Chapter Text
>Terezi: Descend.
Finding Vriska’s hive from the air is not nearly as difficult as the new point of view would suggest: her completely unnecessary tower sticks up out of the landscape like a slender metallic stitching tool wedged between two floorboards to stab the unwary foot. You are suddenly filled with regret that Vriska’s hive is about to be traversed by unwary feet other than hers, some of which you care about; otherwise, you would be enthusiastically prepared to literalize some shiny, pointy metaphors. Also, you packed your scalemate repair kit in too large a bundle to dig your needles out without raining fabric and stuffing down on Vriska’s roof, and that would be wasteful.
You and dragonmom do an elegant yet disdainful spiral around the tower before landing gracefully and mightily on the front lawnring, instead.
Vriska doesn’t come out to greet you or anything, even though you’re quite sure you’re the first one here. Rude! She just doesn’t want to admit that your lusus is every bit as awesome as you always said she was. Your lusus is better than hers and always has been.
This is not a difficult thing to be. You make a mental note to go spit on the spidercorpse some time Vriska isn’t paying attention.
You give dragonmom an affectionate pat on her mighty nose and head for the front entrance aperture. It’s not locked – rude, yet lazy – so you let yourself in. You’re sure Vriska will mind if you take a quick snoop around. Not that you aren’t already completely familiar with her hive and its contents, but mere prior knowledge should not get in the way of a good snoop.
Unfortunately, while she didn’t come outside, she did notice you arriving: when you let the door close behind you, she’s there at the bottom of the least-dusty flight of stairs, glaring at you.
You glare back. Having pupils to narrow again is a definite advantage here. Vriska’s vision eightfold just makes her look cross-eyed. “Serket.”
“Pyrope,” she sneers. “I’d been hoping your big baby lusus would fall out of the sky and crush you to death beneath its massive fatty bulk.”
You’re glad to see her too, but she’s just over-the-top. She gets that way when she’s nervous. You can taste her apprehension, but it’s not even about you. Ruder and ruder! This cannot be allowed to stand. “I see you didn’t manage to blow up your hive while performing a routine execution this time,” you reply. “You may make a barely competent execaretaker yet!”
“I saved some of the blood for you,” she says, “to rub in your hair until it dries and you have to cut it aaaaaaaall off to get it out, right down to the scalp.” She’s totally thinking about you now. You win.
Unfortunately, she’s not nervous anymore, even though she’s alone with you and who knows when the next person will arrive. You could have her bleeding out in her own front hall in three minutes, and it would be so much fun! She is being very impolite or very oblivious not to treat your presence like an implicit threat.
The fact that you’re not going to kill her, or even try very hard, is completely beside the point. The point is that you could do it! It wouldn’t even be illegal! A troll killed by their kismesis legally counts as a suicide if there are enough witnesses to their relationship, and even discounting everyone whose opinion doesn’t have much legal weight, you have plenty. You looked it up on the way over in between making plans.
“You would have to get close enough first, and we both know you are far too slow for that.” Just a little duel wouldn’t hurt. To first blood, even. You’ll be gentle.
You so totally won’t.
You are really incredibly fond of the way Vriska’s face lights up right before she leaps for your throat. All eight of her eyes focus in on you and she smells like oranges and bloodlust, sharp and bright. This is the first time you’ve seen and smelled her at the same time, and it’s your new favorite sensory experience. You are going to kick her ass so hard her stupid ancestor feels it.
She’s all power and no finesse, as usual, committing to the leap way too early and swinging for your face like there’s some kind of surprise factor in play. Still, she’s fast and not kind of sore from riding dragonback for the first time, and you don’t get entirely out of the way. She ends up hitting your right arm and knocking you both over. Her ‘oof!’ is music. Yours, somewhat less so.
You graze her in a dozen places as you flip each other over, scrabbling for leverage, but those aren’t real wounds, not ones that count. A stray splinter could have given you the gash on your forearm! If she wants you to award her any points at all, she will have to try harder. She’s certainly not earning any for style.
She is, however, earning several for interesting writhing with her attempts to pin you. You writhe interestingly – and, more importantly, effectively – right back. If you can get all of her attention on escaping the pin, you’ll have a chance to – yes!
You sink your teeth into the meat of Vriska’s forearm. It tastes like delicious blueberry victory.
The fact that the claws of her other hand rake across the back of your neck immediately afterward does not count, as you have already won. It does, however, infuriate you. Can’t she admit when she’s lost, just once? You bite her again reprovingly. Her snarl grates electrically in your ears.
This is definitely going somewhere terriblertaining, when all of a sudden Karkat and Kanaya are standing in the doorway You almost completely forgot about them. (This is a lie, as you never forget about anything, but it is true that you allowed yourself to be slightly distracted by how much you want to rip Vriska’s face off and eat it.)
It’s somewhat embarrassing to be caught making out like someone on whose clarity of mind the fate of the Empire does not rely, but you can get over it! You disentangle yourself from Vriska with slightly less than all the aplomb you can muster and approach Karkat.
He’s nervous, every muscle wound up tight tight tight in the way that makes you desperate to unwind them. You noticed during the game that after everything started going right he started relaxing all those little spools of nerves, but you didn’t realize how much until now, when they’re all back again. He’s a model of a troll made entirely out of stretchable elastic circles, and you’re afraid of what will happen if they all pull too taut at once.
You will just have to make absolutely sure that that does not happen.
It is barely possible that you play up how knobbly Vriska’s limb joints were and how emphatic the aches are where they tug into your sides, but you would do a lot more than play a little pretend game for the way Karkat’s face softens right up. Vriska doesn’t care what you look like right now, so there’s no point in being tough.
“Hey, cute thing!” you say.
