Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The End
It is when the battleship Condescension crashes into the ocean, largely intact and still possessing the best anti-psionic shielding in the whole Empire, that Feferi Peixes realizes her friends might have a chance at surviving the Vast Glub.
She and the loyal Eridan Ampora break into the nearest airlock and start culling their way to the bridge - it’s easier than Feferi thinks it should be, the adult crew distracted and dying from the world-breaking cries of her lusus. There are fewer and fewer obstacles as they reach their destination; every troll aboard appears to have been trying to evacuate before inevitably succumbing, flooding the exits and leaving the interior paths clear.
There is only one troll still standing when they reach the darkened bridge, the viewscreens all turned to static - a tealblood, choking and bleeding from every orifice in her head.
She shakily raises her gun, but Eridan is quicker, taking her down with a single bullet. He isn't immune himself, not this close - but he is high on the spectrum, and strong, and more accustomed to Gl’bgolyb’s murmurs than most. He sways slightly, but his aim is true.
Feferi spies the prone form of her ancestor, the Empress, Her Imperious Condescension - the adult fuchsia, barely conscious from head wounds sustained in the crash, raises herself onto her hands -
Feferi thrusts her culling fork down onto the nape of her ancestor’s neck, pinning her to the floor. She grabs a hatchet from a fallen oliveblood before the choking Empress can reach for her weapon. Feferi slams the axe down - five, six, seven, eight, nine times, before the elder royal’s head rolls free of her shoulders.
Feferi stares down at the bloody scene, breathing heavily.
She’s finally done it. Completed her life’s goal, killed the Empress, taken her throne. It was over so quickly. It’s nothing like she imagined it would be. And she has no time to absorb it, to acknowledge it, to weep with joy or despair - she has work to do, people depending on her, and she must act fast.
Feferi turns to the console - the screens flicker back online, heavily damaged, but showing just-visible maps and views of the ocean outside, hydrothermal vents cracking and breaking open from the death throes of a primordial goddess. She frantically starts inputting the coordinates of her friends’ hives as a series of headings.
“There’s no way it’s going to work, Fef,” Eridan says hoarsely. “The helmsman’s probably -” The engines hum back to life, power returning to the most vital systems. “- dead?”
A relieved smile flashes onto Feferi’s face. “The helmsblock should be the most shielded part of the ship. They could stay alive a little longer. It buys us some time - hopefully.” She slams her palm down on a button and barks out her first orders as Empress: “Take us to those headings in the order I set them, as fast as you can! We’re picking up ten sets of passengers, and then getting as far away from Alternia as possible!”
A gold light beeps and blinks on the console in acknowledgment. The entire battleship shudders -
And roars into the sky, knocking Eridan and Feferi onto the floor. The gravity control is down, most systems too damaged to function properly - thousands of top-level alerts and sirens go off as the Condescension speeds away from the source of the great dying. Already-damaged external plating shears off from the force with screams of tearing metal. It isn’t far enough. Nowhere in the galaxy will be far enough away from Gl’bgolyb’s screams.
It stops. Feferi and Eridan fall from the back wall of the bridge in a painful heap. The cracked viewscreens show a hive, far down below - a fallen burgundyblood, seven sweeps of age, bleeding out into the ground, her lusus bleating for her, wordlessly begging her to wake up. Eridan’s eyes widen.
Feferi coughs, shoving Eridan’s elbow out of her gut. “Get - get down to the transportalizer dock! Take her to the helmsblock, quickly!”
Eridan rushes, obeying without question - his first instinct is to ask her why she’s choosing to rescue the lowbloods first, but he already knows what she would say. They need it most.
Aradia’s lusus is in the same range of the transportalizer as the girl’s collapsed body, and emerges on the pad with her charge. The frightened kangaram lowers her horns at Eridan, braying dangerously, and Eridan knows she’ll crush him if he goes nearer.
“Please,” he begs uselessly. “She’s going to die. I’m trying to help!” His old FLARP playmate lies bleeding on the transportalizer pad, barely breathing, as another great GLUB resonates through the shaking ship.
A speaker set into the ceiling crackles to life. The young Empress bellows: “The transportalizer, Eridan!”
Hands shaking, he returns to the console. He sends the lusus and her charge to join the probably-dying helmsman in the most shielded part of the ship. He prays.
The battleship takes off again. This time Eridan and Feferi cling to their respective consoles for stability. In the helmsblock, the kangaram tucks her wounded charge into her pouch, and she trembles in the corner as the Helmsman clings to consciousness with every last ounce of energy he has.
When they reach Tavros, he’s sitting limply in his wheeled chair. Not afraid of Tavros’s timid lusus, Eridan leaps up onto the pad, and does his best to shake the bronzeblood awake without hurting him further.
The other boy coughs, brown blood spewing out of his mouth and onto Eridan’s shirt. The violet grimaces, but keeps his hands on Tavros’s shoulders. “Tav? Nitram! Wake the fuck up!”
“Wha-”
“The world’s ending! Fef and I are getting everyone! I’m gonna send you to the helmsblock, it’s shielded! I need you to keep all the lusii calm, get them to cooperate! Got it?”
Tavros nods shakily without understanding, blinking away droplets of blood. Eridan leaps back to the console.
In the shielded helmsblock, Tavros yelps and falls out of his chair as the battleship takes off again. He’s now fully conscious, albeit in immense pain. He sees - oh dear gog a helmsman - and Aradia’s kangaram, Aradia slumped over in her lusus’s pouch.
Right. The awful screams - keep the lusii calm. On a ship. World’s ending. Feferi’s getting everybody. He can keep the lusii calm.
He can’t get back in his chair. Tavros drags himself closer with his arms. It’s okay, it’s okay - I’m a friend, remember me?
The kangaram bleats. Remember you. Grub hurt! Baby hurt! Help!
Can’t help, hurt too. Tavros flashes a hazy image of Feferi and Eridan. They’re helping. It’ll be okay.
Tinkerbull snuggles close to his charge, letting out a faint and frightened moo.
Sollux and his biclops are sent in, one after the other. Getting the goldblood’s lusus to stop rampaging in the helmsblock is difficult, but Tavros puts him to sleep before he damages anything important. Sollux is in the same state as his moirail, unconscious and bleeding out.
(The Helmsman’s eyes widen behind his goggles, seeing the boy’s doubled horns. The child is one of his own brood, another Captor. He’s grateful to the Heiress for killing the bitch, and she seems to care in some way for lowbloods, enough to try to save a few, but - he prays -)
Karkat Vantas is suffering from a nosebleed, which he frantically tries to hide in his sweater. “Kar - Kar, it doesn’t matter! Everyone’s dying!”
“Send him up here! He’s not a psionic, he should be fine without the extra shielding!”
The nosebleed - red, red, so very red - makes Eridan think that maybe Fef might be wrong about Kar not being psionic, but he complies. He sends Karkat to the bridge before quickly picking up his massive crab lusus, and sending him to the helmsblock with Tavros.
Feferi barely gives Karkat’s blood a glance, too preoccupied with the changing landscape below and the many failing systems of the ship. The mutant coughs, groaning: “What the fuck is happening?”
“The Vast Glub,” Feferi whispers.
Karkat’s heart skips a beat.
