Chapter Text
Sollux starts seizing while you're asleep. Or half-asleep, which is about as far as you go these days. Hearing him cry out insensibly is what wakes you up. Karkat's managed to alchemize a thermometer out of a husktop thermosensor and some other pieces and you've been tracking his temperature that way; you can't use it right now but you don't need to know that he's hotter than before, and you're downright frightened for him, and after he stops thrashing you and Karkat haul him into a sponge bath.
And then Karkat leaves you alone with him, leaving you sitting there terrified that this has done permanent damage, that Sollux just won't wake up again.
But somehow, mercifully, when Sollux comes out of it he's actually lucid for a moment, enough to see that you're not Aradia, even, and as you dab the blood off his face he says, mushmouthed, "S' all right, Rose, don't... don't worry. 'M technically dead already."
You realize that this bare shadow of a troll is saying this because he is trying to reassure you. To reassure you. Something cracks in you then.
What it is, you can't understand; only that from then on it's like there's a leak inside you, like you're bleeding internally. You can't go on this way and you're going to expire of it eventually and there's nothing to do for it but keep sponging him down and tell yourself inwardly that Everything Is Fine.
Karkat left in the middle of all this and he hasn't come back yet and you have to go find him. You have to leave Sollux alone in a drained bathtub to go find him, because calling for him hasn't helped, and so by the time you find him you are livid.
You immediately understand, at least, why Karkat hasn't heard you calling for him. He's tucked away in the farthest room he could find, busily screaming and punching a wall. When you give him a look of incredulity he starts ranting. Normally you would feel sympathetic. Right now you are far too consumed with worry for Sollux to give a shit, but that doesn't deter him. (Especially because you haven't actually told him to stop ranting, but who lets common sense get in the way of a good head of steam? ... You, usually. But right now, you're too far gone.)
"God, I should have been more observant," he moans, hoarse from yelling. "I should have said something. His hands were shaking, Rose, the day before he fell over, but I didn't say anything, I thought it was too much coffee... A brainless grub could have seen he was sick. I'm the worst -- friend Sollux could possibly have."
As you shove the snub-horned troll physically against the bulkhead you realize three things.
One: shoving a troll at least twice your strength is a remarkably idiotic act. He could have you on the ground in a heartbeat, could have you dead in two, and you hope Dave never gets word of this foolhardy escapade.
Two: Karkat is too fucked up in the head to resist. The wiry muscles under his skin should hold him firmer on his center of gravity than this. You should not be able to grab him by the collar and slam him to the wall. But it doesn't feel like he's consciously giving way, letting you win. He stumbles aimlessly, as if his emotional state has sapped his ability to direct his movement.
Three: the hesitation when he said "friend" means he's stupidly in love.
Then you have the heels of your hands pressed into his collarbones and you're shouting at him at the top of your voice. "Fuck you! This is not about you. This is not your fault. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine. I brought the boatload of toxic alien bacteria, remember? Me. Not you. You are, in this instance, required to sit your fucking ass down and let someone else take the blame this time."
He takes a breath like he means to protest, but sags against the wall instead. Your feeble human pinning efforts make very little difference once he decides to let gravity take over. "I just... should have noticed..."
"Trust me," you tell him. "You cannot hope to defeat me at the business of not recognizing when things get truly awful because normal is so close to awful anyway. I'm simply the best there is."
~~~
The others return from their exploratory mission. You set Kanaya to the task of culturing out Sollux's blood, though if the hypothesis you've all sort of agreed upon for his illness is accurate, playing find-the-microbe is probably not useful and will take too long to do any good anyway. But you feel your mother would not respect you if you did not at least try. You expect to have to explain a lot more than you do, but Kanaya knows a lot of things; and she knows them in the way of someone who's had to figure them out for yourself.
You wish, not for the first time, that you had grown up with trolls around you instead of humans, all full of irons in the fire and the stalwart psychological calluses of neglect, every last one of them. If you had known these people younger your adolescence would have been less alone.
