Chapter Text
He catches your eye from across the room like a flash of fool’s gold, done up in violent purples and gaudy jewelry and looking for all the world like he would rather be anywhere other than sitting in a midblood’s recreation block nursing a pint of foul-smelling liquor. You can’t really say what possesses you to hold the awkward eye contact - maybe it’s the crowd, maybe it’s the mask, maybe it’s the burgundy shawl draped around your shoulders like the world’s shittiest caste disguise. Maybe it’s the way his eyes widen ever so slightly when you glance back at him, like he’s forgotten that he’s the shiniest thing in the room, like he didn’t expect you to notice him in the first place.
You aren’t really sure what a seadweller is doing here in the first place. He’s visibly out of place in a jadeblood hive, even one so far from the caverns - the rings on his fingers glint in the stray sunbeams that peek through the hastily assembled blackout curtains (the curtains you nearly burned the skin off your hands while trying to tack up over the windows), his carefully styled hair seems to frizz and come undone in the heat of the room, and his eyes keep flitting left and right at the trolls next to him, a blueblood with a smile like a carving knife and a hulking indigo nearly half your height over again. His gaze stops on you for a second - you’re already looking at him, at the thin gold clasp holding his cape around his shoulders and at the dangerous lightning-bolt angle of his horns, when he seems to realize you’re there. You don’t look away, and you aren’t sure why.
His look of surprise is only there for a split-second and then disappears, his expression sliding gracefully back into token haughty aquatic prince, and then a faceless tealblood with an ornate-looking swan getup brushes her way across your field of vision and he’s gone.
You linger by the food tables with a cup of grub juice and a delicately decorated sugar cookie, far enough away from the party perimeter that you aren’t radiating mutant body heat all over the dangerous-looking bluebloods sprawled on Kanaya’s couch. It’s early enough in the night that you can’t politely duck out and leave, but god, do you want to. You weren’t made for this scene.
Kanaya would pout though, if you were to leave her wiggling day party, and you can’t have that - even if you’re not sure she would notice. It’s just been you over here ever since the bluebloods arrived, disgruntled-looking violetblood in tow - Kanaya had made her way to the cerulean the first chance she got, and you haven’t been in speaking distance of her since. You nibble at the edge of the cookie, grimacing when crumbs shingle off and settle on your shawl.
It takes nearly a full hour for anyone to come close enough to set off your flight response, but it happens eventually - an oliveblood with shoulders as broad as a doorframe leans in to grab a grub tart from the tray beside you and nearly knocks into you. Your reflexes are quick, thankfully, and you flinch back fast enough to avoid letting her brush up against your too-hot skin. A highblood might not be able to tell the difference, depending on how many rustbloods they’ve been within breathing distance of, but letting a midblood come that close to you is little more than a death sentence.
Your outfit isn’t so lucky, though - you jerk your arm back out of range of the troll’s bicep and spill half of your juice over your shawl and lovingly made shirt, staining the white trim a vibrant shade of orange. Damn.
And just after Kanaya had re-fitted you, too.
In any other case, you wouldn’t give a shit about a stained shirt, but you’ve been dying for an excuse to leave the overcrowded recreation block for hours and this is just as good a chance as any. Muttering an excuse and a half-coherent apology to the confused oliveblood, you duck and weave your way around the bodies scattered throughout the fringes of the room, sidestepping into a hallway just off to the side before anyone can stop and ask if you’re alright. You’re sure Kanaya won’t mind you skipping out to find her ablution block. You can say you got lost.
The halls are empty, blissfully so after the bustle of the main room - you don’t even realize you’re breathing more evenly now that you’re away from the crowd until the dizzy rush of oxygen leads you to lean against the hive wall for support. The morning air is acrid in your lungs, filled with the tang of burnt heat and sunshine now that you’re far enough away from the blacked-out room for the daylight to creep its way around the corners of Kanaya’s hive.
The ablution block is another three turns down the maze-like corridors of the tower, the floor sloping down and turning ever so slightly until you can hear the thumping, bone-rattling ambience of the music above your head rather than behind it. The sunlight is harsher here, warm and burning and direct - you sidle your way past a window in a kind of hunch-waddle to avoid it, drawing your burgundy scarf up over your head in a half-successful attempt to protect your skin. By the time you reach the door, the stain has set fully into your shirt. Damn.
