Chapter Text
Your name is Mituna Captor, and something has gone horribly wrong.
You've been sparking a little, the past few nights since it happened, and you don't particularly care who notices; a guy's allowed a little lapse of control under the circumstances. You are so fucking glad of Latula's presence, and a little bit perversely relieved that she can't detect the faint odor of ozone produced by the red-and-blue Jacob's Ladders that periodically climb between your horns. She's been really, really good to have around, and although normally you'd feel terrible for leaning on your matesprit so damn hard for emotional support, under the circumstances...
Under the circumstances...
You've got to stop dancing around the issue. It's not the end of the world, no matter what it might feel like with the tabloids swarming like carrion birds.
Because of course there are tabloids involved. If it'd been you, heh, who would have cared, beyond your admittedly diverse social circle? But when the acknowledged scion of one of the more influential and eccentric purplebloods in the Beforan empire has a meltdown that leaves him hospitalized and a quadrantmate deafened, the scandal-mongers are going to swarm.
(Meenah is of the opinion that you should use Vantas as a living shield the next time a reporter comes poking around, and you are just about to the point of trying it out.)
When you stop in to see Kurloz tonight, he's sitting up in the open-topped medicoon, eating jello through a straw; you loiter in the doorway of his hospital block for a moment, watching the way he repositions the straw in the cup over and over, taking core samples of the brightly-colored gelatin: stab, slurp, stab, slurp. He's looking pretty good, you have to admit to yourself (under the circumstances); they'll probably let him go home in the evening. Really, they would have let him go home sooner; Meulin was discharged as soon as they'd determined there wasn't anything to be done for her ruined hearducts and she wasn't going to start hemorrhaging out of anywhere else, sent home with sympathetic looks and a packet of information about applying for culling. But the doctors had decided to hold Kurloz for observation, after someone tried to cut the stitches and he'd chucklevoodoo'd them within an inch of their sanity.
Then he looks up and sees you, and even through what he's done to himself he grins at you, although it makes him wince a little as the expression pulls at sore flesh. "Hey, asshole," you greet your moirail affectionately as you come over and perch on the lip of the 'coon.
He leans against you a little, and you let your fingers stray to his tangled mop of curls; the gentle action of finger-combing his hair soothes both of you. Kurloz slings an arm aroung your waist, getting sopor slime on your clothes; you swat at him and try to wipe it off, which mostly results in grinding the green stains further into the yellow fabric.
Kurloz chuckles, deep and throaty - one of the very few noises you've heard him make since his incident - and almost in spite of yourself you find yourself giggling too. You can feel him at the edges of your mind, chucklevoodoos leaking in around the bases of your horns in a way that would freak you right the hell out from anyone but your moirail. From him, it's ok - he goes brushing past all the little sources of anxiety, soothing rather than letting loose, and you're left with a reassurance that you're dimly aware would probably seem entirely unwarranted if you didn't have Kurloz mucking about in your thinkpan: it's all going to be ok.