Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"This is such bullshit," Ampora groans. He's bent over, forearms resting on his knees, head and hands drooping; you sit beside him in the waiting-room chairs, absently rubbing his back. "Like, I have never in my entire fuckin life observed bullshit as profound or totally unnecessary as this right here, Dave."

"Still not letting you punk out," you tell him, cheerfully. "Just yell if you're gonna hurl again."

He just droops further. Frankly, you don't envy Dr. Helsing--and seriously, is that even her real name, she doesn't look even a bit like Hugh Jackman--the prospect of an hour spent with Ampora in this particular mood, but you've gone this far with the whole goddamn project, you're not about to back out now. "We can go to the scarf store afterward," you'd offered. Even that hadn't seemed to signify.

You'd told Fef, back before the Great Meet-Up, that you weren't qualified for this shit, and you'd meant it; and she had reminded you that nobody expected you to provide Ampora with actual therapy, just a helping hand and a firm smack when indicated, and that trying to get him to go to a shrink right off the bat was not a thing that anyone could possibly imagine working out well. It's now been a couple months, and he hasn't spent the night drunk in a ditch even once, or thrown cutlery at anyone, and he's even demonstrated the occasional flicker of sensibility.

Dr. Z had apparently come to the same conclusion.

"He's approaching stability," Zahhak had said. "Granted, he was so far away from it in the beginning that there's still a way to go, but I think he's getting there. It might be as well to have him evaluated properly."

His pal Helsing wasn't a psychiatrist, just a general practitioner, but she'd kept up with the cognitive behavioral therapy trend and did a lot of screening for the patients who came to her inner-city clinic. The SPCT initiative is ramping up and you're having to work with an actual lawyer to set up a 501(c)3 organization to handle the fundraising shit, and all in all you kind of want to get Ampora into therapy sooner rather than later, for your own mental well-being.

He's now been sick twice from sheer nerves, and you'd give him another Dramamine if you thought it'd do any good. Thank fuck nobody else is in the waiting room with you; Dr. H has cleared her schedule for the afternoon, and you hope her office carpet is easily cleaned. "C'mon, dude, you faced up to Eridan 'Blue Stripy Scarves Totally Go With Purple Sweaters' Ampora, jetlagged and with like two hours of sleep; you can talk to a little blonde English lady for an hour, no sweat."

He twists to look miserably up at you. His hair's coming down. "She's gonna ask me shit."

"Yeah, that's kind of the point. Also, it's not like you never told anyone your story before. You told me, remember?"

"Yeah, but you ain't a doctor, Dave, an you ain't gonna, like, analyze me."

"Pff. Everyone analyzes the hell out of everyone else all the time. Besides, whatever you tell her stays between the two of you. Nobody else gets to know about anything you say unless you let 'em."

"Huh?" He looks at you, confused.

"Doctor-patient privilege, dude. She's literally not allowed to tell people stuff. Unless, I dunno, you're like 'so yep I'ma go home and take a whole bottle of Tylenol, got it all planned out' or something. Which, don't do that, kay?"

"I ain't a patient, I'm a troll," he says, and then realizes what he's just said and groans, covering his face with his hands. You sigh and rub circles on his back. This is definitely, but definitely, beyond your capability to fix.

"Mr. Ampora?" She's standing in the doorway. When you haul Cronus to his feet and walk him over, you're not surprised to find they're pretty much the same height: Greta Helsing is not a large woman. "Come on in. Thank you, Mr. Strider."

Ampora gives you a beseeching look; you put an arm around him, give him a little side-hug. "I'ma go run a couple errands, okay? Be back by the time you guys are done."

The doctor's office door closes behind him, and you are only a little surprised to find you feel kind of sick yourself with apprehension. Nope, you tell yourself, fuck that, it is time to go do shit that doesn't involve worrying about Ampora for once, such as, hey, you need to head downtown to check out the Apple Store that just opened near the harbor, you can be there and back in time to pick him up.

~

As it happens, you're late, because fuck parking in this city. Fortunately this doesn't matter, because when you get there the waiting room is still empty and Dr. H's door is still shut. You text Bro.

TG: hey
TG: hows class going
TT: Karkat dislikes numbers. I assume you're still waiting for Ampora, or you'd be home by now.
TG: yep
TG: cant blame karkles for that one dude
TG: numbers suck
TT: You just resent having to use your phone to calculate tips, little man.
TG: shit you got me
TG: yeah im still waiting
TG: kind of wondering what the fuck theyre doing in there
TG: i mean when he went in he was a wreck
TG: you can picture it
TT: Only too clearly.
TG: yeah
TG: so either she has superhuman powers of shooshing freaked out trolls
TG: or he passed out and shes taking the opportunity to fuck around on the internet or something
TT: Sigh.
TT: Give it another ten minutes and then text Dr. Z.
TG: ten four

It's exactly nine minutes later when the door opens and Cronus shuffles out. Dr. Helsing is smiling, but you think she looks tired. You don't blame her.

"All done?"

"All done. Can I have a word with you, Mr. Strider?"

You look at Cronus, who is considerably less green and does not appear in immediate danger of falling over. He does look slightly dazed, but he nods at your unspoken question. "--Sure," you tell the doctor, and step into her office.

It's evident that she doesn't have a ton of cash: her desk is an old metal affair that looks like it's been around since the forties, the rest of the furniture is mismatched and just as shabby, but every flat surface is covered in books and papers. "Have a seat," she invites. "Firstly I should say he's in much better shape than I expected, given what Equius told me. It seems you're a good influence."

You shrug. "I try, you know? He's been pretty good lately. Has nightmares, though, and he gets super depressed. He was kind of, ah. Nervous. About coming here today."

"I'm not surprised. He's had experiences that'd give anyone PTSD; it's impressive that he's doing as well as he is. There's a great deal of work yet to be done, though, and I'm not the one to do it. I plan to talk to Equius and, if he concurs, refer Cronus to a colleague of mine who's not only qualified but actually very good at her job."

"It was hard as hell getting him to agree to meet one new doctor," you say. "He's not gonna be thrilled about having to go through it again."

"I know. I've discussed it with him, though, and if he doesn't feel comfortable with Dr. Serensky we can continue sessions with me until we find someone he can work with. I have to emphasize, Mr. Strider, that he really needs a stable and supportive home environment while we work through this. If you're considering making any major changes at home, I'd advise you to put them off until he's in better shape."

"We're hoping to move," you admit, "but fu...god knows when that's gonna happen, if we can even find a place we can afford, it's all up in the air. But yeah, okay, I take your point. Not gonna be, like, randomly adopting anyone else in the near future."

"Splendid. Let's schedule an appointment for next week."

~

In the car on the way home Cronus is still somewhat subdued. You keep glancing at him and not saying anything; finally you pull into the parking lot of a 7-11 and put the Buick in park. "Dude," you say. "Are you okay or what?"

"Huh?" He shakes his head a little, fins flapping, and blinks at you. "Oh. Uh. Yeah, I'm good."

"You were in there for a long time."

"Yeah," he says. "We were talkin. Uh. You said nobody gets to know what we talked about."

You almost say I didn't mean me, but stop yourself in time. "Yep. That's all between you and her. But, like, did you like her? Are you okay with going back?"

"I threw up in her trash can," Cronus informs you. "An' she didn't kick me out. She even got me a cup a tea."

"Oh," you say. "Well."

"I think I'm in love."

You can't not laugh, and after a moment he joins in, wobbly and uncertain. "Did you do the eyebrow thing?" you manage, gasping.

"More'n once. I even did the, you know, the fin thing--" he flutters them, which makes you crack up again--"an' she just asked me interestedly about seatroll mor...somethin."

"Morphology. Man, I think you better give up hope, Greta Helsing's not available."

"Hope is a treasure a great price, Dave," he says solemnly, and just like that you know he really is going to be okay.

~

When you get back Karkat is industriously building a castle out of flash-cards and Bro is waiting for water to boil for mac & cheese. "Gave up on the addition and subtraction?" you inquire.

"Do not start with me," Bro says. "I will skin you. Hey, Cronus. How'd it go?"

Ampora blinks, not having expected interest from that particular quarter. "Uh," he says, "good, I guess? I'm supposed to go back next week."

You refrain from mentioning his digestive pyrotechnics. "Cool," Bro says, and dumps macaroni into the water. "Dave, you get to do the afternoon lesson shit, I have to go downtown to meet with the goddamn lawyer again. Won't that be fun, Karkles?" he adds. "Dave can teach you more sentences."

"I know sentences," Karkat points out. "Lessons are dumb. Dave, take me to the quarium."

"No can do, little dude. Today's a busy day."

"Take me to the quarium tomorrow."

"We'll see," you say. Cronus is looking somewhat wan. "--You want any lunch, man?"

"Nah." He swallows hard.

"Go take a nap or something, then, while the rest of us eat. You look grey. Like, greyer than usual."

He flips you off, but he goes willingly enough. Once he's out of the room Bro quirks an eyebrow at you, and you shrug. "She was pleased with him, I guess? Said he was in better shape than she expected. She's gonna get him to see some other doctor friend of hers who's a real shrink. They were in there for a long time."

"So I gathered. She didn't say they were gonna put him on anything?"

"Not so far." You remember him asking you for a handful of Xanax before the ride on C. Fef's private jet, and have to smile a bit. "Although if I was her I'd give him a scrip for tranquilizers just for the sake of her office furniture. I dunno, I think it went pretty good. She didn't respond to him hitting on her."

Bro rolls his eyes. "Of course. Sometimes I wonder how he'd react if someone ever actually did, y'know, respond. Probably run away in terror."

You laugh, and when Karkat knocks over his creation and shows every sign of gearing up for a tantrum you just scoop him up and hug him before he can begin.

Chapter Text

You get to bed pretty late that night. Bro had ended up staying at the lawyer's office to wait for Dr. Z and Fef to show up, they needed to sign some paperwork or something--you are really not good with this whole IRS bullshit--and after that they'd gone out to have dinner somewhere so you'd had to get the kids to bed on your own. Which is not a big deal, you do it all the time, but, wow, you could fucking swear you're approaching forty by the time you finally get the pair of them to chill the fuck out and get tucked in, and then there's all the damn emails from the SPCT site to answer, and all the Youtube comments to ignore.

(One of these days you want to publish some kind of scholarly article on Youtube commenters, to wit, how the fuck do so many of them locate computers and arrange for internet access when they are very obviously random street lunatics? Do they perhaps wait until Starbucks laptop hobos have to go offload the end results of their latest soy half-caf mocha amaretto raspberry pretentiaccinos and sneak onto their machines to spew highly focused illiteracy?)

Eventually it's done with, though, and you shower and get to bed and then can't fucking sleep for no good reason, so you go get a beer from the kitchen and on the way back pause outside your room, listening for a tiny sound you weren't even sure you'd heard.

It comes again. Fuck. Without bothering to put down your beer, you close your bedroom door and cross the hallway to knock softly on the door opposite. The noise cuts off as if abruptly stifled.

"It's me," you hiss.

Nothing.

Fuck. "I'm coming in, dude." You hadn't turned on the lights in the kitchen, so your visual purple is still pretty good when you let yourself into Ampora's tiny room and stare at him. He's glowing, at least the parts of him you can see are; he's curled up on one side in a tight unhappy knot with the Martha Stewart Living comforter pulled most of the way over his head. It is purple. You remember taking him to Target and watching him paw through the bedlinen aisle and bitch about thread count.

You sit down on the edge of his bed. "Hey."

Nothing. Just a soft little sound of profound unhappiness. At least he hasn't been sick again--you've never met anyone with this nervous a stomach, poor guy. God fucking dammit, you knew something like this was gonna happen, you just....kinda hoped you'd been wrong. Putting your Sam Adams down on his nightstand, you lean over and pat what you hope is his shoulder, amorphous under the purple duvet. "Ampora. Cronus. What's up?"

"'s nothin," he says, with palpable untruth. "Go 'way, Dave."

"Nope. C'mon, man, what's wrong? Did you have a nightmare? Shit, are you still feeling gross?"

He rolls over and looks up at you. It's not like you can really get used to somebody's eyes glowing, but you've tried. They're also glittering, and you can tell his pillowcases are gonna need stain remover in the morning, even though they're purple too. "Yeah. Well...no, that ain't it, I just..."

You scowl ferociously and bend over to slide your arms round him and hug him. It's dark, you're alone, nobody needs to know. "Just what? Was it the lab again?"

Cronus buries his face against your shoulder and clings to you with sufficient force to hurt, and yow, you keep on forgetting that he could probably bench-press you without difficulty. "No," he says, thickly. "Not the labs. Street."

It's tough to muster sufficient breath for words but you manage, wriggling a little until he lets up on the deathgrip. "Huh? What street?"

"The street, genius," he says. "Fffuck. I ain't never told that part before today."

Something in your guts turns over, cold and heavy. "Wait, dude, what are you saying?"

"What it fuckin sounds like." He makes a noise between a sob and a nasty little laugh. "Kinda hoped I could, y'know, pretend that whole stretch a time didn't happen, but I guess bein analyzed means you ain't got no secrets left from anyone."

You sit up further, pulling him up to lean against you, aware of the fragile structures of his gills and trying not to hurt. "You don't have to tell me."

"Fuck," he says again. "Yeah, I do, now."

So you listen. You'd known about the labs, the little cages, the experiments. You'd known about the punch biopsies done without benefit of anesthesia. You'd known about the TrollChow(TM). You'd known he had been bought and freed from all that horror, and after that...well, you'd just figured he'd made his way on his own.

Which he had. There are vanishingly few professions open to trolls, owned or independent. Some of them have been put into use as service animals, which makes your toes curl. Some of them are photographers' models. Some of them are pethookers.

He had to explain the name. There are people, he said, who for a smallish amount of money want the company of a troll for an hour or two. People who don't want the bother of actually owning their own, but who want the warm fuzzy feeling of fussing over a lesser creature. Sometimes the warm fuzzy feeling extended beyond being addressed by a collared troll as "master" or "mistress." Sometimes it went to the next, logical if distressing, step.

You can't help thinking about what Bro'd said earlier. What would Cronus do if anyone actually ever evinced interest or desire in his horrible fucking pickup lines.

At first you'd thought it was the product of the fact he'd never had attention of any positive sort during his incarceration in the labs. Now you understand a little more of the mixed poisons that have to be constantly swirling in his head--disgust and fear, desire to please, desire for agency and control--and you listen to him telling the story, the rasping little voice inexorable in that purple-tinged darkness, and you just hold him because there is nothing else under the sun that you can do.

He talks about catching rides across the country, living for a while in Chicago, sleeping rough, catching fuck knows what chest infections over and over, couch-surfing when he could, making his living on the streets after dark. The other workers didn't begrudge him a spot on their beat: they offered different commodities for different tastes. Some of them had been kind to him, for almost the first time. He'd found a protector, eventually, a patron, who'd kept him for a while and then given him the money for a ride back west, where he'd skulked around doing what he could to get by. When he'd heard about what you were doing out here, he'd decided to try his luck on this end of the country.

You can remember him trying to mack on people in Rise that night he'd shown up and got shitfaced. You wonder, now, who he was trying to convince.

