Chapter Text
Typing. Then not typing. Then he slides off the stool and collapses to the ground. That is the first indicator anyone has that Sollux is sick.
"Karkat!" you shout. "Karkat, come here." Hopefully he will hear you; he's out of the room retrieving something, has only been gone for a few short minutes. You run over and examine the fallen troll.
It takes you nearly a minute to figure out where trolls keep their pulse points. But by the time you can start taking his pulse you already know something is horribly wrong. He's breathing rapidly and shallowly and his skin is impossibly hot to the touch. You don't know very much about troll body temperature.
A human with this kind of fever would be dying of it.
You're not sure Sollux isn't.
You run an inventory in your head of the things you can try. Pupillary reflexes: he doesn't even have pupils. Intercession from Outer Gods: inadvisable.
Footsteps are coming up on you now, pounding down the corridor. "What's wrong? - OH JEGUS. Sollux. Sollux, are you okay?"
"No, I really don't think he is," you answer. "He's--"
Karkat is doing his own examination, roughly, checking pulse points that he knows (and now you do, because you're a fast learner), checking for responses, doing strange little things you don't understand. Then he gets to his feet. "What the fuck happened?" he asks you, accusatory. "What the fuck did you do?"
"Try asking different questions before jumping to conclusions," you say, sharply. "I didn't do anything, except check his pulse. He collapsed on his goddamn own. What's troll temperature supposed to be like?"
"Not like this," Karkat says, woefully, pacing in circles now. "I would think he had just worked himself into exhaustion - he just does things like that sometimes - but he's clearly sick as shit."
You have a sinking feeling about this. A hunch. Maybe it's the expression on Karkat's face. Maybe it's just that Sollux seems to be in utterly woeful condition. But you know you need to act now, and you're rapidly coming to the conclusion that this may be more difficult than it appears. "What do you, I mean, what do trolls do when you get sick?" you ask.
"What do you mean, what do we do?" Karkat says irritably. "We get better. Or we die. What do humans do?"
"I mean, haven't you got - doctors? Hospitals? Medicine? Not that any of these things are likely to be present on this meteor, but - knowing what you do would give me a place to start looking for an instruction manual, at least..."
"No, Rose, you don't get it," Karkat says. "We get better. Or we die. By culling if the illness doesn't do it."
"That doesn't make sense. You've got to have some kind of medical treatment. I mean, you treat injuries, right?"
"Oh, we're all taught how to prevent a wound from bleeding out. Does that look like a wound to you?" Karkat gestures to his incapacitated friend.
"Maybe he's got a hidden one that's been infected..."
"No. That doesn't happen. I've seen enough human stuff to know what you mean and that just doesn't fucking happen to trolls. We bleed out or we heal up. We slaughter microorganisms like a fucking hammer and never look back. I've never seen anything like this before in my life."
You clap your hand over your mouth, suddenly feeling sick yourself, for entirely different reasons. "The Pilgrims," you say, faintly.
"The what?"
"Karkat, I have an apology to make. The worst kind of apology. Because you were correct the first time, when you snapped at me and thought this was my fault. It is my fault - for not thinking. Interspecies contact... We have a whole crop of bacteria you've never even seen before. I would have thought it would go the other way, though - would have thought trolls would be hardier than humans, that maybe I'd catch something from one of you, but..."
He opens his mouth to speak and then there's a faint moan from the floor.
Sollux still seems to be out cold, but he's starting to cough and gag, a horrible struggling sound, and his shoulders are heaving. Fuck. You slide back down on your knees on the hard floor and turn him over on his side. He vomits up tiny amounts of bile, and you rap him on the back, trying to keep him from aspirating anything. Gods, the troll is bony, and you're suddenly aware of exactly how physical and material he is.
All that time you were looking up the wrong things, in your little seer's annex. All that time you were trying to understand the Universe, and you should have been paying attention to different questions. To how life works here. Dead is sometimes not permanent, wasn't permanent for Sollux the last time, but he's not God Tier either.
And there is exactly nothing numinous about the stomach contents he's feebly depositing on the hem of your skirt.
"The fuck are you saying?" Karkat is asking. "You made him sick? Why didn't you make anyone else sick then? Why didn't you make me sick?"
"I don't know! But he has obviously been ill for a while, so unless you're beginning to feel the onset, it's not a mine canary effect."
