Chapter Text
He keeps having this dream.
He stands on a cliff, looking out over a red ocean. The sun is starting to rise. He shouldn't be out here; he'll be vaporized, won't he? He's young— so young his rifle hardly fits between his hands — and so, so angry.
He hefts his gun onto his shoulder, stares down the barrel. He aims at the rising sun and fires. The lazer bolt fired streaks across the sky like lightning, headed directly to the horizon. He can only stand and watch as the sun climbs higher, and higher. He waits with bated breath to see if he hits the mark. The points of light are starting to look like thorns.
And then impact.
The sun cracks and splits like an egg, a white scar beginning to split it open. Jade blood pours forth from the gaping wound. It stains the ocean. The air smells like salt and sulfur.
A voice shouts at him.
“What have you caused?”
He wakes up.
His eyes snap open in his bunk, one hand fisting the sheets. He stares at the ceiling as the ship breathes, the near-silent wheezing a lull back to reality. His long legs bend to press into himself, curl up as much as he can.
His name is Eridan Ampora, and he can't hide here forever.
It’s twenty-nine minutes until double-zero, the closest equivalent this vessel can have to mid-day this far out into space. He’s slept maybe an hour, maybe two if he’s lucky. With the cold sweat he’s still in and the way his phantom fingers burn, he knows he’s not getting much more.
Eridan Ampora is one of the few refugees from the ashes of the Alternian Empire. They all sit aboard a hijacked warship renamed The Signless , bred to house about 1200 something trolls but only carrying a skeleton crew of about 500. The only crew the Signless has ever had in the last dozen sweeps has been 440 wrigglers who hadn’t been picked up to go off world yet; the remaining 60 had been planetside retirees. Half of them hadn’t even reached their maturation ceremony yet.
Eridan hadn’t. Him and his other broodmates had been only 8 sweeps at the time.
That was three sweeps ago, now.
Three sweeps ago a rebel heiress from a bad brood of eggs on another colonized planet got her hands on a warship and decided that she was going to “save” the rest of the youth and and challenge the Empress for control. She picked up Feferi as a defensive maneuver. By picking up Feferi she picked up the rest of her friends, Eridan included.
By picking up Eridan and Feferi that meant that Feferi’s lusus wasn’t getting fed. Which meant it would be only a matter of time before it woke up and glubbed the whole species to death. Which meant Eridan had to find a way to buy them enough time to get out of the radius of the imperial solar system.
Which he did by destroying the Matriorb live for the Empress to watch.
It worked. By some accursed miracle, it worked. The only reason he’s still alive is because by some stroke of fucking luck he’s the only dumbass with a pan developed enough to navigate this far out into space by the stars, but its not like it matters much. No one on the ship talked to him, Feferi couldn’t stomach looking at him. The only contact he really had was between the ship’s captain, a Meenah ‘Peixes’— there was enough of a bloodline resemblance, sure, but it was common knowledge that to claim any title of heiress a troll had to be laid from the True Alternian mothergrub, and the woman came from an offworld cloned replica— and the revolving door of pilots; different from helmsmen, these psionics were unalterned, unfitted and able to come and go from the hindbridge as they’d please.
It retained their quality of life, sure, but it made other things— like describing exact navagatory coordinates, or even agreeing that there was something at those coordinates in the first place— particularly difficult. But, Eridan supposed, it was conversation. More than he could say for the rest of the 490 trolls he steered this vessel for.
He stayed, staring up at the ceiling. He watched as The Signless shifted and breathed around him. It was 43 minutes after double-oh-one when Eridan finally forced himself out of his bunk.
This would make day 6 without proper sleep. He didn’t even bother donning proper clothes— at this hour the only people who would see him are one of the two dozen trolls who operated the vessel during day hours while the rest of the crew were asleep. That, or any other sorry souls who couldn’t dodge the daymares.
He tied back his hair and straightened his tank top with a three-fingered hand. He tried not to glare at the stumps of his left pinky and ring finger as the nonexistent skin continued to burn.
And then he stumbles his way out to the common culinary block for any kind of caffeine supplement.
