Work Text:
"I’m fuckin’ tired, Sol, come to sleep," Eridan slurs, glasses sideways on his face. He stands in the hall, a silhouette and the poster-troll of exhaustion, which is almost funny seeing as how you’re the only one who’s been working. The harsh lighting from your monitor isn’t doing him any favors: he looks every bit as cold-blooded as he is, a lesson learned after being used as a personal heater one too many times, and he’s cloaked in some sort of dressing gown that you call prissy and he calls silk like he’s trying too hard to keep his cool.
You know his secret, and that’s that he doesn’t have any cool. He is the very antithesis of cool. He is the 0 to the binary 1 of cool, and there is nothing on this planet or the next that will ever connect a 0 and a 1 in any tangible way. You’d say so if you had a proper segue for the observation. The way things stand right now? You’d look stark-raving mad and utterly, completely sleep-deprived.
"Then sleep," you tell him. It is the most obvious solution in the world, so it tracks that he’d need help getting the memo.
He purses his lips, leaving you smug as you swivel your chair back around to face your work. There’s a moth caught in the frosted glass bowl thing underneath your lightbulb, it’s due to kick the . . . it’s due to die any minute now, and when it does, your code will execute. You’re a genius. You’re an impatient genius putting the finishing touches on a project staked on the life of a moth. You might actually be stark-raving mad.
You don’t expect him to say anything else – for someone who thinks that the world should be dropped into his lap, Eridan is awfully bad at asking for what he really wants. He wavers, stutters, and flip-flops between too commanding and not commanding enough. He really gets to you, actually, and you only hate him for it enough to reap the rewards of a nicer hivestem apartment. You barely suffer the commissions of ruffled shirts that cost more than your entire husktop array and the servers combined – you hate those grub-forsaken ruffled shirts. You’re pretty sure that he only buys them in order to flaunt his vast riches, as if to say, look at me, I’m buyin’ another shirt for my kismesis that he’ll rip up to use as rags just because I can. You’ve considered asking Kanaya to cut him off, but that might clue her into the fact that the shirts are for you, and you’d actually rather die.
Where were you?
"When are you plannin' to sleep?" He asks, trying to put disdain into something that croaks off at the end. He’s such a prisoner to his circadian rhythm that it’s pathetic. You type faster to drown out his nasally voice. TA: print("eriidan ampora need2 to be 2poonfed a trap2 worth of bulge.");
"When I’m tired," you say evasively after an appropriate amount of suspense. He huffs like he’s about to throw a tantrum. Knowing him, he just might.
"Fuck’s sake, Sol." You can almost hear his pout. "When was the last time that you slept?"
"I slept the last time I was tired, ED," you snap, because he can only be so concerned before it gets annoying. "Do you need something?" you say, slowly enough for the likes of him to process.
"Sleep," he says, petulant and distracting.
"Gargle my nook," you say, even and reasonable.
You write your differences, down to the most banal preferences regarding the order that breakfast pellets and milk should go into a bowl, off as a physiological bridge that can never be crossed. It all harkens back to one, simple discrepancy: he is a fish and you are a normal person. If he needs to sleep every day? It’s because he’s a lazy highblood who can sit back and relax and –
The distance between your body and the desk grows – it’s too quick to be explained away as you hitting the wall too hard between the frenetic swings of your feet, one second you’re typing, and the next you’re bringing your keyboard along with you and it’s crashing onto the floor with a clatter. Your rolling chair is moving. The text on the screen is getting smaller. Without thinking, you jump ship and land hard on the floor, biting blood into your mouth when your hip connects to the hard tiling in the combined mealblock. He scoops you up at all angles, there are pointy elbows in his sides, the backs of your heels scrabbling against his thighs. You probably look like a purrbeast having a seizure. You really don’t care. You hiss out a torrent of only the most heinous and vulgar sludge scraped from the ugliest depths of troll 4chan, but he holds you steady like none of it bothers him at all as he drags you at an awkward angle which owes to your (not insubstantial) height difference. You’re taller. You fold at the top and hope to unbalance him.
"Fuck you, ED."
The next tactic comes in the form of an attempted electrocution, but you’re alarmed to find your psionics fizzling out as soon as they’re called forth, arcs of red and blue sparking out into nothing except what spare static clings to a blanket when it’s dry, and so maybe, just this once, he’s right and you need sleep. You’re vulnerable like this – when you’re tired and scraping at the bottom of your reserves, he is physically stronger, but that doesn’t mean that he should get to push you around. Fucking sue you for trying to make a living, much less a hobby. You try to unhinge your joints so that you can knee him in the shameglobes from the exact wrong angle. It’s too late. You’re in the respiteblock and the door is slamming into the frame behind you. Through the heavy curtains, you can see the sun setting. Eridan points this out when he drops you right back onto the floor.
"It’s night, Sol. The fuckin’ moons are rising. The cockbeast is crowin’ somewhere. You were awake for the entire day. Again. Are you ever plannin’ to come to sleep?"
"Of all the hills to die on," you bite back, making a mad rush for the door. He blocks it. You bump harmlessly against him.
"Go to sleep," your kismesis worries at his bottom lip. There’s lurid violet right at the surface, a consequence of his own lapse in care.
"It doesn’t work like that," you light the fast-expiring fuse of your patience with renewed vigor. It’s connected to nothing. You have exactly one weapon left in your arsenal and it relies entirely on a moth that is stubbornly clinging to life back in the other block. "Fucksake, ED, you can’t lock me in my own block forever."
"It’s my block too," Eridan says, somehow managing to bypass the point entirely. "I pay your rent, Sol. Stop being petty."
"I’m being petty?" You spit. "You’re the one who can’t sleep alone."
And he has the gall to say, "you’re bein’ unreasonable."
You jab him in the solar plexus, and because you’re on the naughty list of every intergalactic law known to troll (you’re convinced that hope itself hates you, because whenever you get your mind set on something to put Eridan in his place once and for all, it all comes crashing down on you instead like a high-stakes tower of cards), the moth chooses that moment to die.
You hit the ground on instinct, your hip protesting louder than before as the thermalhull blows in a wash of color and sound and clatter.
Eridan is the only one who ever uses the damn thing – you’re not even sure what vegan caviar is supposed to be, but you are sure that it’s corrupted everything else that you had been trying to keep cold – so you had expected him to get caught in this.
Instead, he’s bent over in the other block, holding his chest out of pain and then – after the highest scream you’ve ever heard – doubling over in mocking laughter.
You want him dead more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your entire life.
Your hair is on fire.