“What the fuck,” he replies, “do you think you’re doing, you hormone-addled sack of shit? I know you were paying attention to the memo, because you kept sticking your cartilaginous glasses holder in, so please, educate me: was it anywhere on anyone’s priority list that you see how many injuries you rack up before we even have anything to fight?!”
He glares at the scratches as though they have wronged him personally.
“You were taking far too long to arrive,” you advance as a defense. “You have no grounds to blame us for being bored!”
“I have grounds to blame you for whatever I want,” he grumbles. “Also, I’m not cute.”
You have a series of educational images already prepared to address this persistent delusion of Karkat’s, but they will have to wait, because he’s licking your scratches clean. Your matesprit is the hugest romantic. As much as you laugh at him, you’re very glad he’s interested in being the hugest romantic with you.
As a bonus, you can smell Vriska’s jealousy from here. Too bad for her! If she wants a matesprit who will do these kinds of things for her, she will just have to troll up and stop downplaying her injuries in front of Kanaya. How hopeless can she actually be?
>Vriska: Troll up.
You cannot troll up, as you have already done so! You are the most trolled-up troll who ever trolled. No one can hope to beat you in a troll-off; you are simply the best there is.
You have no idea what to say.
You’ve spent the last hour thinking about what you’ll say to Kanaya, and now that she’s right there you can’t remember a single damn word. Worse, you look terrible. Stupid Terezi and her stupid hotness antagonizing you when you wanted to look good! You hate her so much. She doesn’t have to worry about this kind of thing! Karkat’s a sure thing with her, plus he doesn’t notice how anyone looks anyway unless maybe they’re bleeding to death. Kanaya does notice hair and clothes and all that shit you usually don’t have any time for, so you tried to look at least okay, but now you look awful, and it’s all Terezi’s fault!
“Hi,” you say. Way to go, Vriska, very suave. Pull yourself together! What would Mindfang do?
...Nnnnnnnnever mind. Mindfang is just letting you down all over the place tonight.
“Good evening, Vriska,” says Kanaya. “I am sorry to have interrupted what I am sure was a truly satisfying squabble, but unfortunately my ability to observe a location before arriving at it is limited to say the least. I am glad that you have not moved any significant furniture in this block since the last time I observed it; otherwise there would havebeen a possibility of extremely untoward results.”
Her rambling is so cute, how does she stand herself? It’s a mystery to you. “I wouldn’t do that! I mean, moving furnishing units is the most booooooooring thing, literally ever.”
“I appreciate the consideration even in the negative.” She looks down at your arm, which is kind of dripping on your clothes. You don’t care, but maybe she does. “Your injury looks superficial, but I do not think it would do any harm to take care of it all the same. Here, let me take a look.”
You automatically tuck your arm behind your back. You’re not a wiggler who can’t handle a little bite! You can still pull your weight, and everyone else’s when they fall apart like stupid dumb losers, even if Terezi’s teeth are really sharp and your arm kind of stings. It’s not a big deal or anything! You were just playing! It’s not like you’re one of those no-fun gamers who can’t take a hit without whining to their friends about it!
Lately, you’ve been finding yourself hearing Tavros’s voice sometimes even when he’s not around, telling you things you totally already know but maybe slipped your mind for just a minute. It would be really annoying if he weren’t right a lot of the time, because this is a part of him that is you, and you are always right! This is one of those times. Tavros reminds you that seeing someone’s injuries, and caring for them, is an important way of showing that you pity them, and wouldn’t want them to be hurt, and on the other side, of showing that you trust them, not to hurt you, even when it’s possible.
He is such a weak wimpy little meddler, even when he’s you!
You hold out your arm so Kanaya can see. “It’s not like a big deal or anything,” you say, just to make it clear that you’re doing this for her, not because you’re a whiner. “I can totally take care of it myself.”
Kanaya is really gentle with your arm, the way she’s gentle with you almost all the time. “I am confident that you are perfectly capable. However, this is your dominant arm, is it not? Treating one’s own injuries is particularly difficult with only one available hand, I have found.”
She actually wraps it, which is completely not necessary, but you don’t try to stop her. She’s really pretty when she’s focused on something, even more than usual.
Tavros-in-your-head is an okay guy, you guess.
“Do you want something to eat, or drink, or whatever?” you ask. That’s how this works, right? You offer to share your food? Besides, she looks way more tired than she should, considering you all woke up this evening as though everything that could have made you tired never happened. “You look terrible.” Oh shit, that was the worst possible thing to say, how did you even manage that? “I mean, not like you don’t still look great, I bet it’s not even possible for you to look shitty, but whatever, you know what I mean!” Maybe she’s suddenly gone deaf. Maybe she’ll pretend to have suddenly gone deaf. Maybe the roof will fall in.
She totally does understand you, because Kanaya is the best. “While I appreciate the offer, I probably ought to be getting on with my assigned tasks. Gamzee is not going to fetch himself, and I would just as soon leave as large a margin of error as possible before dawn in case of unexpected difficulties.”
You consider trying harder to make her stay here, but it occurs to you that you have plans that involve Gamzee being here rather than anywhere else, and Kanaya is the only one who can bring him. It’s hard, sometimes, having so many irons in the fire! But you will survive, somehow. It’s not like she’ll be gone for long, anyway.
“I guess if you’ve absolutely gotta care about whether he gets burned or not, that’s okay. But don’t, like, get yourself hurt or anything, because that would be dumb!”
“I promise that not injuring myself remains an important priority of mine. I will see you later, though hopefully not very much later, then, Vriska.”
Oh god, she’s giving you that look like she’s hoping for you to do or say something but doesn’t want to ask, because she’s Kanaya that way. You want to do it for her, you do, but you don’t know what it is she wants. You hate this! Romance is the worst!
