Chapter Text
She marched in, set her eyes upon him, and every muscle in his body froze up. She made her way across the room in what seemed like an instant, and in less time than that her fingers are around his throat, lifting him into the air and squeezing.
"What. The Shell. Are you doin' here." She growls out, pink tears are running down the side of her face, but the rest of her face is made up of nothing but pure fury. Every piece of the countless gold decorations and jewelry in the throne room crackles with the electricity of her psychic powers. She tosses him across the room, and he lets out a painful grunt as he impacts against the wall, all the breath in his body knocked out of him. The moment he seems to be able to move his hands he covers his throat, but his arms are wrenched aside as she yanks him back up effortlessly by his shoulder.
She stops, all of a sudden, once she sees the bruise on his neck.
"Oh fuck." He stammers out.
"...y-yeah. You're important." Her eyes are suddenly distant. She drops him unceremoniously, and moves over to her throne, dropping just as bonelessly as he did, all the rage and energy draining out. "I still have stuff to do." She says, sighing, bending down and wiping the tyrian pink from her face and rubbing it from her hands into the cushion of the same color. "...need to focus..." She seems to stammer, before letting out a sob, sinking deeper into her throne and shaking silently. A gasp coming from her occasionally as she held herself and cried.
The younger troll got up hesitantly, and inched closer to the throne, unsure of what else to do.
Her Imperious Condescension, living Nightmare of the Universe, Empress of the Alternian Empire, Commander in Reef of the Alternian Interstellar Battlefleet, terror of a thousand worlds, and the Sole Possesor of the Tyrannical Tyrian Blood, Supreme Highest of the Hemospectrum, was sobbing uncontrollably in front of him.
He had absolutely no idea of what to do. An escape attempt would be suicide, obviously, he had seen the massive indigo-and-black armored Subjuggulator Guards on the other side of the doors. And even if he got past them, he'd be stuck in the middle of Space, trapped on board with hundreds of psychics as well as hundreds of other trolls who simply wanted to kill him for the fun of it. But to stay, to have seen the Empress in this pitiful state, obviously would mean a summary execution all the same.
He wasn't truly thinking, letting his body move closer on its own. He found himself standing directly before the Condesce, and without fully realizing what he was doing, he put one hand on her cheek. The sobbing stopped immediately, her eyes shot open, fresh with renewed fury, but it cooled quickly, she allowed him to put his other hand on her face, cupping her much larger head.
He hesitated for a few seconds, but realizing that she wasn't killing him, he moved forward, patting the sides of her face gently and quietly shushing the renewed sniffling.
They continued for a few minutes. She occasionally bubbled up with more renewed crying, and he slowly calmed her back down. Soon she was only mildly hiccuping, and he was standing off to the side of her throne, at arms' length.
"...Kid, what's your name?"
"...K-Karkat Vantas."
"And what the everliving fresh fuck did you think you were doin' just now?"
"I... I don't know." He hesitated, trying to keep his own voice quiet, "You just seemed like you... needed it?"
They were both quiet for a time, and she looked at him in earnest for the first time. Sizing him up. From his view it looked predatory, like she was evaluating whether he was even worth the effort to kill before she ate him.
He decides to bite the metaphorical, and possibly, soon, quite literal bullet. "Are you going to kill me?"
She keeps staring at him, with the same predatory look. "...nah." She finally says. "Nah." She grabs him, and pulls him onto the throne with her. She's nearly four times his height, and the throne was large even for her. She sets him in her lap, and wraps both arms around him. "...Just shut up for a while. Your voice is pretty gratin'."
"O-ok."
She gets a malicious half-smirk. "What did I just say, mutant."
"S-" He catches himself and bites his own lip, staring ahead and refusing to breath a noise.
"You don't have to hold your damn breath."
