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While you can’t bring yourself to regret your petitions for company planetside, it never crossed your mind how unsuited it is for tourism. The proof of this theory barely requires your glasses: you can see it clear as the day hidden behind sheets of colourless clouds, in the way Fef carries tension in her shoulders, in the grip on her matesprit’s arm.
There’s probably a good reason or six your Alternian job was not an interpersonal one.
“It’s so dreary here.” Fef’s murmur carries through the air like smoke. “Where’s all the colour?”
“Interior decorator probably had a coronary on sight,” Sollux answers for you, eyes skyward. The heavens don’t stay clear for very long at a time—clear being a relative term—but you figure you’ve pestered your guests enough for the time being. Deeds, not words, Ampora.
Spires and towers stretch before the three of you like dead things, joined together by stone vertebrae. Skeletons of what you suppose you could have been. You scarcely register the movement of your own feet until you hear Fef catch up to you, a step and a half for every one of yours.
“Where are we going?” she asks: her voice is clear as a brook. Time’s done nothing to dampen your childish wonderings as to what it would feel like to submerge yourself in it.
You chance a look at her, and catch the deep-set jewel tint of her eyes. (Next to her floats a boy with another pair of jewels, and too often you find yourself dotting your empty sky with red and blue.) “Somewhere a little less—what’d you call it? Dreary?”
Sollux snorts. “Seems unlikely.”
“Fantastic input. So glad you tagged along for the ride.”
He sticks his tongue out at you. You stick yours out back. Fef attempts to shove both your faces at the same time. You dance out of the way; Sol zips into a neat diagonal beneath her reach.
Laughter hangs strangely in the air, here, or maybe it’s just been a while since you last heard it. You settle for a combination of the two.
You climb over a crumbling wall—one of many you’ve come across, and you feel it give some more under your boots. Habit turns you back to reach for Fef’s hand. It matters little that she doesn’t need your help (maybe she never has, brushes feathered doubt just inside your pan), she seems content to accept, the worn soles of her feet near as cold as the stone.
Sol doesn’t need a hand any more than she does, albeit for entirely different reasons. A cursory glance at Feferi, though, has you outstretching your hand a second time. His grip is feverish, his weight practically nothing even without him holding himself up.
Your footfalls grow quiet as you approach your destination. Another habit, this one newer, still at its core built out of survival. Often you feel hatched for little else.
Pretty soon, all three of you are craning your necks. One of the biggest cathedrals you’ve come across so far looms overhead like your own personal haunting ground, and you its angry ghost tethered there by holy fire.
“Voilà,” you mutter; your accent rounds both ends of the word. You’re pretty sure your Imperial file, if still relevant, would have read ‘doesn’t play well with others.’
“Wow,” Fef breathes in reply. Sollux only stares: you’re caught up in trying to decipher it when she adds, “so where to next?”
“What d’you mean? We’re goin’ in.”
Sol’s tongue frees itself. “We’re what.”
“Lemme spell it out for you. We’re sittin’ quackbeasts out here. They don’t come into the buildings from what I seen.”
“So you seen a lot then, is that you’re telling us.” Sollux’s eyes narrow the tiniest bit. “And here I thought you shot first and asked questions later.”
“Havin’ them stick around for questions ain’t my ideal scenario.” The doors are bolted shut from the inside by your own hand. A precaution you made after your first few visits here. More climbing required, to broken stained windows some fifteen feet up the belfry.
Fef takes to it like the mast on your shiphive, from back when your mistakes were smaller but seemed just as cosmically massive. “Keep yourself small,” you call up quietly.
“Is that a jab?” she shoots back, rows of razor teeth in a grin. Deeps, but you missed her.
You fix your feet in broken bricks and reach behind you for Sollux again, but he’s already at eye level with you. “That don’t constitute keepin’ small,” you grumble. “Sol, you bloody show-off, get back here.”
“I’m expediting a process, not showing off.” Sollux crosses his legs midair, hovering up to meet Feferi. She giggles, climbing higher, and you roll your eyes.
Stone crumbles under your boots as you move up. “I ain’t fuckin’ around, get on the wall before you do somethin’ stupid.”
“Look around, Ampora. Your entire planet is a blank fucking slate painted with your own elite brand of stupid. I’m trying to think of what I could possibly add to it and drawing up an approximate total of jack squat.”
Your reply is drowned out by a horrible sound, somewhere between thunder and the scraping of nails against glass. It drags against the inside of your skull, against your iron sea-bones like a whisper from some fucked-up lover.