Eventually he winds down, just lying against your shoulder, face pressed to your neck, warmer than he ought to be, but not frighteningly so. You go on rubbing his back, trying to think of what the actual fuck you can say.

"I dunno what to say, dude," you tell him, quietly. "I didn't know. None of us did. Was this seriously the first time you ever talked about it? Today?"

He nods against you. "I didn't mean to. It just...I was tellin her about stuff an it just...came out. Like I couldn't stop. Once I started it just...it was like pukin, Dave, it just had to come up."

Apposite, you think. "What did she say about it?"

"She didn't. Just like...looked at me and thanked me for tellin her, why, I can't fuckin imagine, it ain't like it's the kinda story anyone ever wants to hear, but she just...let me talk, I guess. And then when I was done she started discussin what happened since I been here."

"You were okay when we left, though?"

"Yeah, it...I kinda felt numb? Like your eyelids feel when you cry? Kinda swollen an numb all over. I was fine, I just...I went to sleep an then the fuckin dreams started up."

You sigh. "Move over."

"Huh?"

"I said, move over. This is a lousy goddamn bed but mine's not much better." You nudge him until he sort of sluggishly hauls himself further toward the wall, and you slither under the covers beside him and offer him your forgotten beer. "Good for you, man. Contains nutrients."

Cronus droops against your shoulder, trembling--no, not trembling, he's laughing silently, even if it's still not too far off tears. "Fffuck, Strider," he says after a moment. "You got the answer to everythin, don't you?"

"We like to think it's a family thing."

When at last he does sleep, he's curled up against you and you're wrapped around him, as if your lousy protection now could do a damn thing about the shit he'd been through years before you'd ever met face to face.

~

Thank fuck nobody asks any questions when you show up to breakfast late and yawning. It's Saturday: Bro is doing pancakes. "You get all that shit sorted out with the lawyer, man?"

"Yup," he said. "He's gonna submit it Monday and we oughta hear back from the feds by the end of the week. He said he didn't expect there's gonna be any trouble about it, though. Pretty straightforward application."

None of you had had any idea how the hell you went about dealing with money from charitable donations, so Dr. Z had had recourse to his professional network and found you a tax lawyer who could get you organized sufficiently to apply for 501(c)3 nonprofit status for the newly created Serket Foundation. This meant you were a fuckload more likely to get large donations from people looking for tax writeoffs, and it also meant that you didn't have to worry about capital gains tax for your own personal accounts on shit given to you for the purposes of SPCT.

"Good," you say, flopping into a chair, and are surprised when Sollux floats you over a mug of coffee. "--hey, thanks, man. Thanks. Uh. What's with the Lego yurts?" The table looks a little crowded.

"We're trying to move from pirates to Mongol hordes," Bro explains, flipping pancakes. "For math class. Hey, Karkat. Remember what 'decimate' means?"

Karkat is bashing two Lego horses together, making arrrrrr noises for the Lego barbarians astride them. "Kill guys?"

"Kill how many guys?"

"One guy in every ten guys?"

"Right. So say Ghenghis there in your hand and his vast horde of warriors put the other dude to fire and the sword and such, and decimated his forces, and say the other dude had a hundred guys to start with, how many would he have left?"

"Nine-ety," Karkat says, distractedly, and makes Ghenghis gallop his horse into the sugar bowl.

~

"I'm not surprised," Dr. Helsing says, over the phone. "Not that that helps a great deal, I'm afraid. I think you did exactly the right thing, for what it's worth, and I also think nobody else needs know about this unless it comes up in a clinical context. I assume Equius would have picked up on it if he'd contracted any--"

You cut her off. "Yeah, I'm sure he would. Just. I wanted to know if there's anything else I should, like, be doing for him."

"No. Don't treat him differently after this, Mr. Strider, that's crucial."

"Dave," you say, with a sigh. "You better just call me Dave."

"Then I'm Greta. I mean it, if you start treating him differently now he'll not only pick up on it at once but he'll automatically think you feel differently towards him with this new information in mind. It's absolutely key that you go on just as normal."

"I--"

"Which will obviously be difficult for you. I do understand. To some extent I think you can take cues from him; if he seems to want more affection, you can go ahead and give it, but don't start treating him like damaged goods or some poor little waifish victim. He's exactly the same troll you've known for months now."

You kind of want to tell her to step the fuck off, she's only met him once and you've bailed him out of the god damn pound, not to mention saved his pointy ass any number of other times, and then realize why you are thinking this, and just sag. "Yeah, okay. I got it."

"This won't be easy, Dave," she says, and her voice is kinder. It's lower than Jade's and Fef's, with the remains of a solidly middle-class British accent blunted by years away from home. "But nothing has been, so far, right?"

"Some parts. Not many."

"Let me give you my mobile number," she says. "Any time, day or night."

"Thanks," you say, and are surprised to find you mean it.

Chapter Text

You do not, in fact, take Karkat to the aquarium. Partly because it's the weekend and the place is going to be stupidly packed with people, and partly because you've thought of something else that might be just as enjoyable and less expensive.

Ampora is up early-ish for him, before eleven, and shuffles into the kitchen while you're busily typing updates for the site and trying to stop Karkat from climbing up the fridge door at the same time. It isn't easy, and you're not surprised to find you're making typos.

"...the fuck do they get all that energy," he mutters, eyes still half-shut and slightly puffy. "'s fuckin unconscionable bein all bouncy an bright-eyed before a guy's even had his goddamn coffee."

You look at him, and then at Karkat, who's at least given up his assault on the north face of the fridge and is poking Ampora in the leg with Lego Ghenghis. "You know what I think? I think we need to get the hell out of the house for a while, that's what I think."

"Muh." The coffeepot, at least, is not yet empty. He adds sugar to his mug, gulps it down, winces. "'s too bright out."

"One thing this household is not short of is sunglasses, man." You scoop Karkat up, closing the laptop. "How'd you like to go visit a real sailing ship?"

"A pirate ship?" Karkat demands.

"Nope, but a real honest-to-god Civil War battleship. With cannons."

Karkat's eyes go huge. "Real cannons?"

"They even set 'em off for people."

You can tell this has slid through the haze of sleepiness round Ampora; he's straightened up, made an effort to push the hair out of his eyes. "You come too, man." He blinks.

"Me?"

"No, douche, the other purple troll in the kitchen. It's all appropriately nautical-themed." And probably would give him fewer willies than seeing a whole bunch of sea creatures enclosed in tanks. Never let it be said that you are an insensitive guy.

"I dunno," he hedges, and Karkat reaches out to tug at his sleeve.

"Mister Purple needs to come see cannons."

"Mister Purple..." he trails off, and sighs, but you can see the earfins rise slightly. "Mister Purple ain't got shit to do today, okay, yeah, sure."

~

He's wearing a spare pair of your aviators, dark enough to completely hide his eyes, and you noticed the unconscious relaxation in his shoulders when he put them on: looks like the facial privacy-window-tint effect works on trolls as well. It is so much easier being looked at when people can't tell you're staring right back at them.

You'd asked Sollux if he wanted to come too, and he'd barely even looked up from his iPad to shake his head. You're gonna have to ask Bro what the hell the kid's up to--he's obviously working on something, but you haven't figured out what yet. It's not worth trying to convince him to give up his toy for an afternoon of sightseeing (and crowds and noise, which he dislikes), so you'd just withdrawn and gone to pack your Taking Karkat Places backpack. (It contains, among other things, disinfectant wipes and bandaids, because he is constantly bashing into things and getting himself covered with various substances.)

It's a nice day. There are loads of people thronging the harbor, as usual on a Saturday, and someone is doing one of those cringe-making juggling/unicycle/terrible joke routines in the little amphitheater between the pavilions. It draws a crowd, it always does, and you thread your way through the people with Karkat in the crook of one arm and Cronus close behind you. He gets stares, of course, but the fins stay at least at half-mast and at one point you catch him giving the barracuda grin to a large lady with a Disney sweatshirt and a half-open mouth.

"It's big," Karkat breathes, staring up at the Constellation. It is. It's also real, unlike the ones he's seen in the movies, and even without the sails set the amount of wood and rope and brass on display is pretty impressive. "We can really go on it?"

"We get to pay eleven bucks an adult for the privilege, yo." You ruffle his curls. "C'mon, we got here just in time for them to fire the cannon."

There's no trouble at the ticket window, either: two adults, one kid; you think the lady doesn't want to try and argue with Cronus's teeth. Karkat lets you carry him through the little museum and up the gangway, but squirms to be put down as soon as you're on board. There's several people down at the stern, clustering around a lady in old-fashioned sailor uniform who is finishing loading a black-powder charge.

You've seen this before, but it never stops being super fucking cool. There's a hole in the webbing between deck and railing big enough for the cannon to poke through, and it's hauled up tight against the rail before she reaches out with the slow-match to the touchhole. There's a flash of light, a puff of white smoke, and an explosion that thuds in your chest and rolls echoes out over the water. The kids are all staring wide-eyed, hands over ears, at the gun on its carriage--now several feet further backward--as a wisp of smoke coils from the touchhole.

Karkat, unlike some of the other little kids there, seems totally unafraid. You kneel down and capture him before he can scuttle over and put his hands all over the now-hot gun. "Imagine a whole bunch of those going off at once, all round you," you say. "Pretty scary."

"Awesome," Karkat says, and beams up at the woman in uniform, who gives him a crooked smile.

~

Ampora has to duck--just--to avoid bonking his horns on the low ceilings below decks. You are glad, for once, that you're nothing like as tall as Bro is. Karkat runs around excitedly, like the other kids, and keeps coming back to tug at your hand and show you some new marvel or other. The replica guns down here are huge, throwing eight-inch shells instead of cannonballs, and you can only imagine the noise and heat and general pandemonium when all of them were in use. Karkat wants to sit on one, and you prevent him, but lift him up so he can have a look at the view through the gunports.

He's less impressed with the tiny cubicle where the captain slept ("I think it's bigger'n my room," Ampora says, and avoids the smack you aim at him), but the wardroom at the stern with its long wooden table and relatively comfortable seating is a hit. Personally, you'd prefer to sack out in one of the hammock/bunk hybrids in the sickbay on the next deck down--they're at least close to the size of an actual bed, and probably a lot nicer in heavy weather than the built-in shelf-style bunks the officers used. "This is where you'd come if you needed to get your leg sawn off," you inform them. "Check it out, they have saws!"

Karkat thinks this is the best thing ever, and bounces around the sickbay chortling and waving an invisible bone saw. You're gonna have to get this kid onto Hornblower. At least there'd be less Johnny Depp. "--Naw, kid, I need those legs," Ampora is saying, fending him off gently. "You can cut off Sol's instead, how about that?"

"Then he could have a peg leg," Karkat agrees, with a disturbingly thoughtful look in his eyes, and then grins and wriggles away from Ampora to demand that you pick him up and read him the labels on the alarming bottles in the sickbay cabinets.

You explore the whole ship, from the powder magazine and the rusty ballast-strewn hold to the vast capstan and the lacework of rigging and spars that towers over the deck. Only one person asks you if those are trolls, and when you acknowledge this to be the case, nobody seems to have much to say about it. Karkat, as usual, prattles happily at anyone who'll listen, and asks a couple pretty smart questions when someone in uniform comes by.

Afterward, you buy lunch in one of the pavilions. There used to be a Greek place here that did amazing cheap souvlaki, but it seems to have turned into a Cheesecake Factory or something, so you hit up the pizza joint instead. "You doing okay?" you ask Cronus, taking advantage of the fact that Karkat is distracted by consuming a pizza slice larger than his head.

He looks over the shades at you. His eyes are still circled, still tired as hell, but they're not dull with misery. "I'm cool," he says. "A course. Surprised you even gotta ask, Strider."

~

He's less cool half an hour later when Karkat insists, threatening tantrums, to be taken into the USS Torsk. "I don't do good with small spaces," he reminds you, holding up his hands.

"Yeah, okay. I gotta...he's gonna fuckin lose it, Cronus, are you gonna be okay staying out here while I walk him round the sub?"

"Sure, go on." You aren't sure, but Karkles is starting to attract attention, and you sigh and tuck him under your arm, threatening to put him in a torpedo tube if he doesn't straighten up and fly right. This has the intended effect of making him giggle himself into a better mood.

The Torsk is fucking awesome. Sure, it doesn't have cannons--is cannon plural as well as singular?--but it does have the biggest toaster you've ever seen, plus all kinds of amazing pipes and valves and dials and manifolds and an absurdly cheery Formica mess hall which would go much better with teenagers sharing milkshakes than navy dudes waiting to blow stuff up. You take a lot of iPhone pictures, and don't let Karkat crawl into the machinery, and do introduce him to a couple of the other people who're exploring along with you when they evince interest.

(One of them is an older guy who actually sailed on one of these--not the Torsk itself but a sub just like it--and he is amazingly cool and puts up with Karkles asking him all kinds of what-does-this-do questions. You shake his hand afterward and thank him respectfully for his time, because wow, he so did not have to do that.)

It is kind of a relief, though, when Karkat starts drooping, and you carry him back up the steep steps to the sub's deck, his head resting against your shoulder. Cronus is slouching on a bench and starts guiltily when you approach him; you can smell the residue of cigarette smoke immediately, even before he stifles a cough. You're about to say something, but just sigh. It can wait. "C'mon, dude. If we hurry we can beat the game traffic."

~

"Look, I'm sorry, okay?" he bursts out halfway home. Karkat is sleeping in the back seat; you have almost forgotten Cronus's backsliding in the frustration of having to avoid a bunch of assholes in orange and black wandering vaguely across the street. You didn't, in fact, beat the game traffic.

"Huh?" You flick a glance at him and then back to the road.

"Bummin a cig. Fuckin sue me."

"Not right now, okay, dude, I'm driving." It's not like this is the end of the world, you think, jesus, Ampora, stop making a big deal out of it, what the fuck is even wrong with these fucktards hi way to walk right into oncoming traffic yeah woo go birds you're lucky I'm paying attention!

Luckily you don't actually slam on the brakes hard enough to wake Karkles, but your normal chill easy-going equanimity is pretty much gone by the time you pilot the Buick out of the downtown crush. When you park it back at home you pause to get some of your cool back, and realize Cronus is doing that hunching thing again. "What? What is it?"

"Nothin," he says. If you didn't have Karkat with you, you might've pursued the argument, but you have and so you don't. You just unbuckle the kid from his car seat and scoop him up, smiling despite yourself at the way he automatically clutches your shirt and presses his face into your shoulder.

Bro is leafing through delivery menus when you get upstairs. You put in a vote for Indian, and go to get Karkat down for a quick nap before dinner. He smiles sleepily at you and murmurs "dive dive dive," and this is one of those goddamn moments where something turns over in your chest and you feel warm and shaky and lightheaded.

"You get any pictures?" Bro asks, when you get back to the kitchen. You pull out your phone and show him: Karkat standing beside the cannon, Karkat staring in wonderment at amputation saws, Karkat squinting up at the maze of rigging, Karkat perched on the Torsk's chart table and dwarfed by the spaghetti-knots of piping and valves.

