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She loves his movies, and that's the first thing that endears her to John. She sits down and watches the great ones like Con Air and National Treasure and Armageddon and even How Stella Got Her Groove Back and she doesn't call them ‘travesties to the entire face of a culture so nuanced it's like having your head drilled into with a spoon, Egbert, god!’ She laughs and cries right along with him and asks a million questions and never minds that he has to rewind bits to explain things to her and they end up watching the same scene half a dozen times. Sometimes a movie date that starts off with every intention to just watch Men In Black and eat some popcorn and distract her from all the stress of trying to broker some sort of treaty with humanity before everyone ends up fighting again becomes a full-out Will Smith Marathon, ending at dawn with her fast asleep on John's couch with greasy fingers and a smile on her lips and John trying to collect his mail without getting hounded by the press.
(It's funny, he thinks, how he can set up a whole windy barrier around a house almost an hour away from civilization and they still try to get inside when they think the Empress is visiting. Of course, the worst are the tabloids convinced they're having an illicit interspecies romance and desperate for any photo they can take. Last week’s Enquirer had a cover story featuring an image of John screaming as tiny sea troll babies burst from his stomach. The tagline had read HUMANS TO HOST ALIEN OFFSPRING and John hadn’t even bothered to turn to page 2. Funny how the truth would have worried humanity more; it was such a good idea he’d talked Feferi out of telling them everything right away.)
Sometimes he visits her, though those days are always shorter. There's something about being on her ship that makes it harder for him to forget who she is, for one thing. She has responsibilities that she can shrug off and leave for someone else when she's visiting John, but when she's in range of almost every surviving troll in existence she's expected to remain the empress; even when she's trying to get some rest. He feels sorry for her, that she can’t ever just stop being the empress even though in the game she’d thought her duty was over. Now she has to deal not only with a bunch of trolls but all of humanity too. It’s hard work, for sure: it makes movie night on the ship almost impossible but he makes the trek out any time she needs to talk and never minds that sometimes he spends more time alone in her room waiting for her to return or to get off the phone than they spend taking about stuff. It's just how her life goes, and he's amazed she does it all so well.
She likes him because he laughs. She likes him because he’s never afraid to tell her a joke or to try to trick her into doing something silly, to make her laugh on her worst days when she feels dry and empty inside and out. He explains things simply, sometimes with movies to illustrate the point and he never condescends. He's a fool and a joker but that just means he doesn't take himself too seriously. He's a human and it means he sees her as just another troll and never once thinks about her rank or blood or power or what she can accomplish for him. What she does for him is the human thing called friendship, he explains, and for him that is enough. Sometimes she feels she's using him: that he could never be getting as much back as she does in return. She ought to feel guilty about it but John is so perfectly content with the situation she knows he'd just be upset if she was, so she enjoys his friendship and calls it something else and it works like the tides, simple and easy and with the unmistakable undertow of power.
Feferi tries to be patient, but when the human world leaders and politicians and secretaries and paperworkers scurry and drag their heels and insult her while smiling and saying things they think she won't understand, their eyes over her body and their thoughts all to plain on their face, she turns to John to remind her why she doesn't just burn a swath of land clear and settle her people on the charred remains of whatever humanity tried to claim. He calms her down, reminds her that politicians are a poor way to judge anyone even if the movies make them seem so much better in real life. He takes her to parks filled with human children who swarm around her and ask a hundred questions - can you fly? You can breathe under water? Did you really eat brains for breakfast? And the simmering fission of anger in her chest melts away for another day, another debate. He soothes her because he never tells her she’s wrong about how she feels. He just helps her find another way to feel about it.
(She has Kanaya make her new dresses. Ones that fit and flatter her, ones that are tailored to resonate with the humans as appropriate fashion for a young woman who is also a queen while - and this is important - remaining alien. Kanaya of course excels at the challenge and Feferi thinks it's telling, just how much difference dressing in solid colours and lengthening her skirt makes to the males she deals with - and it is, sadly, mostly males.)
John's with her whenever she needs him, and she loves him for that. Not as her lover and not as a bodyguard, despite what the trashy reporters write in their silly papers John calls rags. She has guards of course, real ones: Karkat and Eridan both won't let her out of their sight when she's off-ship even if the attempts on her life have slowed after the time she was shot right through the head was televised, her skull closing over the wound and skin growing smooth and scarless. The short clip has over ten million views on YouTube and gains more daily. Humanity doesn’t know what to make of her and her friends, but if they’re debating about them they’re thinking, and that is a step in the right direction. Of course she’d rather not have had to feel her brains blow out of the back of her head but at least it wasn’t permanent and John had been right to have Sollux post the video everywhere (and monitor the responses and discussions about it). John understood humanity, even if sometimes she thinks he isn’t very good at being a human himself.
