Work Text:
You’ve just counted all of the capes in your closet, and you’re pretty sure there’s a cape missing from your collection. You have eighteen in total, and you’re pretty sure you only counted seventeen of them in your closet.
...
You double check. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven....
Oh, huh. You’re missing two capes?
You count a third time, just for good measure. You are missing two capes.
You stand there, squinting at the row of capes hung up neatly by your coat hangers. You silently look around your room, then start checking in corners and beside furniture on the chance that you threw one aside. Nothing is there. No capes have been abandoned on the floor by a haphazard exhaustion.
Okay.
You go count what’s in your closet a fourth time. Yeah. Okay, two capes are absolutely missing.
You leave your room to investigate. Your best guess is that you must have set two of your capes aside somewhere else in the meteor— sometimes you throw them off to be dramatic, sue you— and you’ll just have to collect them again. Worst scenario; someone stole them. Easy enough situation.
You backtrack through all of the locations in the meteor you’ve been in the past week’s time. It’s not many, but it’s still enough that you start to get a little frustrated the longer your hunt goes on. Nobody you ask seems to have seen any of your capes left about, so there’s no progress being made from that. And yeah, sure, whatever, you could replace them easily. You’d still like to find out what the hell happened to them, if someone did steal them.
Eventually, you wander all the way to ‘the shitty break room’ with an ancient water cooler nobody ever replaces the jug for. It’s down a stupid swiveling length of hallways, and the only reason people ever go down this end of the meteor is to sit on the giant comfortable couch left in there. Or, to win at hide and seek the few times its been played before the ‘hide and seek meta’ caught on. It’s mostly for the couch. You do remember visiting the shitty break room at one point this week, so it’s entirely possible you left a cape there.
You turn the final corner before you can see the break room. You can already see, dead center in the middle of that eight-foot-long monster of a couch, your capes. What you’re surprised to see is that they’re being used as a blanket.
Sollux, of all trolls, is curled up with your capes. The closer you get, the easier it is to see that only one cape is thrown over as a blanket, and he’s attempted to curl his lanky legs under it. Under his head, he’s tried to use the other as a pillow. His dual-colored glasses are tucked under the couch, out of reach from being stepped on. His hands tucked close shield his face, but once you’re near enough, you see from an overhead angle that his face is tucked to lean into the cape under his head. The implications you see from this are astounding, but that can’t be right.
You tilt your head towards the same direction as Sollux sleeps, as if that will shed some light on anything. You’re now questioning if you didn’t just leave your capes out somewhere, and if Sollux decided to steal your capes from your room. Was he planning to slowly keep stealing capes from you until you noticed? Was he just tired while he was pranking you, and happened to be hiding them here already? You can only imagine that’s why he didn’t just take a blanket, which would be the normal action to take.
How fucking tired was he, anyways? Sollux doesn’t nap. He shreds as much mandatory sleep time away as he can from both sides, and when he needs more than three or four hours, he just sleeps in. Maybe he just didn’t feel well. Ugh, you hope he’s not sick while he’s acting so peculiar and using your capes as a blanket substitute; if he’s been sick and sniveling into them you’ll throw him in a fire with the capes themselves. Something in that train of thought must explain why he’s curled up with them, surely.
You spend an admittedly long time just staring at Sollux in bafflement, trying to put together his ulterior motives. You spend so much time, in fact, that the little shit under your scrutiny himself seems to feel it, and wakes up. You both startle a little.
“Oh shit—” Sollux hisses, and his leg kicks out— you assume by accident, on instinct— to fling your first cape across the room. Okay. Why the hell was he still wearing his shoes to sleep on the couch, what the fuck? He must be ill right now. He has to be.
“What the hell is happenin’ with you right now.” You don’t even have the mental capacity to even act irritated with him. You are so fucking confused.
Sollux, not helping his own case to not seem sick, looks up at you like you’ll go away if he stays still for long enough. He looks like a cat that’s halfway towards doing a somersault and bolting away. “Uh.”
“Are— did you—” you have a little trouble thinking of the sentence you want to say— “could you just not find any blankets? Why do you even have my capes, Sol?”
There is a long pause. Again, astounding implications being given here.
“Can I plead the fifth? I have quite literally just woken up, and would appreciate being given space at a time like this.” His words sound disconnected from him, like— what did someone call it that one time, ‘therapy speak’? He’s therapy speaking you.
“You can’t plead the fifth, that’s a plead for olives and up,” you say, before cringing a little at yourself. “I mean, not like the system it was part of matters anymore. An’ the twelve pleads shouldn’t have been part a’ the fuckin’ caste system in the first place.”
You huff self-depreciatingly, knowing you still have a while to go before you aren’t instinctively siding with bullshit from the empire. Sollux just looks constipated.
“... They just,” Sollux haltingly gets out, “they’re comfortable, sort of. They... smell nice, whatever.”