And Cronus, standing at the Constellation's stern, one of the first ones you'd taken; he hadn't known you were there, and he looks odd without the self-conscious set to his shoulders, the constant shifting effort to define how he's perceived. He plays to a whole goddamn studioful of cameras, you think, and it doesn't matter that they're all inside his head, they all demand attention.

Shit.

You put the phone back in your pocket, mess up Sol's hair--he ducks away, out of habit--and go to find your hot mess of a seatroll. He'd been right, really: his bedroom isn't a lot bigger than the tiny cupboard-berths on board the ship. "Yo," you say, knocking on the door.

There's a definable pause. "Come in."

He's sitting on the bed with his phone, still hunched over, and you sit down beside him and put an arm round his shoulders. "What's up, man?"

"Nothin," he says again, stiff under your touch.

"C'mon. Sorry I snapped at you in the car, fucking O's fans. You feeling okay?"

He shakes your arm off, which he hasn't done in a long time, and glares at you through his eyelashes. "'m fine, Dave, what do you want?"

"What happened?"

Bam, something just went home. He drops his gaze to the purple coverlet. "Nothin happened. I said. I just waited for you to get done seein the submarine an bummed a cig." Cough.

"Yeah, okay, so what?"

"You used to get really pissy when I did that." He's really focused on that cover. "Right?"

"Well, yeah, it's dumb and you shouldn't do it and you know that, but it's not like you knifed a little old lady or something, Cronus, what's the big deal? Everybody fucks up."

"You just, like, sighed. Like, oh it ain't even fuckin worth tellin him he's a asshole, why do I even bother, sighed."

It's not clear in your memory, but you're pretty sure you didn't actually intend to convey any of that via that particular exhalation. "Cronus--"

"I keep on disappointin you," he insists. "I fuckin said I would."

You can feel this starting to slide away from you, the first few pebbles bouncing down the slope, and you put your arm tight around his shoulders and hold him steady. "Listen to me, Cronus, okay, just for a sec. No, you do not keep on disappointing me, that is bullshit and I think you know it is. Everybody, even someone as amazing as me, fucks up sometimes. Right? The key is to not...make little fuckups into huge great gigantic issues, because that's kind of like adding a sixty-pound weight to yourself before you go skydiving, shit's hard enough without making it any harder."

Cronus is still stiff in your arm, but now his shoulders begin to ease. "That's...the worst fuckin metaphor you ever came up with, Strider," he says. "Which is sayin a lot."

"You just don't appreciate the brilliance of my rhetorical flourishes, yo." You give him a little shake, and his head wobbles, and you can't breathe for a moment, jesus fuck you are pale for this jerk. "Okay? We should get you one of those douchebag e-cigarette things, less cancer and terrible nicorette flavor."

He laughs despite himself, briefly, and then goes back to the hunching. "Uh. It wasn't just that. While you and Karkat were doin whatever down in that gross tin can thing, a couple bros came by and said some stuff."

You frown. "What stuff did these bros say, exactly?"

"Oh, you know, stuff. Like, the fuck are you doin off a leash, haha he thinks he's people, like that."

"Jesus dick." You take him by the shoulders, stare at him. "Why the hell didn't you say something?"

"Not like you coulda done anythin, they were gone by the time you came out, an...it woulda made a scene an the kid was already like half asleep..."

You aren't surprised he bummed a smoke off someone after that. "Christ up a tree, Cronus, I'm sorry. That's...I guess I kinda got used to people being surprisingly awesome to the little kids. I didn't figure you'd be in for shit like that."

"Oh, I did." He smiles mirthlessly. "I got lots a experience bein in for shit like that, Dave."

"Oh, God." You just pull him into a hug. He squawks, but his arms go around you and his head rests against your shoulder, and you stroke his back until the faint trembling in his arms subsides. "I promise, dude, that as much as I can, I'ma try to stop that from happening. Okay? And, like, tell me if it does. Please. I may not be able to prevent people being dicks to you, but I can sure as fuck point it out to them and explain how not to be a dick in future."

"You don't gotta protect me," he says quietly.

"No, I don't, but I want to."

Cronus lets out a sigh of his own, drooping further against you. "Okay," he says at last. There's a pause that neither of you feels the need to break--at least until his stomach growls. He'd barely picked at his pizza. Both of you snicker. "...what's for dinner?"

"That's up to the whims of Bro, man. You sure you're cool?"

"Yeah," he says, after a moment. "Yeah, I'm cool."

Chapter Text

The day you're scheduled to take Cronus to his third appointment, you wake up late with a headache you absolutely did not earn the night before. You're not real hungry, either, but you eat cereal and swallow two aspirin with coffee, and soon enough the headache recedes.

For his part, Ampora seems to have gotten over his fear of little blonde general practitioners. "She's gonna introduce me to her friend the actual shrink next time," he explains. "Who has this super kickass name I totally can't spell."

Neither can you: it's Russian or something, got a Z in it. "Good," you say.

"Dave?"

"Mmh."

"You okay?" He peers at you, and you pull yourself together, aware that Bro is also staring at you.

"I'm cool," you reassure the table, at your most deadpan, and are very glad you have your shades on.

~

You're not cool. In fact, sitting in Dr. H's waiting room, you're sweltering hot. Her AC must be broken or something, or someone's set that shit way too high, because in your t-shirt and jeans you are sweating like a god damn pig, and it's gross.

It's really gross. And your headache's back, but more than that you're starting to think maybe there was something wrong with the milk in your Sugar Bombs at breakfast, because wow, you are really kind of feeling significantly pukey all of a sudden.

Get it under control, Strider, you think. Wait till he's done his appointment, drive him home, and then have food poisoning or whatever the fuck is wrong. This shit is unacceptable right now.

When he finally emerges he stares at you. "...the fuck, Dave?"

"Nice to see you too, asshole." You haul yourself out of the chair and are appalled to find that you're starting to get dizzy. "C'mon, let's get out of here."

"You ain't okay," he says. "I know from not okay, chief, an you are not okay."

You shrug, evading the hand he puts out to steady you, and fish for the car-keys in your pocket. The elevator ride makes your stomach feel even worse, but at least outside in the fresh air the breeze is icy cold in your damp hair, on your wet face. Cronus is saying stuff which you ignore, because at the moment the key task on your agenda is getting the two of you back to the apartment. Bro's Buick is parked a little way down the street--there's curbside parking during business hours--and you lead the way with him trailing behind you and complaining. In fact you hold it together long enough for both of you to get into the damn car before you abruptly wrench your door back open, lean out, and deposit your breakfast all over the ground.

You have legit not felt this abjectly shitty for...years. Many years. Not since you were just a kid. It happens again just when you'd begun to think you were empty, and somewhere beyond the profound desire to be shot you're aware of wonderfully cool hands steadying you, holding your shoulders so you don't go face-first out the door into your own sick. When you do finally stop, Cronus tugs you back into the car and you flop against the seat with your eyes closed, panting.

He puts a hand on your forehead, says a number of bad words. "You're burnin up, Strider. Switch with me."

"Huh?" You open your eyes a little. Your lashes are clumped together with tears.

"I said, switch places. You can't fuckin drive, man, don't argue."

"Neither can you," you point out. "You don't have a license."

"Technicality." He waves this away. "Or do you want me to text Dirk?"

The idea of letting Ampora drive Bro's car is not doing your stomach any good, but neither is the idea of having to be ignominiously rescued by your big brother, in a taxi, with the kids, because he couldn't find a sitter on such short notice...The cool hand on your face feels stupidly good. It's possible, if you sit perfectly still and don't open your eyes, that you won't puke again immediately.

"...here," you say, and hand him the keys. Enough people are staring that you think briefly the Bro option would be smarter, but he's twitched them out of your hand and gotten out, coming around to your side. You slide over to the passenger seat and resume sitting perfectly still with your eyes firmly shut, taking long careful breaths.

Cronus starts the car, and you can hear him drop the transmission into a gear, and hope that it's Drive. Then you're moving, and he's rolled down your window a little so you get fresh air on your face, and that helps a little. "Jesus," he's muttering, almost to himself. "This shit came on super fast. You were feelin gross at breakfast, weren't you."

It's not a question. You dare cracking open an eye long enough to reassure yourself that you are in fact in a lane heading the correct direction and not about to bang into any fellow motorists, pedestrians, or buildings, and shut it again. "Mmh. You're driving."

"Brilliant observation, Strider."

"Shut up. No. I mean. How did you learn?"

"Told you I had a protector for a while in Chicago." He doesn't elaborate.

"Don't get pulled over," you say, and then about five minutes later, "pull over."

~

By the time you reach your building you have been sick twice more, and you literally have nothing left inside you to throw up. Miraculously nobody seemed to notice a Skylark being piloted by a purple seatroll in a douchetastic scarf, or if they did, the Somebody Else's Problem field saved your collective ass.

He has to help you out of the car, and now you've begun to shiver, too, which is unpleasant. You lean on him on the way up in the elevator, remembering an evening in which you'd held him upright after much the same kind of activity. Maybe he's recalling the same thing, because he puts his arms round you and lets you droop your gross face against his neck. Scarf and all.

Bro stares at you when you manage to fumble the key into the lock and open the front door. "Holy shit," he says, and looks at Ampora, standing behind you with an unobtrusive hand on your shoulder to keep you steady. "What happened? He looks like absolute hell."

"'m right here," you mumble. It'd be nice to sit down, you're still shivering hard and your knees are starting to feel like they might go on strike any moment.

"Did you guys get flu shots?" Ampora asks. "It came on real sudden, an he's been pukin his guts out the whole way home. Doc Helsing said there's an extra super awful one goin round."

That's nice to know. At least you didn't get sick in her waiting room. Unlike Ampora, that first time. Wow, you really would like to sit down kind of like now.

Bro catches you as your knees give out, eerie-quick as always, and lifts you without apparent effort. If you'd had anything left inside you, you'd have decorated his shirt, but you just groan and tell the universe it can eat a bag of dicks, you are one hundred percent done with this shit. Despite the misery, you can't deny it feels kind of nice to have Bro pick you up like a kid and...carry you to your room, apparently.

"Ampora drove, didn't he," Bro asks you softly, helping you out of your gross sweaty clothes. In the dimness of your bedroom your head hurts a little less.

"...yeah. It was either that or shriek for help from you, and..."

"I'll yell at you for shitty life choices when you ain't sick as hell, kid. Why didn't you say you weren't feelin' good? I thought you looked pale at breakfast."

"Bluh, don't talk about food. I dunno, I figured it was nothing. By the time Ampora was done with Dr. H I was...not in such great shape, though."

"No shit." Bro strokes damp hair away from your forehead; you turn your face against his hand, which is hard with calluses and wonderfully cool. "You could've stayed there and asked Dr. H for help, by the way. Bein' as how she is actually a medical doctor of the type that works on humans."

"I just...wanted to get home." You can hear a horrible note of whining in your voice, and are relieved when Bro just chuckles and goes on fucking with your hair.

"Fair enough, I guess. Anyhow, you're a Strider, ain't no influenza virus yet evolved that we can't beat on our own, am I right?"

"Mmh."

The hand leaves your head, and you squint up at him. "Relax. I'ma get some water, get you cleaned up and into PJs, and then you're goin' to sleep, little man, that is an order."

~

Time goes fuzzy. You're pretty sure you hurl again at one point, but some kind soul has put the trash can by your bed for this very purpose, so this is not something you feel you need to worry about for very long. Now and then people are talking, cool hands touch your face, something blessedly cold rests on your forehead. Somebody lifts you from the pillows and makes you sip something vaguely sweet and lemony.

When you can make out what they're saying it's garbled, nonsensical. "One oh two point six," and "kids" and "Jade's place" and "Helsing." Your throat hurts. Everything hurts. Everything hurts and it's entirely too hot. It's always too fucking hot in Houston, but you aren't in Houston, you haven't been there in years, and you should be doing something, there's someone you have to reassure, someone who's gonna be scared, but you can't remember names: all you can hang on to is the faint sound of somebody crying in the rain.

Then someone nudges you onto your side, and wonderfully cool arms slip around you, someone cool all over pulls you to rest against them; purple light slips through the red fog in your head. You are held close, your back against his chest. You can feel the regular beating of his heart, even through the throbbing of your own pulse in your ears and throat and eyeballs, and it's slower than yours, steady, deep, a rhythm like far-off drums in a great emptiness; and you are grateful to fall into that emptiness and give up conscious awareness for a while.

~

When you wake up Ampora is slumped in a chair beside your bed. You recognize it as one of the folding kitchen chairs, and wonder how long he's been sitting there, and if his butt's asleep.

"Ngh," you say. He blinks, opens his eyes wide, grins a toothy grin at you.

"Hey, chief. How you feelin?"

"Shitty." You push yourself up against the pillows, wincing at the way all your muscles ache. Your back and chest and stomach hurt from the heavy workout of being sick, but everything else hurts too, as if you've been rolled around in a barrel for a while. Your throat hurts, as well, dull and thick. "What time is it?"

"About noon. You freaked us all out, Strider, you were a mess."

"You slept with me," you say, rubbing at your face. Ampora gives a startled laugh.

"Wouldn't call it sleepin exactly. I tried to cool you down is all, you were on fire. Started to go down after an hour or so, but you got all flaily an distraught when I tried to get outta bed, so I ended up stayin with you till mornin."

"Mmh. Oh, shit. The kids."

"They're fine," he assures you. "I mean, they're worried as fuck, but Dirk is pretty good at reassurin people. Guy has a talent."

"I wanna see them." You close your eyes, aware that you're horribly close to tears. "Wait. No. Shit. They'd catch this, whatever it is."

"Flu. Super awful hell flu. Doc H said she'd seen a bunch a cases recently, couple people had to go to hospital. It don't last long, at least, but Dirk sent the kids to go stay with Jade for a couple days."

"You're gonna catch it," you say. Everything is terrible. At least you don't feel pukey any more; everything except that is terrible.

"Could be," he agrees, cheerfully. "Catchin stuff is an area in which I got considerable talent. Ah, jeez, Dave. Don't look like that, man, it's not like I coulda not stayed with you."

You blink at him. He's looking tired, his hair coming out of its standard swept-back configuration, shadows under his eyes, but he's also smiling. "Cronus..."

"Shut up, Strider. Nowhere else I'd wanna be. Okay?"

You can't talk at all, your throat closes and your eyes sting, but he kindly doesn't notice and just takes your hand in his. "Doc H said you gotta keep hydrated, so you got a choice a disgustin Gatorade popsicles: green flavor or red flavor."

"Red flavor," you manage to croak, but you've twined your fingers with his and don't let go, and he doesn't show any sign of getting up.

"I knew you were gonna say that."

~

You sleep, on and off, all day. During one of the periods of wakefulness Cronus helps you shuffle to the bathroom, gets you into clean PJs, and when you get back to your room Bro has changed the gross sweaty sheets. All of this would probably make you want to die of embarrassment if your head was a little clearer, but you're still feverish enough just to mumble thanks and flop against the pillows and let the world go away again. Toward evening your sore throat turns into a cough, which is about as much fun as dental surgery minus anesthesia; it aches deep in your chest and pulls muscles already outraged from yesterday's hurlathon.