He isn’t, and sometimes he seems to know it, seems to know he is supposed to feel one way or act one way and yet is doing the opposite because it just makes more sense to him. It bothers John, though he’ll never admit it. Feferi can always tell though – it’s so easy to read him sometimes, he’s like calm water, and he is so strong and so pitiful all at once she is terribly glad to call him hers. John is sanity and company, friendship and something beautiful and perfectly pale. He's movies at three pm or five am and popcorn with grubsauce, someone to rant at who won't suggest she just cull everyone around her or that it's her own fault for being an empress. He lets her complain and pats her shoulder in sympathy. He lets her cry and wraps her in a blanket and puts on The Little Mermaid which she doesn't even know why she likes it, she just does and there's nothing glubbing wrong with that! He’s answers and advice and he sometimes tells her what he would do, but he never tries to tell her what she should do. He's her very best advisor, even though he doesn't want the title and half her retinue would die of apoplexy if they heard her admit it. He was a leader once, for a little while, and he understands her. The game changed them all but when they returned he'd come back as just a boy to his world, even if he could do things no other human could. She'd come back the empress of a race on a ship that had little resources and was suddenly in orbit over a world ripe with everything they needed to settle. Only the pesky problem of six billion humans keeps her from doing just that.
Sometimes, very rarely, she wishes they had just come back to a barren Alternia, or some new world where it was just the sixteen of them. It would have been less of a headache at least.
The attack catches everyone by surprise (as trucks filled with explosives driven into buildings often do). It's the worst attack so far - everything before had been gunshots into a crowd, dangerous certainly but the casualties had been small. Feferi looks at the carnage around her and for a moment she can only survey what they’ve caused this time, cringing as she hears cries and moans, coughing on the thick dust and smoke in the air. Karkat and Eridan try to pull her away, to safety as if there is anywhere on this world that is safe for them yet, and she shakes them off like drops of water. John is sitting behind an overturned desk, holding his head with bloody hands - though wherever he has been cut has already healed.
She motions when he meets her eyes and he nods and together they start digging through the wreckage, John lifting concrete walls away from those trapped beneath with ease, carting the wounded out in cradles of wind. She likes that she never has to tell him what to do, that he looks at what needs to be done and he just does it. Later he'll complain there wasn't any hot female lead for him to be showing off in front of and she'll offer to put a date with Liv Tyler into the treaty requirements for him. Right now they work as Karkat and Eridan guard the entrances - one much larger now thanks to the explosion.
The living she heals with a touch. Well, it's a bit more than that - it's a touch and a lot of effort and she's totally ruined the dress Kanaya has made for her with sweat and blood and gore. The dead she can't help - not because she can't bring them back but because John had been adamant about that when they'd first arrived and after so much time studying humanity she thinks she understands why. Healing she can do and remain alien. Raising the dead is left for their gods: stepping into their territory would only sour any chances of a peaceful coexistence. Not to mention, John points out, that she’d never get a moment’s rest again.
(She'd researched the gods, with Rose and Kanaya's help. It amused them all to find so many references to themselves in human lore, their signs in their stars. They are the gods humans aspire to please - and yet keep trying to kill. She wonders if it's possible to pity a whole race at once. They certainly deserve it.)
She's distracted by healing so that she doesn't realize Karkat and Eridan are protecting her, eyes wary as they watch the humans who have arrived to help. John's arms wrap around her and bring her back to herself, remind her that she's more than just the flow of power and the beat of a heart. "Let us humans do the rest. You're exhausted." He says, and he laughs when she shakes her head. "Even gods have limits, Feferi."
"Bring me the worst ones." She insists, and keeps Eridan at her side but forces Karkat to help with the rescue teams. He only agrees because the sooner everyone is accounted for the sooner she'll get back to the God damn ship and stop giving her guards a thrice dammed migraine over looking after her masochistic purple ass.
John helps with the wounded, bringing the worst to Feferi despite the paramedics protests. After watching her work they shut up and even though they don't want to believe it they bring anyone they're afraid won't make it to the hospital to the 'freaky alien queen' and Feferi works until she's waxy and shaking and Eridan has to call John over to get her to stop.
