Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first day of a new excavation is always the worst, and Aradia feels all nine hours spent kneeling on a too-thin foam pad while digging at a square of indifferent, hard packed earth with a trowel. The raw knees and aching lower back and knotted shoulders are more than worth it in the long run, but that doesn’t make dealing with them any easier this evening, especially when her moirail has also had a shitty night.

Her stiff fingers tremble as she flips through the keychain for their hive key. In the short time it took to pick up Sollux and drive home, the rain had progressed from a light sprinkle to an outright downpour. It’s not long before Aradia’s curls are a sodden mess, her clothes soaked through.

Gradually, her attention becomes reattuned to Sollux’s grumpy monologue.

“—and I’m telling you, he smiles at you and it doesn’t reach his eyes, it’s as creepy as shit and I think you should get a good look at him because he OBVIOUSLY has NO FUCKING SOUL and maybe you could figure out where it flew off to and spare us all in the Computer Science Department the horror of facing YET ANOTHER ONE OF HIS FACULTY MEETINGS, and hey, if you could open the door any time soon that would be really great because I’m getting slightly drenched.”

“I’m trying, just a second—”

The key jams in the lock and Aradia growls under her breath as she wrenches it out and tries again. This stupid door is always finicky at the worst times, and all she wants to do is eat a piece of the fancy cake Sollux bought her, immerse herself in a hot mineral bath, and maybe convince him to brush out her hair—

The door swings open and she’s hit with a smell she can’t name right away, something cold and vaporous that invades her sinuses so strongly that it overwhelms the rest of her senses. An absurd thought enters her head: it’s a neon smell, my hive reeks of the aurora borealis.

Beside her, Sollux shakes his head to clear it, similarly startled, before his hand slips into hers and squeezes it. The rain pounding forgotten behind them, they take in the utter freakshow that is their media block.

The gander box has gone insane, flitting from channel to channel between bursts of shrieking white noise and distorted, unintelligible voices. Framed photos jerk violently on the walls, as if trying to hurl themselves off their hooks. The bookshelves are quaking, almost to the point of inching across the floor. The books they once held are floating in slow, random paths across the room, while Sollux’s white rain screening device flares open halfway and starts spinning gently toward them.

A sharp wind blasts them in the face and the device flares open, revealing words written in purple marker across it: “HAPPY WRIGGLING DAY, YOU CREEPY ASSHOLE. <> ”

Aradia feels a phantom hand pap her ass. A split second later, Sollux stiffens and yelps.

She throws her head back and bursts into delighted cackles. “KARKAT, OH MY GOD THIS IS SO SWEET OF YOU. How long did this TAKE?”

He doesn’t answer, but for a split second they both catch a flicker of him standing near the coffee table: a faint static shadow of his nubbyhorned outline and a hint of a crescent smile.

Chapter Text

Sollux shows all the classic signs of having spent the day fighting off a migraine: stuffed up sinuses, a stiff neck, watery eyes, shaking hands, and a telltale pallor that means he's vomited recently—a pale tinge around his mouth, a yellow nose. He moves delicately throughout his block as he pulls on clothes, as if moving through the still, wax-smelling air hurts, as though anything firmer than the lightest tread might send spiderweb cracks through the floor.

He emerges wearing regular sunglasses instead of his red and blue ones. His clothes are rumpled, his tie is crooked, and his buttons don't line up. Aradia wouldn't let him step outside like that, but the new excavation means she has to leave the hive much earlier than he does.

Sollux flicks on the ablution trap light and flinches in spite of his shades. There is a message written on a waterproof whiteboard next to the mirror: TAKE YOUR FUCKING PILLS, SOLLUX.

The thought of swallowing anything right now sounds incredibly unpleasant, and on top of that, Sollux's pills have the downside of making him feel queasier than he already is. He scrunches up his face at the message, then sticks out his tongue as the mirror wobbles menacingly.

“Okay, fine, keep your incorporeal pants on.”

He is between migraines right now, the horrible throbbing from the day before having receded to a crawling, nervy pain that's almost tolerable as long as he keeps his shades on and doesn't look at anything too quickly. He can tell he is between migraines because he is fucking exhausted, to the point where opening the lids on his pill box is difficult. He doesn't dare use his psi lest it trigger another attack, and so he fumbles with his fingers a moment before sighing in relief as the lids flip up by themselves.

“Thanks.”

While Sollux picks out his breakfast of painkillers, caffeine pills, vitamins, and mood stabilizers, Karkat floats a filled paper cup his way. The sudden movement startles him, but once he realizes what it is he huffs a laugh and downs the pills, then the water. There's only a slight urge to gag as they go down.

“Gonna nanny me all day, tiny?”

Of course there's no audible answer. Sollux goes through the motions of brushing his teeth and shaving, watching out of the corner of his eye as Karkat makes the marker write more words.

