Work Text:
Sparks kicked against the water, clawing his way toward the surface. He was running out of air. The wormhole generator he’d hooked up to his lasso had malfunctioned. The floodwaters around him swirled muddy red with debris from the settlements he had failed to protect. Croach’s tribe was gone, and Croach with it. Could Martians survive drowning? There were some things even their nanotech couldn’t heal.
His boots were weighing him down but he was too tired to even kick them off. The light above him wasn’t getting any brighter no matter how hard he swam, and his lungs burned cold with the effort not to breathe. Croach was dead. Croach was dead, and Sparks would never meet him, never saddle up with, never ride the red plains of - G’loot Praktaw, Croach’d correct him, if he weren’t--
Sparks startled awake, sputtering, and instinctively reached to clear the water from his nose. Wait, water--?
Oh, gross.
“Croach,” he ground out, making sure that even the most emotionally unaware Martian could sense his annoyance. “Did you excrete somethin’ all over me?”
He was soaked, the Marshal station couch was soaked, and there were telltale streaked footprints leading across the room to Croach’s desk, upon which the paperwork was also soaked - all of it coated in a translucent purple goo that was slowly seeping into Spark’s clothes.
“No,” was the sullen but insistent reply from beneath Croach’s desk.
Sparks wiped the goo from his face and flung it on the floor with a grimace. His Marshal badge stayed dull even after he cleaned it off with his cuff. “Ain’t no one else here who excretes purple ooze,” he countered as he stood. The dryness down his back only made the way his pants stuck to the front of his legs feel even worse. “Unless… there is and you’re hidin’ from ‘em.”
“Sparks Nevada, I am not--”
“It was Croach,” the Marshal station’s Artificial Intelligence intoned, dispassionate (and yet a little too eager to incriminate).
Sotto voce, Croach hissed, “You said you would not--”
“She’s got you there, buddy.” Grateful that no one was there to see it, Sparks waddled slowly to the deputy desk, avoiding the goo on the floor, and sat on one clear corner of it. He gave Croach a good long few seconds and then grumbled into the silence, “Dangit, Croach… we talked about this. You got somethin’ to… to excrete, or whatever, you do it outside, or in the Marshal station bathroom, or, I don’t…” He faltered to a stop. The silence, he realized, wasn’t rightly silence. He hadn’t paid much mind to the noise, on account of it being quiet and not too familiar. He figured it was - goo noise? Whatever. But now that he was closer, with a sinking sense of dread he recognized the sound: Croach was crying.
“Woah, uh, hey.” Sparks slid off the desk and came around to the back of it, boots skidding a little on the ooze. He knelt carefully, mouth twisting a little as his knees squelched into place. Croach looked uncharacteristically miserable. He sat in a puddle of goo, tucked into a corner underneath the desk, speckled arms wrapped around his knees. His antennae were folded low to fit in the space. Goo still beaded on his blue skin, occasionally gathering and plopping to the floor. (So gross.)
Also, he was definitely crying. “Okay, you are crying,” Sparks pointed out, gamely covering his panic. “Like… yeah, like for real crying. Uh, okay. I would never have bet on Martians bein’ able to do that, but I’m not really up on my Martian biology, so.” Croach offered nothing but a sniff to fill the gap in the one-sided conversation. The amount of ‘a loss’ that Sparks was at was staggering. “Right. Are you, uh. Is everything… ? Did you… did you excrete somethin’ because you’re… you’re sad? About. Uh. Are you sad, Croach?”
Croach’s antennae flicked. “I secreted a protective mucus,” he admitted at length, and Sparks was trying so hard not to look relieved that Croach was finally talking that he nearly missed the actual words.
“That is somehow even more gross,” he groaned, wincing a little internally when the assertion failed to elicit any defensive response from Croach. “What’d you do that for?”
“I sensed your distress as you slept. I approached you so I might wake you and I…” His expression crumpled, and Sparks felt like he’d taken a robot fist to the chest. “I do not… I cannot ascertain what I am feeling. I am… overwhelmed.” He looked just as confused as Sparks felt.
Sparks sat back and crossed his legs to be on a more even keel with Croach. “Reckon that was my dream. I was dreaming somethin’... it was, uh, it was sad. Real sad. So.” He scratched the back of his neck, caught between concern and embarrassment that his dumb dream had put Croach in this state. “You must’a picked up on that when you came over.”
Croach reached up as Sparks did to wipe his face clean, then shook his head decisively. “I have experienced the emotion you designate sadness,” he said, matter-of-fact except for the thickness of his voice. “This is akin to sadness, but…” He shook his head again and took a series of short, shallow breaths. Sparks tensed, primed for he didn’t know what, when Croach mumbled, “I wish to engage in the human ritual known as hugging.”
Sparks had barely vocalized his reluctant affirmative when Croach propelled himself forward, wrapping his arms around Sparks’ shoulders. Sparks tipped backward a little and righted himself, patting Croach’s back (and getting his hand momentarily stuck in the protective mucus, ugh) as he tried to think of what to say.
“Did I enact it correctly,” Croach asked muffedly into Sparks’ neck. It was technically correct, in the sense that mucking up a hug was hard to do. And man, hugging Croach was weird. His antenna kept twitching against Sparks’ ear, and it was mighty ticklish.
“Sure, buddy.” Sparks’ quiet chuckle verged on the mildly hysterical. “A-plus hugging. Great job.”
“Ugh,” Croach huffed, but Sparks knew he only pretended to hate enacting human rituals correctly. Probably.
Sparks gave him a good few moments to compose himself before calling out to the air. “A.I., contact the Barkeep and tell him we got a problem with Croach’s feelings what needs fixin’.” Then, to no one in particular, “His wife ain’t likely to be pleased about it, so… for his ears only.”