"No can do," Bro says when you demand codeine (or a nice sharp sword to the jugular). "Helsing was pretty firm on that point, you gotta keep your lungs clear. No suppressants for you, kiddo."

"God damn it," you croak. "Interfering woman. Since when is she my doctor?"

"Since you needed one," Bro says drily, and fucks up your hair. "Quit complaining and finish your nourishin' soup like a good young adult. You scared us."

You look at him. Without the shades his eyes are candid, tangerine and tired and warm. "What happened?"

"Welp. After Ampora hauled your ass home--and don't imagine I'm not gonna have words with you about that when you're better--we got you to bed and you proceeded to spike a crazy fuckin' fever, worse'n I've seen you since you were tiny. You were saying all kinds of shit that made no sense, I think you were back in our place in Houston cause you were complaining about the broken AC on the roof. I called Jade, got her to come pick up the kids--they were scared as hell, but I think between me and her we got 'em to believe you weren't dying. It was Ampora who called Dr. Helsing."

You blink. Without realizing it, you've actually finished your nourishing soup, and you put the bowl down on the nightstand. "Really?"

"Yup. She was all like 'sponge him down with water' but he just got in bed with you instead and did his heatsink thing, which got you down from 103 to a much more respectable 99.9 or somethin', and then you wouldn't let him go." Bro's voice is slightly amused, but mostly what you hear is fondness. "Raised hell when he tried to get out of bed. I dunno if he got any sleep at all; you must've let him go at some point cause when I came in to check on you guys he was sittin' by the bed keeping an eye on you. He's crashed out on the couch right now with the TV blaring."

"He's gonna catch this," you say.

"Probably. I said something to him about it--like, you know, he's got a bad chest to begin with, might not be the smartest idea to be spooning with someone spewing out viruses like a germ volcano--and he just gave me the worst fuckin' look I ever got given by anybody and said he wasn't gonna leave your side." Bro shrugs. "Guy's devoted, what can I say."

Your eyes sting again, and you're kind of grateful for the coughing fit that gives you an excuse for tears. Bro thumps you on the back and hands you a tissue, and by the time you can breathe again you've more or less got your shit together. "I gotta call Jade, talk to the kids."

"Not sounding like that you don't. Text her."

"Where's my phone?"

~

TG: hey harls
TG: thanks for taking the kids on zero notice
TG: pretty rad of you
GG: dave!!!
GG: omg how are you?? are you feeling better?
TG: a little
TG: sorry about this
TG: shit is extremely weaksauce
GG: shhh!! :( its not your fault you're sick!
TG: i guess
TG: anyway just can you tell them im ok and ill see them soon
TG: just uh
TG: gotta stop hacking up lungs all over the place
TG: sets a bad example
GG: :((( awww poor dave! of course i'll tell them! karkat was so worried he couldn't sleep on his own, poor little guy. sollux was just really quiet :\
TG: gdi
TG: well tell them i just got the flu and im gonna be fine
TG: cronus is being awesome
TG: and bro is being bro
GG: so also awesome?? :D
TG: you got it
TG: ok gonna sign off but just like
TG: take care of them
TG: should be over this crap in like another day
GG: take as long as you like!! jake and i are happy to watch the kids :D :D :D
GG: and you need to rest and get well!
TG: yeah yeah
TG: thanks again jade
TG: i mean that

Bro takes the phone away when you're done. You give a little squawk of protest, but he slips it into his pocket, shaking his head. "Nope, you'll just end up fuckin' around on the internet and not getting any rest."

"Man," you say, knowing he's right, "you are no fun at all."

"Damn straight. Dirk Strider, professional wet blanket." He ruffles your hair again and pulls the covers over you. "Go to sleep."

"I can't," you say, coughing. "Not without codeine."

"Nope. You can have honey, though."

You remember that one from your childhood; a spoonful of honey had actually worked to quiet the awful tickle in your throat, made the cough go away long enough to let you sleep. "Okay."

He brings you the honey, the good stuff, dark amber and sharp as well as sweet, and sits down beside your bed: he's apparently taken the afternoon Watching Dave Sleep duty. Despite everything--the thumping headache, the sore muscles, the pain in your throat and chest--when you do curl up on your side and close your eyes, you can't help admitting it feels stupidly, simply good to be taken care of--to know you're safe in someone else's care--and wonder when it was you forgot that feeling.

Chapter Text

You spend the next two days in bed, emerging only to hit the bathroom. It's a little unnerving to realize how tired it makes you even to shuffle that far, so you try not to think about it. You try not to think about a number of things, including how Sol is surviving at Jade's with Bec in residence and whether Bro is going to get in trouble for taking time off to deal with your tiresome ass. Most of the time you sleep, though, and when you're awake one of them is always there.

It's weird how competent Cronus is. You kind of wonder if that's new, or if he was always capable of dealing with sick people and just failed miserably at taking care of himself. He doesn't snap at you when you say obnoxious ungrateful shit because you're so damn tired of lying in bed and trying to expel your lungs every couple of minutes; he doesn't mind when you demand jello and then can't eat it; he's patient with you and cracks horrible jokes to take your mind off it and steadies you through the worst of the coughing fits. He reads Sweet Valley High books to you, doing the voices, and when you can't sleep comfortably he wraps himself around you and takes the heat away.

Bro is pretty much exactly the same as he was when you were little and sick. You don't have to talk; he understands you, knows what you need and provides it with brisk sympathy. You don't think you have ever felt quite so cared-for in your entire life, and it's weird, it's so fucking weird, but it's...undeniably nice as well.

On the third day you graduate to lying on the couch and watching TV. Bro's back at work; Cronus is being a pillow. He doesn't do it very well--he's too bony--but he's still excellent to lie against on account of being so cool. (You tell him this, and he smirks and reminds you that of course he's cool, he's the embodiment of cool, Fonzie on his best day couldn't approach the level of cool he puts out, and you thwack him on the leg and he tells you you're abusive.) There's nothing on, really, and you flip through the channels until you get to the local news, whereupon you drop the remote and sit bolt upright, staring. The ticker along the bottom of the screen says TROLL EGGS STOLEN.

"--believe the motive behind the break-in and theft was not profit but activism," the anchor is saying. "Graffiti left by the thieves indicates they may be associated with extremist groups like the Animal Liberation Front. The hatching facility is working with police to review security footage in the hopes of identifying the suspects, but police are asking that anybody who has information about the robbery contact them as soon as possible."

The screen cuts from the studio to a live feed. A reporter in a network-logo jacket is standing outside a nondescript building that could be a warehouse or a big-box store. Beside her, a dumpy guy in a white lab coat with a red spoon on the pocket shifts awkwardly from foot to foot. "Hi, Patrice. I'm here at the Rockville hatching facility with Mr. Louis Wright, general manager. Mr. Wright, what went through your head when you heard about the robbery?"

"Uh, that it was terrible. Uh, we've never had anything like, uh, this happen before. We're all, uh, very distraught about it."

"Now we've had reports that three eggs were taken in the robbery, is that right?"

"Uh, yes, that's correct, three eggs." Wright's nervousness is obvious, but he leans closer to the mike and stares at the camera. "They have to be kept warm. Around ninety-eight degrees. Uh, and eighty percent humidity. And they have to be turned regularly. We, uh. Ask that whoever's responsible for taking them please provide appropriate conditions."

"There you have it," says the reporter. "We'll stay on top of this story and bring you more as it happens. Back to you in the studio, Patrice."

"Thank you, Candace. Still ahead..."

You mute the TV and stare at Cronus, who stares back at you. Who the fuck steals troll eggs? Is there some kind of extremist pro-troll-liberation organization you don't know about? Are they gonna ask for ransom?

Can you--the SPCT--do anything about it?

Cronus calls Dr. Z; you still can't carry on a meaningful conversation without being interrupted by coughing. While he talks, you go get your laptop.

The first few places you look don't yield much--there's some shit on reddit about troll eggs, but it looks to be pretty much the same crap you see there all the time, nothing about a planned break-in, nothing like a manifesto. You work through the list of sites in your head. There's a bunch of extremely dumbass comments on the news station's website about the story, of course. There are always dumbass comments on news stories. You check Twitter.

Bingo. @savethetrolls has posted a string of ungrammatical comments on the success of something they're calling "the initiative." You email Jade: even if you were feeling 100%, which you are decidedly not, you don't have the computer chops to find out who @savethetrolls is and where they might be tweeting from.

~

You haven't had so many people in the apartment in a long time. Dr. Z, Jade, Bro, the kids, Jake, Feferi. Karkat had leapt on you the moment he arrived and refused to be pried off, despite the fact you're probably still contagious, and he's still firmly attached to your neck like a four-limbed limpet as the others tug kitchen chairs into the living room and settle down for a council of war. You're trying to pay attention to the discussion, but your chest aches from coughing and you're stupidly tired for having done nothing more energetic than lie on the damn sofa all day and mess around on the internet.

"--the real question is whether or not to interfere with the official investigation," Zahhak is saying. He's crosslegged on the floor and doing a decent Easter Island. Beside him Feferi in pink flowery scrubs looks improbably delicate and pretty. "Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the authorities' capability and determination, but..."

"I'll do it for you," Bro says drily. "The cops in this town couldn't find their asses with a GPS, and that goes double for animal control or whoever it is that'd get tasked with this shit. Besides. It's trolls. Not exactly super fuckin' high on their list of priorities, compared with, say, people shooting each other."

"I share your sentiments, although perhaps would not have phrased it quite like that." Zahhak sighs. "We are undoubtedly more experienced in this particular field of endeavor than the police. Jade, have you had any luck tracing that Twitter account?"

"Still working on it. The cops are clearly sitting on the security footage; I can't find any online. Which means we gotta guess how they actually managed it."

"We should go see the hatching facility," Jake says, unexpectedly. He has Sollux in his lap; for once the troll isn't glued to his iPad. He's watching the lot of you with owlish mismatched eyes. "We can come up with a reason to visit it, right? And then we can figure out how they might've got in and out with the eggs."

"Not a bad idea." Zahhak takes out his phone, scrolls through contacts. "I can make some calls, contact some of my colleagues to get us an invitation."

"How long do the eggs have before they hatch?" you manage, croaking. Feferi and Zahhak give you amusingly identical looks of concern. "I mean. Like. If they aren't kept warm or whatever, are they gonna..."

Karkat clings tighter to your neck, and you try not to cough. "--hey, shh, it's okay, little dude, don't be scared," you tell him, not really convincing yourself. Zahhak's face goes even stonier.

"They can survive at lower than incubation temperature for a few days, but after that the chances begin to drop off sharply."

"Then we have to find them thooner rather than later." Sollux's voice is thin, but it slices through the room. "I wanna help."

~

TG: yo egbert
TG: we might have ourselves a situation here
TG: could use some patented egbert advice
TG: egbert answer your goddamn messages cmon
EB: jeez, dave!! why didn't you just call? what's the matter?
TG: dont have much of a voice right now
TG: but listen up shits kind of important
TG: troll eggs
TG: care and feeding and recovery thereof from whatever douchefucks decided to steal them from the hatch facility
TG: are you a bad enough dude to rescue the eggs john
EB: wait back up! someone stole eggs? dave, you're not making a whole lot of sense, are you okay??
TG: been better
TG: point is that yes
TG: someone stole three eggs from a hatchery close to dc overnight
TG: and we kind of need to get them back and obviously the cops are not gonna be of a whole fuckton of help in this endeavor
TG: how do we find em
EB: holy shitballs!
TG: thats very helpful thanks egbert
TG: google troll hatchery breakin for the details
EB: googling now.
EB: what did you mean, you don't have a voice?
TG: flu
EB: oh no! are you drinking tea?
TG: keep on topic here john
TG: we need to know all about troll eggs and what they need so we can like play chloe from 24 and track down the bad guys by looking up whos bought incubators and equipment or whatever in the past couple days or some shit
TG: make with the sicknasty infodump
EB: i'm working on it. i'll email you as soon as i have a list of stuff they need.
TG: good deal
TG: ttyl

~

They make you go to bed at eleven, despite your protests. You don't protest very vehemently: you're so tired you can feel your pulse throbbing in your goddamn teeth, and you have almost no voice at all. Cronus hauls you off to your room and practically pushes you into bed, fetches you a glass of water and some nyquil, and is about to go back to rejoin the others round the kitchen table when you catch his hand.

He sits down on the edge of the bed, looking down at you, purple lines of light in the darkness glowing gently. "You okay, chief?"

"I will be. When we get those eggs back." You're rasp-whistling, and if it weren't you making that noise you'd be laughing your ass off at how dumb it sounds. "I told you Egbert's working on it too, right?"

"Three or four times." Cronus pats your hand. "We got Sol as well as Jade on the computer shit, Doc Z's doin his stuff with professional networkin to make sure we hear as soon as possible if anyone shows up wantin vet care for new-hatched grubs an to get us in that hatchin facility. Everythin's in hand, Dave. You can rest."

You aren't sure about that yourself, but it's almost impossible to keep your eyes open. You just about stay awake long enough to see him close the door behind him, and then you're gone.

(Around two, a little hand pats at your arm and someone sturdy and dense crawls into bed with you, curling himself up against your side, and some of the nasty shreds of dream you'd been wandering through seem to shrivel up and fade into sweet calm nothingness.)

(You must have dreamed the red glint of light in his eyes.)

~

Karkat is still there in the morning, curled up like a bean of a troll against you, and you just pet his hair for a little while in the haziness of half-sleep before you realize you can actually breathe through your nose for the first time in days.

This is enough of a shock that you prop yourself up on your elbows and take stock of your condition. Chest: aches, but it feels like muscle pain, not the hot uncomfortable feeling of inflamed bronchi. Throat: hurts, but not badly. Head, barely hurts at all.

Wow. It's. You didn't know how awesome it was to feel kinda normal. You look down at Karkles, and ruffle his hair gently, aware of the clock radio saying 9 AM. "Hey," you try, and are pleased to find your voice answers when called upon, even if it does sound raspy and hoarse. "Karkat, kid, it's time to get up and go be useful."

He just nuzzles against you for a moment longer, before opening his eyes--and yeah, okay. You aren't imagining things. His eyes really are shading red around the pupil, a thin ring of it, and as he blinks up at you there's that odd scything refraction and for a moment red light flickers in the depths of each eye.

That's fucking weird. He doesn't seem to know he's doing it, though, and as you sit up properly he reaches up to be hugged. "Are you better?"

"Much. C'mon, kid, let's go see what the others are up to, and get you some pancakes. Did you have fun at Jade's house?"

"She let me ride Bec," Karkat says, and chews on his fingers. "But she doesn't make pancakes. Not like you and Bro."

You have to chuckle at the mental image: tiny troll, vast white hound. "Was Sol okay with his allergies? I mean, that's the whole reason he came to us in the first place was he couldn't handle Jade's."

"He thneethed a lot," Karkat says, without mockery, "at first, but then he said it kind of got better? Like he got used to it? Jade gave him pills."

Benadryl, you think. "But he was feeling okay after that?"

"Yeah? He didn't cough or sneeze much. He just played with his iPad."

