Chapter Text
The air drops happen once every two months, vast crates of mostly food parachuting in from a low-flying plane. The humans are too scared, you get told, too frightened of the trolls of New Alternia 5. You’re barely two sweeps old, your grub nubs still itchy, when you start joining the other wrigglers making a mad dash for the crates. At first you don’t understand what they’re all running for—the crates’ contents are meant to be rationed, something like a bi-monthly federal apology for the state of the American troll. Those are the words adults use to describe it, anyway. You just run for the exhilaration of it.
What you discover by the time you hit two and a half is that the first crate of food has been designated by the Grand Highblood himself just for this purpose, to teach wrigglers ferocity and competitiveness. For any wrigglers between three and six, it’s also pretty much the only source of food. When you turn three sweeps old yourself, you join those ranks, and you finally get close enough to the crates to witness one of your nurserymates get trampled to death. You can’t recognize them by the time the adults drag the corpse away.
New Alternia is mostly highbloods, but occasionally someone comes back from the world beyond the district walls to drop their eggs, without telling anyone they coupled with a lowblood. By the time the unfortunate grub hatches, the parent is usually long gone, and they’re left to grow up tormented and alone, many not even lasting long enough to be properly traumatized by it.
There’s two such wrigglers in your nursery class, a pair of olivebloods named Desino and Daelan from the same unlucky clutch. You have hazy memories of everyone getting along as grubs, but after you all pupate the adults in your lives seem to do everything in their power to point out the hemocaste and where these two lie on it. They hold hands a lot.
They turn out to be a boy and a girl, respectively. Daelan spends a lot of her time defending Desino, who is the most pathetic excuse for a troll you’ve ever seen. He sucks his thumb well into his third sweep, fondling a horn with his free hand when he does, and he cries “easier than a stuck pig,” one of your teachers sneers one day, which doesn’t have any context for any of you, but “piggy” sticks to Desino as a nickname. It doesn’t take long for you and the other highblood wrigglers to outstrip both the olivebloods in size. Their blueblood clutchmates offer them no support, or even recognition, especially when a young hyena gets it into their head to jump on Desino’s pudgy back and grab onto his low-slung horns, digging their knees in until he starts running.
Most wrigglers are scrawny, underfed things, some of them with taut bellies from malnutrition, others stronger with stringy muscle developing, but Desino is soft and chubby, and when you’re about six sweeps old, a lot of your nurserymates start speculating that he’s been stealing rations from the crates. Personally, you think the idea doesn’t hold even a drop of water; Desino wouldn’t take a risk that big if his life depended on it, and you’re not sure he could pull it off even if that weren’t true. (Daelan, though, you might suspect her of stealing for him, if she were as healthy-looking. She’s not.) You’re not really part of the grapevine, though, and just when you think that rumor has passed, you come across Desino being cornered by a pair of purpleblood wrigglers, who you know to be called Kolreu and Shrono.
“Sup, brothers?” you greet as they look at you over their shoulders. Desino is backed against a wall of some so-called hivestem or another, black eyes wide and scared, enough that he doesn’t even try to make a break for it when the other two trolls don’t have an eye on him.
“I think you got eyeballs all up in your head what can be makin’ that assessment for you, brother,” Kolreu returns. He’s got long fishhook horns that curve over the top of his head, and he’s always one of the first wrigglers to the crate (unlike you, who waits until the extra aggro motherfuckers have cleared away so you can get an armful and go. No need to get yourself hurt, after all). “We done and caught ourselves a thief.”
“How is it you’re knowin’ Des a thief?” you ask, chewing one of your claws distractedly. “I ain’t never seen what transgressions you’re accusin’ him of, and I ain’t even got a notion that he would be committin’ ‘em.” The main textbooks in nursery are dictionaries and a thesaurus or two that you all fight over. “He’s too soft.”
“You ain’t wrong, brother,” Shrono agrees with a shrug. “But ain’t none of us all roly-poly what like this little motherfucker’s got paddin’ out his skelebones. And he ain’t tellin’ us no truthful words about what made him that way.”