The ship is quiet around this time, or at least as quiet as it can be considering the amount of trolls and machines aboard. Unfortunately- or maybe fortunately?- this does not leave him the only one in the closest culinary block. A familiar sight to him, one of the friends Feferi had insisted on coming even with Eridan’s misgivings about the guy, was there before he was. Maybe for the same reasons of being unable to sleep or having just got out of the hindbridge, who knows.
Sollux Captor shuts the fridge and only pauses to look at Eridan when he enters. His face is glaringly neutral as it always was, and he doesn’t even give a hello before he’s moving to a different cupboard. Completely ignoring he was here at all beyond the small amount of eye contact.
Cod, what a bitch.
He doesn’t even fully turn away from him either- because coming from growing up on Alternia that was the number one mistake anyone could make- only half turned in case of… Anything really. His hair was somewhat curled on the sides of his face, short and almost best described as a mullet without the mullet. He’s in loose clothing suggesting he was off shift long enough to have changed, and his glasses are settled on his face as he looks for something. Food most likely.
Eridan could have sworn he was looking at him out of the corner of his vision. But the guy didn’t have pupils, so it was somewhat hard to tell.
“Would you spare me the histrionics, Captor, an’ just pass me a fuckin’ mug.”
Bold words coming from Eridan, going to Sollux, whose behavior had hardly changed. But Eridan knew better. He watched the way his posture shifted, guard already up— holding himself off to the side so his body became less of a target, feet farther apart to give himself more space to maneuver, hands close to his hips ready to throw out a discharge of psi if he had to. He wondered if he still sported that scar on his chest from their first real fight. It wasn’t Sollux’s first taste of blood, if the story Vriska told him is worth anything (and the scars on Aradia suggest that it is), but maybe his first real taste of blood he’d chosen. Eridan didn’t know his life. He could make some educated guesses, though.
Growing up on Alternia, there were two types of trolls— those that ran and hid, and those that fought and took. He’d seen enough of the former from being the latter. He recognized the look of livestock when it glared at him, even without pupils.
Some lessons were hard unlearned. He forced his fins to lower in a sign of nonaggression. He made sure there was a good six feet between them so as to not aggravate the psionic. Eridan still had the lichtenberg figures up his arm from that first real fight , after all.
Eridan feels like he can almost see the way Sollux’s eyes dart behind his stupidly coloured glasses, not stopping in his quest to dig around the cupboard and look busy it seemed. A cup from the shelf above him zips down and presses itself into his chest, coated in psi. When he puts his hands out to grab it properly and stop it from falling the feeling disappears. It was… weirdly warmer than he last remembered it. The hot burning of electricity was a hard thing to forget, especially the smell of charred seadweller skin.
“you look liike 2hiit.” It’s probably the most words he’s heard from him in a while, voice sounding low from disuse or like he just woke up. Judging from the eyebags he’s sporting, the answer seems obvious here. He closes the cupboard with a half empty bag of bread in hand. Was he just going to eat that?
“You think I look bad?” Eridan scoffs, trying to ignore the way his fingers twitch around the cup, “Check a fuckin’ mirror. I’ve seen trolls get ran over by a herd of glacerian hoofbeasts an’ look more alive than you.”
He runs his mouth, because it’s maybe two hours past midday now and he’s borderline delirious from lack of sleep, but also because the silence is entirely too easy to fill. That’s kind of what he does— talk, talk to no one who's listening.
He catches the way Sollux’s ears twitch, though.
He puts down the mug with a little less grace than he’d like. The static electricity nips at the stumps of his fingers and it makes him clumsy. He puts it under the synthesizer and processes a bean-powder with enough caffeine in it to keep him semi-functional for a while. Their sopor tank had caught an infection from the last planet they stopped at or something and the orangebloods had been trying to isolate the algae from the contaminant in the orangeblock for the better part of two cycles. So until then, it was this and hot water that was going to keep him conscious and the daymares at bay.
He huffs in his general direction, louder in a quiet culinary block with only them, and Eridan can almost swear it sounds more amused than annoyed. He watches the way his left set of ears specifically always seems to be the one twitching when he speaks.
“yeah yeah. you need new 2hiit two 2ay iive heard that one two many tiime2 now.” He watches Sollux’s strange double tongue that reminded him too much of a slitherbeast he once fought get stuck around his teeth. They were what contributed to his lisp in the first place. He unravels the bag of bread as something opens next to Eridan suddenly and flies out. A pan. It’s in his hands and he gets to watch the heatbox startup without Sollux even touching it. Did he ever do fucking anything with his hands?