“…Bye,” you say lamely.
That was totally not the right thing at all, you can tell because you’re trying to get better at reading Kanaya and if you’d gotten it right she would be smiling a lot more brightly. Instead, she draws her space power thing up around her. Just before she vanishes, she sort of glows dark against the world, like the gaps between stars, and in the lights of her eyes you can see eight different places she might be just by wanting it. She’s beautiful.
You kind of stare at the piece of air that doesn’t have Kanaya in it anymore for a while.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, kiss her next time!” Karkat yells at you, and you spin around with a snarl. It’s not any of his business! Besides, Kanaya didn’t want you to kiss her! …Did she?
“Fuck off, Vantas!”
Terezi is leaning on him and laughing at you as he starts giving you a lecture on dramatic moments and romantic tension that you’re 88% sure he picked up from a shitty movie forum somewhere. You hope Tavros gets here soon. His conversation is way better, not that that’s saying much!
>Tavros: Arrive.
Luckily, your journey takes a good bit less time than you were worried it might, so you get to Vriska’s hive with plenty of time to spare before the sun rises or anything else happens to cause problems. Your new thunderscalebeast friend, who’s really an old friend, but you hadn’t seen him for a while, at least from your point of view, and also definitely had never asked him to take you this far before, is enjoying the trip himself, so you don’t feel bad about asking him to leave his home. He pulls up hard right before coming out of the woods to Vriska’s lawnring, though, and you don’t blame him when you take a look at what he’s smelling. Terezi’s lusus is huge, huger even than him by a long way, and dragons are pretty solidly at the top of every natural food chain, on land anyway.
You’re sure she’s not really dangerous to you, though, so you dismount, leaving Tinkerbull with the thunderscalebeast to keep him quiet and reassure him that you haven’t just left him there, and go over to her, kind of stumbling a bit at first. One of the problems with legs is that they don’t like riding for long and aren’t shy of letting you know it. You don’t think that’s much of a downside, comparatively.
Communing with lusii is kind of rude, but you don’t think Terezi will mind if you just talk, instead of trying to make her do anything, and anyway you definitely want to get to know any animals bigger than you before wandering through anything they might think of as their territory.
Greeting/nonhostile/affection/respect
, you think at her, which is more or less how beasts and lusii understand a friendly greeting. They’re not really much for words, at least not on the level where your abilities work.
Greeting/affection/recognition!
you get back, bright and clear, and it rocks you back on your heels (your very own heels!) a little. Terezi’s lusus thinks a lot more clearly than anything else you’ve ever communed with, which now that you think about it makes sense, since dragons are psychic, or at least that’s what your schoolfeed supplements tell you.
Nice to see you again under better circumstances,
you hear, in words this time, and that does more than rock you back. You didn’t know dragons could communicate with more than just their charges and other dragons in words! It kind of makes you nervous, having someone else in your head, when you’re not sure how much control of the connection you have, and especially when she remembers the time Vriska made you commune with her.
If Vriska gets you eaten by a dragon, you think you may un-forgive her for that, and probably a few other things, too.
But cutting the connection would almost certainly be rude, and you can tell that Terezi’s lusus isn’t mad at you, so you don’t. Instead, you think carefully back, I’m sorry about that. It’s harder to think proper sentences over to her, since you usually don’t, but you try anyway.
Not your fault, all is forgiven. You are well?
Yes!
You think you may have shouted that, but the happiness you’ve been feeling off and on, from being alive and whole and having people you care about, burst out in your thoughts before you could moderate it. It feels blue, like the sky of your personal planet, which you miss, but not as much as you missed your legs which are yours.
It occurs to you that you should probably ask what you came over to ask her; otherwise you’re keeping your friend waiting and nervous, and that’s rude. Can my friend come out here and be safe? You think every word very carefully, so that you don’t lose track or repeat yourself.
Yes. Friends!
You grin and reach out to the thunderscalebeast in your normal way. Safe/reassurance/nonhostile/nonhungry, you tell him. He believes you, because animals are generally pretty trusting if you’ve built up a good relationship, but he grumbles a bit in your head as he comes out of the trees. He still doesn’t come too close to the dragon, but it’s a start.
“Oh my god, Toreadork, quit being Troll Doctor Doolittle and come talk to the real people already!”
You jump a little bit, but not enough to frighten your friends. You may have kind of forgotten that Vriska’s hive isn’t just a piece of landscape, but a place with people inside it who you should talk to, even if you saw them only a few hours ago, and you’ve never met a dragon before at all.
“I’m coming, if you wait a minute!” you call back to Vriska, and only after you’ve said it do you think that maybe that wasn’t so great an idea. That was the kind of thing you could say to Vriska during the game, after a while, but now she’s a ceruleanblood again, not that she ever wasn’t, but the point is that someone like you can’t really tell a cerulean to wait.
“Hurry uuuuuuuup!” She doesn’t sound like she’s thinking about that, though, so maybe it’s not going to be a problem.
Still, you don’t take as much time saying good-bye for now to Terezi’s lusus as you want, not that you could take as much time as you want, since you would kind of rather stay and talk to her more and not say good-bye at all. Vriska meets you halfway to the front door anyway.
She punches you on the arm, but it doesn’t hurt at all, so that’s okay. “What took you so long to get here? The pitywingbeasts are driving me crazy!” You’re pretty sure that means she was concerned for your wellbeing, and also that the pitywingbeasts are driving her crazy.
“Who is it that you’re referring to, in this case?”
