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You’re sick and getting sicker.
Some plague most heinous, a motherfucking virus that’s sweeping through all the siblings from teal on up, laying into any trace of cool-toned hemo to be found in wriggler veins and makin’ ‘em suffer for it. There’s sores on your chitin, and some in your bellow-sacs for sure, and something growing outta the cracks between the gray of your abdomen and the purple of your grub scars that you’re getting your claws bloody with fishing out each evening just to have it reappear come dawn.
Some are whispering it’s a hotblood plot, some tricksy traitorous ninja unleashing bioweapons on motherfuckers higher than them. You’re of the thought, these days, that it’s the Messiah’s whimsies, some physical comedy to show the difference between true humor and the unfunny cycles of tolerance and intolerance that all y’all keep rolling through.
You read your scripture, you do, just as you crawl through forum postings past, and in the sweet spot between these two you find something resembling truth, or at least a reality. A reality that your cohort is setting higher boundaries than most between the shades of hemo that splash up in your eyes, making categories number one through eleven instead of a spectrum, in spite of the name. There’s high and low and right and wrong, or maybe just difference, that’s something you’ve been frying in your think-pan lately, stirring up noodles of thought with the purple matter jostling inside your skull. There’s difference, no doubt about it, but it’s the harshness that’s bad in these sweeps more recent. It’s the division that’s true unfunny, you think some days. Other days you know all this shit is nonsense and the lowbloods are just uppity ‘bout shit they won’t live to see.
Cycles, motherfucker.
Red Lord must be rising these days, no wonder he screams so bloody in your veins while begging for feuds and simplicity and striking down.
It ain’t a plot, some frantic part of your mind, the part that belongs to the Green Lady argues against the implacable anger, it’s just the way things go sometimes, as the River flows. You trust your Messiahs Mirthful to see you through it, but it ain’t punishment nor reward nor joke, just a fast flowing current you’ll make it through soon.
It’s just that-
There’s a couple catalystics rattling around your pan and between your palms that make you think all this hemosuperiority feculence is just that.
First is, why would Messiahs turn away so many jokers and ninjas who could fill the world with mirth, mercy, and rage. Makes no damn sense. You know of coolbloods with tender in them and hotblooded fucks with more rage than you yourself can muster most days, and everyone loves a good practical joke with blood at the end. You think your wicked Scourge Sisters would be bitchtits devotees if they felt the calling, and the place where mean-funny meets funny-mean is your bro Tavros’ grubloaf and churned hoofbeast milk product. It makes so little sense, but you’re young yet in the eyes of your Messiahs, so mayhaps clearer meaning will come to you as you grow.
Your second catalyst is that Karkat-best beloved serendipitous palemate littlest best friend motherfucking asshole diamond yours-is sick too.
Your diamond ain’t bereft of traits to pity or worries to soothe. From the moment it became clear he could hide no more from your devotion, you thinking of him as a thousand possibilities-a jade forsaking holy duty, a confused fuchsia in hiding, a purple brother who didn’t feel the call of the priesthood, a gold so powerful he’d have no life if discovered-and not caring what he was as long as he allowed your pity, your beloved had convinced himself he was the lowest of the low. Below rust, hemo the same shade as the beasts Nepeta gets her hunt on for. The low of the low, swill and swine and all other terrible things you have yet to take out of his head and replace with the certainty that he is a miracle.
Miraculous, he is. Miraculous, that his horns and teeth are small and blunt and yet still his skin is scarless from a hundred fights for survival. He insists it’s not skill, merely desperation, and you’re slowly coercing him towards understanding the wonder in his bad self, but it’s slow going. He insists he’s abominable, a grab bag of all your species worst traits; a mid-blood’s small stature, a blueblood’s lack of psi, magma-hot blood from one end of the spectrum and half-functional gills and stump of a tail from the other. It’s not the mismatch you pity him for, but the way that survival with all that ache in him ain’t nothing short of a miracle.
The miracle of his mismatch is hurting him now, though. Coolblood kids are catching sick, dying. The sick don’t discriminate, there’s purples you chat scripture with going silent off the net, and Eridan reporting that there’s seadwelling lusii going beserk bereft of charges. Unclear as of yet whether it’s hitting the coolest worse, or if you’re just feeling a harsher sting because there’s so few of y’all in the first place. But best beloved, who thinks himself lowest of the low, has the sickness just the same as highest of the high, and he has it bad.
