Work Text:
It could be worse.
It’s not fucking awesome, you won’t lie. It turns out that Crockercorp’s finest innovivisectors finally succeeded in making the latest Transportalingerie(TM) version sopor-resistant, which means you never really get to go off shift, and they’ve solved the link stabilization problem too, which means all the assholes who can’t get matesprits aren’t as scared as they used to be of giving guys like you a whirl instead. It fucks up your gaming, trying to ride out the stochastic lashing of another valued client’s valued genitalia while you’re attempting to aim, and it keeps ruining your focus at work. Ugh. Two minutes ago, you were in the zone, coding like a machine. Now you’re shifting awkwardly in your seat and coding like a machine with a wrench stuck in the gears, because you can feel the low hum of a localized wormhole opening between your thighs, and the cool tip of some highblood bulge poking tentatively through. It rubs timidly at the entrance to your nook, like the troll on the other end is scared of commitment, when all you really want is for them to hurry up, get off, and let you get back to your workday. But. It could be worse. You’ve spent your entire life listening to the overclocked pessimism engine you call your thinkpan spinning out in detail all the many ways it could be worse, and this is pretty good by comparison.
To prove it, you lean back in your chair and stretch, cracking your knuckles above your head. Your hips slide forward, and as your mystery guest slinks another few inches up inside you, no longer so hesitant, you lift your half-empty mug in a cloud of psionic sparks and take a sip of coffee. It’s burnt-tasting and kind of gritty — only the best for the Fleet’s legion of disaffected IT specialists — and it’s been sitting there for way too long, but caffeine is caffeine. It focuses you. Granted, what it focuses you on is that you’re actually getting a little wet already, which says nothing flattering about your standards, but you can live with that. You reset claws to keyboard, clenching down reflexively around the bulge as it finally pushes the rest of the way in, and manage another few lines of code. It’s not your best effort, even accounting for the fact that you are actively getting fucked and it is getting increasingly difficult to ignore.
Nobody you know, you’re willing to bet. Too cold for anyone lower than cerulean, and Adalov’s got hangups about ethical technology use, which is good, because you like being able to respect him. Plus, you’d bet actual money it’s not only his horns that are pierced, which — ok, that’s the kind of mental direction that might make this experience tolerable. You close your eyes and imagine the feeling of cool metal against the walls of your nook, smooth and hard, almost alien. You can work with this. The bulge inside you ripples from base to tip, and you think about Adalov hunched over at his desk, face flushed, biting his lip in concentration. He’d be ashamed, if it were him, embarrassed, but not embarrassed enough to pretend that he wasn’t buried hilt-deep in the guy who keeps kicking his ass at hacking.
That’s all it takes. One of your bulges emerges without warning, wriggling over the top of the frilly, ridiculous piece of high-tech magenta frippery you’re currently obligated to wear, and the other follows fast. Both of them snake out around your wrist as you reach down, unzip, and psionically grab the collapsible bucket you’ve been keeping beneath your desk, probably not as discreetly as you’d like. You don’t need it yet, but at this point, it won’t be long before you’re going to. The highblood’s bulge writhes, and you rock down around the length of it, your own bulges smearing traces of gold genetic material over your palm and wrist as they twine and grip, a hot little point of pressure building high up in your nook where the highblood rubs relentlessly against you. Your breath comes up short. Your muscles tense, your head tips back, and —
Your palmhusk chitters. You wince when you see who it is.
CC: Your )(eiress most shrimperiously commands your presence for movie night later.
CC: Maaaaybe??? 38?
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. The troll on the other side of the portal is still going at it, but you need to concentrate. You wipe your frond on a crumpled paper towel, use your psionics to hold your bulges in place as they twitch with frustrated need, and grab your palmhusk.
TA: 2orry ff. ii can’t.
You hope she’ll leave it at that, but of course she’s not going to. She wouldn’t be Feferi if she let you hermit yourself away.
CC: You’ve been saying t)(at a lot lately. Is --Everyfin OK?
TA: everythiing2 fiine ii ju2t cant. life2 ju2t bu2y riight now.
