Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Author: Welcome.

You are THE AUTHOR.  You enjoy writing fanfiction of a romantic and epic nature, especially alternate universes and crossovers like this one.  You will be directing much of this story, although not all of it because your stories have a tendency to get away from you.  What will you do?

TA: Introduce.

Your name is THE READER. You enjoy reading stories of a romantic and epic nature.  Or maybe you just have nothing better to do.  Who knows? Not the author.  You will be directing much of this story, but only symbolically because this story takes its cues from the webcomic that inspired it.  But you’re getting tired of this introduction bullshit.  You’re ready to get to the real deal.

The Reader: Read.

--

The moon is setting by the time the fishing boats come in.

The sea has been generous today.  It’s as though something has stirred the water and sent the fish spinning, flurrying up to the nets above. The boats bob at anchorage now, or lie on their sides in the side, like great diurnal beasts that have done their day’s work and are now sleeping off the harsh Alternian sun.  The fishermen have gone to catch a few spare hours of sleep.

Only one figure is left.

The fisherman threads his way through the boats, checks knots and inspects every boat for damage.  Occasionally he’ll stop and shake his head in disgust at a slack, lopsided sail or jumble of tangled nets, and the offending items glow flickering red and blue and rearrange themselves.

He's one of the most powerful men in the city.  He considers this one of his greatest responsibilities.

He’s most of the way down the beach when something pale moves at the corner of his vision and he freezes, his eyes sparking briefly before he calms himself and turns slowly to look.  It’s not the tentacle of some sea creature here to snag a landdwelling snack, like he immediately thought.  It’s small and almost white, and still several yards away, but it's unmistakably a troll’s hand.  The rest of the hand's owner is hidden behind one of the beached ships; as he watches, the fingers stir slightly again, and then fall still.

The fisherman analyzes the situation.

It's not uncommon for his fellow psionics to exhaust both their minds and bodies hauling nets and rigging and working long nights, and it's possible one of the fishers was last to get off the boat and fell unconscious from the strain.  If so, it's a miracle they haven't been hauled off into the water for a meal yet, and every second they lie unconscious this near the water's edge is a risk. 

On the other hand…

There are creatures in the ocean that can change their colors and shapes.  There are creatures smart enough to use cutting tools to ruin nets when they’re left out too long, releasing any catches that aren’t hauled in fast enough.  There are creatures smart enough to take a troll’s dead arm and use it like bait in a hunter’s trap.  And he knows, as a pure, empirical fact, that the republic cannot afford to lose him.  

He can’t get too close.  So he does the next best thing.

The boats creak and moan as he hooks his hands in the air and calls them out of their beds of sand and water, focusing the electric-ozone tingle in his eyes into physical force.  The boats shudder but don’t move—he grits his teeth and snarls at them, dragging his hands through air that feels like wet sand.  Finally, they rise, groaning as they're dragged across the sand.

The hand doesn't belong to a sea monster.  It belongs to a troll, a pale, limp body collapsed halfway out of the surf.  The fisherman stares for a second before the trembling in his arms and the erratic spark of his eyes reminds him how severely he's already depleted his powers tonight.  He lowers the boats back into the sand as gently as possible and starts forward toward the collapsed troll; she's sturdily built, bloodlessly pale even though he can't see any blood in the surf around her.  Her hair is a soaking tangle full of sand and brine and her horns curve gracefully outward. 

She's also naked.  She's wearing a pretty startling amount of gold jewelry, but she's definitely completely naked, also.  That's something that's happening.

The fisherman does not allow himself to be distracted by this. At all.  In any way.  If his face goes mustard yellow in the last rays of the setting sun, there's nobody there to see except the mysterious drifter.  He shakes the shock off a moment later, wincing as the movement sends a jolt of pain down his horns and through his skull—and leans over to look down at her.  Her face is obscured by her hair, but at least it isn’t turned into the sand.  He’s had sand under his eyelids before.  It’s not an experience he would wish on anyone else.  

The girl is breathing, steadily, but in sharp little shivers that make him uneasy.  It seems likely she's been in the water for a while, and the sea is still icy from the lingering chill of the dark season.  He has to get her back to somewhere warm.

She's wearing a lot of gold. Gold jewelry isn't unheard-of in warmblood territory, but that amount of bracelets, armlets and necklaces…that's highblood through and through.  He doesn't want to bring a highblood back into the city, even a concussed highblood weak from a long naked swim in icy water.  They have enough problems with the highbloods at the border without inviting them into the heart of the capitol.

The girl isn't bleeding blue from the cuts and scrapes on her bare skin, though.  She's not even bleeding purple. 

She’s not bleeding at all.

A wave washes up high enough to stir the drifter's tangled hair, and the fisherman shakes his head again, reaches out and lifts her unconscious body in a crackle of red and blue sparks.  She stirs again as she's pulled up onto drier, warmer sand, and then coughs weakly and pushes herself up as he lets go again, still waiting warily for a trap.  It's rapidly growing too dark to make out details, and when she opens her eyes he can't make out their color; he edges closer, and she looks dizzily around and then notices him and staggers up in one stumbling rush, catching both his arms and holding on hard, legs wobbling under her weight.  Her hands feel as cold as the seawater, freezing cold and strong—his bones creak under her grip.

He’s just strong enough to go out with the boats and haul in the nets, but he’s always been built slight and bony and it’s a miracle he doesn’t overbalance. In the end, when all the stumbling and struggling is over, he’s upright and she’s clinging to him, completely naked and staring up at him with a weird look in her dark eyes.  She looks…excited to see him.  Except he's never seen her before in his life.

“You wath…wasshhhhed up on the…beach,” he says carefully, struggling to keep the hint of a hissing lisp out of his voice.  “Are you okay?”

She opens and shuts her mouth, but all that comes out is a strange, throaty hissing sound.  She blinks like it's a surprise, raises a hand to her throat and tries again—more breathy wordless noises.  She lets go of him all at once, and starts looking herself over instead, like she's trying to find something—lifts up one foot shakily, stares at it, and then almost falls over.  Then, like an afterthought, abruptly captchalogues every piece of her golden jewelry at once, with a faint pop. 

She looks up and gives him a slightly nervous grin full of even, pointed white teeth.

"What the fuck," says the fisherman. 

The drifter doesn't answer, just looks at him and smiles.  A flash of abrupt anger jolts through him—what the fuck is she ignoring me I just saved her life—he stops himself just as he's opening his mouth.  He doesn't just let his mood swings jerk him around anymore, he's not a wriggler, he's an adult and he can act like one, dammit.  He takes a steadying breath, wincing at the never-ceasing ache behind his eyes, and says, as calmly as he can manage, "You can't talk?"

She shakes her head sadly.

“Fine." He should probably offer her his coat or something.  Dammit.  No.  Wait.  He doesn’t have his coat.  Did he bring his coat?  Shit.  His head hurt even worse than normal this afternoon, and trying to concentrate is interminable.  

He spends a moment rifling through his sylladex before he finally digs out a really shitty coat.  It would have been faster, but the mystery girl from the sea is still leaning on him and wobbling all over the place, trying out her legs like she’s never had any before.  She keeps wincing when she puts weight on them; maybe she got injured during the shipwreck…she must have been shipwrecked, right?

Whatever.

He untangles the really shitty coat, which has somehow managed to tie itself into a knot, and throws it around the girl’s shoulders.  She jumps and stares at the cloth like it’s some kind of creature from the deep sea who intends to eat her.  Then she stares up at him, and gives him a wide, brilliant smile.

Something stutters a little inside of him at that; something he can’t name and doesn’t want to think about.  It makes him feel like he can’t breathe.  The first time she’d smiled she had been anxious, and uncomfortable, but this one makes her face light up and makes him really fucking uneasy, honestly.

“What are you th—smiling about?” he snaps, and she winces, ears twitching, smile falling.  She's got long ears, and there are scars striped along the rim of them, and down the sides of her jaw, like something's been chopped roughly away.  Maybe she's an escaped highblood slave?  He's heard of bluebloods and purplebloods who would cut up their slaves just for fun.  It doesn't explain how she would've ended up on this shore, miles from the closest highblood territory, but it does make him feel like more of an asshole for snapping. 

He’s thinking too much, like he always does.  The fisherman pulls the really shitty coat around her, and then pulls her arm around his shoulders and starts trudging toward the distant hivestems of the warmblood capitol.

By the time he gets to the Consulate in the city center and shoves past the first few orderlies up and about, he's in a foul mood and his vision is full of sparks and pain. People keep calling after him, “Sir!” and “Mr. Captor!” and, in one case, “—Sollux, who’s—?!” But he snarls at anyone who gets in his way and shoves past them.  Everything hurts, even moving.  Especially moving.  The girl should be light, easy to carry, but he's been lifting and hauling and using his powers since early in the morning and she feels like she’s made of solid lead.

One of the perks of being on the council in charge of the entire goddamn city: when he puts up his DO NOT FUCKIING DIISTURB sign he's not fuckiing diisturbed.  He reaches out with his psionics to flip the card up as he shoulders his way through the door, and even that tiny amount of effort feels like it's trying to drag his brain out through his eye sockets.  This is going to be a bad night, he can already tell.  He’s never liked coming in so late he has to sleep in the nighttime, but trying to sleep with one of his headaches?  Shit.

The girl is unconscious, or sleeping, or just resting all of her weight on him, and he bares his teeth in a jab of anger and dumps her unceremoniously on one of his couches.  Then he staggers to a pile of spare wires and pillows and old clothes across the room and curls up as small as he possibly can.  The faint glimmer of the lamp on the table is dimmed to its lowest setting, but even that light digs white-hot screws into the base of his horns and lacerates his eyesockets.  He groans again and just sits still, concentrating on breathing.  Once he feels a little better he’ll go sleep somewhere more hospitable, but he’s not going to vomit all over his respite block again, it’s not going to happen.  He just needs to—oh Sufferer dammit it hurts—

It feels like nights later, but really it’s probably closer to an hour when he hears the soft shifting of cloth.  He opens one watering eye and sees the girl he rescued sitting slowly up on the couch, looking around.  As soon as she sees him she smiles at him, and then seems immediately to notice his state of discomfort (Discomfort? Ha.  Hahaha. FUCK).  She sits up and swings her legs off of the couch awkwardly, takes a deep breath, and pushes forward as though she’s trying to stand.  

She almost topples over, but he can barely muster up the energy to care, let alone to lurch forward and try to grab her. He just huddles in his shitty, tiny pile of shit and clutches his head, feeling his eyes spark and agony throb in brilliant spiderwebs through his skull.  He just concentrates on breathing. (In and out, in and out.)

She gets upright after a few moments of staggering, and although her walk still looks painful, she limps forward to him and settles down next to him on the ground next to the shitty pile.  He watches her warily, and for a while she just looks steadily back at him.  And then she holds out her hands, palms up, in a gesture of peace.

That gesture used to be common, but that was fifty sweeps ago, before the Great Suffering.  The only reason Sollux knows it at all is because the last troll who tried to pacify an enemy with it never got his hands back.  Every warmblooded troll knows the story of the Sufferer, and the red-hot shackles.  

The highbloods still use the peace gesture, but ever since then the lowbloods haven't bothered.  The court of the Grand Highblood made it clear how much of a shit they gave about peace offerings.  There isn’t a single wiggler who isn’t raised knowing better.

But his mysterious drifter just sits there, hands held out, with an innocent smile on her face.  

“What do you want?”  Sollux tries to say, but it comes out as a raspy, hoarse little croak.  The girl from the ocean cocks her head to one side, and scoots a little closer, as though testing to see if he’ll snap at her.  She watches him clutch at his hair and chew his lip bloody, and seems to understand.

“Hhhh?” She breathes questioningly, and she points to her head and grimaces in pain.  “Hhhh?”

“Well what the hell do you think ith wrong?!”  Sollux snarls, forcing the words out on a sudden spasm of rage.  The girl looks chagrined and looks quickly away.  Sollux tries to glare but them the echo of his own voice seems to reverberate around his skull—he groans again and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees red and blue fireworks.  “Ahhhh, dammit dammit f—!”

Cold hands touch his.  Sollux jumps, but the hands don’t move, just rest there, as though the girl is asking permission.  He sits still, frozen, waiting for her to make a move.

She waits for several long, long seconds, and then the hands leave his and go instead to his temples, rubbing slow circles.  Sollux takes a deep breath to yell, forgetting that it will make the pain worse; he’s done this before, it barely even scratches the surface of—

Cold water floods into his bones.  

The white heat of the pain behind his eyes goes out like a quenched flame, and he hears himself make a distant, strangled noise as every muscle in his body goes limp with disbelieving relief.  There are distant twinges still bouncing around in his head, like the echo of the agony from moments before, but the pain is gone.

The girl takes her hands away, and Sollux raises his head slowly to look at her.  She makes another one of those soft, familiar-sounding noises, and for the first time, away from the breaking waves, Sollux recognizes it.  It’s a sound he’s heard almost every day of his life for the past eight sweeps, so often and so incessantly that the noise barely registers with him anymore. 

The girl opens her mouth in a mute pantomime of a laugh, and the sound of the ocean pours out instead.

TR: Go back.

You go back, and you’re—

—under the water, deep, deep under the water, slimy darkness stirs, illuminated by floating baubles of rich violet light and the flashing of red and blue eyes.  

"You’ve fallen in love…with a land-dweller?" The Sea Witch’s tentacles slide over the floor of her cave, her silhouette  spangled with golden necklaces, rings, armbands, and a gloriously ornate golden crown, set with a single glimmering stone in royal purple.  Her two eel slaves slither through the water, mirror images of sinuous threat.  They would be identical if it weren’t for their black, blind eyes—one on the right, one on the left.  Their remaining eyes are drifting points of brilliant red and piercing blue.  "You poor, unfortunate shoal…"

Her smile is a collection of glittering, pearly-white fangs in the darkness.

"But we get that," she whispers to her eels, and they turn their heads, moving in such perfect unison it’s like seeing double, like they’re two halves of a single whole.  "We know how that goes…don’t we, my love?"

TR: Further back.

TR: Farther up.

—

The light is brighter here.  Golden and twilight orange, rippling through the water.  Even the sun that can sear out a trolls eyes at a glance and bakes corpses to bleached bone can't burn or blind under the water.

Just to be sure though, the seadwellers don’t look up.

The princess of the empire under the waves flickers through her palace, a flash of silvery skin and golden jewelry and a wave of silky black hair. The palace guards are good, but they’re slow, so slow compared to her, with her fuchsia blood and quicksilver speed, and she flickers past them so fast they barely have the time to notice she’s there before she’s gone again.  

There was a storm today.  The spoils have been spectacular.

Princess Feferi Peixes, Heir Apparent of the Sea Kingdom Most Glorious, princess of all the oceans and seas, mistress of the currents, does a happy little flapping dance in the corridor of her palace and lets out an undignified little squeak of glee, holding her bag to her chest.  Today’s hunt through the wrecks around the shore has kept her out all day, but it's also yielded results beyond what she could have hoped.  She can’t wait to tell—

“Fef!”

Eridan Ampora, Prince Regent of the Sea Kingdom Most Glorious, greatest hunter under the sea, comes tumbling to an undignified halt in front of her and gives her a furious, far-sighted glare, his gills fluttering and rippling from the exertion of chasing her.  She didn’t even notice he was behind her and she wasn’t even swimming at her top speed—but then again, it looks like he's been out hunting, tonight.  There’s a faint purple bruise on his shoulder from the tremendous recoil of Ahab’s Crosshairs, so he must have been after something big.  

Feferi glubs her gills and does her best to look appropriately chagrined, even though she suspects it doesn't really work at all.

“W-what the hell?!” Eridan gasps, and she really winces this time; his accent always gets much stronger when he’s upset, and if she can hear every doubled ‘w’ today.  He definitely knows where she’s been, oh cod he’s going to be insufferable…

But today she has something that just might cheer him up.

“Hello Eridan!”  She says brightly, and she can’t hide the undignified trill to the ‘e’—Ehhhridan!—he must notice that she’s excited, because at least the bony strip of fin down his back subsides again.  He can never be too awfully angry at her if she’s excited.  “You’ll never guess what I found!”

“Found because you been trawlin’ seawrecks again,” says Eridan sharply, but the wavy accent has died back down a little and he sounds slightly more in control.  He seems to like the drama of the accent and he refuses to try training it out of his speech entirely, but he also maintains that it’s undignified for a prince regent to bubble his words like a common market tradesman.  “Cod’s sake, Fef, it’s dangerous up there! It’s sunset, you’ve been out all mornin’—”

Feferi ignores this just like she always does, and reaches down into her bag, pulling out her best find with a flourish.

Eridan waits for a few seconds as she holds it up and then says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh yeah, just wonderful, somefin shiny and blurry.  You shore know how to wow a guy.”

Feferi flickers forward through the water and balances the landdweller devices neatly on the bridge of his nose.  Eridan blinks at her through the thin glass, his eyes suddenly a little too large, and she giggles at the look of incomprehension on his face.

“Everybody knows it makes you mad you can’t sea very shell!”  She says cheerfully, and does a little spin in the water.  “Are they working can you see me?  Eridan?”

“What…?”  He takes the things off and holds them at arm’s length, squinting at them; the black, square frames and the glinting glass inside them. “How the hell did they do that?”

“I don’t know!”  Feferi takes them from him and balances them on the bridge of her own nose, tucking the hooked parts awkwardly behind her earfins.  The world goes into strange, sharp focus, too clear for her eyes, and then resettles itself as she takes them off.  “They just tell your eyes how to see better!” The word ‘see’ is a squeak of delight; Eridan winces a little but takes the glass things back and puts them gingerly back on, staring at Feferi.

It occurs to her suddenly that he’s probably seeing her clearly and up close for the first time.  She fidgets a little, wishing suddenly that she could have had time to put on the rest of her imperial gold—or at least comb out her hair.  He's been out and about as well, he's not exactly in formal regalia, but his arms and wrists and neck and waist are all glittering with gold.  Eridan never goes out without making sure he looks perfect first.  He says it’s his duty as Prince Regent to appear stylish and composed in front of the peasantry, but Feferi is pretty sure (pretty shore, heheh) that he just likes to dress up.  He’s even wearing his earrings, and all she’s got on is her crown and a golden bracelet on one wrist.

He’s still staring at her, mouth open.  His face looks slightly purple, but when she leans in closer to check, concerned, he clears his throat roughly and backs away.

“…A course, I can’t wear them in public,” he says awkwardly, and then, as Feferi’s fins droop despondently, he adds “…thanks, Fef,” and reaches out, sudden and strangely soft, to brush a flowing lock of hair away from her face.

Then he’s gone again, the landdweller eye-glasses hooked over one of his delicate golden belts, leaving Feferi to stare after him.

She…doesn’t want to think about this now.  Not right now.  Not about why he was staring at her, not about the way he sounded almost surprised when he thanked her, like he was thinking something he’d never thought or expected to think.

And anyway…

…she has somewhere she needs to go.

—

TR: Follow her to the surface.

Feferi surfaces with a gasp of air, on the bank of the seagull island. The air is full of spiraling birds, disturbed from their rest by the sudden splash and gasp of a seadweller surfacing nearby, and the water is unpleasantly murky in her gills at the best of times.  Bits of fish, seagull droppings, stray feathers…

Seagull island looms over her; the crashed remains of half a fleet, dragged together into a mess of crushed wood by some great storm sweeps and sweeps ago.  Nobody comes here if they can help it.  They say it’s cursed by the vicious spirits of the landdwellers who sailed those ships.

Maybe there really are ghosts.  Its new occupant, somehow, doesn't seem the type to care.

The moons are starting to rise, but he doesn't seem to be up and about yet.  Feferi peers up into the tangled rigging, and finally finds the silhouette of a lanky figure hanging precariously among the torn sails.  The ropes and canvas have formed a sort of makeshift hammock, under the shade of a ragged sheet of sailcloth to keep off the sun; in the middle of the mess, almost twenty feet above the ground with a bottle hanging from one slack hand, is the madman of seagull island.

"Gamzee!" Feferi calls out softly.  The figure above her snorts and rolls over, miraculously failing to fall to his death on the broken planks below.  A rope just happens to snag one of his arms, and he settles down again, bony limbs dangling aimlessly in open space.

It takes him a while to wake up every night.  Feferi waits patiently, and eventually Gamzee stretches in his rope hammock and sits up.  The rest of the hammock falls apart without him in it, leaving him sitting on a precarious loop of rope, rubbing his eyes and raking his hands at the tangled curls of his hair, staring around at the horizon and the slowly-rising moons with sleepy confusion.

"Gamzee!" Feferi calls again, "Down here!  It's me!"

There's another second of blank silence, and then Gamzee gives a cheerful honk! and drops off the loop of rope, snagging another dangling line as he goes, lowering himself from rope to rope until he lands on the ground in a flail of long, lean, rawboned limbs.  Feferi's seen it before, but she's always fascinated; legs are so strange to watch in action, almost as strange as the thin, deformed dud slits on his sides, like his body tried to have gills and couldn't figure out how.  He doesn't have the right hum and glub to his voice, either—Feferi hasn't talked to enough landwellers to know if that's normal for them, but it sure is weird!  Cute, but weird. 

Gamzee sidles across the wrecked deck of his home and drops down into a crouch at the water’s edge, peering at her through his hair.  “Lil’ sister, you been gone a while!” he says cheerfully, and before he can even ask, Feferi holds up a hand with a salvaged glass bottle in it.  Gamzee takes it, tugs out the cork, and drinks half the bottle down in one swift, economical movement.  When he lowers it again he looks considerably more awake, but even more mellow than before.  He sighs contentedly.

“Gooooood stuff,” he says, drawling the word out lazily, and takes another swig.  “Okay.  Whatcha got, defiúr?”

Feferi pulls her sack of salvage up out of the water and holds it out, and Gamzee settles down cross-legged in the shallow water at the edge of the deck.  Feferi watches his toes twitch as he gropes through the jumble in the bag, and wonders.

“Hey, Gamzee?”  She asks eventually, and he makes a distracted little ‘mmm?’ sound as he lays out the last salvaged item in line with the others.  “What does it feel like to…to have legs?”

He blinks at her, and then, absentmindedly, takes another drink of wine.  Then he settles down with his chin in his hand, his face twisted up in concentration, and goes silent.

Feferi waits.  Knowing him, Gamzee will need to marshal his thoughts even to understand the question, let alone to come up with an answer.  He’s just staring out to the ocean, thinking and thinking and…

Gamzee lets out an almost inaudible snuffling snore and Feferi sighs.  No answers to that one then.  Honestly, sometimes she thinks it would be better if she didn’t bring Gamzee any more wine.  He’s distant and vague enough when she gets there usually, and the wine usually serves to make him almost completely incomprehensible.  But it must be hard, to live out here alone, and she can't really blame him for wanting something to make him feel better.  There are things in the water more dangerous than trolls, and if Gamzee has weapons she's never seen them. 

“Aw shit, I up and motherfuckin’ zoned out,” declares Gamzee, so suddenly Feferi startles and has to clamp her gills shut to keep from glubbing some horrible gullwater through them.  “Sorry.  You ever sit and just all get to listening at the ocean?”  He cocks his head thoughtfully.  “Nah, you’re under it, huh.  You’d get a better hear on of its wicked whimsies from the fish and all.”  He looks briefly troubled.  “Wait, you get your talk on with the fish? ‘Cause I can all stop eatin’ them if—“

“No, Gamzee, we don’t talk to the fish,” says Feferi soothingly.  “Now, come on, what can you tell me about these?”

Gamzee nods and focuses on the items laid out in front of him on the deck.  He picks them up one at a time, looking at each from every angle—he’s mumbling under his breath—“Caed attú?  Caed attú, dethái?”—but even if she could make out clear words or phrases Feferi is sure she couldn’t understand what he’s saying.  She pressed him about the language the first time she heard him use it, but all he would tell her is that a lot of people with blood the same color as his use it and she shouldn’t worry about it.  He always seems to close off when he mentions his blood color, and Feferi has never dared to ask—but it sounds like they’re very civilized and spiritual to her.  Whatever the reason is behind his separation from them, using their language seems to help him think, so she just sits and waits and listens as he examines each piece of flotsam in turn.

“Okay,” he says finally, and Feferi sits up in the water as he lifts up a bundle of thin sheets of something, rolled up and covered in wax.  “This is what you got, sister…”

Feferi returns to the palace with a collection of waxed pieces of “paper”, torn into mostly shreds but still occasionally readable, some scraps of a “fabric” that Gamzee, after long thought and a few more swigs of alcohol, hazarded might be silk (all stained and dyed in beautiful gold) a little instrument almost like a single end of her 2x3dentkind that he says they use to eat, two little pieces of metal that are mysteriously attracted to each other by some invisible force Gamzee can’t begin to explain, and the pride of her new collection stashed in her bag at the very bottom.

Gamzee says there are ways on land of making pictures that are exactly like the real thing, and that this is one of them; that this is a ‘photo’ and that he doesn’t know how they work.  But he’s pretty sure it’s by miracles.

“It's a miracle, brought you that thing,” he had drawled, and pressed a finger to the young, proud face in the frame, tapping a finger against the glass.  “This guy?  You better all up and get your rejoice on, lil’ sister, you’re gonna find him.”

The landdweller’s face is almost gaunt, dignified.  He has two sets of jagged fangs, white against his lip, long and thin and uneven compared to the clean white triangles of seadweller fangs.  His eyes are blank red and blue, pupilless in a way that she knows—from her hasty glimpses of the landdweller fishertrolls—means he’s one of the landdwellers with psychic powers.  He has…she blushes at the thought, but thinks it anyway, rebellious…he has beautiful long eyelashes and there’s something about the slim boniness of his neck and folded hands that looks almost delicate. She wonders if all landdwellers are like that—she's never gotten to interact with any besides Gamzee, and even under the water the only person she really gets close to is…

She feels her face warm up and tries to shake the thought off, but it won’t go away.  The memory of Eridan staring at her, one hand reaching out to brush her hair out of her face keeps swimming in front of her eyes.

It’s…it’s not like she finds Eridan…well, attractive—well, actually, the real problem is that she can’t pretend he isn’t, and it still makes her feel strange to compare the two of them.  Eridan is broad-shouldered and strong and holds himself with a sort of easy grace, and there are a lot of trolls under the sea that would dream of having him in one of their quadrants, if he wasn't such an ambitious, proud, high-strung worry-wart!  But this landdweller has none of that relaxed power to his frame.  He stands with his thin, angular shoulders pulled back square and tall and his spine straight.  He's tense with dignity, tight with authority, but there's a tiny quirk at the corner of his mouth and a hint of white fangs that might be a smile.

The thin face looks back at her when she closes her eyes, and that night she dreams that everything is candy red and electric blue.

Chapter Text

TR: Continue Remembering

Feferi wakes up in the middle of the daytime with a jolt, her vascular system working overtime.  There’s some light coming down through the water outside, but it’s dim and silvery—it must be cloudy on the surface.  

She has no way of judging how late in the evening it is, but she feels almost rested, so it can’t be too long till sunset.  She tries to go back to sleep, but flashes of her dream keep flickering through her head, like a ghost at the corner of her vision, then slipping out of her head again before she can grasp them or remember what the dream was about.  Bright red, electric blue...

There's no point lingering on this right now.  Feferi pulls herself upright, finger-combs her hair and takes off the last of her jewelry like she should have before bed yesterday.  Then she settles down at one of the engraved ledges that serves as her activity plateau, takes out the scraps of waxed paper from last night and sets them on the plateau, pinned under a few spare bangles.

She's tried to bring in pieces of paper before, but they've all turned soft and rotting as soon as she pulled them under the water, crumbling away.  Whatever 'wax' is, it's somehow fighting the water away.  She pieces the shreds of paper together, now, like the puzzle toys they used to give her when she was a minnow.  Sentences form, words she can make out even if their meanings are almost completely opaque.  "—ighblood advances on the northern borde—” she reads, and then, further down, “—lleged abduction of—” “—heir to the—” “—with any information regarding highbloods seen inside city boundaries, pleas—”

She's heard talk on the surface of “highbloods”.  She mentioned it to Gamzee once and he went all silent and distant and papped her head once or twice, absently.

“You ain’t got no call to be worryin’ about anything even makin’ out like that manner of thing,” he’d said, and for all that she could barely understand the words, the closed-off expression on his usually cheerful, open face had warned her not to say too much about it.  She’s picked up a little more since then, from her covert trips up to the surface, and she thinks that maybe people with cooler colored blood (cool like ocean water) are called ‘high’.  It doesn’t make any sense, because Gamzee’s blood is so high then, and so is Eridan’s, and maybe even so is hers, even though hers looks more like the shade of the sky just before sunrise.  

Another page, and in the brightness of the palace she sees, suddenly, something she didn’t see when she salvaged these papers a night ago.

It’s her landdweller.

He looks out from another torn, real-as-life ‘photograph’, very straight-backed, sharp shoulders squared.  He’s standing, looking straight out of the picture at her, dressed in landdweller ‘clothes’ that look very fine and fancy compared to the plain shirts and pants of the fisherman she sees every night.  This picture shows more than just his face, and she traces the line of one ‘leg’ with a fingertip, curious and delighted.  She knew he was a landdweller before, a gasping, gill-less drowner, but it sends another little shameful thrill through her to realize that those skinny, wading-bird legs don’t make him any less attractive.

She hugs the picture to her chest for a second, and then lowers it, blushing, and tries to read the words next to it.

“Counciltroll Captor,” she sees, and then again, twice, three, four times; it must be his name.  She traces the word with one fingertip and tries the syllables out.  “…Captor.”  It’s a sharp name, a good name for that fine-boned face and pointy, angular build.  “—into office for the third time along with several other—Tavros Nitram, well-known for his innovativ—counciltrolls Aradia Megido, Kanaya Mary—Justice of the Pieces, Terezi Pyrope.  The council’s youngest-ever—Vantas, declined comment.” A break in the writing, and then it resumes, a little water-warped but almost all legible.  Something about Counciltroll Captor and fishing—he goes out with the fleet every night?  But that’s dangerous, for someone who’s almost a monarch to go out on the sea…

…it’s almost like her ventures to the land.

Feferi feels another one of those sweet little serendipitous thrills shoot through her and shakes her head sharply, her cheeks unnaturally warm in the cold water around her.  

And then her eyes travel further down the page and catch a word she knows.

“Seadweller.”

She almost rips the fragile paper apart with the sudden, deep-sea chill that runs through her bones.  They know we’re here they know we’re here I have to tell—but then she keeps reading, and the panic flickers and dies.

“—mythological creatures with trolloid bodies and—of fish,” say the neat little letters, and Feferi’s whole body goes shivery and limp with relief at the word ‘mythological’.  “—reported sightings—Captor wishes to make it known that “There is no such thing and I—if everyone would stop spreadi—fairy tales.”

And that’s it.  That’s the last paragraph of writing that’s legible.  They don’t believe seadwellers are even real.

He doesn’t believe you’re even real.

That's a good thing. It hurts far, far worse than it should.  

The sounds of a distant, muffled rumblr jolts her awake, and Feferi blinks and realizes there's a haze of fuchsia in the water in front of her and her gills feel tight and prickly.  She glubs some water through them and squares her shoulders, shaking off the melancholy.  There's a storm coming—swimming in the rain always makes her feel better.  And like shell she’s going to tell Eridan oh-you’re-not-queen-yet, wwhat-are-you-doin’-trawwlin’-wwrecks Ampora where she’s going.

Feferi turns her face to the surface of the water and swims toward the storm.

The Author: Give us some context already.

God, okay, okay.  Impatient…

It is an especially stormy bright season of the eleventh perigee.  It is the 50 sweep anniversary of the end of The Great War of the Sufferer, and there is political tension between the two nations that now rule the mainland.  The lowblooded nation of Alternia is celebrating their split from the theocracy of the Highblood nation, and there are celebrations and festivals across the mainland.  However, the democratic council who rules their nation is troubled with threats of violence from the HOLY MOTHERFUCKING COURT of the Grand Highblood.  His supporters have been spreading rumors, and claims that he found a descendant—a blood heir to the Highblood theocracy.  Further rumors that his heir subsequently went missing and is presumed kidnapped are stirring up difficulty near the borders.