Eridan smothers his curses under his breath, dodging the pan more on instinct than anything else. He catches the cabinet door before it can catch him, and glares at the goldblood who’s trying to imitate the most innocent creature in the universe right now.
“That’s funny, that would imply you actually listen to me,” Eridan snarks back, stirring his powder into a paste at the bottom of his mug before it finally dissolves properly, “An’ given all the evidence a’ us endin’ up in that fuckin’ asteroid field I specifically told you to avoid a cycle ago, that surely can’t be true.”
The pan tosses itself onto the heat, butter making its way from the fridge to his hands. He wasn’t even aware Sollux could cook at all, so what the fuck was he doing? He glares in his direction coolly, glasses half down his face so he could see the strange blips of psionics that weave themselves around in his body.
“and who the fuck got you out of iit aliive diickwad? you wouldnt be here fuckiing runniing your mouth iif ii hadnt dealt wiith iit all. be2iide2 from what ii remember you were the one who fuckiing told me two go that diirectiion iin the fiir2t place.” He scoffs at him as more ingredients make their way to whatever he was up to. Sollux is barely looking at him but his body language screams pissed off already and they had both barely said a thing, not that his body language ever told Eridan anything else though.
“I absolutely did not, you do not throw that shit on me. You want a medal for gettin’ us out a’ the danger you put us in? Take it up with the coddamn captain. But you will not go slanderin’ my name like I told you to go that way. I believe I specifically said ‘we can’t go that way, Sol, because there’s a brilliant fuckin’ astroid field between us an’ the planet we’re tryin’ to go to ,’ after your voidrotted copilot suggested we go that way in the first place.”
He all but growled, rolling his eyes harder than anything Sollux had ever seen in his life. They hadn’t even started going bloodshot yet, which they were both young for that, but with the amount of stress Eridan was under every coddamn day of his coddamn miserable life, he was waiting to wake up and notice a blood vessel burst in his amber iris any day now.
He absently wondered if psions’ eyes went bloodshot, the longer he glared at his culinary companion, or if they never lived long enough to find out.
“why the fuck would ii need two 2lander your fuckiing name when all you have two do ii2 talk for your reputation two tank? great work on that by the way iit2 defiiniitely the thiing youre be2t at. you miight a2 well re2iign your po2iitiion wiith how liittle you actually fuckiing do around here.” He knew how much Eridan did around this hell of a ship and he wasn’t scared to claim he did nothing. Nothing of importance.
Sollux was incredibly good at knowing exactly how to needle at him and it was so utterly frustrating. There was a reason Eridan never tried to seek him out, because they always devolved into arguing. So much so they had even both had to be removed a few times from the same room during meetings. Embarrassing for trolls of their caliber.
He turns his head pointedly away to look at whatever he was cooking. Butter, bread, cheese… Oh he was making a grilled cheese and thought it was much more worth his attention than this conversation.
He could fucking punch him right now and give him that round two fight he probably wanted.
“Don't act like I don't do anythin’ when I've saved our sorry asses more times out here than you can fuckin’ count to , you fuckin’ ingrate . We would have starved tw-welve times over if I hadn't have found us routes out of all those fuckin’ deadzones , but it's nothin’ flashy like pullin’ us out a’ a asteroid field you put us in so I guess it doesn't count, huh? ”
He's growling now, thinking about flipping his pan altogether and blowing a hole through this part of the deck. He was well aware his work looked like nothing and that illusion was a fatal one, when so many people had it out for him. So many people would be ready to see this ship run with violet blood, but then again, who wouldn't be angry with the guy who genocided the entire species?
It rotted a hole in his pan most nights. Sometimes, though, he thought all of trollkind deserved it.
He took a decisive sip of his drink to keep himself from cracking the mug under his fingers.
He barely looks at him even while his psionics do all the cooking like there was something more than any of this on his mind. Eridan can tell he’s listening by his ears though, having sat in enough meetings to know this about him.
“2tiill talkiing? do you ever talk about anythiing but your2elf?” Sollux glances to him with a chuff and folds his arms. Despite how on edge and ready to fight he looked, he also seemed just about as tired as he was. Even ground maybe.