Well yeah, duh, they do smell nice. You intentionally make sure they smell nice. You went out of your way to get your hands on a detergent that smells like your favorite body wash. The humans brought Old Spice to the meteor, and Krakengard is clearly the superiorly scented one. It’s practically your signature fragrance, since you use it all the time. You make sure it’s fresh enough to leave a soft waft of the scent when you dramatically swish your cape, and— and hold on. Wait, hold on. Wait a minute.
“You’re sayin’ I smell nice here, Sol. You do realize that, right?”
Your faces are both equally flushed in your complimentary colors. Sollux’s hand twitches, like any millisecond now he’s going to push off from the couch to zip away down the hall.
You furrow your brow. “I’ll be honest, it’s a little sad if you actually stole my capes just to smell my stuff. Do you know how easy it would be to just ask to borrow my laundry detergent—” You gesture to yourself, but it ends up looking more like you shook your hands a single time after washing them in the sink— “or god forbid, ask the touch-starved guy if he’d cuddle you?” Even after all the signs pointing that it’s not stupid to bring up, mentioning that last part still feels a little bit stupid to bring up. Yeah, sure, like he’s going to want to cuddle with you once he decided to curl up in your capes instead. Clearly he’s just embarrassed that Krakengard is the best soap smell in the universe.
But then, you think you catch the way Sollux’s eyes open up more with interest. But then all too quickly he looks uncertain, and warily glances down the hallway. He exhales irritably the next moment, and covers his eyes with his fingers as he sits up. You’re under the impression— or just an insecure hunch— that your reputation is getting in the way here.
Suddenly, you and every object around the both of you is lifted off the floor. It makes you feel like the floor just sunk away for a moment, until you register that Sollux is quite literally rotating everything like a group of 3D objects in a map builder. He moves it all so the couch faces away from the hall, going so far as to block the way in with the couch. Now he gets a little bit of a head start to hide if someone is about to catch him hanging out with you.
“Give me the second option.” Even if his voice is well-composed, his face has gotten even yellower. Oh god, the two of you are so awkward.
“Of course it’s the second one you want,” you comment dryly, before finding a comfortable spot to lay on the couch. You make sure to take your glasses off, setting them under the couch beside Sollux’s own.
As soon as you find a comfortable spot, back to back with the couch, Sollux weasels his way against you in turn. Surprisingly, he ends up with his head resting between your sternum and stomach, his arms looping around your lower back. You can feel him dig his lower arm between the cushions so it’s not pinned; his upper arm trails a little further towards your mid-back.
You realize, a little late, that you never took your shoes off. You don’t get to comment on the fact that you two are absolute dickheads who put your shoes on furniture, because you feel Sollux breathe in silently against you. He sighs and tightens his hold for a moment, and you remember that you showered only an hour ago.
“Are you seriously this enthralled by the damn soap I use?”
“I’m not ‘enthralled’, jackass,” he grumbles.
“It’s just, like, citrus and sea wood or whatever. I guess the bottle’s red an’ blue, but I doubt you fuckin’ knew that.”
“Maybe I can smell that it’s red and blue,” he says, and that doesn’t mean goddamn anything. Well, you guess it could mean something if Sollux has a type of synesthesia? You don’t think he does, but you could be wrong.
You roll your eyes. “What the hell has got you actin’ like this, by the way? I’ve been worryin’ in my head that you’re sick.”
“Gee, it’s almost like the emotionally constipated guy with big feelings is being emotionally constipated about his big feelings.” He presses his face closer, nose touching the middle of your torso.
So he is sort of sick; sick with want, of all things. You move one of your hands to his head, gently scratching at his scalp with your dull nails before running your fingers through his hair. If wanting were infectious, he’d probably catch that from you in the first place.
If you’re being honest, you’re surprised that want is being directed at you. Technically, the passive ‘plan’ you have (which should be in the heaviest air-quotes ever known) is working. To compensate for the fact that you will always be haunted by your past, you take pride in trying to make yourself as physically appealing to be around as possible. Smelling nice, being comfortable to hold, looking handsome; that’s part of the ways you’re trying to ‘trick’ your friends to want to be around you. You know deep down that you’re getting better at not doing bad things, and that is what’s been making people genuinely want to be friendlier, but it still feels like you’re tricking everyone.
In this case, your ‘trick’ has managed to catch Sollux. You feel like you set up a fly trap, forgot about it, and came back to find a snared wasp. You feel like a bee got in the room that you’ve been displaying a vase of lilacs. You feel like someone snuck a chocolate into your palms as they passed by. You feel like the first time you listened to Anything You Need by Low Roar. You feel like you should be able to pull Sollux closer. You feel like your thoughts are a little unkempt.
You play with his hair with both hands. He breathes out slowly, relaxed. Now that you notice it, you think he’s starting to fall asleep again.
The thought of staying awake to listen for anyone coming down the hall crosses your mind. Instead, you wiggle a little lower into Sollux’s arms and close your eyes. You might not be able to comprehend how Sollux could possibly want to be here with you, but you’ll be damned if you don’t indulge in this nice moment while it lasts.