There are more signs of trouble than the obvious political murmurs.  The dragons have been flying recently, a fact that is making many trolls nervous.  The seers and those who believe them claim this means there will be great change, and the rise of new power.  The other half of the landdweller population doesn’t believe in that ‘magic’ hoofbeastshit, any more than they believe in seadwellers.

The seadwellers don’t believe in magic either.  They don’t need to believe in what they know for a fact to be real.

They don't bother to believe in aspects, either.  They know that every troll has a calling, an aspect of existence that they serve and that serves them in turn.  The princess is known to be a Witch of Life.  Her prince regent is widely rumored to be aligned with Hope, although he hasn't gone so far as to confirm this and it would, of course, be rude to ask such a personal question.  There is even rumored to be a hero of Blood on the council of warmbloods; a good omen, according to the seers, and one not seen for many, many years.

In case it wasn’t clear, magic and aspects do exist.  They’re not a thing that stopped existing or anything.

TA: now, get back to the story.

Feferi hits the surface of the water like a cold slap to the face, slamming through into the air.  For a moment the world spins around her, rain peppering her skin as she breaches.  Then she's in the water again, feeling the waves surge above her, hearing the muffled crash of the thunder.  It's safest to be near the shore when the storm is at its most powerful; she can get close enough to see the distant form of the city built up on the hills on-shore, hundreds of soft, warmly colorful lights glimmering through the roiling darkness.

She's still staring up at them, full of an aching, hungry curiosity, when something cuts between her and the lights.  The distant gold and green and red lights are replaced by a much more immediate, urgent flashing of red and blue, and Feferi darts back in the water as a landweller ship pitches over the crest of the nearest wave and slams back down into the water within twenty feet of her.

The boat is small, much too small for the ferocity of the storm, fighting a losing battle against the weather.  Feferi can see the single lowblood sailor's eyes flaring red and blue with power through the mist of the storm; the boat is glowing with it, like a strange, two-toned version of the star-fire that sometimes clings to masts.  The landdweller wrenches a long arm through the air and ropes pull taught, he glances up at an incoming wave and lets out a feral snarl that’s lost in the storm, and the wave splits, blasted out of the way by a sharp knife-edge of sparks.   Feferi watches, knowing she should duck under the water but too spellbound to care, as he struggles and screams and fights the storm back single-handed.

And then a wave tosses the boat and its lone sailor like a toy in a wriggler’s hands, and his fire flickers out.

The landdweller seems to hang in the air for a moment, silhouetted against the crackling storm clouds, and then a wave scoops him out of the air like a giant hand and he slams under the water.  He surfaces for a moment but then another wave full of flotsam pounds down on top of him and spins him deep under the water.  Something hit him on the head; there’s a plume of golden blood drifting behind him in the salt water as he slowly sinks.

Feferi waits for him to start struggling, or trying to surface, but he just twitches weakly and then goes limp, his body buffeted to and fro by the churning currents whipped up by the storm. 

He’s…drowning.

She watches him sink further and further, and then he turns a little and his half-open eyes are glowing a dim red and blue under the water, and it’s him.

It’s the troll from her photograph, she’s absolutely sure.  Thin-faced, short-haired, with glowing, pupilless eyes, two sets of horns and that permanent, worried quirk to his eyebrows that smooths out even as she watches.  He’s unconscious and sinking, and he looks almost serene as death reaches up from the depths for him.

Feferi’s arm closes tight around his waist.  She hesitates a split second, wondering if she should tow his boat back with him—but there’s nobody else in it and he’s not even twitching, his head lolling back slowly under the water.    She leaves the boat to drift and drags him with all her strength to the surface.

The storm is fading away again as fast as it came when she bursts out of the water, but the night air is still cold and wet with it and it smacks against her face.  She struggles to keep his head above water and he coughs wetly and shudders in her arms, but doesn’t wake up.  

She has to do it.  

She has to go to the shore.

Feferi tightens her grip around the troll’s wiry body and takes off for land.

—

TR: Go to the land.

You are now on land.  There are boats.  Wet sand, soaked with rain.  A wooden pier so waterlogged and sunken the water laps gently over the top of the boards.

There are two people next to the pier.

TR: Examine mysterious duo.

Years ago, when this landdweller construction was higher in the water, Feferi used to sneak up and hide under it.  She was barely more than a minnow, then; it was before one of the nicest palace guards struggled through the gates with a harpoon in his side and she learned how truly frightening landdwellers can be.  She used to listen to them talk.  About mustard-bloods and rust-bloods and teal-bloods and a whole rainbow of colors that she never knew blood could be.

This landdweller (her landdweller) is bleeding yellow from a few deep scratches down his right temple and side and a patch of his short-cropped black hair is stained gold, but when she pulls him out of the water and he thuds onto the soaked sand he starts shuddering and coughing and for the first time his breathing evens out to something close to normalcy.  He jerks onto his back and cracks open one pupilless, bright blue eye, staring up at the cloudy sky.  Then his eyes close again.  In the water, his skin feels much colder than it should and Feferi knows very well the kind of beasts that live near the shore, looking for unsuspecting landdweller prey.  He has to wake up.

He coughs again when she shakes him, and she’s suddenly and shockingly aware of how delicate his arms feel under her hands.  There are already yellow bruises rising on his skin where she had her arm around him to pull him here.  She knew she was strong, but she forgot that he’s also fragile.  

She loosens her grip and settles back with her tail curled on the sand.  The moons are setting, but their light is still harsh and bright.  She can see well down the beach, see that there's nobody coming and there's nothing disturbing the water out in the surf.  She has time.

She leans down and murmurs, so soft he can’t possibly hear her, “…Captor?”

She nudges his shoulder again and he twitches a little, murmuring uneasily.  If only the paper had been torn a little bit higher!  They called him by name a little further up the paper, she knows it.  She might have learned his full name, not just a title and a sign and a lot of things about elections and seats that she didn’t understand.  She knows landdwellers have hatchnames like seatrolls do, there were some on the paper, so strange and new they still stick in her mind; Aradia Megido, Tavros Nitram, and the ‘youngest counciltroll ever elected’, the one they just called ‘Vantas’.  

Maybe not all of them have hatchnames then.  Landdwellers sure are strange.

She runs her fingers gently over the growing bump on his head where the floating chunk of wood hit him, and then, guiltily curious, strokes her fingertips lightly over the crest of his cheekbones and the thin, straight blade of his nose.  Even half-frozen with seawater his skin is very warm against hers, and when she touches one fluttering eyelid something jolts her finger and she pulls it away with a yelp of pain.  She freezes, afraid he’ll wake up now, right now and she’ll have no idea what to say or do.  The image of Agitta pulling himself through the gates, trailing blood in the water, comes flying suddenly back into her mind—

But no.  Guardstroll Agitta had been slow, sluggish, not even as fast as Eridan.  Feferi knows she can be gone the second she catches a hint of this troll reaching for his strife specibus—the second he shows any sign of waking up.  

He has golden earrings, just like hers.  Two thin golden hoops on each side, each of them set with a tiny stone in red or blue. She finds herself comparing the gold to his blood and the stones to his eyes and giggles self-consciously—stupid, poetic nonsense, like Eridan used to write when they were both minnows.

She hesitates, fidgeting—then reaches down and slides a hand over his side, biting her lip nervously.

He has no gills.  She slides her fingers over the place where the wide slits in his side would be; the bony hardness of the gillflaps that would cover them, the tender softness of the hollow under the skin.  But there’s nothing there, not even the empty illusion of gillslits like Gamzee has.  Nothing but sharp, bony ribs and lean, wiry muscles.  She knew that—of course he has no gills, he was drowning when she saved him, but it’s one thing to know and another thing to feel for herself.  His ears are pointed and finless, doubled like his horns.

She’s just reaching out to poke at them curiously when he shifts again and bares his teeth sleepily.  “Go 'way," he grumbles, and his eyes give a brief, angry flash of sparks.  

She jumps so hard she almost hits him with her flailing tail and drags herself back in the sand, until she feels comforting surf on her hands.  He doesn’t sit up though; he’s just stirring, barely starting to wake.  His voice is soft, a little hoarse, and it seems to buzz just a little as he speaks, his ‘s’ coming out as a breathy hiss.  “Just wanna thhhleep.  Fuck off…”

“You…” her voice comes out as a squeak.  She clears her throat and tries again, a little clearer this time, backing away into the waves as she speaks.  “No, you have to get up.  Captor, the sun—the sun’s going to come out.”

“Dammit,” he grumbles, and he starts to haul himself upright, eyes squeezed shut, holding his head.  “Ahhhh, fuck.  Don’t make me throw you into a wall, you know I—”

But then he opens his eyes, and there’s nobody there.

—

TR: Leave this discombobulated councilor to stagger back to the city.  

TR: Examine consequences.

She starts to swim around the shore every day.  She looks for ships that glitter red and blue with psychic power, and discovers he has no favorite; he goes out on any vessel that seems shorthanded.  She discovers that he can lift a huge tangle of nets with his brain and give orders and help someone haul heavy canvas all at the same time.  That he has to stop sometimes and lean on something, dizzy.  Once he tried to get right back up after one of his dizzy spells and he almost collapsed, retching and shaking.  

She must be going insane, because the sight of him all curled up in obvious pain made her want to jump out of the sea and help him.

A week or two after she rescues him, she dares to follow him back to the shore.  She tucks herself up under the sunken ‘pier’ she pulled him onto when she dragged him out of the ocean, and watches his shadow as he staggers a little bit, soaked boots tapping on the wood.  Someone comes out to meet him—he sighs when he catches sight of them, but he doesn’t sound unhappy, just…tired.  

“What’s up, KK?”  He says softly, voice hoarse and thin.  “No, don’t tell me.  Our buddies across the border sent another demand and you need me to provide the council’s only working brain cells.  Woe is us, councilor Captor, how can we ever have a meeting without you?!”

Whoever he’s talking to sighs harshly, exasperated.  “Why the fuck would you ask me what’s going on, and then tell me not to tell you what’s going on, and then explain to me what’s going on?”  He growls, and there’s a soft thud of contact—Captor sways a little, but other than that doesn’t react much to the blow.  “You get so preachy when you’re out on the boats.”

“Well excuse the fuck outta me!”  Captor snarls, suddenly sharp.  “If you’d—”

“Hey,” says the other troll warningly, “Not doing this right now, fuck.  Calm your nonexistent scrawny tits.  Come on.  And what’s this?!”  The voices get slowly quieter as they move away, and Feferi follows them, as far towards the land as she can go, clinging to every word.  “Your good friend appears to have brought you painkillers and one of those puke-worthy rustblood beverages you like to pour down your throat every hour of the night!  What a good friend!  The audience applauds so hard their arms hemorrhage adoration from every pore!  Captor falls over himself to thank his good friend—”

“Stop calling me ‘Captor’,” Feferi hears, as they step onto the sand and away, and she can almost hear the smirk in the yellow-blood’s voice.  “…I know it’s intimidating to be on hatch-name terms with someone so much smarter and taller and more important than you, but it won’t kill you.  Say it with me.  Ssssssssolllllux.  Sollux—”

The troll he’s talking to says something sarcastic and scathing in response, but Feferi isn’t listening. She huddles under the dock, eyes wide, pressing both hands over her mouth, and then gives up and ducks back under the water to makes tiny, frantic squeaking sounds of excitement.  She feels like she’s going to burst out of her skin, she just wants to—to do something, to yell and spin in circles like a dizzy wiggler, to laugh at the top of her lungs—

So she does.

TR: Leave the troubled councilors to their business.  Follow the princess.

Feferi swims so fast and hard she can barely tell where she’s going, her vascular pump pounding inside her thorax like it wants to break free.  Just call me—She squeezes her eyes shut and puts on even more speed, threading her way through mazes of coral and eroded stone, water rushing through her gills so fast and hard it almost hurts, the world blurring around her.  

Sollux.

“Sollux Captor—!”  She gasps out, and she can’t help herself; she does an exuberant loop in the water, spinning and corkscrewing like a little minnow who just learned to swim.  “Sollux Captor, Sollux Captor—!”

To think only a few weeks ago she didn’t even know his name!  Everything seems more beautiful like this—the light of one of the moons is already starting to gleam through the water, tinting it green.  The palace is shimmering; the figures of the guards are glittering in the light, tails shining.  She flickers past the guards, giggling, threads her way through the halls of the palace—there’s not enough room here, but she knows where to find room.  She pushes her way into the throne room and goes spiraling up towards the vast, vaulted ceiling, dizzy, laughing out loud.  His face was so warm, she touched his skin and she knows his name!

“Sollux—”

“What’s got your gold in a knot?”

Feferi glubs in shock and spins around in the water.  Eridan is slouching in the carved throne, watching her.  He’s wearing the landdweller glasses she gave him and all of his gold, and there are deep gashes on his arms and something on his shoulder that looks like an enormous bite.  The excitement powering her stops dead—everything grinds to a halt, caught on the sudden shift from exhilaration to shock and panic.

“Eridan, what—?!”

He waves off her concern and swings himself upright.  “We’ll have shark for dinner,” he says off-handedly, and she gasps as her eyes fall on the bite on his shoulder again.

“Eridan, what happened?!  Ahab’s—”

“I didn’t wanna use it,” he says, with a dull heaviness to his voice that she doesn’t recognize.  He sounds…defeated, or maybe just tired.  His eyes are dark and dull, boring into her.  "Wanted to fight somethin’.”

“What?”  She reaches out to touch the painful-looking wounds on his arms.  “But…but you’re hurt!  Here, let me—”

“No!”  He pulls his arm away sharply, flinching back from her and drawing himself up in the throne.  His fins are flaring; his teeth are showing at one corner of his mouth.  He shouldn’t be looking at her like that, like an enemy challenging her to a fight.  Feferi wavers uncertainly, trying not to be hurt, trying to understand, and a second later Eridan seems to realize what his body language is telegraphing; he relaxes, forcing himself to lower his fins.

“I’ll heal on my own, Fef,” he says. “You’re forgettin’ I can do that.  I don’t always need you to kiss everythin' better, y’know.”

“That doesn’t mean you need to be in pain when I can make you better,” she says, concerned, and for a second an expression flashes across his face that she doesn’t have time to decipher—something open and sudden and pained.  For a second, he lets her come forward a little, reach out for his arm.  “Honestly, Eridan, if you keep making me worry about you like this, people are going to start assuming we’re…” she giggles and winks, but instead of relaxing or laughing or even blushing like he always used to when she mentioned quadrants, he flinches like he’s been slapped and jerks away.

“Yeah, well,” he says, and his voice is even bitterer than before, acidic and almost pained.  “—if I ever need someone to nag me into bein’ a good boy I’ll just call you up!  If you’re not too busy blowin’ off your royal duties and runnin’ up to the surface to stare at the drowners to spare the time!”

“Eridan, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”  Feferi reaches out to rest a hand on his shoulder and he audibly snarls and throws her hand off with a violent jerk.  “What’s the matter with you today?!”  

“What’s the matter with me?”  Eridan squints at her, and those big black frames and glittery glass lenses should make him even less imposing than normal but somehow the way his eyes focus cleanly on her face makes her cringe a little.  He was less scary when she knew he was shouting at a Feferi-colored blur in the water.  “—What’s the matter with you?!”

“There’s nothing the water with me!”  Feferi yells back, and knows she’s shrilling at him, her fins flaring as she gets more hurt and angry.  He turns away from her, hunching his shoulders, raking one hand through his hair.  “You’re being mean, stop it! I haven’t done anyfin wrong!”

“Nothin’ the matter, huh?!”  Eridan whips around to look at her, and under the anger on his face there’s a kind of horrible desperation and frustration.  His hair is drifting into his face and he looks more frenzied than she’s ever seen him. He opens one fist and uncrumples something with a flourish, holding it out between them.  “Nothin’ up at all!  So what’s this?!”

There’s a single moment of horrible, shocked silence as Feferi stares at the crumpled piece of paper—at the thin, familiar face looking out of it, bent and mangled almost out of existence.  Eridan looks angry and defiant, but all those expressions are doing is trying to hide fear and pain and failing spectacularly.  Feferi’s fins are flaring wide, her eyes going round and furious, and Eridan starts to reach out for her—she knocks his hand away, baring her teeth.

“You went through my things?!”

“You found this stuff and then you just started vanishin’, Fef!”  His eyes look glazed, darker, stained violet, and she refuses to think that he might be about to cry, she can’t bear to feel anything for him but mounting rage—if she does she knows she’s going to burst into tears as well.  “An’ you’ve been—weird when you were around, kept sayin’ this name and I didn’t know—well I have access to all a the records in the kingdom, there ain’t a “Captor” down here!”

“THOSE WERE PRIVATE!”  Feferi shrills, and she doesn’t even pull out her weapon, she just flies at his throat, both hands outstretched.  “ERIDAN I’M GOING TO KRILL YOU!”

He lurches backwards and her first punch goes a little short; he catches her wrist in one hand and wards off her wild blows with the other.  If she wasn’t completely incensed with him she might appreciate that the Prince Regent, well known for his ability to fire the most powerful weapon in the kingdom’s arsenal one-handed and wrestle sharks when he needs to let off steam, looks absolutely terrified.  As it is all she can only feel betrayed.

She struggles until she runs out of strength, but he doesn’t let go.  One thumb is rubbing tiny, jerky circles on her wrist—he doesn’t even try to argue, just squeezes his eyes shut like he’s afraid to look at her, his fins pinned low, flinching from every snarl and angry word.

“I can’t—” she gasps, and finally she stops struggling, worn out, her eyes burning.  “You…you took…I can’t believe you would…”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he sounds utterly wretched.  “I know. An’ I felt like a sack a shit about it an’ all, but Fef—” he lets go of her wrist with on hand—reaches like he wants to lay a hand on her cheek, but she meets his eyes and he flinches back again, lowering his hand to her shoulder instead.  “…I got to keep you safe.  I got to.  An’ not just because you’re the princess an’ I’m just the steward.”  He takes a deep breath.  “—Fef, I—”

“No.”

He flinches and pulls his hand away, eyes widening.  “—I—what…?”

“No,” she repeats quietly, and he stares at her, opening his mouth to say something—she talks over him.  “You were right before, Eridan, I’m always leaving you to take care of things, I’m doing a terrible job of taking care of this kingdom.  But…you’re…wrong too.  You aren’t the steward.”  

She smiles at him, and the smile comes out all twisted up and broken and it doesn’t feel right on her face.  Eridan crumples in front of that smile, shaking his head wordlessly even as she darts forward to hold him for a split second and then pull away again, looking him in the eyes, “You’re the prince.  If I wasn’t here you’d be—”

She bites her lip, but the words hang in the water, already said, and Eridan jolts upright, eyes widening.

“Feferi—!” he starts to say, but she’s already flicker of silver, vanishing out the gate of the throne room.  He draws himself up, screams after her, “Fine!  Just leave again, run away!  LIKE I FUCKIN’ CARE ANYMORE!”—tears off the glasses she gave him and snarls as his grip tightens on the fragile glass—

The soft sound of breaking glass is muffled underwater, but it has all the finality of a slamming door.  

Eridan slowly opens his hand, and stares down at Feferi’s gift.  One earpiece is bent.  One glass lens glitters with a spiderweb of fine cracks, broken beyond repair.

She left Ψdon’s Entente.  The weapon of royalty.

You’re the prince.

If I wasn’t here…

Eridan lowers himself gently down onto the cold stone throne and drops his head slowly into his hands.

TR: Through the ocean.  Down.  Deeper than that.  

TR: Go deeper.

TR: Be the Princess.

“Don’t worry,” she says, over the screams, “isn’t this what you wanted?  The moray you struggle, the moray it’s going to hurt.  So chill, prawn-cess.”

(you don’t hear her)

(you’re too busy screaming)

Princess: Be The Reader.

TR: Okay, now where were we?

Sollux stares at the sea-girl, and she smiles back, lowering her hands from his temples again.  He winces instinctively, expecting his headache to return, but there’s nothing.  His eyes don’t even ache.  

“Uh,” he says dumbly, and shakes his head a little, trying to jolt off the fog of confusion his brain is in.  “I’m—thankth.”  No, shit.  “Thanks, I mean, fuck.”

She giggles behind one hand, but not in a nasty way, and…well, at least she’s not mimicking him.  That always seems to be the first thing people do when they hear him fall back into his old speech defect, imitate it back to him like he’ll find it funny to be reminded of it. He’s heard the word “Thollukth!” parroted back at him more times than he would like to remember.  

“I’m Sollux Captor,” he says firmly, and holds out a hand to shake.  She stares at it for a second, and then takes it in one of her own—but instead of shaking it like she’s supposed to, she raises it to her lips and kisses his knuckles very gently.

Okay, that is really fucking weird what the hell.  Sollux does his best not to jerk his hand away, and after a second she lets go of it and sits back again, smiling.

“Sollux Captor,” she mouths obediently, but all that comes out is a sound like wind hissing over the surface of the water.  She looks crestfallen, and he wonders how recently she lost her ability to speak; she seems to keep forgetting about it, so it’s probably something very recent.  She huddles up, one hand rising to her throat, and for a second this weird jolt of pity goes through him.

—Platonically.  She’s just pathetic, that’s all.  Like Tavros after his accident, or KK after too many cups of coffee and not enough sleep.  

She's still trying to make noises.  Sollux frowns, looks around his block and then goes and rummages through the mess on his activity plateau for a piece of paper and something to write with.  Most of the paper is important, and also classified, even if it's also pointless bullshit garbage he wants to set on fire; eventually he comes up victorious with a pad of cheap scratch paper and a pen.  The drifter girl looks at them like she's got no idea what they are, takes them carefully and then taps the wrong end of the pen cautiously against the paper.  When Sollux reaches out with his mind and turns it over to draw a circle on the top of the paper, her eyes go wide and her mouth drops open.

Instant astonishment.  Has she never seen a pen before?  Shit, where was she locked up?  Some fundamentalist highblood cultist’s hive where they only wrote with blood and lived off of sugar?  She does seem to know how to write at least, which is a relief.  She scribbles away for a while, a little laboriously, and then turns the paper around.

I’m very pleased to meet you, she has written, in clumsy handwriting.  My name is

But she stops writing there, the tip of the pen just trembling over the paper.  She pulls her hand away again, and then tries to write.  Nothing.  Her hand stops, a few millimeters away from the paper, like there’s an invisible wall there.  She stares at her hand, eyes wide, and then, slowly, slumps and takes her pen away.

“What the hell was that?”  Sollux asks, and she glances quickly up at him and then away again, her mouth a tight, straight, unhappy line.  She doesn’t answer, but this time when she lowers the pen to the paper she writes without a hitch.

Where am I?

“In the capitol city of the lowblood republic,” he says, and squints at her.  He still can’t tell a blood color at all.  It’s disturbing, like KK with his cold grey symbol stamped all over his stuff and his black, concealing clothes.  Even if he knows what Karkat’s blood color is, it’s still kind of creepy not to be able to see it at a glance.  “…I’m one of the councilors in charge here.  I found you washed up on the shore.”

I’ve seen the city from a long way away, she writes quickly, and then hesitates for a second before adding, in small, nervous letters…it was beautiful.

“It is,” he says, a little more proudly than he meant to—but he is proud, why shouldn’t he be?  He’s put a lot into making this city what it is.  “You’ve never been here before?”  Ugh no, stupid question, come on, Captor… see, she’s shaking her head, what the hell, of course she hasn’t been…

“I could show you around,” says his mouth, completely independent of his brain, and he has less than a second to be angry with himself for being an idiot before she throws herself forward and hugs him.

Chapter Text

TR: Take a look around.

The sea girl starts out weak-legged and staggering, and they don't end up going anywhere the first night or two.  She mostly sleeps, curled up in Sollux's block while he chews through his backlog of paperwork and avoids his fellow councilors as much as possible.  But by the third day she's up on her feet poking at things in his block, and by the fourth day she's bouncing off the walls.  Sollux sighs, opens his window, and floats them both down the back way to go see the city.  

She takes off like a shot as soon as her feet touch the ground.  Sollux growls at her, and she slows down but she doesn't flinch now, just laughs a bubbling laugh and comes back to grab his arm, pulling her along with him.  Sollux bristles at her, and gets another laugh in response—it's maddening, she just doesn't give a shit.

…Well.  Kind of maddening.  To be honest, if not out loud, then at least within his own whirring, color-coded brain, it’s kind of…nice, the way she seems to understand that his mood swings are just temporary.  

She's also just not paying much attention to him.  She's constantly on the move, staring at things and touching and tasting and sniffing like Justice Pyrope at everything she comes close to.  It’s like there are all sorts of everyday things she’s never seen, and when Sollux caves and buys her a piece of saltwater taffy she practically starts purring.  He spends the better part of the day after that giving her new things to try, and catches himself being absurdly pleased at the shades of delight on her face when she tries sour, bitter, sweet and sweet and sweet.  She doesn’t seem to like the taste of salt much; she eats it if it’s sweetened, but shakes her head at the taste of salty food, and shows much less excitement at the offer of fish or seafood.

She’s a mystery, and she draws more than a few curious looks and questions as they wander down through every level of the city, trying out all the different bloodcastes’ delicacies.  She loves the taste of the grazing animals the brownbloods breed, seared into thick steaks on coals, and his own people’s honey-glazed desserts (not the mind-honey of course, never the mind honey).  

The Jade-bloods live outside the city usually, but they ship in green things and especially pumpkins, baked and spiced and ground into bread and pie and hot drinks.  The teal-bloods have always been primarily travelling law-enforcers, before they settled down here, but even they developed their own bizarre, experimental dishes.  Bright colors are in right now, thanks to Justice of The Pieces Pyrope and her famous blinded eyes; Sollux can see now why she enjoys coming down to the teal-blood streets.  Bright red is everywhere; food made for aroma and color as much as (truly bizarre) taste.

They go to the outer levels the next day, and they reach the rustblood section of town just as the moons are starting to slowly sink toward the horizon.  He buys them two rustblood drinks that make her eyes go almost comically wide and he laughs despite himself—the sound feels awkward and strange coming out of his mouth, how long has it been since he actually laughed, fuck.  She chugs her drink like she's afraid he'll take it away, and Sollux laughs again and lets her pull him away, sipping slowly at his own drink as they go.  The duality of spicy and sweet is familiar, hot and good—not as good as when Aradia makes it for him, though, on long mornings when he's been working all day and he's running on empty. 

He should really tell her "thank you" for those.  Aradia's been so different for the past sweeps, since the...incident, but she still finds time to make him stop and drink something when he's working himself into the ground, and Sollux has definitely just started to take it for granted, over the sweeps.  When did common courtesy get jammed so far into the back of his mind?  Maybe he should listen when Karkat starts one of his "you're being an asshole and you need to get more sleep" speeches.  The guy’s only got most of the city waxing pale for him, he’s obviously saying something worth listening to.  He knows a lot more than Sollux would give him credit for—at least, out loud—about tactics, and quadrants—

Sollux's mystery girl turns back from a stall and smiles at him as he thinks that, and Sollux's ears go hot.  She blinks at whatever his face does, making a questioning sound, and Sollux waves it off and starts walking again, heading blindly off down the nearest street without waiting to see if she's following him.  She will, it's fine.  This is fine.

Counciltroll Sollux Captor has never filled a single quadrant, is the thing.  He's a stressed-out, ugly, overworked, neurotic mess and he knows it.  He's also hot shit, and incredibly powerful, and not terrible-looking, and he knows that too.  He's felt something, maybe, a few times, when him and Aradia were younger, when Karkat is following him around nagging him to take care of himself, but that was before Aradia's...accident.  And Karkat spends probably half of his time awake nagging everybody to take care of themself.  It's practically a litmus test for whether you can feel pale or not, if you've ever felt the urge to hunt Karkat down when you're stressed and have him shout you into a pile for a nap. 

Being flushed is something very different.  Something he doesn't know how to recognize.  You're supposed to just know, right?  There wasn't any sudden spark of passion when he saw her—well, no more than his thinkpan always feels full of sparks.  There's just a weird tickle in his chest when she smiles at him, and the shivers that go up and down his skin when she puts her hands on his face to fix his headaches.  That could be anything.  That could be a debilitating disease.  That could be a fatal aneurysm waiting to happen.  That could be flushed concupiscence.  Fuck. 

The ocean girl pats his shoulder and mimes something that might be you look tired, do you want to go back?  Sollux just nods, absent, and she smiles and cautiously takes his arm to lead him back up through the streets toward the consulate.  

Sollux is attempting not to take a ten-point dive off the proverbial handle, which is why he doesn't think about it until they're already at the front entrance of the building—and at that point the guards have seen him and the ocean girl already, and there's no point being cagey about it anymore.  Sollux doesn't meet their questioning glances, just keeps walking like he's got somewhere to be, and leads his weird guest into he atrium, past the lines of trolls with petitions and applications and request forms, heading toward the door to the councilors' chambers at the back of the block.  He's almost made it there, side-stepping the few trolls who try to come out of line and hurry after him, when a voice says "Sollux!  Just a moment!"

Sollux stops in the doorway and turns back, ready to growl—and then stops, and then manages a smile instead as Kanaya Maryam comes sweeping elegantly across the atrium toward him.  She looks startled to see him smile at her, then she smiles back.  "Good morning," she says, "This must be your secret guest!  I tried to facilitate an introduction a few nights ago, but..." she shrugs.  "You seemed occupied.  Are you showing her around?"

Sollux nods, half-shrugging like, yeah, no big deal.  Kanaya smiles, and looks from him to the ocean girl and back again with an interested, meddlesome expression that Sollux definitely recognizes.  But Kanaya's grown up too, and she just says "Well, then I won't hassle you.  But, it's a pleasure to meet you."  She gives a courteous little half-bow.  "I'm Kanaya, dear.  Kanaya Maryam."

Ocean girl bows back, because of course she does, and then reaches out and takes Kanaya's hand, pulling it over so she can kiss the knuckles.  Kanaya lets her, like that's a totally normal thing to do—which makes sense, Sollux guesses, because it is her job after all.

"I'm the councilor for Diplomatic Relations," Kanaya says, "I suppose you could say I'm in charge of making sure we don't offend anyone, although you know how trolls are.  My job does sometimes feel somewhat pointless."  She gives Sollux a cheeky look, raising one eyebrow. 

"Hey, KK is a bigger threat to national goodwill than I'll ever be," Sollux snarks back, but his mouth twitches traitorously at the corner as he says it.  "At least I'm only a complete bulgesore half the time."

"Karkat's a soldier," Kanaya says, waving an elegant hand.  "The only way he will ever keep peace is by going up to the generals of both parties and conciliating them until they both go home."

Sollux actually laughs at that mental image, and Kanaya looks almost startled—it hasn’t been that long since he was in a good mood, has it?  Fuck.  She gives him this look like she can see into his soul, and then turns her attention to the ocean girl again.  “I’m sorry, dear, I have to keep these boys in line you know.”  She winks.  Ocean girl giggles.  “And I can’t help but notice how lovely your dress is!  Although—” she taps her lip with one thumb.  Her lips are painted a deep jade green tonight, matching the many shades of intricately-embroidered jade she's wearing.  “…It wasn’t made for you.  I could work your sign into it, given a few nights—and these seams could be taken in…”

Sollux clears his throat and Kanaya stops squinting at the mystery girl's sleeves and pulls up her courteous smile instead.  "And what's your name?"

“She doesn’t talk,” interjects Sollux.  Kanaya glances up at him, brow furrowing, and then back down at the ocean girl.  

“I’m very sorry,” she says sincerely, and then smiles.  “I’m afraid I maintain an…unusual…sleep cycle, but if you would ever find the time to come up to my hiveblocks in the early night or early morning, I would love to take a closer look at your dress—I could tailor you something that would fit you better.”

The ocean girl lights up, nods hopefully and reaches down to kiss the back of Kanaya's hand again.  Kanaya nods, smiling, and returns the gesture without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow.

“Sweet dreams then,” she says to Sollux.  "When you get there.  I’m going to go watch the sunrise—if you see Karkat, would you let him know that I’ve written up an analysis of the Grand Highblood’s most recent missives?”

