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Your routine isn’t one that you’d consider normal.
You wake up. You greet Kanaya and share a short, chaste meeting of lips, one akin to the first kiss a pair of protagonists in a young adult novel might undertake. You collect your Light clothing and get yourself dressed. You make and eat a paltry breakfast. Then, you head down into the basement of your reformed mansion.
(You never dared to venture into your basement before the game. Despite your interest in the occult and otherwise non-Euclidean, you had a fear of the dark that you still haven’t quite grown out of. Even now, you hesitate to tread anywhere darker than night, despite the infinitesimal glow your clothing gives off. You find this specific upside very valuable.)
The flats of your shoes rub against the worn stairs as you walk down. It takes some time for your pupils to adjust to the drastically different light level, but after a minute or so of walking, the darkness is much easier to traverse. The bit of light your clothes provide is similar to that of a lantern. A large, orange, fibrous lantern that covers your sensitive bits.
For some reason, this tiny mental tangent makes you chuckle.
The staircase continues down, and down, and down. Down into the riverbed, then into the ground below that. The air becomes just a tinge cooler and begins to cling to your skin. It’s a pleasant type of humidity, in direct opposition to the thick, oppressive air that would be felt in the hours before a storm on a summer’s day. It’s chilly, but not stifling, and causes an exhilarating little shiver to run up your spine.
A second light source joins the warm glow of your clothing, radiating up from a flight below. You squint imperceptibly, just to slow the inevitable blast of photons your retinas will soon have to endure. The staircase ends here. If you had to judge, you’d say there are anywhere from thirty to forty flights of stairs above you, and two or three hundred feet of combined earth and water.
The new bit of light filters out of a partially-open door. You take a final step off of the last stair, then tug the door open, only to sidle in and tug it shut behind you.
It becomes even cooler, once you’re past the threshold of the door. The air is heavier, too. An almost invisible sheen of condensation sticks to the walls and floor. The room itself is large, though the space available is minimal. A trio of hydroelectric generators lines one wall. They hum imposingly, and the dynamos rotate at a lethargic pace. The river isn’t flowing at it’s strongest, today. Another wall is bare, save for an alcove barred off by a section of chain-link fence. A door, secured by several padlocks, is the only entrance. A nightstand an an occupied bed are the only things inside. Another nightstand sits just outside, next to a large, plush chair. A single lamp resides on the table, bathing the basement in soft yellow light.
You admit, this setup is slightly self-indulgent, but you can hardly deny yourself a position of power. You make your way to the chair, and immediately take a seat, reaching over and pulling the drawer of the nightstand open.
The scrape of wood causes the bed’s lone occupant to stir, then jolt up into a straight-backed sit. You grin to yourself when you see his fins, fanned out to their widest. It’s a strange brand of pitiful. Not the kind that trolls would blush over, no; the kind they’d hiss and snarl at. Eridan Ampora is a shining example of such a reaction.
“Good morning, my fin-laden charge,” you muse, digging a notepad and a red Sharpie out of the drawer. The notepad is blank, save for a few horizontal stripes of red marker on each page.
He hasn’t yet caught onto your bullshit. It never gets any less entertaining.
When Eridan hears your voice, he whips to the side, his fins making an audible ‘flap’ that you oh-so-wish you’d been able to catch on recording. His eyes narrow, and you swear that if it weren’t for his glasses, his glare would sear a hole through your skull. Sort of like Cyclops’s visor, but much less fashionable. When he speaks, his accent contorts his words into a curt flurry of wavering syllables.
“Well, it must be semantics-o’clock, judgin’ by your presence,” he spits, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and resting his feet flat against the concrete floor. “‘S not like I was gettin’ comfy with your change a’schedule, leavin’ me down here to get fin rot or some equally humiliatin’ affliction.”
“You say that like you don’t need consistent, if infrequent, contact with sapient beings to maintain your sanity.” It’s not a guess, or a question, but an observation. He’s silent, but you can tell that he’s trying to pour as much vitriol into his expression as possible. It gives him a look not unlike that of a parrotfish, if they could close their mouths. You uncap your Sharpie with your teeth, and barely escape the quick whiff of ink fumes that comes with it. You reach up and snag the cap from between your lips, depositing it on the surface of the nightstand. “Now, shall we begin?”
He rolls his eyes, letting out an annoyed ‘tch’ as he crosses his arms so tightly it’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t start hurting his shoulders soon. Then again, you haven’t exactly had the time to discover differences in seadweller and landdweller physiology. He might be cartilaginous, much like a shark. You smile at him, and your mind immediately tumbles away in thought, searching for something that sounds somewhat sensible for you to ask.
"Would you say that the repression of certain memories or experiences contributes to your short and withdrawn nature? And, by extension, your willingness to be hidden away in this manner?" you probe, already relatively sure of what his answer is going to be.
"Your matesprit slicin' me in half with a chainsaw isn't somethin' I want to relive while I'm pickin' grubloaf outta my fuckin' teeth," he mutters, trying his damnedest to not make eye contact with you.