Sollux's illness is going on three days and you're scared every time you look at him, because the dark-grey cast of his skin means that his filtration sponges might be starting to go. He moves in the pile like he's uncomfortable in his own skin.
Sometimes he calls you by your name and other times he calls you Aradia but every time he calls for you, you let him hold your hand, and his face relaxes a little and it looks like he's in a little less pain.
~~~
There was a question, once, and you were going to answer it. A problem, and you were going to solve it. That's what a doctor does, your mother would tell you, along with Being Fine No Matter What. You're not a doctor. But that is also what a Seer does, and you are a Seer.
Sollux got the first half of something, once, shoved into him by their fascist Empire, and whatever it is is going to kill him unless you can figure out the second half. With everyone else there you can break from support care long enough to read more, and you do. You start getting to know Sollux better thorough the files on his husktop.
This is where you find the missing piece, the information you're looking for: an extremely locked-down folder named fucked up 2hiit.
Even after you get Sollux's password from him you can't get in on the first try and it takes Karkat fifteen minutes of fooling around with encryption settings before the contents are visible. He looks pleased with himself when he's done and mutters something about that damned modus being educational after all.
Educational isn't even the half of what's in the folder.
Journal articles and schematics and files that look like photocopies of photocopies and it looks like the kind of careless "download all the things" file pile you'd get from a torrent site and all of it is horrible.
It only barely surprises you, that Sollux knew that someone was probably going to cut him open and make him into a starship - what the early immunological priming was for. The amount of information on it here belies the practiced denial that was in his voice when he said 'unfit'.
At times when Sollux is sleeping but you are too worked-up to nap and too tired to read you sometimes curl around a notebook and work on the list you've begun making, which is titled Positive Things About the Universes Ending.
A lot of things about the Alternian Empire no longer existing go on that list.
Then you hit paydirt.
It helps when you run everything through an alphabet filter so you can skim the titles in a hurry. But you find one stray little article: Immunological Effects of Tyrian-Blood Tissue Cultures in Helmsblock Biotech and the word 'immunological' sticks out to you like it's written in bright light and suddenly you know what you're looking for.
Cause and effect; question and answer. What they did to him boosted his innate immunity. The biotech they were going to splice into his system - that would have boosted adaptive immunity. The kind that remembers antigens, that gives rise to cells that 'tag and bag'. Something about superior immune recognition in longer-lived, cooler-blooded trolls who can't handle as much inflammation - and how, surprise, this carries over when you use their tissue as the seed starter for biotech, and then there's reams and reams of information that you skim just well enough to find descriptions of what the cells and the molecules they make are actually doing.
You don't have hospital resources here; you don't have a full chemistry lab; you don't have any of the extremely specialized equipment you would need to deal with this from the standpoint of human medical research that you knew about.
But this paper is a game-changer.
Because what you do have is an alchemiter, and the corpse of a Tyrian-blooded troll, and you think you know what you can do.
~~~
"You're telling me... you made a serum out of Feferi."
"Yes. Or more accurately..."
"I'm not sure I need accuracy," Karkat says. "It's going to cure Sollux?"
"We can hope so. There are never clear-cut answers in these matters."
"He won't... reject it or something?" Karkat has been listening to you babble, apparently. You feel kind of guilty that you haven't been giving his ranting similar consideration, but you've really been too busy for that.
"Shouldn't, no." This whole thing became more comprehensible when you understood that the Tyrian lineage is technically part Horrorterror. It makes more sense knowing that. It even cheers you up, because you understand Horrorterrors on some level and for you they are in the category of empirical and sensible things in a way that the rest of this situation is not.
Their language is an ur-language, so of course their cells should be ur-cells, timeless, incomprehensible, unrejectable.
That still does not mean you alchemized the right thing.
If the serum works, it doesn't matter that you don't have a full array of sterile injection equipment. If the serum doesn't work, it also doesn't matter that you don't have a full array of sterile injection equipment, because if it doesn't work, he's going to die.
Neither you nor Karkat leave the room for a long time after you inject your concoction.
~~~
When he wakes up again and is hungry, it's wonderful and awful.