Sollux nods.  Kanaya smiles at him and slips through the doorway that leads to the roof with a flutter of jade cloth.

The ocean girl turns to look at him and Sollux surprises himself with a laugh.  “She sleeps at night and stays up all day,” he explains, and pries open the atrium doors with a practiced twist of one hand.  “She’s weird, but she’s nicer than the rest of us assholes.”  She giggles, and then purses her lips and whacks him gently on the shoulder, scolding incomprehensibly.  Sollux is pretty sure he gets the gist of it, though.  “Yeah, I am,” he says, and she frowns at him.  “I'm mean as fuck, don't look at me like that.  Just because you've got horn where your thinkpan should be and it bounces off, that doesn't make meanness not be happening."

The ocean girl frowns for a while as he leads her down the hallway toward the respite blocks, apparently deep in thought over that.  Then, as they're coming to the end of the hallway, near the door with the DO NOT FUCKIING DISTURB sign, she pulls out her pen and paper and writes, do you know your zodiac season?  And then, a little smaller, like she isn't sure she should write it, aspect/class?

Feferi: Explore his character through ancient fortune-telling.

Sollux stands and stares at the paper for a second or two, worrying on his lip with his fangs, and then hands it back and turns abruptly back to the door of his hiveblocks and flisp the sign on the door to DO NOT FUCKIING DIISTURB.  

Feferi is beginning to think she’s made him angry, and she’s just working on composing her apology when he says, sudden and sharp, not looking at her, “—I don’t really believe in that stuff.  Not…really.”

That’s okay, Feferi writes back, encouraged, and grins at him.  It’s just fun!  Here, I’ll go first.  Witch of Life! Hatched at the end of the Sleeping season. In case you couldn’t tell by my regal bearing!  

That actually gets a hint of a smile, even if his voice is full of skepticism when he says “Witch of Life, huh?  And let me guess, that’s how you’re doing the headache thing?”

He makes it sound like he’s not sure whether it’s a joke or not; she nods firmly, and he makes a neutral grumbling sound in his chest and shrugs.  “Okay, whatever you say I guess.  Uh…I’m a mage.  That’s what KK says, anyway, he loves this shit.  And I think…” he hesitates, and she can guess by the angle of his head that he’s avoiding her eyes.  His voice is intentionally careless, too casual, when he says, "Pretty sure my aspect's gotta be Doom."

He glances over at her, catches the look on her face and makes a show of rolling his eyes.  "It doesn't mean anything," he says.  "It's just part of how my shitty mutant thinkpan works, I hear voices, when people are about to die.  It's fine.  We don't cull people here, I just hear the ones from far off over the border sometimes.  But that sounds like Doom, huh?"

Feferi nods and Sollux sighs.  

“Yeah, that's what I figured.”  He runs his hands over his face, raking them through his hair past his sharp double-set of horns, and then offers a tight little smile.  “At least I don’t wear it on my shirt, I'm not fuckin'—weird about it.  My sign's good enough for me, thanks. 

Feferi giggles.  I wish I could show you my sign, she writes, and hesitates, pen hovering for a second.  

…it’s a secret.

“Secret,” he repeats and arches one interrogative eyebrow.  It doesn’t work very well; she laughs at him and his skeptical frown cracks into a smirk.  “Well…okay, I guess.  Everybody's got a couple, right?”

You do?

“Of course I do!”  He doesn’t have pupils, but she thinks he might be rolling his eyes.  It really is a little bit disconcerting, trying to read his face when she can’t even tell where he’s looking.

Can I see one?

Sollux looks at her steadily for a long minute, and she stares back, barely even breathing.  Trust is hard for trolls, she knows that, it’s the same here as it is underwater, but...

“Here.”  Sollux turns abruptly and digs down into a drawer of his full desk.  There’s some clattering and rustling, and then he straightens up, and there’s a photograph in his hands.  He gives her a sharp, thoughtful look, hesitating, and then thrusts it out toward her.  “You want a secret?  Nobody else knows I have this.”

The troll in the picture stares blankly out at them and Feferi’s first thought is of the first picture of Sollux she ever found; this troll is also tall and thin-faced, his hooded eyes blank red and blue, his twin sets of horns arching above his head.  But he’s older, with the sharp, solid jaw and darker skin of a troll whose gone through second pupation.  His chin is proudly high, his hands spread and gloved in fingerless black.  He’s wearing an outfit almost like Sollux’s, but older-looking somehow; a long coat with wide sleeves, yellow-gold over his black undershirt.

“They called him the Ψiioniic,” says Sollux, and there’s a kind of awe in his voice.  “He was the best psychic there’s ever been.”  The word ‘psychic’ is a sharp hiss when he says it—a sort of buzzing whistle, and he clears his throat, biting his tongue as she giggles at him.  He holds this picture like she used to hold his; reverent and gentle, like it’s important to him, even as he shoots her a glare for laughing at him.  “He has my sign.  I always wondered—” he looks away, and his cheeks are suddenly tinted gold.  “I had this stupid wiggler daydream, maybe I could be his descendant.”

He glares at her as though daring her to laugh at him, but she’s smiling at him, eyes sparkling.  He smiles a little, almost nervous, and then wider as she reaches out and touches the picture as well.  

What happened to him?

Sollux grimaces.  "He went missing the night before the Suffering," he says, and takes the picture back, sliding it back into its envelope and hiding it away again, not looking at her.  "People tell stories.  I guess he was talking about debts, and deals, and then by sunrise he was gone."

Feferi would phrase it more tactfully if she could still speak, but she can’t.  Instead, she reaches up to her throat and draws a finger sharply across it.  Sollux blows out a breath, whistling between his teeth.

"Yeah, I dunno," he says.  "I mean, if he didn't get killed off then, he's gotta be dead by now.  If somebody culled him that night, he didn't put up a fight, and he could've put up a whole lot of a fight, y'know?  The psionics who were around said they heard a scream, or a shockwave, or something, but.  Who fuckin' knows."

There's a silent moment or two.  Feferi considers the tight, unhappy set of his face, and the sparks darting around his eyes, and then picks up her pad and writes, carefully, he sounds like a great ancestor to have.

"Yeah, well," says Sollux, like he doesn't want to be happy about that, but his ears flick and his chin lifts proudly.  "Maybe I'm not as good as he was, but do pretty damn well for myself."  He gives her a sharp, almost shy look, like he's not sure if she's going to let him get away with saying nice things about himself.  "You should've seen me at my power testing.  They gave me mind honey and this stupid fucking—mental block dropped for a second, and I blew the top off the hive.  If I didn't get these fucking headaches—"

His expression darkens abruptly, and Feferi shifts unhappily, uncertain.  He winced at the word headaches, and there are sparks darting around his eyes—worse, there's a bitter, angry twist to his mouth, all of a sudden.  She knows he has trouble controlling it, that he feels bad afterward, but it still hurts when he gets angry and frustrated and snaps at her over nothing. 

He doesn’t snap at her this time.  The anger breaks again, and he just twitches one corner of his mouth into a smile and slumps back in his seat.  

“You should see what I can do when I’m out of control though,” he says, and he sounds wistful and distant, almost sad.  “…I could take you flying.  Hell, I could let you lie on your couch and I could carry you around the city all day with my brain.”  

She presses a hand over her chest, only slightly over-acting an admiring swoon, and he gives another one of those surprised little laughs.  He never expects to laugh at anything, she realizes.  He hasn’t laughed in a long time and he’s so tired and thin and worn and…

And she pities him.

He’s still smiling, and she reaches out before she can stop herself and cups his face in one hand, running the pad of her thumb over that shaky, crooked smile.  He goes still, and she can’t see his pupils but she knows he’s staring at her. She bites her lip and starts to pull away her hand—

He grabs her wrist.

“No,” he says abruptly, his voice croaky, and he clears his throat roughly.  “No, it’s, uh…that’s okay.  It’s okay.”

And he reaches out and touches her back.

The touch of his hand on her cheek is a split second of glorious warmth, and he starts to say something—“…do you…?”—before he pulls his hand away, his face dark with yellow blood, and strides out of the room.

Feferi stares after him, and can’t call him back.

TR: Further back again.

TR: Further down again.

“I used to go by other names,” whispers the voice in the darkness, and the darkness writhes—two lights, one red, one blue, flicker on either side of the cave’s entrance, and their dim glow glints off hundreds of gold bracelets and rings, threaded through a mass of writhing tentacles.  “But now I’m just Her Abyssal Phosphorescence.  The Phosphor, to my…” she catches on the word like a private joke—“…fronds.  But you can call me the Sea Witch.  Now…about your problem…”

(You hold out the picture, explain, voice shaking, that you don’t want to live down here anymore, that you’re tired of being trapped underwater, that you want… could you maybe…?)

“Could I?  Oh, don’t worry,” two shadows peel out of the darkness; two mertrolls with the sinuous bodies of eels, their arms bent unnaturally behind their backs.  They watch with baleful, mismatched eyes; red and blind, blind and blue.  “…I may not be as royal as I used to be, but I can still turn that pretty tail of yours into something more suited to your…interests. We’ll find some kind of aray-ngement for you,” coos the Sea Witch, and beckons you with a smile like a shard of ice.  

“…Why don't you come inside.”

TR: Go forward.

TR: Go up.

They don’t talk much the next night.  If Sollux comes back at some point late in the morning, she doesn’t hear him come in, and he gets up and leaves before she’s awake.  She suspects he never comes in at all, and the tight, unhappy nervousness in the pit of her stomach sinks a little lower.  But that moment still happened, and she can’t be completely unhappy when she knows that; that he smiled for her, laughed with her, that he let her touch him and he touched her back and for now that’s more than enough.

She sits up for a few hours that night, and for the first time she plans.

A few hours later, she has wandered around to enough people in the building, paper in hand, and asked enough timid, polite questions that she has found someone who will take her where she needs to go.  She can’t sail a ship, but there has to be someone here who can, and she’s not…

…She can’t go and ask Sollux.  Her face burns at the thought.

“You need someone to sail you somewhere?” repeats a nice lady behind a desk, and frowns, thinking.  “You’re councilor Captor’s guest, aren’t you?  Then we should make sure you’re escorted by someone appropriate.”  She thinks for a second or two and then brightens.  “I think I know who to send with you.  He won’t want to go, but I think he’s the troll for the job.”  She sighs.  “He’s just always so stressed, and with the political climate the way it is…  But he needs to get out of the building and get some fresh night air.  Tell him it’s a mandate passed by the rest of the council.”  She leans back from her desk. “Councilor Nitram, can you come here please?  I need you to sign something!”

There’s a shifting of papers and a creaking chair in the office behind her, and an absolutely enormous troll leans into view from behind his own desk, blinking big, mild, deep-brown eyes at both of them. There's a piece of paper stuck on one of his huge, hooked horns, and a flushed brown spot on one cheek like he'd been asleep on his desk, and for all his imposing size and impressive hornspread, the mild, slightly melancholy look on his face makes him much less intimidating than he looked at a glance. Feferi likes him at once.

“Um,” says Councilor Nitram. "Yeah. Yes? Uh, an escort, right. It’s a good idea.”  He glances back over his shoulder at the door to one of the meeting rooms, and Feferi listens closely to the background noise for the first time and realizes that the faint sounds she’s been tuning out this entire time are the sounds of someone yelling at the top of their lungs, behind a thick door.  “He needs a, uh, a break.  Pretty badly.  I’ll pass it as a mandate if you want. That’s…um…that’s what you want, right?”

“If you would, sir,” says the woman, and rubs her temples.  “…I’ve been bringing him coffee all evening, he’s so wound up I’m surprised he hasn’t had some kind of breakdown yet.”

==>

==>

Two hours later, Feferi is out on the sea in a small boat with two bottles of wine and one Counciltroll Vantas—Karkat, he introduces himself brusquely. He’s shorter than her, stocky and angry, and he shakes her hand with a grip that makes her bones hurt.  His skin is boiling hot, so hot it almost seems to burn her skin—and unlike the other trolls, who she’s pretty sure Councilor Maryam takes pains to dress up nicely for the public, he's wearing thick black clothing all the way up to his chin and down to his wrists.  The only things he’s wearing that aren’t some form of black wool are a silver pin on his collar that Feferi doesn’t know the meaning of and an insignia that must be his sign sown on the shoulder of his jacket.

It has no color.

Feferi recognizes his voice immediately; he’s the one who came and found Sollux on the docks, the first time Feferi ever heard Sollux's name.  Karkat wasn't happy to be pulled away from what was apparently a very one-sided yelling match (his opponent had identified herself as the highest legal power in the country and tried to lick Feferi’s face by way of greeting), but when she held out the signed mandate from the other councilors he swore a lot very quietly and then rolled his eyes and followed her out.  

Feferi spends their voyage pointing wordlessly where they need to go.  Karkat can obviously handle a boat, even if he doesn’t seem too happy about it, and he growls at every wave and swooping bird and steers the ship a little awkwardly in the general direction she indicates.  The sea is calm after the storm that sank Sollux’s one-man sailing expedition; the sailing is smooth, and the voyage is quiet, except for the occasional quiet grumble from Karkat.  He looks preoccupied, and his eyes are very bright, even in the dark—red, but a strange, bright red that Feferi only catches in flashes as his eyes dart from the water to the boat and back to her face. 

The way she looks at her makes her feel like she's being looked right into, but whatever he sees he keeps his peace, expression never changing from a sort of distant, slow-burning anger just waiting for some way to express itself.

He keeps his peace, anyway, until he catches sight of their destination.

"Nope," he says, and immediately moves to turn the boat around.  Feferi jumps up and grabs his arm, and Karkat growls at her and smacks at her with a hot, hard hand.  "Fuck off!  No, I'm not going to the goddamn haunted island.  We're turning the hell around."

Feferi shakes her head again and smiles reassuringly.  Karkat does not look reassured.  Feferi holds out her hands, open and palm-up, that gesture that makes Sollux’s face go strangely blank when he sees it—it’s a peace gesture under the sea, it’s always been a peace gesture, but…

…Karkat’s breath catches softly in his throat and his face goes from pale to a strange, dark color that fades so fast she can’t distinguish its shade in the darkness.  He looks like she just punched him in the gills—although of course, he’s a landdweller, so he doesn’t have any.  

He raises his hands a little, like he’s going to reach out and lay them on hers, but then he just shakes himself and turns sharply away to the rudder again.

“Fine,” he says, and even his voice sounds shaken.  Feferi is suddenly afraid she’s upset him; he doesn't seem like the type to be easily unnerved, but his voice is much quieter and more shaken than she's heard it. Something about that gesture, people react so strangely to it up here...  “Fine then.  But there’s nothing out there but ghosts.  People went out and looked, back when I was a wiggler.”

Gamzee only came a few sweeps ago, Feferi knows, so that’s not hard to believe.  Nobody would want to stay in a place like that—make it their hive even—except someone as detached from reality as Gamzee.

Hm.

Feferi tugs on the sleeve of Karkat’s jacket, and pulls out her notebook.  Karkat rolls his eyes, but squats down to look over her shoulder as she writes out, painstakingly, there is someone there.

“Nope.”  Karkat says again immediately, and he stands up and reaches out to turn the ship around again.  “No, fuck no, I'm not doing this.  I'm not doing this!  This is horror movie bullshit 1-0-fucking-1, and you're shithive maggots if you think I'm going to—”

Feferi shakes her head emphatically. He’s alive.  (Karkat’s eyebrows rise.) He likes to be alone, that’s why he’s here.  (Karkat’s eyebrows twist up and drop low over his eyes in a scowl.)

“There’s some shipwrecked guy living on the haunted island and you knew about this and you didn’t get him the hell off of there?” He narrows his eyes, and even in the dark the red of them is so impossibly bright it feels like a hook in the gills, tugging inside her chest.  "Why."

He wants to be ALONE, she writes again, and underlines the ‘alone’ a few times, just to make sure he gets it.  He scowls some more, but thoughtfully this time, looking from the words to her face and back again, frowning in what looks like deep concentration.

“…So he’s some kind of...hermit or some shit,” he says slowly, “And you just  happen to know he's out here.  For some fucking reason."

Feferi nods diplomatically, and Karkat gives an enormous, gusty sigh and rubs his temples, mumbling something incredibly verbose and unspeakably obscene  Then he gives her another one of those looks, and lowers his voice from its perpetual angry growl.

“So I'm guessing you don't want me to tell anybody else he's out here either," he says. "That's why you're warning me. Right?"

That, and she doesn't want Gamzee to come down to try and make friends and get his head lopped off by accident. Feferi nods again, because it's simpler than trying to write all that out, and Karkat growls and chitters and grumbles to himself, arms folded tightly over his chest, a block of heavy black fabric against the darker night sky.  

“Fine,” he says finally, and glances up at the moon overhead, hunched into his shoulders with a tight, grumpy line between his brows.  “Fine, unless there's some sort of international interference going on here, which I honestly really fucking doubt, I won’t tell anyone.  Now, let’s get on with this goddamn circus act already, the night is getting old.”

TR: get on with the circus act.

Gamzee isn't sleeping in his ropes when Feferi steps shakily onto one of the shattered decks, and that in and of itself is unusual enough that it sets her now-nonexistent fins prickling.  It's so frustrating not to have any fins to flare.

She tugs on Karkat's sleeve again, scrawls on the paper and taps it at him.

“Gamzee,” Karkat reads out, and his brow furrows as though he’s trying to remember something as he mouths the name to himself, staring down at the paper.  “Gamzee…” He jumps as she nudges him and then, at her impatient, silent urging, turns to the shipwrecks instead, glaring around like he’s expecting an attack at any second.  “Gamzee?”

There’s no sound for a moment, and then, faint and weak, Feferi catches a tiny, mournful sound.  It’s like the cry of some small animal in pain, or one of the many birds roosting overhead; a reedy, wordless little sound.  

No, not an animal…more like one of the horns she saw in the marketplace…

Honk.

She nudges Karkat, who looks thoroughly spooked.  She can hear a tiny whirring sound and smell ozone as he opens his sylladex—or, more likely, his strife specibus, ready to pull out whatever he fights with at any time.  He looks much more dangerous silent than he ever does yelling.  

“Gamzee?”  He tries again, the unfamiliar name clumsy on his tongue, and the sound comes again, sooner and louder this time, still weak and shaky.  Honk.

“Where are you?” Karkat tries, although it sounds more like a threat than an invitation to any sort of civilized talk.  His blood is pounding under his feverishly hot skin, she can feel it through the thinner skin of his wrists.  “We brought wine, why don’t you come out here and—”

“…Too…late.”

This time Karkat really does go for his weapon.  Feferi jumps back and lets go of his wrist as a beautiful, deadly, razor-edged sickle flashes into his hand.  He holds it out like he knows how to use it, every inch of him vibrating with unhappy tension.  The voice came from somewhere under the dark canvas awning, in the deepest shadows against the mast that supports Gamzee’s weight when he sleeps.  It sounds like Gamzee, but it’s quiet and shaky, barely audible.  

Karkat reaches back into the boat, never taking his eyes off the shadows, and pulls out a dark lamp, squinting as he lights it with a quick flick of a match and the flame inside flickers into life.  Feferi has never been nervous here before, never afraid in broad moonlight, but she edges sideways into the little circle of golden light anyway.  There’s a kind of creeping horror in the air, like there are things watching her from every side that she can feel but not see.

And then Karkat squares his shoulders and raises the lantern into the shadows

and Gamzee lunges for his throat.

Chapter Text

Gamzee slams to a halt on the end of short ropes, gnashing his teeth and struggling like a wild animal, with Karkat’s sickle inches from his face.  He lets out a deep, rending, agonized groan that breaks into a howl, jagged with frustration and fury.  His eyes are wide and frenzied and Feferi realizes with a sudden jolt there are pale purple tears trickling down his face, mixing with dirt and rime and blood.  His hands are tied behind his back, lashed to the mast, his wrists chafed to bleeding as he throws himself against the ropes again and again.  There's blood and dirt smeared across his skin, layer upon layer of bruises and raw, bloody gashes.

“THEY KEEP MOTHERFUCKIN’ TALKING!”  Gamzee howls, barely coherent—gasping for air, panting and snarling. “MAKING FREE IN MY MOTHERFUCKING THINKPAN—” he shakes his head like he's trying to shake something away from him, finds Feferi's eyes in the dark and flinches away from her horrified stare.  "Putting whisper and want to me for shit a motherfucker never thought to think to motherfuckin' want.  Danagh hlfren túo—PUTTING A WICKED THIRST ON MY DRY MOTHERFUCKING TONGUE FOR YOUR SALT BLOOD, BEST MOTHERFUCKING SISTER OF MINE!”

Karkat bares his teeth in a nervy snarl at the sudden explosion of sound and Gamzee makes one of those tiny, pathetic honks again and then one of those horrible bellows, loud and terrible, and then falls back against the mast, shaking.  His unfocused eyes wander vaguely for a second as he pants, hanging forward loosely in his bonds, and then they focus on Karkat and he bares all his teeth in a smile horribly wide in his tear-streaked face.

“Brought a motherfucker to watch the show,” he says, and his head lolls back on his bony neck, his eyes falling almost shut.  “BROUGHT A MOTHERFUCKIN’ FRIEND, DIDN’T YOU?!  Lookin’ at me knowing me for some cullthirsty killmonger.  A MURDERIN’ MOTHERFUCKING HIGHBLOOD AND NOTHING BUT, MOTHERFUCKER.  Didn’t ever hunt out to go and steal life off some other poor motherfucker until those—fuckin', saachei motherfucker-ass piece of shit went clawing up in my motherfuckin' thinkpan.  You could trust in that eternal, CAN UP AND MOTHERFUCKIN’ TRUST.  No heir, me." 

He turns his eyes to Karkat again, and for the first time something about Karkat seems to waver.  His sickle drops slowly to his side as they hold each other’s eyes.

“Didn't go and seek and look for not a single motherfucking second of that,” says Gamzee softly, and there’s a heartbreaking look in his eyes, somewhere between resignation, anger, fear and longing.  “But they’re still all up and hivebent inside me. Aleire Saldheires, why’d they want to pull some wicked shit like that, bro?”  he laughs weakly, and then spasms around a snarl, his eyes flaring full of red rage and indigo madness.  “WHY’D THEY GO AND MOTHERFUCKING DO THAT TO ME?!”

And Karkat drops the lantern, walks forward like a troll in a trance, drops down on his knees right there on the deck in front of Gamzee, and lays a hand on his hair.

Gamzee stares at him, and even with his eyes still deep, wild red and Karkat easily in his reach, he doesn’t seem to know what to do.  Karkat looks up at him, pats his knotted, wild hair once or twice, and says, soft and firm and certain, “…shoooosh.”

Gamzee stares at him like he’s never seen another troll before.  Karkat lifts his other hand slowly and Gamzee flinches, then jerks forward, claws-first, then pulls away again, winning himself enough slack to claw up and clutch at his head, fingers winding through his hair.  He’s making the most horrible sounds, between snarls and sobs and screams and gasps, like he can’t get air.  Karkat just holds out a hand and lays it over one of Gamzee’s knotted fists, stroking his fingertips through the knots of his hair.

“Shooooshooshoosh,” hums Karkat, and Gamzee collapses forward against his shoulder and lets himself be held.

—

Feferi ends up steering the boat back to harbor, under hasty instructions from Karkat.  He’s sitting in the stern of the boat with Gamzee settled down in front of him, piecing together his fragmented story and patching up the worst of the highblood’s self-inflicted injuries.  After a few minutes of harried scolding, he managed to get Gamzee to open up his strife specibus; a pair of long, battered clubs.  They might once have had brightly colored stripes painted on them, but now they’re faded almost beyond recognition.  Karkat takes them away, but doesn’t captchalogue them; he leans them up against the side of the boat, where Gamzee can see them.  Gamzee relaxes a little further and for the first time almost manages a smile.

Karkat wrings more out of Gamzee in the first five minutes than Feferi ever knew about him at all. He’s a pure purple-blood, a bit more than eight sweeps old by Karkat’s reckoning, and these violent spells have happened every time he tries to go off his drink nd starts remembering why he went on it in the first place.  He’d grown up alone in a hive by the sea and then one day some adult trolls had come to his hive and told him he was going to be trained, that he'd been summoned to the Highblood capitol.  Talking about what he was trained for there makes him start to growl and shake again, and Karkat doesn't keep pushing—when Gamzee names the city, the religion he was part of, in that unfamiliar language he uses sometimes, it makes Karkat's ears flatten against his skull and his lips press into an angry, nervous line. 

"Dunno what there's even real to believe at now," Gamzee says finally, quietly, and pulls his skinny landweller legs up to his chin, wraps his bloody, dirty arms around them.  "Not like a motherfucker could go back to hive, not without paying a most mighty motherfucker of a painful penitence.  Tadaidh's no more for forgiving than his Messiahs are.  Doesn't make a motherfuckin' difference what a brother...wants to believe."

Karkat makes a quiet noise and leans forward in a fast, rough motion, tugging Gamzee's lanky, filthy body into his arms.  Feferi turns her face away, back toward the distant soft glow of the city on the horizon, and does her best not to listen for a while.

“I’m a danger to you,” Gamzee says finally, after a long spell of silence.  He sits back and sighs, a resigned little whimsical sound that doesn’t match the tight misery in every line of his body. “Oughta turn back and drop me off again, sister, I know they’ll come lookin’— If I head landside again, if not one single motherfucker can't keep their motherfucking shit locked down...”

“Who gives a shit?" says Karkat firmly.  "You can't just hide out on some pile of garbage in the middle of nowhere forever, and they're not going to stop looking for you, no matter where you go instead. Are they?  You're the Makara heir. The one they're trying to start a war over."

Gamzee hunches down at the sound of the name Makara, drawing his shoulders up to his ears.  He’s a huge mess of bony limbs and knees and elbows, but he looks much smaller gathered in tight and small with shame.  Karkat sighs again as though being the heir to a bloodthirsty clown-based theocracy is just a bad habit that can’t be helped and paps him between the horns.  

“Well, we didn’t kidnap you and now we have proof,” he says, and bows his head into his hands, thinking.  Feferi remembers that he’s the councilor for wartime affairs, and shivers a little at the numbers that must be going around in his head; casualties and losses and slaughter.  “There are people we have to talk to…I’m not the one in charge, there are a lot of us, but I’m not going to let them send you away.”  He says it with a kind of dazed certainty.  Feferi catches herself staring and looks away, scouring the horizon for land as Gamzee drops his head against Karkat’s knee and mumbles “…thanks, bro.”  

There is definitely going to be trouble over this, but for now Gamzee is finally calm and Counciltroll Vantas actually looks almost content.  Feferi breathes in the sea air and laughs softly to herself, with a sound like crashing waves.

—

TR: fast-forward to the trouble.

It’s late enough in the night that Karkat can hurry Gamzee through the back streets at speed, tugging him along as he tries to stare at things they pass with wide eyes.  Feferi does her best to hurry along behind, her legs wobbling with the stress, and they arrive at the consul a wet, dirty mess.  Gamzee looks interested, wide awake and now calm enough to stare around at the tapestries hanging on the walls and the portraits hung up over them as they hurry through the atrium.

And then Councilor Tavros Nitram sidles (sideways, minding his horns) through a door directly in front of them, catches sight of them and freezes in his tracks.

“Nitram,” says Karkat firmly, “If you panic I am going to chop off those stupid horns of yours and shove them into the first hole that opens.”

Counciltroll Nitram goes even more frozen somehow, with an expression on his face like he's not sure if Karkat means it or not.  Then he says, carefully, “Uh…that’s…  That’s a highblood, Karkat."

"Hey," says Gamzee, pleasantly.  Tavros stares at him, wary and confused, then looks back to Karkat.  He's not reaching for a weapon yet, but his shoulders are drawing up and his enormous horns are lowering in a very worrying way.  He's about as tall as Gamzee is, especially taking into account Gamzee's permanent slouch, but Tavros is much, much broader.

“Yeah,” says Karkat sharply, “That is a highblood, Tavros, ten out of ten for observation, job well done.”

“I…that’s not…” Tavros starts, and stops, clearing his throat, squaring his shoulders.  “I have to tell everyone he’s here, uh, Karkat.  I know you’re my friend, and you like helping people, but I am pretty confident that, everyone needs to know.”  He looks honestly upset at the scowl Karkat sends his way.  “Uh—uh, sorry.”  He smiles weakly.  “…I mean I’m not going to—um…what is he doing?”

Gamzee has stepped away from Karkat’s side.  He advances slowly on Tavros, who takes a step back and then sets his jaw and stands his ground, lowering his chin again into what would, on a hoofbeast, definitely be charging position. 

Gamzee doesn’t seem to notice the glint of fangs or the way Tavros is practically twitching with nerves.  He just reaches out and lays his hands on the counciltroll’s shoulders, looking him right in the eyes.

“You’re a good motherfuckin’ dude,” says Gamzee earnestly, and hugs him.

Tavros stands very still and looks completely dumbfounded.  Gamzee gives him an extra little squeeze that drives all the air out of his lungs, then lets go and nods.  “Yeah, bro,” he says peacefully, “You should get your shout on, let ‘em know I’m here.  Ain’t a thing should up and happen, walkin’ out and seeing me like that, it ain’t right.  Sorry.”

“I think he’s apologizing for scaring you,” Karkat translates, and pinches the bridge of his nose.  “Sufferer’s sake, Gamzee, you can’t just talk like a normal troll?”

“Honk,” replies Gamzee cheerfully, and apparently that counts as an answer, because he goes back to staring at the walls and ceiling with a look of vacant enjoyment on his face.  

“Just let them know I’m here,” says Karkat grimly, “…Calmly.  And you can just tell them that I have an unexpected friendly guest who'll be joining the meeting later.  Yes?”

Tavros nods, his eyes still fixed on Gamzee.  He still looks nervous—from what Feferi has seen it is very rare to catch him not looking nervous—but the edgy, threatening tension of his posture is smoothing out.  He turns back to the room he came from and slips through the door, with surprising grace and speed for his size.

“Come on,” says Karkat, and he glances back at Feferi for the first time in a while.  “I’m going to go and get this crazy freak cleaned up before I show him off to the rest of the council.  You better come too.  Don’t want Thollukth to see you looking like a mess.”

Feferi makes a sound stolen from a sea-bird’s surprised squawk, and then laughs, hiding her face in her hands. 

Karkat Vantas’s rooms are dark, with no hangings of any color that indicates his blood’s hue.  Everything is meticulously neat and orderly, and generally made in dark grey.  In a few places, there are simple designs worked into his property in the shape of his sign, always in plain silver-grey.  The only sign that anyone lives here permanently is a room that Feferi happens to glance into as she goes past; inside there is what looks like a tiny personal version of the ‘cinema’ Sollux showed her on one of their city tours.  There’s a projector and a surprisingly ratty couch and all around it there are stacks and stacks of film reels with…diamonds and hearts on them…oh, and the stacks on the other side of the room are spades and clubs—

Karkat reaches back and slams the door shut without looking, and Feferi jogs a little to catch up as he strides off down the hallway again.  

“Just a hobby,” Karkat mumbles, and Feferi covers a smile with one hand as he clears his throat a little awkwardly.  “…I can…show you some other time if you want.  Best movies in the city.”

She can’t tell him exactly how excited she is—it’s so frustrating not to have fins anymore, she can’t flare them up to show how enthusiastic she is, but she catches up and nods so hard her hair bounces into her face and she thinks she sees his scowl lessen.

Karkat stops at the door to what must be his ablution block, still tugging Gamzee by one arm, and stops, glancing back at Feferi.  “You can go and use Captor’s,” he says firmly, and Feferi giggles (babbling water on a rocky shore) and nods.  

TR: skip this tedious ablution business.  Get to the politics.

There aren’t really any clothes with Gamzee’s color on them, as would be traditional, and there definitely aren’t any with his sign.  He ends up in something golden instead, which look a lot like pajamas and which he seems to love.  They’re made out of silk and they puddle around his bony limbs like he’s wearing a tent, but he just keeps rubbing one sleeve against his newly clean, bandaged face and closing his eyes, enjoying the feeling of the soft fabric against his skin.  He’s still covered in bruises and scratches, but he’s dressed and calm and seems about ready to be civilized in the presence of the council, which, as Karkat grumpily says, will have to do, dammit.