MIDTERM NIGHT, FUCKPOLE. NEED YOU SHARP.

“Yeah, yeah...”

Midterm night is a night they both enjoy. Sollux loves it because he gets to sit in his plush leather desk chair and enjoy the terrified silence as he picks out one by one which students haven’t studied. Karkat loves it because he gets to float above the heads of Sollux's pupils and pick out the cheaters.

It's a careful system the two of them have perfected throughout the perigees. So far no one has discovered Sollux's secret, and if anyone notices the biting chill that looms in the schoolblock, all they do is ask him why he runs the cooling unit so high.

The student body is frightened of Sollux; his ability to figure out what they're up to before they are even able to put their entire plan into action has gained him the reputation as being some kind of unregistered mind reader. His drawer of confiscated palmhusks and calculators and phones has grown full to bursting. As the end of the semester draws closer, few students dare risk cheating in his class, making the rare ones who do a special treat.

Even so, there's still a part of him that wants nothing more than to turn around, trudge back into his block, and lie in his cupe with all the lights off for the rest of the night. He wouldn't do that to his moirail, though, especially since he knows he wouldn't get a minute's peace once Karkat started rattling the recuperacoon and making the air vents howl curses until he reemerged.

He gathers his keys, his wallet, his campus badge. Patting his pockets, he stares at the quiet order of their front room, at his sleeping electronics and Aradia's bookshelves and her tidy piles of throw pillows encrusted with beads and sequins and tiny mirrors that nobody could lie on comfortably to save their lives, and the last thing Sollux wants to do is go wait for a bus in the rain.

Ram mom is curled up in her basket near the front door. He bends down to scritch her wiry-furred head in passing, and her tiny tapered feet twitch in her sleep.

The trip to campus takes a small eternity. Sollux spends it sitting squashed between a dozing person with six bags of groceries at her feet and a burly guy bobbing his head to whatever trash was playing on his headphones. They emit piercing squeaks that drill right into Sollux's pan, and every time the bus lurches to a stop, he has to duck out of the path of one of his enormous horizontally spiralling horns. Someone's ferret lusus is running up and down the aisle, and Sollux can hear someone having a tremendous one-sided argument with their kismesis on their palmhusk.

By the time his stop arrives, the dull pangs in his head have escalated to a steady pounding. After almost tripping over his own feet getting off the bus, he finds himself staring in the wake of its departure at a dome shaped like an enormous strawberry where the bus stop should be.

It takes a second to remember. Some asshole recently approved a six perigee art installation that replaced all the bus stops with brightly-colored food shaped enclosures. There's half an orange near the on-campus hives, a lime outside the math and science building, an apple near the library, and an honest-to-god cherry red gummy fish near the dissection arena.

Sollux squeezes his eyes shut and sighs through gritted teeth. “I don't know if I can do this.”

He feels a soft touch of icy cold on the right side of his face that has nothing to do with the gusty, rainy wind. Sollux's features soften and he lets his shoulders slump.

“Okay, let's do this.”

* * * *

Sollux sprawls in his high-backed desk chair, crosses his feet on the desk, and stares over steepled fingers at the quiet, solemn students shuffling to their desks, each of them immersed in their own private bubble of pre-test nervousness and despair. He takes his time in filling out the attendance registry. They’re almost all highbloods, this bunch, although he spots a few teals and greens here and there. No one over nine sweeps old, though there's a little seadweller prodigy sitting in the back row who's only six.

Soon the din of shuffling test pamphlets and scraping chairs fades, and he lets a beat of silence stretch before he addresses the room.

“Well, then. Here we are. Good evening and welcome to the single most important exam you'll ever take. I'm sure you're more than aware of the rules for on-site testing, but just in case you've all developed a sudden case of amnesia, here's what you're not allowed to bring into this room: no computers, no palmhusks, no listening or recording devices, no cameras. No crabpods or grubs. No notes, no scratch paper, no unapproved calculators. And please, for the sake of my migraine, no fucking watches that beep.

“I shouldn't have to tell you what will happen if I catch any of you with these objects, but I will anyway: you will never see them again. They will disappear into my keeping, and when the Deans are through with you, you’ll wish you would have crawled back up the Mother Grub's reproductive orifice when you had the chance.

“But I know in my bloodpump that you are all good little test-taking champions who would never sabotage your unfledged careers with cheating,” He favors the sea of miserable faces with a broad, insincere smile. “You have one hour. Good luck.”

Thirty minutes later, Sollux is having serious doubts as to whether or not his evening is going to get any more exciting. Every so often he'll take a brief stroll throughout the room to improve his circulation and ensure everyone is behaving themselves. He walks at an easy, deliberate pace, his hands clasped behind him, and lets his eyes travel over them. The room is quiet, the collective hush of a tense and wary herd, and he wonders how different things might be if they knew he was fighting off dizzy nausea with every step.