You know nothing about doctortortuing, besides what you use to keep yourself from motherfucking offing yourself on accident with the slime. You failed most of your biology schoolfeeds. Badly. Yet you suspect that it’s something to do with best friend’s warmness and his intolerance to salt for a good disinfecting ain’t helping. Starshine is breathing real bad, these nights. He’s doing worse than any other sibling you’ve heard of, including yourself.
The kids on the net, the ones who are surviving, are putting it together that if you make it past a perigree without the sick killing you, it’ll wreck your system with fungal scars but you’ll live, you’ll recover. If it gets harder and harder to breathe by halfway through the perigee, settle your affairs and give out grief tags if you got quadrants to give ‘em to. You’ll be just fine, your fever broke two weeks past, and the fungus in your chitin is growing smaller by the day for all it keeps coming back.
Best friend is getting worse, fast. He caught it from you near a perigree and a half ago, but his fevers are still coming strong, with chitin growths worse than yours and breathing coming even harder won. It shouldn’t be this bad unless it’s burning through him faster than you can claw it out of him. He’s fevering, and he’s warm to begin with. You fear for his pan, cooking in his head as the sick rides through him in waves.
It’s all cycles. Sickness and opinions and hemo, even, what else explains him fitting so neat between Fef and AA, it’s all cycles. Cycles are good at breaking the bitches in them, you know this for a fact. If you don’t get something figured out motherfucking soon, Karkat’s gonna sink below a wave of sick instead of cresting it. It’ll kill him.
You’re asking all the motherfuckers you got knowledge of for their advice at all hours of the day and night. Fef stayed far enough below the waves that there was no catching it, her Ma’s paranoia paying off this time. Eridan, on the other claw, caught it from one of his slaughters and survived. So of course he’s bitching about it.
You got Eridan on Trollian, moaning his rump off about how the adults are letting future officers of the Fleet die, spewing all kinds of whaleshit as you wait for him to get to the point with best friend having another long tortured nap in your periphery. He sleeps so much these past few nights, and his throat’s too hoarse for shouting, though he does try. It’s breaking your bones with the pain.
Eridan is sending you terrible advice. It’s clearer and clearer he doesn’t know why he lived but wants to make sure he don’t seem weak for riding on luck alone. Sometimes you admire a brother for his clear vision on service to the Empire. Right now you can’t handle another platitude that surely the adults won’t let anyone actually important die, that the truly superior will be just fine, and you fire off a nasty message telling him to go waste his life killing in the name of a girl who don’t love him before slamming your husktop shut. You pry it open and apologize. He blames it on the sickness, says that your perigee is almost up and you’ll get to pry that fungus off you, and that’s kinder than he usually is so you slam your husktop closed so hard you hear a crack.
The thing is that adults don’t give a fuck how many little sisters and brothers die. What does it matter? You’re kids! Every sweep or so there’ll be millions more of you to fight and fuck and make mirth, slurry, and war for your Empire. You want to live, you trust in your Messiahs to see you through.
You’re gonna be grown one day. You’ve always known this. You’re the kind of boy that lives, both through your own will and that of the Messiahs Merciful and Raging. They wouldn’t have touched you with the faith without reason, so you trust that they’ll see you living to be grown if that’s what you feel like doing. The road to grown is what aches though, and you’ve never done this growing up business before so you don’t know if it’s supposed to be this motherfucking hard.
It’s a road that’s taken you through the sopor-green like your Lady, and high like her too, making everything seem insignificant in the face of Her Vastness-and the empty space of the hive that Dad never is in, never was in, and up and down the whole rainbow of hemo in the hues of friends and those that could have been friends but they were threats first and so fell under your clubs. The killing was awful, and worse still that it were easy, the crack of bones like motherfucking music to your auricals. The road to grown has marched you through all that, just to arrive you here with aching throat and lungs, fungus in your chitin and blood on your claws and the sweetest thing you’ve ever wrapped two hands around suffering harder than you ever have.
