Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Alternia’s capital dominates the landscape from every vantage point. Its turrets and roofs have been intimidating for hours now, a pride of roarbeasts stretched before the hunt. A thatch of droneships patrols above so there’s no entry that way, and the city’s walls are like stone teeth—thickly decorated with skeletons and clown cult holy murals, the spray of blood from bullets or fists or blades—hemmed in with the frantic tick-tock clicking of cameras and heat sensors and guardworm mandibles. The most viscous of the Conqueri’s people do not like surprises.

Impenetrable, trolls say of Sdegr, and so it is. You're the only exception you know of.

You indulge yourself with a measured pull from the waterskin. The slickness goes down your throat like chilled starwine, and you savor it. Sweat has matted all your travelling fabricarmor to you (you smell like a barn), save the cloak Dolorosa wrapped around your shoulders: Signless, you will cover all of yourself up and pin the edges with decent stones; so help me my graven Mothers if you come home cooked. The night sits heavy on you with its heat. Your bones are chanting a dirge of protest. It has been three weeks since you’ve had any roof over your head, since you’ve not passed every waking hour moving your feet in this constant march. You’ve been navigating ancient deserts and toxic marshland, already treacherous even without the marauders and scoundrels roaming their territory, waiting for intruders. Intruders like you. Exhaustion clings to you much heavier than any humid night air.

You’ll keep your word and arrive on time, but you probably should have rested. Your journey was postponed by two nights, given that walking had become something you were genuinely not sure whether swordpoint or salvation could coax you to. You’ve never shared a heat with your matesprit before, after all. Your first had passed long before you met Disciple and the second came while you were fleeing an army and she was leagues away. This, your third, snuck up on you. Memories of sweat and thick curled hair in your fingers, of bitten lips, your mixed laughter spilling, pooling sweetly between your bodies as you moved—they have entrenched themselves firmly in your thoughts, a comfort and a truly effective distraction, more than the ongoing soreness between your legs. Next time, you will not relish Disciple claiming you any less-but you will make time to recover from her affections. Since you set out, you’ve been swilling water at an unwise rate, been dragging your limbs along like lead, been blinking away a feverish sleep you cannot seem to hold out against for more than a few hours. You're embarrassing yourself.

You hang the waterskin back around you, licking your cracked lips, and prepare yourself for a dead sprint.

The way in starts with a series of guardworms who, yes, will feel the vibrations of your footsteps—but you have your humbox for them and you hurl it before you encounter their tunnels. Bulbous, pale shapes large as legless hoofbeasts erupt in geysers of dust. Guardworms are all gut, a hollow filled with multitude rows of teeth and digestive slimes, mandibles grabbing for their prey—but you skitter past. A younger one snaps viciously at your heels, but won’t abandon its tunnel entirely for just one slab of meat.

You crouch low as you move, aware of the wall’s eyes. You are no highblooded mountain, alright; you're small enough to hide in the plumes kicked up by the wind. You must wait for the precise winds though, your feet must follow a specific pattern. Skeletons clatter a warning against the wall. There is a lattice of irregular heat and pressure sensors hidden beneath the blackened earth, and gun turrets glaring down readily for any twitch of disturbance. Sweat blurs your eyes, your bloodpusher writhes in your chest. You cannot rest; you have nowhere to hide. You fling yourself up again, following the steps counted out in your mind’s eye.

One, two—and here you must leap—your weary legs falter. You do not question the miracle that keeps you upright. You are so close you could count the cracks in the wall. The way there is paved in cameras. You give yourself a second to memorize the flashing of their bright yellow lenses. Before your first trip to Sdegr, Psiionic drilled you on these six faulty cameras until you thought you would scream. A boot out of alignment, a falter to your stride, an ear caught on film—his wretched obstacle course was impossible. The lag between shots only gave a millisecond window. How could you possibly move fast enough? He socked you when you complained and made you run it until now? It comes second nature.

You collapse against the wall. You can skirt the stones just like this, back flattened, cloak in your hands to prevent it dancing out into anyone’s view. As you do, you’re panting hard enough that if you didn’t know better, you’d think you were fresh from sprinting several leagues. Great Conqueri—you have only one desire in life, and it is to sit down. You grit your fangs and keep moving anyway. Until the Empire falls, you haven't earned the right to be tired. Your purpose would move you even if you were ash and bones.

Still, though. A chair. A chair, and another sip of water.

Finally, your fingertips recognize the cracks in the stone. You shuck your boots and slip your claws into the holds you carved as a younger troll.

…Of course, you might just have a slight ulterior motive for being here. You have plenty of meetings to attend and plots to supervise and faithful to comfort—undeniably, this will further your cause—but you are still a troll and so you may as well also add that it has been whole perigees without seeing your kismesis. The Condescension has had him sailing the Blacknest and fighting the natives along the coast, all the way on the other side of the planet. You are used to long stretches with his absence—you relish them for he is the very definition of a pompous dumbass—but seven perigees is apparently your limit and here you are, in his city.

By the time you turn up at Hospicte’s door, she just raises an eyebrow at you. “Took you long enough,” she drawls, opening the door wider for you to come in. “It’s nearly dawn. What were you doing?” You stumble through the door, wishing you had a better explanation—you almost passed out in the streets twice. There’s a sour pulse behind your eyes. You’re probably sick, but acknowledging it just makes you stubborn.

“But I know you live for the anticipation,” you say instead, letting warmth drive the fatigue from your voice. “Hello, Hospicte. It has been too long.” She grins the minute she closes the door and—oh, damn. You can outright see her working up to a bow. You move to preempt this. She's given plenty of time to evade the hug of a sweaty, dust-caked traveler, but Hospicte still latches onto you like a fruit press. You’re a little surprised that there’s no knife. It’s nice. Also, you’re about to fall asleep in her hair.

“Welcome back to my hive, Starvent,” Hospicte says as you separate, just brightly to make you sigh. You hear a click and don’t wait to figure out what it is—just duck away. Not a moment too soon either. A plume of fire spits itself out after you from the ceiling, venting the smell of kerosene and stinging your nose before it splutters out. Hospicte has her eyes scrunched in concern when you finish coughing. “That was sloppier than usual. Are you not feeling well?”

Admittedly, flinging yourself directly to your ass was not particularly graceful. Neither are the greeting rituals of Empire trolls, though. “Don’t get any ideas,” you croak. “You may simply consider this chemical warfare. I’m afraid I’m not at my best.”

“Oh no, really? I have medicinal tea—the good kind, straight off the black market. I’ll get you some, yeah?”

You have exactly zero desire for Hospicte’s obviously poisoned tea. “Thank you,” you tell her politely. What you’d really like is to sit and chat, continue to learn from this remarkable troll, but your vision is already blurring again. Without anything to sprint at, you can’t resist it. “…Actually, forgive me—can we put off catching up until tomorrow? I think I might still be able to sleep this off.”

“Of course!” Hospicte escorts you with shooing hands to the closet that has become your residence these trips to Sdegr. Houseguests hide better when the extra respiteblocks are all empty (besides, it’s cozy). “And when you wake up—should we talk about scripture, some? Maybe?”

Her hands are clasped and everything and for a minute you are the leader of the revolution again—you are the Salvation, the Christ-figure Signless, this is your flock, your Hospicte, so greedy to fill her claws with change and magic and mercy. You smile a little. “It would be an honor,” you say.

Once you’ve closed the door after you, though, you are back to being Signless the troll who is sick as a barkbeast and could probably keep time with the relentless pounding in his head—now joined by a churning stomachache. Your eyes are dancing with lights you doubt are really there. This is probably Kulkenar flu. You are probably stuck on your ass for the foreseeable future. Your family will be worried, your contacts will have to put up with you sniffling, and you yourself are annoyed—the only possible avenue for all that annoyance is your kismesis. He is not here.

There is a mug of warm tea waiting for you outside the door when you peek outside. You smile a little more. After you drain it, you drink the rest of your second-to-last water skin. You then flop into your washtub of sopor. Slap some slime onto your face and neck halfheartedly in an effort to stave off nightmares, and you don’t fall asleep—you get dragged abruptly into unconsciousness.

xx-tgc-xx

You wake up with pain wrenching up your sides and your body nearly paralyzed, except for the frantic shivering. Steam is rising from your fever-baked sopor. As you wake, the pain sharpens into knife-slits. You are pretty sure your guts are bursting out of your abdomen.

