Work Text:
All of my powers, day after day
I can tell you, we swaggered and swayed
Deep in the tower, the prairies below
I can tell you, the telling gets old
Terrible sting and terrible storm
I can tell you the day we were born
1.
"You can't keep me here forever," the little tealbeast hisses at you from where you've got her tied up and sitting on your cave floor. She's purrdy cute when she hisses, even though she sounds more reptilian than feline.
You know you can't keep her here furrever. But you've never heard a live troll talking before. Usually they just squeak a bit, and then they're dead. Pounce doesn't let you eat them, but it's a good hearty meal when she can eat the troll and you can eat the lusus meat. It's nice, because it means you don't have to share your favorite cuts, and it makes the forest safer.
This is the first troll you've ever captured and kept alive- mostly because she's the youngest one you've ever seen wandering unaccompanied by a lusus in your part of the woods. She's also the smallest troll you've ever seen in the woods at all- tealbloods run small, you know that from some scavenged schoolfeeds and some hunting experience, but this one's almost as short as you, and far thinner. Her lusus must be a bad hunter, you think.
She talks very strangely, and holds herself very strangely. After a vicious bit of fighting- and you yelled at Pounce not to interfurr- and getting her hands all tight behind her back, she just went purrfectly still and looked at you.
That's why you blindfolded her. You've never been looked at like that by another living troll, and it bothered the stuffing out of you. But now she's weirdly serene, sitting cross-pawed and straight-spined on the stone floor. She talks with a crisp blueish dialect that you only recognize from those few scrapped out-of-date schoolfeeds- she talks like the educaterrorists. There's none of the haughty twist of snout that you'd expect from a proper highblood, and she didn't even bother shouting out your hue before you blinded her. You prefer the hissing to the serenity, anyways.
"I'm not keeping you," you say finally. "That would be stupid."
"It would," she agrees immediately, dropping the hiss immediately. "Stupid and dangerous and pointless. You can't cull me, and I'm not interested in culling you, so keeping me is very unncessary."
You get the sense that she was waiting a long time to tell you that. You're not totally sure how to let her go, though. She's got some good-sized claws, and some good-sized righteous anger that she's clearly keeping a tight paw on. You don't tell her that, just let her lapse back into her silent straight-spined fury, let her sit it out a while. Later, you just sort of carry her out into the woods, a good safe distance from your cave, and you leave her with one rope strategically frayed, and you go to sleep that morning idly hoping that she gets herself untied before anything scarier than you finds her.
2.
It's very, very nice of her to bring you back to her, uh. Cave-hive and clean up your cuts. Again. You're on the cooler side of teal but not blue enough or big enough to scare most wigglers, and your reputation is not yet established enough that wild little green girls know better than to try and hunt you for sport.
"I wasn't hunting you fur sport!" she insists, and completely ignores when you hiss a little at the sting of alcohol on the neat parallel slices down your leg. She's so matter-of-fact about tugging your jeans off and dabbing at your blood that it doesn't even feel like a pale come-on. If anything, it's too- practiced. Like she does this a lot. But she tells you, "You were just too fur into my territory, it's nothing purrsonal. Your hive's down by the river, right?"
You nod. You're wary about telling strange cat girls in caves about your hive, but considering she's gotten the drop on you twice, and has already got you pantsless and wounded, it can't be much worse. It's certainly much better than the last time, almost a full sweep ago, that she tried to eat you. Or, at least, had a very alarming and loud conversation with her lusus about it.
"So you were hunting me for Not Sport," you say, because it pays to be thorough, and also because you really don't know how to make conversation in a situation like this. You've never been around another troll long enough, really. She wasn't the first one you'd ever seen, but she's the first troll that saw you, and survived. It feels dangerous.
She laughs at you, which feels more dangerous. "I'm not that hungry," she says, and gives a funny look over her shoulder at her lusus, where it's curled up in a massive furry white ball and purring audibly. "Anyways, there's plenty of stupider hoofbeasts in the woods than you, they're much easier for a nice meal. Don't you hunt?" She's finished up on your cuts, apparently, but doesn't move away from you, just pats the frayed white bandage lightly and looks at you, head cocked a little. She looks remarkably like a meowbeast herself. The little raggedy bit of fur pinned like a tail to her hindregion suggests this is intentional.
You affect a shrug, and try and drag your pants back on over the bandages as smoothly as possible. You don't take the opportunity to move away from her, though you can't stop thinking of ways out of this cave. (There's only one way out of this cave.) "When I have to. Grubloaf is okay most times, though." You pause, and think. "Why don't you just eat the rations?"
"Rrrations?" she asks, and tilts her head the other way. The way she rolls her consonants sounds like purring, too. Or growling.