It could be worse, you know. You’re posted up in best friend’s hive, because staying put all alone near the sea was like to growling-belly kill you anyway, so what does it matter if Dad comes hive to an empty place or a corpse, and Crabdad is keeping you wrigglers defended. You’re keeping gullets full and hive clean, and best friend...best friend is doing his level best to stay alive.
He’s moving in those motherfucking cycles, palest is, between bright consciousness and swearing he’ll never die to feverish sobbing and choking out apologies for the impending grief tag in your ear instead of the adult quadrant jewelry you’d promised each other for sweeps now. You have to. You have to do something.
Nursing him ain’t doing anything but delay. It’s not like he can afford medication that would be designated for highbloods, how he has a motherfucking allowance in the first place is a mystery unto the ages, and it’s rust level to match his esteem of himself. If you’re being honest, you’re sure that your allowance could swallow crazy cost of medicine to save a life, but you can’t buy shit that’s not on planet. Wriggler allowances are for food and games and the good schoolfeeds and FLARP costumes and facepaints, all those distractions that won’t save your life or your lungs that are hacking themselves to pieces, weak as you’ve made yourself with the slime over the years.
Ain’t no one in this spinning space of a universe who cares for you, who’d lift a frond if you were dying, ‘cept other motherfucking kids who are cared for even less. Swillblood or competition or armada fodder, that’s all you are to the motherfucking powers that be in this world you’re living on, and ain’t no one gonna save you but you. It burns, because fuck if you know how to save anyone, let alone yourself.
You get to thinking, wrapped around your burning-blood miracle as he shakes and sobs and sleeps fitfully in the low-grade sopor that’s all he can afford and all you can tolerate before you start fixing to swallow it. You get to thinking as you shoosh him, as he purrs for you best he can with a fucked up bellow-sac and a mind that’s half-gone. Sometimes you think you could die right here, sick and wrapped up in your beloved, and it would be simpler. It ain’t suicide if it’s succumbing, and the Red Lord will take most kinds of fights against death under his fronds.
You don’t want to die though, not most of the motherfucking time anyway, not when you got your faith and your friends and sweeps ahead to fill with mirth. Best friend never wants to die, not ever if he can help it, so you gotta get something figured on out.
It comes to you as you wake to another evening of shoving meager food down best friend’s gut and pulling the regrown fungus from both your chitins. You watch your blood spill into the sopor of the ‘coon, mixing tyrian then faded brown, and you decide to dream. Perhaps the Lord and Lady can guide you to answers.
You get palest set up on the living room lounge plank, he’s clear-headed but exhausted this morning and accepts it easy when you say you’re gonna go fix meals for the next few days. He demands pale kisses to his face before you leave the room, and you give them gladly as he dozes off. You murmur apologies into his curls, and he cusses you out quiet-like “Oh, you idiot,” he coughs, eyes flaring. “You swollen-panned nook chafing idiot, get back here, you’re the only acceptable ice-pack this shitheap of an existance has to offer,” he wears himself out and you promise you’ll be back just as fast as your hands can work.
Your fast hands find your emergency stash, one of the ones you keep real hidden for backup when starfire pale makes noise at you trying to quit all the way, and you bake a wicked strong pie with twice what you would for just a good high, mixing in the concentrates at the right times to make it a mix that’ll send you dreaming. You focus as your pour it down your gullet, focus on your worries and dreams and ask your Messiahs to give you an answer or inspiration. You fly in that dream. You pray. You pray for wisdom, for guidance, for someone or something to save you. You pray for strength, to be stronger than the weak-ass other wrigglers who are succumbing to the sick, to be better than who you are, a scrawny-horned kid who can barely keep himself alive, who was so useless he drove off his own damn lusus. You pray for cleverness, for some trick or joke that will let that stupid kid get off-planet meds safely into the claws of his secret off-spectrum moirail.
You float in the dreaming prayers for a long time.
