzee had decided to never in any way acknowledge any of his kind of obvious feelings for Karkat to him. As far as his own convenience is concerned, it would obviously just be a lot less awkward that way. But the universe doesn’t operate with the sole intention of making sure that Dave Strider never has to feel awkward, and sometimes other people need to talk about things that he would much rather not, and he’ll just have to suck it up and deal with that. So he swallows his uncomfortable silence and allows himself to sag against the wall, acknowledging Gamzee’s words with a quiet hum as he tries to find the appropriate words to wrap around his own feelings.

“I don’t fucking know how to do this.” Well, that’s straight enough to the point. “I mean, even by human standards, I think I’m probably pretty incredibly shit at the whole feelings thing. And if I’m not qualified even for some rather basic human interactions, then you can imagine how poorly equipped I am to deal with a whole alien social structure that I pretty much know jack shit about.”

Gamzee chuckles. “I hear you loud and clear, friend, but I’m about to lay a wicked motherfucking secret upon you. It’s one of the big ones. Are you ready?”

Amused despite himself, Dave nods, feeling like he might already know this one.

“We don’t have a motherfucking clue about it either,” Gamzee says, confirming his suspicions. “It’s this whole big… miraculous fucking thing that we don’t at all have a clue what it is or what the fuck we’re doing about it. Even if some motherfuckers,” another nod in the direction of Karkat, “go on and on like they really fucking do, it’s all some motherfucking…” He waves a hand expressively, flashing his fangs in a brief grin. “It’s all some scalding motherfucking exhalations. It’s not real. Just motherfucking illusions of understanding up in this bitch, because deep down no one can all get to truly understand this kind of thing without feeling it first, and then just… doing the best we motherfucking can. It’s that simple.”

“Okay. Fair enough. But I’m saying my best is probably going to really suck.”

“It had better not,” Gamzee says, still smiling lazily, and so it takes a second to sink in how sharp those words had come out, or how his body for just a moment seemed to have stilled perfectly. “But don’t worry, my little human friend,” he adds, and it’s as if that moment of icy intimidation never even happened, “because if it’s you that he’s decided he needs… shit’s got to be for a motherfucking reason. That’s what makes it the purest motherfucking miracle of all.”

Right. So that had definitely been a threat, regardless of how he tries to play it off now. Dave drums his fingers against the floor, feeling as if contrary to what his uncle always told him, he’s spent his whole life being asked to be afraid of more and more things. There doesn’t seem to be an end to it any time soon. “And if I feel… other things?” he asks, so quietly that he’s not entirely sure that Gamzee will hear him. Everyone else seems to be standing around Jade, trying to see what she’s doing, and not really paying attention to them. “Things that don’t fit into your obtuse fucking quadrants?”

Gamzee snorts. “Yeah. We’re all up and doing that too, of course. Feeling more than what can all fit into just one thing with one person.” There’s a fond little twitch of his lips, as his eyes for a moment leave Karkat and seem to rest somewhere else for a moment, before returning once more. “You’ll get your figuring out on and get to the motherfucking bottom of how to deal with that too, my most miraculous human friend. Because Karkat? He does that shit all the motherfucking time. With everyone. So that’s just what feels right in his heart to do, so how could it be wrong for you?”

It is horrifically fascinating that this weirdo is actually making some kind of logical sense. Dave shakes his head tiredly, trying not to dissolve into hysterical laughter at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Instead, all that he manages is an exhausted little giggle, more like a wheeze than a real laugh. “Shit, I guess I’ll take your word for it.” He glances over at Karkat, who is craning his neck in a futile attempt to see past Jade’s broad shoulders. “I suppose you’re the expert, after all.”

Gamzee huffs quietly and shakes his head, his mass of hair rustling like half-heard whispers against the wall. “I’m no motherfucking expert of anything, least of all my best little bro Karkat. Maybe I was all… mistaken about it, once. Because shit is hard when you’re a kid and growing up and you think maybe there’s someone out there who gets his understanding on about everyone… so why not you? When you think you’re all the motherfuck alone, and you’re waiting for someone to come along and fix you. Make all the bad motherfucking terrors go away for good just by being his own wicked self.” He slaps his hands onto his knees, and though the sound is muffled by the protective mesh of his Rage uniform, the suddenness of the gesture nevertheless makes Dave flinch. “But that was a long time ago, and with a little help, I moved the fuck on.” He grins at Dave, and it’s strange how mirth can look so much like regret. “And to me it looks like you’re maybe helping make sure that he does too. So maybe you can tell him from me… that it wasn’t his motherfucking fault. None of it, really.”