You contort your fingers to your side with unbelievable effort. Your skin isn’t split (yet), but you are feeling your flesh twitching like electrocution, rapid and unnatural—you don’t even know what muscles these are—a fresh bolt of agony crawls through you. Your thinkpan gives up and you pass the fuck out, aghast that this is your end, that it is death by tea. Why did you drink it, why did you take it for a kind gesture?

You swim back to the surface what must only be seconds later—you have clawed through your skin, wonderful, but there’s not enough blood to have been unconscious for more than a minute—and. And the pain is incredible. You heave yourself out of the sopor. What poison does this--? Splatter to the floor and bite back the whimpers of pain that want to come out. How do you treat--? Your sides shiver jerkily. You will crawl. You will, you will think of something to crawl to—

“Starvent?” You hear the knock through the tempest of agony. Hospicte’s voice. “Are you alright in there? I heard you tip the washbasin over.”

She’s not one to gloat, your brain rapidly supplies. She is not cruel, only devious.

This isn’t tea.

A fresh scream of agony claws through your hide. Your claws snap into the flesh again and you can feel the line of muscle writhing there, like it’s trying to tear out of your flesh. You retch.

Hospicte knocks again. “Si—Starvent?”

“Fine!” You choke out. Your voice is dust. You heave yourself upright enough to, you don’t know, not sound like you’re writhing in your death throes. Your arms are shaking so badly you are about to land on your face. Stifled squeals of pain climb onto your tongue. You inject a trace of laughter into your tone and pray that it does not sound hysterical. “I’m fine. Just a dream.”

“Bad one?” She sounds sympathetic. Oh Conqueri, you cannot maintain polite conversation while you die. The wriggler that persists in your thinkpan screams for Dolorosa; your adult mind wants its moirail, the rest of you wants Disciple and to tell her that you love her, just the once more—

You nearly scream as another wrath of agony boils up your side.

“I see you drank the tea, though,” Hospicte sounds pleased. “Good?”

“Very much so,” you manage between gritted fangs. Your arms are giving way. You sink to your elbows, panting. The muscle spasms are constricting your lungs too tight, your head is spinning. There’s a pulse speeding between your legs, heavy as your bloodpusher, your body’s last act of trying to process its death. It is not a comfort. Your vision grows murky.

You do not want her to find you rotting in here. She does not deserve that, but you can’t move anymore, and so at the very least, she should not have to listen to you die. “May I,” you wheeze. “May I have some more tea?” You don’t hear her response, but her footsteps recede. You labor with breaths, your mouth drips with saliva onto the floor, your muscles go slack. You do not know if you are unconscious or not, but it hurts terribly.

And when the pain on your right side abruptly gives way, you gasp in oxygen so hard you have to cough it back out immediately, lungs clenching as they expand. Your palm clutches the sudden lack of pain automatically. Your thinkpan tries valiantly to restart at the unfamiliar sensation it finds. Alarming--this is sweat, and you feel skin, and it doesn’t hurt, but the shape is wrong. The texture is wrong. Hard, ridged. Like fingers, bony and spread over your waist. And, ah, you are the wrong shape, that’s what it is. You have curved out instead of in. You cannot think with your body screaming its distress, your left side is still trying to explode—

And abruptly that gives way too. You pant shallowly, shaking like a hatchling, fingers skating over your reshaped sides. When you push, firm, elastic sensation responds, like stretched cloth. Your muscles flutter tighter in response. You do not think, not for a while; just wallow in the relief of not hurting. Slowly, you register fully that your waist has bowed out like the edges of a fruit, that your sides are striped with hard ridges, that your stomach—which was bloated before you attempted sleep—is cradled suspiciously well by this new shape.

You remain confused for a moment longer, because no, you know this is not the case. You know of trolls like this, but you are not one of them. You would know, wouldn’t you, at almost ten sweeps? You would know. And you’re a mutant, Conqueri—you’re already sewn through with hemochrome anomalies and the vestigial fins Dolorosa had to cut from you when you were young and horns like something filed down. There is no way that out of all the genes that could have survived whatever inauspicious mix of slurry made you, you got ones so rare that the National Census says it’s one in every fifty thousand made the cut, a tiny subspecies of positives? No. There’s a mistake. What your hands are frantically pushing and sliding against is not possible.

You cannot be pregnant.

Chapter Text

Thinking the word sets you off and your thinkpan fires protests in every direction. You damn well have not been performing the sort of quadrantal feats that end in egg-carrying, and you know it. You hardly even. Hardly ever, you know—look, you have other concerns! What goes on over a bucket is nothing to be ashamed of, but you—

Right on time Disciple fills your mind. Her soft kisses, the searching of her hands against your body, the burn of her inside you, your thick heat scent pleading for more. But surely she didn’t release into you—

Your memories come to you dreamlike, fuzzy. She’d slumped on your shoulder, shaking with giggles as you slid your thighs together to enjoy the slickness. “Well, I guess there’s no need for a bucket, then?” You’d cackled with her, then.

Your fingers press against the very convincing incubation ridges lining your stomach. But.

But, no—this isn’t possible. You’ve only just gone through heat. This must be unrelated; since then it’s only been a… a few weeks. Your sides give another dull throb beneath your fingers. At three or so weeks, incubation ridges aren’t needed yet, but you imagine they might develop early. They’d already be in place to guide the eggsac forward as soon as the eggs started swelling inside their nest, so the pregnant troll can expand without compressing their spine or the internal organs. Fuck.

fuckfuckfuckFUCK

You tear upright and regret it because the ground promptly lurches, and you hit it with your face. Tears jolt into your eyes and your knees protest—you got them under you right before you fell? A wriggler mistake; everyone knows to slap out and oh god oh god oh god your hand is under your belly, your body curved with the fall, you are protecting your eggs.

You claw at the wall until you have achieved something horizontal, staring down at your stomach.

Your fabricarmor is no more disturbed than if you’d had a big meal. Cock your hips forward a bit and even that vanishes. Gulping, you ease your shirt up, and whimper like the most pathetic thing to ever crawl the planet because yes, those are incubation ridges, straight out of any schoolfeed. The familiar gray curve of your belly is now choked between a lattice of cartilage and semi-transparent elastic membranes. Your grubscars have almost stretched flat where the red ridges bowed your waist out to make room for your new incubation unit. As you breathe, the pleated flesh between the ribbing expands slowly. Such membranes can inflate to an incredible extent in order to accommodate a pregnant troll’s young. They are full of bright red veins. They are a part of you.

You think, with the automatic reflex that recognizes which things can kill you, of how best to kill it first. There must be ways to rupture the egg sac, vent the eggs, terminate the life growing inside you before it can be a threat.

Your knees give out.

You land heavily on your side, driven by instincts your hormones must have been prepping you for over the past few nights because they damn well didn’t exist before. Both arms have curved protectively over your belly. Oh stars, Disciple’s young. None of your family dare offer buckets to the Mother Grub. It’s impossible to imagine your beautiful matesprit having descendants—and Conqueri, if there was even a possibility she could turn a bucket in, you would have made Dolorosa take you to the caverns, you would go through every egg. You love that troll, you love her to desperation and madness and inside you aren’t just your young—but hers. Your belly holds Disciple’s seed, her unhatched grubs.

You’re so terrified.

Your thinkpan is wrought with the consequences of committing yourself to this impossible enterprise. With your blood, you cannot seek aid from any medicullation unit. Either you will take to reproduction the way the Mother Grub does, or you will not survive, because every complication will be deadly—not just to you. If your mutations are in the wrong place, you may spontaneously abort your young after perigees of carrying.

Irrelevant. Your chances of making it long enough to have a pregnancy complication are miniscule. This isn’t the sort of illness that can be fixed with sleep and water. You are the enemy of the Empire, you cannot afford to slow for a second, but this will drive you to your knees. You won’t be able to fight when you get further along, probably not even to run. You will not be able to save Disciple’s young when you are killed.