You look around briefly. The cave's not deep, though it's plenty tall and wide. She can't possibly be hiding a thermal hull in any crevices or hidden passages- there are none. There's also no ablutions block, come to think of it, or proper respite block, or recuperacoon that you can see. There's a pile of old schoolfeed grubs, wiggling listlessly in a lightless back corner, and throwing up an impressive stink. You've got your pants on now, which is good, because it means when you reach for your knife in your pocket, there's actually a knife to reach to. You can't believe you didn't put it together the last time you were in this cave- you were blind, but you should've known when you didn't smell the acidic spike of sopor in the air. She's feral.
"Ooh, I wouldn't do that," she says, her big eyes focused tight on your hand where it's tense in your pocket. You glance to where her fist is curled, to expose those claws. Some of your blood dried between her knuckles already, from before. "Remempurr? You're not interested in culling me."
"I wasn't," you agree. You're still not, really- you're interested in not tangling with ferals. Everything in the schoolfeeds has always said ferals are dangerous, and you've seen no evidence that the cat girl's not dangerous, and you're mostly interested in continuing to not be food.
"You still aren't." She hasn't taken those big lamp-eyes off you, not once. You can see where every muscle in her tiny body is coiled tight, ready to spring, but she hasn't moved. "So what if a furr- a few deliveries don't make it? I've got a tricky address. I'm not wild," she adds, quick and forceful. "You're not going to cull me."
You pause. You consider. You don't take your eyes off her, but you take your hand out of your pocket, and rest one bony mitt on her bony shoulder. The both of you are underfed anyways, you think.
3.
You start seeing a lot more of Terezi after she decides to split her grub rations with you. She says they've got a higher fat content, which she says you need, because she says there is nothing sadder than a little purrbeast that's all just fur and bones yowling out in the rain. You ask her if this is a come-on, and she laughs and bops you one, which you like, and you take off your claws and she keeps her knives out of the way so that the two of you can tumble around scratching and punching on the soft leaves of the forest floor. Her part of the woods always has a thick, plush carpet of fat magenta and emerald leaves, and when you scuff them up the air bursts with a sweet pungent smell of rot. You love the nights when both of you retreat back to your hives stinking of it, of the dirt and the rot and the little scuffs and bruises you've given each other.
Since she's giving you grubfeed, you start saving a few cuts of meat for her. The first time you see her eat meat, it's kind of terrifying. She just... swallows almost the whole cut, straight down her gullet, and you can see all her teeth, and there's antlerbeast blood still greening her lips when she gives you the nastiest, hungriest smile you've ever seen in all your life. "That's really good," she says, which you take to mean that she needs more meat in her maw just like you need more fat. So next time you stay out a little longer, until the sky's a little gray around the edges, and you bring down two antlerbeasts, a young female beast and an older hornless male, and you bring Terezi the whole female. It's a bit of a trek to carry the thing, and takes almost a whole night just to get it to her hive, and the few hours before sunrise you have to use to shuffle around leaves, try and hide the trail of bright yellow beast-blood leading straight to her hive. Luckily, she spots you sniffing around at her tree's base just before sunrise, and hauls both you and the beast up with her clever pulleys.
That's the first day you ever spend in a proper hive. It's the first time you eat grubloaf warmed up, and it's the first time you see someone chop up an entire antlerbeast into thermal hull-fitted pieces. She does eat roughly half her body weight in meat before freezing the rest, but since she still has that lean hungry look about her, that's not much. Then she shows you fidusspawn, which her friend on Trollian is trying to get her into, and she shows you her FLARP poster, which she's trying to get her other friend on Trollian into. She shows you all her game grubs, and she lends you all her FLARPing books, and she lets you share her recuperacoon, which you take as kind of a huge and terrifying gesture.
"Are you sure?" you ask her, probably a hundred times. It's already pale-gray outside, and she's stripped down to her little dragon shorts and a frayed old teeshirt with a weird gray mark on it, and a hole right over her left grubscar. Trying not to look at her grubscar through the hole as she stretches to seal the windows makes you babble a little. "I really don't mind sleeping rrrough. Mom says it's better furr keeping my hunting instincts, and she says that sopurr is really only for wild purrples and I don't have any reason to worry my whiskers, she says that if it gets in my mouth it's really bad-"
"It's really okay," She tells you, really furrmly, when she's got the last hive-hole secured. She gave you some of her other shorts to sleep in, they've also got little dragons on them, but they're nice and loose and the cloth is worn soft and all the dragons are snorting out green fire, which is pawsome. You're sitting up purrched on the edge of her recupurracoon, trying to get used to the sharp stink of it, kicking your feet against the thick dry husk of it. She comes over, and gets claws around your ankle, makes you stop twitching. "It's not bad. You sleep heavy and wake up sticky, that's all."