"I'm sorry you guys had to get packed off in a hurry like that." You pet his hair. "Bro and Cronus just didn't want you to catch my flu."

"I know," he says, as if you're an idiot. "I'm not gonna. You're better."

"I'm better," you agree, and you balance him on a hip as you slide out of bed and go out to see what the others have spent the night doing. Your hair is a complete mess and you need a shower and you haven't got your shades on and you're in sweatpants and an old MLP shirt and you don't give any fucks whatsoever: these people are your family now. All of them.

Chapter Text

Bro looks tired when you pad into the living-room with Karkat on a hip. Tired and maybe a little greyish. He looks up and gives you a smile, though. "Feelin' better?"

"Yeah, lots. You guys found anything?"

Dr. Z is scrolling through emails on his phone. Jade is curled up with her head on Bro's thigh, as deeply asleep as Sollux, who's tucked in the shelter of her hair. There's no sign of Jake or Feferi or Cronus. "It's already out of the news cycle, since some Troubled Starlet has done something stupid again. I'm waiting for a call about visiting the hatch facility. Mr. Egbert has sent a very helpful list of information about troll eggs and all things related to incubation and hatching, by the way."

Good work, John. You put Karkat down, and he hurries over to place his hands firmly on Zahhak's knee and look up at him. "Soon," he says, and you cannot possibly help laughing: old meme, but funny meme nonetheless.

"Hmm?" Zahhak locks the phone and lifts Karkat into his lap. You realize that the long bishie hair is almost completely out of its ponytail, and it makes you briefly afraid.

"We find them. Soon."

The oracular nature of this pronouncement is only emphasized by keys rattling in the lock and the arrival of the missing members of your little crew, bearing bagels and--thank God--coffee. Cronus sets his Panera bag down on the kitchen table and comes over to peer at you. "Morning," you say blandly.

"Should you be outta bed?"

"Nice to see you too, Ampora. I'm cool. Tell me you brought everything bagels?"

He makes a face. "Yeah, despite my best efforts, Jake insisted on the stinky kind. If you're gonna be walkin around on two feet like a healthy example a humanity, at least help me get out plates and shit."

~

Food revives everyone. The conversation is technical, about IP addresses and the relative legality of breaking and entering vs. sneaking into somewhere by the use of guile, and you think for a moment that this time last year you would never have believed you'd even have this many friends, let alone sitting round your kitchen table with a troll on your lap and another making the cream cheese orbit the table while plotting how to commit felonies in the name of still more trolls. Your life has become considerably richer since you discovered Karkat in his box. And also more likely to land you in jail for the foreseeable future, but hey, life's no fun without risks.

Ampora keeps on giving you little concerned looks until you sigh, reach over, grab his hand, and press it to your forehead. "See? Not feverish. I'm good, dude, stop fucking worrying."

"'M not," he says, but the line between his eyebrows lessens. You flick his earfin lightly, and that makes him squawk and distracts him completely from your state of health. You're about to toast another bagel when Zahhak's phone rings and the whole room goes silent.

"Yes," he says, the voice as deep as you've ever heard it. The silence stretches. Feferi is looking at him with both affection and deep, focused attention; you all are, really, even Karkat and Sollux. "I see. Thank you very much."

~

In the end it's you and Bro and Zahhak again, like it had been when you went to beard Sol's ex-owner in her lair and get his bee back. Everyone had been vocal about your participation being a really shitty idea given your state of health; everyone except Karkat, who'd just given you a cloudless smile and asked for apple juice. There was no sign of the red light in his eyes when you hugged him goodbye and trotted to catch up with the others--but there was no fright in there, either. Karkat apparently didn't think you were going to end the day in Central Booking.

You hope he's right.

Jade had wanted to come, had been almost angry enough to tear up when Dr. Z had told her he needed someone to stay in touch with them and the hatchery and run the computers while Feferi watched the children. Eventually, between him and Jake, Dr. Z had convinced her to stay put. Cronus had gone a nasty unhealthy color and pointed out he would be captured and that he wasn't all that hot at resisting enhanced interrogation methods, which had made everyone burst out arguing at once about what you were likely to find.

Bro had cut through the noise by picking up the car keys and bouncing them in his palm. "We doing this?" he'd said.

There's a lot of deja vu about the ride. Bro's shotgun, again, in Zahhak's Crown Vic; you're sitting in back, watching the trees flash past as you speed along I-70. None of you are talking and the radio is off. The only sound is the big car's tires eating up the highway. The sense of slightly unreal anticipation--of not being sure you are really doing this--is overpowering.

"Get off on 94 south," Bro says, abruptly, when a green exit sign appears. He sounds even grimmer than you feel; you'd asked him if he was okay, and he'd just said he'd had a shitty night, couldn't sleep, which you can totally sympathize with. Zahhak doesn't reply, but clicks on the indicator and slides over a lane to the right.

Jade's stun gun is warm with the heat of your palm, the smooth plastic oiled with your sweat: you've never used one, but neither had the others, and Bro and Zahhak are much more capable than you of knocking people unconscious. You put the stun gun down on the seat beside you, immediately pick it up again, and wonder if they'd been right when they told you you weren't well enough to handle this shit.

You're going to have to be. Zahhak turns off the highway onto a narrow two-lane ribbon of blacktop, passing through a small cluster of civilization before opening out into rolling countryside. It's pretty, but you can't think about anything other than where you're going and whether you're actually going to shit yourself if you have to zap somebody with Jade's toy.

"It's another five miles, then there's a pull-off and a track into the woods," Bro says. He's watching the blue dot that represents you on his phone, moving slowly toward the red dot that represents your destination. None of you are sure if the people behind this idiotic stunt are really stupid enough to have hidden out in a state park within yelling distance of a DNR office, or if this is actually the cleverest thing they could have done precisely because nobody would ever expect to have to look there.

Bro clears his throat, as if he's stifling a cough, but keeps his eyes fixed on the phone. Both you and Zahhak look at him, then away again, and nobody says a word.

~

Ten years ago it wouldn't have been possible for you to find them. Hell, two years ago it might not have been. But the combination of active word-of-mouth networking and computer expertise had narrowed down a likely area not far from Rockville within which the eggnappers were likely to have gone to ground, and despite some clumsy IP-spoofing efforts on @savethetrolls' part to camouflage the location from which they were tweeting, Sol and Jade between them pinned it down. Zahhak's contacts yielded one vet's office in Olney reporting a break-in the night the eggs were stolen; whoever broke in stole an incubator (and the entire stock of morphine, codeine, and fentanyl, plus all the pseudoephedrine they had, which you think was more for the thieves' benefit than the eggs'). Everything had happened so fast you're still blinking, and now you and Bro and Zahhak are...preparing to get in really, really fucking deep shit.

Nobody, in fact, says a word until you reach the graveled pull-off and the track. It's obvious someone's been along here recently, the gravel's disturbed and the tire-marks in the dirt aren't covered with fallen leaves. Zahhak parks as far out of sight from the road as possible, but here again his choice of daily driver is to your advantage: people passing by and seeing an unmarked black Crown Vic with a searchlight on the driver's side are likely to slow down and look law-abiding instead of wondering why it's there.

You get out, on shaky legs. "Um. You okay, dude?" Bro is definitely more than a little grey in the face.

"I'm fine," he says, with the note in his voice that you know means drop it. "Let's keep focused, kid."

Zahhak frowns at him, but you can tell his mind isn't on his companions so much as where you're going. Bro makes a little eyerolling get-on-with-it gesture that you think would probably earn him a harsh Dr. Z word or two if the situation were not quite so dire.

"Come on." Zahhak turns and hurries along the track. He's actually trotting, but making very little noise; you try and keep up, and you sound like an elephant crashing along, breaking twigs underfoot and panting. You really aren't sure how long it takes before the place comes into view. It's Blair Witch as interpreted by the trailer-meth-lab crowd, an ancient doublewide green with moss and black with the soot of a long-ago fire. A decaying BEWARE OF DOG sign dangles from the door; the windows are blocked out with what look like floral polyester bedsheets.

"Jesus," you say, and Zahhak rumbles deep in his chest. If there are troll eggs in there, you're pretty sure he would rip the fucking trailer open with his bare hands, if necessary, to get them out. "This is a dumb idea." You'd asked John if he was a bad enough dude to rescue the eggs: you don't actually think you are.

"It's a crazy idea." Bro sounds weird. You wonder what his deal is, turning briefly to him; he gives you a Not Now, Kid look.

"It's our only idea," says Zahhak, and adds "I'm not leaving the eggs in that ruin."

"Maybe we could just politely knock on the door and ask for them back?" You hear yourself giggle, a tiny insane little sound.

"Or call the cops. Anonymously."

"You know how long they've been out," Zahhak says with a sigh. "By the time the cops get round to bothering to show up and go through the paperwork and get the eggs released back to the hatchery..."

He doesn't have to finish the sentence.

~

Probably you began to reevaluate your life choices right around the time the kid with the shitty dreadlocks and pinpoint pupils clocked you over the head. With the four-headed soapstone lingam he'd undoubtedly bought on Etsy.

Things had gone to shit almost immediately as soon as the three of you had gotten through the door. Inside, the trailer was smoky, stiflingly hot and dark, reeking of pot and other, less identifiable things, and you had barely had time to try and get your bearings when the yelling started. Beside you Bro had begun to hack violently almost as soon as you got inside, and you weren't having a real fun time breathing yourself: there was definitely something more than just pot smoke in the air in here. Your chest hurts like it had in the middle of the flu.

Then you heard Zahhak's voice, harsh, raised the way it almost never is, and eggs, in the confusion of shouting, and you grabbed Bro's arm and tried to haul him in the direction of the door and the relatively fresh air outside, but despite his coughing he was still stronger than you and you found yourself pushed out of the way while he stumbled toward Zahhak's voice.

You'd followed, stun gun in hand, and that was when the kid with white-boy dreads got you just behind the ear with his whimsical decoration and things went black and starry for a while.

~

"--what does that make us?" someone is asking when the ringing in your ears finally subsides. "Go on, say it, you gotta say it, Harley, don't leave me fuckin hangin."

"Biiiig damn heroes, sir."

~

Next time you actually can make sense of your surroundings, you're in a car again, the wheels humming on the grooved pavement. Your headache is extraordinary, a thing of almost tangible intensity. Something heavy is pressed against you, tucked inside your shirt, smooth and hard against your skin, and you almost scream when something inside that casing moves.

"He's awake," Jade says, and you blink away disorientation to realize you're in the back seat of Jade's CR-V, she's riding shotgun, and Cronus Ampora is behind the wheel, doing sixty in a fifty-five zone and grinning a shit-eating grin.

You stare at her, and then eloquently ask "the fuck?"

"You're a temporary incubator," she says, pointing to the mass under your shirt. She has one too, and her other hand is cupped round it protectively. You peer down inside your collar.

It's...

It's a troll egg. It's got a hard, oval shell. It's the size of...maybe like a bowling ball, if you stretched a bowling ball into an oblong? And it's blue.

You didn't know the eggs came in their blood colors. Had John told you that? You wish John was here. Things would be less confusing, if John was here.

You didn't know holding an egg with a grub inside it would be terrifying and kind of awesome at the same time. You also didn't know Jade had apparently given Cronus carte blanche to borrow her goddamn car at any time of Cronus's choosing.

"Where's Bro?" is the best you can come up with at the moment. "What happened?"

"We saved the day, Harley and me," Cronus says, looking at you in the rearview. "Saved the absolute fuck outta it."

"After you guys left, we did some more thinking, and we kind of thought it might not have been all that smart just sending the three of you to deal with whatever you'd find on your own. I know Dr. Z was like 'no way are you coming with, Miss Harley, I need you here on the computer'' but Dirk didn't really look all that hot when you guys left, and, well--"

"And I was like 'maybe my instinct to hide under the fuckin bed ain't exactly the most helpful option at this juncture'," Cronus puts in.

"--So Cro and I kind of left Fef and Jake with the kids and came on after you. Before you ask, I was driving on the way out."

"Can't drive with one a them things takin up your personal space," Cronus grins. "An' I can't incubate nothin, I ain't a warmblood like you guys."

"Plus he really wanted to drive."

"Plus I really wanted to drive," he agrees. "Zahhak's got Dirk and the third egg in his car. Looks like Dirk's been incubatin a juicy case a your hell-flu. Sounds like me in the mornin."

"What happened," you insist, feeling the bump behind your ear. Ow. Ow, ow, ow. Your hair is sticky with blood.

Cronus sobers slightly, changing lanes to pass a slow minivan. He...actually is a pretty okay driver, you think, and then point your attention back to the important shit. "When we got there you were out cold and Dirk was pretty much not gonna be much use, that smoke really did a number on him, so it was all Zahhak tryin to subdue two tweaked-out assholes without actually hurtin em. You musta actually got one with the stun gun cause you had it held out in front a you when you fell."

"I did?"

"He was all flopping about like a gaffed fish," Jade confirms. "You got him good. We got the eggs out of there--they'd put them in a really shitty little incubator that wasn't set right and wouldn't even close over them cause it was too small, plus the air in there was unbelievably foul. I think Dr. Z bounced the other two kids' skulls off each other, they were out when we reached him."

"What the fuck were they doing in there?"

"Cookin up conspiracy theories in between batches a crank," Cronus says with distaste. "No wonder the air was fuckin toxic."

"Is that gonna hurt the grubs?"

"What do you think?" he asks, eyes narrowed. "Course it fuckin is. I dunno how much a that shit can get through the shells, but they were in there for a while."

"They're all alive," Jade adds in a hurry. "As soon as we get them back to the hatchery they'll be examined and treated properly."

Your head is really hurting now, and you're feeling dizzy again and kind of pukey--but you have one more question. "Are we gonna get in trouble?"

Jade smiles over her shoulder. "I don't think so. Dr. Z's got someone who knows someone on the inside at the hatchery, we should be able to get them in without too much trouble. And the best part is we picked up one of their phones and used it to call in an anonymous tip about a possible meth lab to the local cops, then threw the phone in the Patuxent. If anyone's getting in trouble, it's those guys."

It seems like way more information than you can possibly process at the moment, so you just blink at her, and hug the bizarre and precious troll egg against you, and go ahead and pass out.

Chapter Text

You don't remember anything until you wake up in the familiar clutter of your own bedroom, eggless and with a really world-class headache that seems to have something to do with the big lump on your skull behind one ear.

Sitting up hurts, but the room steadies after a second and you get to your feet, grabbing your phone from the nightstand to find out what the hell time it is. Oh. Uh. Nine p.m. It's even the same day as your heroic rescue attempt. You weren't passed out for very long at all.

Slowly things start to register in your fuzzy mind. Cronus had apparently driven you and Jade all the way to the damn hatchery and then gotten you home without getting arrested, or if he had, he'd done it quietly enough not to wake you up; Bro has your flu, which is probably the first time in about ten years he's been sick; all three eggs have been safely retrieved from the meth trailer and returned to their proper home for appropriate care; and now, finally, the whole bunch of you can maybe have a bit of downtime with drama levels below the standard of a typical telenovela.

Ha.