It’s technically not a lie. That doesn’t make you feel any less guilty. She’s your friend and your matesprit, and you’ve been putting her on read for the past half-perigee because you’re an asshole and you can’t deal with the thought of her knowing that you are currently, this moment, doing time as a public bucket. She’d worry about you. Or maybe what she’d do look is at you, know how much time you’ve spent these past nights with strangers’ slurry dripping out of you, and realize instantly that you’re the kind of pervert who gets through this kind of hoofbeastshit by getting off on it, not by lying back and thinking demurely about the propagation of the Empire. She wouldn’t judge or care, but she’d know, and you would prefer for the intense, bulge-twisting humiliation of this whole idiotic experience to remain private. So you flip the palmhusk closed, tilt your shitty office chair back again, try not to think about your self-inflicted relationship problems that might not even be problems outside your own screaming neuroses, and switch your junk from psionic to manual control just in time for the first sudden gush of cool slurry to hit you. A moment later, it's pouring into you in short unsteady spurts, filling you until the liquid weight of genetic material against your genebladder and the base of your bulge leaves you throbbing and on edge. A little more, you think. That's all you need. Fuck, please. Then the highblood withdraws, leaving you soaking, empty, and still achingly unsheathed. You need to deal with this.
Good thing for you, you have gotten very practiced in dealing with this. You grip the unruly tangle of your bulges in one hand and slide the fingers of your other into the tight gap between them, pressing down on the sensitive place where they bifurcate. You fuck yourself like that, rapidly, biting your lip like Adalov in your fantasy, until you have to brace yourself against the desk and bend almost double, stifling a moan as you fill the bucket almost to the brim. For a second or two, you’re loose-limbed and calm, your thinkpan gloriously blank — until the sound of footsteps down a hallway not far away reminds you that you are in a cubicle where anyone could see you, because privacy is a luxury granted to trolls above your paygrade and place on the spectrum, and that life as an IT automaton still sucks.
That’s that, you guess. One more night in the glorious Alternian Empire. Your hands are a gross mess. The floor is not pristine. You’ve got more than two hours before you can leave. You ruin too many paper towels cleaning up, and get back to work.
.
You make it back to your hive that evening with a minimum of awkwardness. It was quiet on the way — no getting caught in lifts with cameras watching from the upper corners, no need to duck into the little-used corridors of the station in search of someplace you could convince yourself nobody could see you — and now, if you’re lucky, you might get fifteen fucking minutes to yourself to catch up on your gaming.
You’re not lucky. Luck and you are diametrically-opposed poles of the multiverse. You’re barely even through the door before you feel the warning buzz of the portal opening and the slick intrusion of another bulge start working its way through, and despite all the nights you've spent getting used to this, you almost drop your husktop when it happens. You have to catch it psionically as you stumble to the loungeplank, crinkling the plastic you’ve spread over the cushions to preserve your furniture’s innocence if not your own. The bulge that surges into you as you fall back is olive, maybe, warm and textured, thick enough that you have to take a second to adjust. You curse. That’s all you need, at the end of an already too- long day. Olivebloods don’t usually earn enough to pay for this kind of service on their own, which means a not-insignificant probability you’re in for an office party. Those can last a few hours. Thank fuck for takeout delivery drones, is all you have to say.
Thank fuck, specifically, for delivery drones fast enough that you’re not a complete wreck when they arrive, even if your pants are in a heap on the floor and your boxers are unsalvageable. You grab the pizza, abscond to your loungeplank, shovel down a slice of grubsausage and fungus supreme as you slouch down, and allocate some mental energy to judging whichever idiot it is that shoves it in without preamble, wriggles frantically for maybe two seconds, and comes almost immediately after. It probably would not be impossible to infiltrate the customer database and figure out who’s got this timestamp, but the question is, do you really want to know?
Your palmhusk is making noise again. You could ignore it, and you want to ignore it, but it’s probably FF, if it isn’t Aradia or Karkat, and somewhere in the tortuous biochemical labyrinth of your neuroendocrine system, the feeble extrusions of your friendship gland are trying to convince you that you’re not that much of a jerk. So you grab the phone, as One Minute Wonder pulls out and someone new replaces them, and you fire off a semi-conscious reply to whoever just texted you.
TA: 2orry wii2h ii could chat but
TA: iim kiind of occupiied.