At worst, they might be mutants like you. They might spend every second of their brief, helpless lives fleeing those that would hunt them down and tear them to shreds. They might be mutants unlike you, a mess of broken genetics—those that will not even have the time to run before they die. They might come into the world broken, even if you die giving birth.

You cannot even consider trying to do this, but still, you understand fully. You cannot allow harm to come to these eggs.

No, you are growling at the thought, palms stroking firmly against the bare skin between your ridges. You will head home immediately. Before you weaken further, you need to find your family. You don’t know the first thing about pregnancy, but one of them might. You will need their protection.

You wonder how your Disciple will look when you tell her. When she sees for herself—in a few weeks, you will surely have a more impressive belly to show her. You will whisper into her ear, your grubs and mine, and your breath falls out of you with the last of your growl, you rub your belly, you nearly purr. And Dolorosa—who tries to mind every wriggler young enough, much to the chagrin of their actual lusii—you know your lusus misses the caverns she gave up to rescue you. You can already see her fussing over tiny sopor pods and wee blankets. Psiionic will tell you that you’re an idiot, but he’ll hug you, he will shooshpap you into serenity, and you will kiss his fingers even if that’s all the moving you can do. You will be king of all if he is at your side. If they are.

Oh Merciless Conqueri, you’ll fucking fly home, is what you’ll do. If you survive the laying, you’ll give twice over your lifetime to your people—you will never delay another second—but this once, you need to surrender. You must leave quickly, while you’re still small. You will send your apologies to those you were supposed to meet with, you will thank Hospicte for letting you stay, you will sneak out in the early hours of dawn, and you will not think of your kismesis.

Your throat constricts.

That's right. He can’t know about this. He worships the Empire without a single hint that he possesses a thinkpan of his own. The nature of your hate is something all-consuming and undeniable, he tolerates you; but if he hears about a bellyful of mutants you know he won’t rest until there are half a dozen harpoons through your gut. You are halfway to curling up in a little ball to shield your eggs just from this imaginary danger. You must not. It’ll be perigees, but—

Even if you’re going to die without meeting again?

Right now, your treacherous thinkpan points out, you would be able to hide your young easily. As long as you kept his claws off your ridges, he’d never know. And even if you left at first night, you can’t go too far—you have to camp out before you try to cross the Windreach—you might do just as well to leave in, say, late aftermidnight.

Hours before he left for the Condescension’s mission, the pitch bastard blew you a kiss. Sarcasm dripping from the action because you were still a bleeding mess on the ground and he’d zipped his pants up, run his fingers through his hair, and looked totally unaffected. As you recall, you flipped him off, and that really feels lacking as a comeback.

When was the last time you made a proper pitch gesture for your kismesis? Not just breaking into Sdegr to see him, but something truly romantic. You could do a lot with the hours before you leave. You could kiss him, you could make him bleed. Say a smug goodbye while he’s on his knees. And oh, you’re already grinning savagely into the dark with this next thought—when you’ve laid your eggs, you’ll parade up to him and tell him that there was a pregnant mutant under his nose and nothing he’ll ever get to do about it. You’ll be strifing for hours before one of you gives up and it turns into fucking. He’ll never forgive you for the treachery.

Hospicte knocks on the door again, startling you out of your thoughts.

“Tea,” she offers in sing-song.

You’re still shivering a little bit, but as you smooth your shirt down, all evidence of your condition vanishes. Between your legs you feel a little wet. Some color rises to your cheeks as you make the obvious assumption as to why—ah. Not so much death throes as your nook’s dynamic shift into an incubation unit—you don’t dwell on it again. You’re already carrying. There is nothing more to debate.

When you open the door, Hospicte goes for your eyes with the boiling tea. You throw your cloak into her face and tackle her in a tangle of flailing limbs. With ease—and this time, intent—you cushion your belly from jostling.

“Here you go,” Hospicte chirps when you’ve untangled yourselves. She brandishes a thermos at you. You’re a little touched as you take it. As you try to find the words, she observes, “Damn, Starvent, you stink. I am almost offended just having touched you.”

You’re covered in an unholy mix of sweat, sopor, three weeks of travel, and whatever it is your nook discharged. “I really doubt that sick trolls ever smell good,” you tell her dryly. “There’s actually some scripture about illness, if you’re interested. Plague boils, that sort of thing.”

Her grin springs back to life.

xxx-tgc-xxx

You doze off midway through composing the formal apologies to the contacts you shall leave behind in Sdegr. For all that you’ve clearly finished producing your ridges, you still feel like shit. Achy all over, dizzy, and so sleepy you feel like you might never wake up. Maybe you really are sick? This is not exactly optimal for meeting with a kismesis. It will be harder to be smug later if he wipes the floor with you now, so you let your weariness chasten you back into your sopor for a nap.

When you actually bolt awake without the aid of your alarm, you immediately think you must have slept through it—until you see the timepiece. Without any sort of splitting pain it’s difficult to discern why you woke up early. Stars, you’re so tired. You’ve never been this tired. It takes you a moment to listen.

The voice outside your door isn’t Hospicte’s. It’s a buzz in monotone, clicking at the end of every sentence and you have ample experience with the mechanical rigidity of their speech. Surrender, aberration. The sound tells your bloodpusher to kick and thrash in your chest and cold sweat to spring up on your skin. One arm tightens around your belly and the other goes for your sickle.

There are drones in Hospicte’s hive. You silently crush yourself beside the closet door, blade at the ready. You’re not afraid, but your hands are shaking and you are worried you’re about to lose your footing and fall over. You grit your teeth. They won’t expect you to come out fighting. They never do—and they definitely won’t expect you to dive between their legs. You might be able to take them out before they call for reinforcements.

A hiss of hydraulics blasts beside your door and you flinch.

“Imperial citizen, you will let us know if suspicious activity persists.”

“Oh, of course,” Hospicte simpers. “I had no idea there was a fugitive on the loose! I’d love to help any way I can, Officers.”

You appreciate the fact that the average drone is as dumb as a sack of rocks when they answer, “Good day, citizen.” Their clanking footsteps march away. At least three of them. You wait until the front door has been closed for at least five minutes before you rocket out of yours, adrenaline making you steadier than you would otherwise be. Hospicte appears to have sat down in front of the door. You are pretty sure she didn’t tell her legs to do that.

“It’s okay,” she tells you immediately, pale as a sheet. “They didn’t know about you. Your cover is good. There’s just some kind of criminal on the loose, they’re questioning at random.”

“Hang my cover,” you tell her, crouching down and making sure she’s not hurt. You take her hands to help her upright. It seems natural for you to do so, but the way she looks at you makes you question if it isn’t. Maybe you should have punched her instead. “Can I get you anything? A drink?”

“No, but you could take a bath. Seriously.” Her nose wrinkles as you announces this. “Ugh.”

You scowl, dropping her hands, but her face stays pinched with worry. So when you speak, it's to fill the air with the sound of how convincingly calm you can sound. Give her anything to relax into. “What sort of fugitive is on the loose anyway? Any interesting crimes?”

“They didn’t say.” Hospicte shuffles away towards the kitchen, probably about to go for the booze. “Did match your description pretty well, though. Right down to the nubby horns.”

This gives you pause. “…Nubby?” You repeat.

“Yeah,” Hospital calls back, turning the corner. “That’s the word they used. Kind of cracked me up. I mean, I would have gone for ‘short’ or maybe ‘rounded’, but they—“ She pokes her head around the corner. “Hey, where are you going?”

You jerk your hood down, cloak already wrapped heavy around you. Your vision is surprisingly clear when you are seeing red. “Oh, just to kill somebody who really deserves it.” You’ve even managed to unwrap your arm from your stomach to grasp your other sickle. Not shaking at all, because you really are going to kill him. It will not be a merciful death.

How’s that for black?

“Have fun,” Hospicte calls before you close the door. “Quote something sacred at ‘em before you hack their bits off!”

Chapter Text

Dualscar intercepts you before the first gate heading into inner Sdegr. He knows that your sympathists aren’t highbloods and so you’d have to cross one of these entry points to do what you need to. Which is, of course, rip his head off of his shoulders. HE SET THE POLICE DRONES ON YOU, THIS FISHFACED FUCK.

You’re going for the kill, but Dualscar starts moving before you close in. He doesn’t seem to have seen you.