Karkat looks confused at mine canary but you don't care to try to explain through layers of culture just now.
Sollux is blinking weakly, coming to. Another wave of heaving hits him and you keep his head steady on your knee. Mercifully there doesn't seem to be anything left to come up. His head feels like it could singe skin from your fingers just touching it, but you keep a loose hold on the back of his neck and stroke his hair, making soothing noises at him almost automatically.
Karkat keeps going on. "Could be you humans are just made of poison and I'm immune due to my mutant blood. But we have a whole empire and walk over other species like they're crushed Faygo bottles in the street. And sometimes we make them sick, but... No, this doesn't make any fucking SENSE!"
"Hello... you, too," Sollux croaks. His eyes are fluttering open, that which passes for his eyes, one socket empty and the other full of light.
Karkat stops ranting and drops to the ground across from you, staring Sollux in the face. "Sollux? Sollux, you okay?" It takes him mere seconds to slide back into a rant. "Dipshit, when were you going to tell us you were feeling bad? Maybe after you died again, for shits and giggles?"
"Thought..." Sollux begins, and then loses his breath. You stare down Karkat fiercely and make a noise, you're not sure who at, that is half a ssshhhhhh and half the hiss of a cornered cat. Karkat shuts his mouth.
"It's okay, you don't need to answer him," you tell Sollux in a quieter tone.
Sollux keeps trying to talk, though. "Thought I was just... migraine," he says. "Or... not hang'n on to... body. Didn't know why, though..."
You shake your head. "We think you might be ill from a human bacterium," you explain, calmly. Well. You couldn't possibly imagine having a feeling right now, much less telling it to anyone, so the voice is calm, at any rate. "Your body is fighting something, at least if you're made anything like us. Karkat, do trolls usually get fevers?"
"O-- occasionally. But we stomp those fuckers down, it doesn't get like this--"
"Nehhh...." Sollux' voice is weak, thready. "Think I know... They did things, injections." He rubs at a spot on his thigh and winces, as if reliving the memory physically. "In EP... Nev' took it too seriously... thought I'd be," His fingers lift to the side of his head and flop there like a fish out of water, making a feeble imitation of the universal gesture for crazy, "unfit..." then his hand clenches and his eyelids close, in exhaustion or pain you can't tell.
Out of the corner of your eye you see Karkat flinch. The very air seems to stiffen around him.
EP? you mouth. "Evaluative Preparrogation," Karkat says. No one could possibly manage to enunciate that perfectly without the benefit of tightly compressed, cold, bitter rage. "For the Service. They start young, if you have too much potential... I don't understand the full details. But I think he's trying to say that whatever the Imperial nookchoads gave him made him more vulnerable to whatever came in with you."
"Not... vulnerable," Sollux manages. The effort of speaking makes him pant for breath. "I think... immune... attack..." He rolls to the side, halfway, trying to shift his weight against the floor, but he can't lever himself over on his side. "Fighting too hard. They said... happens oc-c-casionally, if... don't get a second round. System... too well defended..."
"Oh, shit," you breathe. You remember your mother coming home from being on call that one time, or rather, not coming home when she was supposed to, leaving you alone for a whole day beyond when you were expecting her - and when she did come home she was wiped, not the normal kind of tired but too tired to be ironic.
That night, as usual, she used the case as an opportunity to pop-quiz you on what you'd been reading. You knew from the tone of her voice that the patient had died and that she'd taken it personally. You missed the cause too - cytokine storm, septic shock caused not strictly by infection, but by the overwhelming immune response to tiny amounts of bacterial toxins - and you did not acknowledge the tears that ran silently down her face.
There were far, far too many martinis from the moment she came in the door, and you did her the kindness of not complaining about it.
But now is not the time to be wandering in uncomfortable childhood reminiscence. Now is the time to figure out what is breaking Sollux and how to put him back together. Knowing that your mother, a proper physician, couldn't do that successfully with someone on Earth makes your heart fall into your stomach, but at the same time you know that you have no real way of gauging the logical relevance of these things.
You are not your mother.
She had a medical education; you have the chewed-up pieces of it like a baby condor fed knowledge from her mouth, and the less said about that analogy the better.
But you've survived, and she has not. You have in front of you a troll who has died at least once and supposedly twice, but to all accounts seems fully biological and has not reached God Tier. And all bets are off.