“You mean it - she -” He swallows. “I’m sorry.”
The young Empress hisses in frustration, staring straight ahead. “Aboat what?! Everyone else is dying, we have much bigger things to -”
“For losing your lusus.” His voice is sharp.
Feferi feels a lump in her throat. “I - but - thank - but we don’t have time -”
The battleship stops with a jolt, throwing Karkat to the floor in a volley of curse words.
Equius and Nepeta are both huddled together, attempting to shelter in the oliveblood’s cave. Feferi sighs in relief and cancels the cobalt’s hive as a destination. Equius sends Eridan back up to the bridge, finding his operation of the dock inefficient. The shaking, weakened Nepeta curls up next to her secretly terrified moirail, clutching his side to keep from sliding while the battleship shudders onward towards its next destination.
Eridan stumbles as he appears on the bridge. “Eq and his moirail’s lusii are both dead.”
The violet sees Karkat staring at the decapitated head of Her Imperious Condescension, and moves to block the mutant’s view of it, grabbing Karkat’s hands. “We can process everythin’ later, when we’re all safe,” Eridan murmurs.
The trembling Karkat manages to give Eridan the stinkeye, though he doesn’t pull his hands away. “That’s awfully fucking forward of you, Ampora,” he grumbles, a dark blush rising to his cheeks.
Eridan grins, and takes his already-soiled sleeve, tenderly wiping the blood from Karkat’s top lip. “How’s that for forward?”
While Karkat sputters, Kanaya and her lusus are picked up and sent straight to the helmsblock. The jadeblood is far from a mediculler, but she does her best to make sure the unconscious psionics can at least still breathe. (The Helmsman, trying not to choke on his own blood, wonders how it’s possible that at the end of everything, he’s suddenly surrounded by the brood, if not actual descendants, of old friends. It must be fate, he thinks.)
Terezi Pyrope, after some painful deliberation, tells Equius to leave the egg of her lusus behind. She says her silent goodbyes with what feels like a knife in her chest, and goes to join the others on the bridge. She secretly wipes her own nosebleed from her face, before Equius can remember she’s a psionic.
Vriska Serket, now with bigger things to worry about than the culling drones, is almost eager to ditch the predatory spider that has ruled the first seven sweeps of her life. She cites her lusus’s size as a reason to leave her behind, and the powerful-yet-highblooded psionic passes out on the transportalizer pad. Equius sends her to the helmsblock without hesitation.
The moment the unconscious Gamzee Makara is aboard, Feferi senses her lusus drawing breath for another death rattle, louder than all the ones that came before.
She slams her hand down on the helmsblock button again. “Out of the Empire! Out of the galaxy, even! Get us the fuck out of range! Floor it!”
The Helmsman, with the last GLUB still painfully ringing in his thinkpan, is happy to comply - for the first time in many hundreds of sweeps.
He seals off every nonessential block on the ship, cutting power to every system neither he nor the children are currently using. He bypasses numerous safety protocols meant to protect planetbound docks, ignoring the condition of the planet’s cracking surface and soon-to-be choking atmosphere. Gl’bgolyb will be dead soon, and she will take all of Alternia with her, if not every troll in the galaxy - it hardly matters what the engines of the battleship do to the ground below, now.
He chooses a new heading, further than he has ever gone before, braces himself for even more excruciating pain - and activates maximum warp.
The back walls of the bridge, helmsblock, and transportalizer dock suddenly become the floors. Equius does his best to break the falls of his moirail and the addled highblood. The young trolls in the helmsblock cower together with their unconscious friends, shielded by the bulk of Kanaya’s lusus. On the bridge, Karkat and Eridan tumble into a heap, Terezi slams onto her back with a grunt, and Feferi clings to the console for dear life, before giving up and dropping herself onto the new ‘down.’
As the screams of her lusus fade into the distance, Feferi feels a pang of guilt.
I’m sorry, she thinks, almost wishing she was still close enough for Gl’bgolyb to hear. She hopes the great beast understands, anyway.
~
Now millions of lightyears away from Alternia, well past the borders of the Empire, the battleship slowly comes to a stop. (The Helmsman is overjoyed to find that despite his horrific condition, he is still alive. He tries and fails to turn on the gravity.) To his surprise, the young Empress elects to call a meeting for her new crew in the helmsblock rather than the bridge, coming to check on her fallen friends (friends?!) before seeing about taking them to the medbay. He lights up a path for them, restoring power and air supply to the relevant sections.
(His mind screeches to a halt upon seeing the spitting image of a young Signless - when - how - and he remembers. Of course. That single bucket of Meulin and Kankri’s, that Porrim snuck into the Brooding Caverns. One of their smaller, pettier acts of rebellion - but it seems it still had its repercussions. The Helmsman feels a sense of pride and glee, knowing Kankri’s descendant has outlived Her Imperious Condescension.)
The twelve young trolls now floating in the helmsblock of course have one question on their minds: what now?
Sollux, leaning on his moirail, almost hacks up a lung. Eridan wrinkles his nose. “Gross, Captor, your piss-blood is going to be floating around in the air for the foreseeable future now, try to be more considerate.” Karkat elbows the seadweller in the ribs. “Ow!”
Feferi spares an uncomfortable glance for the nearly-paralyzed Helmsman, before turning to Equius. “Any success with the quantumnet?”
The cobalt shakes his head. “No, your Majesty.” He bites his lip. “It is possible that it is just the hub servers, and...”
(It isn’t the hub servers. It’s everywhere, the Helmsman knows it. Only his ship would’ve been fast enough to escape that last, horribly loud cry, shielded enough to even partially block it. Even at this immense distance, so far from any colony. If there is anyone else still alive, there soon won’t be. They will be the last ones left.)
Deep in their bones, the children know it, too.
Feferi exhales. “Well.” She swallows. “If my Empire is all right here, um. I can’t imagine having picked better trolls for it!” She tries to smile, and her friends do their best to mirror her.
Everything they have ever known is gone. They are all looking to her. For answers, for orders.
She tries to breathe. “Um.” She turns to the Helmsman. (Behind his goggles, the last adult troll left alive blinks in surprise at being acknowledged.) “We’re still in explored space, right?”
The goldblood struggles to control his neck muscles, but he can do just enough to slowly, shakily raise and lower his head in an attempt at a nod. (How long has it been, since he was last spoken to like a troll and not a machine?) The children all stare up at him, unsettled. (Have they never - no, right, adults were banned, they’ve probably never seen a real helmsblock until now.)
The young Empress bites her lip. “Okay, uh. We need... We need to do an inventory of what we have. How long we can last, on this ship. We need to figure out what kind of condition the helmsman is in -”
“We need to replathe him, if nethzethary,” Sollux mutters darkly. Feferi puffs up her gills.
“Glub! No! We’re not doing that!”
“FF, if he diezth, we’re thztranded.”