"Maybe just a little cat-nap," you concede, because pawnestly, you're curious. "But where are you gonna sleep?"
"It's big," she says, and you can see all her bones and joints when she shrugs. "We're small. We'll fit."
You're not sure when she decided that you really weren't going to eat her, or when you decided that she really wasn't going to cull you. But you sleep sounder than you've ever slept in your short life. The sopor's warm, and you feel weightless, except when she moves a little, and the ripples move you too.
She wakes you up at the crack of sunset so you can start the long walk home. Your hair's all matted green, and she laughs hard, wipes off your horns with her sticky hands, and throws you in the ablution trap for your first-ever hot shower. Standing half-awake under that ceaseless jet of water goes against every instinct you have, but it does leave you feeling a lot cleaner than when Mom just grooms you. (You just really. Hate water. She cackles even louder when you stomp out of the ablution block, hair slicked down wet to your head, shivering and furrious.)
On the long walk home, the heavy bag of books and grubs and rations that she's given you feel light. You kick up all the leaves under your feet, and you come home stinking of soap and rot. Mom tries to lick the smells off you, and for the first time, you don't let her.
4.
You don't pity her. You're not exactly scared of her anymore- not like you're a little scared of Aradia, or Vriska, and you watch them like every move they make is finally going to be the fuck-off crazy death-stroke they've always wanted to land on you. But you're never going to forget sitting on her cold cave floor, completely convinced that you were about to die at the hands of this tiny green cat-wiggler, and you're also never going to forget the time she brought an entire antlerbeast, the whole weight of its body easily thrice her own, blood-crusted and warm, to your tree.
So you definitely don't pity Nepeta. You feel safe around her, which should be strange and isn't. It's possibly a sign that you are half-feral yourself, so starved for trollmanly companionship that you'll take any kind of cahoots you can get, even with forest-terrors who try to eat you.
And because you do not pity her, it's not sympathy that makes you give her your old husktop when the new shipment comes in. It's kind of more that you'd like her to be less breathtakingly embarrassing, and there's no good way to socialize her without either getting her culled or getting your friends eaten, so this seems like a decent intermediary step.
After reading all the FLARPing books, Nepeta won't stop with the roleplaying, too. It does make sense- she's half-wild, and pretty clearly conceives of her self as more meowbeast than troll at times, and it's kind of fun to pretend to be a dragon because dragons are the best and you like the idea of being closer to your mother the way Nepeta is with hers. But also if Aradia or Vriska ever read one of your Trollian logs with Nepeta you'd probably have to stab their eyes out to burn out your embarrassment.
She also, after getting to a few particular schoolfeeding grubs, won't quit asking you about quadrants. You tell her that Troll Google exists, and she shuts up about it, which is good. You could not care less about romance. The amount you don't care is astounding! You are QU1T3 R34DY for your friends to SHUT UP about romance!
So when you go over to her cave, almost a full perigree after she stopped talking about it, you're incredibly unprepared.
"Who is this?" you immediately ask about the painting of a small, nub-horned boy troll with a broad-opened mouth, shouting little crudely-drawn spades and little question marks at a remarkable likeness of Tavros. He looks familiar, in a way you can't totally place.
"He's your furriend you introduced me to!" she chirps, clearly delighted for an excuse to talk about her shipping wall. "CarcinoGeneticist, remember?? He said his name is Karkat! And he knows Tavros! And he thinks Tafurros is stupid! It's purrobably not canon, but it was fun to think about."
You shouldn't ask, but you can't help it. "What is canon, then?"
She points up, in the big pale quadrant. You don't know half of these trolls. You don't know when she learned to paint. You don't know how the hell she knows Feferi- you never gave them each others' troll handles- or how she knows what Sollux' horns look like. But there's two big scribbly pink circles around ships up near the top. Eridan and Feferi, everyone who knows Eridan knows about that, he won't shut up about it 3V3R, and- oh.
"Is that Equius?" Is that Vriska's stale-sweat-smelling neighbor who's really into hoofbeasts and shouting about castes, emitting scribbled diamonds at Nepeta's sweet little self-portrait? Really?
"He's purrfect," she bubbles, resting one grubby paw on the stone wall and looking, well, conciliatorily besotted. "I met him when you were off on that big campaign with Vriskers. He's a wreck, he can't make friends with anyone."
You've never heard someone sound so genuinely happy while talking about Equius. You're sort of not sure how to take it. You're sort of hurt, a little, in a remote way. You remember when you were four, and she cleaned your cuts after she sliced your leg open. You remember the first time she ever slept over, the way her little body hung so close to yours you could feel the warmth through the sopor.