Fef stares out, scanning the sky, mouth open. “What—”
“We gotta go,” is all you say, giving her closest foot a push upward. You’re painfully aware of your back, bare and exposed without your Crosshairs strapped across it.
(You’d thought it wiser, with company, with two trolls you actually give a shit about, idiot, idiot—)
“I’m at the window. Eri, what shoald—”
“Climb in,” you say, “an’ jump.”
“Are you—”
“Jump, Fef!”
She jumps. You watch her legs disappear through the broken teeth of the glass. “You next, smartass.”
There’s no reply. You pull yourself higher, and follow Sol’s frozen stare to the horizon. “Fuck,” you mumble, and then, more emphatically, “fuck!”
And you lean off the wall, swimmer’s legs straining, grab the back of Sollux’s collar and yank.
He makes a YEEP sort of noise that you’d make fun of him for if the brushing against your marrow weren’t threatening to root you to the spot, a violet piece of ivy. There’s a sizeable difference in strength between the two of you, and whatever resistance Sol might have given is reduced to nothing. As such, you wrap your body around his — ignoring the inches he has on you — and let yourself drop into the cathedral.
*
You land with a splash. Somewhere in the stretched-out seconds of your freefall, you flipped your positions, mapping out the odds of tile versus seadweller spine. In your grip, you feel Sol suck in a breath, proving that he has at least a teeny remaining shred of self-preservation.
The water breaks your fall, some six feet deep. Around the time you barred the cathedral doors, you’d ventured into its bowels and flooded crypts to look for its source, with little success. It runs on tides that don’t listen to moons or to you. That’s fine—you don’t listen much to the game, either. Your back hits the checkered floor hard enough that your gills kick in, flaring open under your shirt.
Sollux struggles more, like he’s realized he’s still alive and not intaking air. You haul him up, blinking glittering droplets from your lashes, hands on his upper arms. “Okay?”
“That was terrible,” he rasps.
“Okay,” you confirm, and duck your head around him to peer into the filtered, dusty light of the church. “Fef?”
She surfaces with the faintest of ripples, raking curtains of squid-ink hair from her face. “Oh,” she murmurs, “oh, oh, you made it…” Fef rests a hand over yours, where your grip on Sollux is slackening in a soundless test of his state. “You’re both unhurt.” it sits on the brink of a question.
“Aye. Unhurt.” Sol glances at you, then nods. Where Fef is treading water, the two of you can stand with some room to spare. Your kismesis looks like a wet puppy.
Feferi’s hand moves to his cheek, then to yours. In the starving halls of this drowned place of worship, it’s fucking deafening.
You say, “That counts as stupid, just for the record.”
“Thank you so much for clearing that up. The synchronized dive into Olympic-sized liquid death hadn’t actually done that, so I was left here pondering the repercussions of my actions like troll Descartes or some—”
You address Fef over Sol’s impressive imitation of one of Karkat’s monologues. “We gotta get to a higher point.”
She frowns. “I thought you said they don’t come in here.”
“They don’t,” you agree, and point to the narrow stairwell up to the belfry.
Through the splinters of the window you recently vacated, you can make out the outline of one of the shapes that have taken up semi-permanent residence at the edges of your vision. “It’s a loner.”
“Is that good oar bad?”
“Nothin’ about the angels is what I’d call good.”
Fef ducks her head to rest briefly against your shoulder. You ache just as brief for love of her.
Sollux, at some point, stalled in his one-man tragicomedy to spot the belfry’s entrance. “It’s submerged.”
(Thubmerged.) “Your powers a’ deduction are staggerin’. No wonder you landed two quads.”
“Hop off my bulge, Ampora, you’re not nearly as cute as you think you are.”
“I’m a little cute,” you reply, and avoid the swipe Fef gives you on his behalf. “Hey.”
He’s a little less like a wet puppy and more like a piece of flotsam battered against a rock. And by rock you mean your boyfriend’s pathological fear of water. And by flotsam you mean…uh, something. Your metaphor game is a little off the mark, on account of the whole demon circling your sanctuary.
“It ain’t flooded to the top,” you promise, “not even a minute at most.”
The screeching, further away, punctuates your sentence. It wakes him up enough to confess what you already knew.
“I can’t swim, ED.”
You open your mouth to reply, but he continues. “I’m quadded to two fucking seadwellers. Gods are real and lacing up their tap shoes to dance on my soggy, soggy grave.”
“Ew,” you say, and Fef smacks you for real. You never worked paleways, but old habits die hard in blood as cold as yours.
