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“Do you trust me?”
You stand in front of Sollux, where he has his hands out towards you. He hasn’t told you what you’re supposed to trust him about, but by the way he’s floating in the air on his psionics, you have a hunch.
“Trust ya’ more than a few other things I can think of, at least,” you say as you take his hands in your own. The sentiment is good enough for him; he gets a hold of you with his powers and properly hoists you up to his level.
The ascent into the sky isn’t the same as when you’d hunt with your lusus; Sollux has a firm physical hold on your hands, with an even sturdier grip on you with his powers, and yet he pulls you like an afterthought to the movement. Where your lusus would be bringing you along, Sollux guides you along instead. Surprisingly, in your muddy memories, this movement into the air feels safer. Maybe another night you’ll take Sollux to the ocean and reverse the roles. It’s possible that after everything, the memory of how to swim got a chance to cling to him like seaweed. It would certainly be nice if you won’t have to teach him how to tread water.
You’re tugged along at a comfortable pace. The clouds are lower in the sky, and the two of you move slower as Sollux carefully skirts past them, letting you look at the forms and movement as you pass by. They’re stratocumulus tonight, and your eyes scrape over to look at the shapes, even if you can’t see any imagery in the clouds from this close.
When he begins to lower you down, you realize he’s taken you to a cliffside that’s overlooking the ocean. A forest of spruce and pine trails up with the raised terrain to look out to the water. There’s a tiny grass clearing at the edge that has a blanket set down already, weighed down on the corners with a few rocks and a lantern. The sun is hardly a sliver of light on the horizon; the different colors are taking their final moments in the sky before they make room for the stars. The clouds, on the other hand, continue on with their idle crawl through the air, not giving a shit.
Sollux sets you both down on the blanket and you realize that the ground is softer than it should be. If you had to guess, you would assume Sollux carved a shallow hole in the grass, threw the grass turf into the ocean like an idiot, and put a few light pillows under the blanket for comfort.
You experimentally squish the pillow-y surface with your open hand. Maybe there’s a comforter under there too, holding the theoretical pillows together. “You certainly planned ahead with this, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t want you complaining that your ass would get numb,” he shrugs with a wry smile.
You mimic his stupid smile before you roll your eyes to the side. Yeah, you probably would have.
Regardless, the sky is perfect to watch. The clouds drift at a steady pace, too dark to see anything but their silhouettes. Sure, you can’t discern anything notable in them, like animals or scenes or what have you, but you’d be damned if you couldn’t say this isn’t pretty. To be fair, you can’t see shit in clouds that well at any given time, day or night, future visions or pattern-recognition. You can watch them just because they’re pretty, though. Maybe you’ll train your eyes on accident.
Sollux ends up looking at his phone after a couple minutes, which you understand. You can’t force him to appreciate stuff like this. When it comes to showing Sollux nice things, it’s like getting a horse to water and making it drink. The horse won’t fucking drink because it thinks the water kind of sucks. So when you bring it over thinking that drinking the water yourself will convince it to drink, the horse instead goes, “Ah, the idiot who I’ve decided can catch a ride on my back thinks this goddamn useless bullshit water is okay. Looks like I should just keep taking my idiot here because he likes it so much,” and start to bring you to water sources to intend for you to drink. And the damn horse is good at finding water on his own, apparently.
There’s a lot of time that passes as you watch the sky before you wonder about why Sollux decided to bring you up here in the first place. The further things go as you think, the more you start to get uncertain. Even if you know the two of you are as thick as thieves, your insecurities are a radiation eating at your thoughts. Even by cheating and having old memories of his tucked aside with yours, you aren’t certain on what he could like about this.
“Y’know, I’m kinda surprised you brought me up here.”
He looks over. “Why, you think I don’t know what a good view looks like?”
“No— well, yeah. But that’s not the thought I was focusin’ on.”
He watches you silently, albeit with an unimpressed look, giving you the time to continue.
“I just,” you try to explain, “I dunno.” You look over to the far edges of the horizon, focusing on the buildings you can see past the trees. “I know it’s just— it’s paranoia, just tryin’ to get a hold or whatever. Sometimes I don’t see how you could still genuinely like havin’ me around, actively wantin’ to do stuff with me.”
“Wh—?” Sollux frowns, like he’s a little insulted you would think that. “I like having you around. Fuck, Eridan, I don’t think I could dislike having you around again if I tried.”