It’s nothing a good scrubdown with some soap and hot water won’t (mostly) fix, you think, and you aren’t exactly aching to get back to the festivities upstairs, so it’s an easy thing to lock yourself in the ablution block and flip on the taps without so much as a glance back down the hallway. Kanaya can come find you if she really starts to worry - although you have a feeling she’s a bit preoccupied at the moment. You can forgive her being an inattentive host, if she can forgive you really wanting absolutely fucking nothing to do with the highbloods packed into her main room.
So you scrub, and you hum as you scrub, and you watch your reflection in the mirror as the steam wafting up from the sink fogs it over. It’s calming.
At least, that is, until you hear the sound of voices echoing down the hallway, accents clearly tinged with the oceanfront twang of highbloods. No one below cerulean has a voice like that, and you know it - wavy and sleek, clipped at the ends and guttural enough to set your hackles rising. You double check the lock.
“-not sure what you’re wantin’ me to do,” the voice is saying, low and full-bodied. It sounds like claws scraping over concrete, in the best way possible. “I didn’t exactly come here on account a the pleasant conversation - present company included, a course.”
Another voice cuts in, higher and sharper, viciously feminine. “Fuck off, Ampora.” Ampora? “I brought you here to get you out of that depressing shithole you call a shipwreck so you could make some friends, you know. Maybe it’ll keep you from leeching all my spare time off me.”
“Please,” says Ampora, all haughty highblood vitriol. “As if it ain’t a fuckin’ favor that I talk to you at all.”
“We’re here to broaden your horizons,” Voice Two drawls. “What about that rustblood you were making eyes at? Don’t think I didn’t see you earlier.”
There’s a scoff, and you nearly miss the next few words while trying to place exactly which voice it came from. Ampora speaks - you lean closer to the door, straining to pick up the threads of the conversation again. “I’d rather not pitch myself in with gutterbloods,” he says, and you grit your teeth. “Even if you think they’re easy on the eyes. Besides, I figured you’d be too wrapped up in your own drama to notice me sizing up the threat levels in that room-”
“Threat levels? Don’t be such a prude. Lowbloods know how to have a good time, even if you can’t take that harpoon gun out of your ass for long enough to see it. And I wasn’t the one window shopping, was I?”
The voices are closer now, no longer echoing - you hear the footsteps approach the door to the ablution block, the swish of fabric against the tile, and you know without even leaning down to peek through the keyhole that Ampora has to be the gaudy seadweller you saw upstairs. Instinctively, you shrink back against the wall as you hear them stop outside the door - it’s locked, you know it is, but they don’t try the handle. Your blood pusher slows marginally when you realize they won’t be coming in, and after a few more moments you feel brave enough to press your ear against the door to catch the lower strains of their conversation.
“-just need you to socialize a bit, preferably with her other friends so I can catch her alone for a moment,” voice two says again.
“Ain’t it her party? She’s friends with the whole bleedin’ lot of them.” Ampora doesn’t sound angry, you think, just put out.
“She’s not friends with you.”
“Thank you so much for remindin’ me, Vris, stellar interpersonal skills you got goin’ for you. Just peachy.”
“Can it, fishboy. If you won’t help me, at least stay out of my way so I don’t have you hanging off me like a leech the whole time.”
There’s a huff, loud enough that you think it was meant to be theatrical, and the click of shoes down the tile hallway starts up again. You unstick your face from the door.
It’s obvious, above anything else that’s happened tonight, that you weren’t supposed to hear that. You aren’t always the best at picking up social cues, but you sure as fuck know when a conversation is private, and this one was. There’s really nothing for it but to hide out here in the locked ablution block until whoever is left goes away, and then try to make your escape as quickly and painlessly as possible. You dry your clammy palms on the fancy pressed fabric of the slacks Kanaya made you and breathe as silently as you can manage.
You’re fully prepared to hunker down next to the load gaper and pretend you don’t exist for the next twenty minutes when the tiniest noise possible filters through the heavy wooden door and reaches your ears. It’s almost indecipherable, a little inhale that you wouldn’t have thought twice about if not for the choked-off sniffle that follows.