That’s one way to put it. You are extremely occupied. The new guy is big, as eager as the last one but forceful in a way that makes relaxation impossible. Every time you try to think about something else, their bulge curves hungrily along the inside of your nook, pressing against every nerve ending, and reminds you that hey, guess what, you’re being penetrated by a complete stranger, who is going to come inside you and then pass you on down the line, and that on a raw physical level you’re more than halfway turned on yourself. The urge to bear down around the bulge inside you and just ride it is floating on the surface of your consciousness like a weird bubble on a fathomless sea of so done with this shit, and you can already tell that you won’t be making any progress on your own projects today.
Except then a new message hits your palmhusk with a loud insectile skree, and just like that, new guy’s efforts not withstanding, exactly zero percent of your attention is devoted to the fucked-up team building exercise going on below your waist.
CC: Shoallux, w)(at is wrong? You’ve been avoiding me for the past two W--E--EKS, and you won’t even tell me w)(y! 38(
CC: …
CC: If I’ve made you mad for some reason
CC: Then FIN--E, let’s talk it out, I don’t want to fi)(ght and I )(ope I didn’t )(urt your eelings
CC: But t)(ere’s no way to fix t)(ings if I don’t even know WAT--ER TH----E PROBL------EM --EV---EN IS!!!
Fuck. This is the absolute last thing you wanted. It’s also the absolute first thing you should have predicted, except that you’re an idiot, and you thought — what, that she wouldn’t assume there was a problem? That she’d know, just magically, that the problem was you, not her? The worst at quadrants, it is you. If there’s a way to quantify how badly, exactly, you just messed this up, it probably requires logarithms, or possibly a new branch of mathematics altogether.
TA: fuck. no. no iim not mad at you. iim ju2t
Your claws hover over the keypad, but you can’t make yourself type the rest. Technicalities are for legislacerators. You’re not just busy. You still don’t want her knowing, but it’s no longer possible to avoid that without her assuming something worse, so you’re going to have to bite the projectile murderpellet and deal with it.
TA: ok thii2 ii2 embarra22iing but utter humiiliiatiion ii2 probably the lea2t ii de2erve for blowiing you off liike that. iim entangled iin the legal 2y2tem.
TA: or ii gue22 more accurately the legal 2y2tem ii2 entangled iin me.
TA: fiir2t tiime piiracy charge. you know how iit goe2.
CC: I’m not sure I do know w)(at you’re talking aboat.
CC: Wait. O)(.
CC: 38(
TA: iit wa2nt even my piiracy charge. let me ju2t bold that and underliine it twiice. iim not 2ayiing iive never flown the black flag but when ii 2aiil the hiigh 2ea2 ii dont get caught.
TA: iit2 ju2t that no way iin 2tiicky faygo spattered clown hell wa2 ii lettiing one of my iidiiot iintern2 go through thii2 hoofbea2t2hiit iif iit could be avoiided, 2o… ye2 iim bu2y gettiing communally paiiled for 2omebody el2e2 2hiity troll regency cleaniing product mu2iical theater. let2 all poiint and laugh now.
There’s a long pause, interspersed by bouts of CC is typing, and you try not to flip your shit. Your shit remains impeccably unflipped. You are the epitome of calm. You barely even notice when Valued Customer Number What-The-Fuckever twitches once, goes still, then starts pumping a midblood-warm load of slurry into you, because you are too busy not being nervous until a new message arrives.
CC: Sollux, I am not going to point and laugh)( at you for our laws being TH--E WORST. T)(at’s )(ORRIBUBBL--E. Are you OK?
TA: iit2 a 2hiity job but 2omeone2 got two be judiiciially dragooned iinto iit. iit2 fiine ii ju2t need a fuckiing break. ehehe.
CC: Did it ever occur to you t)(at t)(ere is an abyssvious sealution to your current predicament?
TA: ii wa2nt goiing two go wiith triial by combat ff. iim not 2tupiid. or triial by clownbat. ii dont know what a clownbat ii2 but iit cant be anythiing good.
CC: That is NOT what I meant. 38(
CC: As of as soon as possible, your )(eiress is OFFIS)(IALLY and P--ERCHMAN----ENTLY commandeering t)(e o)(ther side of t)(at transportalizer!