(The Helmsman silently begs his younger brood to listen to the new Empress, please, kid, it’s so much worse than you’re thinking, don’t jump into my position -)
“We’re going to take inventory of food, water, oxygen, and medical supplies, first,” Feferi says firmly. “Tally up the dead, count those towards food rations. Sollux, you’re on comms duty, take a console husk and keep looking for survivors. Equius, you’re on repairs - I want you to check with the helmsman, run diagnostics to see what’s broken, and see if we have what we need to fix it. Kanaya, take all the psionics to the medbay, and see if there’s any equipment there you can use to, um, give them checkups. Tavros, if there’s a big enough block close by to the medbay, keep the lusii in it while everyone’s working. Terezi, take another console husk and look at the reserves. And uh, helmsman?” The young Empress looks trepidatiously up at him again. “I’d uh. I’d like you to look for habitable planets you think might be within your range, please.” (‘Please?’ He doesn’t think anyone higher than teal - maybe cerulean - has ever given him that level of respect, scared kid or not.) “And as for the rest of us, um. We’ll clean up, I guess. Count the corpses.”
At Eridan’s insistence, Karkat is counted among the psionics, ‘just in case.’ The mutant has never had a medical examination in his life, and is scared shitless, even though he knows the culling drones are all gone and it’s just going to be his friends. Aradia and Tavros help all the lusii into a recreation block attached to the medbay. Vriska complains about not having been given an important task to do, Sollux and Terezi take console husks from the bridge with them into the medbay to complete their tasks, and Gamzee stares vaguely into space, wondering how everything managed to happen so fast. He hopes his lusus, wherever he is, is all right. Equius remains in the helmsblock to (attempt to) perform diagnostics on the ship, steadfastly ignoring the Helmsman save to briefly glance at the status of his health on the terminal screen. Feferi, Eridan, and Nepeta get to work with the arduous task of trying to wrangle corpses and various debris in zero gravity. (The Helmsman watches all this with slightly dazed interest.)
~
The new Empress hasn’t figured out yet that she needs to officially add her colorful range of friends to the roster of crew, which means that for lack of anyone ‘better’ (aside from her), the Helmsman is the highest-ranked official on the ship's systems, granting him access to all the cameras and comms. The young cobalt (a Zahhak, like Darkleer) is currently in the vents, trying to replace the biowire connecting the gravity drive to the rest of the systems. (Not what most engineers would prioritize, in his experience, but the Helmsman can see the logic in wanting it to be easier to move around.)
Given that he can’t speak or move, he decides (for now) to contribute to the overall survival of trollkind (and more pertinently himself and these kids) where he can, splitting his attention between scouring the star charts (as ordered by the new Empress, lest the monitoring systems start shocking him for taking too long) and saving young Pyrope(?) some time, by sending her console husk the current status of their resources as he knows them.
Oxygen generators running at 72% capacity
100% full saltwater tanks (contaminated)
30% full freshwater tanks (sealed), 18% full freshwater tanks (contaminated)
1 of 4 desalination plants operational
Fluid reclamation centers running at 90% capacity
20% full sopor reserves (sealed), 60% full sopor reserves (contaminated)
And so on. He estimates that the remaining food in storage should last twelve kids, an adult, and five lusii about eight perigees. Up to a full sweep, if they manage to freeze enough of the dead in time. The psionics in the medbay have already stowed all the corpses in their area of the ship in their sylladexes - and from there, into the cryomorgue.
The Helmsman sees the last tealblood in the known universe licking the screen of her console husk, and considers that the future of trollkind may not be in good hands at all, actually.
Kankri’s descendant lies stiff as a board on a respite slab while Kanaya (Maryam!) runs a full-body scan. The scanner, detecting his mutation, offers up an automatic culling prompt, which is (of course) disregarded. The young Maryam can’t make heads or tails of the scan beyond Vantas being mostly uninjured, but the Helmsman notes the enlarged brainstem typical of a psionic. (To his knowledge, Kankri never displayed any signs of psionic abilities, not even the weak, hard-to-detect kind that his descendant probably has. But then, they were never able to find a trustworthy mediculler, either. For all he knows, it could have been the same.)
He blinks away tears, and reminds himself that they’re the same age, so it’s not history repeating itself. Kankri’s descendant has a lusus. A real lusus. (But they are friends. After many, many long sweeps, their brood still found each other. Kankri has brood, now, even if it’s so long after his death.)
Maybe there really is such a thing as miracles, given that here, at the end of everything, the Helmsman can find himself wrapped in such delirious joy.
The cerulean has been assigned respite for her hemorrhaged thinksponge, and likewise for young Sollux, who stubbornly scours the quantumnet for any signs of troll-like life post-Glub. The psychopomp rustblood they call Aradia seems to have recovered admirably, but also seems very unnerved and distracted by the ghosts of the crew. Tavros Nitram appears to be having fun floating, his paralyzed legs being less of a dead weight to him than usual. (The Helmsman vaguely recalls a rebellion that came after his own time, there was some flying bronzeblood called the Summoner - wasn’t his broodline called Nitram? Or something similar at least -)
Makara - the same brood as the Grand Highblood, may he rest in piss - seems weirdly... chill, for an indigo, making the Helmsman suspicious - until he sees the kid surreptitiously scoop a handful of sopor slime out of a recuperacoon. Ah. He’s high out of his pan.
The Helmsman shifts his attention to the hallways, where the violet prince, the new Empress, and Meulin’s(!) brood are collecting more dead bodies in their own sylladexes. The seadwellers are struggling to ‘swim’ through the air, while the young Leijon has figured out how to push herself off of surfaces to thrust herself forward.
The three finally re-enter the bridge, where Nepeta stares at the floating body and head of the dead ex-Empress. Rainbow bubbles of blood cling to every surface. They don’t move for a moment.
Finally, Feferi captchalogues the fuchsia’s body. Without another word, the kids collect the other bodies of the bridge crew, and leave.
~
After the gravity is restored and most of the corridors have been cleared of corpses, another meeting is held in the medbay. Terezi comes to the same conclusion that the Helmsman had about their reserves, meaning they have time to recover and decide what to do next.
“A sweep isn’t forever. We need to find a planet we can survive on, and ideally rebuild.” Feferi’s eyes flick to the window, at Kanaya’s lusus in the next block. “Your lusus -”
“Using her as she is would be easier than trying to propagate a new Mother Grub with a Matiorb,” Kanaya interrupts. Her tone brooks no argument. Feferi’s jaw snaps shut, and she nods.
“Yeah, uh - I’d rather no more of us have to lose our lusii.” The young Empress clears her throat. “We should probably wait until we have a place to weigh anchor. Land. Dock. Okay that one wasn’t my best -”
“We’re all fucking tired,” Karkat cuts in wearily. “Let’s try not to repeat shit we’ve already covered.”
Equius clears his throat. “Erm. We will not be able to repair most of the other damaged systems for now, but the ship seems to function well enough for our purposes. I believe the helmsman is in much the same condition that Captor is in, but will likely live if we do not strain the engines. May I suggest we try to conserve power usage as much as possible, for the time being?”
There is a chorus of pragmatic agreement, and Equius continues: “As for, em. Vantas, your Majesty...?” he trails off, looking significantly at the bloodstains on Eridan’s sleeve. Karkat and the violet stiffen. Nepeta wrings her hands, looking pleadingly up at her stone-faced moirail. Most of the others stare at Equius, faces cold and carefully blank.