Feferi brushes out her hair and gets a clean dress from the wardrobe that Kanaya put together for her, and by the time the three of them troop downstairs again she feels confident enough that she can hold her head high as they walk into the main council-room.  And she only feels her face heat up for a few seconds when Sollux goes straight to her as she comes in.  She thinks maybe he’s looking her over, making sure she’s alright, and she finds herself straightening her skirt self-consciously and smiling far more shyly than she meant to.  

“You were gone longer than you said,” he says, and there’s a trace of his habitual hiss to the ‘s’ that means he’s much more relieved than the calmness of his face betrays.  “What happened.”  He glances up.  “KK—Karkat?”

“We got a little bit sidetracked,” says Karkat brusquely.  “There’s a lot we need to talk about. It’s about the highblood situation.”

Instantly, all the tired faces around the table tense.  Tavros looks nervous.  Aradia Megido looks inscrutable, as calm as Feferi has ever seen her.  A tiny, short counciltroll with wild hair and wide, olive green eyes is twitchy in her seat, staring at everyone in turn and squinting especially hard and curious at the dark figure of Gamzee still hovering outside the doorway in the shadows.  Sollux looks like he’s about to have one of his headaches again, and his hair is rumpled where he’s obviously been combing his fingers through it all day.  The Justice who had sniffed Feferi when they met is still grinning her razor-toothed, inscrutable smile. 

“We went out to the haunted island,” says Karkat evenly.  There’s a variety of reactions—Aradia inclines her head a fraction of an inch, polite and neutral.  Sollux throws off a brief flash of startled sparks and then narrows his eyes.  Tavros glances over at Gamzee in the doorway and licks his lips, shifting uncertainly in his seat.  “…It’s not haunted, obviously.  But there was someone living out there.”

“I would assume that someone has information pertinent to the current highblood situation,’ says the Justice, and sniffs the air.  “Would that be the delicious smell outside the door?  Why, Karkat, it smells almost like…hm…” she looks at Karkat with blind eyes—an effect that would probably be more intimidating if she wasn’t looking somewhere above his left shoulder.  “…grape jelly.”  

“Awww, shit, do I so motherfucking smell like that?  That sounds delicious.”  

“Guys, it’s okay!”  Tavros starts, but Karkat’s voice cuts over his like a drill sergeant’s bellow.

“SIT DOWN!”

Everyone freezes, hands still rising to hold their weapons.

“Hey bro, ain’t no need to yell and get your fuss on,” Gamzee says soothingly, and he paps Karkat’s head a few times, a little awkwardly like he’s not sure he’s doing it right.  Karkat huffs in annoyance, but does indeed seem to calm down a little.  At least, his scowl ceases to bare teeth and his lowers his hands, leaving his sickles where they are.  Gamzee smiles down at him, and a ripple goes around the circle of watching faces at the transparent paleness of the gesture and expression combined.  “I’m—“

“Yes, he’s a highblood,” says Karkat firmly, before Gamzee can drop his name into the middle of the meeting like a bomb.  “A goddamn amaranthine, or whatever Nepeta’s stuck-up palemate calls them.  If you’re going to spew panic out of your blithering chitinous wind-holes over this, get it over with now.”

He gives it a long, ostentatiously patient pause, but everybody waits just as patiently, if a little tensely, and he gives a sharp nod and pushes on.  "He's plenty fucked up, but from what I got out of him, they tried to train him how to go blood-crazy and he freaked out and left."  He glances back at Gamzee.  "Yes?"

“Sounds about like a truth,” says Gamzee indistinctly, and rumples his own newly cleaned hair distractedly.  “Put some thoughts in my think-pan I ain’t never asked for to up and have.  But my brother gone strolled right on up and calmed me all the fuck down.”  He drops a hand on Karkat’s hair again, ruffling it with long, bony, scarred and calloused fingers.  “Ain’t that a motherfuckin’ miracle?”

“You’re…” Kanaya leans forward, eyebrows rising, and nods pointedly to the two of them. Karkat’s face goes a grimy, greyish shade of…something red.  Maybe he’s a rustblood?  “Is it official?”

“Yeah, I guess,” mumbles Karkat, but there’s something that looks almost like a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth out of his habitual frown and into a straight line that might as well be a bashful grin. The little olive-blooded troll with the horns like pounce-beast ears looks radiantly excited; she's smiling a smile that bares a lot of very sharp fangs, and her eyes are practically sparkling.  The others all look surprised or confused in various amounts, but they're also all smiling, and Feferi wonders, not for the first time, how long these trolls have known each other.

“KK, you were gone one night,”  Sollux says, and Feferi realizes with a jolt that he’s smiling too; that tight, sharp little sarcastic smile that means he finds something genuinely funny.  Karkat flips him off.  “Doesn't it usually take at least a night or two before everybody falls horns over heels for your winning personality?”

“As it just so fucking happens, it was my winning personality, Thollukth.” Karkat echoes nastily back at him, and waves his hands in the air as though to shoo away all further inquiries.  “Come on, there are bigger things to discuss right now than my pale quadrant, for fuck’s sake.  He's got a lot of information somewhere in his thinkpan, but the highbloods know he's gone and they're going to want him back.  If they find out he's here, we're up slurry creek without a bucket.”

“What do you mean, want him back,”  Sollux says, smile dropping immediately away.

“Irrelevant!" says Justice of the Pieces Pyrope.  "I still say the point of weakness is bluebloods, the ceruleans—we won't get anywhere trying to make the jelly-bloods lose their taste for war!”

“Seconded,” says the little olive-blooded girl immediately.  “Terezi’s right, the purrples aren’t going to stop fighting unless they know they can’t win.  And efurrybody in Equius's bloodcolor are so hung up on their stupid hemocats.”  She looks briefly confused, mouths the previous sentence again, and then amends, blushing, “…hemocaste. There's no way they're going to stop if the Grand Highblood still wants them fighting.”

“But the ceruleans are also tricky, and not in the straightforward way!”  says the Justice—Terezi—and slams the tip of her dragon-headed cane on the ground with a sharp click.  “You and I and all of us know the leader of their Eightfold Eight!”  She twists up her lip, broad smile turning bitter and strained for a moment.  “She will be harder to manipulate.  She is a Thief, after all.”

“Um,” says Counciltroll Nitram, and everyone quietens a little to listen.  “I don’t want to put Karkat’s new…moirail…in danger, but we could use him to, uh, to get leverage over the blue-bloods, probably.  I mean, if they like the hemospectrum so much…?”

“Mm.”  Aradia looked thoughtful.  “It's true, no matter what other plan we take, having…” she pauses, obviously giving Gamzee the opportunity to introduce himself, but he’s staring vacantly into space and doesn’t answer.  

“Gamzee,” contributes Karkat reluctantly.  Aradia nods.

“Having Gamzee on our side is a considerable asset.  But anything less than royalty can't challenge the weight of the entire theocracy.  Even if it could, by absconding, he exiled himself.  He would have to demand the return of whatever his original title was directly from the Grand Highblood.  I don't think he'd fare very well against the Lord of a Thousand Terrors, do you?”

“Oh.”  Tavros subsides, looking troubled.  “No.  Um, probably not.”  He glances over at Gamzee.  “Sorry, uh…Gamzee.”

Gamzee obviously hasn’t been listening at all; he jumps at the sound of his name, waves lazily and grins.  Tavros dares a slightly hesitant wave in return and an unsure little smile.  

“Don’t bother apologizing to him, he’s not even paying attention and he doesn’t care,” says Karkat harshly, and Tavros hastily goes from waving to scratching uncomfortably at the base of one huge horn, his eyes snapping back to the tabletop.  “Oh for fuck’s sake.  Nitram, don’t do the big stupid moobeast-eyes at me, I’m just saying there’s no point.  Now, focus.”

“What?”

All eyes turn to Sollux at the sound of his voice, but he isn’t looking back at them; he’s turned back in his seat to look at Feferi, who's tugging at his sleeve and holding out her pad of paper.

“You have an idea?”  Sollux asks, and Feferi nods, her heart pounding.  She has no idea if she’s allowed to do this by her contract, this could be betraying everything she grew up learning, but she can’t let this chance slip past.

If someone of an even higher color of blood than the purple ones was on your side, she writes, so hasty she splatters the ink, the words barely legible, would the blue-blooded ones bow out?

“Higher…than purple?”  Sollux shakes his head.  “There’s no such thing as higher than purple.”

“What?”  Gamzee sits up a little in his chair, looking confused, but Karkat waves him down.

“Talking about complicated stuff right now, Gamzee, just shoosh there.”

“But bro, we ain’t—”

“Shoosh.”

Gamzee subsides, and trades a look with Feferi as the council immediately starts to argue over top of them.  Feferi shrugs helplessly and gestures to her throat, shaking her head, and he makes a ludicrous expression of shock.  Feferi realizes that he may have only just understood the fact that she can’t speak, and resists the urge to bonk herself repeatedly on the head in absolute frustration.  She doesn't know how much she'll be able to write here, what they'll believe, when she doesn't even have any proof.  All she has to do is tell the truth; there is someone higher than purple, there is someone.  I’m the monarch, it’s me, I might be able to save all of you and…

“Of course, in the end you have a choice to mackerel.”

Sollux turns sharply at the little gasping sound of pain and then stands hurriedly, leaving the others to discuss as Feferi bends double, burying her face in her hands.  The face of the Sea Witch, Her Grand Phosphorescence, hovers in her mind’s eye, as real as if she was really there, white teeth bared in a vicious smile.  She still remembers that smile, that smile, like something from the sea’s bottom, all sharp teeth and hunger as she joked and laughed and named prices far too high to pay.

“I look forward to sea-ing your answer, princess…”

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?”  Sollux says, sharp with concern and nerves and exhaustion, and then falters as he sees her shoulders shaking.  "Oh, fuck, hey.  It was an okay idea, it just..."

If only it was as simple as when she was a minnow, upset because her advisors didn't listen to her wild ideas.  Feferi shakes her head and laughs mutely, because it's that or break down and start crying.  She can't deal with the horrible feeling of crying without tears again, not right now. 

“Uh…” Sollux coughs again, soft and awkward, and she realizes that he looks a lot younger when he doesn’t know what to say.  He’s not the untouchable diplomat right now, he’s just confused, twelve sweeps old and uncertain.  He reaches for her paper.  “Can you…?”

She nods shakily and takes the paper.

I’m not upset with you, she writes out, as soon as her pen touches the paper.  I just…

She trails off, because how is she supposed to finish that sentence?  I have to choose.  I have to.

I just remembered something sad, she finishes, and he gives her a sharp look, like he’s not convinced at all.  You should listen to Gamzee.

TR: Leave the princess to her thoughts.  Be the other guy.

She's not telling him the truth and he knows it, but there's not a whole fucking lot he can do about it right now either.  Sollux turns back to the table, rubbing one hand at the base of a horn and squinting through the bright, painful flashes of light that are drifting across his vision.  This is going to turn into a real bitch of a headache in a little bit, but there's not a lot he can do about it right now.  Not unless he was willing to let her touch his face and fix his broken brain in front of the whole council, which he's not.  There are matters of national importance to worry about here, his quadrants are the last thing they need to be discussing.

He tries to concentrate.  What are they talking about now?

Tavros is arguing against whatever plan was just proposed, on the grounds that there’s too much possibility for loss of life.  He takes his job as the councilor of Public Wellbeing very seriously and he does it very well and that’s really all there is to say on the matter of him being on the council.  There have been several elections where nobody has even bothered to step up as his opponent, and honestly Sollux is not surprised.  Tavros is probably the most well-liked troll in the entire country. 

Aradia is frowning, so it’s probably her plan that’s being argued down—yet again, not surprising.  As generally mild-tempered and polite as both Tavros and Aradia are, they clash frequently.  Aradia just hasn’t been the same since her…accident.  She seems to have completely forgotten how to care about casualties and losses, for one thing.  It's not exactly the end of the world, for their Councilor of Historical Precedent to look at things with a cold, logical eye, but somehow they clash anyway.  On an individual level trolls are dumb, panicky douchebags, and they can all go fuck off and die in a hole somewhere.  But Sollux's focus on Innovation and Advancement bleeds over into public wellbeing often enough that he still ends up arguing on their side every time. 

"Well, what do you suggest?" Aradia is saying, at the moment, frowning as much as she ever does, which isn't much.  "We can't just open our borders and give ground every time the highbloods make up an excuse to challenge us."

"I don't think it's an excuse!" Nepeta says, like she's been saying it while Sollux wasn't listening; she's got a fan of maps spread out in front of her, with one unfolded right in the middle showing the full extent of the border between warm- and coldblood territory.  "Look, I'm telling you, look at this—"  She points to slashes of blue, cerulean and purple along the wavering line of the border.  "These are just the purrtrols we've seen in the last dark season; it's way less than it was a sweep or two ago, but they're still invading on the roads you could take by foot, and guarding the crossing-pounce along the border—points, the points—  I believe them, that they're looking for somebody, even if they're using it as an excuse to claws trouble too.  It just makes sense!  And if Karkat's new meowrail left two sweeps ago, the times do match up!"

"But why would they care, though," says Sollux, irritably, and catches Karkat's sharp, angry glance in his direction.  Familiar, sizzling anger sparks up his spine, through his horns.  "Fuck off with that look, KK, you know I'm right.  There's not a lot of highbloods by they're not short enough on creepy murder-priests to give a shit if one skinny asshole flips off the handle and makes a run for it."

"Must be nice to be brain-damaged enough you can ignore blatant evidence when it's staring you in the face!" Karkat growls.  "Look, the Grand Highblood obviously gives a shit he's gone, even if you don't know why, so stop being such a whiny wriggler about it and look at this horns-on.  He can help us, but we need to find a way to keep them from finding out he's here.  They've got spies, and pan-breakers, if they find out we've got him they're going to tear our heads off and use our skulls to drink their horrible sugar drink."

"Then perhaps he shouldn't be here," says Terezi, very crisply.

Karkat's nubby, tiny horns lower like they're as big as Tavros's and his eyes turn into narrow red and gold slits.  "He can help," he says, and crooks his claws at his sides like he's ready to fight somebody.  Sollux isn't surprised, somehow, that the guy's just met somebody he's pale for and fallen horns-over-heels in one night—but it's really fucking inconvenient.  "He doesn't want to fight—"

"Then it doesn't benefit them to have him back, and it doesn't endanger us to return him," says Aradia, flat and steady.  "And if he is the one they're looking for, and their entire excuse for invasion is one runaway half-trained court priest, then sending him back to them—"

"No."

Sollux is tensing before he even processes where the word came from, sparks stinging at the corners of his eyes.  Karkat was already opening his mouth to protest, but it wasn't his voice—it was Gamzee, motionless in his seat in the corner, staring down at his bony bare feet.  His expression is frozen and blank, but his pupils are shrinking to thin, sideways slits in the burning purple of his eyes.  The yellow in them is going a dangerous highblood red. 

"Gamzee," Karkat starts, and his moirail twitches and looks up, still staring with that blank, thousand-mile look in his eyes.  Sollux has to force himself to take a breath; his nerves are electrifying, his spine is full of useless twitches of icy terror. Something is squeezing his mind, pressing him back in his seat like some kind of prey cornered by a hungry pouncebeast.  

“You don’t want me back at his side, motherfuckers,” Gamzee says quietly, and bares his teeth in a horrible smile—he doesn’t yell or snarl or even raise his voice, but the words ring like funeral bells.  “You don't want that at all.”

“Gamzee," says Karkat tightly, and Aradia holds up a hand at him, snapping his jaw shut so fast she might be using her powers.

"Why not?" she says, and Gamzee laughs, strangled and humorless.

When he stands up, it feels like it sucks all the air out of the room.  The shadows climb up around him and the pressure on Sollux's mind intensifies tenfold, squeezing and shrieking, dark shapes creeping in the corners of his vision.  The purple of Gamzee's eyes has eaten up everything else, no pupils, no angry red, just a tooth-aching, bone-searing purple that makes Sollux's horns ache to look at. 

"He'd make full use of me, this time," Gamzee says, and there's an arrogant, careless rage behind the words, sneering and savoring.  "He all but made his way in my thinkpan before I bolted, and I was a terrible sight to see, in his claws.  Strongest they ever motherfucking seen, caírei.  STRONGEST THEY MOTHERFUCKING SEEN. Not just pretending and showing off to make the dirt-bloods fear, I've got the most real and true motherfucking power hid away up in my thinkpan, JUST AS THE GRANDEST AND MOST HIGH HIM-FUCKING-SELF.”  

He tips his head slowly back, spreads his arms and closes his eyes, his voice shaking-soft again with a startling suddenness.  “…And even him, Messiahs told me I'd bring low, someday," he says.  "I was faithful once and gifts they gave me, made me to wield the fearful ways so I’m like to blow a lowblood’s motherfucking brain out.  BURST THEIR BLOODPUSHERS WITH THE WICKED CRUEL HARSHWHIMSIES.  The very fucking ways of my veins spell the map of Messiahs' mirth.  I see you, shalcel, dirtbloods, waiting for your doubled death, well HERE IT IS.  Do you see it--DO YOU SEE IT, WHERE THEY SET IT BURNING IN MY MOTHERFUCKING BLOOD?!"

The words ring for a second, echo down Sollux's horns and around his skull; it's hard to even think, they're so loud.  The room is full of high wailing, buzzing, soft laughter, screams of agony, the air flickers black and white and neon and for a second a highblood lord is standing over them, glittering with bloody finery, robes and hands and head and horns weighed down with ancient gold.  Reaching out a deadly hand with a hungry, empty-eyed smile.

“You don't want him to have his hand in my making, brother,” says Gamzee, almost gently, and the tension snaps like a wire.

Sollux blinks and gasps for air and realizes that at some point he fell out of his chair; he’s slumped against the side of the table, shuddering and icy cold all over.  He licks his dry lips, and there’s a trickle of sulfur-iron blood on his upper lip—his nose is bleeding.  Tavros looks dazed and numb, eyes wide and unfocused in his pale face.  Aradia has her eyes shut, taking deep, slow breaths.  Karkat…

…Karkat just got up and back-handed Gamzee in the face.

“Honk,” says Gamzee mournfully.  

“IF YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN I AM GOING TO TEAR OFF YOUR FREAKY PURPLE BULGE AND SHOVE IT SO FAR UP YOUR WASTECHUTE YOU WILL HAVE TO SWALLOW IT BACK DOWN AGAIN, YOU BRAINLESS PIECE OF SHIT!”

“Aw, bro,” says Gamzee, and raises his hands in surrender. “I was just up and makin’ a motherfuckin’ point.”

“You do not make points by screwing with people’s thinkpans, you enormous suffering bulgelicker—”

“But he did make his point,” says Aradia, a little shakily.  She turns her head a little to Nepeta, sitting next to her, and murmurs something.  Counciltroll Leijon is practically bristling, but she nods and pulls a few papers out of the stack in front of her.

Sollux would be sympathetic, except he’s too busy taking deep breaths and trying to calm the helpless tremors that are still running through his hands.  Highbloods aren’t supposed to be psychic.  Lowbloods are the powerful ones, the psionics, the rust-blood communers and telekinetics, Nepeta and her uncanny animal instincts that border on precognition.  There’s an electric storm of psionics boiling inside his eye sockets and lashing out at the inside of his skull, and he keeps having to remind himself that his body needs air—that he has to breathe in—good.  And now breathe out again.  Sweet.  Now, repeat.    

Their spymaster flips through a few of her notes and then hands some of them to Aradia, who looks them over with a cursory eye and then looks up at Gamzee, who is still doing his best to pacify his furious moirail while simultaneously being aggressively cared for.

“Makara.”

Gamzee looks up, Karkat goes stiff-shouldered with protective shock, and Sollux’s stomach turns inside out, all thoughts of calm completely forgotten.  

"I wondered," says Aradia, and flicks a hand; Gamzee's chair jerks forward and bumps the backs of his knees and he sits down abruptly, looking uncertainly from Aradia to Karkat.  Aradia pinches the bridge of her nose.  "I was expecting to have to trick you into revealing your identity, not be in the front row for...all of that."

She seems almost underwhelmed by the news; Sollux stares at her and then at the rest of the table, waiting for the panic.  He's panicking.  He's fucking panicking!  It was bad enough when Karkat just brought home some random purpleblood, let alone a highblood noble—the highblood noble, fuck.

"It does explain a lot," says Terezi crisply, and taps her cane sharply against the tabletop, a slow, thinking rhythm.  "Highbloods are tricky like that, except when they're not.  And this one apparently isn't!"  She snickers.  "No wonder they're so angry.  You must have given them a fuck-wild globes-out off-the-handle flip when you decided to bolt, Mr Grape Jelly!"

“That’s why we haven't seen them fur-ching for you in their own territory!” says Nepeta distractedly, and pulls out a set of scribbled notes that Sollux recognizes as more maps of highblood border activity.  They appear to be written in animal blood.  Some of them are on tanned hide.  “They know you ran!  They know that you haven’t been cat-nipped.”  She blinks, and then amends “…kidnapped.  You left of your own free will, and you’re a scapegoat, they’re just looking fur war!”

“Yeah, that sounds just about like a thing that happens,” says Gamzee, and his voice is neither the soft, dangerous murmur or the furious highblooded snarl.  A sort of lazy drawl seems to be his middle-ground, Sollux notes, and resolves that if he ever hears Gamzee start varying from that voice without Karkat nearby he is going to flip his shit and slam the highblood repeatedly into the ground until he stops groaning.  Screw his freaky psychic shit, highbloods aren’t supposed to be psychic.  That's the one of the few advantages that the lowbloods have always had; their numbers and their psychic abilities.  Then again, Makara made it sound like he was some form of freak.  A mutation, a genetic anomaly.

…just like the grandest and most high…

“Well then,” says Kanaya, and Sollux jumps.  He’d forgotten she was there.  She hasn't spoken more than a few words since Gamzee was brought into the room—then again, as cultural attaché, she doesn’t generally have much to say at wartime meetings.  “I would like to take this opportunity to formally welcome you to our city, Lord Makara.”

Gamzee stares at her, then glances over his shoulders a little guiltily, as though checking that there’s no other ‘Lord Makara’ present.  Then he raises his eyebrows and points to himself.  Kanaya nods kindly and Gamzee bursts out into ludicrous, honking laughter that makes his whole bony, stork-like frame shake and double up.

“Lord Makara!” He repeats finally, and then breaks down into another round of wheezing laughter.  “Naw sister, don’t up and get all respectful now, you were doin’ so good and all!”

“But the name ‘Makara’ has been associated with the throne of the highblood theocracy for hundreds of sweeps,” points out Kanaya gently.  “You are, in fact, the prince.”

Gamzee laughs so hard he falls over.  Sollux tries his best to keep a straight face, but Kanaya is looking so politely confused and Gamzee is lying on the ground kicking his big, bony bare feet in the air and Terezi is cackling in glee and even Karkat’s mouth is twitching at the corners, and somehow—maybe in the aftermath of the terror, maybe because nothing makes sense, maybe just because it’s been a long day—they all end up laughing.  

Everyone except…

Sollux turns to Feferi’s empty chair just in time to catch sight of the hem of her dress whipping out of sight around the door.

TR: Further down.

TR: Be the Witch of the Abyss.

Her slaves are curled up, sleeping, when one of them shudders awake—she feels it too.  Someone else who knows the princess’s secret?  Someone who could interrupt the entire plan, an addled mind, but shifting, strong, resistant, hard for her to slip into—she can’t control him directly, he’s not part of the spell, but he’s going to tell them everything if he isn’t silenced.

“What are you waiting for?”  she hisses, and they cringe, afraid of her anger.  “Do whatever you have to.  Stop him!”

Chapter Text

Feferi: Examine contract.

These are the rules.

You will have the legs of a landdweller, and sacrifice your voice in return.

You will fall in love with the landdweller and he will love you by the end of the bright season, or the deal is void and all winnings will go to Her Most Abyssal Phosphorescence.  

You will not be allowed to reveal your blood color or origin to him throughout your time as a landdweller, not through word or deed or blood or any other means.

You may, at any time, back out of the deal and return to your life as a seadweller.  There will be a withdrawal fee of whatever single golden artifact of the royal line the Phosphor chooses.  However if, by the time the dark season comes again, you have managed to make him flushed for you, you may also choose to change your blood to the same color as his, and become a landdweller in all aspects.  You will never return to the water, but your life and blood will change to match his in every way.

This transformation will be final.  

Feferi: Despair.

This was the trick.  This was the game the Sea Witch was playing, this is what she planned from the beginning.

The dark season is coming.

A choice has to be made.

Feferi sits on the couch in Sollux’s respite block with her knees pulled up to her chin as her thoughts spin round and round like a maelstrom.  Sollux is flushed for her, he as good as told her that less than a night ago.  He got embarrassed and he left only moment later but there had been so much pity there when he touched her cheek, and she remembers the way his voice shook, just a little.  She can choose—she can choose to stay here on land, with him, with his blood and his friends—she can try on dresses with councilor Maryam, watch those movies Karkat promised her, she can go out and see the wilderness with counciltroll Leijon and teach Gamzee how to act like a prince…

She can be with Sollux, for the rest of their lives.

But she’s not stupid, and she knows how that will end.  War is coming.  War is unstoppable now, held back by only that thin thread of hope, if there was someone…

…if there was someone of royal blood…

If she goes back to the sea she loses Sollux.  But if she stays on land with him she could lose him anyway; a bloody mess under a highblood’s murderous hands, a brain-dead wreck controlling machines of war far too massive and complex for one mind to bear, an unlucky death from a blueblood’s stray shot.  If she stays with him this city could fall into ruin, these people could be mercilessly slaughtered.

If he’s not flushed for her, she loses him.  If he is and she stays, everyone will die and she loses him.  If he is and she goes, the Phosphor takes her fee and Feferi loses him.

There is no choice, but she can’t bear to make it.

The door creaks slowly open, and she knows who it has to be even before the blanket rumpled on the couch slides up her shoulders with a soft crackle of sparks and wraps itself around her.  She pulls it closer with cold fingers as the psionics controlling it vanish, and hears Sollux stop in the doorway, hanging back in the shadows.

“We talked to Makara,” he says softly, “He tried to tell us something about you and he started..." he shrugs unevenly, uneasily.  "...Choking." 

Feferi sits up abruptly, worries forgotten for a second, but Sollux is already shaking his head.  "He's fine!" he says, "I mean, he's, uh, passed out, KK's pissed.  But he's okay."

The Sea Witch has ways of silencing whoever she needs to.  Feferi nods slowly, settling back.

"He did get something out though," says Sollux, and takes another step forward, uncertainly.  "I mean, just a name, but—are you Feferi?"

Everything she was thinking goes right out of her head.  Feferi stands up in a rush, staring at him, and Sollux goes flushed golden-grey as she steps forward into his space, staring at him.

"Feferi," he repeats, and she throws herself forward and kisses him.

His lips are warm and his teeth are hot and his skin gives a startling, sparking thrum under her touch when she presses against him.  For just a second he doesn't move to respond, and she starts to shift back, uncertain—then an invisible spark of force presses against her back and he pulls her closer with both hands and his mind, kissing her eagerly back.

It's a good thing he's already supporting some of her weight, because when he lets her go her treacherous landweller knees go watery and she almost stumbles.  When she looks up at him he's actually smiling, smiling for real, eyes wide and glasses sliding down his nose, and Feferi's bloodpusher does a weird throbbing beat out of rhythm as the gills she doesn't have anymore try to glub.

“Uh,” says Sollux, “Wow.  Yeah?  I gueth that’s—that’s—your…uh…I guess that’s right, then.”

She sighs and rests her head against one sharp collarbone, and he hesitates and then wraps his arms around her, patting her back uncertainly.  She sighs again, a breathless sound that would be his name if she wasn’t—

Wait.

She sighs again, not forcing anything, keeping her voice soft and letting his name ride on the breath like it’s almost an accident.  Yes, there it is again—

“Ssssllxxxx…”

He almost drops her.  She laughs, breathless—how can one night be at the same time the best and the worst in her life?—and holds on, pressing her forehead against the crook of his neck and squeezing gently.  His skin is so warm and almost like silk compared to the slick scaliness of hers.  She breathes out his name over and over again, overjoyed to finally be able to say it again, to say it to him, and he shivers a little and squeezes her close.

She knows what she has to do.

She stays there for a few endless minutes, breathing in the smell of ozone and metal and the sea, and then sighs and pulls away.  He makes a reluctant noise she wouldn’t hear if her ear wasn’t so close to his chest, and she giggles and squeezes him a little harder before gently but firmly pushing herself away.  

Time to take some royal responsibility.

Feferi: Put plan into action.

Sollux looks confused and a little hurt when she pulls away, but he brightens slightly with comprehension when she reaches for her paper and pen.  There’s so much she wants to say—but so many other things she needs to say, and she can’t express most of them on paper anyway.

She’ll tell him once she can speak again…if he even wants to hear it after he sees what she is.

You’re amazing, is the first thing she writes, and for a second it looks like he doesn’t know whether to go yellow with embarrassment and deny it or grab her and kiss her again.  He ends up just making a sort of strangled noise that might be “—I—you too?”

He’s so uncertain and confused and she has to stop thinking about this because it is not making it easier to plan how she’s going to leave him behind.  She clears her throat and leans over her paper again.  

I need a way to get to the ocean without being seen, she writes, and his brow furrows in that way that means he wasn’t expecting something at all.  He opens his mouth—to ask where this is coming from probably—and she presses a finger to his lips.  He shushes again, looking disgruntled.  Is there anywhere like that?

“There’s a place under the consulate,” he says slowly, “This weird cave, it’s got a tunnel or something, we figured it was some kind of old escape tunnel that got flooded.  Why—”

Feferi feels a sharp spark of interest, but shrugs it off—the fact that it's connected to the ocean and out of sight of prying eyes is the only thing to worry about now.  

Good, she writes.  I have an idea.  It could help you with the war.  

His eyebrows rise incredulously.  She shakes her head sternly and he closes his mouth again with obvious reluctance.

Please, she writes, every letter deliberate.  Take me there.

Feferi: Do what you have to do.

Sollux insists on finding as many of the other councilors as possible, and she doesn’t argue.  Better to have a lot of witnesses—she knows it’s likely that the others wouldn’t believe Sollux if he had to recount what’s going to happen to them with nobody to support the story.  It’s Karkat with the headache this time, shaking his head like he’s trying to throw something off, muttering to himself.  Gamzee is trooping along behind him, but sort of distantly, like he’s not sure he’s supposed to get close to anyone after the “brain-fuckery” at the meeting.  There are dark spiderwebs of burst blood vessels on his neck, and the beginning of a thin, livid strip of bruising.   

None of the other councilors look much better.  Sollux doesn’t say anything to Karkat about the headache, but Feferi catches psionic sparks nudging Karkat straight once or twice when his eyes are closed and he’s in danger of staggering into a wall.  Kanaya and Nepeta are both out—Kanaya to rendezvous with the Grand Highblood’s party in the daytime, when he can’t come out of his shade to slaughter her, Nepeta to watch from a distance and send back reports if anything goes wrong.  Tavros has been listening to people from the city petition and complain since early in the night and looks like he would honestly rather be wandering out towards the fields to spend some quality time alone than following his insane fellow councilors into the depths of the Consulate.  Apparently there's almost nothing more calming than sitting very still and listening to the thoughts of cows.

Sollux is just…

…quiet.

Feferi reaches out and her fingers trail across the back of his hand; he jumps and glances at her, tense, but relaxes a little when he sees the worried look she’s giving him.  He lets a few of his fingers uncurl and she hooks them with hers, invisible in the dimness of the deserted corridors they’re walking.

Sollux eventually leads the way to something that looks more like a closet than a real door, and shoulders his way unceremoniously through it.  The space on the other side does nothing to dispel the image of a long-forgotten cupboard.  Except for the fact that instead of shelves or cleaning supplies—although Sollux growls and kicks something away that clatters, unseen, into a corner—there’s nothing in there except for cobwebs, dust…

…and another door.