You're not wearing shoes. Someone had put you to bed--probably Cronus, since Bro was out of commission--and again you feel that little flicker of warm pride in how far he's come since you found him hurling in the alleyway outside Rise. Self-control was a stupidly hard thing to learn at any age, but he hadn't had the benefit of practice.

He and Jade are curled up on the couch with the kids. Karkat apparently wants to know all about the eggs, who is inside them, when are they going to be adopted out to their forever homes--and Cronus is as brightly lit-up as you've ever seen him, looking honestly proud of himself. "One a them's a little violetblood judgin by the egg color," he's saying. "Deep as I ever saw, they're gonna be gorgeous."

Karkat doesn't seem to be as pleased with the news, climbing into Cronus's lap and grabbing a handful of his shirt the way he had with you when he was little and not feeling well. Oh, no, you think, did I give him deathflu too? Fucking Typhoid Strider.

Cronus is...huh. You haven't seen him act this way toward the kids before, holding Karkat almost protectively, and then it strikes you: your moirail has gone broody. Apparently that's a thing seatrolls can do.

This is absurd enough to make you snicker, and they look up. "Hey, Dave. There's pizza if you want anything to eat," Jade says. "How's the head?"

"Some asshole's been using it for bongo practice," you say, "but I guess I'll live. What did I miss?"

She tells you what had happened after you'd conked out in the back seat: the little convoy drove straight to the hatchery, where Dr. Z's pal had arranged to meet them and smuggle the eggs back inside, and then brought the rest of you back here for beer and pizza, or in Bro's case copious amounts of Nyquil. The Scooby Gang chalks up another triumph.

Still, you can't quite shake a weird sense of foreboding, like there's something all of you have forgotten to do that's going to turn out to be crucial. At least your stomach feels better than it did, and you put a couple slices of pizza in it and let Sol hand you your ass in Call of Duty instead of worrying about impending doom.

~

It stops being impending around 4 a.m. when the kitchen phone rings. You let it go to the answering machine because fuck picking up the phone at four in the morning, and roll over and bury your face in the pillows when whoever it is calls back immediately.

It occurs to you that Bro is not currently available to castigate whoever's calling, so you'll have to do it for him, and you groan and haul your ass out of bed and pad in the darkness to the cold tile of the kitchen--hss, jeez, that's freezing--and snatch the handset off the cradle. "What."

"They're selling the eggs to a fight ring," a voice tells you, in a whisper. Your stomach goes cold.

"What? Who is this? What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The eggs," the voice hisses. "The three eggs that were stolen. They can't adopt those out now, the quality's compromised, but they can get some cash for selling them on the black market cause two of them're highbloods and the third's probably a psi."

"But they're a fucking hatchery," you say. "Crockercorp stopped all the shitty lab and fight stuff."

"Look, I'm just telling you. I gotta go, if anyone knows I called you it's my ass." There's a click, and the hum of the dial tone.

You stare at the phone in the darkened kitchen, and have exactly no idea what to do.

~

As is typical on such occasions, the answer is "call Dr. Z." You don't notice when a pale purple light starts to throw your shadow on the kitchen counter; you're too busy talking fast into the phone. In fact he's come almost all the way up behind you before you realize Cronus Ampora is listening to every word you've said.

"Dave," he says, carefully. You turn around and he is right there and wow, you don't think you've ever seen quite that miserable look of betrayal on his face before, even in the beginning.

You have no idea what to say to him, and it comes as a surprise to hear your own calm voice: "Go get your coat, Ampora. This time I'm gonna drive."

On the phone Dr. Zahhak tells you he'll meet you there. You don't wake Jade--someone has to stay with the kids, and Bro's running a temperature of 101 and completely zonked on Nyquil--but you do leave them a note affixed to the fridge with a magnet shaped like fruit:

so the situation with regard to the eggs has changed
turns out we need to go steal em again
not sure how this is gonna work out but the alternative is either lab or fighting ring and i dont need to say hell no to explain how much hell no is involved with that option
dr z is coming with
ill text you if im gonna get arrested

~

You might have preferred the drive back from the pound when he was being astonishingly sick all over the car, thinking back on it, to this silent tension; you can just tell he's remembering the labs, all the things that were done to him, all the things that will be done to these baby trolls if we don't get there and stop it. He's unconsciously rubbing the double-zigzag scar on one side of his forehead, and you wonder what had caused it, and just as certainly know you are never going to ask.

Twice you have a scare when Crown Vic headlights appear in the rearview, but both times it's either not a cop or a cop who has better things to do than bug people driving shitty Buicks at four a.m. You wish you were in Dr. Z's car so you could speed with impunity, but you have to keep the old girl to 75, and even at that speed things are rattling and shaking in an alarming sort of way. You've tried twice to talk to Cronus, and both times he's shot you down, staring straight ahead, his fins brilliant in the darkened car. Okay. No talking. You're cool with that.

You're terrified.

By the time you get to Rockville he's sweating, and you have to pull over so he can throw up, but there is pretty much no way he's going to let you do this on your own, whatever the fuck it is you're going to do, which you kind of hope you figure out soon because uh wow, that's the hatchery building. You kill the lights and engine, letting the car roll silently into the shadows of the parking lot, and a moment later the silent bulk of Dr. Zahhak materializes out of the darkness and kneels down by your door. He's so big this puts him more or less on eye level with you.

"What's the plan?" you whisper, and are eternally grateful when it turns out he actually has one. Cronus turns his glowing thousand-yard stare on Dr. Z and you think he's listening, but it's hard to tell; at least, when you get out of the car, he follows silently, and the glow fades to a dim almost imperceptible light.

There's a truck backed up to the loading dock, you can see as you creep around the corner, and a dude in a baseball hat and work fatigues is holding a clipboard, examining it by the light of a flashlight tucked in his mouth like a cigar. The truck's engine is running, which you don't know if it's a good sign or not, but at least it covers any noise the three of you make as you approach.

(You are so done with this secret agent bullshit. You may never play Bond again as long as you fucking live, if you get out of this.)

(If.)

Dr. Z splits off to the right to do his Creating A Distraction deal, which apparently consists of...dude is pushing dumpsters around? It's noisy as fuck and immediately gets the truck guy's attention. He shouts something--who's there?--and drops his clipboard on the seat, trotting off to find out what's causing all the ruckus. Which is your and Cronus's cue to hop up into the loading dock and get inside the building.

He's moving totally silently beside you, which is really fucking unnerving--it's like he suddenly doesn't weigh enough to make his footsteps audible, and no longer needs to breathe--and the two of you turn a corner and come right up face-to-face with the guy who was on TV pleading for the eggs' safe return. He's shorter in real life, and kind of tubby, and freezes to the spot, because Cronus Ampora has become terrifying.

Abruptly he is blazing with light, all his freckles glowing like LEDs; the spines of his fins, spread as wide as they'll go and standing out from the sides of his head, are almost too bright to look at. All his icepick teeth are visible in a snarl that goes way further back than it ought to, and they are faintly glowing too, and between them he is hissing a noise that is not a noise any human is capable of making.

You take all this in during the instant you have before he leaps at the hatchery guy and sinks his teeth into his shoulder, knocking him to the floor; you can tell he meant to tear the man's throat out, and a voice you do not recognize as yours is calling his name in a high-pitched squeak--which is a mistake, because he quits chewing on the hatchery guy and comes at you instead. There is nothing of your friend in those blazing eyes, nothing at all: they are shark's eyes, blank and merciless and dead.

Getting your forearm up in front of your face probably saves your life, and the massive dump of adrenaline in your bloodstream means you don't immediately feel the pain of his teeth in your flesh. What really ensures that you don't end the whole wretched night as some really puzzled coroner's problem is that right then another hatchery person comes round the corner, carrying a purple troll egg in her arms.

Cronus drops you and he blurs, moving too fast to really see, and then he's holding the egg and the woman is screaming in a high ragged fire-alarm beat.

You're not sure what really happens next because you've decided to join hatchery dude in the all-star Lying On the Floor Bleeding competition. There's more people, shouting as well as screaming, and that hissing from an alien throat, that violet light, and then something else hisses a sharp burst of air and there's a thunk of metal hitting flesh.

And then another, and another, and finally the hissing stops and the light fades and...oh, hey, there's Cronus on the floor next to you, not competing in the Bleeding tournament but doing really hot in the Having a Lot of Trank Darts Stuck In You ranks.

Dr. Z is kneeling beside you, looking at your arm, which is definitely doing a champion job of bleeding, and he says something to the other people there and after a while somebody is putting something that stings like fuck on the holes and then wrapping them up tight in a bandage.

At this point your ability to think more or less clearly comes back, and you take stock of the situation. Hatchery guy is having Ampora teeth pulled out of his shoulder--you look away quickly--and Dr. Z has the purple egg securely in his arms. Cronus is breathing shallowly, completely unconscious. His own blood is smeared on his mouth and chin as well as the stains of yours. Leaving teeth in people must kind of sting.

"...completely agree," Dr. Z is saying in the soft smooth voice that means he's thisclose to unscrewing somebody's head. "You'd be absolutely within your rights. But I would point out that bringing this matter to the attention of the authorities would also expose this facility's extremely unethical practices with regards to the black-market sale of troll eggs. I think that might possibly cut into your profit margin significantly further than the other option available."

"Other option?" says a woman in a lab coat. Presumably she's in charge.

Dr. Z cradles the egg. "The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Trolls will take charge of these three eggs, completely out of the good of its collective heart, and not reveal to the news media what you were planning to do with them. You won't sue for assault. We'll all walk away from this without anybody getting hurt further." The possibility of people getting hurt further is absolutely still an option, his tone makes it clear.

The lab-coat woman looks from him to her bitten colleague and back. It's clear she really, really, really wants to make this go away.

"And when I say walk," Dr. Z continues, kneeling down to hand you the egg and haul Cronus over his shoulder like a sack of bad decisions, "I mean most of us."

"...Fine," she says. "Just get them the hell out of here and go. Is that thing poisonous?"

"No, it's just ceruleans who have venom," he tells her gently. "I recommend antibiotic prophylaxis anyway, but your colleague shouldn't have any trouble healing up."

She steps back, motioning the people holding the blue and bronzy-yellow eggs to hand them over, and her heel crunches on a seatroll tooth. Her expression of disgust is going to stay with you for a while.

You haul yourself upright, woozy but pretty much okay, and take one of the other eggs so he can carry Cronus and the third. At this point it strikes you that you might not be safe with Cronus in the car, and then it really hits home that he just fucking savaged you and at least one other dude. You have never seen any hint, any remote hint of the dead shark eyes before, the wordless animal hissing, and you think of all the times you've held him, all the times you've gone to sleep with the soft defenseless meat of your neck inches away from those teeth.

"H-how long is it gonna take him to regrow all the fangs he left in that dude?" you ask brightly. "Because he's gonna be really sensitive about it and I bet Sol's gonna give him shit and that's not really all that helpful at this point and...should we tell his shrink he flipped out and tried to eat somebody? Is that the kind of shit they need to know to help their patients more effectively? Also, is he gonna do it again cause it's gonna get considerably fucking harder to cover up this new exciting hobby and I don't want to be an unsupportive friend or whatever here but--"

Dr. Z turns to you, glasses flickering reflection in the dark. You're almost all the way back to the car now, and that's good, cause you are not sure you can really do much more walking in a straight line right now. "Dave," he says and you shut up.

"Yeah."

"Take a deep breath."

You try, but it's difficult. He just watches you, and three attempts in you get the beginning of calm back. "Good," he says. "I'm going to take him back in my car, for a number of reasons. Will you be okay to drive?"

You look at your hands, perceptibly shaking even in the dark. "Yeah." You have to be. "Peachy keen. Are they gonna call the cops on us anyway?"

He shrugs, and Cronus's limp arms sway back and forth. "We shall have to wait and see. --I know you couldn't not bring him, not after he'd overheard, but I could wish he'd shown better self-control."

"Yyyeah. I've...never seen him like that. Ever." You want to cry. You want Bro. Suddenly and almost overwhelmingly, you want Bro, want to press your face against his chest the way you did when you were young and dumb and scared about shit, and feel him holding you, know nothing cold and alien would sink its teeth into you without going through him first.

You make yourself take another of those deep breaths, and hear his voice in your head: this shit is wiggy as wig can get, little man, but you sack the fuck up and you get yourself home in one piece cause I can't be there to do it for you. Dimly, somewhere, there's the cold awareness that he won't always be.

"I have a feeling he was saving it up," Dr. Z says quietly. "Not having had a chance to bite chunks out of the people who were responsible for hurting him. And this must have been enough to...I don't know. Perhaps trigger a flashback. It's over now, Dave."

You really want to believe him. That it's over, that Cronus has gotten all the murder out of his system and you don't have to sleep with a fucking sword beside you for the foreseeable future. That when he wakes up from the tranquilizer darts he'll be someone you recognize.

You want that a whole fuck of a lot, and you hold on to it all the way home.

Chapter Text

Bro looks fucking terrible.

You can just about remember the last time he was really sick, but it was a long time ago. The fact that you're older and more competent now does not make this any easier to take.

He's got both his pillows and one of yours stacked up so he can kinda sit up in bed, which makes breathing easier, but he still sounds pretty horrific. You remember this clearly from a couple weeks ago, how your chest would make these weird wheezy-bubbly noises after each breath, how it felt like you had mud in there instead of air. Dr. Helsing has been to see him, and if he's not feeling significantly better by tonight you're calling her again, because this shit is beginning to scare you.

He looks so different without the spiked hair. Older, more like a standard-garden-variety human being instead of your Bro.

You shift uncomfortably on the chair beside the bed. Dr. H had re-dressed the bite wound on your arm and given you a shot of antibiotics, and you don't get why needles have to go in buttcheeks when they could totally just go in your arm like a fucking civilized society would expect. The movement wakes him out of his doze.

"Hey, kid," he says. The orange eyes look even weirder with the dark circles under them. He's very pale.

"Sup." You're not wearing your shades either. He can see your face. "How you feelin', man?"

"Shitty," Bro says, and reaches for the glass of water on the nightstand. "Fuckin' Nyquil dreams." Then he notices the bandage, and his face changes. "What's that?"

You should have worn a long-sleeved shirt, you idiot. "Uh." Come on, Dave, make something up. "Fell off my skateboard?"

"Jesus fuck, kid, I'm not dead yet," he says tiredly. "Try harder. Or, y'know, consider telling me the actual truth."

He doesn't need this, worrying about it is not gonna help him get any better, but you are frankly all out of creative extemporization. "Um, we had to go back to the hatchery to steal the eggs back cause they were apparently gonna sell them off to some underground fighting ring, which, just, no, and it was me and Dr. Z and Cronus, and Cronus kind of...flipped his shit."

Bro's eyes narrow. "What did he do to you."

"It's not all that bad," but it is and you know it, and you resent the feeling of having to defend him when you still kind of want to run and hide. "Bit me. After he bit some guy who worked there."

"He bit you," Bro repeats.

"Yeah."

"Is he here?"

"No."

"He's not coming back here." You start to say something but just then he launches into one of the miserable coughing fits, and you just thump him on the back to help get the crud out and try not to remember doing this exact same thing with Cronus.