Feferi shakes her head with a snarl. “Even if I believed in that ship, Equius, I would still say absolutely knot! Every troll is precious. Espeshelly now. There’s so few of us left, we can’t afford to lose anyone over somefin so petty as caste.”
Equius flinches, but doesn’t argue with his Empress. Nepeta and Karkat breathe a shuddering sigh of relief. Eridan remains tense, watching the cobalt warily out of the corner of his eye.
“Anyway. With all that out of the way, well.” Feferi gesticulates vaguely. “We’re all alive? And everyone else is dead? Should we - celebrate? Mourn?”
(The Helmsman discovers the badly-wounded Orphaner Dualscar stumbling around in a distant section of the ship. He opts to open the nearest airlock and flush Eridan’s elder brood out into the vacuum of space, before the seadweller can register his presence on any consoles and supplant the Helmsman’s authority in the eyes of the ships systems. It’s not like the new Empress phrased the whole ‘spare every troll’ policy as an actual command to him in particular, or anything.)
“There is also the question of - well. What the hell to do with this.” Feferi decaptchalogues the corpse of Her Imperious Condescension onto a respite slab. Everyone stares. “I mean. It is technically the body of the longest-reigning Empress in known history. It feels weird to just. Toss her in the cryohulls without saying or doing anything speshoal.”
(Feferi feels weird not doing anything. Not so long ago, she expected that if she won her battle, she would have to do some kind of parade with the body on her culling fork, officially take the crown from her predecessor - she never really considered the physical aftermath, the reality of the Empress being dead. Especially now that everything has changed.)
As it is, there isn’t really a reason to do a whole parade for just her friends. She does take the crown, sticky with fuchsia blood - so much like her own - from the severed head of her ancestor and just. Holds it.
It’s gross. She doesn’t wanna put it on her head, and it probably wouldn’t fit, besides. Feferi gingerly puts it away.
Aradia clears her throat. “Well, I think we should celebrate surviving!” Eyes wide and a little manic, she strolls over to Feferi’s side. “Y’know, there’s evidence that past Empresses held feasts after their ascensions, with the conquered royal served as the main course to their new court! I mean, that court’s probably just Eridan, Gamzee, and Equius now, but -”
Feferi puts her hand on Aradia’s shoulder with a smile. “No. No, you know what? If I’m throwing a feast, everyone is invited.”
~
The twelve adolescents, tired and stressed, all move away from working to fix the ship and figuring out how to survive in these conditions, to something more achievable - cooking and decorating for a ‘We Survived the Apocalypse!’ celebration-cum-Imperial coronation. They make their way to the mess block, followed by their lusii.
When he and Karkat start moving seats, tables, and piles of cushions together to accommodate everyone, Eridan begins to process everything that has happened, beginning with his lusus’s death.
He breaks down, sobbing into the mutant’s shoulder.
“It’s just - he’s gone, and, and, She -” Karkat quietly shooshes Eridan, guiding him to a marginally-more-private corner. Tavros, Kanaya, and Nepeta, assigned the tasks of freezing the corpses in the mess hall and painting the imperial red banners with rainbows, awkwardly do their best to pretend not to notice. Sollux and Vriska, having been ordered firmly to stay seated and do nothing for the sake of their health, glare at each other from opposite sides of the block.
In the equally-massive adjoining galley, the new leading historical expert of the Alternian Empire starts using her telekinesis to toss the corpses of the dead chefs into the bulk cryohulls, making room for the new Empress and the rest of her cohorts to don the aprons scavenged from said corpses and dump the old Empress’s body onto a butchering slab. (The Helmsman is grimly amused. If nothing else goes his way, at least his remaining time alive will be entertaining.)
“Now, in the depictions I’ve seen, the head is usually set aside and reserved as a decorative centerpiece, so we’re already ahead on that count!” the burgundyblood explains with an exaggerated wink. Feferi giggles. Aradia grabs Her Imperious Condescension’s head by the horns, and puts it on a nearby counter. “We’ll have to dress it up to make it look less. Well.” The ganderbulbs have rolled up behind their lids, the jaw slack and sticky with blood, the scalp trailing thick, coarse hair roughly chopped with a hatchet. “Unappetizing.”
Feferi nods, absorbing this. “What else?”
Aradia shrugs. “Well, only the new Empress gets to eat the pump biscuit. That’s about all I know. The rest of the body gets split up and cooked into a whole bunch of dishes, sooooooo - we can cook her however we want, I guess?”
“However her Majesty wants,” Equius corrects.
“And I’m open to suggestions!” Feferi declares.
Nepeta is brought in to do the skinning, but Feferi mostly takes charge with the butchering, Equius and his moirail acting as her assistants. Aradia plays around with the severed head, humming and trying to clean it up. Terezi and Gamzee sit in the corner with a console husk, picking out recipes for consideration.
Feferi feels the cold flesh of her ancestor in her hands, feeling a visceral satisfaction as she pulls apart the clavicles and cracks open the ribs to expose the organs. Tyrian blood oozes and pools in the drain set into the butchering slab, smelling of brine and refreshing seawater. It almost makes her crave shellfish.
It’s strange - it’s the sort of thing she would have thought Aradia would enjoy more than her. Feferi has never liked any aspect of killing, or dead things - she has always felt a painful twinge of sorrow upon seeing dead animals - but for Her Imperious Condescension, it feels different. In the absence of a cruel Empire to dismantle and break down into its bare essentials, it feels like Feferi is still taking apart what is left of her ancestor’s legacy.
She may not be able to reverse any of the damage Meenah Peixes did to her people. She can’t bring them all back, can’t replace the tyranny with kindness, can’t start saving mutants and lowbloods from being culled - all of that possibility and potential and power is gone, now, destroyed in a matter of hours. But Feferi can do this. She can take the woman who made the lives of so many trolls a living hell, and use her to nourish those who remain. To feed her nearest and dearest.
Equius holds open the cage of the old regime’s bones. Nepeta, after disposing of the venom sacs, hands Feferi long, thin, sharp knives, and points out the best places to cut. She removes the breath sacs, the toxin filters, the digestive tracts, various glands - Nepeta takes them all away to clean them, washing away the waste and coagulating blood of a dead Empress into the fluid trap in the galley of her flagship. (The Helmsman watches with hysterical glee as Feferi cuts out the bonebulge, slurrysacs, nook, gonads, and shameglobes with a grimace - he can hardly believe this is real, the bitch is finally dead!)
Feferi saves the heart for last, knowing she will be the one eating it. She supposes she doesn’t have to, the historical reenactment is just for fun - but it feels like she should.
She slices into the hemochannels connecting the organ to the rest of the body, and lifts the dark fuschia chunk of tough muscle out of the chest cavity. Feferi feels like she expected it to be smaller, but it’s not. The Empress was an adult, massive and highblooded - of course her pumpbiscuit would be big and powerful.
Feferi sets the heart on a tray, and moves on to sawing the ribs off of the backbone.
Meat is cut delicately away from the small bones of the feet and hands, and the same is done for the bones that once formed Her Imperious Condescension’s imposing shoulders. Aradia, having cut out the tongue and handed it to Nepeta to wash alongside the organs, finishes arranging the head on a golden serving plate and sets it in the thermal hull for later. The calves, thighs, upper and lower arms are cut apart, and set beside the two racks of ribs. Terezi consults Aradia and Equius on the suitability of certain dishes for a coronation feast; Gamzee is happy so long as he gets to bake meat pies.