“Nice place,” says Karkat sardonically, and sniffs the air.  “Is this an escape tunnel?  I didn’t even know this thing was here, why does nobody ever tell me these things?”  He sniffs again, and then hazards, “…Leads to somewhere by the sea.”

“You do learn!”  Terezi says, delighted, and leans down to pat him on the head.  Karkat snarls and flails at her.  “And I agree!  Somewhere underground and full of seawater.” She gives Sollux a sharp sideways look—misses slightly, but it’s still intimidating.  “…This tunnel doesn’t lead anywhere,” she says, uncharacteristically serious.  “It's a dead-end cave.  Do you mind explaining why we need to go down here?”

“Hell if I know,” Sollux snaps, “It’s her idea!  I’ve been down there before, it’s a dead end, but she said she needed to get to the ocean somewhere nobody else could see us.”

Feferi giggles, giddy with nerves.  She can feel very every troll there looking at her sharply, judging the likelihood of a threat or a trap.  

Karkat is the first one to break the silence.

“Well hell,” he says grumpily, “Are we going down the weird hidden wall aperture tunnel or not?  If she wanted me dead she could have tried it without you stupid assholes around.”

The tension breaks.  Sollux laughs, a sharp, surprised little laugh, and then he leads the way down.

TR: Follow.

The passage down to the cave is dark and damp, but not claustrophobic at all.  It’s actually fairly spacious, with a simple, elegantly arched roof and ornamental pillars every few feet.  Every so often along the walls of the tunnel there is a rotted scrap of cloth that may have once been a banner, but whatever used to be displayed there is now completely invisible.  

And then they step out of the tunnel and into the cave beyond and Feferi gasps out loud.  

When she heard the room was underground, she had imagined a rough cave, the kind under the sea palace, full of crawling animals and fish with huge eyes that hate the light.  But even though this cave is many times smaller than some of those vast, dark pits, it feels much more spacious.  It’s a simple room, in the shape of a rough oval, and at the far end there's a broad, deep pool surrounded by a ring of soft sand; a modest but elegant portal from land to sea.  It should be dark, but it isn’t; the walls are streaked with what looks like some kind of plant, growing flat on the stones and glowing with little flecks of blue and green.  It gives the whole cave a beautiful, ghostly glow.

Feferi squeaks with delight and ducks past Sollux, running out into the cave and staring around.  She can hear the others coming out of the passage behind her—Gamzee says “Motherfuck, ain’t that all kinds of miraculous?” In an echoing stage whisper.  Tavros gasps and Terezi makes an interested, pleased sound, audibly sniffing.  

Karkat just grunts and says “Huh.”  

“Okay,” says Sollux behind her, and Feferi turns back to him, smiling brilliantly.  “Now, why are we here?”

Oh.  Of course.  They are here for a reason, aren’t they?  Sollux holds out her paper towards her, but she doesn’t take it.  She runs over to the water instead, and pulls off her shoes.  The stone is rough, wet and grounding under her bare feet.  

Now…how is she supposed to do this?

Whatever is going to happen, she’s probably going to have to get in the water, and she doesn’t want to ruin her clothing.  She hesitates for a second, but there’s no point in modesty now…when she transforms back she’s going to have to take them off anyway.  She settles down on the rim of the pool.

Sollux chokes.  Karkat and Gamzee are suddenly jostling and shoving at each other—Karkat’s face is as red as Sollux’s is yellow (what’s visible under Gamzee’s hands, anyway).  General abuse is happening, to the tune of Karkat’s rising yells of “Get the fuck off, I'm a grown goddamn adult—!!” and Gamzee vaguely suggesting that everyone turn around ‘so’s little sister can get her nude on.’  Terezi is making giggly insistences that someone tell her why it smells naked in here—although by the look on her face Feferi is fairly sure she just wants to make someone embarrass themselves by explaining the situation.  Tavros turned around so fast he almost fell over and now he’s sort of hunched up and pretending he doesn’t exist.  Feferi squares her shoulders, refuses to look at Sollux’s face, and starts stripping off her skirt.

The water is very very cold when she edges forward and slides her legs into it.  But nothing magical seems to be happening—for a moment she doesn’t think anything is going to.  Her heart skips a beat, then sinks, and she slumps forward and kicks her feet in the water, thinking about the quicksilver feeling of water sliding over her fins…

The water splashes up and clings to her—it spirals and curves up her legs, and she cries out at the scorching prickle of it as it wraps around her, so strange and alien after so long on land.  It’s like the tingling burn of Sollux’s sparks, like the agony that had lanced through her as her tail split into legs—she doesn’t dare to look down at her legs, but whatever is happening there’s yelling and noises of shock and fear coming from somewhere far away.

And then the pain slowly dies away, and she’s left lying on the beach, curled up tight, feeling her blood pound in her ears.  Her gills are fluttering in the cold air, and she's herself again.  

Karkat is muttering a soft but continuous series of swearwords.  Tavros’s voice says, in something that is probably meant to be a whisper, “—oh, my god, what.”  The others are silent, but she can’t bear to look at them to see their reactions.  

She looks up, and Sollux is staring at her, his eyes huge and bright in his pale face, his face slack with shock.

“Th-that’th—” he coughs sharply, and the sound shudders almost like he’s scared.  “That’sss—not possible!”

Feferi reaches out to him and he jerks back with a jumpy little whine he’s surely not aware he’s making.  He’s panicking, she can see that and she understands, but it still hurts.  She tries to say something—it comes out as hissing surf.  Her voice must be collateral.  She hasn’t broken the deal yet, not officially.  But nobody else is moving to comfort Sollux, and he looks like he’s about to have some kind of breakdown…she tries the trick she tried before, sighing out his name, letting it be carried on the sound that comes out, and it’s there, barely audible—“…sss…lxxx…”

He jumps a little, and then takes a deep breath and looks at her again, meeting her eyes and holding them with his own pupilless gaze.  He seems to get a hold of himself, slowly, and takes another few steps forward, looking down at her.

“That’s not possible,” he repeats softly, and he kneels down slowly as she props herself up on her arms, feeling the sinuous slide of having one long, silver tail again.  It’s an amazing feeling, so simple and elegant, but at the same time she finds herself missing stumbling, week-kneed, complicated, ridiculous legs.  She’s become such a landdweller…  “You’re…impossible.”

She shakes her head, and her tail slaps in the surf, water splashing.  

“It smells as though our shipwrecked girl has been eaten by a giant fish,” says Terezi, and her voice echoes around the cave, shaking off some of the numb disbelief in the air.  “But since nobody is rushing to slay the beast and our local skeptic is freaking the fuck out, shall I assume that something even more exciting is going on that I am missing out on?  Someone please explain!”

“She just turned into a, mertroll?”  Tavros says—he actually seems the least freaked out.  Feferi remembers Sollux’s brief introductions of each councilor, and wonders if there are fairies out there as well.  She’s never heard of them, but for his sake she hopes they’re just hiding, like the seatrolls have always been.  “Like, a real one, with a really very pretty tail?  And she has taken off her shirt also.  That is, a thing that happened.”

“I got that,” says Terezi, and giggles.  “I smelled Councilor Appleberry-Blast turn into Councilor Mustard-Cheeks!  A real mertroll, you say?  Fascinating!”

Feferi is beginning to understand Sollux’s assertions that he is the only sane troll on the council.  

“So you can change from the one to the other?”  Gamzee drawls, and he kneels down to get on her level.  She is grateful for the gesture—she never realized how disconcerting it is to be surrounded by long legs and to only be able to prop herself up on her arms.  “Sis, what did you go and tangle yourself up in, huh?  What did you all get your bad self up to?  I ain’t never felt something like what pinched off my motherfucking squawk blister when I tried to talk on you to them.  Closed my airpipes right up like voodoo.  You’re in the motherfucking wicked shit with this one, huh?”  He produces her writing pad with a flick of his hand, and tucks a pen behind her earfin.  "There you go, sister."

“Wait, back up,” Karkat growls.  “You knew about this?!  You knew she usually has a tail and you didn’t mention it.”

“Well if a sister wants to up and get her walk on…” starts Gamzee slowly, and Karkat groans and rakes his fingers through his hair, leaving it even more roughly tousled than before.  

“That’s the kind of thing you mention, Gamzee,” he mutters into his hands.  “That’s the kind of thing you fucking mention.”

“Whatever you say, bro,” says Gamzee placidly.  “Kind of had my pan all mixed up for wanting a drink, y’know, everything’s real clear and kinda blurry all the same time and my horns getting their motherfucking ache on…makes a brother forgetful.  And folks like she's got her owe to, seems like I'm no more allowed to flap my jaw about it than she is.”

“That—” Karkat growls, but shakes his head, dismissing the topic. “What folks?  What do you mean, owe?”

I had to find Sollux, she writes, and tries to look anywhere but his eyes as her face starts to burn.  She can tell she’s blushing—really blushing, like her body is making up for all the lost time where she couldn’t express her embarrassment by turning bright fuchsia.  I made a deal with the Sea Witch that I would trade my tail and my voice for legs, but if I stay this way

“The Sea Witch?”  Sollux repeats, and his voice cracks a little bit like he’s not sure if he’s going to laugh or not.  “But she’s just—a story, a story to tell wigglers to get them to go to bed on time—”

Feferi looks up at him pointedly and flops her tail in the shallows.  He falls silent again.

“Oh my fucking god,” Karkat mutters, somewhere in the background.  “…if we survive, somebody has to make this into a movie.”

“And where are you going?”

Aradia hasn’t spoken since the transformation.  She looks almost distant now, her eyes strangely luminescent in the reflected light from the surface of the pool.  Feferi hesitates and then, slowly, lowers her pen to the paper again.

I have to go and break my deal with the Sea Witch, she writes.  I can change from my tail to my legs as long as I can’t speak.  But I’ll need to speak.  So I have to go and pay her whatever gold she wants from the palace and have her make this permanent.  I swear I’ll come back after that. She smiles at all of them, and she has to bite her lip to keep in the half-sob that threatens to burst out of her.  She’s only known them for a little more than a week, but already the thought of leaving them is almost unbearable.  I’ll be back to help you fix things.

She lays down her pen and her paper on the dry sand, and looks up at Sollux.  His face is utterly blank, but his hands are clenched at his sides, shaking—she pulls herself up as tall as she can sit on the sand and takes on of his hands in hers, pulling him down to kneel on the sand in front of her.  

Nobody makes a sound as she kisses him, then pulls back and strokes his cheeks gently with hands that are already cold as the ocean.  She can’t bear to open her eyes; just feels the warmth of his skin against her palm and then starts to turn away—

“Wait.”

She opens her eyes, and Sollux is staring back at her.  He reaches up and takes the hand on his cheek, squeezing it in one warm hand.  “…I…I’m going with you.”  

Feferi shakes her head immediately, pulling away, but Sollux presses forward, ignoring the water lapping at his knees. 

“I’m going with you,” he repeats, more firmly.  “This isn’t just me being clingy and stupid, I have to go with you.  The fact that I’m going with you is an immutable fact that I’m stating for the record.  It doesn’t mean that clinginess is what’s taking place here.”

She laughs a little, softly, and shakes her head again, turning away and starting towards the water, but he follows her, raising his voice.  “No—Feferi.”  He grabs her wrist—pulls her back into the shallows, not seeming to care as the cold water soaks his boots.  “Listen to me.  I…I heard something, okay? A voice.  I think you’re going to be in trouble down there, I'm not gonna sit around up here waiting up here for you.  I’ll go crazy.”

She shakes her head and starts to pry his fingers off, but he tightens his grip and bares his teeth at her, nervy and desperate.  

“I heard someone yelling,” he says, quickly and quietly.  “I heard somebody yelling your name, telling you to run away.  They sounded terrified.  Okay?  Someone you know is going to die soon, I heard them, and it could happen while you’re down there and…and I haven’t heard your voice yet, but I could—any second, I could hear—”

He stops, and his hands are trembling as he drops Feferi’s wrist and covers his eyes with one hand, breathing slow and deep.  Feferi looks back at him for a moment, wide-eyed with pity, and then she pulls herself up in the water, cups his face in her hands, and kisses his forehead.  

“I can keep the pressure off with my psionics,” he says, his voice barely audible.  “I can keep pulling air down from the surface, I know I can.  Please.”

She hesitates…

…and then nods.

TR: to the sea floor, quickly.

It’s not as deep as Sollux imagined when Feferi told them she was going to the bottom.  The moonlight and the remnant of the sunset are still visible when Feferi stops in the water and points down into the depths.  There’s a high spire of underwater mountain standing tall on the sea floor, looming out of the depths, and built on and into it…

The castle of the sea-kingdom is big enough to put the entire lowblood capitol in its shadow.  It looms up, clearer and clearer as they get closer and closer, and what looked like pits in the rock are suddenly windows, and what looks like spires of water-worn stone are towers.  The place is enormous.  There are guards with flashing silver and blue and purple tails swimming slow circles around the base of what looks like the central keep, but the rest of the palace is left unguarded.  Sollux glances up at Feferi and sees that her face is pale and her mouth is a tight, straight line of worry.  Shit, there are supposed to be a lot more guards than this, aren’t there?  Normally he would be glad it’s going to be so easy to get in, but Feferi is obviously worried stiff about the rest of her people and he would have to be a complete ass to not be worried for her as well.

She pulls him a closer suddenly, wrapping her arms around his chest and holding on tight, and before he has time to so much as wonder why they’re rocketing forwards through the water, straight through one of the open gap-in-the-rock windows.

She lets go of him in the hallway inside, and Sollux stares around and sees…a fairly normal corridor.  The walls are smoothly polished rock, the roof is high and arched and has carvings on it that look like they’ve been there for years, and there are little drifting lights attached to the rock at regular intervals, like the lamps up on the surface.  

Feferi lets him look for all of thirty seconds, and then she grabs him by the hand and takes off down the corridor, making turns and opening doors and going up sloping paths apparently at random. She swims so fast he can barely pull his air bubble after himself fast enough; he tries to keep track of where they’re going and where they’ve been and then stops hastily as the blurring walls and lights stir nausea in his guts and pain behind his eyes.  

They come to a halt so fast he almost slams into her, and then she lets go of his hand and he has to do some undignified flailing to stay upright in the water.  It’s only when he finally stabilizes himself that he looks up, and realizes why they’ve stopped.  

They’re in front of a truly massive pair of doors, covered in colorful designs that he realizes suddenly are formed out of coral.  It’s been grown in patterns on two huge slabs of stone, kept neatly in the lines of its pattern, forming two huge, curved lines and one sharp crossbar in rich, bright fuchsia.  The doors are at least twice as tall as he is, but Feferi swims straight up to them, puts a hand on each door, and pushes, hard.  Muscles work in her arms, and holy shit, even with the water making it easier she shouldn’t be able to open those all by herself, what’s even wrong with highblood muscles?

Feferi looks back and notices him gaping at her.  She giggles—a strange little underwater hiccup through her gills that makes a sound like glubglub!—and then reaches back and pulls him gently forward through the doors and into the towering room beyond.

The room is massive.  The ceiling is arched, the walls are polished almost smooth by the water and the pillars of stone around him are covered in coral.  As he watches, a fish darts out of a hollow in a growth of something thin and frilly-looking and stares at him with goggly eyes.  At the other end of the room is a huge throne, and hanging over it is a gleaming, golden, double-ended trident.  

Feferi glubs through her gills again and lets go of his hand, darting forward to take the weapon and examining every inch of it with careful hands.  She spins it expertly, weaving and jabbing and blocking invisible blows until she seems satisfied that she can use the weapon.  Then there’s a soft pop and it vanishes into her strife specibus. 

She swims back to him and smiles, and he gives her a look that's probably more impressed than is strictly dignified.  She gives him a critical look in reply, and reaches out to measure the skin of air wrapped around him with her hands.  It’s wearing thin—the corridors of the palace are hard enough to navigate mentally, let alone while maintaining an air bubble and trying to focus on what’s in front of him at the same time.  

Feferi considers him for a second, and then floats back a bit and gives him a little gesture that clearly means ‘stay where you are’.  He nods, sinking back into the crevice behind one of the enormous pillars, and she smiles at him briefly before her tail flicks through the water and she’s gone. 

He waits for about five minutes in the dark water, and concentrates on pulling bubbles of air down from the surface.  Air is biddable, easy to manipulate, but it doesn’t like to come down this deep into the water any more than he does, and he’s halfway through coaxing another bubble down to the window they came in through when the rumbling starts. Something fizzes in the back of Sollux’s brain, and he just barely has time to shut off his psionics and block as much of his mind as he can before a great blast of some kind of power he’s never felt before rolls through the palace, setting all of his nerves on fire and making the windows shake.  Then there’s more grinding rumbling, and then, abruptly, the window he was trying to bring air through seals shut, completely airtight.

For a minute he panics.  Considers sabotage, betrayal—hates himself for it for a second and then moves on to considering his imminent death and how screwed he would be if he tried to blast his way out through the ceiling—

…isn’t…isn’t it getting closer?

He stares for another few paralyzed seconds before his brain can comprehend that no, the ceiling is not dropping towards him.  It looks like a rippling mirror, it’s sinking really damn fast and it’s the water, the water is draining out of this room.  

He kicks off the floor, wearing the last of his air bubble like a shield as the first drops of water start to leak through it—god that’s cold—and breaks the surface with a slap of damp air that makes him gasp.  It’s a little stale—smells like salt and wet stone and there’s water pouring down the walls and raining off the ceiling but he's breathing air and that is good enough for him.  He lets the water level carry him slowly back down to the ground, until he’s standing in chest-high water and the draining stops.

The doors grind further open behind him, and Sollux starts to turn, grinning, full of questions about the mechanics of—

“PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE FUCKIN’ AIR.”

Sollux sees a gun and a snarl and doesn’t even think before he lashes out.  The seadweller flies halfway out of the water and splashes back down twenty feet away, but he recovers quickly; flips under the water and comes up aiming his gun at Sollux’s face.  It’s a deadly looking thing, pure blue and heavy-looking, but the seadweller hefts it one-armed.  He’s bare-chested, but wearing enough gold to buy half a city.  Necklaces, rings, chain belts and even a few gold piercings glinting on the flared fins that almost hide his ears from view.  He has wavy, lightning-bolt horns, also heavy with gold, and eyes with such huge pupils they’re practically jet black.  And he’s wearing…glasses, which are surprisingly normal, with thick black frames and one cracked lens, and they make his black eyes look even bigger, feral.  Around the rims of his pupils there are rings of what look like pure purple, even purer than Gamzee’s; when he snarls, his teeth are white, even triangles like a shark’s fangs.  

“How did you get down here?!  What have you done with Ψdon’s Entente, you split-legged little freak a nature?!”

“Get that thing out of my face,” Sollux snarls back, watching the glowing tip of the rifle warily—he’s taller, but judging by the rumors about highbloods, the carefully banked strength in Feferi’s movements and the caution Gamzee used to touch the lowbloods, this guy could probably kill him with his bare hands.  Sollux can’t release a full power blast, not down here—if he breaks whatever seal is keeping the place airtight he’s dead.  “I’m here with royalty, and I don’t even have a strife specibus, let alone a strife specibus with space for freaky two-ended tridents!  Step off!”

“Then how did you know what it looks like?”  Snaps the seadweller, but he doesn’t wait for an answer, just switches to a two handed grip and takes aim—

—and jerks the barrel up his rifle sharply upwards as a flash of pale skin and dark hair comes between them like a lightning bolt.  Feferi’s eyes are wide and her gills are fluttering as she pants, but she still draws herself up in the water, spreading her arms defensively between Sollux and the seadweller.

Feferi: Mediate.

Eridan looks absolutely murderous.  Feferi has seen him angry before, but there was never this element of panic to it—he looks seconds from completely flying off the handle.  His fins are flared up in shock and panic as much as in challenge and fury, and he stares at her like he’s seeing a ghost before Sollux moves behind her and his gun snaps up again, pointing past her, trying to get a clear shot.  

“MOVE!”

Feferi shakes her head—the spiny fin on her own back is rising at the tension in the air, and Sollux is snarling, sending little jolts through the water.  It’s like being trapped between a huge, angry electric eel and a furious shark.

“I can take him,” Sollux growls—dammit, she had been counting on him to be the rational one, but there’s an edge of prickly snarl to his voice, almost boastful.  If they're flirting, she's going to stab something.  “Feferi seriously, just—”

Feferi bares her teeth at him over her shoulder and he looks taken aback—of course, he has no idea this is her oldest friend, no idea how well Eridan has taken care of her over the years.  She turns to Eridan and snarls as well, because he has no idea either—he snarls right back and jerks the tip of his gun, like he can order her to move if she doesn’t want to.  She shouts back at him—something that would be “NO!” if she could still speak.  It comes out an angry, mute screech, and he bristles.

“I’m here with her permission—!”

“Gonna fucking kill you what did you do to her—?!”

”If she wanted me shot and you blasted out of the water she’d be moving, but since she’s not—!”

“HE’S A DROWNER, FEF!”  Eridan howls at her, and the air crackles as Sollux snarls “Don’t you yell at her like that you slimy piece of shit!” and Eridan roars and starts forward, his hand on the trigger of his rifle— “GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN WAY—“

Feferi pulls out Ψdon’s Entente so fast it’s a blur and in the space of a second there are needle-sharp spines of gold pointed directly at Eridan’s throat.  Sollux starts forward like he’s going to attack as well; Feferi half-turns and jabs the weapon warningly towards him and he backs off, looking from Eridan to Feferi and back again.

“Fef—” starts Eridan, softer, “…why—?”  His eyes flicker from Feferi's face to Sollux's, narrow--and then widen.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and his rifle drops to his side.  “Oh my god.”

Feferi doesn’t drop her weapon, but she lowers it.  She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes out; just the faint sound of bubbling water.  Eridan is staring at Sollux like he’s seeing a ghost, his face strange and pale.  “You seriously found him,” he says weakly.  “You were landside, this whole time?  With him?" 

He's lowered his gun, but Feferi has never seen him this distraught before.  He keeps starting to say things and then stopping, catching on breaths, his gills fluttering under the chest-deep water.  He’s practically hyperhydrating, his hands shaking on his gun.  “I—I never stood a glubbin’ chance, did I?  You wanted to go up there so bad and here I am just thinkin’ it’s some phase like a chump—you know what he is for you?  What he means?”

There’s a single painful second, where it looks like he isn’t going to be able to finish the sentence, but when he looks up he almost manages something like a horribly crooked smile.

“Hope.”  He says softly, and there’s something in his eyes that makes Feferi jerk as though to reach out for him…then stop.  “It’s fuckin’ hope, Fef.  Goddammit, that’s exactly what he is for you an’ don’t try to deny it, it’s my aspect, I oughta know.  Fuckin' idiot—”

“And who are you, athhole?”  Sollux snarls back, the words slipping and lisping.  His eyes are glowing with uneasiness in the cold, salty, recycled air, and the delicate, filmy crest along Eridan’s spine rises sharply with tension and anger.  They aren’t circling each other and glaring or raising their weapons, but they might as well be.  Sollux is in an underwater palace he would've sworn doesn't exist, facing down a creature that's supposed to be nothing but a myth.  Eridan is being threatened and outdone in his own palace by a creature he's always thought of as beneath him.  And Feferi knows both of them well enough to see that Sollux is so far on edge his feet are barely on the ground and Eridan’s finger is twitching on the trigger of his rifle.  She rushes forward and lays a hand on Sollux’s shoulder.

Sollux seems to slump a little at the touch, and some of the fighting tension goes out of him.  He bares his fangs at Eridan, and Eridan snarls back, all black shark eyes and sharp white shark teeth, but flinches back as Feferi glares at him.

“…Eridan Ampora,” says Eridan, with a kind of nasty courtesy.  Upright in the water he’s a few inches shorter than Sollux, but also a lot less skinny and wiry; Feferi is all-too-keenly aware that he could snap a landdweller’s neck with one hand, and she keeps her weapon in her hands, making sure to watch both of them closely.  Eridan’s practically vibrating with offended royal dignity, and Sollux is wearing the expression he puts on for his speeches to the council, his back pulled almost painfully straight.  “Prince regent a this motherglubbin’ kingdom, pissblood.  An’ I know your name, much as it pains me to say.”  

“Oh, a monarchy,” Sollux sneers, and Eridan bridles, affronted at the disgust in his voice.  “We haven’t had a monarchy since the dark ages.”

“The dark ageth?”  Eridan repeats, mock-horrified, and smirks.  “Thorry we offend your delicate thenthibilitieth, landdweller—”

“You—”

Feferi smacks Sollux hard in the face.  Eridan has time for one loud HA! Before she storms up to him as well.  He stops and holds his hands up, but she just reaches out and removes his glasses gently with one hand.

Then she winds up and smacks him so hard he half-spins in the water. And she starts yelling.

At first it’s just glubbing, but the more she shouts and the louder she gets the more the room echoes with the sound of the roaring sea and ships crashing and gulls screeching.  She’s slowly turning fuchsia in the face with anger; Eridan tries to get a word in edgewise once, holding his cheek as it turns purple where she slapped him, and she makes an expansive gesture that makes him cringe, chagrined.  They boys glance at each other, eyes wide with a sort of numb, shared confusion, before Feferi makes one last sound of absolute frustration and then finally goes quiet, fills fluttering in the water as she pants.

Eridan is the first to recover.  He looks significantly less tall and menacing with a livid handprint on one cheek and his fins drooping in embarrassment.  “Fef…” he says, a little more quietly, “He’s a landdweller.”

Feferi spins around, and for a moment she looks like she’s going to hit him again.  She draws back a hand, but Eridan just looks back at her, the picture of helpless contrition, and she hesitates, and then drops her hand.

Somewhere off in the distance, something rumbles.  Sollux flinches as something jolts through his mind, and then is gone again, leaving a sudden stab of pain behind.  Feferi catches the movement and hurries over to him.  Her hands are cooler than ever on his skin, and there’s that familiar, soothing feeling of water breaking over him, washing away the agitation in his skull.

Eridan makes a tiny, miserable sound and Ahab’s Crosshair’s vanishes from his hands, disappearing back into his sylladex.  

“And you’re flushed for him,” he says, almost to himself.  “Wonderful.  A hundred happy sweeps, an’ all that whaleshit.”  Another deep rumble, and he glances up, his brow furrowing.  The change from Eridan Ampora to Prince Regent is almost visible; he shakes off the defeated slump to his shoulders and one hand rises, ready to go for his weapon at any moment.  “…dammit.  Something’s up.  Fef, stay here, we can talk when I’ve sorted this out.”

He starts toward the door—then stops again, glancing back.

“…I’m happy to see you,” he says quietly.  “I’m glad you’re…okay.  You know that, right?”

Feferi nods, and he flashes a white-toothed, shark-like smile and then vanishes out the double doors and into the palace corridors beyond.  

Sollux: Lament.

Shit, shit shit.  That wasn’t just a random guard, was it.  

The headache is gone, but Sollux rubs his temples with chilled fingers anyway, just for something to do with his hands.  Feferi turns back to look at him and gives him a look that’s pure wordless apology, and he shakes it off.  

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and she looks surprised.  “He was…like…a friend, right?”

She nods, and glances at the doors, her mouth twisted up tight with worry.  He’s really missing her paper and pens right now—he wants to know about the look on Ampora’s face when he said ‘flushed’, and about the trident that apparently is famous enough to have a name and hang above the throne.  And how and why the whole palace can be airlocked and drained.  And what she’s planning to do next.

He doesn’t have a chance to ask.

The rumbling comes again, louder this time, and the same power that sealed the palace rolls over them again—something wails, far away, something that sounds like an alarm.  There’s a distant rushing sound, like a cup filling with water, Sollux’s ears pop, dying voices wail inside his head and the doors of the throne room slam open—

Sollux has the space of a split second to take a deep breath and then the sea water hits him like a huge, icy fist.  A body tumbles past him on the sudden surge of water, trailing violet blood after her, and slams into one of the ornate pillars.  Sollux’s eyes burn with the familiar sting of salt and then the cold hits him and his whole body seems to seize up.  The deep–sea water is so cold it feels like it’s boiling his skin and stabbing him with tiny needles, and it presses on all sides at once like it wants to squeeze him out of existence.  Salt rushes into his eyes and up his nose, fuck—people are dying somewhere, people are dying with brief, choked screams and then flickering out of existence like snuffed lights, and it’s coming closer and closer—

Sollux has just long enough to try to scream, clutching at his head, before his vision goes black.

Chapter Text

Feferi: Hold your ground

The Sea Witch advances down the long throne-room in a cloud of jet-black hair and twining tentacles covered in gold, and where she touches coral and stone they crumble, cracked into hundreds of pieces by sinuous networks of fuchsia light.  Her twin half-eel slaves flicker behind her, but Feferi knows what to look for now and she sees the spiderweb veins of power that bind the sinuous fish bodies to their torsos and the strangely coordinated way they move.  Sollux’s blank eyes widen and he lets out a little bubbling gasp and then claps his hands over his mouth as the precious air escapes him.  Feferi’s mind flickers back to the hidden pictures of a tall troll in black and gold…stories of bargains in the dark and mysterious disappearances…

She looks the slaves in their sunken eyes, and the Ψiioniic is looking back.  

Those eyes hold hers, blank with exhausted anguish, and for a moment their agony and their endless captivity is so clear to her she freezes like a little fish in front of a shark, shaking, fins folded and quaking with terror and useless, pounding adrenaline.  Everything about this is wrong, sickening and wrong—a landweller torn into halves and stitched onto a body that wasn't made for him, dragged down under the ocean and kept alive moment by moment, drowning and in pain.  Their arms are bound behind their backs—his arms are bound behind his backs so tightly they seem to be grown into his skin, and she wonders whether he still has legs or whether the Sea Witch carved him open and tore them off before she bound him to these bodies.

“You backed out on the contract,” says the Sea Witch softly, and she cocks her head to one side.  She looks calm but the Ψiioniic flinches and twists away from her in the water, mouthless faces twisting in pain, turning away from her rage.  “You even brought your buoy down to meet me.  You little fool.”  She turns those horrible eyes on Sollux, and Feferi flickers in front of her, drawing Ψdon’s Entente, baring her teeth.  “You shoal-dn’t have brought him down here. I’ll rip him in two like I did my love, and I’ll make you watch—”

And then there’s a flash of silver and gold and rich violet, and Eridan is there.

The Sea Witch stops for the moment, regarding him with almost scornful amusement.  Eridan isn't weak, isn't easy, cowering prey, but in front of the Sea Witch he looks small.  The horns arcing over her head are huge and heavy, and her tentacles squirm and twist and spread across the floor of the throne room like ink.  Eridan's ears pin back, his fins flatten, but when he raises Ahab's Crosshairs his hands are steady.

Feferi is about to swim forward to his side, already reaching for Ψdon's Entente, when the split halves of Sollux's ancestor shudder and split away from their mistress's side, moving in jerky, painful fits and starts through the water, and she hears a muffled, gurgling cry of pain from behind her.  Feferi whips around just in time to see Sollux writhe weakly in agony, doubling over in the water, clawing at his head; his eyes flash and flicker and then abruptly dim, and the air rushes out of his body as he goes limp.

Feferi screams wordlessly, furious and terrified, and darts back through the water, pressing her hands to his chest, pouring life into him.  His body doesn't need air yet, it has sweeps and sweeps to breathe, it can make it a little while longer—

"Go."

It's Eridan's voice, she knows his voice.  She's heard it every day, all her life, but it sounds so strange and hoarse she barely recognizes it.  Feferi looks up, and catches the flicker of one dark eye looking back at her before something terrible flashes across his face and he looks away again.  "Go on," he says again, and his voice sounds strange and small and hurt.  Hopeless.  "Fef, go."

She knows what he's going to do.  She knows, and he can't win.  Feferi tugs Sollux's limp body into her arms and rushes forward, tugging on Eridan's arm—he shakes her off with a snarl and the Sea Witch laughs, amused, watching like she's enjoying the show.

"I said get the hell outta here," Eridan snaps, and twitches as one of the Ψiioniic's bodies tries to slip to one side of him; the bolt from his rifle glances off a sparking shield of blue light and shatters a chunk off of the nearest pillar.  "This ain't the time for heroics!"