You wake to Karkat hoarsely shouting for you, informing you that if you make this house look like a murder suicide he’ll never forgive you. You’re still up in some kind of lower stratosphere when you crawl back to him, staking your claim and ownership of a hive that’s not yours as your pheremones go bugfuck wildin’. Even in the throes of a sick that might kill him, best friend knows what’s on in your head better than you even, and claims you right back with teeth and scent, because the truest thing on this fucking planet, in this whole dark void of a universe waiting to be wiped out by the honk of HIGHER FUCKING BEINGS, is that you are his. You wish you were better, braver, smarter enough to deserve that belonging, but you only really ever follow where he motherfucking goes.
You wish. You pray that you will not both perish in this house.
If you were just better-
Oh. There’s an idea.
It worms into your pan, fat and happy on your desperation and replacing the lingering fuzz of your high. What would a better you do? If Gamzee motherfucking Makara were less of a wreck and a better boy for his boy, you’d have emergency stashes that are more than just sopor and it’s additives. You’d stash money and meds for all occasions, and the really high grade sopor that helps most people sleep better heal faster where it’ll just make your brain go firework bright ‘til you snuff yourself out with it. There’s people who know to do that shit, people who have the means intellectual and monetary to do that shit, and while those people ain’t you, they could be.
“Best friend, Imma borrow your husktop, that alright by you?”
“You’re still higher than the sun in the gogdamned sky, and you have a perfectly good and nicer than mine husktop of your own, what in the name of the Great Endless Sea could you need mine for?”
“Eri was getting on being himself again. Them covers for the miracle machines be fragile as all get out, little brother.”
He’s stuck on the loungeplank, so despite that he got lungs fit to blow the horns for the Vast Honk, you go ahead and get your bright ideas on.
The Great and Magnificent Alternian Empire of Her Glorious Condescension has a homepage on the trollish intranet. It’s stupidly easy to get to, because while most wrigglers get to the stage in life where they can slap their own husktops together, not too many get farther than that due to the miracles of technology being a bit hard to unravel. The only reason you yourself got access to the interwebs, not just the intra, is that a few good dreaming sessions let you figure out talking to the data grubs. They whisper to you sometimes. Best friend’s intranet is right up front when you open the husk, with it’s large, easily-readable icons for APPROVED WRIGGLER ENTERTAINMENT and REQUIRED SCHOOLFEEDS FOR ASCENSION. What it doesn’t have is the HICs IMPERIAL CITIZEN DATABASE icon you’re used to, which it takes you a good long while and a shot of Faygo to remember is only available to bluebloods and up. Takes two more shots of Faygo, a break when best friend insists you both gotta eat something today, and a real tense chat with Terecita to get a new login window and modified admin privileges. Best friend is ever so grateful to the teal ninjette for ‘humoring’ your stupid ass, and you are grateful as fuck too and so fucking bitter than you can’t do this shit on your own. You just know Terecita is sending you private messages with everything nasty you already got in your head down on the screen.
The database is yours in the end. It’s a good fucking resource, made available to wrigglers as a way for coolblood kids to connect with each other, or to better surveil and stalk your competition. It don’t just got wrigglers though. It got everyone. You’re the kind of boy who lives through the goodwill of the Messiahs and the generosity of your pale love. But somewhere along the endless ages of the Empire, there must be a you who was better, who would have thought the same way minus the slime, who might have left some helpful shit behind. Old purchase records, a reference to a hive location, something anything for you to stumble upon. An Ancestor long dead, you but less ruined, who might have left the key to their better life behind.
You type in your own name half a dozen times before selecting the option to search by sign and drawing your sweeping Capricorn in the prompt box. Best friend’s crabby little husktop wheezes and buzzes through the trillions of data points the Empire keeps on file. The Empire don’t like leaving things unknown. You wait, staring until your eyes blur, and.
Oh, Messiahs do bless and keep and deliver you, they must think you’re fucking hilarious today. You fold yourself down to do prayers gymnasty style and promptly smack your horns on the floor instead. It hurts. Beloved shuffles in from his second nap of the day to usher you to pile. He pets your head real gentle. You fetch him water. You lie there wordlessly to recover yourselves from the very hard business of living while sick and stupid.
Then you remember. You tell him “I got a way to fix you right up, my main motherfucker.”
“I would fucking hope all that hoofbeast shit with the computer and hate-flirting with Terezi was for a good reason.”