When Bro can breathe again he lies back against the pillows with his eyes shut. "He ever tries to set foot in here again, I'm gonna kill him."

"Bro, it's..." you start again. "Dr. Z said it was like a flashback? To when he was in the labs himself? Like...I don't know, guys who were in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever and they have PTSD."

"Gonna put money on it that war vets with PTSD don't fucking bite people, Dave."

You have to concede that point, and your shoulders droop. "Where is he?" Bro asks.

"At the clinic. He got hit with like three tranquilizer darts and Dr. Z was like, I gotta keep him under observation in case there's any reaction or whatever." And, you're fairly sure, because he doesn't want Cronus in the house with you right at the moment either.

"What about the eggs?"

"They're safe here. Jade and I and the kids made them a nest, it's kinda adorable." You'd never worked so hard at keeping a smile on your face in your whole life. You don't feel the need to add that the purple egg is at the clinic too.

"Okay." He looks at you hard, trying to decide if you're really okay, and then just reaches out and hugs you very tight. He's burning up and sweaty and gross and you cling to him like a limpet, burying your face in his shoulder. "Oh, kid. What a goddamn clusterfuck."

"Why does everything happen so much?" you mumble into his T-shirt. "What are we gonna do?"

"You're gonna start by gettin' me some apple juice. And very hard drugs. After that we'll see where it goes."

And just like that, you think it might possibly turn out okay.

~

Jade had yelled at you when you got back at sunrise, white and shaking, and then as soon as she actually understood what happened shut up and stared at you with huge eyes.

"We can't tell the kids," you said. "Not until we know what's happening."

At least you remembered to put on a long-sleeved shirt after you talked to Bro: neither of the kids can see your bandage. Karkat is sitting in your lap on the couch, eating his snack of cheerios and burbling to himself, a sort of stream-of-consciousness narration for the Lego guys he's bouncing against your knee. From what you can make out, the Lego Darth Vader is a physicist and the Lego Boba Fett is a pirate cowboy. You wonder whether you came up with that level of creative shit when you were a kid. Probably not.

"--and then the Dread Pirate Karkat's gonna fly away on a big dragon," he concludes, making Boba Fett swoop around in exuberant circles. "Dave, where's Mister Purple?"

It takes you by surprise, and you know he's caught the way you tensed up for a second. "He's...not feeling well. So he's gone to Doctor Zahhak's clinic."

"Dr. Zahhak gonna fix him?"

"Yup," you say confidently, and wish you had your shades on. Bro says your eyes get briefly wider when you're telling a direct lie.

"He has bad dreams," Karkat informs you. "About scary stuff."

"I know, kiddo."

"An' he talks to the lady with the red hair about it." He means Dr. Serensky, his therapist, which reminds you that you need to call and tell her he won't be making his appointment this week. Possibly ever.

"That's right," you say.

"He likes the egg. The one that matches him." Karkat looks searchingly at you. "He wants to keep it safe."

That's one way to put it. "Yup, I know. He's real taken with that egg."

"Don't take it away from him," Karkat says, holding the eye contact, and there's that red glint again. You're sure it's there now, not just your imagination. There, in both pupils, just briefly, a flicker of red light. "Dave, promise."

"...I promise," you say, and he looks at you a moment longer before nodding and returning his attention to Professor Darth Vader.

~

"How bad is it?"

Zahhak sighs on the other end of the line. "Well, the good news is that he's conscious and lucid. The bad news is that it is bloody difficult to put somebody on effective suicide watch when they can just bite holes in themselves whenever it occurs to them, even minus several teeth."

You wince. Yeah, okay, that's not really a huge surprise. "Does he...remember anything?"

"Very little. I'm keeping him stable on Xanax for now; he had...I suppose a panic attack...when I told him what had happened, and then kept alternating curling up in a ball and hysterical weeping. I'm not sure which one is more alarming."

Everything is terrible. "Should I come over?"

"I...don't think it would be a good idea, Dave." It's the first time he's suggested you keep away from Cronus. "He's shown no sign of aggression so far, but seeing you might trigger something."

It's not a surprise, but hearing him say the words makes you ache. Despite the toothmarks, despite how fucking scary that whole experience was, you want to be near him, do everything you can to try and chill him out. Because this whole pale thing goes both ways: he's a part of your life now, and you can't imagine not having that part anymore.

"Dave? Are you still there?"

"Yeah."

"It's way too soon to tell how this is going to work out. Don't lose hope."

You give a little mirthless heh into the phone. "Even if he is all done with murdershark mode, Bro's never gonna let him come back."

"Don't lose hope," Zahhak says again. "I'll call if anything changes."

Karkat's instructions are forgotten as you hang up without saying goodbye.

~

Bro sleeps most of the afternoon. When you check on him in the early evening, Karkat's curled up asleep on the end of his bed, and you wonder how long the kid's been there.

His temperature is down a bit, but he's got that taut line to his mouth that you know means he's worried or upset. He asks to see the eggs, and you bring them to him, the gold and the blue looking ridiculously oversaturated in the light of his bedside lamp.

"Where's the other one?"

"Clinic," you say. "It's purple."

He flicks a glance at you, and then back to the goldblood egg in his lap, his attention focusing completely. "--Shit, I just felt it move. How long do these guys have before they're supposed to hatch?"

"I forget, but all this running around and shit might have, like, woken it up early?" Is that a thing? You're holding the blue egg, a deep cerulean blue, and it's been moving a little too, but nothing like as much.

"Fuck," he says, lying back against the pillows, coughing, raw and exhausted. His eyelids are almost translucent. "I don't...ah, fuck, Dave, how the hell am I supposed to watch out for two little kids and two goddamn newborn babies if I can't even get out of bed? This thing better not be hatching right now."

You start to say something, and just stop and look down at the egg in your hands. It's been about six years since you've heard him say anything remotely close to hinting that he's not 100% in charge of the situation, and it hasn't gotten any easier to hear. When you were a kid, the thought of Bro not knowing what to do had been like imagining gravity had been turned off. These days it's less incomprehensible, but no less upsetting. He looks defeated, and you can't bear that.

"You don't gotta," another voice pipes up, and you look up to find Karkat awake and focused. "I'm the man of the house cause Bro is in-ca-pa-sustated." He folds his little arms and gives you a profound look. "Dave has to do what I say."

"Oh? How come I don't get the job?" You marvel briefly that this is the same little morsel of existence you lifted out of a soggy cardboard box not so very long ago.

"You'd do it wrong. And Thollux is worse. He puts peanut butter on his waffles."

This is evidently proof of unfitness for office. "And he's a butt," Karkat concludes. "Now make dinner, Dave."

Bro looks at you over the little curly head, and neither of you can help smiling. The world settles back onto its rails. "Can I order it instead?" you inquire.

"Only if you order from the place with the wiggly letters and soup."

You'd introduced the kids to Vietnamese takeout a little while back, and it had been almost as big a hit as Indian. "I guess that could be arranged. Anything specific the Karkat military junta has in mind?"

He's ignoring you, clambering up the bed to look Bro in the eyes, and even from an angle you can see the brief red flicker. Bro's own eyes widen. "Stop worrying," Karkat commands.

"This is seriously gettin' to be some Twilight Zone level shit," Bro says, but he sounds better. "Not that I'm complaining, Karkat, don't get me wrong. Dave, go get the menu off the fridge."

~

You like to think of yourself as an open-minded, willing-to-experiment kind of guy. You'll try anything once. Well, almost anything. Segways, for example, not gonna be trying those. Marathon running, ditto. And while you agree that the tub of pho Karkat's consuming smells incredible, you are all kinds of so not down with noshing on tendons.

"You can get it without them," Bro says, slurping his own soup--it's bun bo, incredibly spicy, you tried it once and your eyeballs nearly melted. "You gotta say 'for pussies' when you order, though."

"I don't do connective tissue or filtration organs," you say, and throw a rolled-up wrapper at him: he's sitting up in bed, and the rest of you have brought in the folding card-table and the kitchen chairs. "Also, quit being a sexist pig, you're setting a lousy example for the kids."

Bro fields the wrapper easily. He's looking much better; he has some color back. That might just be the amount of capsaicin he's just swallowed, of course, but you think he's on the mend. He's just about to say something that you just know will win the entire conversation when a brittle cracking noise makes all four of you pause.

The gold egg, which has been sitting in a warm nest of blankets at the end of Bro's bed, is rocking. And there's a dark jagged line almost all the way round the part of it you can see.

You and Bro look at one another with identical oh shit what do we do expressions. Before either of you can figure out what, in fact, to do, Karkat has climbed up onto the bed and is poking at the egg with little curious fingers.

"Karkles--" Bro says, and puts his soup aside. "I dunno if you should be messing with that..."

"Helping."

He uses the verb 'to help' for a whole bunch of shit, you reflect. The egg rocks again, and the crack widens visibly. Sollux is staring wide-eyed, kind of huddling next to your chair, and you put an arm round his shoulders.

"It'th a pthionic," he whispers to you. "I wath pretty sure before, but now I can totally feel it."

"Is it...uh...is it okay?"

"It wantth out of there."

You don't blame it. There's another sharp cracking noise, and part of the eggshell comes away in Karkat's hands. Something the same color as the shell, but wet and glistening, is just visible inside. And--oh, shit, there's a tiny flicker of sparks that obviously stings, judging by Karkat's wince, but he doesn't stop trying to help the baby crack its way out of the egg. The sparks are...orange? And green?

Bro is watching with the most anxiety on his face you've seen since...well, since you were sick. You reach out with the arm that isn't wrapped round Sollux and take his hand, and his fingers close over yours with a bruising grip. All three of you kind of don't want to get in Karkat's way right now.

"Come out," he says in his little kid's voice. "Come out now."

The egg trembles. You can see the thing inside flexing, and then the whole top half of the shell comes away in one piece. Karkat lifts it out of the way. Egg stuff is getting all over the bed. It's really kind of gross as shit, but then he reaches down and scoops the egg's gooey inhabitant out in both arms, and the three of you stare.

"She's cold," Karkat says. "Dave get blankets."

What he's holding is...a grub. An honest-to-fuck grub. It's the same bronzy-gold yellow as the eggshell, its soft body segmented. Two tiny black legs per segment wave uncoordinatedly. Only, instead of having a gross caterpillar head, it's...it's a baby troll.

"Dave get blankets," Karkat repeats, scowling at you. You tear your gaze away from the little grey face with its orange-and-green eyes and tiny snub nose, and hurry down the hall to the linen closet--as behind you the hatchling starts to wail.

~

She hasn't got a name yet.

She is so goddamn weird you cannot get over it, but you also can't deny that it's the insanely-adorable flavor of weird. Like Sol, she has two sets of horns, but hers kind of point in different directions, so it looks like two sets of crossed fingers sticking out of her head. Her fluff of hair is so fine, once the egg goo is washed out, that it clings to anything that comes near with a tiny crackle of green-orange static.

Sollux hasn't stopped staring at her since she hatched. He's smiling, though, so you think it's a good kind of stare. And Karkat is apparently intent on chasing her round the floor and tickling her, which she responds to by chomping on his fingers. You don't blame her.

Something's kicking your brain, watching Sollux watch the grub, how close they are in color. He's really focused on it. Man, you are stupidly tired, you'll figure it out tomorrow, you're putting off a lot of shit until tomorrow, including--

"Fuck," you say out loud and pull out your phone, dialing the clinic. Karkat had told you not to let them take the egg away from Cronus, and now you think you see why. It takes a long time for anyone to pick up, and when they do it's Feferi, not the doctor.

"Skaia Veterinary Clinic, how may I help you," she says, and wow, you have never heard her less bubbly.

"...Fef? Are you okay?"

"Oh, hi, Dave." Still not a lot of enthusiasm there. "I'm fine."

"You sure? You don't sound too great."

"I'm fine," she repeats. "If you wanted to talk to Equius, I can take a message, but he's not available right now."

Probably taking a well-earned nap, you figure. "Yeah, but I can just as well tell you. I totally forgot earlier. Karkat told me that Cronus ought to have the egg with him. Like, it might make him less depressed to have that to focus on or something. He freaked out when he saw the hatchery person holding it, maybe it'd help if he knew it was safe."

"That's a good idea," Feferi says, and still she sounds dull and uninterested. "I'm afraid it'll have to wait, though."

"Feferi, what's going on? Seriously." You are starting to feel cold and sick.

"Cronus is in surgery," she tells you. "We think it'll be okay."

"Think what'll be okay?" you demand. You're on your feet now, pacing back and forth, ignoring the stares you're getting from the others. "You're not making sense, what happened?"

"We thought he was still under sedation. Equius just took his eyes off him for a minute." You can tell now that she's been crying. "He...he opened his wrists."

You'd known that was a possibility all along, it comes as no surprise, Zahhak had even said as much--but you still have to shut your eyes and hold on tight to the phone until you think you can trust your own voice. "How bad?"

"Bad enough. He's...he's stable, but he lost a lot of blood, Dave."

"I'm coming over," you say.

"There's nothing you can do."

"Yeah there is. I can keep another pair of eyes on him." You're leaning in the kitchen doorway, your forehead pressed against the doorjamb. "If he flips out and tries to eat me again, well, that's gotta be better than trying to off himself. You guys...you can't be expected to deal with this all yourselves. That's not fair. Dr. Z probably hasn't even gotten any fucking sleep since this went down, and you have other things to do than babysit Ampora. That shit's my job."

"Dave--"

"No. I'm coming over." You stand up, aware that the bite wound on your forearm is throbbing angrily. "One of the eggs hatched, by the way."

"You really shouldn't...what?"

"The little gold egg. It's fucking adorable. I'll show you pictures."

"You will?" She sounds so young it hurts. "Promise?"

"Actually, fuck, should I just bring her in with me? To...I don't know, what do you even feed them, and you guys should maybe check her over to see if everything's cool, after all that bullshit with the meth trailer."

"--Yes," she says, and while she still sounds young, there's less of the lost child in her voice and more of the medical professional. "Yes, do bring her in."

"Okay, Fef. I'm on my way."

You, on the other hand, sound older than your brother, and tired almost beyond rest. It's a relief on some levels nonetheless: at least now you don't have to wait and wonder what he's going to do. When you hang up the phone, the kids are watching you with huge eyes. Even the grub.

"C'mon, guys, it's your bedtime. I gotta take Buttercup here in to get her looked over by the docs, no idea how long that's gonna take."

Chorus of groans, but you think that Karkat looks somewhat philosophical, sucking on his chewed fingers. Maybe he's having another of those red-lit moments. "Besides, you two need to be here in case Bro needs anything."

That convinces them, and both small chests puff up with pride at being in charge of taking care of Bro. You cradle Buttercup--or whoever she is--against your chest, and are a little surprised when all six of her tiny grublegs latch on to your shirt and cling. She's warm, and her skin is so soft it feels velvety, like her miniature horns. She drools on you.

John should know about this. About how little and extraordinary she is, how much you have no fucking clue what you're doing. You'll text him from the clinic.

Time to go fix Mr. Purple, you think, and go to get your coat.