Your kismesis, Orphaner Dualscar, is the Condescension’s naval general, the commander of her fleet and unofficial leader of half of the pirates besides. Storms themselves flee him. Every troll you’ve ever met has either been scared of him or just stupid.

He knows you’re here.

You follow the challenge of his bright purple cape—spiked and arched up like the shoulder guards on a drone, all he needs is a moustache to twirl and he’ll mwahaha his way into a complete cliché—and you boil with anger. You catch the point of your sickle in the fabric to stop him. Dualscar walks two paces before he realizes, tearing a wide slash. His mouth twists and yours echoes it.

“Filter-feeder,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Shithead,” you echo back. He takes a step and you glide with him, your feud entirely unnoticed by the crowd. Well, except for one troll who seems to think you’d make an exceptionally good stabbing target but you stamp on his toes—hard; you have probably broken some of them—and a look at your face sends him sprinting. “Have you heard, lord highblood?” You ask in mock courtesy. “There’s this mysterious troll that’s got all the drones excited. You wouldn’t happen to have word?” You give his cape another jerk. It feels good to watch it die. He shoots you a look that is pure contempt.

“Don’t strain yourself. It’s not as if I let slip your dirty little secret.” You are going to skewer him through the gills. He deigns to touch you—pulls a scab of congealed sopor from your hair and flicks it to the ground with an exaggerated shudder of disgust. You growl. “Besides. Why send me that message, if you didn’t want my attention?”

You sent him the damn message to make sure he’d be in his hive when you went out looking for him, not fondling himself in front of the shipyard or something equally horrendous. NOT so he could sic the drones on you, put your allies in danger, and fucking boil the blood in your veins. “And you have mine undivided,” you hiss back. “What were you thinking?”

Dualscar snorts at you, pretending he doesn’t have to answer the question. You catch the wall of an alley with your claws, throw your shoulder into it. You’re not at your best right now, and he’s always been stronger than you—but you’ve taken him by surprise—and you yank his feet right out from under him. While he’s off balance, you slam him up against the wall, the perfect target for your fists. His eyes blaze. “Aww, Kan, did you want us to hold hands?”

He’s using your name freely—out in public, no less—damn him. He does not have the right. You cannot hate him more. “All you had to do was ask,” you snarl, and jab into his stomach hard as you can. His breath spills out, you crack him across the jaw with an uppercut, hook your sickle around his neck, drag with the flat, snap your teeth on his ear as you hiss, “Romantic enough for you?”

“Oh, very,” he drawls.

His elbow catches you in the jaw and your body chooses this moment to remind you that you’re sick. The world fragments into spinning. You hit something solid, one of his huge, iron hands shoving your wrist into the wall and he bites you in return, hard enough to make you howl. He has his hand around your throat, cutting off your air. You knee him in the gut—he sinks his teeth deeper—you can feel your blood trickling down your neck. You know it’s neither safe nor wise, but he bit on the side not facing the street, he grunts in pain as you make yourself a nice, soothing bruise in his stupid rock solid abdominals, and you’re actually kind of glad he has you against the wall because you’re feeling the urge to collapse again.

When he lets you breathe, you snap, “Nubby?”

Dualscar is, close up, a thing that robs you of your senses. Usually with fear. He’s a storm come to life, power and gigantic highblood stature written in his bones, silvery with scars, fangs like knives, he dwarfs you with no effort at all even though you know he’s younger than you are. Jaw that could hammer in stone foundations it’s cut so wide, eyes that burn cold terror into your gut with the kindling heat, and beneath the brutality, he has these lovely aristocratic features that make you despise him in all new ways. His cheekbones could kill. Trolls will never stop making statues of him. You have fucked up his hair throwing him into the wall and that’s nice.

The smirk curved around his fangs rearranges all those nice, hateful details into a need to snarl, strife, and spit exactly what you think of him. He reduces you to empty rage.

“I’ve been thinking of you, nubs,” he cooes, and claws down the side of your face. More blood. You let out a low rattle of warning, his mouth quirks—to hell with his sneer. You sink your sickle into his shoulder a little ways, and pull. He cannot hide a wince. You don’t hide your snicker, and lean closer, nuzzling your nose to his gently.

“Look, a hooked fish,” you murmur. His claws are in your back now, trying valiantly to break through your cloak and shirt at once. They’re long and sharp, but not enough. He’s just kneading. He butts your nose with his. You tug at his impaled shoulder and laugh pointedly.

“You think you’re so fucking swell,” he growls. “Cod, I’ve had worse bug bites, you stupid shit. You’re not even trying.”

“Or is that fishbait?” You suggest drolly—and this time, he bites your lips. You get a hand at the back of his skull, forcing him to stay craned down, bent at an awkward angle for you to bite back. He snarls, yanks his shoulder against your sickle—you have to recoil before he slices his own muscle in two. You may hate his guts, but you don’t want him crippled. He’s so much more fun when he’s not.

He’s pushed you into the wall, or maybe you pulled him to you. It has never mattered less. His hands smother your jaw, manipulate your mouth to suit his, and you idly tear fresh gouges into his atrocious cape, chuckling as he snarls. You are not sure how he can bite you and use tongue at the same time, but that is what he is doing. You give a treacherous moan. You can’t help it. And he gives up a second later anyway, so it doesn’t matter—growl pitching soft and interested as you tilt your head, give him more.

His hands shift—you squirm away. He likes to gloat over how small you are, likes to grab you by the waist when you’re in front of him. Not tonight. He snaps angrily down at you, but like you even give a shit. Every inch of him is something you’ve mapped and explored with your body in strife, in sex, in calmer touches between while he was sated with you. Seadwellers are a fascinating. He is the pinnacle of his kind, probably. Uncontrollable rage, power beyond anything you’ll ever know, a mind that is as iron and clever as a whistling blade, and potent too. You shudder to think of what will become of his matesprit, if he ever stops looking at his maps and conquests long enough to pity someone. You hope he chooses a seadweller, for their sake, because you are not sure that anything softer would survive his passion.

You barely do.

In a perfect world, you could just look at him and smell him until your senses burned out—all iron and sea salt and blood. Brewing storms. You lick the blood from your lips to taste him and he swallows up the space between you before you even realize what you were looking at him like. You groan stupidly when his hand finds its way between your legs, the other shoving you back into the wall by the horns.

“Fuck you, get off,” you manage after he’s got you wet and wanting with a few rocks of his palm.

“Be silent, landdweller,” he snaps. You sink claws into his throat and he pins your hand with his impossible strength, crushing your wrist into stone. Your blood wants spilling; your eyes close in a shiver of pained rapture as his fangs break your skin again, biting you bloody. “It’s been too long. You owe me.”

Owe him? Owe him for what, his being too stupid to see that service to the Empire is bullshit? Well, he’s right—but you owe him a kick in the teeth, not access to your bulge. “Not long enough,” you retort, but your words hitch with his touch. You give up your sickle to clutch his hand to the throb of your nook. He sneers, grinds the heel of his hand in as you gasp. Damn him.

“Let me go and I’ll touch you,” you offer, and Dualscar laughs.

“Yeah, hard, in the eye,” he shoots back, which is not entirely inaccurate. You grin up savagely, mouth falling open to the gentler press of tongue. He thinks he has you and any other night he would. The knowledge that he has missed you sinks in you with a thrill of pure satisfaction. You’re not the only one desperate. His claws knead sparks of pain into your wrist and his hand seems determined to make you come in your pants it’s being so friendly; you let go of his wrist to cup his jaw, breathe him in, admire. You don’t want to think of being gone. You want to be able to threaten to shave his damn head and fuck him senseless because you’re not full of eggs and responsibilities and damn him anyway, you were seriously pissed and now all you can think about is that you want him to take your loathing to completion over his bucket.

Bastard.

“Ha,” you chuckle, twisting away. “Pail you? I thought we made that abundantly clear—you called the drones on me, and the last damn thing in the world you get for that is sexed up.”