“Vantas and Pyrope, duh!” She rolls her eyes so hard you think it has to hurt. You can’t help but notice that, on the list of things that have to hurt, she has a bandage around her left arm, and also a small collection of minor injuries, which you guess you can expect, but it’s not like Terezi can have been here that long. Also, she’s doing this thing that you’ve noticed she often does, where she acts really incredibly confident, way more confident than anyone could ever actually be, even Vriska.
You definitely have to talk to her about things soon, even if she doesn’t want to, because if you don’t she might, possibly, explode, and nobody likes it when she explodes, especially not you.
Soon, but probably not now, considering that you’re on her lawnring, and there are other people who would almost certainly hear every word you said. “Terezi and Karkat are here already?” Not that you didn’t know that Terezi was here, with the dragon and all, but Karkat didn’t bring his lusus, it looks like. “Is, um, anyone else here yet...?” By ‘anyone else’ you almost completely mean Gamzee, and Vriska knows it, because you told her, which from the look on her face you suspect you’re going to regret.
“Kanaya went to get him,” she says, “waaaaaaaay too long ago. They’ll be back soon! So we have time to coach you on what you’re going to say when he gets here!”
“Uhh,” you say, trying to think of a polite way to say ‘please, please don’t’. It’s not that you don’t believe Vriska wants to help, it’s just that everybody has something they are best at, and in Vriska’s case, that something is definitely not romance, of any kind. “I think, maybe, that things like this should be spontaneous, and from the bloodpusher, instead of planned, too much, which kind of makes me nervous, more than I already would be...”
She rolls her eyes again, but her grin is much less ominous. “You are the lamest lame lamer to ever be lame! Buuuuuuuut if you really want to mess it up on your own, I won’t stop you! Just remember my generous offer when you crash and burn!”
“Thank you,” you say. You really, sincerely mean it. You hope you don’t crash and burn, though, since Vriska will be smug forever if you do, and also you’d rather, on a personal level, succeed at talking to someone you want to kiss, about how you want to kiss them, and maybe have a positive outcome, than fail, in any of the ways that failure could be measured in this situation.
“Could we maybe, go inside now, and say hello to people, instead of standing out here?” you ask. Not that you’re opposed to being outside, but you kind of want to see Terezi’s eyes, which you haven’t seen for a long time, and let her see for real that your legs work again, and things like that.
“You’re the one who was taking forever!”
Terezi is a really super great friend, and it’s proven as fact, because as soon as she sees you she gives you a big hug, so you can give her one too, which was pretty much exactly what you wanted to happen, even if it means she’s shouting, “We are indisputably the best!” kind of loudly and close to your ear. But she is completely right, you are all the best, and have won at everything forever, particularly at having limbs and organs and lusii, all of which are way more important than people mostly think about them, who have never had the experience of not having any of those things.
Then all of a sudden Kanaya and Gamzee appear in the middle of the receivingblock with you, and you’re not sure if it’s really accurate to say that you’ve won at everything yet, when you kind of can’t breathe properly and very definitely want to be in the most elsewhere possible location.
>Gamzee: Talk to Tavros.
You would be talking to Tavros, right this very motherfucking second, but you’ve got at least a couple seconds’ worth of other things to be getting off your hands first, so you can talk to your bullbro with all the hands he is definitely up and deserving. Kanaya is the most on your hands of all of them, ‘cause she ain’t any kind of well, no matter what she was all insisting on when you said it wouldn’t do any harm to get your walk on for a bit instead of working her miracle space thing harder than it looked like feeling ready to be worked. She’s none so hard to get off your hands, though, not when Vriska’s right there looking like she’s been and tried to make her face look like it’s singing a worrysong, which ain’t a song her face is used to nohow.
As soon as your Sylphsis is off your hands, though, there’s one thing you’ve gotta get good and on them before they’re any kind of good for handholding, and that’s Karkat. Your best palebro is all hovering like a miracle of a troll wingbeast, working himself into a most unchill fret when what he really wants to do is get his hug on. So you get his hug on for him, nice and tight and comfort-like. You maybe lift him up just a little bit like he gets his embarrassed yell on about doing in public, but the way you figure it, there’s nothing wrong with being a little bit warmer than you’d otherwise be if the night is special enough, and you just won a pretty motherfucking long game, which makes tonight pretty motherfucking special, if you look at it like that.
If you don’t, if you look at it the way you can’t help but be getting your gander on, then you really could motherfucking use a tight motherfucking hug.
Your Karkat seems to be in a not unlike shape of pan, which is nothing to rouse your glee for in its ownself, but right in the now it means he holds you just as tight and just as long as you’re holding him, enough so you can be motherfucking sure he’s not going anywhere on you. He’s all strong and soft and miraculous warm, and you can’t even imagine how your friends even keep breathing not getting to hug him.
You can see Terezi over top of Karkat’s head, her looking at him with her whole body, and maybe you and she don’t always see eye to eye on matters miraculous, but if you didn’t have nothing between you at all but the look you both give him when he can’t see you all doing it, that look what he doesn’t believe it if he does see you, that little nothing you can touch would still give you your surety of her. You don’t need no promise from her, not from her and not from your kittysis when she gets here, to be having the knowing of the pact you’ll be forming without ever saying a word about it. It’s its own kind of marvelous miracle, the harmony pity can be up and playing on people.
In his own time your palebro has his embarrassment catch up to him and puffs himself all up like anyone has any kind of minding for how he shows his diamond, but you don’t care what he says with his words, his whole self says everything you need to hear. Now you feel like you’ve gotten your relax back on enough to go talk to Tavros, see if maybe he meant what you were thinking you’d like him to mean. That would be the wickedest miracle you’ve seen tonight, wicked enough in miracle ways to almost make the rest of the unmiracles go away.