Karkat kisses him all over his face and you...
You can't feel anything at all, and for days that was the opposite of a problem; but now it's wrong, you're wrapped in foam and when the bleeding inside your soul stopped it dried into a huge immovable clot and you have to walk out of the room, drifting aimlessly, hearing the voices inside like they're calling through an echoing void. You have to stand outside. Or fall over. Falling over seems like a good idea right now.
You let Karkat and Terezi help Sollux back to the land of the living, and you lie down and sleep like something dead.
~~~
It's not your idea to go near anyone, but there are only so many places to go on the meteor. Which is how Sollux finds you, a day later, staring out a viewport. He's shaky on his feet and you think it's probably his first time walking.
You can't speak. You won't. You won't breathe; you won't open your mouth. Because if you open your mouth you'll start crying and you are not allowed to start crying it is absolutely not permitted you are Rose Lalonde and you hobnob with horrorterrors and learn everything about everything and you are competent and you handle everything when no one else can --
-- and all of your resolve to stand there and not breathe is made of something extremely vulnerable to skinny troll hands because when Sollux rests his on the back of your neck, it breaks.
You cry silently though and you don't speak until you think you can articulate something without blubbering, but he speaks first. "Hey," he says. "Hey."
Long breaths, slow, shaky, you're trying to navigate your way back to speaking.
"I'm told I spent a while thinking you were my former moirail," he says.
"It doesn't matter," you say quietly and it was the wrong thing to say, because of how he looks at you - guarded, near defeat. "I mean. I don't mind."
"I'm sure it gave you an extremely classy impression and all."
"That's beside the point."
"What is the point?" he asks. "For you, I mean. You're a human. You don't have the same emotions we do. So is there a point?"
And you're caught up by a plaintive note in his voice. You know that tone: you haven't heard it from him when he was well before, only when he was ill and trying to reassure you that it was okay if he died and calling for someone who was sometimes you and sometimes Aradia.
"What am I supposed to say, Sollux? Of course there's a point. I spent days knowing that it would break me into pieces if you died on my watch. That is certainly not a prime example of the professionalism that I'm only really mimicking as a protective instinct. But I also don't think I want to sleep with you." You can't afford to look him in the eye. You'll only see him again, and find it twice as hard to keep talking.
"Rose," he says. "Look. I don't blame you if you want to turn away. But there is a word for that--"
"I know, okay? I know about quadrants. I read things. So yes, I think I'm having a troll emotion. Is that acceptable?" Your voice breaks a little, around the defensiveness.
"Is it acceptable, she asks. I don't know. Is it?" You're aware of Sollux's hand still there on the back of your neck, telling you of reciprocation, telling you what his words aren't. Then he asks more seriously. "Is it? Because I have a terrible track record at protecting the people I care about. They do altogether too well at protecting me. Even Feferi," he says, and you realize someone must have told him about the serum, about your callous act of science. "I'm still not sure how I feel about that."
"How do you want to feel about that?" And you're going into a therapist-tone, translucent and reflective, and some of the tightness fades out of his voice.
"I don't know," he says. "I'm not sure I deserve it."
"I didn't know her," you tell him. "But somehow, I am certain she would be pleased to know that she saved your life."
"You saved my life," he says softly, and there's a wondering note in his voice and something in you sings it back at him, silently, in a way that has nothing to do with your secondhand medical expertise.
"I also nearly killed you!" Suddenly you're standing apart, across from him, breathing hard, and his hand has dropped from your neck. "I should have thought about that before showing up here - I -"
All of the failures and misjudgments are crashing in on you at once so fast you can't even recite them. Stepping into your role in foreordained events without questioning. Failing to save your mother and John's father. And you can't breathe, and you're dizzy, and -
-- then you're being held. His arms are still birdlike from his sickness and he's warm but no longer too warm and just feeling that, feeling the temperature of his skin and knowing you helped, knits together that imaginary wound inside you and something is different than what it was.
"It's acceptable," you murmur, and you hold him up as he stumbles against you, still weak. "It's acceptable."