Chapter Text
-- carcinoGeneticist (CG) began pestering centaursTesticle (CT) ! --
CG: ATTENTION ZAHHAK.
CG: TAKE A BREAK FROM WHATEVER DISGUSTING ACTIVITY YOU ARE CURRENTLY ENGAGED IN.
CG: I HAVE IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR YOU.
CG: REGARDING YOUR FLOPPY-HAIRED FISHTROLL PRINCE.
CG: IT SEEMS WE HAVE SOME ANOMALOUS DRONE SIGHTINGS NEAR HIS PIECE-OF-SHIT HIVE AND HE IS NOT RESPONDING TO MY FUCKING PESTERLOGS. OR MEMOS.
CG: ZAHHAK ARE YOU EVEN FUCKING THERE OR AM I JUST TALKING TO A LAB FULL OF DISTURBING DISMEMBERED ROBOT CORPSES WITH LIP MARKS ALL OVER THEM?
CT: D --> I am here
CT: D --> Pardon the delay; I was away from my computer
CT: D --> Kindly elaborate on your statements, Vantas
CG: ELABORATE ON WHAT, I GOT REPORTS OF CULLING SQUADS OR SOMETHING SIMILAR, SHIPS WITH IMPERIAL INSIGNIA FUCKING AROUND ON THE COAST NEAREST WHERE HIS SHITTY SHIPWRECK IS LOCATED
CG: AND SO I, BEING A KIND AND THOUGHTFUL INDIVIDUAL, REACHED OUT TO MY DEAR FRIEND MR. AMPORA
CG: TO INQUIRE AFTER HIS WELL-BEING.
CG: AND HEARD JACK SHIT IN RETURN.
CG: YOU MIGHT WANT TO INVESTIGATE FURTHER.
CG: I’M JUST SAYING.
CT: D --> Your concern does you credit, Vantas
CT: D --> I will look into it
CT: D --> Give Nepeta my best wishes
centaursTesticle (CT) has signed off! --
CG: FUCK.
CG: FINALLY GETTING A MATESPRIT HAS DONE NOTHING FOR YOUR SOCIAL GRACES, EQUIUS.
carcinoGeneticist (CG) has signed off! --
Nights in the past (but not many):
Ugh, he won’t take any of your delicate hints. Time to up the ante.
Equius is bent over his workbench, tinkering with the active guts of what he says is a replacement for your shitty generator, as he has been for the past however many hours. The single lamp shining on his work gives him the air of some kind of tortured sculptor. It’s effective, you've got to admit, but it’s also really annoying since you wanted to take his clothes off with your teeth like two hours ago, jesus.
You marshal your resources and you stride over to him and you wait until he has put down the soldering iron before you touch his back. He jerks in surprise at the touch and twists his head to look up at you. His hair needs a wash.
“Eridan?”
“Shhhh,” you say, “only matespritship now,” and you start to rub his shoulders. You’ve taken off your rings; under your fingertips his skin is cool, slightly damp, over muscles as hard and knotted as ironwood. He makes a little soft helpless noise as you grind your knuckles into the worst of the knots, half-bruising them to make them let go, and his head droops helplessly. It is only with difficulty that you can attend to your job, actually, but hey, you started this, you gotta follow through on it.
When you’re done working out the knots in his shoulders you just rub his back, gently, firmly, and you can feel the little catch of his cough under your hands. It’s been almost a perigee since the whole fuck the ocean issue and he’s still doing that, but you think possibly he may be doing it on purpose because he has worked out how very effective it is on you, how it makes you come over all protective. In which case you have to award him points for Very Slightly Sneaky Tactics, which for Equius is a hell of an achievement. Either way, you go on rubbing, loosening the tightness in his back and chest, until he is draped on the workbench with his head resting on his folded arms and doing something that in anybody else might be described as purring.
“That’s better,” you say, perching yourself beside him on the table. “You’ve been working on that for like hours now. It can wait till evening, Equius, give over and come have dinner and let me fuck around with your hair.”
“You say the most romantic things,” he rumbles, but he leans over enough so that he’s resting his face against your hip. “Mmh. Very well, if you insist.”
“This is me insisting. I am insisting the fuck out of all this right here.” You rest a possessive hand on his head for a moment. “I’m cooking, by the way. We need a break from cheap-ass delivery. I intend to make food that has nutrients in it, you should be grateful.”
“I am,” he says, and with a very minor groan he sits up and scrubs at his face. “I am most grateful, even though it means your generator will not be ready when I guaranteed it to be.”
You make a rude noise and slip off the table. “My generator is the least of my worries.”
It’s funny: Fef always kind of ended up mothering you when you were being a total fuckass and you had no idea how she put up with it; now you do, there’s a wonderful sort of blend of exasperation and affection that comes with nudging Equius to do things like not work all hours of the damn night and part of the day as well, and...yeah, okay, fussing over him. You would never have figured yourself for a fusser, but hey, you have a broad range of talents, right? You are a complete Renaissance Troll of a guy. Dashing and deadly seadweller, crack shot with a rifle, can kind of cook a little, real good at fussing over his enormous matesprit. It all works together, really it does.
Now that Nepeta’s spending a lot of her time with Vantas he hasn’t got anyone scuttling around his great echoey rock-cut hive to distract him from work and bother-cajole-annoy-charm him into chilling out and doing some normal troll stuff. You have stepped in to fill this gap and it’s kind of weird sometimes how easily it fits. When he’s out with you on the Dualscar it’s different somehow, that’s your hive, your lair, everything there is comfortably familiar and worn just the way you like it, and he never seems to need a nudge to keep his attention on you instead of your various shitty mechanical ongoing projects; here, it’s a little bit of a challenge to capture his focus.
You like a challenge. Whistling to yourself, you saunter off to Equius’s spartan meal-preparation block and start rootling around in the cupboards for what you need. He is damn well going to eat real food tonight, that’s all. And you weren’t playing when you mentioned fucking with his hair, you haven’t been given a chance to mess about with it in like two nights, which is unconscionable, it really is. He’s let you trim the split ends and he puts up with you trying out hair products on him (“no, really, Eq, I gotta see how this shit works on proper straight hair, mine is all wavy and shit, c’mon, pleeeeease?”) and running your fingers through it every chance you get, and you are seriously addicted to that.
When he joins you a little later he comes up behind you and does that thing where he wraps his arms around your waist and rests his chin on the top of your head, like a great big warm hooded trollcloak, and you sigh and lean back against him and there is absolutely nothing, nothing in all the world, that you could want more than this.
In approximately three nights you will come to realize that there are, in fact, things in the world that you could want more than being held by Equius Zahhak, such as getting out of this fucking cell or strongroom or whatever it is and also maybe getting to punch that one of your captors with the really annoying voice a bunch of times. Or hit him with a plank. You’re not choosy.
It all just goes to show, the universe really does hate your purple guts. Nobody listens when you point this out, but the evidence is overwhelming.