He hugs her again, catching her arms against her side and whispers into her ear. "Do you want to find out that heroic deaths are actually permanent here? Because killing yourself saving humans is pretty damn heroic, I bet." She gets to her feet unsteadily and they leave the rest to firefighters and paramedics and police. The walk back to the shuttle is only a minute from the embassy but it's lined with photographers and John tells Karkat and Eridan to let them be. The flashes are annoying and Feferi feels horrible that she'll undoubtedly end up on the newscasts looking pitiful and weak and not at all like an empress.
She complains about this to John, because it’s been his job to try to keep the worst of the press away, and he just laughs and tucks her tired head against his shoulder. "You don't understand. This isn’t weak, you were a hero today! You saved a bunch of lives and you didn't run away until everyone was looked after. A lot of the other leaders ran. So that makes you really brave, and everyone will get to see how hard you worked yourself to help everyone when you didn't have to. Hiding that would mean people wouldn’t know, which is just silly after all that effort and rescuing people and everything. It’ll work out, don’t worry.”
John's right of course. That night the attack is all anyone speaks about on the internet. The trolls’ actions are all over the newscasts and blogs and reaction videos. There is video of her and the others working through the rubble, pulling people out and helping put them back together again. She gets to see herself stumble and nearly fall and Karkat catch her - she doesn't even remember it happening. It's already becoming a blur.
The reporters are careful with their words but humanity is not: courageous, hero, kind, brave, human. They call them human because they did what was obviously needed and necessary and that, Feferi thinks, tells her so much about humanity right there.
"See?" John beams and claps his hands as Sollux forwards data he's sampling on the overall attitudes towards the Alternian settlement. Approval is up five prevent. Not bad for one bomb blast. "I told you to let the reporters film you. Humans want to see a bit of weakness sometimes, it shows how strong you are. And it was super lucky the security footage survived for Sollux to leak it to the press before the embassy sealed it away."
"Stop gloating nookwhiffer. Five percent still only puts us at just under thirty overall. Aradia says we need more if we want to avoid a war."
"But it's a start." John beams and Feferi loves his smile, how bright and brilliant it is, how clearly and straightforward John sees when she’s so used to having to think in layers and mazes and complicated games. John doesn't play chess: He half cuts the legs of the chair of his opponent when they’re not looking and steals their king as they’re picking themselves up off the ground. And then grins and says ‘who, me?” when he’s questioned about unethical tactics, the very picture of innocence.
"So wwhat's next? You said another shooting wwould be suspicious. Should wwe arrange another bomb?"
"I was thinking Feferi should add someone to her retinue. Maybe Equius? It'll look like she's worried but isn't willing to back down. And maybe we can have something like a fire next. He could put it out really impressively." John sits next to Feferi, perches on the edge of her armrest in a way no other troll would dare and gestures wildly with his hands. "Don't worry Feferi. Just like I said: we just have to make you a real hero and show how awesome and nice and super powerful all your friends are and humans will want to be your friends too, because we won't want to be enemies."
"Are you sure you don't want that date with Liv Tyler? I think with all your work for us you earned it!"
"I'm just helping my friends have a home. There's nothing so special about it. If it takes a few explosions and Jade shooting at you from rooftops, well that's just because we're silly! Just promise we can have a giant Con Air party and make Nick Cage come when the treaty's signed and I’ll call it even stevens."
Feferi giggles, tone matching John's note for note. "You know I'll do it just to see your face when you meet him!"
"Dude it would be so awesome!"
"If you're both done being ridiculous and sappy and pale can we please get back to planning the next attack? These things take time and somebody has to do it while you're trying to charm the assorted fucking castoffs who lack any discernable competence that this ‘United Nations’ has thrown at you. That somebody, in case you forgot in your sickening infatuation with each other, is me. Right now the plan is to choke you both to death before you make my bile sac expel the disgusting slop the humans fed us in their pathetic display of 'fine dining'. I don’t like this plan. Can we please make a better fucking plan that does not involve rage snakes or my bile sac?"
They sit around a table and look at their itinerary, which is planned for the rest of the month so to encourage the real attacks from disgruntled humans and help keep their own cover. Slowly and surely, they'll win humanity over and find a place to settle - Aradia and Terezi have both Seen it. The trick is to do it without an extended war - which, if they're careful, they can avoid. Feferi thinks she can be patient. They have a ship full of trolls, all castes, and a matriorb that just needs the right conditions. They have each other and enough power between them all to shape this world to their will if they have to. John's sure it won't come to that.
But it's nice to know, she thinks to herself as he suggests the next attack be somewhere in open air, maybe during a speech, that if it came down to trolls or humans, John will pick his friends every time.