CC: For the good of the --Empire, by w)(ic)( I mean the good of my matesprit, who TO B--E CL---EAR, will be under no obligation to have sex with anemoneone and will finally be able to take a nap.
TA: ehehe thank2 ff. ii need a nap. you have no iidea how much ii need a nap.
This time, she’s the one to leave you on read, but you’re not complaining. For one thing, you’re pretty sure that things are OK between you again. For another, you have had a few too many online conversations for an introvertebrate running on approximately four hours of sleep and an inadvisable cocktail of caffeine and weird sex hormones. You grab another slice of pizza and settle in to let the office party or whatever it is finish up, because it does seem to be winding down. The next few trolls to take their turn are quick and efficient, weirdly desultory about the whole thing. You don’t get a whole lot out of it, but you’re not supposed to, and you’re not sure they are either. When they’re not busy with you, they’re probably standing around waiting for the event to be over, sipping drinks, wishing they could be back at their hives fucking around on the internet.
After they’re done, though, the next bulge is different. This one lowblood-hot, sliding in slow until you’re stretched around the base, moving in a rhythm predictable enough to let you relax as you take it. You’re full enough to feel it pulse against the walls of your nook, and you have to hope this troll lasts, because their rolling, placid motion is really doing it for you. You thought you’d pretty much run dry for the night, but you can feel your own genetic material welling up, soaking through the lacy fabric around the portal and trickling down your thighs. You wonder who it is that's fucking you now, and how they feel about it. Secreterror, maybe, or janitormentor. Someone overworked and underpaid who spends all day dealing with assholes, and now, at the end of the quarter, they’re finally getting a much-needed reward. Which is you. You guess you’re OK with that. Your nook is unreachable to anyone on this side of the portal, but you tease at the opening of your sheath through your boxers and the Transportalingerie beneath them, and even though you’re tired, you’re not even surprised when your bulges slip easily into your hand. The satin lining of the panties is soft and sleek when they press against it, curling into your palm, and your breath escapes in a long hiss.
Slow is good, after the night you’ve had, and so is fabric between your hand and your oversensitive bulges. You lie back with one leg hanging off the loungeplank and stroke yourself almost lazily, in no more hurry to get off than the troll on the other end seems to be. It’s easy enough to let your hips lift, seeking a better angle, offering one. You can just let them use you, feel the way they push as deep as you can take them, unconcerned with what you’re thinking or feeling but still so incongruously gentle. They could be anyone you might pass on the street, neither one of you knowing, and there’s something freeing about that thought. You don’t have to wonder about who they are, and you already know what they want. You can do what they’re doing, and sink into the sensation of something slick and hot inside you, velvet-soft but unrelentingly strong. You grip your bulges lightly, letting them twine around each other, every serpentine slide of one against the other sending tiny, crackling psionic sparks up and down your spine. That’s all you need, and if you could, you’d draw it out for as long as possible, riding the line between almost enough and too much, but the bulge inside you doesn’t let you pick the pace. It’s an insistent, unyielding presence, its steady motion rolling over every part of your nook, until you spill out over your thighs and abdomen in a shivery, exhausted wave of pleasure. The lowblood is still there when you collapse back against the cushions, finally starting to come. They flood you with heat, and you lie back until they finish too.
After they do, nobody replaces them. Party’s over, probably. You’re done for the day. Your pizza’s cold, your nook is twinging with random aftershocks, and you’re feeling sticky and wrung out. Maybe every second troll in the Empire is going to want your full attention in a minute, but you can still throw yourself into the recuperacoon and crash. You pry yourself off the sofa, which you don’t have to deal with until later. Thank fuck for plastic, too, and being too exhausted to give a shit about anything. Nobody interrupts you as you get a glass of water, peel off your boxers and toss them into the laundrifier to worry about tomorrow, and grab a change of Transportalingerie because the old ones are about as wrecked as you are. You probably have time for a shower, which is good, because you both desperately need and desperately want one.
As you’re on your way to the ablutionblock, your palmhusk buzzes where you left it on the floor, and you’re still awake enough to call it to you with a flick of psionic power. What you see, when you switch it on, is an image of a portal-linked belt hanging from one very sharp-looking tine of a trident, captioned FIS)(ION ACCOMPLIS)(ED!! 38D
.