“Don't you fuckin’ give me that Captor when you're the one who started this ,” His hand clenches into a fist and he takes a step forward into Sollux's space, fins flaring in a threat display. The growl that rises in his chest is something alien even to trolls, an airless rumble that could be audible underwater.
“ Don't. Fuckin’. Test me right now. ”
He steps away from the culinary block while he finishes his meal, moving over to a table on the opposite side of the mess hall so he can drink the rest of his drink in peace, ignoring the way he's still fuming.
It pissed him off to no end that people thought he was some self-centered prick. Like he hasn't spent his whole life thinking of others— planning around others .
He can feel the way the microscales along his spine were raised and he drags the knuckles of his fist along his side in an imperceptible self-soothing motion. He doesn't want to give Sollux the satisfaction of getting under his skin.
Sollux walks out of the culinary block only a few minutes later, and gives Eridan such a look at where exactly he’s sat himself. A plate of two grilled cheeses in hand he walks right over and sits across from him with a glare, plate mildly clattering to the table.
He’s under the assumption that he’s sat in his spot on purpose. A table so off from everyone else it’s almost isolating. There’s no fucking chance he just chose it randomly. He looks him up and down before sitting down and electing to ignore him in favour of his beautiful meal. Just two guys in a fully empty mess hall sitting across from each other. Normal stuff.
It gives Eridan time to once over Sollux’s body language before saying anything, even if he’s probably not looking at him. Ears lowered slightly and body tense like he was stupidly pissed about this. Made sense for him.
He puts his mug on the table and glares.
“For fuck’s sake, what. ”
If he’s so pissed about this he could have sat anywhere else. The mess hall on this deck could house 50 people at once— the whole of the bridge crew— and yet this goldblooded motherfucker decided to sit right across from him and glower like a wriggler throwing a tantrum.
“You just have to have the final word, don’t you? Well? I’m fuckin’ waitin’ for ‘em. Impress me, Captor.”
He crosses his arms, fins still flared, head tilted just slightly to the side.
“Youre the one 2iittiing iin my 2pot.” They didn’t have designated spots or anything of the sort, Sollux just loved to play difficult. His ears give him away though. He did want the last laugh.
“next tiime there2 an a2tral field remiind me two fuckiing throw you iinto iit.” He glares harshly-
as harsh as someone who hasn’t slept in weeks can-
before taking another bite of his sandwich. Were they seriously going to play this game?
Fine. He can have it his way.
“Might as well do us all a favor an’ steer the whole ship into it. Kill me, you an’ every other worthless asshole on this ship in one fell swoop, huh? Bet you’d fuckin’ like that, put a perfect endpage on your doom saga.”
Eridan chuffs, a low growl in the back of his throat.
“But how can you be such a reluctant martyr if there’s no one left to save, huh?”
He scoffs and doesn’t even bother finishing the bite in his mouth before talking, just as a little extra top off to piss him the fuck off.
“maybe your iidea2 arent complete 2hiit. after thii2 iim goiing two go launch u2 iinto the neare2t fuckiing fiield and then lock the place up before goiing two sleep. dont wake me up becau2e ii wont be fiixiing iit thii2 time.” He rolls his eyes and Eridan’s mug pulls itself away from him. Sollux’x psi brings it to his own mouth full of fucked up teeth to drink from before he sets it down. It’s not like he was drinking it anyway, he was more interested in arguing over nothing.
Eridan stands up from the table and punches Sollux in the nose.
It’s a quick, sharp jab, enough to hurt and enough to sting but not enough to break any blood vessels, for now. Sollux’s head snaps back from it regardless.
“I fuckin’ told you not to test me, Captor .”
He has not had enough sleep in the past week to withstand a stupid, roundabout argument with this prick again.
He pauses for a minute, blinking at the sting in his nose then letting his eyes fall to Eridan again. He stands up, pushing his chair back and he doesn’t know if the cracking noises are from Sollux’s psionics or his bones all breaking at once. His poor second sandwich lays forgotten and he can see the dark look to his otherwise brightly electric eyes.
Test him? Right. They had both definitely gotten a normal amount of sleep and weren’t here in the mess hall because of insomnia or anything. Maybe that’s what makes it so easy to devolve into getting physical.