Feferi tries to argue, and comes out with nothing but the mocking sound of rushing waves.  Pulls his arm away with all her strength, wrenching him halfway around, catching one of his hands out of the water and clinging to it in a silent plea.

Eridan holds her eyes for a second, and then swallows hard and squeezes her hand.

"You ain't got the time left," he says, almost gently.  "He'll drown down here, Fef.  I'm gonna be fine."

Feferi hesitates, chin trembling—Sollux spasms in her arms, thrashing weakly, pawing weakly at his chest, and she breaks away, hesitating in the water, looking back.  She gives one last long, moaning cry like wind in a storm—the only sound of mourning she can make for her friend, confidant, the prince she might have loved—and then she turns toward one of the high windows, and she's gone.  Her tears stain the water fuchsia for just a moment as she goes; then they whip away in the water, and they're gone as well.

Eridan Ampora faces Her Imperial Phosphorescence and does not falter.

Feferi: Run.

Feferi makes it halfway to the surface before there’s a horrible, wrenching tug and something blurs away from her through the water.  She goes for her weapon instinctively, but finds nothing there; just a strange emptiness.  Empty sylladex.  Empty specibus.

…there will be a withdrawal fee of whatever single golden artifact of the royal line the Phosphor chooses…

Feferi gasps in water and then chokes as it hits her air-dependent pulmonary circulation system instead of her gills.  She assumed the Phosphor wanted to take some precious, ancient piece of jewelry—maybe even her crown.  That she just didn’t want to phrase it in those words to avoid sounding petty or to make the contract sound more official.  But the oldest golden artifact the throne has…the very most valuable…

The Sea Witch has Ψdon’s Entente.

White light sizzles past her like underwater lightning and she whips around for a split second—just in time to see every piece of glass in the palace shatter in a burst of pure white light that lingers like frozen lightning in the water.  Red and blue psionics crackle through the white fire like spiderwebs, and then the light dies out completely and the palace is dark.

Feferi holds her matesprit tight against her, and turns away.

—

The rest of the council is still there at the underground bay when Feferi bursts through the surface of the water and lands hard on the bank, and the first thing she’s conscious of is a pair of hands lifting her up, trying to pull Sollux away from her.  She fights them—she’s sobbing so hard her choked lungs burn and her gills glub and gasp for water, trying to pull in oxygen she can’t breathe fast enough.  People are talking to her, but she just cries, like she hasn’t cried since…

“She’s coming!” someone is choking nearby, tearful and barely coherent, “She’s coming she killed him—she took—”

Oh.

That’s her voice.

The revelation shocks her into silence, and for the first time she struggles to think rationally.  Sollux is still in her arms, but he’s not breathing—there are hands tugging at her arms and by the heat they have to be Karkat’s, he burns like there’s a fire under his skin.  The arms holding her so easily are bony but they support her as steadily as iron bars, and Gamzee’s murmuring by her ear in his weird, highblood language, patting her back.  For a second she almost pushes away from him, struck by sudden fear that Karkat will be angry at his moirail for comforting her, but he’s thumping her back too hard to be a comforting pap.  It almost takes her by surprise when her body starts coughing and a fair amount of briny water comes out with the air.

“Hey, welcome most mightily to the living world, defiúr,” says Gamzee, and she finally relaxes her hands numbly and lets Karkat drag Sollux’s limp body out of her arms.  “What happened down there?  Sea’s all up to be gettin’ its boil on, flashin’ all kinds of crazy lightshow.”

“Yes and, all the fish in the, uh, ocean?”  Tavros’s voice says, somewhere out of her vision.  He sounds nervous.  “They’re all dying.  Or, um, running away, swimming away I mean.  Some of them are doing that instead, which, I feel like that is a good idea?  Not that we should, run away as such, or swim, but I thought you might, uh, might want to know.  That all the fish are.  You can…talk all of a sudden?”

“Sea Witch,” croaks Feferi, and breaks into another fit of coughing.  She can hear Sollux coughing as well, and Karkat growling muffled insults to him and telling him all the horrible things he’s going to do if Sollux dies.  “—c…coming—she’s…”

“Sea Witch?” repeats Gamzee, sharper than Feferi can remember hearing him, raw and sober and present. He's silent for a second, jaw working, then he says, "...How soon?”

“Soon,” says Feferi helplessly, and coughs again.  Her mouth tastes like bile.  “She took my Ψdon’s Entente, she…she ‘s got to be…coming up already…”

Arms loop under her tail and her shoulders and scoops her up against a bony chest.  She yelps and struggles, but Gamzee doesn’t let go of her, just turns to the lowblood council.

“Sea Witch is coming and our little princess lost her motherfucking weapon,” he says, “I’m getting her out.  Brother, where are my clubs?”

“In my rooms,” says Karkat without looking up from Sollux.  “Do your crazy psycho powers do anything to Sea Witches?”

“Maybe?”  Says Gamzee.  “I dunno, never got my motherfucking try on it.”

“Then you stay with Feferi,” says Karkat firmly, and he draws his sickle as Sollux starts to blink his eyes open and stir.  “If this crazy watery bitch gets past us, you kill her or you fucking well die trying.  Yes?  I am a shitty moirail for even saying it, but you do whatever you have to, even if you have to…”

His voice trails off, but Gamzee seems to know what he means.  His eyes do that flash of almost red-orange, his lips twitching for a second into a tight, toothy smile.

“I'd swear a holy motherfucking oath on it for you, brother, if I had one for you your panmatter'd bear to hear.”

“Good.”

Sollux: Have famous last stand.

You can’t have a famous last stand, you can’t even stand yet, not when your whole brain feels so waterlogged it’s going to slosh out of your ears.  And this sure as hell isn’t going to be your last.  And you aren’t—

…well okay, you’re kind of famous, but the stand wouldn’t be, not in this little cave under the city.  This is a shitty place for a famous last stand.  

Oh, Karkat’s talking again.  His voice makes your head hurt, but it’s his soldier voice, so whatever he’s saying is probably important.

Sollux: Listen.

Karkat stands up slowly and turns to the rest of the council.  “If she gets past us and kills Gamzee and Feferi,” he says, viciously blunt, “Either she takes over and rules or our people go to war with no leaders.  Slavery and mass culling all around.  You can run now if you want.”

Oh, that’s rich.  They’re not all soldiers, but all of them are more than capable of fighting, the stubby little self-centered ass.  “Fuck you,” rasps Sollux muzzily, and Terezi giggles sharply.

“I have to agree with Councilor Appleberry Blast,” she says, and Karkat yelps as she reaches out quicker than sight and bonks him hard on the head with her cane.  “You are an idiot!  And we are not cowards.”  

“I know,” says Karkat defensively, and ducks as Terezi tries to hit him again.  “Terezi, goddammit!  You don’t have to be a coward to want to stay alive, okay?  Actually—” he gives her a long, pointed look, brow furrowing, and then says, slowly, “…you should probably go.”

Terezi bristles at that.  “Oh?”  

The word is a threat and Karkat knows it, he’s known her for long enough.  He explains in a hurry.  “You don’t have any powers and you’re a close-range fighter, Terezi.”

“I could say the same thing to you!”  Terezi makes it sound like a joke, but she’s baring more teeth than necessary and there’s a growl to the words.  “Are you thinking of sparing me, because I think if you are I shall give you a little preliminary beating to warm you up for the fight at hand.”

“I have to be here,” says Karkat firmly, “Because of reasons.  And because I’m the leader.  But Nepeta is out spying and somebody needs to let everybody know that the shit is going to hit the whirling aeration device.  You have a reputation for being truthful, you’re close range, you don’t have any psychic powers to back us up.”

He meets her blind eyes, and his voice drops a little into a hoarse kind of half mutter. “…I wouldn’t try to shelter you,” he says, soft and awkward, “…you know that.”

Terezi gives him a long, long look—sniffs the air and then twists her mouth up in a frown.  “I hate it when you make sense,” she sighs, and raps her cane sharply on the ground.  “Alright, fine.  I’ll go and warn the populace.  What do I tell them then, fearless leader?”

“Just tell everyone we’re under a lockdown,” says Karkat.  “Polish up your weapons, organize the militia.  Council mandate.”

Terezi salutes, and Karkat winces.  “Aye, sergeant-major!”

She’s gone before Karkat can yell at her.  He growls and glances back at the pool of water—the lights swimming under the surface are brighter, the water is slopping onto the banks of the pool.  “Aradia, close off the exit from the cave.  Wreck the tunnel.  If we need to get out, we can get out, if we don’t come out we can at least make this hard on her.  Tavros, what’s going on down there?”

“The fish have stopped running,” says Tavros.  His eyes are closed—his head is cocked to one side like he’s listening to something.  “Um, I mean, not that fish can, can run, but they’re not swimming away anymore I guess, is the thing to say—”

“You’re babbling, Nitram,” says Karkat tensely.  Aradia raises her hands, shimmering with pale light, and stone begins to rumble and grind in the tunnel behind them.  “Now would be the time to fucking focus.”

“Um, yeah, sorry.  I haven’t, uh, done this much before, this, being scared for my life thing, like the fish are doing now?  Um.  Yes, they’re not running.  They’re, dying instead, sorry.  They’re just sitting still in the water and, and dying.”

“Shit,” says Sollux, and catches another cough.  He’s been dazed, swimming in a kind of uncomfortable fog since he drifted back to consciousness, but the image of the fish just floating in the water, waiting to die in front of a predator, sparks something— “Shit.  Shit. Fuck!  KK, it’s not just going to be her.”

Karkat glares at him, tensing.  “What.”

“The Ψiioniic,” says Sollux, rushing over the words, mangling the name and not caring, “KK he didn’t die, he never died—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”  Karkat snaps, and Sollux starts to scramble to his feet, searching for his psionics—dammit he’s not even at his full strength, he felt the power of that split mind, the Ψiioniic could roll over him like a troll stepping on a bug. “You couldn’t have fucking mentioned this before?!”  The water slops—he glances back at the pool and visibly shakes off the shock, baring his teeth.  “Never mind.  Fuck it!  You have to deal with him, Sollux, we’re going to have enough shit going on.  Aradia, try to unfocus him, if you can get him off his feet, do it, if you can get that trident out of her hands, do it—”

“His power’s split,” Sollux babbles—bites his tongue, ignores it.  “He’s all broken up in two bodies, spliced with some kind of fish, I think—I don’t know what—”

“Details,” snaps Karkat dismissively, and he draws his sickle.  “Is that good or bad for us, Captor?!”

“Good?  He—he can’t focuth—ss, he can’t focus his power, both sides are strong, but they’re both off-balance—the red side is—too aggressive, like a cannon, can’t control his power but the blue one is weaker—”

“Good.”  Karkat turned to Aradia and Tavros.  “Tavros, you confuse the red one, see if you can—do something with the fact he’s half fish now, whatever you can do.  Aradia, take out the blue one first, but don’t try to take him on head to head—Aradia, are you listening?  Aradia—!”

“'General Megido',” Aradia corrects him distantly.  Her voice is steady and blank, like it was—fuck, like it was when the war got really bad, like it was after they dragged her back to the capitol babbling and covered in blood.  After she finally started talking again, after she came back but...different.  "Carry on, Sergeant-major.  I’m right behind you.”

Karkat gives her a split-second look, but Sollux can almost see things slotting into priorities in his mind and there's no time for Aradia to be one of them right now.  On the other side of them, Tavros draws his lance, hefts it like a twig and hooks it under one arm, watching the water with a sort of tight-strung, panicky excitement, like he’s gone out the other side of being scared.  Maybe he’s believing they can win so hard it’ll be slightly less false, Sollux thinks, and stifles a totally inappropriate, slightly shaky laugh.  

“Sollux," Karkat says, and turns away from Aradia.  "How close are they?”

Sollux reaches out with his mind, searching for the sinkhole of power that is his ancestor, but there’s—

…nothing.

It’s like looking into a bottomless pit.  He snaps back into his own mind with a croaky little horrified noise, and Karkat barely has time to glance back at him, concern etched on his face over anger and tension, before the glow of the water goes pitch black.

The pool has stopped bubbling.  The water doesn’t even ripple; it’s gone still, and dark as ink.  There’s a slim figure rising slowly in the center of the pool, moving inexorably forward, trailing strands of hair like inky water made solid.  Writhing jet-black tentacles (too many too many, bile rebels at the sight, his guts twist up in disgust) trail behind the Sea Witch as she steps slowly forwards onto the shore, and then suddenly there’s a spark of tyrian purple and without seeming to change at all what looked like tentacles are a long, flowing black and gold skirt, slit in the front.  Her bare feet sink deep into the sand.

She’s dragging a limp, bloody body with one hand, and the sea prince’s corpse makes a wet thud as it hits the ground.

“Hello, buoys and gills,” says the Sea Witch, and out of the water her voice is huskier, purer, less sibilant.  Her eyes land on Sollux and for a second he almost takes a step back; her eyes are pits, rich purple on pure black, her face is almost inhumanly beautiful, her lips are painted the color of her blood.  

“…Bow.”

Chapter Text

For a second, nobody even breathes.  

Sollux tries to open his mouth to say something, but his throat is so dry the words won’t come out.  The Phosphor looks him up and down and then give a dismissive little smirk.  “Skinny little thing, aren’t you?  How nostalgae-ic…I wondered what put her over the edge to make the noble sacrifish, give up her little yellow-blood buoy for her people, but you’re pretty pathetic, aren’t you?” She smiles, and her teeth are sharp as a deep sea fish’s, sharp like needles.  “Adorabubble. I could just eat you whole... Couldn't I, love?"

Two figures thrash out of the bay, coiling and twisting on the sand.  Two long, sinuous bodies in muddy green-gold, coiling and shivering on the beach at the Phosphor’s feet.  One jerks onto its back and a baleful, flickering red eye stares up at the council from a mouthless, twisted face.  Tavros makes a thin sound of disgust and Sollux glances at him—he’s holding his head, face twisted up in pain.  

The Phosphor reaches down to her servants, not deigning to bend down, just reaching imperiously out, and they shudder and then pull themselves painfully up, flickering with red and blue lights, until they can coil at her sides, heads lolling limply on thin necks.  She pets their heads and smiles down at them with a sickening sort of fondness, and then clenches her hands in fistfuls of their hair.  They don’t even flinch, just stare straight ahead with those blank eyes.  

Sollux tests the water, reaches out, tries to loosen her grip on them, and the red one's eye gives an abrupt flash that hits Sollux like a punch in the gut, like being winded inside his head.  He staggers, thoughts spinning, and the Phosphor laughs at him and wrenches his ancestor up by his hair, tilting his head back to smile down at his blank face.  

“Good boy!”  She coos, and that violet light that had split her fish body into legs pulses for a second on the Ψiioniic’s grey, wasted skin, spreading across his frail bodies like a spiderweb.  The red body’s tail thrashes weakly in the water—the blue body just shudders.  ”Get up.”

The eel tails shift and bunch and change—the slick grey-brown eel skin becomes thin, old fabric, loose on bony hips, barely covering scarred, bruised knees.  The Ψiioniic’s feet are bare and his bodies stagger as he tries to stand, legs struggling to support his weight for the first time in fifty sweeps.  His arms unwind from behind his back, hanging limp at his sides.  They’re impossibly thin, just skin stretched over bones.

As one body lifts a hand to look at it with its mismatched eye, Sollux catches the flicker of sparks.  His ancestor is supporting himself with nothing but his mind, controlling both of his bodies like a pair of puppets.  

There’s a horrible, soft, wet sound and the Ψiioniic sucks in air through the sudden, dark gashes of his mouths.

The Phosphor smiles at him, and the pride and affection in her face would be less sickening if they weren’t so genuine.  Then she turns to the council, and her smile falls away.

“…I think I clearly told you beaches to bow.”

“Fuck bowing,” says Karkat, and Sollux sees his eyes darting from the Ψiioniic’s bodies to the Phosphor’s face to his own troops and back again.  He moved a little to one side when Sollux took that hit, Sollux notices suddenly; he’s got one arm a little bit out, so he can step in if anyone tries to attack while Sollux is still brain-winded.  Dammit.

The Phosphor frowns at them, but not like they’re a problem—more like…like Feferi frowned when she was looking at the map of the city—so many fun things to play with but how can I ever choose which to play with first?  “I know we haven’t been up here in a hundred low-blood lifetimes,” she says, slow and soft, and her voice has pressure, pressure like the deep sea.  “But you betta recognize who your masters are.”

The pressure of her presence is sudden and horrible.  Aradia makes a soft, throaty sound and then, slowly, crumples to her knees.  Sollux almost screams—maybe he does, but he can’t hear himself.  Everything is—submit, obey, submit, obey, KNEEL and Tavros is struggling but he’s barely upright and if he didn’t think seeing his putrid blood might offend her Sollux would slit his own throat for daring to stand in front of her.

“Leave them alone.”

How dare he give orders to royalty?  Sollux wonders dizzily.  He should be tortured, killed, he should fall on his face and beg forgiveness—

—wait.

Sollux lifts his head slowly, and he’s in control again.  It’s tenuous, like walking on a knife blade, but if he pours everything he has into it, he can remember.  We are the democratic formation, we are the voice of the many, we are no longer the pawns of royalty. He takes a few deep breaths, and then slowly cracks one eye open.  There’s someone standing between him and the towering figure of Her Imperial Phosphorescence, a pair of black boots set apart and square, feet planted firmly on the ground with all the stolid defiance of a stone statue.

Karkat crosses his arms and turns the full force of his glare onto the Phosphor.

“I don’t believe you exist,” he says firmly.

The Phosphor throws back her head and laughs.  The trident is a gleam of gold in her hands as she levels it at the tiny, stocky figure in front of her.  “I don’t be-reef you should exist,” she says, amused, and the point of the trident flicks; a deep gash opens in Karkat’s cheek.  Karkat doesn’t flinch; he just reaches up to his cheek and smears his fingers across the bleeding cut, holding up his stained fingers for everyone to see.

The blood is so scarlet is seems almost unreal, brilliantly red against his grey fingertips and dripping on the tip of the Sea Witch’s trident.  Karkat turns his fingers in the dim light, staring at his own hand like he’s never seen it before; he clenches his fist on the red stain of blood, so tight his knuckles turn white.

“You little abomination,” says the Phosphor, almost lovingly, and her lip curls over her horrible, needle-sharp teeth.  “No wonder you can slip right through my net, little mutant minnow like you.  You should have been culled the moment you were spawned.  I can sea to that for you…” she presses the tips of her weapon to his throat; more broken skin.  More trickles of mutant scarlet.  Karkat doesn’t move an inch.  “Water my gifts for, if not culling uppity little wigglers like you?”

“I don’t believe you exist,” repeats Karkat, and then sighs.  “…I don’t believe in magic.  I don’t believe in seers.  Or aspects…” he squints at her for a second, and then laughs a humorless laugh.  “…Thief of Life.  Wow, that’s not cliché at-fucking-all.”

Her Phosphorescence looks amused.  “Not as shallow as you look then.  Buoy, why don’t you just—”

“But I don’t believe in friends either,” says Karkat, talking over her, “Or serendipity or weird-ass prophetic dreams or zodiac patrons or ancestors.  And they keep finding me anyway, so why should that other shit be any different?”  He sighs heavily and presses a hand over his heart, bowing his head.  “Fuck everything,” he says, with all the solemnity of someone reciting holy scripture.  “I know you can hear me, you always do.  If I have to believe in you to get this crazy watery bitch away from them then I give up.  I officially surrender.  Whatever you want.”

“Karkat?” Tavros croaks, somewhere in the distance, wavery and scared. “What are you—?”

“Me?”  Karkat laughs roughly.  “I think I’m probably selling my soul or something.  I had this…dream…” he trails off vaguely.  The Phosphor is looking at him more sharply now, her whole body tensing like she’s expecting an attack, her fins flaring.  Karkat barely seems to be watching her at all; he focuses, abruptly, and looks down at Sollux.  "She would've dragged you under the water," he says, and his eyes gleam just as red as his blood.  A cold, sick thrill goes up Sollux's spine.  "She would've felt you all the way up here, and dragged you down in the water and ripped you in half just like she did to him.  I had to hide you."

"You couldn't," the Sea Witch snarls, and she doesn't look amused anymore.  "You're not even on the spectrum, there's no way you could salmon enough power to hide them from us!"

"I am the fucking Knight of Blood," says Karkat, and the words ring through the cavern with echoing, chilling force for a second before he promptly ruins the moment by flipping her off with both hands.  "Fuck off!  I didn't ask for this shit!  If I thought crawling across the country to the pulsating mass of the Mother Grub and begging her to let me fucking crawl up her undulating egg-sphincter and be spawned all over again would get me a new class and an aspect that didn't suck shit, guess what!  I'd chop my legs off and start crawling!  But I can't, and I won't, and you have no fucking say how powerful I am, so shut the fuck up!"

The Sea Witch actually twitches back at that, affronted.  Sollux laughs before he can stop himself, choking and shaky, and then shuts the hell up as the Phosphor turns to glare at him.  Karkat steps between the two of them before the pressure of that look can crush Sollux back down to the ground, and glares right back at her.

"I said leave them alone, you waterlogged bitch," he says.  "Sollux, get the fuck up."

"I," Sollux manages, and pauses to wheeze for a while.  "Nngh."

"Oh, hoofbeast-shit," says Karkat, irritably.  "It's just mind-fuckery, and she's not even as good as Serket is.  Shake her off already, let's—"

He breaks eye contact for a split second, glancing back, and there's a lightning-fast flash of gold in the dark.  Karkat grunts as the wind goes out of him, and then makes a briefer, softer sound—choked, sudden, worse somehow for how quiet it is—and staggers.

Red splatters the floor of the cavern as the Phosphor pulls her trident free.  Red trickles between Karkat's fingers as he presses a hand to his stomach, staring down, looking almost shocked.  Sollux gives a strangled shout of protest and jerks to his feet, and the Phosphor looks over at him and moves like quicksilver, impact slamming through Sollux's body so hard it staggers him back.

There's something wrong.  Something cold, and foreign, and very, very wrong.

The pain doesn’t hit until he looks down. His psionics caught the Sea Witch's trident before she could run him through, but not before she could skewer it right through his palm, fuck, right into him, inches of cold, ancient metal buried in his chest.  Sollux stares dumbly down at the growing patches of yellow blood staining his jacket, feeling every caught attempt at breathing, every cold drop of sweat on his skin, and then the Phosphor lifts him carelessly off his feet and flicks his wrist, and Sollux is thrown across the room like a ragdoll, slamming against unforgiving stone.

Aradia catches him before he hits the ground, the almost-painful crackle of her telekinesis supporting him like a giant hand.  Sollux can't find the words to thank her—his uninjured hand is clawing helplessly at his chest, digging at the center of the pounding, relentless pain.  He’s been wounded before—almost choked to death once, when he was stupid enough to hire guards who could be bribed.  He’s been stabbed, poisoned.  Stabbed and poisoned once, but this pain doesn’t even feel like it should be possible.  The metal of Ψdon’s Entente had been furious, burning cold, and instead of ebbing away the chill is staying, searing into him with throbbing, otherworldly agony.  Other things are aching too—his ribs might be broken—there’s hot blood in his mouth and there are painful gaps where a couple of teeth used to be.  He thinks he might be crying.  He can’t tell anymore.

“This thing was made for krilling your kind, lowblood,” the Phosphor is saying, somewhere far away and garbled.  “Not a nice eeling, is it?  Don’t worry, the pain won’t finish you off.”  She laughs, a high, bright laugh, a royal laugh, and there’s a horrible screeching scrape as she drags the tips of Ψdon’s Entente across the stone.  “…I’m going to do that myshellf.  But I’m going to take.  My.  Time.”

“What part of leave them the fuck alone…nnh, don’t you get?”

Sollux stares, dazed and numb with the pain, as Karkat pushes himself up to his full height again, holding his side, staggering forward to put himself directly between the Phosphor and his friends.  Sollux can remember the dying scream he'd heard in his pan, half-conscious as Feferi dragged him away from the palace—the seadweller prince, dying, caught on that golden trident like a fish on a hook.  A limp body on the sand, oozing seadweller-violet blood into the water.

It must have hurt.  And it isn’t allowed to happen to Karkat.

Sollux hears the pathetic noise he makes as he forces his muscles to move, but he’s too far gone to care.  He’s crying—yeah, he’s definitely crying, there’s no ‘maybe’ anymore, but Karkat is right, like he always seems to be.  Fuck bowing, fuck obeying, fuck her and how she looks at him like he’s something to take to pieces and play with.

“Finally,” growls Karkat, as Sollux hauls himself onto his feet and sways, blinking away tears. “—was wondering when you were going to grow a fucking vertebral column.”

“Shut up,” Sollux is pretty sure he manages to say, but it probably comes out like more of a whimper than anything else.  “—what’s—plan?”

“Well we start with a timeout for the idiot,” says Karkat.  “That’s you, you're the idiot.  Then I talk to the voices in my head for a while like a crazy person…”  He’s talking loud and showy, taking his time, and Sollux can barely pay attention to what he’s saying—his eyes are fixed on the Phosphor, just waiting for her to lunge forward, to try and finish the job.  She doesn't move, though—just circles, slowly, watching Karkat as he talks, furious but fascinated, condescending but amused.  She’s playing a game, and Karkat knows it.  He’s putting on a show, telling a joke she’ll want to hear the punchline of.  

“And after that,” says Karkat, “I do some kind of bullshit bloody thing.”

Sollux's heartbeat doubles, triples—getting louder, stronger, pumping so hard and fast he can feel his skull pulsing with the force of it.  Something jolts, grinding out of his skull through his horns, his eyes, his nose and mouth; he can taste blood, and Karkat is looking at him in the dark, eyes burning a vicious, stunning red. 

"Sorry," he says.  "This is going to suck like a thousand festering hellmouths."  Sollux gasps, choking on the taste and smell of his own blood—somewhere far away Tavros is giving a horrible, croaky whimper, and Aradia is sobbing.  "I'm sorry.  Fuck.  I just wanted to keep you guys safe."

There's one final tearing burst of agony, and then the pain rips free and Sollux's skull is empty.  A whole universe of emptiness, for an endless moment, something heavy and smothering that had been pressing down on him is finally gone.  For one heartbeat, then another, there's nothing but endless space behind his eyes, and then something bright and hot and electric seems to realize that vacuum and expands.  It drowns the world in white-hot sparks, red and blue lines of coruscating fire, tracing every nerve and muscle and vein of his body outlined in stark, blinding detail until all he can do is scream.

And then he’s through, on the other side, and he’s floating.

Sollux Captor is fire inside a body, and everything is flat and soft and quiet.  He blinks his eyes, breathes absently with his lungs; his body’s feet aren’t touching the ground, but that’s inconsequential.  It’s like he’s been carrying something unbelievably heavy for sweeps, and now it’s been lifted off of him.  

He registers, with distant apathy, the way his skin is crackling with red and blue light; the way he can feel the electricity sparking from neuron to neuron, and sense the transfer of oxygen in his lungs.  It’s interesting, and he spares a millisecond or two to think about it before it occurs to him that back when he was just a troll, back when he was no more than a body with a few sparks inside, there was something important happening.

Sollux Captor blinks, and he's a troll again.

Suddenly everything hurts.  It’s not the dull, aching throb of his headaches, though. It’s like drinking a drink that’s almost too hot to bear, feeling it sear his throat; there’s power rippling uncontrollably under every inch of his skin and it hurts, but the feeling is so exhilarating he can barely remember how to breathe.

“KK,” he rasps, and the distraction of trying to form words looses a surge of power through his fingertips that arcs between him and the ground.  The cobblestones turn to sand under his feet.  The power barely lessens.  “What—did you—do?!”

“I knew she would be looking for you,” says Karkat.  “I guess.  I mean, fuck, I just…there were dreams.  There was…a guy, who looked like me, covered in freak blood like mine, and he told me someone was looking for you, and he showed me how to hide you.  And a girl in green, and a guy in blue, but they didn't have horns…”

The Phosphor makes a movement with her trident, and Sollux reaches out a hand and stops it a hair’s breadth from Karkat’s throat without looking.  The Sea Witch bares her teeth and fights his grip on the weapon, and for the first time something jolts and pushes back against his power.  Her physical strength is no joke, but that’s not what’s driving him back.  There’s a thread of tyrian purple through the calm red and blue of his mind, and Sollux grits his teeth and turns his full attention on keeping her weapon where it is.

“You said you had a mental block,” says Karkat, and laughs.  It’s a real laugh, too, surprisingly cheerful and so totally out of place in the situation that Sollux almost loses track of what he’s doing.  Power lashes out of him and the sand whirling under his feet consumes more stone from the cave floor, pulverizes it and whips it around.  Some of it is starting to turn to glass, he notices vaguely.  “Sollux you moron, you never had a block.  I was the block.  It was me.”

“Ahh…ow,” groans a voice behind Sollux, and he can feel the impulses that make Tavros’s muscles flex as he staggers to his feet, holding his head.  “Ow, ow, ow—“And then a sharp gasp.  The Ψiioniic’s bodies jerk in pain, his atrophied legs almost buckling.  

“Oh wow,” says Tavros very softly, somewhere in the distance.  “You really are part fish, wow…” And then, a little lower, less wondering, with that slow, tight tone that he almost never uses, “Oh.  It's, she’s killing them—” There’s a sudden, weird, warping feeling in the air—Tavros bows his head in Sollux’s peripheral vision, fingers pressed to his temples, mouth a tight, straight line of effort.

“You were clouding our powers,” Sollux says quickly, and hisses between his teeth as the Sea Witch sends another lash of power through her weapon.  “How.  Why.”

“I told you, I’m the Knight of Blood,” says Karkat, with none of the same haste.  He seems distracted by the red stains slowly drying on his fingers.  “Knights protect.  It’s what they do.  I had to…” his brows contract slightly, and he scowls a familiar scowl, lowering his bloody hand.  “Fuck, I don’t know what I did.  Ahh, shit…”

He sighs heavily, and finally steps away from the needle-sharp weapon inches from his throat.  “I have no idea what I did, okay?  Feel like my brain’s been put through a goddamn nutrition processing device and then flushed down a load gaper.  I have a weird class and a weird aspect and two patrons and my ancestor was a seer and the whole thing is one big clusterfuck!  And its favorite game is ‘let’s kick Karkat’s brain around like we're playing grub-ball’!  He won’t mind if we use his thinkpan to settle all of our unfinished fucking business!  It’s not like he has his own problems trying to coordinate the military for an entire fucking country or anything!”  He huffs out a furious breath and strangles someone invisible violently for a second. “God I have a headache.”

“ENOUGH!” The Phosphor’s voice rises with fury.  The Ψiioniic’s bodies lurch and this time they can cry out—horrible, hoarse sounds that are more like sobs than screams.  Tavros makes a similar sound—the red-eyed body straightens up a little, shaking his head as Tavros staggers.  

The Phosphor sinks her claws into the Ψiioniic’s necks, gives an order too soft to hear, and Sollux’s skull tries to explode.

It’s all he can do to shield himself from the blast.  He staggers back—something catches him, pushing him back forward again, and the soft, almost painful, electric power of Aradia’s telekinesis expands behind him.  The roof rumbles ominously.  Sollux can almost feel Aradia’s attention turn upwards, and the stones growl as she pushes them up, leaving no room for them to crumble.  The psychic pressure flickers, suddenly unbalanced—Tavros is leaning heavily on one wall, but his eyes are fixed on the red-eyed body, his horns lowered and his teeth bared in a frown of concentration.  

And then someone yells something and the psychic attack stops so abruptly Sollux staggers.

Karkat is still up.  He’s bleeding; trickles of red on his cheeks and his chin and one side of his face is covered in scrapes and broken skin, but he’s never been anything if not doggedly persistent.  He steps forward again, ignoring the Phosphor, only focusing on Sollux’s ancestor.  Both bodies are frozen, staring at him.

“Mituna,” says Karkat again.  His voice sounds very strange for a second, deeper and hoarser, with weird notes in it Sollux has never heard there before.  “Someone used to call you that, didn't they?”  And then the moment is over and his voice is his own again, rough from shouting and tighter than normal with pain.  “Somebody used to call you that.  But he’s dead, so right now you just listen to me.”