“A brother was not flinging spades in that bitch’s direction!”
“Yeah, and I’m the star of the revival of Thresh Prince. See how stupid you sound?”
You grumble for a moment, but upon prompting tell him your plan.
“There’s another me, out up in the sky, out in space. A better one. He can fix all this. I’m lucky, so motherfucking blessed. The wriggler access only show his stats and shit before he got his Ascension on, but he’s still kicking out there in the stars. Name’s Kurloz on the page but it may be he’s got a grown title now and money to throw around for a brother of the faith”-
Little brother starts aggressively papping you. Like, aggressively papping you.
“NO LIFE-CHANGING DECISIONS LIKE MESSAGING AN ANCESTOR, WHAT DO YOU MEAN HIGHBLOODS JUST HAVE ACCESS TO THE CITIZEN DATABASE LIKE THAT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN TEREZI HAS ACCESS TO THE CITIZEN DATABASE LIKE THAT, WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED THAT NO ONE SAW FIT TO TELL ME ABOUT ALL THIS UNTIL I AM LITERALLY, NO BULGE YANKING INVOLVED, ON DEATH’S DOORSTEP AND ABOUT TO RING THE DAMN BELL, YOU ARE NOT MESSAGING ANYONE UNTIL YOU ARE LEAGUES MORE SOBER THAN YOU ARE NOW, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? AM I GETTING MY MESSAGE THROUGH YOUR SKULL THAT’S THICKER THAN A GOGSDAMN TECTONIC PLATE? EXIT THAT TROLLIAN CHAT WINDOW RIGHT NOW OR SO HELP ME I WILL BITE OFF YOUR FRONDS!”
Okay, so maybe you were still. A teeny tiny bit too high to string a good sentence together, specially to an adult. Little brother didn’t need to do all that yelling though, specially as it just got him coughing up fungus chunks again and sent the two of you into another forced naptime. You are no longer half-dreaming when you wake near dawn, though, and you send out a message before best friend can wake up and stop you.
It’s all polite and introductory, mentioning your standing as a priestling in the Church and how you’re looking for shit that’s hard to get on-planet, and bee-tee-double-you, did you happen to hide any high grade anti-fungal medication on planet when you were a wriggler? Honk?
You get a ping back real fucking quick. It’s a coordinates and time for the next dawn. You very carefully do not tell Karkat about this. Certainly there are five thousand ways this could go south, but you got Messiahs on your side and the certainty your best friend will die and take you with him if you don’t go. You’re motherfucking going, sure as your paint will need to be perfect for this trial of your motherfucking faith.
The first time you meet your motherfucking Ancestor starts off with being swept away on a special star-to-planet ship that you just now realize is how they’re gonna get all your wriggler asses up to the stars on Ascension Day, and not the blast of red-green light and psi-like floating you pictured in your mind. Maybe something a kid with a lusus who showed them how to log into schoolfeeds knew about that already, Karkat probably knew about it but he was back hive sleeping after a nasty-ass wave of fever that had you shaking in your shoes and praying that if he isn’t gonna make it he at least waits for you to get home so you can go to the Carnival together. It’s a trip to be sure. You’re as coldblooded as they come without living under the sea, but the idea that a grown troll can just excuse a wriggler from home planet for a day just ‘cause they want to is a privilege you didn’t know existed. Probably cleverer kids than you know this shit, but you’ve done what you can. You got on your fiercest funniest garb, paint sharp, voodoos wound round your head the way you only can when you haven’t had any sopor at all for over a night, and fangs polished.
No enemy you were planning on engaging on, but a troll you had want of assistance from and an older you to boot. You known your own fickle heart well. Best to impress.
His Mirthfulness, because your motherfucking Ancestor was the motherfucking Grand Highblood of the Alternian Fleet, King of Colors and Overseer of the Faith as practiced in the motherfucking spaces between MOTHERFUCKING stars, takes a motherfucking lingering look upon you as you enter his ship. He moves slow and sinuous as a slitherbeast with a taste for the ninja arts while you are doing your motherfucking best to keep your wonder at bay. You stand at attention, not moving even when he dares to trace a claw down your mandible.