When you get your look on for him, though, to see if maybe he’s got a piece of time you could be sharing, he’s all wearing his serious face and making hissing little wind noises with Vriska. You’re not sure how you all be up and feeling about that. Miracle of serendipity as pale feelings are, you’ve never been easy in your own pan about Vriska, after what she did to Tavros and all, up and changing her mind so sudden and being let pretend there ain’t nothing between them ever wasn’t pale-sweet.
Could be you’re a little touch worried still about her being safe for your miracle boy, could be that makes you get your mosey on over to them when you wouldn’t otherwise be all up and interrupting palefriends in a jam time like this one is. Could just motherfucking be you feel the whimsy jitters coming up inside you every time there’s a second goes by with you not knowing what Tavros maybe is all wanting from you.
Your Tavbro sees you coming, but maybe he ain’t your Tavbro after all, ‘cause he goes to get his abscond on like you’re some flavor of danger come to lay some hurt on him, and doesn’t that just drill a hole right through your heart.
Vriska doesn’t let him abscond, though, and she gets her hiss on something motherfucking fierce, until he changes his mind around, or gives up maybe, and stays where you can get to him.
“Hey,” you say. You don’t rightly have the words for what you’d like to be conveying, not when you don’t know what he’s all up and thinking in that miracle pan of his.
“Uh, hi, Gamzee,” is all he looks like to say for his part, and the hole gets drilled just a little wider for every word he doesn’t have to say to you. You bet he’s wishing right now he hadn’t tried that joke what turned out to not be all that motherfucking funny after all.
“Gamzee!”
Vriska’s got her plotting face on, you don’t have to be any kind of comfortable with her to see that. Ain’t nothing that shape of cheek-twisting could be but a plotting face. “Just the troll I wanted to see! I’ve got something really important to show you two!”
You can see a trap when she’s laying it all out so tidy-like, practically got the blueprints held out in front of her for you to see whether you look or not, and you don’t have any plans to go falling into traps, not spidertraps or any traps, but Tavros is looking at her like she’s giving him some kind of present. Maybe, you figure, he doesn’t want to talk in front of everyone that’s here and everyone as might finish their miracle journeys while you’re talking, and for all you’re no kind of private person that’s the kind of want you can be respecting. “Lay it on me, spidersis.”
You’re no kind of surprised at all when the first empty block you come to she shoves you and Tavros in without going anything like inside herself and shuts the door on you. That was pretty much what you were hoping she’d do, and it’s no harm but maybe a reasonable bit of good, so as far as you know it’s the best set of actmotifs she’s ever gone and done.
“So, uh,” Tavros starts his speaking, still nervous in a way that twists you up inside for him being nervous of you in any kind of way that ever might be, “I guess we should talk, about what I said, the last time we talked, if that’s a thing that makes sense, for me to say…”
He’s all scared like you ain’t ever seen him with you, not even looking up where you might take a chance of catching his eye and showing him how little anything’s gotta change if he doesn’t want it to. You never wanted to make your Tavbro this kind of scared, like there’s some power you’ve got that you might ever use to do him harm, and just for a moment the thought sneaks its way into your thinkpan that he was never scared of you when you were eating sopor, like maybe he’d like it better if you stopped remembering all those things you up and forgot all that time.
“I just want you to know, that it doesn’t have to be a big deal, if you don’t want it to, because I value your friendship, kind of a lot, and, um, I wouldn’t want to lose that, over something stupid, that I said, so if you want, we could just agree, that it hadn’t happened, and not to talk about it, or related topics, such as feelings, which I may or may not have, again.”
The thoughts sneaking around your pan made you almost up and miss what he was saying, but Tavros saying that he values your friendship isn’t the kind of thing you could ever for real miss, no matter what thoughts you were motherfucking thinking. “There’s nothing you could ever say to make me up and not be friends with a motherfucker,” you say, and maybe those words aren’t the ones you wish you’d said, but they seem to do the job when it comes to brightening Tavros right back up until he looks you in the face for true. That gets you to figuring you might as well give saying what you mean another try. “I don’t want a Tavbro to be up and feeling like he’s gotta say the right thing if it’s not something he’s all behind with his own rhythm, you feel me?”
The way he startles, you think maybe you got him wrong, and it’s all kinds of relief to that hole you ain’t quite forgot about. “That’s not, uh, what I mean is, there are things, or one particular thing, I may have said, that you might not want to have heard, but they weren’t, it wasn’t, not a thing that was true, and still is true, for me.”
“Really?” You can’t stop a smile from breaking out on your face, ‘cause that sounds pretty motherfucking close to telling you that you can fill in that hole in your heart and forget it was ever for a minute there.
He smiles like a moonrise full of teeth, sweet-sharp and gorgeous, and you don’t know what hole could ever have been in your heart. “Really.”
You would’ve said when you woke up tonight that there was nothing like miracles anyplace anymore, but now you’re kissing your motherfucking matesprit you guess you maybe counted just the smallest bit wrong.
You then proceed to have the sloppiest rap-off (or possibly the rappingest makeouts) in the history of paradox space.
>Nepeta: Eavesdrop.
That’s so unfair! It makes it sound like you’re the only one eavesdropping, which is completely not true! In fact, it’s kind of hard to hear anything with all these people trying to be quiet.
They’re not very good at it, not nearly as good as you. A lot of the most delicious wild beasts have very sharp ears, so you have to be the quietest stalking huntress of all just to get close enough for a pounce. Your friends don’t eat wild beasts much, so they aren’t nearly as good at being sneaky. They keep twitching and making their clothes make noises.
It sounds like the interesting bit is over, though, unless you want to listen to your friends kissing, which is the creepiest thing you can possibly think of to do as well as being the least romantic, so instead you sneak very carefully back out to the receiving block with the rest of your friends., who are also not creepy…or at least not that creepy. You can all be pretty creepy sometimes!