He lets out a little air from his nose, but refuses to open his mouth, sitting incredibly tense on the lap of the Empress, with both of her arms held across his chest. She shifts in the seat, pushing him a little back and having him lie against her stomach. Karkat wasn't aware of just how cold her body was until his entire back was pressed into her. He fidgets slightly, unsure of what to do or even functionally wrapping his mind around his current situation, when a cool, massive hand cups his entire head, patting him a few times as she lets out a long "shoooosh, brat." She continually petted his head, her claws combing through his entire head of hair, as he found himself instinctually relaxing. "Don't worry Vantas." She begins. "Nofin's goin' to hurt you here. Just relax, stop juttin' your elbows into me." He lets himself become slightly less tense, the adrenaline and fear beginning to slowly ebb away with the rush of pale hormones. She leans back completely, letting him lean with her belly and relax completely.
He was very, very confused. But it was also inexplicably comfortable, lying down on the cool surface of her chest, breathing in tune with her and being silent without having to hold his breath.
His eyes droop slightly, and he wants to shake the drowsiness from his head, but he doesn't want to shake her hand, still stroking the top of his skull, to get shaken off, so he lets it come. Within five minutes his eyes close, and he falls asleep on the lap of the Empress of a thousand worlds. The nightmares come, as usual, but they're duller, pacified by the continual petting of his head, of the pulse of blood from another heart beating just a few inches from his ears.
She never even showed up. Even without the telepathic irritated murmurs of her Lusus, she knew her Heiress wouldn't show up. There had been countless others, in the long reign of the Condescension. Girls not even tall enough to reach her knees, even one or two boys, somehow, echoes of male pink-bloods so far back in history that they've forgotten permanently. All cut down mercilessly in the name of continuing her rule. This one though, this selfish little beach, does the absolute unthinkable, and runs.
It's not just disgust at her lack of ambition, of her outright refusal of the authority that belonged to her by blood. It's their mother, their Lusus, who demands they fight. It's for the entire troll race. They must fight, there must be one Queen, or the hive falls apart. Or Gl'bgolyb kills everyone. Its despicable, its ingenious, really. By running, the Condesce will be forced to stay on the homeworld, and pacify their Lusus, to keep the horror-terror from destroying the Empire with its psychic screams. While the Heiress gets away with a stolen battleship and hundreds of young trolls, to start her own Empire far away.
The Condesce looked upon her ancient mother, who so lovingly shook the earth, hunted for her, and whos power assured her safety when she was only a small grub, fluttering in the water in an attempt to swim. Her ancient, beautiful, horrifying mother. So kind, so dangerous, she floated close, and rested her hand upon one of Gl'bgolyb's eyes. Under the lusus-white shell were millions of veins of royal Tyrian pink. She was beginning to get antsy. There were two of her children, both of age, both ready to take or retake control of the Empire. And there still was. And there still was. The Condesce was supposed to have fought her Heiress to the death, her mother kindly explained, in the silent language they had spoken with for centuries. The emotions, the confusion, the alien maternal instincts, were beginning to make her raise her voice, from the silence, to the beginning of an invisible whisper. That whisper, if it were allowed to come forward, would spell the death of every rustblooded troll in the galaxy. It would take years for there to be enough for even a poor army. Even if they were the most plentiful, worthless caste of their species, they were absolutely necessary to the Empire.
Her mother had to be silenced.
But the Heiress was gone.
There were only two choices. The Condesce could surrender her position to her cowardly Heiress, kill herself, and allow the teenage girl who ran away to become the one to rule the entire Alternian Empire.
Or she could silence her mother.
Her own life, or that of her benevolent lusus? The creature that meant the most to her in all the worlds?
She made sure it was done painlessly. Quickly. So fast that not even a gasp of surprise could come from the massive white beak. She pulled an entire warship, so wonderfully pointed and sharp, capable of ramming through a steel meteor at the speed of light and not take a dent, through her mother's city-sized brain almost as fast. Pink gushed into the currents, choking out any other color, and swarms and swarms of sea life came to feed on the suddenly harmless carcass of the largest creature to live on the planet.
She roared in rage at the Heiress, moaned in absolute sorrow at her mother, and summoned her flagship immediately.
Her crewmen knew what had happened, they had seen the lesser battleship, the second greatest of the fleet, sacrificed to save all of trollkind from her Lusus. They understood what it meant to her, and they were on the ground, faces pressed to the floor, absolutely silent as she marched through the halls to her private room. Refusing to show weakness to her trolls. The door guards bowed when she arrived. One opened his mouth to speak, but as her glare shifted to her, the guard let it fall, bowing instead.