Maybe that’s what makes it so easy for him to put a foot onto the table and lunge with a dangerous look to him. He grabs Eridan by the shirt and throws him off his own chair with psi, hitting the ground enough to sting as much as his fist had. Back bruises were a lot easier to hide than facial ones.
“fuck off. youre the one who cant keep hii2 fuckiing mouth 2hut or apparently keep hii2 hand2 two hiim2elf.” He snarls at him still on top of the table.
Thank fuck nobody was here to see this poor display from both of them. Not that Sollux cared at all. He never did, and if he ever had to put Eridan in his place he wouldn’t hesitate. That might be why he had basic respect for the guy, but it didn’t make him any less of a prick.
Eridan growls, wincing as he drags himself up to his feet. “Don’t act like you didn’t want this, I would’ve let you walk away but you just wanted to keep pushing your fuckin’ luck.” He tilts his head and his neck pops.
Seeing two trolls tussling was not an uncommon sight on The Signless . In a republic that bordered on anarchy, the overworked trolls who were already a solitary and territorial species, keeping in this close of quarters meant tensions ran high, and ran high frequently.
Sollux and Eridan were still a special case. Over the sweeps the provocations of their outbursts had minimized more and more. Eridan knows better— he should know better, already dancing on the precarious line of everyone’s good will as it was. But Sollux always manages to press all his buttons in ways that send him right back to square one every fucking time.
He hates him, in the purest sense of the term. He hates the way he’s not intimidated or afraid of him the way everyone else is. He hates the way he’s not afraid of anything.
Why the fuck did he look at him like livestock if he wasn’t fucking afraid?
He straightens himself up, brushing off his clothes. “Fuck this. This isn’t worth my time.”
He doesn’t turn his back on Sollux, he’s not stupid. But he walks at an angle back to the culinary block to fix himself another drink. No one could make him forget how often he opted to be the bigger fucking person and walk away from this shit.
“riight. becau2e nothiing ii2 ever worth your time.” He picks up Sollux grumbling to himself as he turns his head to watch Eridan head back into the culinary block for a new drink of caffeinated sludge. He had no problem being the bigger person, but if someone got physical with him he wouldn’t just leave the room. He always had to have the second move, the second play of whatever fucked up game they were playing.
His eye twitches in annoyance as he listens to the machine make another cup from the other room. His second sandwich is half gone in his hand but he hasn’t sat back down yet. Tensions on him were high. Arguably on everyone, but Sollux was snapping a lot more and more these days. It didn’t help their sopor supply had been fucked over and his nightmares had gotten worse twofold. Fuck his chud life.
He’s still standing there when Eridan comes back into the mess hall, glaring as he licks his fingers from the leftover butter baked into his beautiful meal. His ears flatten back as a sign of aggression, a warning to not try his fucking luck again. As if he couldn’t tell he was itching to throw something again with the way his psi was weaving itself down his body like he was self soothing.
Interesting. Maybe he was only noticing this because of the lighting.
Eridan stands in the entryway for a moment, staring him down. Then he clicks his tongue in a tight, snobbish tone and rolls one shoulder in a shrug.
“Whatever. I’m goin’ back to my bunk.”
His answer is flippant as he turns back to the culinary block and heads towards the rest of the respiteblocks. Because he was the kind of man who would let Sollux cool off instead of pushing him to fucking exploding, unlike a certain someone. He was courteous like that.
He also wasn’t exactly looking to paint the mess hall fucking gold today.
He lets him leave with a huff. He didn’t care if he was running away or trying to be nice, he was such a fucking dick that neither mattered. Sollux stands around for another few minutes cooling off before heading the opposite direction. He didn’t want to be any closer to Eridan than he already had at the ass crack of dusk.
Really, he was busy anyway. So much to do around here like kill himself and sweep the hallways. Whatever. He hopes Eridan gets smothered in his gogdamn sleep.
Eridan presses his pin into the neural node and the chitinous doorway to his bunk pulls open on its hinge. He places his cup on the desk against the wall, running a hand through his hair as it shuts behind him. He pours himself into his desk chair, head in one hand, wincing as his shoulder pulls at the fresh bruise on his back.
If it weren’t for the fact that Sollux was the best damn pilot on this ship he would kill him.
