Work Text:
"AAAAAAAA"
Normally, this exclamation would constitute a venting of frustration from one of the household's two resident geniuses, but, more recently, it was an exclamation pre-recorded in a bathroom for maximum acoustic strangeness and then fed into the audio files of a Roomba. The little cleaning boy was very bad at his job of actually cleaning things, but when he bumped into stuff, he yelled, he screamed, and he generally made a ruckus of things. A hilarious ruckus, but a ruckus raised nonetheless. It wasn't like the Roomba actually had sentience, unlike several other projects the two STEM-freaks at large were working on. Well, they weren't sentient, but they were worryingly close.
The Strider-Ampora-Captor apartment was a veritable museum of projects and creations. On a shelf, two small Raspberry Pis talked endlessly at each other, generating a stunning amount of text volumes from strangely implemented Markov Chains - that one was Sollux's idea. They flashed red and blue, dinging a small chime whenever one of their semi-random text vomits ended up saying one of a dozen dozen recognized "cool phrases". Sometimes, this would result in several dozen chimes in a row, often at odd hours, as if they were specifically doing it to annoy Dirk, who slept in at similarly odd hours. Dirk knew their code inside and out, though, and that meant that there was no targeted method for making them begin to say profundities, although when he was awoken by their noises, he usually checked the logs to see what they were babbling about.
On the television was one of Sollux's pride and joys - an emulator hooked up to a neural network that constantly tried to beat video games, generally tended to once or twice a day like one would feed a fish. It had to be switched on to different modes per game, but the algorithm had gotten pretty competent at Super Mario Brothers™, and was right now struggling with Tetris™. The debugging process involved a lot of trying to get it to stop pausing, as Sollux noticed a consistently worrying behavior in his little child, in that whenever it detected in the next frame that it was going to lose, it just paused forever until manually reset. When the television wasn't running that, it was loaded with the typical stuff. Torrented anime played on shuffle from a playlist to form an incoherent mixture of all genres, and, when Eridan so desired, a movie or two. Or sometimes, even the news.
Unlike the two gearheads he admired from the couch, Eridan was not particularly oriented towards programming or engineering or even video games. He worked as an aide to the Mayor, and the closest thing he got to them interest wise is a shared desire to watch projects grow, resulting in the eventual purchase of his little aquarium that he doted over with care, helpfully isolated with several layers of redundancy from all the electronics covering the everywhere.
But it was okay that he didn't understand what they were talking about when they talked about things like "electric resistance" and "assembly code" and "gear ratios".
He didn't need to be a 1:1 match with them to enjoy their presence.
Sparks flew out from the worktable, causing Sollux to swat away at Dirk and say something muffled behind his facemask. Their big project this month was a bipedal robot based on some Japanese model that Dirk had imported, and then proceeded to soundly and succinctly break apart into all of its component pieces. An arm here, a leg there, actuators and motors and tubes and hydraulics, leaving bare the skeleton that they would re-assemble once they thoroughly understood it inside and out. Eridan didn't get closer than couch-distance.
Not like he didn't want to, because the desire to squeeze them into a tight hug was always present, but because he knew that it wouldn't be safe to get close to them when they were working with volatile materials and blowtorches. Dirk said something back to Sollux, and Eridan didn't hear, because their voices were muffled, but Sollux reacted and gave him another playful thump on the shoulder, and then more sparks.
Heat and electricity, that was what it was all built on.
Hopping up from the couch's back, he ambled his way into the kitchen of the two-bedroom apartment, a pretty spacious place normally that's been turned into a bit of a cramped cavern from the sheer volume of wires and shelves and half-finished projects to be completed at a later date. With the money pouring in from the trio's jobs, they weren't at a lack for anything, but, robots and computers and fishies aside, they lived pretty spartanly. Opening the stainless steel fridge with the gentlest of touches like he was trying to avoid leaving fingerprints, Eridan began pulling stuff out and setting it on the countertop. He hummed to himself and grabbed the biggest, sharpest knife they had.