“We’re here to kelp, Sollux,” she chimes in. “Like he said, it’ll be over beshore you know it!”
“‘Beshore?’ That was a little weak.”
“See, he’s fine.” You brace his shoulders again. With the threat of shocking himself in the water, Sollux looks a lot more vulnerable, under your hands. “You trust me?”
He grimaces: one fang pokes out, a little hilariously. “Unfortunately.”
“Great.” You reach down and grab him by the waist, and throw him over your shoulder like a sack of root vegetables.
He immediately starts whaling on you, beating his fists against your back with some degree of enthusiasm that tells you he’ll be alright. “Grow up, Sol, or you’ll just make this worse for yourself.” You take a couple slow kicks against the water.
“I’m being manhandled by my pitchmate. Please elaborate as to how this could possibly be worse.”
“You could be being manhandled by your flush,” Fef pipes up from behind you, and judging by the kick that narrowly avoids your glasses she swam through your strides to pop up directly beside him.
“Thanks, FF. You always know just what to say to make my situation not sound so utterly shitty.”
Her giggles fall against your fins like rain. (It does not rain here.) There’s a pause, and Sol relaxes against you in that way he only does when kissed. It’s an effect she has on both of you.
“Okay,” she says when she pulls away, and her voice slips into the sugar of command you were hatched to obey. “Let’s go.”
Even in the carry, you and Sol fit together annoyingly well. It means you feel him take another breath, and duck his head against you. It’s a song of surrender.
You slip beneath the surface.
*
Fef swims beside you, a formation you’ve held a hundred, a thousand times before. Freckles glow a soft pink in the distance between you: in the greys and whites of your Land, you feel a sense of home. Your own luminescence follows. Sol relaxes further, but his grip on your shirt remains tight.
The water rises past the belfry entrance for another thirty feet or so. You pass the lowest window and call to Fef in a language built to ring clear. “D’you still see it?”
She flips turnways, graceful as anything you’ve ever hunted. “Yes.”
Fucking shit. “On we go, then. How you doin’, Sol?”
The second you say it you feel a little silly on a few different levels. You opt instead to press forward, make his suffering a little less short. Monochrome light wavers around you, brighter than any of your free dives.
You shift Sollux upright to breach the floodwaters first. He gasps, fingers gripping your horns like a lifeline; you grant him the favour of pretending not to notice.
He’s mid-bitching when your head clears the surface. “—despicable, most loathsome combination of shitty arrogance and pickled organs moonlighting as a troll I have ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“All this sweet talk will give you more cavities than the noxious waste in a can you deign to call energy drinks.”
Sol’s retort is cut off by your girl poking her head up beside you. “See? We told you it would awl be okay!”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, in that good-natured tone you know he hates for you to hear. (You know because you have one, too.)
Fef kicks up forcefully to drape her arms around his neck for a kiss: you clear your throat in lieu of an actual complaint about two trolls hanging off one of your shoulders in the most literal way possible.
She drops back down with a splash and looks around. “What is this place?” The water level stops at a landing, older stone than the cracked tiles of your cathedral floor. You drop Sol unceremoniously onto it, and the sound is swallowed into the walls of the belfry.
You motion Fef closer to hoist up beside your other quad, who is lying prone on the floor. “Y’know, Sol, the deadman’s float don’t work so well on land.”
“I’ll take my chances, thanks,” he informs the ground, slightly muffled.
Climbing onto the landing, you shake your hair from your eyes. Your fins flick against the waves that have fallen free from their usual updo. Fef gets to her feet before you, wringing out her own hair (a hopeless case). “Okay, spill. Why did we come up here?”
“I know why.”
Sol’s voice comes from further up: he’s peeled himself off the floor and crept up the next few stairs. He’s leaning backwards to watch you. “Come see, Princess.”
She picks up her skirts and dances up to join him, and you jam your hands in your wet pockets and follow, a shadow of a smile on your face.
Some dozen steps up from the first landing is another, open on one side to the gaping maw of the tower. Rows of bells, colourless brass stamped in writing you can’t decipher. At its edge sits a great box of an instrument with hammers at the hands and feet.
“A carillon,” you say, in answer to a question that wasn’t asked. “It strikes the bells, with the wires there.”
Fef ventures forward, running a finger over an embossed hammer. “You mean you’ve played it?”
You shrug, conceding to honesty. “Playin’s a bit generous. I use it for bait, if I touch it at all.”
Sollux glances at you from his examination of the closest bell: it’s up to his shoulder in size. “Bait?”