“Bullshit,” Dualscar growls down, eyes ablaze at the suggestion you might deny him. You groan, having his claws insistent on you. Your eyes close. “I could have you any night of the week. I could have you strung up and that little cunt of yours would be fucking my bulge because it’s damn well the best you’ll ever get, you freak, AND—“ he adds this like it is the pinnacle of argument “—because a pailslut like you would spread those legs for me and probably your followers and anyone else walking by, cod, you’re disgusting.”

Well by Conqueri, that sounds like Orphaner Dualscar is sulking. He nips hard at you, taking your space without a hint of finesse. You grin—he’s so damn ready to pail after his victories and campaigns and triumph that his globes are bursting. He must want you so much.

This just got so much better. Because you are totally going to bulge block him, is what you’re going to do—you’re going to bulge-block him to go be pregnant and you are going to enjoy every mean, petty minute of it. You do not actually hope his globes fall off because you still have use for them, but it’s a near thing.

“Mm, fuck yeah,” you sigh. “Have to keep my followers happy, don’t I?” You drive his hand away. He looks momentarily horrified. He’s still got your wrist. You roll it against his thumb, trying to break his grip.

“Kankri,” he murmurs, voice lower now and rough with unexpectedly bare want. “I am not fucking around. It’s been perigees and I’m not waiting. I’m having you.”

“Is that so?” But you’re shivering and you can't shake his grip. He backs you into the wall again with a slow, hungry growl, covering your mouth. Your hand has crept between his legs to pet his bone bulge and he slaps it away to drive his leg between yours. Both your wrists are pinned—when did he do that, the asshole?—and he rocks his leg between your thighs as you struggle against his stony grip, snapping your teeth all over his kisses. You are very, very wet and he can probably feel it. You are also getting lightheaded. You hope he catches your flu bug. The only part of you that feels good is your nook and you squirm on him helplessly.

You’ve picked a good alley for it, to be honest. The edge of a banner cuts you off from sight and it’s utterly lightless. Anyone nosy wouldn’t be able to see your blood color, but they’d see the giant highblood looming over you and think hard before interrupting one of those monsters mid-rut. With his hands holding yours to the wall, Dualscar won’t even notice your obviously pregnant belly. He’ll fuck you, you’ll enjoy it, and no one will die.

If you were well, that is. You know Dualscar’s proclivities well. He’ll fuck you the way a savage storm shakes the ships it doesn’t entirely wreck, and he’s pent up so he won’t stop until he feels better. When he does let you drop, he’ll leave you to ooze and whimper on the ground to make his statement about how pathetic you are while he saunters away. Under normal circumstances you’d pick yourself up and storm off to lead your rebellion. Right now, you’re not sure you’ll be able to stand up in time for dawn when he’s done with you, let alone escape this city. Now is a good time to start thinking like that, before you lay eggs. Get into the habit of not taking risks.

You chirr at him as beguilingly as you know how—he crushes his leg into you and you make the noise again, hoarser, much more genuine. Letting his leg hold you up as yours lifts. Perhaps, as though you were going to wrap it around his waist.

You go for the back of the knee he isn’t using to tease your nook. Huh, sure seems like he was resting a lot of his weight there. He stumbles with a curse and you slither out of his claws. Jerk your hood up to hide the blood he’s spilled and oh right, you turn at the edge of the alley. He’s storming at you with an expression that spells out your doom. You bring a hand to your mouth and blow him a quick kiss.

Small isn’t good for lots of things, but for disappearing? Oh yes. He intimidates the crowd, parting it aside as he charges after you, and you just follow the tide, drift away, cackling under your breath at his roar of frustration.

“I swear to the Gl'bgolyb herself, my dear,” Orphaner Dualscar roars in pure vitriol, “You’re going to pay for that in blood.”

But his cape is in tatters, you’ve spilled violet streaks down his neck and shoulder, and he looks anything but unaffected. He looks impressed and outraged and he will remember you while you’re gone. He’ll ache for you.

It’s your victory tonight, and you’ll be giggling for weeks.

All you have to do, you think, is survive a brood of eggs.  Compared to surviving your kismesis, that should be easy enough.

Chapter Text

When you get to the wall, you discover that, okay, there’s suddenly a drone patrol cutting off your access point. Which is no big deal. Annoying, but no big deal (and you’re kind of touched that Dualscar is going to this much effort, to be honest). You scurry up the side of someone’s hive. From here it’s just a quick jump over the drones’ heads and—

Just in time, you see a head swivel towards you. You duck.

In case you have ever doubted your kismesis’s influence in the Empire, here it is: there’s not just a drone patrol covering Sdegr’s exits. There’s a patrol on the wall itself. That’s not even slightly reasonable for whatever petty crime he’s accused you of—and worse, Dualscar has guessed how you get into his city, hasn’t he? Shit. You might be slightly screwed.

You need a plan. It’ll be better if you come up with one when you aren’t bleeding in public. So you reluctantly drop back down. “Not leaving tonight, I take it?” Hospicte says when she answers her door. Her eyes flicker wider as you lift your head. You don’t think she’s ever seen your blood before, but to your relief, her mouth just hangs open for a minute.

“I got into some trouble,” you admit. “Might take a while to sort out again.” You have no idea how to sneak past that many sentry drones. Where did Dualscar even get them all from?

xxx-tgc-xxx

Later, she ambushes you in the middle of bandaging your cuts. Figuratively. Hospicte hasn’t attempted actual murder since you told her you were sick, but you drop the bandages on your foot anyway. Yeah, you are such a fucking messiah. So smooth. She stares up at you for a full minute and then clears her throat to tell you, “Might be better if you stay until you get over that flu bug. I don’t mind the company.”

“I’m on the mend, though,” you assure her with a grin. “Shouldn’t be too long before I’m out of your hair.” You’re almost not lying.

Hospicte’s grin flashes back to you. “I can always force you into the bath if you start smelling any worse.”

You snort. “Best not. There’s lots of things beyond these walls that like the smell of soap on their dinner.”

“That’s why it’s a threat.” Hospicte flutters her fingers at you. “Woo, I’m ordering you to stink less—upon pain of death!” You give her a mock bow and she smirks back. “Right, anyway. Did you kill the troll you were after?”

No, but you still might. “I made him very, very unhappy,” you console yourself. “There is worth enough in that.” She cackles and you smile at her reflection.

You are pretty much having a moment with a troll who is not in your family. You would not hesitate to die for any one of your followers. But that kind of caring is not really the same thing as friendship, is it? You may be woozy, exhausted, and generally gross, but the warmth in your chest suddenly fills you up.

Until she adds hopefully, “Can I keep a bandage?” Her eyes are huge.

So much for it not being weird about your blood.

xxx-tgc-xxx

There are drones everywhere. You jolt awake every time you hear one walking Hospicte’s street. You think sleep deprivation might be why your cuts aren’t healing. You’ve slept worse, though, so maybe you just need extra sleep when you’re pregnant? You bandage them off so no blood shows. The rest of you isn’t getting any less sick either. Your head hurts all the time, you’re dizzy enough that if you don’t stay moving you will fall over and collect another bruise. The churning nausea in your gut is more welcome. It at least has purpose. The Empire is tight enough with its food supplies that you feel bad for accepting anything of Hospicte’s that isn’t tea. And you drink a lot of tea. You are eternally thirsty.

Dualscar is such a shit. After two nights of intensive observation, the patrol on the wall still has no weak points to exploit. Both nights, you’ve had to trudge back in defeat because you’re worried you’ll lose consciousness. You spend the rest of your time trying to sleep, with dismal results. And Dualscar—fuck him to oblivion for all of this—sends you a message. It’s very pleased with itself. Apparently he caught you on camera trying to look at the walls. That scares the fuck out of you, frankly, but he assures you that you have yet to merit further investigation—which sounds like fuckhead speak for ‘I convinced them not to shoot you, you should appreciate me more’—and then suggests that you stop by his hive around midnight.

Your message cannot be called a reply, exactly, because it addresses none of the statements his made and focuses more on explaining your general mood with a lot of four-letter words and unkind metaphors about his bulge. He responds with a full page of nautical puns.

You hate him utterly, but you outright can't go to his hive. You’re too run down. You’d probably fall asleep in the middle of sex, and then wake up just to throw up on him. Which should sound like an entertaining experience, but you’re so damn tired right now that you don’t even crack a smile.