It wasn't really like any of them could cook, but a meal from home was better than a meal from Dominos yet again. If not in taste than certainly in nutrition (but also, in taste, breadsticks aside). The sound of metal edge against cutting board echoed through the kitchen, accompanied by a chorus of beeps and whines and thrums and the omnipresent sound of a blowtorch hissing far off in the distance. Thuk Thuk Thuk Thuk Thuk Thuk
It took a couple of minutes for Sollux to turn around, lifting his mask off of his face to look for his boyfriend. "Uh, you theen ED?" He asked, having long since mastered the art of not biting his highly uncooperative tongue, his eyes flicking across the living room slash workspace as if to make sure that he was really missing.
"Nah. He's probably somewhere, though." Dirk responded, pushing Sollux's mask back on before letting the hiss of his blowtorch cut across more metal, prying the last bit loose that they needed open. He passed the fuel canisters and the torch aside for Sollux to put back on the tool shelf, and then took his mask off, wiping a healthy layer of sweat off of his forehead with his forearm. Sollux returned with a rag and no safety mask, with Dirk gratefully using that to mop up the rest of the sweat, removing his gloves in kind.
"Well, of courthe he'th thomewhere, unleth you're implying he jutht dithappeared into the aether?" Sollux snarked, putting down the toolbox with all their wrenches and pliers and screwdrivers on his side of the workbench and popping it open. This particular robot had been a tough nut to crack, but now that the head was open, that meant Sollux could begin fastening wires to it and seeing what he could do with the code. That is to say, his favorite part of the whole show.
"That is, in fact, exactly what I'm implying. Woe betides the lone Ampora, who, unobserved, vanishes like a particle decaying. Did he ever exist? Who are we talking about, even?" Dirk said with as flat and monotone of an affect as he could manage.
"I'm right here, you goofballs," Eridan answered, causing Sollux to jump slightly. "Now turn around and face away from the robot corpse. I'm feeding you."
"What? Who said that?" Dirk joked, covering the tangerine orange of his eyes with two sunglasses as he turned back towards the robot corpse, unlike Sollux, who dutifully listened, swinging his knees all the way around. Eridan set out a little folding table in front of them, pushed it so that Sollux's knees were underneath it, and then unfurled a chair for himself before disappearing back into the kitchen. By the time he returned, Dirk had changed his tune as well, sitting with his legs underneath the plastic platform with a narrow, wry little grin.
"This is food." Eridan declared confidently, putting the wooden cheese board out for them, along with a healthy variety of little toasts, crackers, fruits, both dried and otherwise, nuts, and dried meat products. After all, even if you couldn't cook, so long as you can handle a knife, you can make a cheese board that's good enough to impress even your pickiest of significant others. "You will eat the food."
"I will?" Dirk questioned, staring at it with a mockingly dubious expression.
"If you won't, I will," Sollux said, already beginning to eat. Teeth gnashed open and shut as various indiscriminate combinations of flavors assaulted his insensate tongue with reckless abandon. This was no Ratatouille™ moment where the correct combination of two things would result in an overindulgent flavor explosion in Sollux's mouth: he was hungry, and food was here.
"No, he definitely will," Eridan replied, staring at Dirk, trying to see the faintest bit of orange behind his black shades.
"Are you sure about that?" Dirk said, with the exact same intonation as that one John Cena meme, eliciting a chuckle from the ravenous programmer sitting to his side.
"Yes. Now eat the cheese. I worked very hard on it." Eridan said, grabbing some of the three-person-proportioned foodstuffs for himself. He crunched while Dirk spent the microseconds required to retort.
"You made all this by yourself? Impressive."
"No, but I did cut it up and arrange it."
"...Fair enough."