“I done told you, alls I got is the junk food from what’s in the crates,” Desino whimpers, which attracts Kolreu and Shrono’s attention again. “I only got the truth to tell. My stomach all up and twisted with aches same as yours! It’s gots to be genetics, or something like that.” He speaks a bastardized version of hyena vernacular, belonging with neither the purple nor bluebloods, and your educated guess is that he wanted to appeal to the ones more likely to kill him; now it’s the only way he knows how to speak. It actually just pisses them off more, unfortunately for him.
“You got smarts up in your thinknug, Makara,” Shrono says, not turning this time. “You think we got ourselves a sticky-fingers motherfucker?”
“Nah, not so much,” you say with a shake of your head. Lucky for Desino that you came around, you guess. Maybe they’ll leave him alone for the day.
“I got more smarts than Gamzee fuckin’ Makara,” Kolreu snarls. “Ain’t matter he know who his daddy is, that don’t give a motherfucker life experience. And this is all up and bein’ a thief we got in front of our visages.”
You don’t get a chance to stop him before he tears Desino open, right in the soft belly.
What makes it horrible is that Desino is still alive as his guts pour out of him, snot-nosed screaming and crying in his pain. “Yeah, there’s that thieved shit,” Kolreu laughs; Shrono isn’t quite as strong of stomach and is gagging. Kolreu hit low and the smells coming from Desino’s organs aren’t great; you don’t feel too daisy, yourself. “Now I’m gonna be takin’ my share.”
Kolreu squats down and plunges a hand up inside Desino, aiming up away from his intestines, and when he pulls out a gob of unidentifiable bloody flesh, Shrono does throw up. Desino is slipping away, but Kolreu doesn’t let the opportunity pass to make Desino’s last seconds alive as shitty as possible, bracing himself against the wall so he can lean in close to the lowblood’s face and take a big bite of his handful. Olive blood smears with his crude grey clown makeup that he’s technically not allowed to wear yet, and he smiles just in time for Desino to die.
“How ‘bout you two soft fuckers, are you wantin’ a bite—” Kolreu starts to say, turning with a big green grin, but he doesn’t get to finish as your hand curls around the back of his head and slams his face against the wall, just above Desino’s head.
“Whoa, Makara, it was just—” Shrono says, but you decide you don’t have to listen to either of them. If Shrono wants to defend Kolreu, he’s guilty, too. Kolreu’s just worse, so you’re gonna take care of him first. He’s trying to say something through his broken teeth and broken nose, maybe defending himself, or maybe trying to insult you into insecurity, which sounds more Kolreu’s style, but it doesn’t matter. You take a stronger hold on his head with a fistful of dirty, matted hair, and you smash his face into the crumbling brick wall until it’s mostly just purple mush.
When you drop him, you’re not sure if he’s still breathing, but Shrono’s gone. You can tell by the vomit-traced footprints which way he went, though, and you bolt after him. He hasn’t made it very far, maybe weak with nausea or fear or both; whatever the case, he’s slumped against another nearby wall.
“Gamzee, man, you gotta get your believe on, it was all Kolreu,” he pleads, holding his hands up like he’s gonna fucking pray. “I was only wantin’ to scare the li’l shit for maybe bein’ a thief! I ain’t even know if that was all truthful or what, I just wanted to have a li’l bit of fun!”
“You ain’t did nothin’ to stop him,” you say as you close in on him, still shaking a few drops of purple from your left hand.
“Neither did you,” Shrono retorts, right before realizing that was the wrong answer. “Shit, I mean—”
“I’m doin’ something right the fuck now,” you say, and you grab Shrono by the shoulders to throw him face-down against the gravel. Shrono has time to shout No—! before your heel crunches down on the back of his neck.
Once you’re done dry-heaving, you go back to Desino’s body, and you crack the very dead Kolreu’s face against the wall one more time to get some fresh blood going so you can paint a crude clown face on Desino’s features. It’s kind of like initiating him, maybe, letting him belong in death; at the very least you can make him smile.
Later on, Daelan finds you and mutters some very reluctant thanks; nobody fucks with her much anymore, but she also avoids the shit out of you.