“Bait.” You extend a hand and gently rest it over Feferi’s. “For drawin’ ‘em out when they don’t show themselves rightaways.”
She tenses under your touch. It’s not, this time, out of fear of you. “You mean. You mean like the one we—”
You give her hand a squeeze, then ball it into a fist and push down on the hammer.
A single bell rings, low and unhurried, somewhere below you. The note and its overtones swell as they rise up through the tower. You can almost see it hang in the air like mist, waiting to be dissipated.
For a moment, the three of you don’t even breathe. Then Fef’s fins prick a fraction before yours, without her noticing.
Wingbeats—you reach behind you as ozone cracks, and are met with the familiar weight of the Crosshairs. You swing it over your head and make for the shutters, half-open.
The horrid sounds brush over you like oil. It’s slowed you, once or twice. Coaxed you to listen. You give yourself a shake, and set up where the brittle panels have snapped away.
Fef whispers, “Eri—”
You turn and raise a finger to your lips. She shuffles closer to Sollux, who’s vainly trying to conserve body heat with folded arms and hunched shoulders. He doesn’t pull away from her, though.
Turning your focus back to the window, you catch the outline of your target. They aren’t much for straight formations, the angels, swooping and banking sharply, breaking their wings into sudden drops. It is, in layman’s terms, a serious pain in your ass.
You brace your stance and follow its trajectory with the tip of your rifle. It’s gotten a little easier, with time, to trace their sporadic dances; you’re not sure whether that’s a good thing. Before you all started played, you’d already had experience hunting winged creatures. You know how to be a step ahead, aim where they will go. These things escape you here, frustrate you until you're sure—so sure there’s no chance at all that—that—
The angel turns its empty face towards you, and dread wraps one icy hand around your pusher and another over your trigger finger, and squeezes.
Fire fills the cracks in the shutters, coating the three of you in white anti-shadows. The recoil rams into the hardened muscle of your shoulder, and you grit your teeth and follow the wretched thing until it falls. There’s a faraway sound like colliding shards of crystal. Nothing of use to you, except a fresh coat of silence that feels more unnerving every time you shoot one of them down.
The Crosshairs go back in your sylladex with another overarm stretch, and you step away from the shutters with a huff. “Bait.”
Your quads are staring at you. It makes you uneasy, and you straighten and stare back, on account of your defence mechanisms are garbage.
Feferi, blessedly, speaks. “Ever used it for somefin else?”
You haven’t. “Like what?”
“What do you mean, like wwhat?” Fef mastered her impression of you sweeps ago; it glances off your thickened skin and reassures you that she feels safer. “It’s an instrument. You minnow, to play music on?”
“I know what an instrument’s for, thanks. This one’s busted.” You reach beside her and strike one of the hammers at the highest end. “Half a’ these don’t make a sound.”
Another shuffle behind you, one you’ve grown to recognize. “Maybe you’re playing it wrong.”
“Fuck you, there’s no wrong way to play a carillon. Allow me to lay it out in common vernacular for you. Hit key, ring bell.”
Sollux sorts, and joins you and Fef at the box. “Show of hands, who here is surprised that the minute Eridan Ampora can’t solve a problem by inserting Object A into Slot B—”
“Gross, Sol—”
“—or by going ballistic with a perma-Nat20 godweapon on it, it’s deemed a lost and impossible cause?”
You whirl, hands on your hips. “Okay, wise guy, you play somethin’ an’ tell me how right it is when it ain’t the resident gunslinger givin’ her a go.”
“Thank you.” Sollux kinda nudges you out of the way with one body elbow, tracing over the hammers. He’s warm enough that he’s already half-dry: his hair is curling around his ears and at the collar of his shirt. He smells the way the air does, after one of Alternia’s thunderstorms.
Fef tucks into your side, in the crook of your firing arm, and watches.
*
Sol sits on nothing, a party trick you’ve always found funny and would rather run yourself through with tuna hooks than tell him. His sneakers find the foot pedals, and after some shifting in midair and some muttering to himself in a dialect you don’t know, he splays his fingers to strike an interval, two notes lower than your baiting bell. His foot pumps a bass that curls along your spine, makes the fin there shiver under your sweater.
“Right,” he murmurs, half to himself again, and then he strikes a second time, broken chords between his hands and feet. They start at one end of the board and travel up: bells toll higher than you can see. It sticks to the eroded brick like candy.
At some point, he hits dead hammers, and the lingering peals of the bells are punctuated with hollow thuds. You watch the focused frown you’ve been the target of countless times before settle easily on his features.