The Ψiioniic cocks his heads to one side.  The red body is the first to open its mouth, but his voices overlap, echoing strangely, identical.  “What do you mean—” “—you mean, he’s dead?”  “—dead?”

“I mean he’s fucking dead,” says Karkat.  “Fifty sweeps ago, the Signless Sufferer was put to the shackles and subjected to goddamn public execution.  I don’t know what she told you, but she lied.”

“Dead,” rasps the blue half, and “how…?”  croaks the red.  

The rest of the council is frozen where they fell, staring from Karkat to Sollux's ancestor and back again, confused and uncertain, hands still hovering over weapons.  The Phosphor is still moving, a mental and physical struggle against Sollux’s newly unbound psionic control.  He’s got more brute force and he knows it, but she’s had thousands of sweeps to perfect her art and her power keeps sliding through his, finding cracks and slithering into his mind.  Not an active power, like his, but a passive pressure, whispering give up, she’s better than you she’s royalty, how dare you?!

“They captured him a day after you left,” Karkat recites—he’s read the books, Sollux knows.  He likes to pretend he doesn’t care about the Sufferer, but he’s read all the stories.  Everything the lowbloods know, anyway.  All they have are a few garbled accounts from highbloods captured or the few lowblood representatives that were forced to watch.  “He went to them for one last meeting—they all told m—him it was stupid but he went anyway, just to make sure, and he held out his hands to seal the deal and they—”

He winces and stops for a second.

“People tell it like they put him straight in the cuffs, but they didn’t,” he says, and his hands rise in front of him, palms up, like he’s remembering.  “—The Highblood got hold of him and just slammed his head into the ground until he stopped moving—he was huge, you know, I was never tall, my friend.”  Karkat stops dead, brows furrowing, and then growls.  “—No!  Fuck, I’m just telling the story, you shut up.”

The Phosphor twitches a hand; the Ψiioniic jerks, but Tavros growls, fighting her for control, and she can’t afford to be distracted.  

Karkat doesn’t seem to notice.  His eyes are still flickering between the Ψiioniic’s thin faces, irises flickering red-hot in the dark.

“He woke up in jail,” he says, “They left him there for a day.  Let some of the higher bloods take out their grudges on him.  Tried to make him renounce, but they didn’t really care if he did or not.  They had to keep him pretty intact for the public execution.”  His eyes flare like coals under a sudden wind, then flicker back to fierce, steady red, flat and calm and piercing.

“She said—” “—said he would make peace—” “—make peace, he would be—” “—be known forever, be—” “—be famous for all the good he’d done—”

“Oh, he made peace,” says Karkat, and laughs harshly.  “And he sure the fuck was famous! She didn’t tell you how she’d make it happen though, did she?”

“No,” the Ψiioniic's bodies croak in unison—the blue-eyed body shaking its head jerkily like he doesn't want to believe what he's hearing, the red-eyed one snarling with pain and rage.  "No.  Kankri."

“They woke him up the next night with a whipping,” says Karkat, sudden and sharp, with almost brutally clinical bluntness, and there is no way he can know this, but no trace of speculation in his voice.  He’s just telling a story, remembering a story… “Not a lot.  5 times.” He traces lines on his own skin. “Just to wake him up, to let him know what was coming.  One of them cut him on the cheek—almost took my eye out, but most of the others just cut up my arms.  They made his Disciple watch.”

“God,” breathes the Ψiioniic, and arcs of electricity span the gap between his bodies.  “Meulin—”

“Yeah, that’s what he called her,” says Karkat. “They hit me for that.  Here.”  He touches his cheek.  “…I lost a tooth.  I—he—lost a tooth.  Then they heated the cuffs in front of him so I could watch and imagine how it was going to feel.”  He half-laughs, an ugly little sound.  “He was so fucking scared, he wanted his mother.  I know why we leave our caretakers so early now.”  He shakes his head, and his face twists with pain that looks strange and out of place on his face; the pain of a much older troll.  “He broke so quickly, when they threatened her.  I would have done anything to keep her safe, it made him so vulnerable…”

“Don’t listen to him,” hisses the Phosphor, but Sollux pushes at her and Tavros’s sign flashes between his eyes, negating her orders, and she bares her needle-sharp teeth, knuckles pure grey on her trident, eyes wide with outrage.  The Ψiioniic doesn’t even seem to hear her; his eyes are fixed on Karkat.

“They broke my legs.” He touches one leg just above the knee; traces a short line with slightly shaking hands. “The bone stuck out, right here, then they…they chained him up on the flogging jut and left him to bleed out.  He could feel everything, he could feel his fucking skin boiling.  It hurt…more than you can imagine.”  And then he takes a step forward and looks the Ψiioniic right in the eyes.

“My dear friend,” he says, and at that moment his voice is wholly someone else’s, someone older and sadder and so, so tired.  “She has no right to you, Mituna.  She lied, she took you away from us and I...I never even got to tell you ‘goodbye’.”

The noise the Ψiioniic makes is horrible, low and choked with pain. His red-eyed body bares its teeth to snarl; his blue-eyed body is hunched in on itself, shoulders shaking in silent dry sobs.  Sollux winces as power crackles between the Ψiioniic’s two bodies, drawing them closer together, cracking the ground around them, and then Aradia jerks a hand and the two versions of the Ψiioniic slam into each other.

There should have been an explosion.  But maybe the universe is getting tired of explosions, because there’s no jolt of power, no wave of energy to throw them back.

There’s just silence, and somehow, the silence is sad.

The Ψiioniic straightens up and looks around, and he’s whole again, tall and thin as bones.  He looks exhausted—he looks angry, and sad, and distant, grief-stricken in a way that drives all the air out of Sollux's lungs.  His ancestor turns to look at him at the tiny noise he makes, and his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose are knotted with psionic scars, pale thin streaks in his skin where the intensity of his power has seared into him.  The red and blue of his eyes is deeper, darker, like the glow inside is coming from far, far away. 

The Phosphor reached out in the moment of silence.  She lowers her hand now, and her fingers tighten around Ψdon’s Entente—but she doesn’t attack.  She’s just watching, her face unreadable, her eyes dark, and she looks and feels so old all of a sudden—not old like Sollux has always thought of it, there isn’t a single wrinkle on her face—but old, nevertheless.  Like the ocean she's inhabited for countless sweeps.  Old and ageless.

“Love,” she breathes, and the Ψiioniic bows his head, breaks eye contact, and turns.  The bottom drops out of Sollux’s stomach as his ancestor takes a wavering step towards his mistress—another, and she runs a hand down his sunken cheek, stroking one thumb along a sharp, scarred cheekbone.

“You know…” she starts softly.  She doesn’t finish the sentence, but the Ψiioniic slowly raises a hand and rests it over hers. 

“I know,” he says hoarsely, and then his hands close on her wrists like shackles, red and blue sparks dancing around his hands.  “Captor?”

Sollux feels his back straighten involuntarily; his ancestor glances over his shoulder and meets his eyes, and the Ψiioniic smiles a tight, wry smile.  It’s like looking in a mirror.

“Do it.”

“What are you doing?”  The Phosphor wrenches on her hands, but the Ψiioniic hangs on, hands crackling red and blue—pulls her closer, cupping the back of her neck with one wasted hand and letting her head rest in the crook of his shoulder.  Sollux slides his cracked glasses off the bridge of his nose.  They don’t matter anymore; he drops them on the ground and straightens up, gathering all the power in his body into a spot directly behind his eyes.  He can feel the skin of his eyelids and cheekbones tear and singe and he knows he’ll have scars, to match his ancestor’s. The power builds and builds until he loses track of who he is, what he’s doing—until every drop of power in his body is focused on controlling the supernova inside his head.

And then he lets go.

He feels something break, but he doesn’t know whether it’s inside his own body or whether it’s something deeper than that—or maybe it’s the sound of his skull exploding, bursting outward in shards of red and blue light.  He hears his own scream as though it’s being dredged up from his bones, an inhuman roar and shattering stone and

“Thank you,” breathes a voice in his head, clear and quiet, and the Phosphor lets out a terrible, blood-curdling scream and then both voices are gone.

They take the rest of the world with them.

Chapter Text

Sollux lies on the cold stone floor of the cave, in the dark. 

After a while, he realizes he can hear people yelling.

After another while, he remembers to breathe, and that seems to kick his body back into action; instantly everything jolts a little out of balance.  Things hurt.  People are still yelling, but they stop a few seconds later.  

He can’t see anything.

Somehow he’s okay with that.  He’s okay with most things.  He would have been okay with not starting to breathe again.  He would be okay with just lying here until the world ends.  He’s okay with it when someone picks up his body and he’s hauled over a warm shoulder—Tavros’s voice vibrates through him as he’s carried up…somewhere.  Anywhere.  It doesn’t really matter.  His head feels so light… “…all the fish and sent them at least a mile away, but the ones closer than that, were still dying…I’ve never stretched that far, my brain really hurts.  Probably not as much as, uh, Sollux’s though?  Is he okay?”

Someone touches his face; lifts his head.  Sollux placidly lets it happen.  The hands are warm.  Probably Karkat’s.  That’s okay.  Karkat touching his face is okay.  Everything is okay.

Everything hurting is even okay.  He can deal with that.  

More time happens.

He’s on a couch.  He still can’t see.  There are no voices in his head.  There’s no headache.  Everything hurts except for his head.  

Okay.

“Bro?”  Somebody patting his face.  They want him to wake up.  He’s already awake—he doesn’t feel like opening his mouth and saying anything about it though—he just lies still, being okay.  “Sollux?  You’re…you’re freaking me out, come on—”

…Hm.  

That sounds…an awful lot like Karkat trying not to cry.  Everything would not be okay in a scenario like that, because Karkat crying is something that should not happen.  

“What the fuck is wrong with him?” says Karkat, and yeah, his voice definitely sounds kind of choked up,fuck.  “Did I— We didn't have time to fuck around, and, but, don't psionics just burn out sometimes? Fry their brains, or, or something? Fuck, I shouldn't have turned off whatever the fuck I was doing, he's a fucking vegetable, he was my friend and I basically fucking killed him, I'm such a stupid piece of—”

The sudden lack of okay-ness is overwhelming.  Sollux attempts to sit bolt upright, but his muscles give out halfway up and he just kind of flops back onto the couch like a puppet with its strings cut.  There's a clamor of overlapping exclamations—and then all the wind goes out of him because ow, something hot and heavy, and arms wrapped around his chest, ow, fuck—

…Oh.  There are tears on the crook of his neck and Karkat is swearing furiously into his shoulder about all the horrible things he’s going to do if Sollux ever does something like that ever again. Huh.

He really does care a disgusting amount about everyone.  Sollux gropes around and pats the top of his head in a way that hopefully doesn’t encroach on Makara’s territory.  

He can’t see.  That is markedly less okay, all of a sudden.

He reaches up to his eyes with his unskewered hand, even though he knows they’re already open.  Blind, huh?  That’s…he doesn’t know how to feel about that. Bad, he supposes, but he really can’t find the feeling right now.  He’s burned out.  Sailing smoothly.  He didn’t even realize how precariously he’s been balanced his whole life—wavering between high and low, energy and self-loathing—it seems clear, now.

The skin around his eyes is tender and striped with soft, smooth scar tissue.  Nothing is swollen or bleeding.  Just perfect, cauterized scar tissue, spread across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose.  He drops his hand to his mouth—considerably more swelling and bleeding there.  There’s a lot of empty spaces where there used to be fangs.  He pokes at the spots where the teeth used to be—they twinge, but not too awfully.  His chest is a mass of pain, but someone has bandaged it.  Overall, he’s alive and mostly intact.

“KK,” he manages eventually.  “Stabbed—in the chest—can you—?”

Karkat lets go like Sollux has suddenly become red hot and starts apologizing and heaping abuse on his head in equal amounts.  Then cursing under his breath.  Oh right, he got stabbed too.  Goddammit, this idiot.  

Sollux sits up again—a little more carefully this time—and props himself up on the arm of the couch.  Shit, ow…it’s been a while since he was stabbed by someone.  Even longer since he’s had that charred-bones taste at the back of his mouth that means he’s burned himself out.  

“Damage report?”  He tries, and this time the voice that answers is Aradia’s.  

“Nepea and Kanaya report that something catastrophic occurred while Kanaya attempted to talk to the Grand Highblood, but the material was too sensitive to discuss through messages.  The end result is not positive.  We have maybe two nights  before he arrives.”

Sollux suddenly misses his hazy state of overall okayness.  Still no headache, but he has to take a few deep breaths to process the news.  

“...Yeah," he says finally, when he's gotten things mostly under control inside his head.  "Okay.  And?”

“They’re returning as fast as possible—it’s possible he lashed out at Kanaya, but Nepeta would only say they were coming back.  Terezi alerted the citizens to the oncoming trouble, but they are still waiting for the announcement of the emergency—now we have something to tell them.”

“Oh, the good news!”  Sollux says, and is amazed to hear his own voice so clearly.  No front teeth to catch his tongue on!  That’s kind of exciting actually.  “We’re all going to die but at least we don’t have to tell everyone that mertrolls exist!”

“No, you’re going to have to do that anyway,” says a high, sweet voice, and—oh, that’s Feferi.  She has a nice voice.  It’s a little bit squeaky, but now that he’s not getting headaches anymore, that doesn’t really bother him.  Especially if—mm.  Yes, hair-stroking is a good thing.  “Or I am, anyway.  But I’ll let that be a surprise, it will have more impact that way.”  She sounds determined.  “…maybe me being royal will actually do someone some good for once.”

“Feferi is intact,” says Aradia, crisp as someone filling out a list in her head.  “Makara is also intact, if…jumpy.  Terezi is—”

“Absolutely fine!”  Says Terezi from somewhere across the room, and Karkat yelps, sudden and loud.  “—Keeping Karkat on his toes!”  She giggles.  “Sending me away and then bleeding all over everything was unfair play!  The prosecution objects!”

“There aren’t even any bloodstains!”  Karkat yells back, and oh, still no headache, but he’s very capable of earache apparently.  Sollux winces.  “Get the fuck off!”  Some kind of scuffle ensues.  At least they have the courtesy to take it somewhere far away from his couch.  

“…Eager to do her part,” Aradia finishes, as though there was never an interruption.  “Karkat has lost a lot of blood and drained his abilities pretty dry.  Several seconds of full-scale possession would be a stretch for anyone.  But he insists he's still capable of doing whatever he needs to.   You also bled a lot, although all of your wounds seem to have cauterized when you burned yourself out.  You’re missing your front teeth, I’m sure you noticed, and you’re—”

“Blind,” interrupts Sollux, and if he puts a little bit of concentration into it, his voice doesn’t even waver.  “Yeah, I kinda noticed, AA.”

“Yes,” she says, and there’s a sad little sigh to her voice.  Her hand pats his undamaged one.  “And I don't know if you'll be able to use the last two fingers of your other hand again.  We’ll do our best, but full motion isn't likely to return.  I’m sorry.”

That’s also okay.  A surprising amount of things seem to be, in light of the realization he’s still alive.  All of them are still alive.  How is that even a thing?  “I can lift buildings with my brain, AA, I’ll survive.”

“Good.”  She says, and he could swear he hears a smile in her voice.  He hasn’t seen her smile in more than sweep.

...And now he never will again.

That makes his chest hurt to think about—he tries not to.  

"Tavros?"

"Fine," Aradia says.  "Apparently the Sea Witch was drawing life out of sea creatures around her for power, so he sent away all the sea life within at least a mile.  We'll worry about he implications for the fishing industry later."

Shit.  That's way further than Tavros could ever stretch before.  And holding up the cavern ceiling for that long was way more than Aradia should've been able to manage, no matter how determined she was.

"Are you good?" Sollux says, before she can keep talking, and reaches out blindly to find her arm, squeezing clumsily.  "I mean, seriously, AA.  You okay?"

Aradia takes a deep breath, and reaches up to squeeze his hand.  "I'm okay," she says quietly.  "I'm fine, for now.  I don't know how it'll go when I have to come up against a highblood looking for grief, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

“Only you, AA,” Sollux grunts, and pushes himself up a little further, letting her pull him up, prickling static wrapped around him and pressed against his back.  "I...missed you.”

“I’ve missed myself,” she says softly, and she squeezes for a second before sighing heavily and letting go again.  “Now isn't the time to bring this up though, Sollux.  We have a lot to do.  Can you stand?”

Before, he would have lashed out over that—of course I can, just treat me like a brain-damaged wiggler why don’t you—

“Nope,” he says, with certainty.  “Not unless you basically just want to see me fall on my face repeatedly.  But I already did that tonight, so either the meeting comes to me or somebody helps me whoa!”

“I’ve got this!”  Feferi giggles, and hitches him up a little in her arms.  “Where are we going?!”

They explain on the way there, about how the ocean had rumbled and boiled and the city's strongest psionics had all whispered thank you at the same time.  About how the cave under the consulate collapsed behind them as Aradia cleared the tunnel for them and led the way out.  About how Feferi’s tail had suddenly warped and just split into legs again, and Ψdon’s Entente had returned to her strife specibus.  She can change from legs to tail now, and she thinks it might be because she is now truly the empress.  Her successor is dead.  

They’ve won the battle.  But they haven’t even begun to fight the war.

—

Feferi: You have a long night ahead of you.  Get some sleep.

Feferi stays awake for hours after the council gathers, but there’s really not much she can contribute.  Karkat keeps ranting about wars and skirmishes Feferi has never heard of; he seems to think that they should meet the Grand Highblood outside of the city, attack first, playing the odds that he will launch a surprise attack from the center of the city if they let him.  Aradia is arguing the benefit of letting him into the middle of a crowd of lowbloods, many of them with militia experience.  Terezi is pointing out the laws of combat—the blue bloods and some of the ceruleans believe strongly in the honor of warfare, apparently, and she thinks the Grand Highblood wouldn’t affront them by betraying those rules.  The rest of the arguing blurs together.  

Feferi doesn’t realize she’s asleep until something goes BANG and she jolts awake so abruptly she almost falls off her bench.

“—borderline skirmishes, how does that qualify me for frontline command against the exact asshole who took me out of combat in the first place?!  Fucking explain it to me! Fucking make it make sense!”

Feferi blinks up at the ceiling, then over at the councilors, still gathered around the table—which is now considerably messier and fuller.  She takes mental inventory and realizes that the spymaster, Councilor Leijon, is squeezed in between Aradia and Karkat, still dressed for the road, covered in mud and dirt and looking as utterly exhausted as everyone else at the table.  She has a nasty bruise on one cheekbone and her eye is swollen almost shut.  Councilor Maryam is nowhere to be seen. It has to be after midday.  

Feferi sits up slowly, wincing; her neck is cramping, and her new legs have locked into a weird, curled-up position in her sleep.  Karkat is standing up at the table, and by the way he’s leaning his weight on his hands, all white-knuckled on the tabletop, she thinks it may have been the sound of him slamming his hands down that woke her up.  He looks exhausted, angry, and…strange.  She realizes, suddenly, that he’s wearing a plain, wrinkled shirt and no jacket; this is the first time she’s seen him out of uniform.  Even as she watches he sinks back down into his seat with a wince and a muffled groan, holding his bandaged stomach.

“You’re the councilor of wartime affairs,” says Sollux, equally weary and grim.  “You always said you wanted to lead when you were a wiggler, KK.”

“When I was a wiggler I thought it was all glory and medals,” says Karkat, and he lets out a sharp sigh that might be a curse.  “I’d never been shot or cut up or poisoned or stabbed and I’d sure as hell never seen the Grand Highblood flatten whole regiments single-handed.  He didn’t care we were a scouting party, he didn’t care which side of the border we were on—fuck, he doesn’t even care if he takes out his own soldiers!  He just breaks people, do you have any idea—”

“You’re resistant,” says Aradia.  She sounds withdrawn, tired, upset, but firmly straightforward as ever.  “Moreso, now that you’ve accepted your calling.”

“Resistant?”  Karkat laughs sharply.  “Yeah, I was really resistant when he fucked us up.  Really helpful how I lay there crying in my filth like a grub while he fried your thinkpan.  A repeat of that's gonna do a whole fucking lot of good for everybody."

"You survived," says Aradia.

"So did you!" Karkat snaps, "Look how great we're doing!  Wow, so fucking normal and not talking to ghosts in our heads at all!"

“But nevertheless,” says Aradia simply.  “If it comes to that, you may be our only hope.”

“Wasn’t for nothing he got all gifted his titles of lordship,” says Gamzee, more softly.  He's found himself an extra chair and dragged it over to sit by Karkat's shoulder.  “…Lord of a Thousand Terrors.  Most Mirthful of Murderers.  Ringmaster of his Lordship of the Double Death.  We got namings to him that you can’t ever know the terror of, motherfuckers.  Aleire Saldheires, the Mirthful Messiahs, they bless him, they count him among their brethren and call him—” He says something in his highblood language, eyes flashing bright, painful purple, and whatever he does makes the air ripple. Feferi feels a rush of something hit her, like a wave trying to knock her over, and her head throbs all of a sudden.  

Then there’s a sharp clacking sound and Gamzee yelps.

“Shoosh!”  says Karkat, like a threat.  “I will fucking pap you if I have to.”

“Aw, bro,” says Gamzee, a little accusingly.  “C'mon, not with the horns.”

“I aimed for the tips, you giant wiggler,” says Karkat.  Another sharp little sigh.  “—I don’t expect you know anything about the way his fucked-up pan works?  You stayed in his palace for a few sweeps, right?”

“He moves his armies to his whimsy, brother,” says Gamzee, and shrugs—a complicated movement on his gangling frame.  “Can’t tell you his ways, they’re as like to be my own only by way of sheer motherfucking humors.  He’ll do what up and finds a chuckle in him, and I didn’t get the knowin’ of that before I fucked right off out of there.”

“…Right,” says Karkat slowly, and sighs again, weary.  “Maybe we could just tell him how his descendant is the moirail of a red-blood freak, maybe he’ll find that so funny he’ll leave us alone.”

Gamzee perks up a little.  “Yeah, that sure sounds like a thing could get its happening going real good!”  Then he seems to realize something—he sinks a little in his chair, head dipping in something like fear.  “Or he might up and get his bloodied offense on and give you the cuffs.” He shudders.  “Don’t do that, bro.  I couldn’t…”

His voice trails off, but Karkat seems to know what he means; his voice is almost soft when he says “I know, dumbass.  I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Ugh, god, newly-‘rails,” says Terezi Pyrope, with no little trace of glee in her voice.  “Get a pile!”

Karkat goes scarlet.  “Shut up, Terezi!”

“We don’t have time to argue about this!”  Nepeta says sharply, and everyone flinches a little and settles back.  Nepeta is small and kind and cheerful to a fault; when she snaps, people listen.  “He’ll be here before the second moonrise tomorrow night.  We can’t just throw Karkitty out in front of him, he’s a monster.  He’s so…old.”  She shudders.  “It feels wrong.  Nobody should be that old.”  She frowns at Karkat.  “…Besides, you look like you’ve been chewed up and spit back out again.”

Karkat sighs.  “Yeah, well,” he says, “…I feel like it too.  And I don’t want thrown out in front of him either.  I’m a mutant, not a god, my ‘resistance’ is kind of pathetic.”  He sounds thoughtful, but when he speaks again his voice is grim.  “…I doubt Feferi can even stand in front of him without getting a little bit nervous.  You’d have to be completely crazy to do that, he’s enormous.”

Everyone turns to glance at Feferi, and then stop, surprised.  Sollux looks around blindly and then says, grumpily, “What, is she awake?”

“Yes!”  Feferi hastily sits up straighter, even though he can’t see her, and smiles.  “I’m sorry, how long was I sleeping?”

“Couple of hours,” says Karkat roughly, and nudges councilor Leijon.  “See, she can talk now.”

“I see that!”  Councilor Leijon looks curious, but she just spares a smile and a little wave before she turns back to the table.  “If we are going with Karkat’s plan, we would have to find somewhere to ambush them, and we would need a distraction and the distraction would have to be one of us—” everyone glances at Karkat almost in unison—“…and they would probably end up either crazy or…” She bites her lip.

“Smashed to a pulp?”  Says Karkat into the silence, with all the delicacy of a chainsaw surgery.  “Yeah.  I'll just fuck off and throw myself in front of his club and leave the entire warmblood council without an active military councilor.  I don't fucking think!”

“Way to work that modesty, KK,” says Sollux wearily, but he’s smirking. “That’s what we’ve been arguing all night, though.  Taking the fight to him out in an open field is wholesale fucking suicide.  You just sank your own plan.”

“And also, I think it would help the people to see us, um…stand up to him face to face,” says Tavros firmly, as Karkat opens his mouth to unleash what would undoubtedly have been a blistering stream of invective.  “Not ambushing him.  We like to think we’re better than that—you know, spying and ambushing and things of that…um.  Speaking for…well, speaking for me and the people I’ve talked to, I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with…”

“Oh, you can say it,” says Councilor Leijon brightly, “I’m a spy!  I’m a furry good spy.  But people don’t like to know I exist, and we should keep it that way!  If everyone knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t be a good spy anymore!”  She smiles, and it’s all sharp little teeth.  “…That would be just pawful.”

Karkat rubs his temples.  “Fine,” he growls, and then winces, his hand twitching towards his bandaged side.  “Fine, okay.  We let our enemy right into the center of our defensible city and put all our trust in fucking shock and awe.”  He looks diminished somehow, now that he’s not fighting anymore.  His face is pale and the shadows under his eyes are livid.  “Get some sleep then, I guess,” he says roughly, and pushes himself slowly to his feet.  Gamzee gets up hastily and gets a hand on his shoulder—Karkat bares his teeth a little, but can’t even seem to find the energy to shake him off.  “If we all die tomorrow night…”

But he turns away to the door, voice trailing into silence, leaving the words to hang forever incomplete in the still air.

Lowblood Council: Prepare for last stand.

The streets are silent, except for the night wind rustle of voices in the air. The lowblood militia is gathered around the dais and wide steps at the front of consulate, all trolls currently trained for the defense of the city with their strongest weapons equipped.  Other people, jumpy from the alert and the rumors of invasion, are gathering as well.  The streets are full of tense whispering.  Nobody tells them to leave.  Any citizen of this city above the age of pupation has spent at least half a sweep training in the militia, and, as Karkat growls to Aradia when she comments neutrally on the presence of civilians, the more people watching the better.   It's not like not being here would save them.

They don’t have to wait long after sunset before the city goes suddenly, strangely silent.

Feferi’s earfins flutter—there’s a low noise almost like thunder, barely audible, coming up from the lower city.    A sound she’s never heard before. She leans just a few inches over, to whisper to Karkat.  “What’s that noise?”

His hands are twitching, fingers tapping at his sides—he doesn’t look at her or turn his head, just stares straight ahead, every muscle tensed like wire under his skin.  “…His army,” he growls, and she would swear she can almost see his hair stand on end.  “They’re here.”

The first thing Feferi feels is the fear.

It starts as a numb little tingle at the base of her spine—her heart seems to rise in her throat and pound under her collarbones, and at her sides the lowbloods tense up, hands clenching and jaws tightening.  There are tiny beads of sweat on Sollux’s forehead, and on the bridge of his nose.  His blank, blacked-out eyes twitch and blink, as though he’s struggling to see.  Feferi swallows hard, and concentrates, and the fear dies away a little, forced down to an uncomfortable prickle on her skin and at the bases of her horns.

Terezi makes a tiny noise next to her, and Feferi sees her lift her head, sniffing the air. Her razor-toothed smile is tense on her frozen face—she says, just soft enough to carry to the councilors around her, “All three colors, mostly blue, but their ceruleans all stink of psychic confidence!”  Something twists in her voice—something ugly and sad and tired.  “She’s not there.”  Tavros lets out a tiny sigh of relief—Nepeta nudges his shoulder gently and he smiles at her wanly.  “They are fresh, ladies and gentlemen.  If it comes to a fight, we will be pressed.”

“Crushed,” mutters Karkat tensely.  “Squished is actually the fucking word. Pulped, maybe.”  Terezi ignores him.

The roads are dark, but the moon is bright, and the sharp glint of moonbeams off of gold glitters as the Grand Highblood’s personal battalion drifts out of the darkness like ghosts. The bluebloods are a milling line of muscle; the slightly lighter-weight cerulean-bloods hang back in ranks, ready to use what psychic power they may have at the first sign of trouble.  A skulking, central cadre of Highbloods in colorful, bloodstained robes, glittering magpie collections of gold and jewels in every color of the hemospectrum on their hands and necks and ears and lowered horns.

And in the center of the mix, dark and blood-stained and enormous, looms The Great Highblood, covered in tattered, bloody finery and gold that glints like stars in the moonlight.  He walks slowly, unhurried and arrogant, and he seems vast enough to block out the moons.

The council of lowbloods is not at its strongest.  But Sollux is standing tall, blind eyes hooded and shoulders squared, Karkat isn’t even swaying, Tavros can stand without leaning on something and Aradia looks demure instead of harried and upset.  Terezi and Nepeta stand slightly in front of their damaged counterparts.  

There’s a long moment of silence as the Grand Highblood comes to a slow, final halt a stone’s throw from the council.  He regards the council; the council watches him, expressions ranging from politely neutral to blank to guarded and openly hostile.

“Well, well, well,” says the Grand Highblood softly, and his voice breaks suddenly on the last word, splinters into an eerie two-toned growl that makes all of Feferi’s bones want to crawl out of her skin.  It’s like a mask slipping; for a moment the mad terror wells over her, and it’s so much stronger than when his descendant summoned it that even her blood starts to pound in her skull.  Sollux’s hands tighten into fists on one side of her, and he sways like his knees are weakening.  Karkat’s lip curls into a snarl on her other side.  Aradia blinks once, long and slow, and takes a deep breath.  “Look what I’ve up and motherfucking STUMBLED ON HERE.”

The suddenness of the roar shatters the tense silence, and even his own soldiers sway a little away from him.  It had been bad when he used that tone for his horrible, low snarl, but when he roars like that every nerve seems to electrify.  Feferi reaches out to one side and wraps one hand around Sollux’s hot, grey-knuckled fist.  He’s shaking, almost imperceptible tiny trembles.  He relaxes—not all the way, but enough for her to slip her fingers through his.

“Is he…” he takes a deep breath, his voice barely audible.  “…is he as big as he sounds?”

She can’t answer—just squeezes his hand.  He squeezes back, squaring his shoulders, blinded eyes staring fearlessly ahead.  Feferi bumps his shoulder with hers, and then lets go and steps forward.

The Grand Highblood squints at her through sharp, ancient eyes and she holds her head high and glares right back at him.  Because she wasn’t there underground, when her matesprit blinded himself to defeat the Sea Witch, because Karkat is barely standing behind her and because she loves these people and it doesn’t matter how huge or ancient this troll is, she is not backing down from this.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be queen.

She tosses her hair and stares at the soldiers he’s brought with him as well; they look back, stoic and carefully blank faced.

‘My name is Feferi Peixes,” she says clearly.  “I am descended from the royal line and I claim supremacy over you, highblood.”

There’s an uneasy, affronted murmur from the Grand Highblood’s army.  The Grand Highblood doesn’t look surprised.  Distantly amused, maybe.  His face is a blurry shadow behind the mess of his hair and his mask—a bleached, gilded skull’s face, with the yellow-white gleam of troll bone.

“Your mind games won’t work on me,” says Feferi calmly, before he can try.  She reaches to her belt, and pulls out her double-ended trident, planting the end of it on the ground.  The soldiers in the front ranks don’t move, but their eyes flicker from her to the weapon, and hands twitch ever-so-slightly in readiness.  “Have you been telling everyone that you’re the pinnacle of the hemospectrum?  The ones who trust it, believe blood color determines how ready we are to rule?  Because you lied.”

She slides the shawl off her shoulders, leaving her in her skirt and a plain black wrap.  She knows the onlookers can see her gills—they prickle in the cold night air as murmurs of dismay and interest and even awe spread through the crowd around her.  It’s an intoxicating feeling, and she allows herself to be swept up in it; to hold the weapon like a murderer and stand like a ruler, to toss her head and smile an empress’s cold smile.