Your belly feels bigger too. No one is going to notice with your fabricarmor this loose, but Dualscar managed to get eyes on you and you’re twitchy. Because what if someone notices? Dualscar can’t find out. You redouble your observations of the wall. Track the drones mercilessly, try to worm your way through. Your head hurts.

And you wake up with the sky starting to lighten.

You get the fuck down, because it is not a good idea to fall asleep on roofs. You are trying your very hardest not to panic.

When you get back to Hospicte’s, there’s a series of arrows printed on copy paper paving the floor—and real hallucinations would be more interesting, so you follow the arrows. When you get to the ablution block, you learn that she has filled a tub. It's topped with a somewhat waterlogged newspaper boat which bears a garish red X flag at the top. You get the point.

At home, you take a tip in the river if you feel disgusting, maybe wash your hair with well water if you get mites. Baths with tepid, unmoving waters are not your favorite thing. But you’d like to do at least one thing right tonight, so you share looks of deep suspicion with Hospicte’s soap and select the most innocuous one (the only one that isn’t white). You're filthy from travelling and the water blackens. Hopefully it’s black enough that you’ll stop stinking. You wrap yourself in your cloak—which is still comfortingly foul after the floral scented distress of the bathwater—and because you’re already tired again, you curl up in your sopor.

When you wake, you look like death. The dark bags under your eyes are more pronounced, the skin around them alternating between pale and lividly fever flushed. You’re made of candy gelatin and pain. Your lungs creak a little when you breathe in—you really regret not drying off yesterday—and when you unwrap your cloak, you’re not imagining it, your belly is bigger. Big enough to make the first real bump against the fabric of your shirt. Aghast, you run a hand over it, and it’s solid and warm under your hand.

How can you have gotten big so fast in just three nights? When you look, your incubation ridges still cup your belly between them, but no longer like they're lifting up. You're beginning to poke out--this is serious. There is no way for you to cut down your journey time. It takes weeks because it has to, and if you keep passing out, it’ll take longer. How fast, exactly, are you going to swell? And how heavy is it going to get? You feel light, but you’ve seen pregnant trolls waddle enough to know it won’t stay that way.

If it gets heavy, you’re not going to be able to walk. You’re already too weak to carry serious weight.

Shit. You don’t know what to do. All you know is that you damn well can’t stay here.

You have to escape Sdegr tonight, you determine. You’ll tell Hospicte goodbye and you’ll figure out some way to cheat your way through the drones. You’ll make fake horns. You’ll leave by the main gate and double around before the checkpoints. You’ll fight all the drones off with your magical pregnant mutant superpowers, but first thing’s first, gotta tell your host thank you and goodbye. Conveniently, she is right outside the door.

Standing there. Silently. Staring at you like she was waiting for you to open it. You’re admittedly a little disturbed by this, but Hospicte is Hospicte. She’s a city troll. You’re not supposed to understand her. “Evening,” you greet, trying to look less dead. “Sleep well?”

“Signless,” she says. You twitch.

Everyone is exhausted, though, you get it. You nudge her shoulder. “No, it’s Starvent, remember?”

She blinks at you, slowly. The back of your neck prickles and you find yourself stumbling back. One of her razor wires is unfurling in her claws. Her eyes are glued to you. Your voice comes out very, very steady.

“Hospicte, what are you doing?”

She launches herself at you. Straight on, and all you can do is dodge. She's trying to take her head off, wire digging a gouge in the wall. Hospicte moves like lightning, deadly serious and you try to twist your arm away before she can snap the wire around it, but, fuck, why are you suddenly so slow? You give a gasp of pain as the wire slices into you. You get lucky then—her foot drives into the washbasin and she slips. Hospicte skins your arm from wrist midway to your elbow, but it’s still attached, and you get on top of her, wrestling her down. It should be easy. Gravity is to your advantage.

But her arms are forcing yours back, wire straining for your throat. You’re shaking all over, not with fear—with strain. She’s strong, she’s a Sdegr troll. But you’re feral, right? You’re not this weak, you know you’re not, but sweat is dripping down you and you can’t breathe. You’re leaning your weight down and it’s useless.

“What are you doing?” You demand. And she throws you like you’re nothing. You need to keep your eyes on her, but instead you yell with panic, curl to cushion the impact. Have to protect your eggs. Your head hits the wall. You blink stars from your eyes, cannot keep track of pain. She is standing over you, her wire is dripping red. You are somewhat concerned that you’re going to die. “Hospicte,” you say, and your voice is slurred. “Stop.”

“Signless,” she says again in that eerily flat tone of voice. “Signless.” Sounds a little more like herself this time. One of your hands has blundered up, presumably still attached to you. You’re not scratching at her, not hitting. You’re cupping the side of her face. “I’m sorry,” she says dully, brow wrinkling. “I thought the bath would help. But now it’s just worse.”

It’s so out of place that you almost laugh. “This is about how I smell?”

“I’m sorry!” She says again, voice pitching high. “I don’t want to do it! You’re making me!” The wire shakes in her hand. Your arm is dripping on her shirt. She brings it to your skin and it skids off in a slick streak. She presses her face into your hand, panting. You watch her eyes drip teal. “Signless. You’re not supposed to be alive.”

She’s your follower. She has been your friend for a night or two, even. Not always faithful to the rebellion, but faithful to her own heart. A good troll. You don’t need to trust her to like her, to know her. A tear tracks down her face.

“Run,” she whispers.

“I can’t,” you tell her honestly. She’s on top of your legs. Even if she weren’t, something is very, very wrong with you.

“I’m sorry.” You stroke her cheek and work your face into a smile. She pushes the wire to your throat. It hurts. You think she’s trying to saw, but her hands are shaking too much. “I’m so sorry!”

“Yeah,” you say. “Me too.” And then your other hand finally finds the lamp it was groping for. You club it into her pronged horns with all your strength. She collapses on you without a sound, and doesn’t move again. Your throat is wet with stinging blood, but it’s not deep. You’re just bleeding a lot. These cuts probably won’t close either. This isn’t the flu, but you don’t know what else it could be—and you damn well don’t know what just happened to Hospicte, but you can’t stay to find out.

You roll her off of you as gently as you can. If your sopor is tainted by whatever is wrong with you, it’s not safe for her, so you have to leave her on the floor, because there’s no chance you’ll be able to carry her to her recupercoon. You go about it very methodically, sterilizing the wire, and washing the blood you left on the floor and walls. You sponge her off too and take her shirt off with your eyes resolutely fixed to the ceiling. Burn it with yours, and borrow fresh ones. Bind up your cuts. Hospicte growls a little and you shush her.

Your vision is wavering too hard for you to see straight. You cover her in a blanket, and check her pulse. “I’m sorry,” you tell her. “For whatever happened to you, I’m so sorry. I hope you’re going to be okay.”

And then you get your cloak around yourself and leave. You need to go. You should have gone long before now.

Your panting sounds loud and ragged even to your own ears and you cannot shake the feeling that you are already much too late.

Chapter Text

Her Resplendent Majesty the Imperial Condescension is pissy with you. You have no idea why; all you’re doing is staring at the ceiling, glubbing in acknowledgment as she makes a commemorative list of every mistake you’ve made this sweep. “And another thing,” she continues, “All them drones sitting up there like barnacles. What the shell do you need that for?”

You raise an eyebrow. “Meenah. This call isn’t actually about you speculating on my quadrants, is it?”

She hits something. You hear it splinter and have to give a fond smile, because Meenah. “You never shiptalk with me and I’m your moirail!”

You lean back in her chair to remind her, “To be fair, the great and good Orphaner Dualscar doesn’t shiptalk with anyone.”

“Yeah, but you’re supposed to with me!” Her indignant tone makes you roll your eyes. You could not love Meenah Peixes more if you had all the diamonds in the land physically embedded in your bloodpusher, but she is about the nosiest fish that ever did flounder. She also makes you tend to slip into the nautical puns really bad and you’re trying to kick that habit. You prefer when the lowbloods are too scared to think, not wondering if they were meant to take your joke about whales littorally.

“I bet she’s a hagfish,” Meenah announces. “You’re embarr-bass-ed of her and that’s why you won’t tell me.”

It’s a he, not a she, but of course that is what Meenah wants. “Nice try,” you tell her.

