Work Text:
You don’t know how to describe how you feel right now. Are you tense? Antsy? Impatient? No, fuck, nevermind, you know exactly what you’re feeling— you’re nervous.
You’ve been inseparable from Eridan ever since the two of you died. It’s been approximately three sweeps that the two of you have spent wandering through dream bubbles, existing in the post-life that you have together. It feels a lot more significant when you tell this to the other ghosts of the humans, who marvel at spending about six human years together. You have to hand it to them; humans tend to make time feel more prolonged and purposeful with their time measurements.
And now here you are after all this time, with a very purposeful gift sitting in your pocket. It’s waiting for you to take a fucking chance to give it to Eridan, and its small shape making contact with your leg through your pants pocket buzzes with bad sensory input. it would be fine if you could put it somewhere else without Eridan noticing and ruining the surprise, but you don’t have a place for it. So the input feels like pure shit.
Though, there’s a bigger problem you’ve found yourself with now— Eridan is finally starting to notice that you’ve been acting weird. To give him credit, maybe he noticed a while ago, and only felt the need to bring it up now; he says he tries to give people space like that sometimes. You know he’s just bad at bringing things up.
“Somethin’ on your mind? Even I can tell your hand’s gettin’ clammy,” he says simply.
“Great job, you managed to observe something,” you snark automatically.
He squeezes your hand, and you can tell he thinks you’re predictable. No getting out of this with well-placed bickering, is there? “Alright, what is it?”
The bubble the two of you are in is calm. You’re in a memory of a small human city at dusk, the Earth’s sky in soft shades of pink-ish reds and blues. The two of you stopped at a park bench so Eridan could look at the sky— he gives a shit about it simply because it reminds him of you.
The feeling of the gift in your pocket feels like it weighs in your chest. You can’t tell if its clawing your words back down or trying to shove the words out prematurely. You manage to say, “Do you remember that one Dave we ran into a while back? The one who lived in the memory of that breakfast-based human restaurant?”
“The fuckin’ Denny’s?”
Oh. Yeah, of course he’d remember a place named like that. “Yeah, the fucking Denny’s.”
“That Dave made the pancakes from the menu pretty damn well,” Eridan reminisces. “It was nice havin’ an impromptu lunch like that— or, a ‘brunch’, or whatever. What about it?”
“You know how you left to explore the back of the restaurant while I finished my food?”
Eridan cracks a smirk at that— he’d told you after the encounter that, among the other things he got to do, he’d managed to scale the appliances in the kitchen to sit on a tall jutted-out wall. He apparently wanted to feel tall. The Dave didn’t give a shit; you suspect he had encouraged it. “I do.”
“Right. So, while you were still getting up to whatever the fuck you were doing, I wandered around the front and found a lot of stupid shit at the cash register for sale. Some trinkets they probably sold to get a little extra money off the customer as they payed for the bill.”
He hums in acknowledgement. “Sounds about right.”
“And so,” you say, “I found a little stupid trinket I thought you might like.”
“Wow, stealin’ without payin’ at the till? How could you?”
“We’re dead, asshole. Money isn’t real anymore.”
Eridan scoffs. “An’ so it’s taken you, what, a third of a fuckin’ sweep to bring it up?”
“I was—” you punctuate your train of thought by swatting at him with the hand not holding his— “fuck you, I was waiting for the best time to give it to you!” You glare as Eridan laughs openly at you.
“So you’re givin’ it to me now, right?” Despite Eridan being dead-set (ha ha) on being teasing right now, the gleam in his eyes at the thought of a gift is easy to spot.
“I... am,” you falter out, the little burst of energy fizzling right back out again. In your own head, you’re kicking yourself and throwing some goddamn chairs around. Why are you so nervous?
You wordlessly get your hand to move, grabbing at the damn thing burning a hole in your pocket. You bring your fist out, and you can feel the nervous pinch of your expression; the embarrassed warmth in your face. Eridan leans a little closer to your fist, pulled in by curiosity.
Oh, shit, you suddenly remember why you’re so nervous.
“So, before I show you, I...”
Eridan glances at you. “Mhm?”
“Th— this isn’t, wasn’t, supposed to be following that human-type shit around this type of gift. It can be, i-if you want it to, but it wasn’t originally meant to. But I was sitting on giving this to you, and the realization that it seems like, feels like such a human thing, that started to creep in, and... and I’d be fine either way, I guess? But...”
He’s looking at you, and you can tell he’s patiently waiting to figure out what you’re talking about. Waiting for you to stop being so fucking terrible with feelings, and talking, and you are fucking this shit up, god damn it.
“I— just— ugh.” You scrunch up your nose with a nervous grimace and open up your hand.
Sitting in your palm is a little silver ring; a seahorse on it faces the left with it’s stomach full of swirling colors. The little shitty box you swiped it from called it a mood ring, but you call it the most inaccurate blood ring in the dream bubbles. Apparently, instead of using temperature to adjust jewelry to a troll’s color to cut costs, humans use the same concept for emotions instead. You think it’s stupid. The ring’s temperature matching with yours makes it a light teal color, with swirls of a darker reddish-brown hue mixed in.