Thinking of people who are creepy makes you think of your moirail, who is probably the creepiest person you know (but not creepy enough to be listening to your friends kiss; you don’t know anyone that creepy). You’re kind of worried about him, because he wasn’t here when you arrived, but there’s no way he could have come here late when he lives right next door in practically the same hive, so he has to be avoiding you. This is definitely a worry, no matter what he promised, because he’s so dumb and thinks he’s right all the time even when he’s completely and totally wrong, so if he’s avoiding you, it’s because he did something so terrible he can’t even convince himself that it wasn’t, not STRONGly enough to defend it to you.
You are going to have to find him and make him tell you what he did.
This will be one of your less dangerous hunts, actually, since there aren’t a lot of beasts inside, and all the trolls inside are your friends, but you know Vriska and Equius both have some strange stuff lying around, so you guess that will do.
Before setting off, though, you give Karkat his second big pounce of the night, with a bonus nuzzle because he’s just too cute not to nuzzle every chance you get.
“What the fuck do you want now?” he says. “Because I warn you, I already blew all my stupid public fucking displays of affection for the perigee, if not the sweep. Why am I surrounded by people who can’t keep their globefondling grasping limbs to themselves for five grubfucking minutes? What did I ever do to paradox space—”
You decide he’s probably said everything he actually needed to say, so it’s okay to kiss him a bit now. He hardly splutters at all when you’re done. Practice is definitely making perfect, or maybe resigned. Either way, you win!
“I’m going to go hunt fur Equius and tell him he’s being impawsible,” you inform Karkat. If he turns around and you’re not here, he’ll worry, and you don’t want that.
“Why? What’d the sweaty asshole do this time?”
You frown. “I don’t know yet! That’s why I have to go furlush him out of hiding.” He’s not answering his messages, either, so you know he knows he did wrong, whatever he did.
Karkat keeps frowning in the way that means he doesn’t get it and isn’t sure he approves, but Terezi does both, so that’s fine. “Bring the recalcitrant criminal to justice, pouncellor! I am deputizing you in this matter.”
The two of you nuzzle noses. Terezi is your absolutely best friend and maybe-sister, though you haven’t talked to her about calling yourselves that. You know ‘sister’ is kind of a tense word for her, and anyway it’s a big step in a relationship, especially now you’re getting older.
“I hate you both,” Karkat says as you clamber off him and leave him in Terezi’s capable claws. “Platonically.”
You giggle and wave over your shoulder. He’s so cute when he’s flustered!
Once you’re outside of the receivingblock you stop giggling and think seriously about your hunt. Equius could be in his hive, in Vriska’s hive, or outside somewhere. If he wanted to hide seriously from you, the best place would be Vriska’s hive, because you don’t know it at all, but on the other hand, it’s Vriska’s hive. You don’t think it’s very likely he’d hide there, since he didn’t ask permission that you know of, and he cares about things like that. That’s kind of the problem.
The next best place for him to hide from anyone but you would be outside, but you are a mighty tracker as well as hunter and can easily find him if he did, which he knows perfectly well. Besides, there’s nothing he could possibly be doing outside other than hiding, and you know Equius: he doesn’t want to admit that he’s hiding, even when he so totally is! He’s weird that way about a lot of things. So, he’s almost certainly still in his hive somewhere. You take off out the front door and around Vriska’s hive.
You have to turn back and go around the other way, because the body of Vriska’s lusus is blocking your path. It doesn’t bother you or anything, but part of you isn’t sure it’s really dead, and that would be way too big for you to handle on your own!
Or maybe you could handle it now. That thought makes you perk your tail up. You still go back to avoid the spider corpse.
Equius’s hive is really annoyingly big. He could be pretty much anywhere, and it might take you a while to find him if you had to look in every single block. Fortunately, you’re a smart hunter who knows her prey better than anyone.
He’s done something terrible, so he’s unhappy. When he’s unhappy, he gets mad. When he’s mad, he breaks things. He doesn’t like it when he stops being mad and discovers that he’s broken something he cares about, so he tries to break only things he can rebuild. So, right now he’s probably in his workshop, fighting his robots!
You listen carefully, but you can’t hear him yet. You’ll have to get closer before you can start tracking by sound, and you’re not as good at hunting by scent as a real pouncebeast. Sight-hunting it is! You head deeper into the hive. His lusus keeps everything really tidy, but you can still tell which block connection corridors Equius actually uses, particularly when he’s mad. He forgets not to stomp sometimes, and the floors show it.
Finally, you get to a stairwell, and now you can use your sharp ears. The echoes are weird, but you can hear noises up above you. You follow them as fast as you can.
The noises worry you. You’re used to the sound of your moirail hitting things until they give up on staying in one piece. Usually it’s a good sound. He says it makes him feel calmer, and it certainly makes you feel calmer to know he’s there keeping an eye on your back for you. Even when he has bad nights, where he isn’t safe for anyone but you until he’s worn himself out, it’s comforting to hear him beating up robots or monsters. As long as he’s doing that, you know he’s still there inside. You haven’t lost him. (You worry about losing him sometimes.)
The sounds you’re hearing right now don’t sound comforting at all. They don’t sound like he’s hitting anything that can hit him back. Instead, it sounds like he’s pounding something against the floor, or maybe – you wince – ripping pieces off it and pounding them against the floor. That’s not a good sound at all. He calms down from fighting against things, not just hitting them, or at least he did up until now. You swallow before pushing the door open.
