Work Text:
They test Nepeta, because her olive is yellow enough to be a possibility. Even Equius can’t get her out of it, because Engineradicators mean nothing if there are no ships.
She fails, and the two of them pile as best they can in the Processing Pit blankets and shake and shake. It’s almost a relief that Aradia is dead, because Equius can pine for her ghost and talk to her on Trollian when she lets him and they can all forget that she would have passed the tests.
The flying colors are rust through olive, and it’s one of Gamzee’s miracles that two of the three of them have somehow failed. It’s tragic, of course, and they should be ashamed that they can’t serve the Empire in a more useful capacity, but Eridan and Tavros have made it known that they don’t want to be disturbed as they set about celebratorily wrecking Eridan’s block.
Nepeta curls herself around Equius and revels in the sheer animal comfort of his presence. Poor Sollux, being told by robotically cheerful voices to rejoice, has no one to curl up with but his laptop. He and Feferi are avoiding each other until after her Challenge.
The outcome doesn’t matter as much to her and Equius: there will always be a need for Hunterrorists and Engineradicators, and with Nepeta’s failure, they’ll be able to do what they want, go where they want, live the lives they want.
Equius clutches tighter, and Nepeta can feel her ribs creak. She hums a little, the closest to a purr her voicebox can produce, and runs her fingers through his hair.
**
He goes to see the Challenge even though it’s been a silent mutual agreement to stay away from each other until everything is over. Sollux can’t not watch his beautiful sharp princess fight a monster. He’d never been able to watch her with her lusus, because the pressure that deep was too much even in a diving suit, but he’d been able to imagine it, imagine her soft curves and clouds of hair made mere extensions of the hand holding her culling fork as she wrangles dead lusii into that gaping maw. Everything about her is deadly power, and he’s compelled to watch her bring it to bear against the Condesce.
Well, he can watch the first hour, at least, if it lasts that long. After that, his intake group is supposed to report to Flight Preparannihilation for a health check and their pre-surgery boosters. Klaxons sound the approach of the Condesce, and a wave of chucklevoodoo sweeps over the crowd, courtesy of the attendant Cultists. Sollux presses his hands together and resists the urge to abscond. He’ll stay for this, and he’ll watch, because it’s his future on the line either way.
Feferi steps into the arena, hair knotted back in chunks of seashell but the mass of it still hanging low. They’d talked about cutting it, getting it too short to be used against her in a fight, but she’d taken on that light of conviction that made her almost glow and said that, no, they’d leave it: the reporterrorists already had vid of her like this, and she wasn’t going to show them any fear. Her grip on the fork is loose, like the massive thing taller than she is is no kind of weight at all, like she’s carrying it along absently as she goes for a walk.
She looks up into the stands, and her eyes shoot to Sollux unerringly. He shrugs, a little, and tries to smile.
She smiles back brilliantly, vicious teeth on full display, and his blood-pusher is full, full to overflowing. He doesn’t cheer, because cheering is bad form and has been known to get everyone in an entire section culled, but he makes a heart of his hands and shows it to her.
Her smile widens fractionally, and then she turns away to face the Condesce as she enters. She’s all death and hair, easily three times Feferi’s size, and her culling fork is scaled to match.
The klaxon sounds again, signalling the start of the Challenge.
It’s over almost before it begins.
it doesn’t go well.
Sollux leaves the stands feeling as if everything inside him has already been replaced by plasteel and scandium, and doesn’t pick up his palmhusk when it vibrates. It’ll be Aradia, he knows, because she still speaks to the other dead.
He double-checks his bags mechanically. He ignores his devices as they go off, all of them, with alerts of incoming messages. He can’t right now. He just can’t. It’s not just a broken heart, another dead girlfriend like Vriska mocked him for collecting after trying to auspistice between her and Terezi went bad: it’s that his whole future is fucked. His whole future is shit, and, once they’re done with him, he’s going to like it.
He reports in on time, and he doesn’t look any more hollow-eyed and broken than anyone else, and that feels right, because they’re none of them anything but husks.
