Chapter Text
“Quite frankly, I hadn’t realized casual infanticide was a direct feature of your previous career path rather than just an inevitable result. Or are you just looking to expand your portfolio?”
“Har fuckin’ har, Lalonde, five thousand years a’ time travel ain’t helpin’ your standup routine much.”
“Hm… rats. Well, I suppose I’ll ask Dave to dip me back to drink deeply from the temporal stream once more, and once you’re quite finished reducing a grub I’ve fostered since hatching into a delightfully cotton candy smear, maybe, if the gods are kind, I might just be able to do some whacky observational comedy about it a la future Troll Jerry Seinfeld.”
From outside, Feferi’s fins flick. Rose’s voice becomes sharper and more indistinct in turn as she audibly mills about the room—there’s the sound of flats on tile, the sound of a running faucet, some distant crinkling of paper.
It was the first time she and Eridan had properly visited the Carapacian Kingdom—things in their own domain had kept them busy enough, most days. But Kanaya and Rose called, and they came. They’d gotten to spend a few hours wandering the decorated streets, beneath the broad, colorful sheets of canvas and ribbon-shreds that the carapacians are so fond of—it reminded her of Derse, in a funny way.
“Deeps, you humans think you know everythin’. You think I’m doin’ this because it’s how I get my jollies?”
“What I do understand is that we are all wading into very deep and uncharted waters. For five thousand years, none of us walked this infant planet. And for five thousand years, there was never another tyrian. You, just like all the rest of us, have no goddamn idea how or why one hatched now. What you need to understand is that I’m not about to let you exercise your darkest fears about your own species by leaving a child under my custody to die. If you aren’t interested in taking her, then fine. I only called you because I thought Feferi might know better than all the rest of us what’s the best course of action to take, instead of blindly stumbling ever-onwards, chasing the tail of dread, confusion and, of course, dead kids.”
“I ain’t just gonna—I’m not goin’ to let her do that to herself. That’s what you don’t understand, that’s what none a’ you fuckin’ understand. Bein’ the penultimate ain’t just somethin’ I claim to for the sake a’ the title an’ paddin’ my resume, it’s a relationship humans don’t have anythin’ analogous for, so in the words a’ troll Epicurus I’m goin’ to need you to step off.”
Eridan had asked for ten minutes alone with Rose, just ten. Feferi indulges him for exactly eight minutes and forty-three seconds.
“Are you kidding me?”
Eridan and Rose snap to look at her; Feferi finds some fleeting satisfaction in their surprise. Rose is fussing over something in a medium sized plastic container—Eridan is standing several paces behind her, leaning backwards against a countertop but visibly bristling. His fins are flared in a way Feferi recognizes to be irritation—and maybe a hint of fear. Neither of which seemed to be directed at her.
“Fef—”
“Don’t Fef me right now. Cut the carp—the crap—cut the shit, Eridan! Do you even hear yourself?”
“Well,” Eridan says in that very special souring tone of his, pushing himself off the counter, “I’m sure you an' the popular record won’t be surprised to hear my noise hole’s closer to my ears than my pan.”
Feferi doesn’t deign to reply, frustratedly fidgeting with the ends of her hair, twirling it in tight loops between fingers decorated in three distinctly colored quad rings. “Don’t I get a say in this, or do you think you’ve already decided what’s best for me?” It has an edge; she meant it that way.
That seems to strike a defensive cord: Feferi can see it run down the line of his jaw like a taut string being plucked, something silently reverberating between orphaner and heiress. Rose, either oblivious to the silent power dynamic between the two trolls or pointedly ignoring it, turns her attention back to the container balanced on the edge of the sink. Feferi vaguely registers the way she tips the contents of a brightly-colored cylinder into it.
“A’course you do, Fef—eri.” The second half of her name is clumsily pieced together against the first, and Feferi would feel guilty under different circumstances. Then, he continues: “I just don’t want you makin’ this decision with your collapsin’ an’ expandin’ bladder based aquatic vascular system instead a’ the real estate between your ears.”
Annnnd he’s ruined it again. Feferi can feel her urge to apologetically pap this dumb buoy dry up like seaweed at low tide.
“This isn’t just your decision, Eridan,” she repeats, leveling him with a look that was thoroughly unimpressed. “At the bare minimum, Aradia and Sollux get a vote, too. We’ll take her back to the Troll Kingdom like we promised! And then we can work from there.”
“But—”
“I’m not going to get overthrown and murdered by a tadpole even if she has cool blood and sweet tricks! Have a little faith!” Feferi’s fins flick again and she takes position alongside Rose, who’s still carefully adding salt in small increments to the water of the grub’s temporary holding container.
Feferi takes a look inside.
It looks like she must have, as a child. Right? Granted, she’d never seen another tyrian before, her own ancestor excluded. But it’s an approximation to what she’d imagined: it’s got horns that are short and slightly curved, almost like hers, but not quite—and its body is segmented, like the other grubs she’d seen in Rose and Kanaya’s care (like most trolls, she’d never seen a grub on Alternia—she wasn’t a jadeblood, after all). It looks up at her with bright eyes in a hue she recognizes, and immediately disappears against the backdrop of the container.
“Oh,” Rose muses.
“Oh,” Feferi echoes.
“She’s got a sort of camouflaging mechanism that we’ve seen in a number of the other seadweller grubs, you, ah, might have triggered some kind of instinctive response.”
“Right.”
“Given that, on Alternia…”
“Right.”
Feferi lets the final word stay suspended in the air. Her eyes don’t stray far from the container—neither to Rose on her left, or to Eridan, who has soundlessly joined her on her right.
She quietly resolves that she and her clade will do right by this small, fragile thing. This isn’t Alternia.
This is something better.