His voice is low and gravely, the way yours will be in three hundred sweeps “You’re softer than I hoped for, little one. Couldn’t pass up such a motherfucking opportunity when we were stationed near homeworld, but I’m sorry to say you’ve put a bit of disappointment in me.” And if that doesn’t crack your sorry excuse for a bloodpusher down the middle entire, it’s only cause there’s bigger fish to get frying.
“What favors you begging for, little kin of mine?”
The motherfucker must know, he’s you but unruined, you but honed deadly and sharp. He can see your inflamed half-fins, can hear the hitch and wheeze of your breath. Doubledamn you he can probably smell the blood from where you’d clawed out this evening’s fungus growth before getting dressed up real nice. The flush comes up high on your face and arms without warning.
“Medicinals,” you croak out. Start again. “My fine motherfucker of an Ancestor, lemme get my gratitude on for getting a chance to salute your bad self while still a priestling of no real motherfucking rank. This poor ninja is seeking aid from a brother in the faith to get through a rough patch. Messiahs bless you in escaping the First Death so long, that we might get a chance to get down with our bad selves together in a venue not the Carnival Darkest.” You are so motherfucking polite. You were rehearsing the whole ride up, from the moment you figured out that you were heading towards the stars.
“Don’t gotta wrap your vocal stem ‘round fine foolishness like that pupa,” he brings his ‘voodoos up, a slight pressure on the sides of your pan, so you get your joker shields up until you know what he’s riffing at. “Church speak as Church will, all ninjettes and ninjas getting through linguistic trials as the spirit motherfucking moves them.”
“Plain then, I’m asking for medicine, motherfucker mine. My wriggler caegers ain’t gonna be worth much to you, but they’re yours to have. Anything you want smuggled off planet’s up for the offering too, I know some motherfuckers leave shit behind that’s real hard to get off after you go.”
“A deal?”
“Grubloaf ain’t meant to hold this high shade, you feel me?”
He laughs at that. There will forever be the bright shining moment you made the motherfucking King of Colors laugh with your irreverent whimsy.
Then your pan near implodes.
Dark laughter presses in on every side, howling and cackling at your expense, each HONK another bludgeon into the purple of your pan-matter. Your joker shields fall inwards, and you are a bag of PULSING PURPLE MEAT GRABBING DESPERATELY FOR A WEAPON TO END YOUR FUCKING MISERY AND BASHING YOUR SKULL AGAINST THE METAL OF THE SHIP FLOOR WHEN NONE ARE WITHIN FROND-REACH.
YOUR MIND IS YOUR BODY IS YOUR HARSHWHIMSIES INSIGNIFICANT AGAINST A HIGHER DEVOTEE OF YOUR TWIN GODS. YOUR MIND IS YOUR BODY IS A CHUCKLEVOODOO JUST STRONG ENOUGH TO CLAMBER ONTO AND-
“Like I had my meaning on, pupa. Softer than I expected. Weaker too. Too stupid to own up or too weak to see it through.” The humming is constant but one handhold on sanity gives you another and you’ve got plenty of your own hilarity to hold onto, plenty of fucking rage-
“RAGE AIN’T WEAK, IF THAT’S HOW YOU FIGURE POPS. I GOT MY RAGE ON JUST FINE.” You’re grinding your fangs to dust, every nerve on fire and maybe you can bash your head through a porthole and send you both into oblivion anything to make the FUCKING NOISE STOP. YOU’RE NOT UNFUNNY ENOUGH TO GO OUT LIKE THIS.
“Ain’t got the fucking smarts though, that’s right. The meds ain’t for you. We got the same tough hide, little me, if not the same pan. Yours is”- the sensation of a claw tearing through the sludge of your pan and your stomach simultanously- “fucking rotted through. Our hide will weather anything the Messiahs see fit.” You steel yourself and manage to do the customary nod and gesture for Merciful and Raging, ingrained deep in you as it is. If you’re about to go to their Carnival you’re going to go with RESPECT. There’s such coldness in your Ancestor’s ganderbulbs as he watches your motions.