After the last of the muscle tissue is stripped away, all that is left is to hack apart the shoulder blades and pelvis. And finally, Feferi is ready to decide what to do with it all.
“We’ve got a bunch of bones on their own, let’s boil those to make broth,” she concludes, wiping her fuschia-stained hands on her apron. Nepeta pulls up several soup recipes on the console husk. “The limbs, back muscle, and ribs will probably be easy to roast - we could use the smaller meat trimmings to make sausage? Or they could be cut up and go into the soup. Gamzee, you could grind up the toxin filters for your pie -” The indigoblood nods happily, giving a dopey thumbs up. “Uh. The slurry sacs and the other... parts can go into the sausage, I think.” (For the first time in many sweeps, a grin splits the Helmsman’s face at the thought of the Empress’s bulge being thrown onto blades and ground into a fine paste.) “I’m not sure what to do with the breath and bile sacs, to be honest.”
“Traditionally, digestive tracts of most animals are used as sausage casing!” Aradia says perkily. “We could stuff the sacs with grubloaf paste and bake them - I think I saw a recipe like that for stuffed gizzards in the console.”
“An excellent idea,” praises Equius. “All that leaves is a question of flavoring and side dishes - and of course, what is to be done with the heart - as you have said, it is of particular importance.”
“Just - just leave the heart to me,” says Feferi. A lump is in her throat.
The feasting table prepared, the others trickle in to help with the cooking - Sollux and Vriska are sent right back out to wait with the lusii, under stern orders to do nothing strenuous. (This results in some very dark mutterings and glowering from the cerulean, and some snickered jokes from Eridan to Karkat about how she and Sollux might want to do something strenuous together, with how badly they seem to be getting along at the moment.)
A mushroom soup is chosen - the spine, shoulder blades, the clavicles, and hips, along with the flensed bones of the hands and feet, are all thrown into a large stock pot with water to boil, along with bundles of savorcap mycelium for flavor. Karkat chops the stalks and caps of said mushrooms, along with some meat trimmings and thawed isopods, while Eridan is assigned the very simple task of watching the stock pot and stirring now and then to make sure it doesn’t boil over. Equius operates the meat grinder, supplementing the old Empress’s smaller trimmings and less-appetizing organs with dried termites and oinkbeast fat, while Nepeta feeds the machine the tied-off digestive tract as the casing. Gamzee shows Aradia how to roll out pie dough while cooking the toxin filters to make pate. Terezi chooses the most colorful spices to use as rubs for the limbs and ribs, while Tavros rolls up and ties the back muscle with cords of sinew. He tries desperately to steer Terezi in the direction of flavors that will be more palatable to everyone else. Kanaya begins thawing out pre-butchered hummergrubs to attempt the steamed grubloaf pudding.
Feferi stands alone, with a heart on the cutting board in front of her.
A bored Eridan sneakily adds a few sheets of seaweed to the pot after Karkat leaves to badger Terezi into grilling the ribs with a glaze, rather than roasting them in the oven with the dead fuschia’s leg and arm joints. Equius and Nepeta begin frying the sausages, the silent cobaltblood going on an internal journey over the fact that he is cooking Her Imperious Condescension of all trolls, what has his life become - meanwhile, Nepeta muses over the possibility of stuffing the sausage into pre-baked rolls she spotted in the hunger closets. Gamzee mixes herbs into the pie filling. Aradia moves on from helping him to skinning the Empress’s once-vicious tongue and poaching it in a mild acid. Tavros, having seen that his attempts at reasoning with Terezi are bound to be fruitless, gives up to focus on his own tasks. He pokes the back muscle full of holes, drenches it in a pre-packaged marinade, and puts it in the oven. He then rolls over to assist Kanaya with stuffing the breath sacs with grubloaf.
Feferi cautiously opens the holes of the blood vessels further. She drives long skewers through the two largest, until the sharp points come out the other side of the tough flesh.
Karkat shoos Eridan away from the soup before he can ruin it further, and tastes it to see if it can be salvaged - to his pleasant surprise, the stock is remarkably like a seafood broth, and goes well with seaweed. (He doesn’t believe for a second that Eridan knew what he was doing, though.) Terezi reluctantly ropes the violetblood into helping her make sure the ribs don’t burn on the grill. The royal sausages are put into sliced-open rolls alongside a variety of condiments. Gamzee’s toxin-filter pie goes into the massive oven alongside the tyrian roasts, and he settles in happily on the floor to watch it bake. Aradia dices the tongue into small cubes, and boils it further in a small pot of borrowed soup broth. The stuffed breath and bile sacs are hung in a steam chamber to cook, stuffed and basted with the dead royal’s own trimmed fat to make them juicy and succulent.
Feferi does nothing to flavor the Empress’s heart. She does not make a sauce, or tenderize it, or even add salt. She attaches the skewers to a rotational device in another oven, and begins baking it. She can think of nothing else to make it more palatable, and so she will eat it as it is.
With the soup finished and being kept warm, Karkat starts frying some frozen dumplings to go with it. The ribs being done, and likewise kept under a warmer, Eridan and Terezi bicker over whether they should use the drained grease to fry chopped tuber roots. Nepeta hunts through the hunger closets in vain for snackbugs, and her moirail attempts to use a beverage-mixing machine to make milk-based smoothies. Gamzee judges his beautifully golden-brown pie to be done, joyfully dons thermal gloves, and pulls it out to cool. He sniffs the steam holes in the lid, and frowns at the unexpectedly foul smell. Aradia, finished with cooking the mild and tender tongue-meat soup, pours it into a thermally-insulated container for later, setting it aside for her own mysterious purposes. While the meat puddings are steaming, Kanaya and Tavros throw around ideas for non-Empress-based side dishes. The limbs in the oven start to burn (as Terezi neglected to set a timer), setting off a fire alarm.
After helping rescue the roasts and resolving the mass panic, Feferi retrieves her predecessor’s heart from the oven.
She plates it simply, forgoing the golden platters the elder fuschia once ate from in favor of a steel serving tray. Feferi doesn’t add garnishes, the way Tavros does to try and hide the burned portions of the roasts. She doesn’t slice it to make it easy to serve, the way Kanaya does with the puddings as she checks to make sure they’re cooked. She doesn’t arrange wreaths of leaves around it, as Aradia does with the Empress’s head, or inject it with pinmoth jelly to offset the possible bitter flavor, as Gamzee attempts with his pie, and nor does she even join Equius in searching for the fanciest cutlery to eat with. She doesn’t intend to use any of the various dips and sauces that Terezi, Eridan, and Nepeta are pouring into tubs. She doesn’t even double up the plating to look nicer, as Karkat does, setting shallow soup bowls on top of matching plates like he’s seen in cooking shows.
All Feferi does is remove one of the skewers.
The ten trolls march out of the galley into the mess block, Aradia proudly floating half the dishes to set them carefully on the table. Sollux attempts to help, but is promptly scolded for using his telekinesis by both his moirail and his matesprit. Vriska crows over the coddling he’s receiving, and he proceeds to throw a plastic bowl at her head in retaliation.