Equius is in there, all right, smashing what looks like it used to be a robot torso into smithereens on the floor, and he doesn’t look good at all. There are robot parts all over the room – mostly very small parts. He doesn’t have a single injury, like none of the robots, you can’t tell how many, were even turned on. The way he’s breathing, though, he’s been doing this for a long, long while. Hours, probably, maybe even since you talked to him last.
Part of you wants to turn and creep as silently as you know how back down the stairs before he sees you. You shush that part right up! Equius won’t hurt you. He won’t. But if you don’t talk some sense into him, he’ll definitely hurt himself, and he might hurt somebody else.
“What do you think you’re doing?” you say.
He actually jumps, like he didn’t even notice the door opening, but when he turns to look at you, you can tell he’s still your Equius underneath. He bundles the rage back down so he can pretend it was never there. “Ah, Nepeta, I was simply…” He’s trying to think of an excuse and doing pretty terribly at it. “…relieving some stress,” he says eventually. You have to give him some credit for not technically lying to you.
“Hoofbeastshit!”
That doesn’t mean you’re going to let him get away with it. He doesn’t even wince at your language, so there is definitely a serious problem going on in his thinkpan. “Why aren’t you with everyone else?”
“The others have all arrived? Without exception?” He tenses all up again.
Hmmm, you think. “Meowst of them. I didn’t see Sollux or Aradia yet, though. I hope they’re okay.” He winces on both of their names. Just as you suspected, he is a stupid stupid dumbface who should never be allowed to say words without your supervision. You give him your best disapproving face (it’s mostly an imitation of him, actually). “What did you do?”
“That’s none of your—” You do the extra frowny eyebrows, and he reconsiders. “I...took what I concluded was the most advisable course of action.”
Getting the full truth out of him clearly calls for some drastic action. You pounce on him, ejecting your beastpelt pile from your sylladex on the way to the floor. No more dodging now! You are going to have a feelings jam.
He knows there’s nothing he can do about it when you’re this serious about a feelings jam, and he doesn’t make you ask any more questions. “Considering the situation,” he says, picking his way around the words like they might bite him, “it would be best for all concerned to restore a particular level of acceptable behavior as soon as possible, lest anyone should get accustomed to lewdness and cease to recognize their shameful behoovior – behavior – as such.”
None of those words mean anything except that he’s a giant troll-shaped bundle of nervous right now, and also it may be almost as bad as you feared on the way over. You’re pretty sure you can guess where he’s going with this, because he’s predictably awful like that.
“Accordingly, I… brought an end to my—dalliance. With the lowbloods.”
You want to headdesk so badly right now, but there’s no desk (you think some of the little metal pieces used to be a desk, though), so you bang your head against Equius’s shoulder instead. Your moirail is such a big dumb butt, why do you even put up with him? Other than because he’d clearly be lost without you, like a grub in the forest, and probably fall down a ravine and get eaten by growlbeasts, only with emotions instead of actual growlbeasts.
“Equius, you are the worst,” you start to say, but before you can get on to the reasons why, the whole room shakes, like something’s exploded in the tower underneath.
Both of you jump to your feet.
You have to get somewhere safer, have to find the threat, have to make sure that everyone else is okay—
The window blows out, and Aradia’s floating where the glass used to be. Oh. That’s all it was.
Well, not all; when you listen you can hear something – or someone – coming up the stairs, blowing doors off their hinges as they go. Sure enough, Sollux appears in the doorway, flashing a whole bunch of colors. Aradia’s all white, and she’s glowing not flashing, but neither of them look happy. You don’t really blame them, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to let them just come in and go bloodrage on your moirail, if that’s what they have in mind. Not even if he won’t stop them. Especially not if he won’t stop them.
You snarl, just a little, so they know you’re willing to get involved if you have to. You hope you don’t have to. The three of them should definitely talk, and fight too, but you can’t leave them alone if they’re just going to be platonic about it.
Aradia meets your eyes and gives you a little nod. “It’s okay.” She’s pretty trustworthy mostly, so you nod back and sidle toward the door. If Equius asks you to, you’ll stay, but you hope he doesn’t. It’s not a good idea to avoid this kind of thing!
He doesn’t ask you. He’s still gaping at both of them, like he didn’t expect them to be mad and want to fight it out. He is the most dumb. It’s him.
You don’t trust Sollux as much to not let his powers run away with him, so on your way past him out the door you hiss just for him, “I know where your meowrail sleeps.” You know Equius needs to be smacked upside the thinkpan right now, but if Sollux goes too far, you’ll make him pay.
You abscond back down to the receivingblock, leaping over a scattering of doors, and perch on a furnishing piece. You can’t hear what’s going on up there or anything, but you’re still in the hive, if someone needs you.
You hope they don’t really break up. You think they’re sweet together, if the three of them can work this out.
>Aradia: Make him pay.
Oh, you plan to! Do you ever! He is the worst, most infuriating troll in the entire history of the species! You know this for a fact, because all that history is spread out in the map of your veins, and he’s right there at the center of it, in the place reserved for the most horrible horrificantor, making the whole thing hurt.
You want to throw something at Equius, but there’s nothing large enough to throw, so you throw him. He’s big enough. He hits the wall but doesn’t even dent it. It’s very unsatisfying.
You throw some words instead.
“You horrible, disgusting, cowardly excuse for a troll! How dare you?!” He doesn’t seem to have anything he wants to say to this, just keeps looking through you like you’re not even there. He’s never looked through you like that before.
Rage bubbles up hotter inside you with every second he pretends you don’t matter. He’s lying. At a time like this, he’s lying to you!
You go to throw him against another wall in the hopes that a second try will make you feel better, but Sollux beats you to it in a crackle of red and blue. This time Equius does dent the wall, but it doesn’t make him react.