“Yeah, I know, and the feelin’ is mutual,” you reassure, knowing how easily his own worries could snap on him to parallel your own, “It just takes a second sometimes to sort of...? To recalibrate that thought back into its place. To convince myself all over again, after a while.”
You don’t expect warm hands to end up against your cheeks. A thumb smooths over your skin as Sollux just contemplates you. And well, maybe you can already tell your cheeks will be tinged a soft violet color in a moment. You’re already fully aware the two of you don’t have the standard troll’s boundaries between you, and you’re more than comfortable with it. This moment is a little new to the both of you, is all.
"How can I convince you that I like having you here?" Sollux asks. By his tone, he's practically pleading with you, and his frown’s gotten a little sadder since you last looked. He takes a moment before he asks, "Can I hold you?"
You nod, too uncertain about your voice to use it. Your tone might end up compromising your thoughts, leaving them to bleed out into the open. Or, you might just get an embarrassing voice crack.
Sollux practically scoops you towards him. he presses closer, and he holds you tight, as if he's trying to close the distance on a molecular level. You snake your arms around to return the gesture, with one hand running up to rest over the high end of his spine. There’s barely a breeze tonight, but the cool high-altitude air around you both is still amplifying how pleasant his body temperature is.
You're nearly overwhelmed with a feeling in your chest; it’s warmth in a way that feels stifling. It’s the realization that you can be wanted returning home after a long day. It feels like you need to act— it compels you to ask, a little hurriedly, and a little under-planned, "Can I kiss at your face?"
The pause Sollux leaves when only his muscles react nearly dowses the warmth in your heart. You have a second to think that, fuck, you jumped the gun, or you misread the moment between you, before he angles his cheek towards you. "Yeah. Do it."
‘Do it’, he says. Not ‘go ahead’ or anything similar. That’s active interest on his end.
You press against his cheek, trying to shove all of that thankful, nervous energy into the feeling of your lips against his skin; the soft texture you can only credit from habitually applying lip balm twice a day. You trail kisses across his cheek at a comfortable snail’s pace, a hand on his other cheek to keep you both sturdy, until he turns his face closer.
His nose is almost touching yours. "Can I kiss you?"
Technically, whether he means to or not, he's implying the most "you" thing about you is your mouth. Technically, with the hours upon hours of time you've spent talking towards him, that would be correct. You meet him to the kiss first. The kissing lasts for about six seconds, and then you both instinctively pull away to get your glasses off your own faces, setting them aside so they don’t clack and dig in when you two keep kissing.
The sound your lips make as they tentatively break apart and meet again, over, and over, and over, is soothing. Both of you have fallen into place against each other, settled by a comfortable connection and trust in one another. The loose rhythm you have breaks for a moment while the two of you— almost in sync, both on similar timers— swap the angles that your heads lean towards. You two stay like that for a while, needy in the ways that you both curl your hands into loose fists in each others shirts; needy in the way your tongues start to tentatively greet each other.
And that's the funny thing about the dynamic between you both after being a sprite, isn't it? In whatever way he did it, Erisolsprite burnt up all the intensity between you by just existing for that short period of time. Maybe the wick of the metaphorical candle that represents the two of you has been trimmed and cleaned after the split; the fire doesn’t pop and snap and spit little sparks when you light it anymore. It curls, it envelops, it sways. You wonder what an actual candle with the two of you in mind would smell like.
Sollux leans back slowly, and trails fingers through the back of your wavy locks of short hair. “Any thoughts going on in your head?”
Your own hands are comfortably on his waist, where he’s ended up in your lap. You hum a little noncommittally, yet you still ask, “Do you like collectin’ candles?”
The baffled smile that catches up to Sollux is, quite frankly, a win in your book. “No,” he says, like its the most obvious thing in the world— and it is, really. He adds, “Why are you thinking about candles?”
“They just smell nice, is all.”
“No they don’t,” he says with a crinkle to his nose, “They always smell like stupid shitty pine needles. And a little medicine-y.”
You balk at the idea. “Who the fuck has been subjectin’ you to candles that smell fuckin’ medicinal?"
“I don’t know! People just have shitty candles.”
“Well you can bet your ass I don’t,” you huff, letting your hands curl back into Sollux’s shirt. “I’ll light my nice candles for you, then you'll see.”
He settles again, with stray fingers moving back and forth over your side. “We can go do that now if you want. Unless you want to make out a little more.”
You tilt your head towards him. “Only if you’re still up for it.”
His smile reaches his eyes before he catches your lips again.