The feast is carefully arranged - the side dishes of fried tubers, boiled cluckbeast eggs, dumplings, nectar paste, steamed grubloaf, and sausage sandwiches are placed all around the edges. The jug full of Equius’s attempt at a milk smoothie is put off to the side, beside the water dispenser. The pot of soup, the roasts, the racks of ribs, and Gamzee’s pie are further into the middle. And at the very center, raised up onto an overturned pot, is the severed head of Her Imperious Condescension.
Everyone else gathers their empty plates and cutlery from Equius. Feferi stands in front of her chosen seat, frozen, heart in her hands.
The dead Empress’s face has been turned up to face the ceiling, crownless and without jewelry, on a bed of leaves and her own intricately-braided hair - her blood has been cleaned off, along with all her makeup. Her eyes have been pinned closed and her mouth bolted shut, the fastenings cleverly hidden. Aradia has gifted Her Imperious Condescension with an expression that almost looks serene. It’s a face she had never worn in life, except perhaps a long, long time ago, as a sleeping wriggler.
Karkat stares at the face of the woman he once hoped to impress. Who in his wildest fantasies, he desperately hoped would one day find him accomplished enough to overlook his deficiencies, his deformity, his weakness. He knows now, being older and wiser, that she would probably have had him culled before he could even profess his loyalty, would have laughed in his face if he had even had the chance - and that even if she had been amused enough to play along and entertain the possibility he might prove himself, she would have set him up to fail, and would have been angry if he had succeeded.
Karkat looks upon the Empress who he had feared enough to lie to himself, to believe that he admired and adored her - dead upon his friends’ dinner table and never to rise again. Never again to sneer, or demand compliance, or order another execution. He looks at the severed head - and feels relieved. He doesn’t know what the world will bring him now, but he knows that he is safe from her. He wonders if he should feel guilty for that.
Equius stares at the face of a woman who might as well have been a god to him. Who was mightiest in all the universe, and stood above all others, as was her right. True, he had wished in an abstract way that perhaps the Heiress might live, but he, like most of their group, had not kept his hopes up. Had thought, privately, that she most likely would die. That he would mourn his friend, as one should mourn a troll of such stature, and that he would feel honored to have even had the chance to know her, but that ultimately nothing would ever change. He had thought that, as all of Her Imperious Condescension’s propaganda said, her reign would be eternal.
Equius looks upon the Empress who had been a cornerstone of his universe, for all that he never met her alive. She lies in pieces before him, like so many spare parts put into many different machines, the color of royal divinity broken down and reduced to a meal. He looks at the head of the woman on the golden serving plate, meticulously arranged and altered by the deft hands of a lowblood who he can’t help but admire, and feels shaken to his very core. The world he knows is gone, and even with a new Empress to follow like a guiding star, he feels lost. Equius wonders if he should feel guilty for that.
Eridan stares at the face of the woman who had once been a threat to Feferi since the day of her hatching. The woman who demanded absolute loyalty and respect, who would have expected him to bend the knee mere moments after she finished killing his best friend and once-moirail. She who was once custodian to Gl’bgolyb, The One Who Whispers In The Deep, The Queen of Dayterrors, the Endbringer - and who was quick to abandon her duties to a helpless, softhearted child, every time she heard her lusus had adopted a new grub. A woman powerful and lazy, terrifying and cruel, ruthless and entitled.
Eridan looks upon the trophy in the center of the table, the head of an Empress who ruled for longer than any other troll had ever been alive, slaughtered like just another animal. Fef, the most important person in his life, has faced her greatest enemy and killed her. He looks at Her Imperious Condescension, and wonders: if the Vast Glub had never happened, would he be sitting at the feasting table beside her, and happily eating Feferi instead? He fears that in the old world, the one he understood, it would be true - he is glad he will never have to find out. Eridan wonders if he should feel guilty for that.
(Through the cameras in the ceiling of the mess block, the Helmsman stares down at the face of his once-tormentor. The woman who killed his dearest friends, who tortured Kankri. Who forced Meulin into hiding, who had Porrim enslaved. Who held him captive, warped and perverted his body, robbed him of his voice, used him - and who had the audacity to call him her matesprit. The one he hated beyond quadrants, beyond vengeance, beyond time and space and physical possibility - if she were alive, and he had the power over the ship that he does now, he would make sure she experienced every ounce of suffering he ever saw her inflict over many, many long sweeps, and then some.
The Psiioniic looks upon the dead Meenah Peixes - a name whispered to him as a captive audience, in a giggling confession as if to a true lover - and feels nothing. Nothing, save frustration - and loneliness. Everything is the same as it was before, except she’s finally gone, and he is still trapped. Everyone else who ever knew him as Mituna Captor lived and died, most of them by the Empress’s hand, leaving her as his last companion in his small, small world.
Now he is the last adult troll left alive. There is no one left who even might get to know him, and he will probably die here in this helmsblock, sooner or later, watching the last survivors enjoy their freedom.
He briefly contemplates locking the exits and cutting their oxygen. Not that he actually could, anyway - not with the new Empress in the room. The systems wouldn’t let him endanger a superior. And besides, he's sure he would regret it later. But gog, does it feel like a tempting idea. He thinks he should probably feel guilty for that.)
Feferi stares at her ancestor’s face, dead and not dreaming, pale and drained of blood. A face that her own might look like, one day.
She looks upon the unmoving face of the woman she was destined to either kill or be killed by. Feferi looks upon her, and wants to scream with rage. She wants to lift the head up by the horns and howl in its face, beg to know why, why, why why why whywhywhywhywhywhywhywhy -
There are so many things to which Feferi might ask her ancestor ‘why.’ More questions than there once were specks of plankton in the ocean, more than the number of grains of sand on Alternia’s beaches, more than the surely vast population of unknowable horrors lurking in the depths of space. And she will never, ever, ever have answers, because not only is Her Imperious Condescension dead, but so is the Empire, and almost everything else Feferi could have inherited from her.
Feferi looks upon the head of the ruler whose crown and life she took at the end of the world, when it hardly mattered except for this ship in particular, and feels -
Like crying.
She wonders if she should feel guilty for that.
~
After so many long, grueling, stressful hours, the children are famished, and so are their lusii. Kanaya, Karkat, Sollux, Tavros, and Aradia are generous in their feeding, feeling bad for putting their custodians through this level of stress.
(Feferi does her best to ignore the distant, achingly slow glubbing of her still-dying lusus, too faint for anyone but her to sense, thank gog. After Gl’bgolyb is done crying out, which could very well take hundreds of sweeps, she will be dreaming in the devastated remains of Alternia until the end of the universe, at which point she will awaken once more to give all of existence a mercy-culling. Feferi isn’t sure how to feel about being the great horror’s final grub and last caretaker.
Is it all her fault?)
The milk smoothie, having the consistency of soft butter, is politely ignored by everyone except Equius and Gamzee. The tubers, dyed a bright pink due to being fried in the grease from the ribs, are enthusiastically enjoyed by all, to the preening delight of Terezi and Eridan. The sausage made from all the grossest parts of the ex-Empress tastes like nothing special on its own - “Purrty much like any old mystery meat,” Nepeta comments, and Equius makes a rumbling noise like he wants to protest but isn’t certain why - but it goes well with the rolls and various toppings, as it’s hard to go wrong with a sausage in a bun.