You find your voice. "A second round of what? Someone, please bring me a guide to these troll immunizations from hell. There has to be one somewhere. Doesn't there?" And you damn the waver in your tone at the end, because here at the end of all things, you're not entirely sure that there has to be a guide to anything.
~~~
There is a guide, sort of, but you're going to find it in the last place you'd expect. It is not in the servers of the Furthest Ring, as far as you can tell, even after you figure out how to phrase search queries in the Alternian alphabet (which is a quick enough learning process because it's remarkably similar to English and because you're a quick study, and Troogle can usually fill in the blanks when you drop a diacritical mark.) It is certainly not in the schoolfeeding texts.
But all of that is later. Right now:
Sollux says something totally incoherent about his husktop and passes out again.
You check that he's breathing, and disentangle yourself slowly. Karkat takes your place. You make a trip to the alchemiter for some Sensible Things, and leave Karkat with the short form of directions on what to do if anything happens (don't let him choke; find me.)
When you return, Karkat is quieter than you've ever imagined he could be, sitting cross-legged with Sollux's head in his lap, staring at his friend's unconscious face in a way that would be downright creepy if he was a human. You didn't know trolls could emote so much by being perfectly still.
"He means a lot to you, doesn't he?"
Karkat doesn't answer right away. He's blushing, you think, and he swallows down some words. "What's all that, anyway?" he says, and gestures to what you're carrying in your arms.
"Bedding, for starters. This isn't the world's best sickroom, but --"
"I don't care. Everyone else can just deal when they get back. Sollux practically lives in here, anyway, and it's not like anyone else is going to maintain the servers while he's out." There's a harsh, sore bitterness in Karkat's voice and you're reminded not for the first time that he lost several friends recently.
You've never been good at empty noises of sympathy, so you forgo them altogether and start setting up a makeshift cot, instead.
"No," Karkat says. "You're doing it wrong. We don't rest on flat planes like humans do."
"I don't know how to take care of someone on a troll pile."
"At least stack the pillows up a layer or so. Look. See, that gives you space to work, right? And he can curl around them and sink in a little."
Your instincts tell you that you should be in charge of everything. Your instincts are wrong, and inwardly you shout them down, and you let Karkat set up the bed.
~~~
For days you are doctor and nurse and hospital and librarian and, well, Seer. It's more exhausting than anything - even than the game itself, in some ways. The game was strange and numinous and responded well to applications of needlekind and grimdark.
Illness does not. Illness is small and wretched and material, even in a half-dead troll. It turns his skin searing-hot and raises a rash of yellow blisters on him so that he writhes with the ache of it even in his sleep and his digestion's been at a dead halt since before anyone else noticed and keeping him from starving would be a full-time job all by itself at this point. It is apparently mostly normal for Sollux that he could slice things with his ribcage, but it means he has no reserves.
Trolls at least have some level of oral absorption for simple sugars, like humans do, so you can give him calories when he's awake enough not to aspirate, even without having actual medical equipment. You've discovered that your Seer powers allow you to mainline reading materials, that you can start reading first aid handbooks and basic biology texts and do this thing with your eyes and suddenly be reading three of them simultaneously and the rush makes you want to cackle out loud, or would if you could feel anything properly right now.
He's less and less lucid.
"AA. Don't leave me again," he says, while you're spooning soda into his mouth, and you let him grab your other hand, reassuringly, your traitorous human hand that exposed him to the bacteria that his body is trying to kill him over, your hand that is not Aradia's hand and never will be, and you do feel things and it's terrible.
"Shhh," you say, "it's all right," because another thing your mother taught you well was how to lie convincingly.
"I don't deserve you," he says, quiet and solemn and wistful. "I really don't. I killed you. You're right to stay away."
You don't say anything other than "Shhhh," because you're feeling guilty enough for letting him mis-recognize you, and because he needs as much spoon-fed sugar as he can get before he grows nauseous again or loses consciousness again and it's a matter of life or death. His heart could give out.
If yours doesn't first.
When he starts gagging and you know it's going to be a while before you can get more sugar into his system, you keep him on his side again through the awful heaving and you clean him up afterward. He slumps back into the pillow pile with his eyes shut, and maybe it's not medically necessary for him that you seat yourself behind him on the pillow pile and wrap your arms tight around his shoulders, but you do anyway.