“Answer her!” Sollux yells over the sound of his own psionics. “Answer us, you bulgerotting nookstain!”
Equius keeps not looking at you, but he says, “I have already expressed what there is to exchange. Further discussion would be extremely foolish,” and shuts his mouth again with an audible snap, like he thinks he can end the conversation just by saying so.
It’s like he thinks he’s the boss of you, like you haven’t had this conversation before, like that’s even a thing he wants when you know that’s the opposite of a thing that is true. He’s lying and that’s hurting you, hurting Sollux, and it makes you so mad you can’t say anything, just grab him with your mind and shake him until maybe his thinkpan falls into a more sensible arrangement.
It doesn’t happen. He doesn’t even look at you when you’re shaking him, like you don’t even exist in his world. It infuriates you beyond belief. Equius infuriates you a lot of the time, but right now is something special. You want to rip him apart just so he’ll pay attention to you.
You’re not going to. You promised Nepeta, and anyway you don’t want him dead, you just want him to stop – being – so – terrible!
Sollux maybe doesn’t agree, or else just doesn’t care. He’s been having a worse night than you, which you haven’t really been helping. Anyway, he keeps shouting while you both throw Equius into every single last wall and Equius pretends you’re not doing it.
“Is this your idea of a fresh start?” Sollux demands. “Oh hey we’re alive, first thing let’s stop kissing the lowbloods, or they might start getting this weird impression that I liked them, no idea why they might think that, it was just a bit of fun, not an actual relationship or anything. Is that what’s going through that dessicated excuse for a thinkpan?”
It hurts to hear him say the words. It hurts more that Equius doesn’t deny them. That hurt curls around the rage and makes it stronger. He has no right to do this to you! You don’t care what he says, he’s a terrible liar, and you know, you know he wouldn’t have said he cared for you if he didn’t mean it, not when he hated the very idea so much. You want to remind him of what he said, what he did, so he can’t say it didn’t matter. He can’t say you didn’t matter.
This time when you grab him from Sollux you pull him to you instead of throwing him away. Equius actually looks at you for a moment. He’s confused. You’re pleased, finally. He can try to lie from a distance, but he can’t ignore you now.
You kiss him. There’s no pity in it, not now, only hate, boiling out of you and into him. How dare he pretend you don’t matter, when you own him? Who does he think he is to turn you away like this?
For a moment, it’s okay. You can feel him bend to you, just like all the other times you’ve kissed. Sollux’s psionics crackle over both of you, and it’s normal again.
Then Equius changes his mind – you can tell he doesn’t mean it, you can feel him pulling himself together wrong – and tries to pull away from you. You could hold him. It wouldn’t be difficult. You want to hold him. He’s lying and you all know it. If you don’t let him go, if you keep kissing him, he’ll have to shut up. You don’t have to let him do this thing none of you want. He wouldn’t fight you.
You drop him. He doesn’t look at you, like he doesn’t know or doesn’t care that you almost didn’t. Oh, you hate him. You hate that you have to care about things like this, because he won’t.
You hate that you’re crying.
You hate that he’s not.
Even if Equius won’t look you in your face and see your tears, Sollux will, and it makes him even more furious. Now he’s the one pulling Equius close, slamming him into a wall and hovering over him.
“Does this make you happy?” he snarls.
Equius doesn’t respond, doesn’t look at him. It’s like you and Sollux aren’t even there. Sollux, though, forces Equius’s head toward him, where he can at least pretend he’s paying attention. “Would it make you feel better, you worthless piece of shit, to have no one care about you? Is that what you want out of life? Is it? Do you get off on it harder if I maim you platonically? Is that what’s going on here, you sick freak? Is this just a kinky sex game to you, fuck with us so we hurt you more? Is that what you want?” You can see Equius wanting to respond, wanting to surrender. You can also see him not surrendering. But he’s going to, you know it. You’re sure. Almost sure. In a minute, he will.
Of course, that’s when Karkat comes up to the flipped door, looks into the room, and turns right back around, shouting, “What the shiteating fuck, do you for some reason think that that’s the best possible use of your time?” This is somehow not nearly as surprising to you as it should be, considering you don’t know the future anymore.
“You owe me three bottles of nutritionblock thinkpan cleanser,” Karkat continues, “each, and that’s after you quit whatever the fuck you were doing – don’t you dare fucking tell me – and get down the bulgemunching stairs, if not to prevent me tearing your entire fucking hormone production glands out with my bare hands, then through a sudden and unforeseeable attack of remembering what the fuck we came all the way out here to deal with.”
Sollux looks away from Equius; you don’t, though, so you see him relax, shutting his eyes and biting his lip bloodier than it was. “FF is here?”
“Along with her prince in shining shitty cape, so you might want to get your collective gluteal resting surfaces down there, and this time I specifically mean you, Equius. They’ve been here all of five fucking minutes and Eridan and Vriska are already fluffing themselves up like a pair of hideous birds doing a mating display, only instead of mating they’re competing for the honor of who can be the most terminally obnoxious to the most people in the shortest amount of time, an honor which is in fact the opposite of mating, since it will be won when they end up driving each other shithive maggots and start trying to claw each other’s ocular sockets open in what they mistakenly believe is a sensual manner, leading to a net negative quantity of mating and also way more fucking drama than I am prepared to deal with.”
You don’t listen to most of what Karkat’s saying. It doesn’t have much to do with you, anyway. Instead, you watch Equius straighten up like nothing has happened at all. He’s not very good at it. He’s still better than you want him to be. By the time he leaves the hive, he’ll have knocked himself back into an ordinary everyday shape that doesn’t scream his guilt to the world.
You ignore all three of them and float back out the window. It feels like running, but you’d rather run than stay and watch him wipe you away again.