She swung the doors open and closed them behind her, consumed with more emotions than she ever had before in her life. She became aware of a troll standing in the throne room, and seeing the small size, the lack of armor, decided he wasn't worth more than a punching bag. She grabbed him by the throat, consumed with fury, and let him struggle in her arms for a few seconds before throwing him across the room.
It wasn't doing anything for the rage or the sorrow, but after enough time, experience told her, losing herself in the violence would let her calm down. She just needed to let it out.
She marched up to the troll, picked him up by the shoulder, and pulled back her fist in what would have been a punch light enough that it would make a sound, but not end the therapy right away. But she saw the welt on his neck, the imprint of her fingers a deep, fire-hot, sunlight red.
He swears, his voice is sharp, like he's used to shouting, but it comes out like a gasp, a pitiful hopeless plea.
"...Y-yeah. You're important." The cults, the heretical rebellious lowblood religion. She still had things to do. It was not the end of the world. She had prevented that. The empire didn't suddenly not exist because she had to kill her lusus. Lots of trolls had to put down their own lusii. It was... normal. She had work to do, she could mourn her mother later she could- she dropped him. Her responsibilities choked away the rage. And without the rage to balance out and counteract it, there was nothing left but sorrow. "I still have stuff to do." The sadness was all-consuming. She had killed her mother. Glub-glub wasn't there anymore. The massive demonic cephalopod was no longer a responsibility in the back of her mind. She no longer had that nagging feeling of whether she was being fed properly, or whether she was happy, or if she was going to end trollkind.
She sank into her chair and began to sob. She couldn't think, she just knew that her lusus was dead. When she opened her eyes, pink liquid poured from them, and an entirely new wave of regret surged through her. She tried desperately to think of the Heiress, to turn her emotions back toward fury, she could deal with fury, but when she thought of the younger Peixes, she only thought about how that one lost her mother too.
She sat in her throne, hugging herself for who knows how long, when a warm, small, hand patted across her face. Who dared?! But it wasn't enough. She couldn't bring herself to care, only calming down as the warm hands patted her cheeks and her forehead, calming her, as he shooshed down her anguish, helped her slowly control herself. Comforted her back into cognition.
As she stopped crying, left only with a small hiccup in the bottom of her chest, she opened her eyes and saw the troll she choked for the first time. Not through the blinds of pure anger, but just staring forward. He was so small. Smaller than any troll she's seen on board a ship. He was wearing a fluffy oversized black sweater, with a grey handcuff symbol lovingly sewn in. His eyes were big and still mostly grey, though the red color that was peeking through was clearly not maroon, but primary, bright, dying-sun-red. His horns were nubby and insignificantly small. Everything about him seemed soft and round and edgeless. The closest thing that came to pointy on him was his messy hair.
"...Kid, what's your name?" She says.
"...K-Karkat Vantas." He says.
"And what the everliving fresh fuck did you think you were doin' just now?" She says, daring him to say something cull-worthy.
"I... I don't know. You just seemed like you... needed it?" That was definitely cull-worthy, if anyone less fluffy and so inexplicably sympathetic and-
...pitiful...
-had said it.
She keeps staring at him, taking in every detail of the downright tiny troll.
"Are you going to kill me?" He asks, and the way he sounds so threatened, so scared, makes her want to kill whatever made him feel that way. But she already decided she wasn't going to do that.
"Nah." She says, resolutely. All the cult stuff can wait. "Nah." She had mourned, but the Empire could wait a few more minutes.
She picks him up, and he weighs next to nothing. "...Just shut up for a while. Your voice is pretty gratin'." As cute as it was, it was almost painfully loud. She takes him into her lap, like he's a wriggler's comfort toy, and hugs him close to her chest, fluffy sweater and all. He's so small his entire back can fit on top of her stomach.
"O-ok." He says, nervously.
She almost cracks up. "What did I just say, mutant." She says, with a false harshness, and almost giggles when he seems to contract in on himself.