But you don't pity her, so there's nothing to be done about that.
5.
You wish Terezi had a meowrail.
She hasn't come to your hive for a few nights. She doesn't log onto Trollian. It's not that unusual- sometimes she just gets really caught up in her weird law books and prosecuting her dragons and FLARPing and everything. But then you notice Vriskers doesn't log on for a few nights, either. Or Aradia. Or Sollux or Tavros. That's a very suspawcious group of trolls to all suddenly disappear for almost six nights, all at once. You know they can't all be on a campaign, because you asked Eridan, and he always knows about Vrisker's campaigns because of his bad shipping decisions!
So you go to her hive with half a dead musclebeast on your back, staining your coat all blue. She doesn't answer when you call up, but she's shown you how to work the pulleys yourself, so you climb up first, and haul the beast up after.
You find her in her ablution block. She doesn't turn her head around from where she's sitting in the trap. The water she's sitting in is a murky turquoise. When you enter, she holds up one finger for silence, so you wait. You know, from hunting, how to hold purrfectly still for a good long time, but it's hard to wait. You can't tell how much blood she's lost, but it can't possibly be good if she's been silent this long.
She finally speaks. "I was talking to my lusus."
"Oh," you say. You have no idea what to say to that. She's sitting alone in an ablution trap filled with blood, talking silently to a dead thing?
"She's not awake, but I can talk with her a little more, now."
Terezi turns around, and you almost throw up. Did all that blood come just from her eyes? You gag, and jerk back. The smell of it's overwhelming. "What-"
"It's okay, I already got her back."
"What did she-" There's only one she, you know, you knew, this is why half your ashen wall is taken over by throwing every half-competent troll between Terezi and Terezi's Worst Idea Ever. You'd considered taking the quadrant yourself, but you just couldn't get mad enough at Terezi to make her behave. It's stupid, it's the stupidest thing you've ever seen or smelled or heard of, and if Terezi had just gotten herself a good moirail it wouldn't happen, because someone would've stopped her.
"It's okay," Terezi repeats, firmly, loudly, over the sound of you being furrious about Bad Shipping Decisions. "I can smell where you are. I can smell where the door is. I am working on a new way to do some things. I know what color the water is, and I know what color your face is. The bandages are white, and the ablution hull is white," she adds, a little softer. You look, and you see them.
You wish Terezi had a meowrail, because that's who should be getting those bandages. That's who should be dropping to their knees and raising their shaky paws to probe the extent of the burn on her face. It's who should be hissing low, between their teeth, when they see the blisters around her eyelids. It should be Kanaya doing this, or Karkat, or maybe Tafurros. Anyone but you, happily quadranted and totally unqualified to deal with this. YOu think about if this had happened to Equius, and you gag again, and choke it down. Your own eyes are stinging.
"I've cleaned the area already," she says. Her voice is so steady. "I just need you to cover and secure it." She can surely hear you breathing, can probably feel the little bursts of air where you're choking and then gasping a little to make up for it. "You've done this before," she adds, purrobably when she feels your paws shaking on her. "It's not different."
"It's diffurrent," you say, but you breathe, and you think about Equius for a second, and you think, she deserves to live long enough to find that, at least, and your hands stop shaking long enough that you can wind the cloth loose around her head.
When you finish, and tie it off, she stands. Shakily, but she's clearly not going to die from blood loss if she can stand. You're less concerned with her nudity than with her other burns, the gnarled and blistery flesh around her neck and arms. She must've stayed out in daylight, it's the only way to get burns like these. You don't want to know what the hell Vriska was trying to accomplish with this, if not kill her.
"Did you kill her?" you ask, finally, when she drips enough of the nasty water off that she can step out on her own without slipping. You don't offurr her your hand, you can't quite manage that. You're doing enough blatant infidelity in one day without inviting it.
"She didn't kill me," Terezi says. She reaches for a towel, misses it by a few inches, and grabs again, perfectly aimed. She hisses when the cloth touches her burns, but wraps it tightly around her thorax nonetheless. "It wouldn't be right to kill her, for not killing me."
"You should kill her," you say, and you're surprised to find that you really mean that. "She's not safe. She'll kill someone weaker, if she can't get you."
Terezi looks at you- or, points her face at you. She sniffs, audibly, nostrils flaring. "No, I took care of her. She doesn't need to- it's not time for that."
"Yet," you say. You follow her out of the ablution block. She's not once in danger of mis-navigating, so you don't feel the need to guide her.
"Yet," she agrees. "I smell hoofbeast, did you bring your blueberry diamond?"
"Food," you say, and you are so keenly aware of how wrong this has been, and you want to talk to him. Badly.
"Even better!" she crows, and grins with all her teeth, and you nearly furrget she's broken.