Officially-speaking, in addition to scorched-Alternia sanitation breaks throughout the night, your sentence allows you fifteen minutes in the ablution trap every morning and evening to scrub your nether regions before the monitoring device starts emitting a warning shriek, plus an additional five before it becomes the kind of problem with legal ramifications. You’ve hacked the timer, so it’s not urgent, but wasting time in the shower still increases the chance you’ll get caught with your creepy communal fuckpants off, so you’ve been trying to keep your ablutions efficient. But now that the device is in FF’s claws, there’s no one who will care if they decide to go for it and find nothing on the other side, which means you have the full luxury of time and hot water at your disposal. You place your new, clean pair of panties in full view anyway, in case any fuchsia tentacles make an appearance, but the link remains inert. You’re not surprised, because Feferi simply isn’t somebody who does shit like that without asking first, but another time, you might have been disappointed.
Right now, you’re too worn out to be anything but glad. The steam when you turn the heat up is bliss, the hot water is better, and the total lack of demands on your time and your body is best of all. You scrub yourself down, reveling in the new and alien concept of having some privacy for a change, and then when you’re done with that, you scrub yourself down again. Sensations wash over you, not fully under your control but close enough to count: your own claws in your hair. Suds running down your back. The simple, undemanding pleasure of being completely and entirely clean. You linger until the water starts to turn lukewarm, then step out into the soothing humidity of the block, reaching for your towel. Almost against your will, your attention drifts over to the countertop where you left the obnoxious fucking panties.
You could just… leave them off, even though your sentence isn’t over. You could have an uninterrupted day, and an evening featuring zero contact, sexual or otherwise, with any troll except yourself.
What you find yourself doing instead is lifting the things in a telekinetic glow, turning them around in midair, considering the way the bright ablutionblock light catches the embroidered trident emblem and makes the gold thread gleam. Yeah, they’re tacky as hell, but now that Feferi’s got the other side of the portal in her possession, it’s easy to think of that royal fuchsia not as Imperial but as hers. If you put your half back on, you’d be hers too, whenever and wherever she wants you. You swallow hard, then let your towel fall then tug the panties over your walkstubs and up until they sit close against your scrawny hips. The portal hums when it first touches you, then goes latent — well-hidden, if you didn’t realize, but there’s no way you can override the awareness of it, not uncomfortable, just there. Maybe Feferi’s thinking about it too, and all she needs is for you to ask.
Acting on impulse, you snap a pic of yourself with ablutionwater still beaded on your skin and the panties slung low, trying to ignore that the stupid lacy things look ridiculous on you, and send FF a quick message:
TA: naptiime. giive me 2even hour2 at lea2t.
TA: after that… maybe you could wake me up. iif you know what ii mean and ii 2ure fuckiing hope you do.
TA: and before you a2k, ye2 ii mean iit and ye2 iim 2hore.
There’s no reply before you drop into the recuperacoon like a rock, but you weren’t expecting one. You’ll get your answer tomorrow. For now, you submerge yourself up to your chin in warm, welcoming sopor, and you finally..
.
You wake up floating.
Your eyes are still closed, and your hair brushes the back of your neck, drifting in the current of the ‘cupe’s filtering mechanism. There’s something soft and slender moving between your legs: the very tip of an unfurling tendril, cold and curious and familiar.
Hey, FF, you think. Missed you.
You could tell her that yourself, but you’re not going to rouse yourself by reaching for your palmhusk, so you’ll have to trust that she knows. You’ll get off later, probably, to this or the memory of this, but you’re still half asleep and languid from the sopor, and doing nothing feels like a really good idea. So you lean back, letting the slime buoy you up, and feel half a perigee’s worth of tension leave you in a sigh as Feferi’s bulge coils a little further into you. She’s big, but she’s patient, and it’s easy to take her in and just hold her there as you let your body figure out whether it would rather be all the way awake or all the way asleep, or just suspended in this comfortable halfway state until she comes or you do. You reach down, not to touch yourself but to trace the outline of the trident emblem, before your claws uncurl again.
Sleep, you decide, and the last things you're aware of as you let it happen are the full, wriggling motion of Feferi's bulge and the flow of sopor on your inner thighs as your legs drift open. There's time for sleep. You’ve got a long, lazy evening ahead of you, and she can have as much of it as she likes.