“And you despearately want to end things with her and seek out someone worthy of you, my little diamond cuttlefish, but you can’t! Your feelings are too strong! You’re netted!” She cackles, entertained by her wildly inaccurate perception of your quadrant.

This is ultimately your fault. Your fault for getting drunk enough to complain about trying to romance someone perpetually unreachable, your fault for wailing about the sex being good and thus convincing her that you were hammered, but not that hammered—you had indeed fucked someone black—and your fault for refusing to tell her more when you sobered up. If you had half a thinkpan, you would have just lied.

Cause cod forbid you not fall black for the only troll in the entire Empire you can never tell Meenah about. Every time he’s in your arms you are holding a loaded weapon, and yes, you know it. Mass destruction just flips your switch. He’s weaker than you and smaller and has the prettiest little face—and you have been going to war since before you could swim by yourself, but nothing rains hell like Kankri when he’s on a roll. He’s a fucking badass. And you hate him, of course, because he’s all that exquisite ocean of potential, and what does he do? He picks the dumbest cause imaginable—fights for a bunch of lowbloods—spends his time trying to stop wars, convinces trolls of incredibly stupid magical pixie dust fairy bullshit. You make it a point not to listen to him and his hypnotic words because you’re loyal to your moirail and her glorious purpose of conquest.

“Cute,” you drawl at Meenah now. “Can we talk about your quadrants next? Perhaps the fact that you don’t have any?” This actually does concern you. You’re kind of dying to set her up and she keeps blowing you off.

“Uh-uh,” Meenah tuts you. “I want my drones back. You must have found your lubber by now, unless it’s me you’ve decided to hateflirt with.”

“That's disgusting,” you huff (and Meenah is the only troll alive who will ever reduce you to huffing, ever). “No, it’s… it’s not about capture. My ‘lubber’ isn’t even trying. I’ve been able to tail the landdwelling scumbag myself, and usually that’s not possible.” Which maybe reveals more about Kankri than you meant to, so you steer the conversation away quickly. “What I want is surrender. I want to them to admit that they can’t get what they want without my help. I want begging.”

“And all this because your dumbass wants to stand at the top of our wall?” Meenah sounds skeptical.

Sightseeing is a pretty weak explanation, fine. You concede that. But the truth—that your kismesis exploits the shit out of millisecond loopholes in the wall defense? That you’ve watched him with binoculars and your bulge twisting in your pants as he dances through sensors and those awful guardworms and guns and everything else, nothing but a shadow with eyes that glow? She’d either correct the security error and that would be the end of him visiting, or she’d just shoot him. You want neither.

Doesn’t hurt that it’s pretty fucking hot watching him play her security like a military trumpet. This is an objective observation.

“He’s kind of batshit insane,” you tell her without thinking.

“’He’?” Meenah repeats in utter delight. “So it’s a he? Aw, good for you, Cronus, finally got your prawnouns together! You got a little he-hate quadrant going on, huh? And,” she adds as you dump your face into your hands, “That plotting is hot as vents, Cro-dad. He’s gonna be all seduced to hell.”

“…Think so?” You don’t even fucking know what was up with Kankri the last time you saw him. You’ve spent the past few days taking your frustrations out on new recruits for the navy. They are all utterly terrified of you, and you thrashing them on an hourly basis probably isn’t helping.

Stupid fucking Kankri could work you out on the sparring field like nobody’s business, but no, he’s a stubborn little shit. When he finally gets over himself enough to visit, you’re locking him up somewhere it’ll take him a couple of days to escape from. You’ll use him to your pleasure until he hates you enough to jump you himself. It’s been a long, long time, and you’re starved for him.

“Shell yes,” Meenah assures you. “Lucky buoy you got.”

“Okay, enough of the tender sentiment,” you tell her. “I’ll give you your drones back in another week, tops. If it takes any longer, I’ll grab him myself.”

“That’s the spirit!” Meenah cheers. “Reel that sucker in. Diamonds for you, Cronus!”

“…Diamonds,” you reply, somewhat flustered from her affection. You click off your chatspeaker and then let yourself dangle from your chair.

You were beaten within an inch of your life these past few perigees. But all hail the Empire: Alternia has won back the coveted Blacknest. The rumors were true: the Blacknests’ feral clansmen’s ships weren’t ships. They were enormous fucking sea monsters that munched up your armada like candy. But still, you conquered. You’ve told Meenah before that you will never lead a failed invasion until the one that kills you. Your existence will be a very tidy one for her.

And then you come home to this. Your kismesis teasing you and then giving you the kiss-off like it’s nothing but a piece of seaweed that got him soaking and heated up. And your loving moirail giving you grief cause she knows you’re pretty desperate to fuck something and doesn’t get that you’re not settling for less than Kankri That Asshole Vantas. Oh, and a whole batch of new recruits you swear Imperten saved just for you, just to piss you off. Meenah thinks he’s got it pitch for you. You’re fairly certain he’s just naturally a jackass.

You should die of exhaustion, just to spite them all.

Instead, you fasten your new cloak about your shoulders (a much finer one than the salt-stained, ragged thing Kankri ruined, not that Kankri knows good cloth from a dishrag) and head out. Watching Kankri stomp around and growl at things will cheer you up.

So you head for the wall, enjoying the dry land air, the way the sky is an impenetrable spill of ink with all these lights around you, the hubbub of the locals, the hilarious way they scramble to clear you a path. Nowhere you go that you don’t make ripples anymore. You turn off into one of the empty side streets Kankri tends to favor, and encounter a couple of the locals don’t scurry off. They’re busy. Looks like these fellows have taken it upon themselves to stomp the shit out of a burlap sack and they’re so focused that they haven’t noticed you towering over them yet. It’s pretty funny shit, actually. Whatever they’ve got is alive—you see it squirming, though it isn’t putting up much of a fight as they lash out.

A particularly vicious kick sends the edge of that ratty fabric whipping back. You see a pair of little feet and—what, a kid? Did a kid wander into Sdegr? Why the hell for—and poor stupid shit; it wouldn’t have lasted long anyway, but it could at least try to run—another boot slams down and the wriggler tries to roll away. Black hair unfurls out of the hood. You catch sight of the nubby horns and your stomach drops out.

That’s not some wriggler, that is your kismesis curled up as tight as he can against two unarmed thugs who you could take with a well-placed flick of your thumb—what the holy shit? His blood. Fuck, now you see it’s smeared everywhere in front of them. They’ve seen it. You don’t wait to understand why they haven’t called the drones. You have a hand for each assailant, would you look at that?

Your fingers encircle their skinny lowblood necks easy; you paste their skulls into the wall. Kankri gives another shaky little moan and you think you maybe stepped on him in your haste to fucking remove these guys from the world order—how DARE THEY touch your kismesis—but he just coughs up something wet and red that is too thick for blood. You drop the bodies and to gather him up. Kankri stirs like he’s asleep (or drugged), limp in your claws. He smells like…

The fuck are you smelling him for; he’s bleeding. You take off your cloak and wrap him up, hoping he takes his time bleeding through it. You give him a cursory check for wounds as you arrange him into the fabric. Nothing lethal. A couple of slashes on his neck, he’s missing some skin, his wrist is broken, and there’s something wrong with his leg that makes him hiss when you touch it. These idiots had no idea how to kill him. None of that’s bad.

Not until you touch his stomach.

You think it might be part of his messianic bullshit, or maybe he can’t afford food—but Kankri goes through life half-starved. You’ve had him bare enough to curve your palm to it, trace veins and ribs and those curse-colored grubscars and your fingers always fan upward to map something concave. Tonight his stomach is distended under your hands. It gives in a way that flesh should not. Your thinkpan floods with possibilities, and half of them are a sure death if he doesn't get help now. So you cradle your terror of a kismesis into your shoulder and he makes a painfully soft sound that you will tease him for forever when he’s okay again, he’s going to be okay, you have treatment for every poison in the book in your hive.

There’s no time to clean up the mess of his blood, so you claw out the other trolls’ throats and splash them over it. Not pretty but you don’t think anyone will look too hard. And then you gather him close and sprint. Now trolls dive aside to let you charge through. You must look some kind of fucked up, huh? Once you’re behind locked doors, you unwrap your kismesis—and of all things, Kankri tries to get to his feet. You’d hit him for being stupid, but you just. Can’t. Right now. You push him back down onto a table as gently as you know how.