"S-" He almost apologizes out loud before catching himself and slamming his mouth closed, holding his breath.
"You don't have to hold your damn breath." He lets out a little burst of air, but remains just a tense as ever.
Hesitantly, surprising even herself with her gentleness, she began petting his head, shooshing and papping softly, leaning back and letting him lean down with her, a comforting warmth on her chest. "shoooosh, brat." She said, as he finally began to relax and lean into her, appearing even more soft every second. "Don't worry Vantas." She begins. "Nofin's goin' to hurt you here. Just relax, stop juttin' your elbows into me." He lets go completely, and allows himself to be hugged into her.
She wasn't really sure why she was doing this. It was a sudden, a feel-of-the-moment action. She was absolutely miserable, more torn up about anything she had ever been torn up about before, and this... child... clammed her down in minutes. She had never felt such a well of pale feelings form so quickly for anyone.
She knew the secret behind it of course, he was a mutant lime-blood, after all. One of her predecessors had them culled from the spectrum, for "dangerously powerful psychic abilities". Truly though, it was their pacifying effects on highbloods her ancestor had feared. In the time before her time, every highblood had a lime moirail, if they could. Their blood was the same color of the sopor slime that dulls the nightmares of her race. They had the same calming effect. They had far too much influence over the aristocracy for lowbloods, and so they were culled, an entire caste removed to remove any limiters of power on the highbloods.
That didn't mean the emotions she felt weren't real. He calmed her, but she wanted to calm him as well. This precious, mutant, soft, weak, frightened little shrimp of a troll. He was absolutely pitiable. She had taken hundreds of lovers in every quadrant over the years, more so Matesprits than any other, as very few were cocky enough to try and become rivals with the Condesce, very few could calm her fury or earn her pity, and so very few interfered with her fights and survived. But this was the strongest she had felt about a moirail in a long time.
He began to twitch on her stomach, and she realized that Karkat had fallen asleep. He cried out slightly from the nightmares, occasionally screaming and reaching for his wrists, but every time she shooshed him, and patted and rubbed the top of his head, running her thumb over his tiny candycorn nub horns, and he would calm back down into relatively peaceful slumber. He needed a recuperacoon, she decided, and she got up, careful not to disturb him, and carried him through a secret tunnel (one of many) that led from the throne room to one of her private chambers. She quickly pulled off his clothes, dribbled with pink tears, and set him into the slime for a proper rest.
Setting his clothes nearby she leaned into the wall and considered him, sleeping in a coon a dozen times his size.
He was the descendant of that rabble-rowser. The Signless, as one cult called him, the Sufferer, as another did. Both cults pledging loyalty to him. The Sufferer cult attempting to dismantle the hemospectrum, hiding refugees and kidnapping Alternian children from their lusii to live in hidden bases throughout the galaxy, preaching peace and hemonymity and quadrantless love free from the threat of drones. The Signless Cult was spread quietly among the lowbloods, as well as the story of the Summoner, and was a call to arms that repeated over and over among the lowblood communities, with no sign of dissent for years, and suddenly a spark as dozens of psychics would assasinate their betters, a call to reverse the hierarchy of the hemospectrum.
Both were major problems. But ones she's dealt with for years. She initially planned to use the Descendant, should he ever appear, as a method of forcing the cults to reveal themselves. Or, if he was taken by them first, to take him out, and all the cultists, while they unified under him. Either way, forcing all the squeakbeasts out of the woodwork at once, and culling all of them. Then he would be killed quietly. No more martyrs. The Grand Highblood messed up all those centuries ago, making the execution so public.
But now...
The Descendant of the Signless Sufferer, neither signless nor suffering. Living in the luxury of the seadwellers, a personal consort of the Empress they opposed. How would the Cultists react to that? Of finding their savior in the arms of the evil Empress, being comforted from his nightmares?
It was a delicious irony.
And even if that didn't matter, if that wouldn't deal with the Cultists issue at all. She was the Condesce, she could do whatever she wanted, and she had found her moirail, on the hardest night of her life, after thousands of years of searching, she had found a moirail she felt she was meant to be with, delivered to her front step, at the moment she needed one most. It was serendipity.