Chapter Text

-- turntechGodhead (TG) began pestering ectoBiologist (EB)!--

TG: hey egbert
TG: uh
TG: so you would not fucking believe the drama that is going down on this side of the continental divide
TG: shit is unreal
TG: cliffs notes version is that we rescued the eggs from the bad guys
TG: there may even have been a couple witty one liners involved i cant say for sure
TG: and now one of them has hatched
-- turntechGodhead (TG) sent file sheneedsaname.jpg
TG: so if you could see your way to summarizing grub care for dummies in real short words for people who havent been sleeping a lot lately
TG: that would be greeeeat
TG: g2g ampora managed to upstage everyone yet again with an incredibly dumbass stunt and im on call
TG: just like
TG: get in touch ok
TG: need you dude

-- turntechGodhead (TG) ceased pestering ectoBiologist (EB)!--

~

Feferi had looked small when you got to the clinic; small and tired, somehow deflated. The vast cloud of her hair was knotted in a thoroughly inelegant bun at the back of her neck, and one of the jeweled cuttlefish clasps was missing.

Then you set the baby grubling in her arms and she squeaked--literally squeaked, like a rubber toy--and if she'd been a seatroll her earfins would have lit up and pointed at the ceiling. She carried the baby off to weigh her or do arcane developmental tests or something, and left you sitting in the corridor outside Ampora's room.

You lean your head back against the wall and close your eyes, remembering the last time you were here. It had been snowing. You'd totally thought shit couldn't get any more complicated or difficult to deal with, and wow had you ever been wrong.

"I thought I told you not to come," Zahhak says, and you open your eyes and look up at him. His black scrubs are crumpled and his hair's coming out of its ponytail. A disposable surgical mask is still tied round his neck.

"Yeah, well, I had to bring the baby to get checked out so I thought I might as well poke my head in. What's the situation?"

He sighs. "Unfortunately we don't exactly have access to typed and crossmatched seatroll blood, so I've had to push a lot of plasma. And he's going to scar. He's extremely lucky that he didn't do permanent damage to any of his tendons."

"But he's not..."

"He is not going to die." Zahhak rubs at his temples. "Not for want of trying. He's under heavy sedation and he's in restraints, because he's weak enough now that he can't actually snap his way out of them. I suppose you can see him, but he won't be conscious for a while." There's a pause, and then he blinks behind the rectangular specs and stares at you as if seeing you for the first time. "The baby?"

"Gold egg hatched," you tell him. "It's a girl. Fef's weighing her or something."

Zahhak straightens up and under the exhaustion and frustration and concern you can see the edges of a smile.

~

The sight of him brings back the memory so vividly you're almost dizzy with temporal dislocation. This time he's not half-hidden under wires and tubes and oxygen masks, though. This time you can see his face.

He's so pale the little dots of his light-up freckles stand out like acne scars. The skin around his mouth is smudged with faint bruises; that and the circles under his eyes are the only color in his face. The black hair and eyelashes look almost fake against that pallor.

But he's breathing. The restraint belts fastening his arms to the sides of the bed make you feel a little bit sick, and the cuffs of bandaging round both wrists don't help. There's an IV dripping clear fluid into one arm, and he's got one of those clippy oxygen meter things on his fingertip. Other than that he's not hooked up to much machinery.

You notice that his claws, which he's thoroughly vain about, are a mess--half of them are cracked right down to the quick, jagged and ugly. There's still a bit of the purple polish you remember him putting on a week ago, while you were watching TV, before everything went crazy. For some reason that's the thing you can't bear, the thing that makes you crack and closes your throat and stings your eyes with the threat of entirely unStriderian tears. None of you have had enough sleep lately, and shit has been unbelievably stressful for everybody, but still you've been keeping it together until now.

Fuck the restraints. You undo the belts, not caring how much the wound in your forearm is throbbing, not caring about the memory of his dead shark's eyes. All you can see is his poor stupid beautiful claws all ruined, and the way his cracked lips are parted just enough to reveal his missing teeth. You get your arm around him and hug him to you, his head tucked against your shoulder, and he feels...lighter than you recall. As if he's bled enough to lose weight.

"You are such a fuckup," you tell him, and bury your face in his hair.

~

You spend the rest of the night there, curled up in a hideously uncomfortable chair beside his bed. At some point Zahhak comes in and spreads a blanket over you, and you can dimly hear him and Feferi talking, and the chirps and squeaks of the grub. The next thing you know, light is flooding through the venetian blinds, throwing bars of warmth across the bedclothes, and Cronus is stirring.

It takes him a while to get the strength up to actually open his eyes and try to focus on anything. You watch: when he finally does look up at you his eyes are astonishingly purple compared to the bruised shadows they're sunk in. It's a glassy, dopey gaze, and you can just about see the little wheels slowly beginning to turn in his head.

His eyes widen as he finally recognizes you--and then his face kind of crumples, and he winces away. It hurts more than it has any right to.

"Nice to see you too, jerkface," you say. "What, do I smell?"

Cronus looks about as miserable as you've ever seen him. "Dave," he says in a very small voice.

"Yup. Me Dave, you Cronus. Also, the sky is blue, water is wet, and Dr. Z is tetchy." You sit on the edge of the bed. "What other topics of conversation can we cover?"

He's still squeezing his eyes shut. "Don't. Please."

"Don't what? Don't make really, really bad decisions? Don't scare the bejesus out of everybody? Don't chew on yourself?"

"Please," and his missing teeth give him the edge of a lisp, not as noticeable as Sol's but there nonetheless, and you just cannot with that, your ability to can has gone out the fucking window. There is nothing to do but lean down and haul him into the tightest hug you can manage.

He's stiff and resisting in your arms. It's like hugging a sack of depressed coat hangers. "Coulda fuckin killed you," he mumbles.

"But you didn't, dude. You just kinda nommed on me while you were in the middle of a world-class freakout, you didn't even know it was me." You're still hugging him, and all of a sudden the stiffness is gone and he is clinging to you, pressing his face against your neck, burrowing close as if he's trying to crawl right inside you and hide. He's crying, almost soundless tearing sobs, and you are so fucking relieved it hurts.

Cronus cries himself out. You hold him all the way through it, letting him cling and trying not to notice the lack of strength in his grip. By the time he's down to sniffles and hitching gasps, you have an audience: Feferi, in the doorway, cradling the little gold grub in her arms. She's smiling a little, through the fatigue.

"Hey," you say into Cronus's hair. "Want you to meet someone."

He looks up, blinking. The purple tears stand out livid against his pallor. "H-huh?"

You nod, and Feferi comes over with her bundle while you let him lie back against the pillows. "'Member those eggs you saved by being a big damn hero?" He's staring so hard you worry that his eyeballs might pop out. "One of them's not an egg anymore."

"Hold out your arms," Feferi instructs, and very gently sets the baby in them. Cronus opens and shuts his mouth a few times without actually making any words come out, which may be a first for him. Tiny uncoordinated grublegs wave, wanting something to cling to. He cuddles her against his chest.

"She's beautiful," he breathes. She'th.

"Yup. Needs a name, though. And the blue one's beginning to wobble. Your purple egg's probably not far off hatching as well."

He looks up from his armful. "My purple egg?"

"Well, yeah, dude, it's kinda obvious that you feel a connection with that one. Being all royal and aquatic and such."

"The violet hatchling is going to need to be cared for by a seadweller," Feferi agrees solemnly. "Equius says it's important."

"There, see?" You reach out and pet one of the baby's curving horns. "So hurry up and get well, cause you're gonna need to have way more energy than you think you will. Little kids are fuckin' exhausting."

He's not listening to you. "You haven't named her?"

"Not yet. 'Goldie' is kind of uninspired, you know?"

"Aureia," he says. "She's golden."

In his arms the grubling wriggles and waves all her tiny legs, chortling. Orange and green sparks flicker round her horns. You think perhaps that represents approval.

~

When Jade gets there midmorning, she squeals over baby Aureia and gives Cronus a stern talking-to which is immediately ruined by the gigantic hug she follows it up with.

"Don't you ever ever ever do anything like that again, you hear me?" she says, squeezing him so he can barely breathe. He's sort of smothered by her hair.

"...promise," he manages, and Jade smooches his forehead and lets him go. She has evidently had some goddamn sleep, in a proper bed, without shitty dreams, and you kind of resent the bright-eyed briskness with which she surveys the room.

"You look like ass," she informs you.

"Thanks, Harley. It's the unquestioning love and support from my friends that keeps me going through these difficult times."

She grins and flips you off. "I'm gonna go take Aureia back to your place. I'm guessing you wanna stay here?" You kind of love Jade Harley for her ability to make correct assumptions. And you are not leaving Cronus, not right now, not when he's still so very near the edge.

"You're guessing right. But if you could, like. Tell Bro and the kids everything's cool? And maybe grab me a change of clothes while you're there?"

"I am not rooting through your underwear drawer, Dave. Just putting that out there right now."

"The sheer awesome of my Decepticon boxers might be too much for you to handle," you agree. "Get Sol to do it. Check on the blue egg, too, if you get a chance?"

"Will do." She comes round the bed to give you one of those bone-crushing hugs, and murmurs in your ear "It's gonna be okay."

"I know," you say, and discover to your surprise that you actually mean it.

~

When she comes back in the afternoon you're not really awake. It's Dr. Z doing something extremely painful to your arm, later, that really shakes you out of dreams, and you yelp and demand to be told what the hell he thinks he's up to.

He looks better. His hair is pulled tightly back and his scrubs are fresh and unwrinkled, and you notice that he smells ever so slightly of Feferi's perfume. That's enough to distract you a little.

"Wound care," he informs you, ignoring your yelp. Your arm is throbbing, and when you look down at it the punctures of Cronus's teeth are red and a bit swollen. "I ought to've cleaned this out better when it first happened. You'll be quite all right, it just needs some work."

"Not gonna turn black and fall off?"

"Not as far as I know." He's cleaning the holes again, with something that...holy fuck that hurts, and you just squeeze your eyes shut and wait for it to stop fizzing like Mentos in Diet Coke. "--I know," he says, and his hands even through the nitrile gloves are warm, not ungentle. "I'm sorry, Dave, I know it's painful, but I'm almost finished."

You're still curled up in the chair in the corner of Cronus's room, and thank fuck he appears to be deeply asleep for this enjoyable little episode. The purple egg is tucked under his blankets, resting against his narrow chest. "Ngh. Did Jade come back?"

"Yes; she brought you some clothes and a number of amusing handmade cards for Cronus. And news that the blue egg seems to be fine but has not yet hatched. Open and close your fist for me, please."

The holes in your forearm stretch and brim a little with the movement, which kind of makes your stomach feel weird. You shut your eyes again. "--Good. Is he okay?"

"So far. He's still very weak, it'll take him several days to get over the worst of the blood loss, but I don't think we're in any danger of him making another attempt." Something cool is spackled over the wounds, and then Dr. Z is wrapping gauze round your arm and securing it neatly. "I'm putting you on a course of antibiotics, and Feferi's ordered dinner. After that you'd better get some more rest."

"I think my spine has fused." You try to straighten up when he lets go, and are relieved to find the new bandage hides the gross little holes completely. "Gonna spend the rest of my life in this exact position, I'll need to have someone push me around on wheels."

Dr. Z laughs, a little, a rare and rather nice noise. "You needn't belabor the point. You can have the couch in my office."

"Good deal. What day is it?"

"Friday. Why?"

"No reason. Time's kind of gone wonky." You think. "Wait, no, there is a reason. He's s'posed to see Serensky on Monday and I'm betting he isn't gonna make that appointment, can you call her or something?"

"I can do better than that; she's actually on her way over."

You straighten up with a creak. "Shit, really?"

"Yes. I gather Dirk rang her up and told her something had happened, and she got in touch with me."

You are so, so fucking relieved. The last time you and Cronus spent much time in this room, you were the closest thing he had to a shrink: now he actually has one, and you are off the hook for his continuing mental stability. Presumably Zahhak can read this in your face, and gives you the edges of a smile. "I've briefed her," he says. "I expect she'll want to talk to you as well, but you can handle that."

"I'll try," you agree. Your stomach growls, and doesn't immediately stop growling when you try to make it, and you have to laugh. "Uh, you did mention dinner?"

"I did. Come and wash up, it ought to get here any minute."

~

The three of you are halfway through Oriole Pizza's mediocre best when the clinic doorbuzzer goes and Dr. Zahhak excuses himself to go let his colleague in. You're a little surprised to hear two female voices--but when Greta Helsing, thoroughly out-of-place in a North Face puffa-jacket, comes in with Serensky, you find yourself dropping your pizza on the paper plate and stumbling to your feet. It's dumb, it's totally kiddie shit, but she'd come when you called her to see Bro, and she'd told you he was going to be fine, and you are really kind of helplessly glad to see her.

Helsing just hugs you without saying a word. Sometime over the past few months you have turned into one fuck of a touchy-feely dude, and this is kind of wigging you out a little, but it is so nice just to know you're not on the hook for everything, that people with the right letters after their names are on the job.

"Uh," you say smoothly, and quit clinging to her. "Hi."

"Hello, Dave." She puts down the bakery box she's carrying--it's got the Ravens logo all over it and you know it contains purple donuts--and gives you a smile. "Nice to see you too. I take it he's doing better?"

"Yeah, I think so? I mean, we had your standard oh-I'm-fucking-terrible freakout on regaining consciousness, but he seemed to chill out after that was over." You settle back in your seat and reclaim the pizza. Dr. Serensky is hanging up her coat, shaking snow out of her hair. Dr. H snags her own chair and pulls it up to the table.

"To be expected," Serensky says, joining you. "I'm not at all surprised about his response, but I'm very glad you were able to be with him when he woke up."

"Um. Jade brought over some cards from the guys for him. Can you hand them over when you talk to him?"

"Of course. Greta, I'm stealing a donut," she adds, with a smile.

"Those are for your patient. Tell us about the baby?" Helsing says to Feferi, who is very pleased to go into detail.

Maybe it's whatever Zahhak shot you full of after re-dressing your arm, or maybe it's just sleep deprivation and stress still catching up with you, but for the first time in a long few days you actually think shit is going to turn out okay.

~

-- ectoBiologist (EB) began pestering turntechGodhead (TG)!--

EB: omg!!!

Chapter Text

This fic will not be continued.

I'm sorry to disappoint people, but it's just not going to happen. However, for those of you who have been patiently waiting to find out what happens next, here is the outline of what would have been written:

The violet egg is committed to Cronus's care. This has the twofold advantage of a) giving him something to think about other than his own terribleness and b) setting off actual protective troll instincts in him that automatically provide the egg and the grub, when it hatches, with what it specifically needs. All three eggs rescued from the trailer hatch and are reasonably healthy given the circumstances.

John and Dave finally get together properly. Equius marries Feferi. The SPCT successfully lobbies for policy reform on behalf of trolls: it will take many years for things to truly change, but they have set the mechanisms in motion.

It's not happily ever after, but:

we've seen some changes, and it's getting better all the time.

ALSO: for those of you who have asked me if you can write more in this verse, absolutely! Go ahead, just make a note that your fic is not UFUTverse canon (and if you want to use the characters from Loophole, you need to get permission from saccharineSylph).