“The Barkeep is currently unavailable.”
“What? Why? There ain’t trouble in his place, is there?”
“His away message states that he is out of town. With his wife.”
“His awa--? Wait, out of town like… on vacation? Can the mayor do that? Do not--”
“Yes.”
“--answer that. Great.”
Sparks went quiet again, patting Croach on the back with a little more urgency as he tried to think of a plan B. The last time Croach had cottoned to someone’s overpowering emotions - a Martian fueled by blood rage was a powerfully alarming thing - some convenient cosmic powers had set things to rights. Without that Barkeep ex machina, Sparks wasn’t sure how to help Croach out of his doldrums. At least this time around things were less likely to end in imminent bloodshed.
“So, are you gonna be stuck like this, or… ?” he asked the top of Croach’s head, and Croach, annoyingly unruffled by the extra goo that now clung to him, dislodged himself from the hug, one brow raised incredulously.
“Do you intend to reassure me, Sparks Nevada?”
Angry crying was something Sparks never needed to see Croach do. “Right. Sorry. Just… not super familiar with your kind’s penchant for this sorta thing. I mean… would it help if I, I dunno… if I thought about happy-type things real hard?” Croach gave him another look. “It’s a suggestion!”
“A poor one!”
“What, you got somethin’ better?” Croach deflated a little. “Sorry. Right. I… sorry.” Sparks weighed the pros and cons of trying to contact the Red Plains Rider for help. Croach was embarrassed enough experiencing any emotion; he wouldn’t want to make a big production of it. And Sparks could just hear her lecturing him on how he was the least qualified human on Mars to help Croach out with his feelings, on account of his (alleged and patently untrue) emotional incompetence. No, he could handle this all on his lonesome, without Red.
“Reckon some deep breathin’ would help? That’s a thing. That humans do. Yeah, deep breaths. Close your eyes, Croach.”
“I do not see how--”
“Come on, close ‘em.”
“--still sense the--”
“Be a pal.” It rankled Croach something fierce when Sparks tried to play that card.
“I will place you under onus if this fails to alleviate my… sadness,” Croach said, grudgingly closing his eyes.
“Sure, you do that.” Sparks closed his eyes as well, settling his limbs into a slightly less uncomfortable position. The goo on his clothes was starting to cool - had it been warm? gross - and even if Croach hadn’t calmed down in five minutes, Sparks was still gonna get a shower and a change of clothing. “So… breathe in.” Sparks led by example. He could hear Croach emulating him. He held it in for a moment, listening to make sure Croach did the same. “Okay--”
“This does not appear to any of my senses to be relieving my symptoms,” Croach interjected, sounding like he was being squeezed by a giant spider.
“Doesn’t help if you ain’t quiet.”
“Relative to our environment, I am speaking at a level--”
“If you ain’t silent.” Croach made a skeptical sound but otherwise kept his mouth shut. “Breathe in again. And imagine - whatever, remember, uh, somethin’ good? Like… uh. That time. Christmas. All of us around the campfire. Thought I wasn’t so keen on havin’ company but reckon you and Red and Felton changed my mind about that. So.” He cracked open one eye to check on Croach’s progress. He was turning purple around the edges. “Breathe out! Dangit.” Croach let out his breath in one great whoosh. Sparks closed his eye. “In again. Slowly. Think about that time I saved your tribe from that flood. And you met me. Definitely a pretty good day for you.”
“That is debatable,” Croach muttered.
“Don’t you get sarcastic--”
“I am merely observing--”
“--ain’t gonna be no help if you--”
“--circumstances of our--”
“--no matter what Red says--”
“--considering the direction in which--”
“--tryin’ to tell you that you’re my--”
“Bagropa,” Croach exclaimed with sudden clarity, and Sparks opened his eyes to see that Croach had as well. His antennae were perking up too.. “Was this your intention all along? To distract me from my thoughts? It is... an effective coping mechanism.”
“That is - absolutely what I was doing. One hundred percent. Distractin’ you from your blues.”
“... Blue is my natural pigmentation.”
Sparks didn’t know whether to be mad or proud that Croach was actually getting good at sarcasm. “You know what, whatever.”
The corner of Croach’s mouth twitched up into what Sparks reckoned to be (and Croach would probably deny being) a smile. Sparks extricated himself from his sitting position and heaved himself up with assistance from the desk, noting with disgust the way his pants tried to stay stuck to the floor. Croach inched out from his spot half under the desk and stood slowly, looking down at the mucus - ugh - goo on the desk, floor, and Sparks.
“You are so cleaning this up.”
Croach lifted his pile of paperwork from the desk. It drew away in thick strands. “Doing so would reduce my onus to you.”
“Doing so will reduce the amount of super gross in here.” Despite its efforts to cling to him, Sparks peeled off his jacket, holding it away from him with the fabric pinched between two fingers. “I need to go take, like, five showers. And shine up my Marshal badge. And… just… so many showers.”
“You do that.”
“I will.”
“Fine.”
“Not fine.”
Croach wiped some of the goo from the desk, then paused, obviously unsure what to do next with it. It dripped from his fingers onto the floor, and he looked at his hand with a contemplative glint in his eyes.
“What are you - are you - you look like you’re… do not eat that, oh my god, I am going.” Sparks turned on his heel to high-tail it out of the room, gagging a little as he went.
“Sparks Nevada--” Sparks paused but didn’t turn around. “I… would be under onus to you if you did not mention this.”
“‘Course, buddy.” He resumed his walk, side-stepping the puddles on the floor, and pretended not the hear the quiet, “and thank you,” on his way out.