Occasionally, their chewing was interrupted by a small conversational piece, one that usually flew over Eridan's head until he asked for one of them to explain it in pure English and not nerd terms. The difference between talking about assembly code and soldering irons, and instead, talking about "Oh yeah everything in a computer ith jutht a bunch of true-falthe thtatementth," and "It's very, very hot metal. Please don't touch it.". Moments like these brought Eridan back to the swooning flush he had felt when he first met the two.
The meal was over, and as the twosome deigned fit to turn around and get back to work on the robot, Eridan stopped them with a mighty outstretched palm to the shoulders. "Oh no, you don't. You two have been working on this thing for literally 72 hours straight. We're watching a movie, and then you can get back to dissecting your robot."
"Oh, we're well past the dissection stage, now we're picking its brain and then turning it into robot Frankenstein." Dirk replied, showing otherwise no resistance as he got up, stretched, and then vaulted over both the plastic table and the couch, each time muttering "Parkour!" under his breath. What a nerd.
"You mean Frankenthtein'th Monthter, Adam." Sollux responded, sighing as he got up and followed behind Dirk, but at a reasonable walking pace, walking around the edge of the couch. Eridan was somewhere in between, just getting up and climbing over the back of the couch, fitting in right between the two of them. Sollux eased into place, leaning his head into the crook of Eridan's shoulder, while Dirk, substantially taller, let Eridan lean into him, wrapping an arm back across Eridan's shoulders.
"Do they ever say his name in the book?" Eridan asks, reaching out for Dirk's free hand and letting their fingers entwine.
"I'm sure they do at some point, but I can't produce a citation for you on the spot." Dirk answers, while Sollux uses his phone to fiddle around with the television. "What are we watching? Can we watch Evangelion again?"
"The entire series, or just Rebuild?"
"Either slash or."
"No."
Sollux leaned a little more heavily into Eridan, grabbing a knit blanket from the floor by kicking it up into his lap with his feet. Dirk used his thumb to grab the other end of it, spreading it over the three of them. "How about Princeth Mononoke?"
"Yeah, I can vibe with that."
"Sounds good to me. Ghibli night?"
"Hell yeth."
Several hours and three movies later, Eridan slowly extricates himself from the pile that the trio had ended up merging into, plying the sleeping Sollux's head out of his lap, gently pulling the two together so that when he removed himself from the scene like an Indiana Jones treasure making itself scarce from its own pedestal, Dirk would be leaning on Sollux instead of on Eridan's shoulder. He got up, letting his hands come loose of the other two's hands, and pulled the blanket up a little higher, listening to their snoring - Dirk's high and reedy, Sollux's surprisingly low and grumbly. Grabbing the wooden cheese board, he began to clean up, satisfied that they had collectively eaten everything. Everything packed away into its requisite places, board wiped down and sanitized, utensils thrown in the countertop dishwasher, set to run. Rumblerumblerumblerumblerumblerumble.
His footsteps are silent, padded by thick wool socks. He ambles over to the workbench, preparing to shut their open laptops, when something on the screen catches his eye - a Google docs file left open, schematics in the background, lines of code on Sollux's computer.
List of features for Eridanbot 1.0
- Recite fish facts when asked (scavenge an Alexa?)
- Literally incapable of not saying fish puns.
- Markov chain new, nonsensical fish puns?
-
Stitch together Eridan's voice Youtube Poop styledont actually do thii2 - feed2 fii2h
- randomly turn2 on the roomba
- Randomly scream in the Roomba's voice.
- ramble2 about miiliitary hii2tory when prompted
Chuckling to himself, Eridan looks at the vaguely humanoid pile of parts wistfully, and then closes their laptop. Walking into the living room, he shuts the idle television screen off, wanders back towards the couch, and lays his head into Sollux's lap, right on top of the blanket, before closing his eyes and falling quickly asleep. In its docking station, the Roomba silently sits, its cleaning duties for the day done and accounted for. On a shelf, two Raspberry Pis chirp quietly. One of them just came up with an interesting sentence.