Wife, you internally correct, and drag a fresh stripe of Sharpie across the midway point of your current page.
You see him peer down at you, down over the rims of his glasses and the sloping hook of his nose. His fins cock forward in annoyance, and you can see him lean to the side in an attempt to get a peek at what’s (not) in your notepad. You tilt it just a tiny bit further away to frustrate him. It works. He frowns, and momentarily leans a little farther before giving up and resigning himself to slouching against the back wall of his little haven.
“Would you consider yourself fit for interaction with another troll?” you ask. You don’t mean Kanaya, obviously, but Karkat, maybe.
He doesn’t answer or visibly react for a time. Instead, he stares at you like you’ve just asked him what his greatest sexual fantasy is for about thirty seconds. Off-guard, and vaguely affronted.
“Why the hell,” he growls, “should my answer to that be worth anythin’? I’m sittin’ in a fuckin’ basement. You wouldn’t give a damn no matter what I said, anyway. You’re just gonna scratch somethin’ outta that stupid fuckin’ notebook.”
You stare him dead in the eyes and drag your Sharpie over the paper.
He huffs like a displeased child.
---
Twenty-odd minutes pass. Your questions continue along this line, and Eridan’s answers continue to be marginally more revealing of his inner turmoil than he means them to be.
It’s sad, but you find it entertaining. He seems to have next to no qualms towards his isolation. In fact, he sought it out himself before Kanaya persuaded (or, rather, scared) him into living in the basement of your shared manor. It was humid enough at first glance, but Eridan occasionally complains that the air is just far enough from pleasurable for it to get on his nerves. You offered to bring a humidifier, but he adamantly declined.
Occasionally, whilst pretending to be lost in thought, you steal glances.
Trolls are infinitely interesting. Their path of taxonomy is obviously radically different from those of Earthly species, and thus, it’s a disservice to compare them to any species you’re familiar with. Horns, fins, gills, sharp teeth, and slitted pupils, all on the same creature? It’s like the universe’s most radical case of convergent evolution, when taken sheerly at face value. For all you know, and all that Kanaya has told you, their horns could be little more than decorative. And, at the same time, they could be sensory organs to rival even the most astute of creatures.
The fins and gills are even stranger. Your time in the game proves that other aquatic species existed on Alternia, which lends merit to the existence of an undersea apex predator. You didn’t think that trolls would sit at the top of the food chain there, too. Even then, seadwellers are amphibious. It’d make biological sense, then, for all trolls to be seadwellers, but nature is a fickle thing.
Little nuances in his facial structure and posture catch your eyes for a time. The spines of his fins, poking past the frayed edges of the membrane between them. The rise of his cheekbones, and the way they meet the curve of his jaw. The way his lips drag over the points of his teeth on certain syllables. The spark in his eyes when he’s agitated --
“Are you even listenin’?”
You’re startled out of your reverie, but manage to clamp down on yourself before your surprise becomes apparent.
“Of course I was,” you say, as flat as your voice will allow. “What do you take me for? I’m not the same young, idiotic, heartless harlot that blew up your computer all those years ago.”
His fins twitch.
“Repeat the last sentence I said.” He looks so proud of himself for pulling what, to him, is an unbeatable trump card.
You, on the other hand, are trying to prevent a shit-eater’s grin from splitting your cheeks. “‘Are you even listening?’” you say, as flatly as you can imagine.
His expression drops like an anvil. Yours, on the other hand, rises like a balloon carelessly released from a small child’s tiny, thick-fingered hand on the way out of an amusement park. You press your Sharpie to the paper and drag another meaningless line from one side to the other.
“You’re infuriatin’,” you hear him grumble under his breath.
You laugh, a little louder than necessary. “I’m flattered. Truly, I am.”
He growls, short and animalistic, then grabs the drawer handle on his nightstand, yanks it out of its slot, then flings the drawer and all of its contents at you. Thankfully, it and the miscellany filling it are stopped by the chain-link fence that separates him from you.
There’s an almighty racket when the bulk of the drawer hits the fence. Bits of paper, lint, and other assorted items scatter the floor of his little alcove. He’s standing, now, and, if he was any angrier, there’d be steam coming out of his every orifice. His fins are fanned out, again, and the gills on his neck are flared open like those of an angry betta fish.
You, on the other hand, haven’t blinked once in the last thirty seconds. You stare at him with the bemused expression a physicist would have upon watching something at a fifth grade science fair.
“Fuck you,” Eridan breathes.
You set your notebook on the table, then turn off the lamp. “Maybe later,” you say, then stand up and walk away. You can almost hear him fuming behind you, but you don’t dare to turn around. You open the door, walk through, and pull it closed.
The walk back up is cathartic. Your mind brings up images of Eridan’s face on the way back up.
The thought sends little electric shocks down into your very toes. And other places, which you’d care to ignore at this moment in time.
---
“Kanaya, darling?”
“Yes?”
“I’m less capable of distancing myself from my emotions than I once thought.”
“Indeed.”