The handle rattles, Ampora curses softly when he finds it locked.
Shit. “Just give me a second,” you call, trying to keep the lowblood accent out of your voice as much as you can. Flushing the load gaper, you flip the sink tap on and off again for show before steeling yourself and unlocking the door.
It swings open and there he is - standing a head and a half taller than you even with the hunch to his shoulders, cape askew and hair curling down around his fins (they’re tinged purple, you hadn’t noticed that from far away). He flinches back, takes a second to size you up, then goes rigid when he eyes the burgundy scarf around your neck. It’s an instantaneous change; from one second to the next he goes from slouching, defeated troll to haughty regal prince, fins flaring out and shoulders rolling back until he’s an imposing figure that you have to crane your neck to make eye contact with. He sneers at you with his lips pulled back over two rows of razor-sharp teeth.
“Enjoyed the show, did you?” he snarls, vitriol dripping from his lips. The violet rimming his puffy eyes ruins the effect of it a little, but you’re still pretty sure a lesser troll would have shit themselves in your situation. You give yourself a mental pat on the back for managing to hold eye contact.
“Just leaving, actually,” you retort. “Wouldn’t want you feeling like you have to make nice with the gutterbloods now.”
You bite your tongue the second the words leave your mouth - this isn’t Sollux, you remind yourself, this is royalty that you just spat out a cullable offense to - but he doesn’t seem to register the insult. Something in his jaw twitches, a muscle contracting as he clenches his jaw tight, and then he’s pushing his way past you into the ablution block without so much as a word in response.
The door slams shut, the lock clicking into place with a sense of finality.
---
Kanaya is preoccupied when you get upstairs, chatting away with a blueblood in an elaborate, frilly dress, but she still waves you over when you manage to catch her attention.
“Oh, it’s you,” the blueblood calls as you walk up, dragging out her vowels in a way that makes every word sound mocking. “Did Eridan get ahold of you?”
“Who the fuck is Eridan?”
The blueblood’s eyes flash dangerously, and she extends a thin, long-fingered hand for you to shake. “No one you need to worry about. Vriska Serket, I don’t think we’ve met.”
You eye her hand like it’s contagious, but Kanaya kicks your ankle daintily, and you reach out to accept the handshake. Vriska’s grip tightens sharply around your knuckles, then disappears altogether as she straightens up.
“Pleasure to meet you,” she drawls, and Kanaya seems overjoyed by the success of the five-second conversation. “If you see my friend, please let him know he’s missing out on a wonderful party up here.”
Something clicks in your think pan, and you realize Eridan must be the seadweller you ran into on your way out of the ablution block.
You aren’t sure why you do it, really - he was nothing but rude to your face, and didn’t really seem all that pleasant to be around even despite the sympathy that tugged at your blood pusher for the split-second of weakness you saw in him, but something about Vriska rubs you the wrong way. So you cover for him.
“I think he’s just not feeling well,” you say. “Probably won’t be up for a while.”
Annoyance tugs at the corners of Vriska’s lips, but she smooths her expression down into a chipper mask before you can comment on it. “That’s too bad,” she says, theatrical voice drawn out dramatically. “And here I was looking forward to introducing you two.”
You’re sure she was.
“Well,” you cut in, glancing between Kanaya’s half-distracted expression and Vriska looking like she’s about to drag you into something you don’t particularly want to be dragged into. “This has been fun, but I don’t usually leave my lusus alone this late in the morning, so I should-”
“Go?” asks Vriska, pulling back. You hadn’t even realized she was leaning towards you in the first place. “Well, if you want to be a spoilsport, I suppose.”
You do suppose. You suppose so hard, it propels you right past Vriska and Kanaya and out the door. Kanaya doesn’t even seem to care at this point in the morning, either - she waves a cursory goodbye and gives you a hug before turning her attention back to the blueblood at her side. You don’t really mind.
As you’re loading yourself into one of the service cars line up outside the door to Kanaya’s hive, you glance back up at the tower window - the morning sunlight scalds a bit, but if you shield your eyes from the glare, you can just barely make out the sill of the window you had passed on your way down Kanaya’s hallway. There’s no hint of violet on the other side of the glass.
You try not to let yourself be too disappointed by that.