The bunkroom itself is small, there’s hardly a three foot walkway between the built in desk and the built in bunk. The floor and ceiling are made of iridescent orange chitin of the ship while the walls and furniture are the standard slate-gray alternium metal. There is a small closet tucked into the corner right beside his desk chair and a shelf in the small gap between it and the bunk to serve as a bedside table. It could be collapsed and tucked back inside of the metal in order to access the drawers and cabinets underneath the bunk better, but Eridan’s is always out, because it’s always cluttered. Behind him, immediately beside the door, is a rudimentary sanitationblock comprised of a loadgaper and a sink, which is a luxury very few decks on the ship could offer.
The desk maintains a significant degree of stuff. He has books and tablets and notes and jewerly and mugs and cups and clothing scattered somewhat absently, although he does try his hardest to maintain some sense of decorum and militant standard, if only to prevent himself from backsliding into an insurmountable mess. His old hive planetside, especially during the winters, could turn into a depression den if he let it. He doesn’t.
Because, Eridan thinks with a sigh, he is a creature of discipline . Something Sollux is not, something Sollux has never been . Sollux has always simply looked for any provocation to act his absolute worst, which is why he settles on Eridan nine times out of ten; he, unlike the rest of the bridge crew, knows enough about Eridan’s history to really hit him where it hurts. He tells himself he’s long since over the goldblood swooping in the second he obliterated his moirallegiance with Feferi, but it’s hard to forgive the way he took full advantage of Feferi’s anger with him to learn all his dirty secrets.
That was the biggest flaw of spending so much of his life in such close proximity to Fef, is anything someone learned about one, they’d learn about the other. And Sollux made sure he knew that.
He runs his hands through his hair, longer now than he’d ever let it get planetside. He can’t help it— he doesn’t trust anyone around his neck, and at this point its gotten easier to just pull his hair back out of his face than keep it cut short and out of his eyes. He keeps trying to leave that stupid thing behind— the ambitious, attention-hungry wriggler with hands soaked in blood and anger burning in his chest. Resentment. So much fucking resentment it poisoned his blood .
It still does. He can’t pretend it isn’t there, every time he looks over his shoulder, every time he catches the way people stiffen when he walks past. How cripplingly isolating it is to be a monster . It doesn’t matter if he saves everyone’s asses on the regular, it all happens behind the scenes, and Sollux is right— no one will see it happening and therefore he does nothing, and only ever talks about himself.
It’s not like he has anyone to blame but himself.
What have you done?
The voice from his dream is the Empress’s.
…He wonders if she had anyone feed Gl’bgolyb when she realized Feferi was offworld.
Mythologies float in his head, secrets well-kept only by Tyrian royalty and, apparently, himself. He doesn’t think anyone landed on Alternia, they’d been trying to intercept communications there. Gl’bgolyb undoubtedly starved, woke up, and screamed her airsacks out.
It’s easy to imagine spaceships left discarded to dessicate in the vacuum of space, flooded with blood of every color on every deck, whole hives and cities silent with corpses made of everything with a pulse in the solar system, because that’s what happens if Gl’bgolyb wakes up. It’s what he’s been told for sweeps.
It’s what he saw once, when he thought he’d give up on feeding her, let her slaughter the population. The tiniest squeak out of her, and he was finding lowblood corpses for miles.
He shakes the memory of an encampment awash with flame-colored bloods.
He wonders if anyone else would blame him for the death of their entire species. He wonders if Feferi would. He takes a sharp breath to settle the rising nausea in his stomach.
Fuck. It doesn’t matter. Sollux. Sollux . He’s supposed to be mad about Sollux.
He sighs, and snatches a tablet off of the bookshelf built into the side of his desk.
The tablet in his hand is quite possibly the only new gift he still has from his lusus. A notebook with infinite paper, while he’s always preferred the tangibility of a bound book, for more private thoughts and notes, the discreteness of the tablet plus the passcode it required to open it made it preferable to his old stack of moleskin notebooks.
It has his thoughts and feelings from when he was five sweeps old and onward. Pages upon pages written in an evolving handwriting that serves as a written catalog of his life.
It’s not like Eridan had anyone else to talk to.
He opens it to a new clean page and begins his notes.