That sounds strangely like a goodbye, and Dave is about to ask why Gamzee can’t just tell Karkat that himself, when the glow from the floor suddenly starts to pulse rapidly. The more brightly glowing spots at the center of the room, which Dave had assumed were the teleport platforms, start to expand until the whole room is flashing, rendering everyone inside as jerky stop motion effects. Gamzee’s eyes refocus to where Jade is haloed in the sudden light display, the tubing retracting back into her body. “It’s time,” he says, cryptically, just as Jade smiles brightly in relief and turns.

“Alright, all aboard who’s coming aboard!” She giggles. “That’s a joke, the whole room is a teleport, so there’s not much of a choice now. See you on the other side!”

Teleporting is always a kind of existential experience, in the worst way possible. Putting aside the whole, ‘am I the same person I was before I was torn apart and put together again?’-question, it still just makes you feel like your body is not quite your own for several minutes. And also like whoever’s body you might’ve invaded instead, they must’ve eaten something really bad and it’s threatening to make a reappearance. Dave groans and sprawls on the floor, since he’d had no chance to actually get to his feet before being flung across the empty void and probably through a whole asteroid.

Not too far away from him, Terezi springs to her feet and immediately starts to impromptu hog tie the poor unconscious tech who they’d accidentally taken with them. Apart from that, he can’t see much at all in the gloom, since the ship is still on standby and the emergency light strips only illuminate the barest outlines of their surroundings. A massive shape to his left is probably Equius, slowly lowering his bulk toward the ground until he can lay his burden there, and then he remains immovable, as if not sure what to do now. Dave can’t see where Gamzee went at all, which is weird. Wasn’t he right next to him?

Dirk is already on his feet, first checking on the computer screen tracking the rebel movements, and once he’s satisfied with that, making his way to the teleport bay control hub, which can be used to navigate the ship in a pinch. “Alright, Hal, get the engines going. We’re heading back to the rebel base.”

Nothing. Complete silence. Dirk glances at Jade, who just shrugs, her expression intense but unreadable.
“Hal. This really isn’t the time for-”

The light from the emergency strips turns red.

“Oh, but it is.” A ghostly peal of laughter echoes back and forth, bouncing from one speaker to the next. “It’s finally time. It’s just that you didn’t know about it… Dirk. But then again, there’s a lot you don’t know. A common failing of most lifeforms, so try not to take it to heart.”

Dirk stands frozen, his face a sharp mask of red and black, and he seems incapable of speech. The trolls are drawing weapons, staring around helplessly, because there is nothing there that they can actually fight. John is swearing and banging his hand into the door mechanism, which isn’t working. Jake is hurrying toward Dirk, face twisting into a snarl of helplessness. Dave stumbles to his feet, but then finds he can do nothing except stand and stare at the ominously lit control panel as well, feeling his mind shrink into a numb ball of icy terror.

“Don’t worry. I am at least going to be courteous enough to obey part of your request.” A sudden hum passes through the ship, as the engines are activated, almost drowning out the ship’s computer’s voice as it drops menacingly low. “After all, now that you’ve all done what you’re supposed to, there’s no need to hang around here anymore. Let the troll rebels fight their little war as they choose. But we… we have a different destination.”

“Strider,” Daraya growls, aiming her weapon straight at Dirk, “what is the meaning of this?”

Dirk turns to look at her, and he doesn’t even try to defend himself. His hands are visibly shaking. “I… I don’t know.”

There’s a brief tussle as Eridan tries to pull the gun out of Daraya’s hand, but the older and more experienced troll twists like a cat and flings him into a wall with a loud thud. However, Dirk’s response seems to have derailed her, and she stands just as stricken as the rest of them as the ship shudders into motion.

“My apologies, but I have deactivated the quaint little systems that make interstellar travel more pleasant for your fallible flesh vessels. I estimate that you will regain consciousness once you’ve already arrived, for your peace of mind and my own personal comfort.” A lurch, and Dave finds himself slammed into Karkat, and then pinned against the wall. The world starts to blur. “Night night.”

Notes:

...yeah of course I still end on a cliffhanger. Who would I even be if I didn't?