“It’s for someone else, your favor to ask. Not a hatefriend, we wouldn’t,” he pauses, the laughter in your pan loud and cruel enough to destroy the bare hold on sanity you got. You shove a frond between your teeth and bite down for clarity, sending your own darkness back at him. His mind is as far from you as the green moon is from home, but never let the Red Lord say you didn’t put up good final comedy set. “Alright, you’re stronger than I thought. I’m still stronger. So you would do this shit for a hatefriend, you bleeding bloodpusher. You won’t cull them for their weakness, though you have culled. Naw, little brother. This little song and dance is for a quadrant.”
You give him the knowledge of how a horrorterror sounds from the depths of a drowning dream where you’re searching through a dark sea for salvation that never comes. IT ROARS UP WITHIN YOU.
“A moirail.”
“MINE. NOT YOURS MOTHERFUCKER. SOME THINGS ARE FOR A BODY ALONE, NOT THE FAMILY, YOU HEAR?” You’re digging claws into your chitin, not for the fungus but for your nerves themselves to quiet them from the CONSTANT FUCKING STING.
The pressure recedes. You got the fucking bends but it’s better than the crushing depths of his wicked humors. The laughter is near tolerable now, and audible in your physical auricals as well.
“My small copy got himself a diamond?”
“A need for medicine is what I got, and if you can’t MOTHERFUCKING PROVIDE, I’LL GET MY SORRY ASS ON HIVE.”
“Don’t get your motherfucking briefs in a twist pupa, what’s mine is yours.”
You brace.
“Beg for it.”
You are a troll in palest love with the universe’s brightest miracle, but you are still a motherfucking troll.
“Never.”
“What a joke from the pupa.” Your Ancestor laughs, and you stop existing for a good while there.
Your pan is flayed open for his perusal. It’s shameful. You will not beg for mercy, you won’t, you will BEAR THIS you will BEAR IT as he rips your head to shreds, the pain holy in how it’s like ringing church bells that have hemo flowing out of every orifice on offer. He touches you, and you do not know fear. Overwhelming, life-ending pain, but not fear. He’s curious. He is inspecting. He is the gravity of a black hole and you are one small STUPID BOY, his hand wrapped around your matchstick thigh. You fall into him and don’t feel a fucking thing except everything.
“Beg.” He commands. “Beg your Lord.”
“My Lord,” you begin with all the candy-red fire of your love’s veins and the soul of Messiah Raging “WOULD NEVER SURRENDER.” You lash out with your ‘voodoos, a clumsy thing, but powerful and desperate. You get half a glimpse of his surprise and oh praise, his pride. Pride in you as he breaks you to pieces.
“Let’s see how far you can make it. Can’t let subpar material into the Church Fleet, you gotta understand that much even with a fried pan.”
He makes you dance for him. Every limb and nerve, vocal stem too. He’s got his mind wrapped around every part of you with no effort, making you an ugly mockery of the toys Messiahs use to tell their jokes. Just a little puppet, he croons. What a beautiful little puppet to play with, all unexpected-like. What kind of motherfucking fool walks into the reach of an adult troll with nothing on offer? If he’s going to give you what you want when you surrender, and oh you will surrender, he’s got to get his pleasure from you somehow, since you’re not strong enough to fight.
You dance for him, and who knows if the purple on your mandible is hemo or tear lymph.
It’s forever. You keep unbroken, the rage of the Red Lord constant in you over the facts that something so unfunny can happen to you, that you can be caressed and violated, weighed and found wanting, encouraged by the monster whispering to you from every corner of what’s left of your mind.
“You can hold on longer than this,” he confides, after eternities of pain you’d punch your Carnival ticket to stop. You’re so close to doing anything, anything to get what you’d come for, to at the very least be alone in your pan again. The thought of surrender, if only for your beloved, of getting him what he needs, is so close. But the moment you surrender could be the moment your strings are cut, the entertainment done, the baby bug squashed under a claw. Disposing of an unfunny joke. You know how it goes, you’ve done it before. You’ve done the same, and your Ancestor motherfucking KNOWS IT. So there’s nothing to do but BEAR IT.
“You hate me something fierce right now, little me, but we know this is nothing we haven’t done before. You’ve culled. Sure, you’ve defended, but you’ve hunted too. You love how they squirm and bleed. You think sometimes about drawing it out, making them suffer and beg. You like it. It stirs your pathetic whimsies. Don’t deny it, it just grows into this.”