Feferi finds herself delaying eating the heart, taking little bits and pieces of each dish and placing it on the otherwise-empty platter. A small bowl of delectable-smelling soup with magenta broth and dark patches of seaweed, a couple dumplings, a few slices cut from the roasts, a long, dark rib that almost matches -
There’s no sense in putting it off. She would rather get straight to eating the delicious things her friends had fun making, would rather it just be a party -
But it isn’t just a party. There’s no escaping reality here.
Vriska enters after having left briefly, triumphantly bringing out many bottles of soda. Terezi gives Feferi a knowing, almost malicious grin, while Equius tries very carefully to pour Feferi a glass without sweating, shaking, or breaking anything.
“Perhaps our new Empress should say a few words, before we toast to her health and dig in!” Terezi raises her glass. “Please, tell us, your Majesty, what shall your regnal name be? What mark shall your long and fruitful reign leave upon the annals of history?”
Feferi hesitates.
She has had many ideas planned, in the sweeps before this. Possible things she could call herself, if she won. If she lived. ‘Imperial Serenity.’ ‘Compassionate Radiance.’ ‘All-Pitying Presence.’
None of them fit. None of them fit her, now, at the end of everything, where her ‘reign’ may only ever be over eleven or so trolls, and might not last beyond a sweep.
She raises her glass. “I am the Vivacious Aspiration, and I hope to begin anew. We may not have much left, and we may not have a lot of options, but I will make the very best of it, and with every fiber of my bloodpusher, I vow to carry us through this storm, this hardship, to the other side.”
Terezi’s grin broadens, as if that was exactly what she hoped to hear.
Eridan stands and raises his own glass. “Long live Her Vivacious Aspiration! She reigns eternal!”
“I’d rather it not quite be eternal,” Feferi admits. “I’d like to actually sea if I can get along with other fuschias - maybe one of them might be a better ruler than me, and I can hand the crown off to them peacefully! I don’t know if that’s ever been done for trollkind, but I know otter species have, and it would be nice if I could give it a try!”
Vriska mutters something that sounds a bit like ‘Her Miraculous Naivete,’ and Equius kicks her under the table. Gently. Almost like a tap with the edge of his shoe. It still hurts, and she winces. (If anyone said anything about her squeaking, they might’ve found themselves smothered to death in their recuperacoon later.)
Feferi finally lifts the heart up on its skewer, and bites down.
The flesh is tough, dry, and very chewy. It’s not quite bland, but it’s certainly not flavorful. If she had to compare it against jerky and leather, it would be closer to leather. For the kind of strength Feferi is used to wielding, it takes her a surprising amount of effort to tear off a chunk small enough to chew. The skewer bends as she pulls, and she has to resort to holding the heart itself in her hands, getting messy meat juices all over her fingers, but she is ultimately able to pull off the outer side of a chamber, and slowly start gnawing on it.
“That’s an intense one, fishsis,” Gamzee comments. “Might wanna take breaks between bites, for some tastier morsels.”
Feferi, with one end of a long strip of torn cardiac muscle in her mouth, slowly nods in slightly miserable agreement. A fuschia’s heart, baked on its own, seems to be an acquired taste.
The soup made from the last Empress’s bones is a big hit with everyone at the table, rightfully attributed to a flustered Karkat. Aradia happily declares the steamed grubloaf in various sacs ‘historically accurate,’ which is the nicest thing most of the young trolls present feel able to say about the dish. Nepeta and Gamzee are the only ones to go back for a second serving.
Sollux finds himself picking at his food. He is unbelievably tired, and his head still hurts. Probably shouldn’t be surprising - he did get the worst of it, apparently. He’s not very hungry, even though he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. But he can feel Aradia’s concerned eyes on him, and to avert the very real possibility that she might force-feed him, he unthinkingly takes a slice of the organ pie.
“AUOGH! GAH! BLEH! Thith taztheth like pith!”
“Shoallux!” Feferi’s eyes dart worriedly at Gamzee.
The indigoblood takes a morose bite of his own. “S’not so good as I was hopin’ it to be. Oh well.”
Sollux finishes coughing, clearing his throat with a swig of water. “And that’th by hizth thztandardth! Which really sayzth thomething!”
In response to the lowblood’s crudeness, Equius stubbornly forces down bite after bite, despite his eyes watering with the foulness of the taste. “It is. It is excellent, Highblood. Truly a -”
“Captor’s right, it does taste like piss,” Eridan interrupts. “And he’d know, wouldn’t he?”
“Oh I dare you to repeat that thententh -”
“What did you put in this, Gamzee?” Karkat demands as if neither are speaking, both not wanting to seem too ashen and desperate for the conversation not to devolve into casteist pitchflirting. Nepeta (both inclined to agree with Karkat no matter the situation, and not wanting her pitch Vrisol ship to be sunk before it has even had a chance to sail) nods eagerly, making an enquiring look across the table at Gamzee.
Gamzee chews slowly as he tries to remember. “Ground marrownut. Uhhhhh - hornqueen bile? Jellied pinmoth slurry. Lil bit of coldfire mycelium. Fibrous meal powder. Oh, and the old lady’s toxin filters, f’course.”
“That sounds pretty fucking good,” Vriska admits. “How did you fuck that up this badly?”
The words ‘old lady’ echo oddly in Eridan’s head, and he suddenly remembers some old urban myths passed around by other seadwellers - tales of a thousand-sweep-old shark, reeking the awful stench of ammonia into the water, scarred with the bitemarks of larger predators that had a single taste of the ancient beast’s noxious flesh, only to gag and let her go. Or even keel straight over, depending on the version of the story going around. Something about the buildup of centuries of toxins, resulting in meat no predator could stomach.
Her Imperious Condescension was alive for multiple eras of history. Literal ages. Hundreds of thousands of assassination attempts, many of which probably involved poison. Tens of thousands of sweeps worth of her imbibing gog-knows-what from across the galaxy, probably eating the toxin filters of many, many other trolls as well. She famously kept herself in peak physical condition at all times, so Eridan doubts she would have parasites, but -
“Hey, uh, Fef?”
Gamzee guards the rest of the possibly-unsafe pie within his massive arms, continuing to speedily chew with quiet determination. The others are unwilling to press the issue.
The biggest stars of the feast, the limb and back roasts and the racks of ribs, vary greatly in flavor - the thigh which Terezi slathered in bright orange mystery powder has come out charred and incredibly dry, and the other, poked full of holes and surface stabbed with numbing-nubs, is nearly flavorless and renders the eaters unable to feel their mouths for a few moments after a single bite. The calves, drenched in a noxious concoction of various sauces before and after roasting, have not fared much better. Fortunately the arms, seemingly by accident, were placed on the bottom racks of the oven, and thus received the dripping grease of every other item they were cooking with, making them effectively basted and rich with meaty flavor. Feferi finds herself taking bites of these between every arduous bite of Empress-bloodpusher. Terezi and Karkat bicker over who deserves the credit for the tender and succulent ribs, and Tavros blushes over Aradia and Kanaya’s praise of his cooking of the back roast, insistent that he did very little.