“It changes color, but it’s completely garbage at it, so I don’t give a shit if you don’t want it because of that,” you rush to get out as you look away, because fuck, there are so many things he might not like about this stupid ring. It’s silver, so what if he doesn’t like it next to his other gold rings? And sure, he’s known to associate his identity with ‘seahorse symbolism’ from time to time, but he’s complex! What if he doesn’t like this specific seahorse? What if it reminds him too much of his lusus? You don’t even know what the color in the ring will be for him! He’s going to feel like you barely know him. You feel like you barely know him. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Eridan’s cool hands brush against yours as he takes the ring.
You peek at his face; he has that same expression he had a few weeks ago when you came across the bubble of an art museum. His eyes were practically saucers, filled with recognition at all the things he could see in the works you both passed that you couldn’t quite relate to, not on his level.
He glances up at you. His lips start to slowly, painstakingly, form a tiny giddy smile; you can hear his breath leave softly from his mouth. He looks back at the ring that’s now held up in his fingers.
“Did it take you so long to show me this—” he glances back— “because you got caught up over-thinkin’ about human marriage?”
You let the way your hands hide your lower face answer for you. The panic is slowly ebbing away, being replaced by a general fluster. The bubbly laugh Eridan lets out as he sees you like this is beautiful. He can fuck off for being handsome like that.
“Shut up,” you say into your hands.
“Thinkin’ about marryin’ me?”
“Yes, idiot, kind of!”
The dorky sound that’s bled into his soft hum is indication enough that Eridan’s not unfazed by this idea. He probably couldn’t stop smiling if he tried. “This is a nice place to do that.”
You sink as far down the bench as you can without outright falling off; you are near-horizontal. “Ugh, I don’t know how I wanted this to go, but whatever it was supposed to be, I didn’t do it right. God, I fucked this up.” Your own leg furthest from Eridan is bouncing like a motherfucker right now. You’re surprised you aren’t shaking the entire park bench.
Eridan is silent, but he does put a hand on your non-bouncing leg comfortingly. You dare to glance up at his face. He’s already put the ring on the damn finger humans use for their marriages. He’s holding his hand out in front of him. “Sol, I don’t think you fucked up at all.”
Before you can get another word in, Eridan brings his hand closer to study the colors in the seahorse’s stomach. With obvious glee, he shows you how it’s turned against his blood temperature. It’s a slightly warmer violet, with little wisps of yellows swirled around. Oh god, you are the luckiest fucking bastard in all of these damn dream bubbles.
You can’t help but ask, “You like it?”
“I love it,” he assures. You think his face must be starting to hurt with how long he’s been smiling. “It stands out perfectly from all my other rings while still bein’ on theme, it’s fuckin’ flawless.”
You deflate into his side, all the stress leaving you like a punctured bounce house.
“Sit up,” he adds, “You’ll fall off the bench.”
You do sit up, and promptly claim your spot leaning on his shoulder. Holy shit, he’s so giddy you can tell for certain that he’s not as cold to the touch as usual. What the fuck, you make him so goddamn happy. What the hell.
“There is just one thing I’m realizin’ about all a’ this,” Eridan comments, putting his arm across the bench back behind you. “We died pretty fuckin’ young, yeah? Even if we’re... nearly nine sweeps old in terms of how long we’ve existed, we’re still a little stuck feelin’ six at the core, aren’t we?”
You see what he’s getting at. “Being married would make us husbands, right?”
“Yeah.” He leans closer to you and looks at the colors in the sky. The height of his happiness has cooled down into a contentedness you can still hear in his tone. “Feels a little strange in reference to us, doesn’t it?”
“Post-life is a little strange,” you say. “I’m sure we’ll settle in to feeling older at some point.”
The both of you sit like that. Eridan’s knees wobble back and forth as he thinks. You accidentally start mirroring his idle action instead of bouncing your leg again.
“Maybe for now, we could just be married boyfriends?” Eridan looks your way. “Maybe married quadmates?” The two of you decided ages ago that labelling your silly little quadrant properly was more effort than it was worth. At some point, all the intricate feelings between pale, flushed, and pitch stabilized into one big clump that neither of you wanted to even attempt pulling apart.
You reach back and take his hand in yours. “Married quadmates is nice,” you decide.
The way his passive smile starts to reach his eyes again feels like a Ghibli movie. “I need to get you somethin’ in return,” he insists. “I’ll find somethin’ that you’d like to match the ring.”
“You don’t need to—” you manage to get out, before Eridan’s fins flutter with realization and he sits up taller, dislodging you from your spot on his shoulder.
“I could find a USB stick for you. Put it on a string, make it a necklace.” He puts his hands together, lost in his new idea, and the tinkering sound of his rings hitting one another is heightened on your ears. “Put a file or two on it, somethin’ sentimental you can look at when you want.”
Oh, it’s idiotic how much that idea makes you want to kiss his face.
“I can’t stand you. You’re everything to me, you prick,” you blurt out before you can stop yourself. This gets a surprised guffaw out of Eridan.
“Well you mean the world to me, bitch,” he grins.
You jab at him as a joke, and Eridan manages to get you in a headlock in return. The two of you end up play-fighting in the park for what feels like an hour before you call a truce. And when you leave for another bubble, he holds you hand in a way that you can feel his new silver ring against your fingers.