“Told you so,” you say before you can stop yourself. It’s too easy to push his buttons—you’re always curious to see how he’ll react, prove himself, and Sol isn’t that big a fan of disappointing you.
He raises an index in a mirror of your earlier action, before walking it with his middle finger over the working hammers. Counting, maybe, you think. Mapping. Programming. (Old habits.)
This time, the melody is as high as the carillon will allow. There’s no hesitation to it, like when you’d found it for the first time and struck all the keys to see what would happen. Sollux plays with the sides of his fists, loose wrists caught somewhere between the intense focus he gets and the most relaxed he’s ever been.
You’re kind of entranced. A glance at Fef out of your peripherals tells you she’s much the same. Between bar lines of sheets you can’t see and stamps of his feet he says, “I need a second set of hands.”
It takes you a moment to realize that yes, it’s addressed to you—jammed somewhere in time with the notes—Ineeda-second-setofhands. “Sure,” you reply, caught in your own bars of puzzlement and blood-borne desire to rise up to challenges. Is this even a challenge? You don’t know, and it’s your pitchmate, so you don’t care.
Sollux scoots to the side to make room for you, which, given that he’s sitting on nothing, has the effect of making Fef dissolve into giggles that float up the belfry. You remain standing, until he reaches up to push down on your shoulders, and you comply with a sense of trust you’ve never been able to name or date. Then you’re sitting, kind of, a hum of power around you that flattens your fins before inducing them to relax.
You had a fiddle, on your shiphive. You and Fef would take it out, on nights where the air and your hearts were heavy, and you’d play the clouds away. She’d fall asleep right there on your sundered deck, and you’d carry her back to ‘coon and you wouldn’t even dream.
It means your hands find easier fits, when Sol breaks another chord, ascending bass to match his over-under tune. (You can almost see it, hanging over the water below your feet.)
Slowly, the both of you acclimate, realign yourself as you’ve been unconsciously doing for the past few perigees. Your hands look around one another, reaching for harmonies you almost feel like you’ve rehearsed beforehand. It’s got your girl laughing again, her own fingers waving in the empty air like she’s conducting you.
Sollux sways forward to depress a foot pedal, and you fill the empty space. All of the empty spaces in your cathedral, you think, are gradually being filled.
Harmony, less discordant than many, many of your previous interactions. It tugs at your limbs, its resonance past the shadows of your belfry, your churches, into your endless grey. You and your Land are, for once, filled with something greater than gunfire and divine tears to break through the angry silence.
Anger, you learned a long time ago, is fucking exhausting when it’s your go-to reaction.
Now, though, your spirits are lifted, with the same effortlessness that your kismesis keeps you afloat. You arpeggiate, together, over one another across the working board. Fef drops one of her hands with a flourish, and alights a delicate finger on the highest hammer and pushes down.
It rings, full and almost obscenely bright, higher than you’ve dared to climb, leastways not on your own. The three of you stop abruptly, staring at one another, and then you burst into laughter. Real laugher.
You laugh like when you found your gun, and even though it called to your blood it still knocked you back four feet and flat on your ass. You laugh like you did after Fef sought you out, fiddling with her braid in an uncharacteristic display of nerves, and proposed another go, if you’d have her, if you were okay with sharing her, as if you would ever refuse.
She keeps to Sollux’s other side, more peals of notes made whole again. Dewdrops.
You raise your hands off the board like they have balloons tethered to the wrists. “I guess there is a right way to play it, after all.”
Sol grabs your shoulders and crushes his mouth to yours. You feel laughter catch in your throat, again, and opt instead for tugging on his hair until he growls and lets you drop.
Fef keeps laughing, even as you land in some bastardized half-crouch, and offers you a kiss of her own. Sollux, for his part, launches higher to investigate the tower and its new sounds. After a silent beat of the two of you watching him, you see him surge forward and kick at one of the bells to ring down again towards you.
Your girl grins, and strikes a hammer at random; Sol searches out the corresponding bell to kick, and you’re content to sit cross-legged, your rifle out again and nestled against your elbow.
“The Jade human told me a saying,” she calls to you, between poundings of her fists in the least violent display your planet has seen in its existence. “‘Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.’ From a movie or something.”
You raise an eyebrow. “I don’t believe that.”
Fireworks, red and blue and miniature, wander down the the belfry. Fef says, “There’s a lot of things you don't believe."
You flick the fingers of one hand, and a spray of white sparks join them. “I’m workin’ on it.”