The best of them need two nights of boosters before they’re deemed fit for surgery. Sollux needs three, because he’s apparently bordering on malnourished or energy drink overdose or something. He doesn’t listen to the technical explanations.
He doesn’t listen to much of anything. She’s dead, so what does it matter?
They don’t get the time to just sit around and wait for the boosters to do their job: they have ship schematics to look at and they get to put in for assignments. Whether or not they actually get the assignments they put in for looks like it depends partly on power, partly on hemocaste, and mostly on having higher-blooded quadrantmates.
He and Equius had enough of a thing over pushing the bounds of hardware and software to do their duty to Empire, but there’s no future in it, and Sollux isn’t going to go asking for favors. Sollux puts in for a Battleship, because why the fuck not? It’d be badass if he got it, but it doesn’t really matter. Nothing matters.
A lot of his intake group spend their few off-hours with quadrantmates, curled up in semi-public debauchery or behind closed but un-sound-proofed doors. There’s even one pair who go suddenly and violently pale for each other that first night, and Sollux hates them, a little, as he goes off to talk to his ghosts.
The third night, their group is half what it was, and the brittle-smiled teal who’s been training them tells them that it doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t get the assignments they want, because acclimation after surgery is a whole different world and they won’t all progress through that the same.
Sollux just wants to know how long until they let him die. They won’t, of course, or not on purpose. There’s no point to him dying when he can be useful instead, and they won’t want to have wasted boosters and operating room time on him. He’s going to be alive for a long time, for a given value of ‘alive.’
He curls up in a blanket alone, his husktop fan the closest approximation of Aradia’s warmth he’s felt in years, and asks if he can join her.
She says no, of course, and he turns off his husktop and goes to wallow in sopor until it’s time for surgery. It’s hard to forgive being required to live.
They anesthetize him, which is a relief and a change in policy. Traditional thought holds that awareness of the nerve grafts as they take place makes for a better connection over time, but Kanaya and Equius and Tavros had written a persuasive enough paper about paradigm shift, cognitive dissonance, grub development, and non-traumatic nerve growth that Sollux’s group is the second to have a test group who receives anesthesia.
So Sollux goes to sleep, and wakes up to aches and a general lightness of being that can probably be attributed to the lack of arms and legs. There are input ports grafted on his shoulders and hips, to make it easy to plug him in, and there’ll be smaller ones all down his spine. He arches his back and the vertebrae pop and the feel of his flesh around metal is almost pleasurable.
A mediterrorist comes in, checks his monitors and his input ports and ignores his troll-self as much as possible.
“When can I get started?” he asks, and his voice comes out raspy, like he’s been under a long time. The idea of it worries him, because if it’s taken him a long time to recover, he’ll get some tiny little ship, some backwater shipping piece of shit.
The mediterrorist twitches and looks at his face for the first time, seemingly shocked when she meets his eyes. “I’ll check with the Engineradicators. None of this Ascension group are trained up yet on installation.”
She leaves him there, and Sollux drifts on boredom. There’s no way to get online like this, which is both deeply anxiety-inducing and peaceful. He has no way to contact anyone. He’s used to being online or at least working on computers at least ten hours a night, as many as twenty when he isn’t required to socialize face to face. He’s used to his whole in-clade being a keystroke away, to never being truly out of contact, to never being alone. But he doesn’t think he could deal with them, with their varied concern and horror and pride. This is probably the last time in, like, ever, that his brain’s going to be just him, and, while he hates his brain most of the time, it doesn’t feel like the kind of thing he should throw away. Plus Fef wouldn’t be on, and Aradia would tell him he’s still not allowed to die. So he’ll take his last bubble of silence and hold onto it.
Eventually, he sleeps, and when he wakes up there’s the same mediterrorist and some blue-blooded asshole standing over him. “We’re going to run some tests,” says the asshole.