It's the worst at his desk. He must look alert, ready to address any concern or question. Staying awake is a struggle, especially with no tech of his own to play with. He is allowed to keep his palmhusk in case of emergencies, provided he keeps the alarm silent and disables any web access. There is no danger of it being hacked via outside sources; he secured the device himself.

That leaves his smartwatch, a wriggling day gift from Aradia. He's required to have one on him just in case someone finds a way to mess with on-campus timepieces, but it's also blocked from the internet and most of its apps are disabled during testing. There's only so long Sollux can spend checking the weather (more fucking rain) or watching it monitor his heart rate before he gives up fiddling with it altogether.

He wonders what Karkat is up to.

Then, a miracle. There is a moment's chill over his right hand, and Sollux smiles as a sticky note app appears on the face of his watch:

FOURTH ROW, LAST SEAT. BUGGED LEFT EARRING. GO GET'EM. <>

Without lifting his chin from his hand, he looks at the seat in question and feels a disappointed pang. There sits the little prodigy, scribbling answers and animatedly punching things into her calculator. Elvira Something. With her heavily made up face and manicured nails, she could be any self-absorbed juvenile blowing her monthly stipend on licorice scottie dogs and clam phone minutes. She is covered in gold—gold rings on each finger, thin gold bangles ringing softly on her wrists; even the spikes on her custom sharkskin jacket are gold.

From the bottommost tines of each ear dangle a single perfect amethyst suspended inside a hoop-shaped bony fish. Without Karkat's help, he never would have guessed they were anything but more seadweller bling.

He wonders if she made them herself.

Sollux's eyes drift shut. It's always better when he can tell they're lazy, apathetic little shits with a thrilling future in babysitting datagrubs—but he's seen this one work, and had she played by the rules for a sweep or two until graduation, she could have been something great.

A test like this should have been as easy as breathing for her.

What a fucking waste.

Sollux sighs through his nose and senses a new stillness settle over the room. He knows this silence. It means everyone else has clued in on what's about to happen, and instead of working on their tests they are sitting very still at their desks, staring at their half-filled answer sheets without seeing them, waiting.

He doesn't regret, exactly, what he's about to do, but he can't say he's going to enjoy it.

It only takes a moment's concentration. A sharp, hideous pain blossoms behind his oculars, but it's worth it to hear a pressurized pop as Elvira's left earring explodes in a mess of blue and red sparks.

She jumps out of her fucking skin. Her shriek is ear-splitting in the tiny classroom, echoing off walls and bouncing back. Clutching at her ear and blinking back pained tears, she whips her head up to snarl at him in baffled outrage, all her tiny needle teeth bared.

“WHAT THE FUCK--”

Sollux gives her a single long, knowing look and enjoys the satisfaction of getting to watch dawning horror take over the fury on her face as she realizes what he just did and why he just did it.

“Oh, Elvira,” he says quietly.

He draws out his disgusted pause just long enough for her to notice that everyone in the room is staring at her like she's just signed her own culling warrant.

“Shit.”

He purses his lips in grim agreement and rises from his chair. “I'm sure your classmates are going to love how much more difficult you've made things.”

Sollux's spine is very straight as he crosses the space between them in four long, angry strides. She flinches as he snatches up her test pamphlet without looking at it, the paper crinkling.

“N-no, wait, fuck, I—”

“Out.”

His whisper cuts her off as effectively as a shout. Elvira gapes at him a moment before her face goes coldly furious. Trembling, her glossy lips pressed into a thin line, she stuffs her calculator into her purse, grabs her jacket, and exits in a flurry of clicking boots and chiming jewelry.

She doesn't slam the door, but the look she gives him over her shoulder is so loaded with crackling hate that, by all intents and purposes, it should have stopped his pump in his chest.

Sollux looks at the rest of the room and everyone finds their answer sheets very interesting all of a sudden.

“You have fifteen minutes left.”

It's a miracle that he manages to walk in a straight line back to the desk. His chair wobbles and creaks as he flops unsteadily into it. Fumbling at the topmost drawer, he brings out a bottle of triptan tablets and swallows two of them dry.

On his palmhusk, there's a new sticky note waiting:

WHOA.
DID SHIT JUST GET CALIGINOUS IN HERE?

Sollux snorts and buries his face in his arms. He is miserable, he is exhausted, and the inside of his thinkpan is hosting its very own private armageddon; fuck looking professional.

There is a small breath of coolness against the back of his hand, like a puff of air escaping a cryogenic storage seal. A moment later, two spots of intense cold alight on his horns and linger, numbing chill radiating downward in gentle pulses so that it spreads across his scalp.

Sollux shuts his eyes and breathes.