You sob aloud, for there is so little you desire less than being a monster, even if it were in service to your Messiahs. Yet here is proof that it is inevitable. You will grow and be grown and steal all the whimsy from others, for the fun of it. For a single kind of morbid joke and no other. You still do not beg, but only because it seems impossible. A monster does not beg. Motherfucking monsters aren’t able to REASON with their captors.
After more motherfucking eternities in a blaze of holy fire and the doubledamned hell of constant drowing and every nerve on fire and some of them on the floor in front of you, there’s a call: “My younger self would not have made it so far. So you do have hidden talents.”
There’s a deep part of you that rejoices at this news. It’s so small, it’s all that’s left of your sanity. It’s your faith and your hope and your secrets-Fef’s home address and starlight’s miraculous hemo and all the offenses that would get your friends culled on the spot-all holding on impossibly long out of pure RAGE.
Then the smallest crack opens in your mind, but it’s fine. It ain’t hurting no one but you. You let the words spill out all at once, not for you, you’re dead and gone but maybe, maybe, “Please, for littlest, my littlest, meds. Please he needs them, anything anything, my life, my death, my carnival ticket please. He’s my palest.”
Every word of it aches and angers you beyond imagining, and you’re waiting for something, for anything, but you can’t move to see Kurloz’s face. Not a muscle, not a voodoo. There’s nothing left in you but pain and the constant, aching pity that brought you here.
But pity your ancestor does take on you. He laughs, slathering you in healing cream and handing you vials of medicine and purest grade sopor like it’s cheap, like it’s nothing, and it is for him. It’s so easy to save wriggler lives and no one gives a shit! They let you all die like you don’t got souls and dreams and loves, like your life won’t be a target for every troll in the vicinity if your ancestor releases the vid he took of you begging on bent knee for your diamond’s life. You’re owned, you’re an owned creature now, a puppet to dance as he sees fit and you’re so so angry but. There’s medicine in your claws as Kurloz ships you planetside once more, you with barely enough energy to snap at his damn fronds.
You’re just a stupid kid. Your life is a dunk tank at the carnival, all rigged against the little boy throwing everything he has at an impossible target.
You got nothing in you, back hive. You’re trembling, and you barely stumble in the door to beloved’s ‘coon, pouring the glass-bottle meds and the goodshit sopor packets into the slime before climbing in there with littlest the way you shouldn’t if you want to wake up sober tomorrow. Who cares if your pan is melted, you’re more focused on wrapping your shaking arms around your best friend and praying, please Angel, please say you’re not and won’t be holding a corpse in your arms before evening falls.
You’re seven sweeps old, and only alive because the monster you grow up to be has your sense of humor. It’s funnier to hold the threat of fucking you over forever with a vid of you begging for your diamond’s life than to destroy a puppet that could be made to dance. Your life is the Grand Highblood’s forever now. A fair trade for Karkat’s, a fair trade for palest getting to fucking live, but a choice you’re realizing you should not have had to make.
This is the truth you hold close, even as you awaken, healed completely even as you’re on a bad high from meds-infused non-diluted sopor. Even when beloved breathes easy for the first time in near two perigees, and you pray and weep even as he gets the story out of you and lashes you with his tongue for it, because he can die but your pain is unacceptable, and he doesn’t understand that the situation is all to being the other way around. Even then, the thought remains. You shouldn’t have had to do this. You shouldn’t be at their whimsy, you or any other motherfuckers. What about all the kids out there with no ancestors, with no connections? What if, impossibility of impossibilities, you did not love your best friend as you do? There would have been no one to speak for an infected mutant, and he would have died choking on his own lungs. A complete end to any mirth.
All these young voices silenced. There is no just cause in this universe, of this you are well motherfucking aware, but the idea that your peers could be taken before even the opportunity of making a joke of their lives can be seized? Makes no damn sense at all. Your Angel of Double Death could not want this. Your Lady, Messiah Merciful, whispers agreement in your ears. Something must change. What, neither of you knows. But it needs to change. Someone, someone should care, when wrigglers get sick.
You suppose it’s you, now.