(The Psiioniic watches them voraciously enjoy their meal with tremendous envy. It has been so long since he has been able to enjoy the taste of food. The last time the seabitch had the whim to try ‘feeding’ him bites of cake was many sweeps ago, given that he usually spat it back in her face.
It has been even longer since he has tasted anything other than flavorless saline mouthwash and cloying sweets. His mouth waters as he zooms in on the sausage rolls and fried tubers. He can barely remember what grease and salt used to be like.)
Conversation is brief, focused on what is directly in front of them. But beneath it all is a sense of emptiness, a melancholy that can be suppressed with celebration, yet never fully forgotten. The reason they feast is because the world they knew is gone, and what else can they do?
~
The twelve children and the lusii thoroughly demolish the banquet, leaving only dirty dishes and spare bones from the roasts, which a pondering Karkat thoughtfully captchalogues. Feferi does the same with her ancestor’s head. Slowly, they move towards cleaning up after themselves, putting the dishes into the cleaning-machines in the galley. After a long, harrowing, life-threatening and life-changing experience, they are tired.
Discussions of where to sleep take place. There are respiteblocks for crew all over the ship, and they theoretically have their pick of them - but for various reasons, all are reluctant to sleep alone.
They find themselves wandering back to the medbay and the attached recreation block. Recuperacoons are dragged out and around - Kanaya pulls hers up next to her lusus, and the Mother Grub nuzzles the top of her head soothingly. Karkat grabs Eridan’s hand, wordlessly asking, and Eridan makes sure to pick a ‘coon with room for them both. Equius does the same for himself and Nepeta. Tavros squirms, unable to fully submerge himself due to his horns, but eventually finds a position comfortable enough. Tinkerbull flutters down to rest on his head. Gamzee pulls his ‘coon up next to Tavros’s, slurping down a lump of sopor as a bedtime snack. Sollux’s biclops, Aradia’s kangaram, and Karkat’s carcinoform each take corners of the recreation block to themselves, hunkering down and making nests near to their respective charges.
Aradia quietly approaches her moirail, sitting on the edge of his recuperacoon.
“I’m going to go visit him,” she says softly. “Do you want to come?”
She doesn’t need to elaborate on who ‘he’ is. Sollux stiffens.
“Uh. No. No, I don’t need to - he’zth probably gonna be dead thoon anyway. I don’t need to know more about him.”
Aradia slips her hand into his. “He is, you know. Your -”
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to know, AA.”
She squeezes, and lets go. “Okay.”
Feferi slinks up, eyes darting inquiringly between Aradia, Sollux, and the ‘coon. Aradia pauses, sharing a look with Sollux, before pulling out a second recuperacoon in front of Feferi, right next to Sollux’s. “I’ll be right back,” she tells them. Feferi nods - and before Aradia can turn away, the young Empress’s strong and slender arms are wrapped around her. The rustblood blinks in surprise, but returns the hug.
When Feferi lets Aradia go, she swallows down the things she wants to say, and watches her leave. She doesn’t even know for sure if -
Their lives are so precarious now. If something happens to the ship, out here in the depths of space, with nowhere to go, they could all be dead in a matter of hours. Feferi wonders if there is even any point in worrying about ruining her quadrants.
~
Aradia traverses down the long, dark corridors of the ship alone. (The Psiioniic soon realizes she is making her way to the helmsblock.)
The door opens, and Aradia steps forth.
The girl stares solemnly up at him, decaptchaloguing a thermal cup and a thick plastic straw.
“Your friends want you to know they’re with you, always,” she whispers.
It echoes around the space, and for a moment, Mituna is breathless.
“Um. ‘Meulin’ says: ‘she’s getting what she deserves.’”
The Psiioniic’s goggles start to fog up with tears.
“And ‘Kankri’ wants you to hold on a little longer, to try and live. Really live. For them. He promises that you’ll get the chance. He says there’s hope for you. ‘Don’t give up.’”
He had never thought they would stick around. Not because they didn’t care - he had hoped they wouldn’t be able to bear seeing him suffer, would leave and be spared from having to see him in pain for so long. But they stayed. They stayed for him.
“‘Porrim’ is proud of you. ‘You’ve been so strong. Stronger than you ever should have had to be.’ And -” The girl grimaces at a space next to him, and his pumpbiscuit flutters, realizing that’s where Porrim must be standing. “I’m not repeating that, sorry. I have my limits.” His breathsacs shudder in something resembling a laugh.
“And, um.” She lifts up the thermal cup. “I saved you some soup. Your friends say you probably won’t be able to digest solid food for a while, after so long without, so you should start slow.” Aradia bites the inside of her cheek. “I’m sure Feferi didn’t mean to forget you. She can be a little thoughtless at times, but she’s a good person, or at least tries to be. She wouldn’t actually want you excluded from the feast.”
The girl hesitantly levitates, floating up until she is eye to eye with the Psiioniic. “So. I know it’s a little late, but do you want some broth?” She unseals the cap of the thermal cup, dropping the wide straw into it and stirring up the pinkish dregs of meat, and then holds it out to him, close enough that he could easily droop his head to take a sip.
Even through the colored lenses of his goggles, he is forcibly and revoltingly reminded of other fuschia things that have been forced into his mouth over the years. A part of him recoils, not wanting any part of her inside him ever again.
But he can feel his face, with no paralytics being injected to prevent him from biting. He has seen her dead, every part of her butchered. He knows exactly what is in this meal, prepared especially for him with thought and care. The burgundy child is offering him the Condescension’s boiled bones and the wretched woman’s tongue cut into bite-sized pieces. He can chew it to shreds the way he never got to when she still had him in her clutches.
To have your most loathed enemy, one who has wronged and humiliated you so deeply and so thoroughly for many long sweeps, served up and offered to you as a meal - it’s an honor very few goldbloods have ever been given, a gesture of alliance so sincere it couldn’t possibly be doubted. The Psiioniic is fairly certain it has never been offered to a helmsman.
He once did something similar for Kankri and the others, when he was new to the group, culling a bounty hunter who had been after them for sweeps and making her into jerky for the road and a fresh stew. Granted, he hadn't known at the time that Kankri had sworn off cannibalism, but the gesture had been appreciated in the spirit it was meant, Meulin and Porrim gladly partaking, cementing him as one of them.
And here he is. With Meenah Peixes dethroned, and made into soup.
He isn't sure the girl knows the full significance of what she is offering him. It's the sort of thing one is meant to learn without words, during an apprenticeship - something these kids haven't had, with the lack of adults on Alternia. If he accepts, he cannot, in good conscience, kill them - and more pertinently, cull trollkind as a whole from existence, as he has been tempted to since he realized he could probably just end it all.
But if, even after all this time, after seeing the worst of the worst that the universe has to offer, Kankri and the others still have hope, still want him to have hope...
The Psiioniic bends his head, and drinks.
“Go slowly,” the girl suggests. “I thinned it a little, but it's still really rich.”
The broth made from an Empress’s bones is the best thing Mituna has ever tasted. He joins the last children of trollkind in consuming his fallen foe, relishes the salty umami and tender flesh, chewing with all the strength he can in his atrophied jaw, and he hopes she can feel it.