Sollux nods, even though his feedback is largely irrelevant, and they roll his tank to another room, to what looks like a modified helmscolumn, one without the nutrient tubes and none of the spinal connections. They’re testing only gross motor function, then, which is confirmed when the asshole just sort of heaves him into place with no regard for the fuckton of sensitive wires trailing from the ends of him. It takes what feels like half a sweep but is probably just a few minutes to get everything set up, and then Sollux gets to rattle through some basic commands, starting with what apparently correlates to yaw and pitch and thrust and roll, then adjusting that while keeping a micro life support pod green.
The blueblood doesn’t tell him how he did, but he puts Sollux back in his tank, which means he did well enough not to be culled right away. Sollux doesn’t ask questions, because he’s a battery and he doesn’t matter enough to get answers. They leave him in the tank a while longer. Everything’s starting to hurt less, so he’s healing. He kind of resents it. Everyone else probably healed faster and is already in space, or is dead. Everyone else probably has resolution already.
He considers blowing up the equipment, just to get something to happen.
The blueblood asshole comes back, with another couple bluebloods who look about the same age. “Wheel it to the hangar to start the installation,” the asshole says.
“What kind of ship?” he asks, because he can’t not.
One of the younger bluebloods looks surprised. “You blew away the acclimatization test and didn’t even spend any time screaming. We’re putting you in a Battleship like you wanted.”
Part of him relaxes, because at least he’s not going to spend the rest of his pathetic existence as a garbage scow. They take him to a great huge glorious ship, with gun turrets and launch tubes for fighters and a helmsblock that’s actually nearly part of the bridge, has doors that open directly onto the bridge and a clear view of the main screen and everything. Not that he’ll need the view, once they connect some of the spinal inputs and he’s getting direct video feed from everywhere. The two younger bluebloods start attaching connections under the critical eye of the asshole, and Sollux can feel when systems get properly attached: it’s like getting limbs again, though they’re differently shaped and metal and can do, shit, all kinds of things.
Once the main inputs are connected, the helmscolumn starts helping, tendrils twining out on their own in search of his spinal inputs. The blueblood trainees just need to prod them in the right direction. As they make their soft wet connections, information starts flooding in: vital signs on the ship, engine monitors, life support status, plotted coordinates, flight logs. As more tendrils of the helmscolumn connect, the information flow speeds up, the column trying to get him as up-to-date as possible as fast as possible. The bluebloods start to get irrelevant in the face of trying to process everything, and then he can’t keep up.
Sollux blanks out. It’s not a black-out, because bits of him are still there, sort of, sorting through and prioritizing data. It’s not an active process, not at all, especially once the software module, the one that’ll let him interface with Fleet, goes live. The module temporarily overrides, well, everything, and Sollux goes well and truly offline.
When he comes back, it’s as a Helmsman.
*
Now, everything he does is for the Empire. Which is a positive! A flat monotone positive that doesn’t shift no matter his feelings on anything else. He can see, can grok, can taste the shape of the subroutine his own brain is running to keep that feeling, but he can’t do anything about it.
He almost doesn’t want to. His lusus is dead, Aradia is dead, Feferi is dead or worse, and those parts of him not regulated swing from despair and longing to join them to euphoria at being a fucking spaceship. There is no in-between, none but the fulcrum of the subroutine. He thinks that if there were no fulcrum, he would get lost in one state or the other.
He’s never sure which one is worse. When he’s wallowing, his missing limbs feel like penance. When he’s a fucking spaceship, he’s a fucking spaceship. Not just any spaceship either, but a Battleship, and his fingers are guns (that’s where they went).
KK’s out there somewhere, he and his death-sentence blood hidden thoroughly before Fef went to her Challenge. Eventually he’ll make enough noise to get someone sent after him, because he’s a persuasive seditious bastard. The moderate reforms other parts of their in-clade put forward aren’t enough, and anyway need a violently revolutionary counterpoint in order to seem reasonable. Sollux kind of hopes he’ll be the one sent, because then at least he’ll see KK again before he -
Well.
Sollux as the Battleship Imperator will always be happy to serve the needs of the Empress.