“You are not royalty,” she says, clear and cold, and slashes Ψdon's Entente across her forearm, splattering the cobblestones with royal fuchsia.  The blood runs down her arm when she raises it above her head, showing the highblood army; it trickles across her chest, slick over her golden jewelry.  Her voice feels larger than she is, cold and pressing the way it never was before her ancestor died.  Before she became empress.  "You're nothing!  Bow to me.”

The Great Highblood snarls and his soldiers stagger; Sollux lets out a choked moan somewhere behind Feferi, and the lowbloods around her wail in fear.  She can see what they must be seeing; the towering darkness, the pain and the death that looms over them.  It batters at her—changes form, pushing at her, nagging her with worries and insecurities.  Changes again, and for a second it almost catches her as darkness oozes around her like a cold, creeping touch, trying to creep through the cracks in her control.  Images try to spring to mind; Sollux being held in the air by a giant hand, clawing at the fingers wrapped around his neck, the ground splatters yellow, guts unspooling, pictures painted in Karkat’s vivid blood, a smattering of screams and limp, dismembered bodies—

But she's above that, and she just concentrates her hardest on the cool, calm center of her mind and walks forward, her head held high.  She steps over the writhing forms of his soldiers on the ground.  She walks past the cerulean psychics and the blue-blooded soldiers and the high-blood priests.  She points Ψdon’s Entente directly at the giant’s throat.

The force trying to assail her mind dies away as the Grand Highblood banks his snarl and just looks at her instead—and maybe this time his ever-present smile holds the tiniest hint of regard.  The soldiers she walked past try to stand up, to pick up their weapons, but there’s another throb of pressure from behind her and a low, feral snarl.  Gamzee’s voice is a mad croon, a low, alien snap of laughter as he whispers to the trolls he passes, and her enemies crumple to the ground again in terror.  He’ll watch her back for her.  They'll bow to her control now.

The Great Highblood looms over her, looking down on her with eyes that show barely a slit of reddish-gold around the endless pits of his black-violet irises, and with a flick of his wrist there's a massive club in one hand, heavy and spiked, splattered with every shade of blood.

Feferi...isn't scared.  She knows she should be.  He’s only two shades warmer than her and huge, and the stains on that club are from hundreds of thousands of cullings.  But everything is perfect and clear, and Feferi just watches as he raises the club over his head—

Her trident grates along the spikes and locks, grating and grinding, metal on metal.  Her arms are trembling with the effort, but so are his, and they stare each other down, neither of them backing away an inch.

“Caed attú?” The highblood rumbles, and even as the muscles in his arms strain and flex and the pressure increases unbearably on Feferi’s trident his voice remains almost disinterested.  “Make yourself known to me.  You remind me of someone, girly.”  He smiles, showing a crooked, scarred smile full of long, sharp white fangs. “She never bowed either.”  He looks past her, over her shoulder.  “Hello, wiggler of mine,” he growls, and then his faces flashes abruptly feral.  “HELLO MY OWN LITTLE MOTHERFUCKING COWARD!”

“Hey tadaidh,” says Gamzee, almost distantly.  “This army you gathered up and all, pretty motherfucking weak, huh?”

“Weak like you,” growls the Grand Highblood, and Feferi grits her fangs as her arms give another half inch, her feet sliding on the pavement.  “You ran fast, apostate.  BLASPHEMER.  So motherfucking fast even we couldn’t find you.  Could've built yourself up all that time, made something of yourself, but seems like you WASTED THE FUCKING TIME AWAY.  Lon Ealsílsarat.  Fucking disgraceful.  And the nerve of the wriggler, to think like he can bring the ruckus, now?  Bring the holy fear?"  He takes a rushing step forward, almost shoving past Feferi, and roars, a shockwave of pressure and flashing purple eyes.  “BE GONE!”

Gamzee makes a startled, strangled sound and the pressure of his presence drains abruptly away.  Feferi bridles at the indignation of it—how dare he, when these people are under her protection now—and lets the anger flow over her.  She throws her strength into her arms, and the mace grinds slowly back.

And the Highblood just laughs.  He swings his enormous mace up and over one shoulder so suddenly she staggers with the loss of resistance, and then he just throws back his head and laughs like this is the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen.

“The best kind of joke!”  He gasps, and howls his laughter to the moon.  “THE BEST MOTHERFUCKING KIND!  The kind that thinks it’s true.”

He cocks his massive head to one side, looking down at her.  “You put together a good plan, fishfucker,” he chuckles, and holds up a hand as one of his blue-bloods starts to raise her weapon groggily.  His troops look confused, but they follow orders, lowering their weapons.  “THE KIND WITH ITS MOTHERFUCKING TRUTH ALL WRAPPED ON UP INSIDE.  Think I'm inclined to let you have this round.”  He looks around at his soldiers; at the looks on their faces as they start to come to and see Feferi’s blood-stained arm and Gamzee standing at her shoulder.  “There’s not a motherfucking one bearing a witness who isn’t thinking treason on me and mine at this time.”  He sighs and shakes his head.  “SO THE ROYAL MOTHERFUCKING BLOOD IS STILL AROUND.  Where’s your fish-tail, little Peixes minnow?”

“I’m the empress,” says Feferi coldly.  “You know what that means.  Unless those horrible sugary drinks you’re always dumping into the sea have rotted your brain.”

“Been an age upon a motherfucking age,” he says, almost nostalgically.  “The empress walks where she will and swims where she motherfucking will as well, do I remember right?”  He leans down, squints at her, and she realizes, with a sort of strange clarity, the age of him, the massive weight of years of experience.  He has to be almost as old as the Sea Witch.  “…then I rightly think my lady of old is rotting for the motherfucking fishes, little banrin.”

“Yes,” says Feferi.  Everything is strangely calm.  This troll could probably smash her skull between a thumb and foreclaw.  They could take him with them, if he decided it was time for them to die, but it would leave the capitol in ruins.  Feferi takes a deep breath and lets it out again. “She...made a bad deal.”

“Mmm.”  He stares down at her for another horrible second, and then growls softly, exasperated more than angry.  “—She was getting old.  Teach her to motherfucking UNDERESTIMATE.”  He straightens and his back cracks as he looms up—and this time, this close, he really does obscure the moon.  His fangs flash as he smiles, a grinning skull in the pitch-dark shadow of his ancient face and wild hair. “We’ll send ‘round a treaty or some shit like that.” His club vanishes back into his sylladex.  He reaches out to one of his soldiers.  “You, COME HERE.”

There’s a crack and a shrill scream of agony—the blueblood falls to the ground, writhing, clutching the broken-off splintered remains of her horn, and the Grand Highblood kicks her twitching form bodily out of the way.  He holds up the horn and digs it into the palm of his hand; drags it in a long line until rich, dark purple flows down his arm to match the blood splattered down Feferi’s.  Then he holds out his hand.

Feferi doesn’t hesitate.  She reaches out, never breaking eye contact, and shakes the proffered hand, and the Grand Highblood laughs again and shakes so hard she’s almost lifted off the ground.  His hand is at least twice as big as hers.  With horrible clarity, she notices the blood under his claws.  

“I’ll even play nice and let you keep my blood’s spawn, there,” he rumbles, and nods to Gamzee.  Gamzee snarls back, a flash of white teeth and purple-on-red eyes, and whatever the Grand Highblood does then—a sudden jolt like electricity, a sharp sense of impact—makes him sway back again with a low keen of pain.  “…Abhei inithe.  Don’t try to be cute with me, COWARD.  Didn’t I MOTHERFUCKING TELL YOU you couldn’t touch my mind yet?  Maybe in another fifty sweeps.  We’ll see then if you’ll be of the inclination to try taking your motherfucking hatchright from me.”  He shrugs his massive shoulders.  “…I’ll wait up.  We’ll see how you turn out.”  Then, to Feferi again, soft and bone-grindingly horrible, “…I got time.  I’ll give you ten sweeps to prove to me you’re motherfucking empress material.  Don’t disappoint.  Or I COME CALLING AGAIN. And maybe not in such a mirthful motherfucking mood.  Lane bhide famhionn?"  And then, when Feferi just stares at him, "I said, do we make motherfucking accord?"

“I understand,” says Feferi firmly, and remembers enough to give what might even be a fairly acceptable royal nod.  A clip of a familiar voice runs through her head, warm and bitter-sweet, and if she stutters the ‘w’ a little when she says “…wwe are honored by your personal attendance,” there’s nobody there to know why except her.  She has never been a politician, not a ruler, not really, but—and she swallows hard on the thought, straightens her shoulders and lifts her head proudly—she had an excellent teacher.

The Grand Highblood glances down at Gamzee again and snarls something in that weird growling language—only the last few words are clear, enunciated with deadly clarity.  Lane bhide famhionn?  Gamzee bares his teeth back, but returns “Famhionn, tadaidh.”  

The Grand Highblood nods, once, and then gestures with one gnarled hand.  His bodyguards do a sharp about-face—the blueblood whose horn he maimed is hauled onto a shoulder and helped into rank, and in perfect unison they march, until the sight and sound of them fades into to distance.

The last trace of pounding feet finally leaves the air, but the quiet stretches on.  Nobody moves.  Nobody breathes.  Feferi stands very still and listens to her heart beat.  She is suddenly, abruptly terrified that this can’t possibly have happened; there’s no way they’re still alive, still unhurt.  What if she’s hallucinating, insane, asleep on the ocean floor?  What if the images the Grand Highblood put into her mind were true, what if she turns around to gruesome paintings and scattered bodies—

“I think,” says Tavros into the silence, “Somebody should…uh…explain what’s going on.  For the people who don’t know, I mean?”

Feferi turns around so fast she almost stumbles, and there they are.

Tavros is leaning heavily on the wall behind him, taking deep breaths.  Aradia is already sitting down, perched on a stone bench with one hand over her heart, staring into the distance with a distant look in her eyes.  Terezi is supporting Sollux.  Nepeta is a shaking ball of excess energy, twitching and picking at her coat.  And in front of them all stands Feferi, still covered in her own blood, and Gamzee, who has settled down cross-legged in the middle of the road and is staring after his ancestor with a sort of puzzled half-frown on his face.  

As one troll, the council turns and looks out at the crowd gathered in the street.  As one troll, the crowd stares back.

“Uh, yeah,” says Karkat, a little shakily, and he clears his throat. He still looks a little bit shell-shocked and he’s holding his side, pressing a hand to his stab-wounds.  Feferi is almost positive he doesn’t know how small and fragile he looks, with his eyes all widened and his arm curled around himself like that.  She feels suddenly responsible for him—for all of them.  She’ll make this good.  She’ll make this better than good.

She’ll take care of every single person here.

“…Well,” says Karkat awkwardly, and then he straightens his shoulders and shakes off the frailty, transforming suddenly back into an unstoppable force of pure stubbornness.  Feferi loses track of her all-encompassing, imperial pity under the force of his sudden, brusque glare. “So.  There are seadwellers.”

There should be panic, Feferi thinks vaguely to herself.  In any normal circumstances there would be panic, people shoving, yelling questions, curious and upset.  But even as the murmur of slow chaos starts to rise, Karkat takes the biggest breath Feferi has ever seen a troll take and slams a hand down on the railing of the stairs, glaring at the whole crowd like they’re wigglers who didn’t go to bed on time.  “Oh, you’re going to just panic like a herd of moobeasts now?!”  He starts, and his voice is still a yell but for him it is almost dangerously quiet.  The people at the front of the crowd flinch.  Karkat raises his voice again.  “—Is that what you’re going to do? NO!”  The word is a bellow, and it echoes across the crowd and freezes them where they stand.  “YOU WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT, THAT IS AN ORDER YOU HORRIBLE SACKS OF SLIMY INCONTINENT WHALE SHIT!  IF YOU’VE GOT SOME KIND OF FUCKING QUESTION YOU WILL FUCKING RAISE YOUR HANDS!! IF YOU ARE AT THE BACK YOU WILL YELL!!  IF WE STILL CAN’T HEAR YOU THE REST OF YOU WILL PASS THE MESSAGE WORD FOR WORD UNTIL WE CAN, OR I WILL WADE IN AND START PUMMELING, ARE WE CLEAR?!”  

And people…just…

Who needs an empress?  Feferi wonders, as the first hand is tentatively raised.  She stares around—more than a few faces stare back, but even the ones that seem hostile show only a sort of sullen confusion.  The wild mob that she was expecting doesn’t come.  The screaming and panic she was expecting are mysteriously absent.  

She just settles down next to Gamzee in the middle of the road and slumps.  He glances over at her, and she can see he’s not quite alright—the yellows of his eyes are still a little red, there are beads of drying sweat on the bridge of his nose and the grin he gives her is a little bit tight at the corners.  But he does smile, and mouths motherfuuuuuuuck at her, and then all of a sudden they’re sitting there in the middle of the road, the remains of royalty, as democracy happens over their head to the punctuation of Karkat’s staccato cursing, and they just kind of lean on each other and laugh.

“What did he ask you?”  Feferi asks blearily, and Gamzee makes an inquiring sound.  “The…Grand Highblood.  What did he ask you?”

Gamzee sighs, and his bony shoulder shifts against hers.  

“Told me I’m the only one he’ll accept to finish him,” he mutters, and his horns rap against hers gently as he lolls his head back, staring up at the moon.  “Had me make accord on it, all right and set to be.  Give my word.  Think he still wants me to all up and kick that wicked monarchical shit when I get my grow on.  It ain’t a thing that’ll happen.”

They sit in silence for another while, and after Gamzee waves mildly at the first few people who glare at them, they kind of…stop bothering.  There are two highbloods, but they’re small enough, for highbloods, and not doing anything to hurt anyone.  One short, friendly-looking olive-blood actually comes hurrying up and offers two loaves of hot bread.  The taller troll she’s towing by one hand silently offers a mug of something hot.  Gamzee blesses them profusely in his own language and they leave, looking confused but throwing interested looks back over their shoulders.  People have been giving them a wide berth until now; they ease in a little closer, until Feferi and Gamzee have their own little island in the sea of the shifting, murmuring crowd.

“Look at that palemate of mine,” Gamzee mumbles at some point, and they stare up at Karkat—at Nepeta, who has climbed onto the railing next to him to yell answers to the questions he doesn’t know, and Terezi, who is jabbing ferociously with her cane to call on raised hands.  At Tavros, who startles everyone with a surprisingly loud shout when someone asks a question Karkat is about to yell at them for.  Aradia, who appears to have caught a scuffle in the crowd and just flicked two fingers—the fighting trolls slide apart by ten feet with startled yells and Karkat stops in his brutally patient explanation of psychic susceptibility to bawl out the perpetrators.  “Look at him.  Who’d think?  Could shoosh the whole world, like that.”

“That doesn’t…bother you?”  She hazards, and he makes a long, slow, tired noise and an equally tired shrug.  Feferi knows the feeling—her bones feel heavy, her thinkpan feels battered.  

“I’m the one he settled one to one,” he says distantly, and yawns.  “Hands-on-face, eye-to-eye, calmed all miraculous…I won’t be forgetting that in a time worth thinking on.  I’ll be fine.  It’ll bide.”

“You’ll have to explain to me how that happened sometime, Makara.”

Feferi sits up abruptly straight, and Sollux yelps out loud and then just holds on awkwardly as she throws her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder.  “Hi, FF,” he mutters into her hair, and she giggles at the nickname, thrilled.  “Fuck, you’re freezing.  Here—”

He decaptchalogues a jacket, something warm and soft with age and far more battered than anything he ever wears in public.  It smells like him.  She wraps it around herself, sighing happily at the warmth, and then goes right back to hugging him, pressing her cold fingers flat between his jutting shoulderblades.  She can feel the bumps of his spine through his shirt, and she runs a finger over one in slow circles.  

“You’re so warm,” she mumbles sleepily into his neck, and he tenses up for a second, then relaxes.  She can feel how hot his face is through her hair—and not just because he’s a lowblood, she thinks.  Any other time she would be infinitely pleased at the thought that she made him blush, but right now she’s just too tired to think about it.  She needs to get some more sleep and it’s so nice here, like being wrapped up in warmth right down to her bones…

She lets herself drift, leaning against Sollux’s chest, and closes her eyes on more flashes of distant memory—warmth, the smoky tint of vent water filtering through her gills, warming her up from the inside out as she drifted off, and a voice drifting through the water, half-humming, fragments of words and a simple tune…you’ll know you’re home when the w-water’s warm, an’ my love, I have missed you so—

It was a lullaby for minnows, she told him not to over and over again but he knew no matter how many times she insisted it was stupid she always slept better—she—

You’re gonna be the princess—or the empress ‘r somethin’, an’ I’m in charge until you’re grown.  

Yeah well, it’s a song for wigglers, you’re a wiggler, I don’t see the problem here.  Go to sleep, Fef.

You been up trawlin’ shipwrecks again, it ain’t safe!  I’m supposed to protect you an’ all—

Get the hell outta here, Fef, this ain’t the time for heroics!

Sollux holds her while she sobs, and doesn’t say a word as the world rights itself around them and the ocean swallows up the setting moons.

Chapter Text

They bring up Eridan’s body that night, and next night Sollux and Feferi lead each other down to the morgue—Sollux giving directions, Feferi leading him carefully wherever he says.  

Feferi keeps glancing at Sollux’s face; he’s been talking to Terezi a lot even in the space of the day since he was blinded, and now he turns his head this way and that, smelling the air cautiously.

He’s blind and scarred and still working so hard, and she didn’t know it was possible to pity someone this much.  It makes her want to kiss the scars around his eyes and snuggle up into his warmth.

But that’s not what they’re here for, and she faces ahead again as they reach the door.  Sollux glances blindly in her direction, his eyebrows quirked up in worry, and she takes a deep breath and pushes the door open.

She was afraid he would look like a rotting corpse, like the daymares that plagued her when she tried to close her aching eyes.  She was afraid he would look normal, just sleeping, and she couldn’t stand that.  She knows that would break her heart.

Eridan looks tired. 

Serene, too still, almost sleeping, but too cold, too peaceful.  She stares at his face, and misses the permanent, worried quirk of her eyebrows—the expressiveness of his twitching fins and dark eyes and his mouth when he smiled.  His gills are slack and still.  His hair is—oh no, he would hate that.  His hair is in his face, mussed and out of order.

Aradia is sitting next to the body—some sort of vigil, she’d said, when Karkat had asked.  She doesn’t react when Feferi reaches out and brushes Eridan’s hair out of his eyes, running her fingers through it like she has so many times before and settling it into soft waves.  She slips off the ring on her thumb—lifts one cold, stiff hand and slides it gently onto one of his fingers.  

His face is still too pale, too pale to fool herself into thinking he might be sleeping.  But at least now he looks like the prince he was.

Sollux leans down and sniffs the air.  He runs his fingers over Eridan’s face blindly, and feels the crust of dried blood at the corners of his mouth and under his nose and eyes. “Psychic feedback,” he says, a little soft, a little sad.  “Should have just knocked him out and left him there, but he must have fought like hell.”  He traces his fingertips down Eridan’s neck, across his chest until he finds three deep, final wounds just above his gills.  “…she had to kill him herself.  Must have sapped a shit-ton of my ancestor’s strength before he went down.”

He leans down, as though Eridan can still hear him; murmurs something inaudible and bows his head in a jerky little nod of respect.

“Hope,” says Feferi.

“Hope,” repeats Sollux, almost reverent.  “He lived up to the title, the bastard.”

Aradia draws a silk shroud in Hope gold over Eridan’s face and pats Sollux’s shoulder gently before turning to Feferi.  “We'll give his body to his people, of course,” she says, and Feferi nods, still looking at the blank, golden fabric and the familiar face underneath. “What will you do with him?”

“We’ll give him back to the ocean,” says Feferi firmly.  “The sharks can have him.”

Sollux makes a sharp, confused little noise of shock, but Feferi smiles at him—remembers he can’t see her and squeezes his arm comfortingly instead.  “It’s not…” she hesitates, then tries, “…It’s an honorable way to go. They’re strong, vicious, noble—it’s a hero’s funeral, from our old stories.  He told me once he would like that, but…but he wasn’t sure he’d ever be worth enough to deserve it.”

The actuality of it is not romantic, not pretty—but maybe that’s how it should be. They stand far out on one of the piers, with both moons overhead as Feferi lifts her childhood friend’s body into her arms and murmurs her last goodbyes.  Sollux hears the body hit the water; wonders if Terezi’s driven him crazy already or if he’s really smelling the threads of blood that dissolve and wash away on the crests of the waves.   

The body sinks, and Tavros catches Feferi’s nod and tips his head back, raising his hands to his temples.  Minutes later the water ripples with fins and deadly, streamlined shapes.

Feferi doesn’t cry.  But as Sollux and Karkat pull everyone away, Sollux tilts his head, and thinks he hears a voice humming softly over the sound of the water, rising in broken snatches of words.  You’ll know you’re home, when the water’s warm…my love, I have missed you so…

She comes back hours later, and Nepeta tells him she looks okay—no sign she’s been crying.  Just tired.  

He feels her tiny smile as she kisses his cheek, and he has to grab her shoulder as she turns to go.  He knows how strong she is, but she feels so small, and she bears the pain of loss so bravely.  He steal another kiss—a real one this time, long and lingering—and she squeezes him tight.  Then she’s gone again, up to Kanaya’s room to be fussed over and have the last touches added to her dress before she officially meets the people she saved.

Oh, right.  Kanaya.

Kanaya, Sollux has gathered, from the general reaction when she arrived in the middle of the day, has…changed.  Since she left to meet the Grand Highblood.  Karkat was immediately and loudly aghast, just about to the point of tears—because, for one thing, she has apparently found some way of sawing herself in half.  And.  Apparently, had found some way of not dying from it.  

Oh, and she glows now, too.  

“It was Vriska,” Kanaya had explained, after she genteelly requested her sewing supplies and set about embroidering the gash in her abdomen shut. “She…won’t be bothering us again.  She is not dead, but she is injured.” And he could almost hear the tiny, tight smile in her voice, “…rather badly.  And possibly…somewhat anemic.”

“The spider-bitch who broke Tavros’s back,” Karkat had explained sharply to Feferi, before she could ask.  “She’s a psychic.  Runs a whole squad of psychics who think they’re gamblignants or some shit, we’ve come up against her before.”  

Tavros had nodded, and rapped his knuckles against one leg—the sound had been sharply metallic.  

At this point, Feferi is pretty sure she knows less than half of the story.  Terezi’s smile goes fixed and dark and painful when Serket is mentioned, and despite the way Tavros smiles ruefully and laughs off references to the incident that broke him for sweeps, she catches a sort of stifled sadness on his face when nobody is looking at him.  

She doesn’t press the issue.  Vriska’s powers are obviously dangerous—dangerous enough to fool Kanaya’s hands into slicing her chainsaw deep into her own side.  Although apparently there are other creatures that the landdwellers don’t believe in, and she is in the presence of one of them; Kanaya’s skin is so bright and white it is literally glowing.  

“Did you just read so many of those horrible pulp novels the universe decided this was what you deserved?”  Karkat had managed, after the initial panic where he was sure Kanaya was staggering in on her last legs and she was about to fall over dead.  “Rainbow drinkers?  Why the fuck not?  God!  It’s not like this makes any less sense—” Then Gamzee had leaned down and engulfed him in bony limbs until he stopped hyperventilating.  

Presently, they are explaining everything all over again, to hundreds of confused trolls with the same questions.  

That’s her first impression of the people of the lowblood capitol.  The people are many.  The people are loud and in many cases angry, and in some cases wildly excited to see her.  

…but in general, the people are just…confused.  

Fortunately, the fact that Feferi stood up in front of all of them and faced off against the Grand Highblood himself seems to have gone a long way for their acceptance of her.  She shakes hands, smiles widely, answers the same questions over and over again…she keeps catching herself halfway through a polite answer, catching on her ‘w’s, slurring her ‘v’s, and she does her best to smile and assure the people she’s talking to that she’s just fine, yes, of course.  

The melancholy and tedium are broken when, about halfway through the night, she finds it necessary to pick up a would-be assassin by the neck and slam him into the ground.  The crowd parts as she twists the troll’s arms up behind his back until the stiletto knife drops out of his hand.  People murmur, looking generally impressed, but not exceptionally excited—the council gives a sort of collective sigh.  

Feferi shifts over as a shadow falls over her and her would-be murderer, and Terezi picks up the ‘miscreant’ by one twisty horn, whaps him on the head with her cane, cuffs him casually, and dumps him behind the councilors.  Then she goes back to her seat and resumes her conversation.

Feferi is surprised the first and second times it happens over the course of the next few weeks, but eventually she starts to realize that really this is just a way of life.  Assassins come after Gamzee.  They are found gibbering outside his door the next morning.  Even more assassins come after Karkat—the Second Coming, people keep calling him, while he looks uncomfortable and tense with his new bright red symbol on his sleeve.  If they’re lucky, they’re apprehended within a hundred yards of him.  If they’re unlucky, Karkat gets someone to test out his new sickles on. Assassins come after all of them; after Tavros and Aradia and Sollux.  They even track down Nepeta in the wilderness.  Unfortunately for them, she is at her moirail’s hive when the assassin finds her; she drags a body back to the city, and apologizes for the way it’s sort of…exploded in half like that.  

“There were three of them!” she says, wide-eyed like a wiggler describing an exciting surprise.  “I couldn’t bring back the other two though…” her face falls a little.  “I just got mad beclaws I was having a jam with Equius and they tried to stab him with this poisoned knife and…” She sighs, innocently melancholy.  “…there were too many bits of them and Equius didn’t have any bags big enough.”

Gamzee tells them that in the few weeks he spent at the Holy Big Top he learned that “The Old Motherfucker” thought the different ways his assassins always died were hilarious.  Apparently he found a lot of things hilarious—messy deaths, crushed uprisings, executions, just about anything that involved death—and Gamzee theorizes that this is probably his way of letting them know he liked Feferi’s sass and approves of her as a ruler.  

Feferi protests that she isn’t a ruler—but people come to watch her as she leans down to the water and speaks with the seadwellers, and people ask her if they can have bottles of her blood for fortune telling and luck, and people bring her wigglers and ask her to cure them by touching them.  Which, to be fair, she sometimes can.  But that has nothing to do with her royal bloodline!  

Of course, she still has royal duties off the land.  Once a perigee she wraps on her favorite light, pastel skirt and the plainest shirt she can find and slips into the water.  She’s used to the feeling of transformation now; it barely tingles to go from tail to legs and back. She won’t sit in the throne, she won’t appoint a prince regent, but they keep calling her empress, and eventually she stops correcting them. And every time, she returns to the land.

The sun sets as the fishing boats come in, bringing their blind helmsman with them.  And a figure is waiting on the twilit sand, one hand raised to beckon him home.

Chapter Text

The lanterns are bright gold tonight, but the ones that Terezi is sitting under are, at her insistence, bright scarlet. She's lounging on a decadent pile of cushions, while the rest of the council sits around, chatting or eating or watching her, waiting.  Every so often she’ll mutter something, then shake her head.

It's been almost an hour, and the candied beetles are starting to finally run out, when she suddenly twitches, eyebrows rising, and a sharp grin spreads across her face.  Gamzee and Tavros break off a lazy round of slam poetry to listen.  Karkat stops bickering with Nepeta and her giant moirail and turns as well.  The council falls into expectant silence.

“I see islands to the Southeast,” says Terezi, in that whimsical, almost surprised voice she uses when she’s making predictions, like she’s telling riddles with no answers.  “Green islands, all covered in animals and plants.  Things I’ve never seen before!  Cities under clouds of steam!  Oh, this is the way to go, my friends.  This will be an adventure!”  She sniffs, and her smile widens, her tongue flicks out over her lips.  "Mm, and they'll be waiting for us.  Pink little creatures with glass eyes!  Two of them first, always on the border and watching.  They...walk.  Run.  no, no no.  So sure, they stride."  She snickers to herself.  "Pink skin, no horns...and they'll say—”

There's a long, stretching moment of silence as she leans forward, eyes fixed on something invisible, breathing in whatever she's seeing.  Then the moment fades and she slumps, breathing out hard.

“Say?”  Karkat prompts, and she sighs at him and jerks her head in the way that means she’s rolling her eyes.  

“The seer of mind will see exactly as much as she needs to,” she explains primly, and he rolls his eyes and grumbles.  “Oh don’t complain, Karkat!  This way it is exciting!  They looked so very interesting…I wonder what color their blood is…”

“What if the thing they were about to say was some variation on ‘look at those grey-skinned freaks!  Let’s kill them!’?”  Sollux interjects from his spot on a pile of random junk by one of the couches.  Feferi is running her fingers through his hair, but he sits up anyway, looking in Karkat’s general direction with a an incredulous frown.  “Please don’t tell me you’re already planning who to bring.”

“Stop complaining,” Karkat says vaguely, and pulls a map out of his sylladex, glaring at the blank ocean to the southeast like it’s personally insulting him with its emptiness.  “The sea air will do you good, you scrawny little fucking nerd.  If you sit around in your room all day working on that stupid Electronic Computational Device thing, you’re gonna go blind.  Oh wait.”

“Oh my god, fuck you.”

“Oh, come on, Sollux!” Feferi ruffles his hair—he growls up at her half-heartedly and she giggles and leans down to kiss the tip of his pointed nose.  “It’ll be fun!  I’m so excited already!”

“You’re excited about everything,” Karkat growls behind his map.  “Who even said you were going?”

“Well, we are experiencing a time of unprecedented peace, apart from the assassination attempts,” Kanaya asserts, “Theoretically, we are the best exploratory party we could muster, and our subordinates should be more than capable of taking care of the city while we are gone.  Besides, those who are quadranted might be better off staying together.” she looks down at the glowing-pale skin that shows through her intricate drapery of jade and black cloth.  “…I am the cultural attaché, obviously, but whether they are aware of the nature of rainbow drinkers or not I am well aware that most people find my new appearance…vaguely disturbing, at least.  Perhaps a black cape and mask would be in order…”

“But if they do gonna try and kill us,” says Gamzee, contentedly, “…We can just tear off their pink hides and use them as masks so ain’t nobody who’ll care when we get a peek on at their steamy places of living, right?”

Karkat shoots him a look.  Gamzee smiles innocently at him.  Karkat glares, then rolls his eyes and looks back at his map.  

“You are…going to seek out new people to subjugate?”  Nepeta’s moirail asserts uncertainly.  Nepeta tsks and pulls a towel out of her sylladex.  “I…yes, that seems like… a worthy pursuit.  Mm.”  He clears his throat.  “I would be, er…willing to accompany you and contribute my STRENGTH—!”  (Karkat winces and glares, but Zahhak doesn’t seem to notice.  He’s too busy wiping his face.)  “If you ordered me to…sir…”

“Equius, ew,” chides Nepeta, and then turns to Karkat.  “But seriously, Karkitty, we could take him!  He really is really strong!”

“Yeah, it’s pretty freakish, KK,” says Sollux from his spot by the couch, and Karkat growls and rolls his eyes.  

“Fine.”

“I predict…romance…” Terezi is crooning in her pile of pillows, and giggling.  “I predict…Tavros will be unlucky in hate…sorry, Tavros!”

“Aww, okay,” says Tavros, disappointed, “But are you, uh…I still can’t tell sometimes if you're pretending to be predicting things and being gleeful about your fake, um, fakey predictions or if you are really predicting, and that's really going to happen?”

Terezi just keeps cackling.  (I predict sloppy interspecies makeouts!  And the blossoming of, hmm…something flush?! Oh, only to be shot down, hehehe!)

“As long as they don’t see us coming, we have the upper hand,” says Karkat firmly, and rolls up the map, dropping it on the table with something that’s almost like an especially vicious smile.  “Alright, fine.  Two nights.  We’ll leave at moonrise.”

(“Their lanterns are red and gilt and green, and they are crowned with horns like bronze and gold, sharp-toothed with skin like slate and voracious curiosity that is born to their kind,” she murmurs, eyes closed, hands folded, meditative.  “They will come from the west in ships that ride the wind, sailed by invisible hands.”  Her family murmurs, troubled and interested, even excited, as she opens bright violet eyes flecked in the same gold as her dress.  “They’ll come at sunset.”)

TR: End.