“What are you doing?” He rasps. His eyes are glazed. Since he’s not struggling, he probably doesn’t know who you are.

“Saving your scurvy ass,” you retort as you clean his blood away. You’d cauterize this shit in the navy to stop him bleeding out, but you have luxuries here, and you switch on the dermal regenerator. It hums up rapidly. Kankri’s eyes dart again. “Relax,” you tell him, not meaning to be nice, just needing him to do it. His thinkpan is probably scrambled from getting near kicked in. He’ll listen to nice, won’t he?

Before he dies, anyway. Cod, his damn stomach. You think of fever, you think of bloated guts and screams and foul death. Internal bleeding, sepsis, parasites, poison. You try to get his shirt off and he’s suddenly furious with you, kicking and slapping and he’s not strong enough to stop you, but you don’t want to hurt him worse by shoving him off. “Kankri!” You bellow. “Settle down, you sanctimonious fuck! I’m trying to help!”

“I’ll kill you!” Kankri shouts back—his voice crackles; there’s something wrong with his lungs, too? “I’ll rip your throat out! No.” He’s curling around his damaged stomach to stop you, stubborn and gasping for breath and this is so utterly wrong. “Won’t ever let you.” You figure at this point he has an inkling of who you are because he calls you a lot of names that don’t quite make sense but relieve you anyway. Good hearing him bitch at you. He’s at least half-conscious now.

“Kan?” You lean down to make him look at you, give you some kind of clue what’s happened to him. “Hey, what happened to you? You eat something, or…?”

“Sick,” he answers after a pause. You think back to the alleyway and recall how he was so easy to push into the wall, so warm with what you thought was lust, how he shook when you drove your leg between his and gave him attention. Right.

He’s been sick for a while, you grimly determine, and you were just too stupid to notice. “Worse than I thought,” he croaks.

“Yeah, you figure?” Kankri’s glare has no energy to it. Ass-kickings make everyone look terrible, but underneath the injuries he’s a waxy, hollowed-up caricature of the troll you hate. You take a breath. Sick is okay. Sick is fixable. “Did this start when you got sick?” You prod at his arms, but he’s got them locked tight around his stomach.

“Just leave it,” he snaps. “I’ll be fine. Just need to rest.”

You are going to throttle him. You are going to throttle your beaten, unwell kismesis, and it will be entirely his fault. “You piece of shit,” you breathe. “Don’t give me that. I don’t care how fucking tough you think you are, what kind of backwards expectations a degenerate like you has of medical care. Whether you think you’ll survive or not is not your call, it’s mine, I’m in charge, and if the next word out of you isn’t a breathtakingly clear explanation, I’ll cut you open and examine you myself!”

Kankri is very, very still when his mouth opens. “Please,” he says, and your kismesis has never, not once, asked you please.

More than any amount of blood, that scares the shit out of you. You cup his burning cheeks in your palms and coo at him, soft as you know how.

“Move your hands, pitch black. Just this once, I am not going to hurt you.” He shivers. Kankri’s eyes are so bloodshot he could be culled from a close look, so threaded with bright lava. You close them with your thumbs, so he doesn’t have to see. His belly makes a soft roundness between the knees he’s curled up, and it would look good on him, you think. A little meat, a little softness. It looks harmless. You tug his legs aside gently. Then you scrape his shirt up and stare at his stomach.

For all that it’s rounded out like the side of a bubble, it’s not bruised. The slenderness of Kankri’s waist has vanished into riveted swells, like the sides of an accordion, folded round to let him bloat up further. It’s almost pretty. For a moment your stomach turns and you feel this… this impulse for violence. Like you’re obligated to turn your claws on him and hurt him until he stops smelling like he does.

It’s only for a heartbeat and then you are his kismesis and Kankri is hurt, and he’s a couple of weeks pregnant at the very least. And you know it wasn’t you that did it because you’ve been away at sea (didn’t know he was an egg-layer either). And you just, fuck, how quickly can you murder whatever amoebic scum-sucker fucked your kismesis? How quickly can you force these eggs out of him and—cod, scrub him from the inside until he BLEEDS—how is he pregnant?!

Your voice comes out deadly, “What the hell is this?”

Chapter Text

Kankri gives a wretched little laugh. The evidence that someone else took him glares up at you, unmistakable. It shakes with his breaths when his laugh breaks into more coughing—you struggle with the wrath climbing into your bones. You want the eggs forced out of him.

You want to tear him in two and spill them on the floor.

He gasps to you, “I kept it safe.” This is not at all what you just asked him. He’s wrapping his arms around it again, tucking his head in. You stare, watching him shield his ill-begotten spawn. “Keep them safe,” he murmurs, crooning to the contents of him.

You wonder if he’s aware that he nearly died ‘keeping them safe’. That he’s so sick he’s—hell, you don’t even know. Pregnancy doesn’t do this. Something has trashed him and he’s making grub noises at his nook and somebody else’s eggs and, you realize with a rush of pure fury, he was trying to get past the drones and out of the city. He was trying to go into the wilds, alone, unprotected, like this. Out of his mind with instinct.

He was going to die.

You don’t make a sound, but the second you shift, he knows. Eyes you razor-edged and feverish. Might be the rage making your claws fucking vibrate, might be that Kankri can sense that he shouldn’t be in this room with you. Kankri tells you, “Don’t you dare hurt them.” You snarl back, full of violence. His teeth are bared, his shoulders bunched—he would give you such a good strife right now, if he was capable of it.

You tell him as simple as you know how to. “I could hold you down, cut those out, and flatten your stomach with my own two hands. And you wouldn’t have shit to say about it, fucker. You’re nothing.”

His glare doesn’t waver. “They won’t be mutants.” While you’re blinking, he adds, “Dolorosa told me.”

Dolorosa… That takes you a minute. Isn’t she his weird troll-lusus thing that he pretends isn’t a quadrant? The change of subject diffuses your anger for a spell. If it was just a few eggs and the law of averages had been kind, maybe they’d be normal. But then he’d have to be further along to get this big, right? And you don’t even see any veins in his horns yet—you damn well felt nothing on his neck when you were biting and groping him a couple of days ago—so he can’t have been carrying for more than a perigee. That makes you figure it’s a big litter, so there’s bound to be at least a couple cherry reds.

And he’s also kind of using that carefully believable voice—just a little smug, slightly too arrogant—that means he is trying to bullshit you. He goes on, “If you mate with—“

“It doesn’t matter who you mate with, you get knocked up and the kids are half yours,” you say flatly. “Shut up.” Beneath your skin, fury cooks you alive. Piece by piece, you will lay the meat in front of him. Kankri will watch when you slaughter whoever did this, oh yes. “What troll—?”

He cuts your snarl off. “They won’t be mutants,” he snaps. “They’re Disciple’s. So you can’t kill them.”

In the heavy quiet that settles down around you both, three things make sense in short succession.

The first is that your kismesis is an incredible sort of idiot, the kind that bawdy tavern songs get sung about and the kind who is currently giving you the biggest headache of your life.

The second is that you, in the height of your desperate envy of whoever fucked him until he got pregnant, overlooked the options beyond 1) rape and 2) rape Kankri isn’t admitting was rape. He’s got a damned matesprit and you are the dumbest troll in the world (second only to him). Coddammit, it could have been you who knocked him up. He lied and hid it from you—this should not be how you find out. You decide to be angry about him lying now, instead of him getting pregnant by his matesprit (because hell, no one is that territorial). At least you can breathe again, knowing that nobody happened on him while you were away and did something unforgivable.

The third is that Kankri for some reason believes you want to kill his mutant grubs not because there’s some other troll’s spawn in his nook—but because they’re mutants. Couldn’t be because he’s supposed to be yours. Not because you want him pregnant by you.

You seriously question how this guy even musters the brainpower to stumble upright in the mornings, cod. Does he have to work at being this dumb, or is it a special talent?

You heave a very slow, patient sigh. “Kankri.” You fucking embarrassment. “I don’t care about you whelping, not so long as your matesprit put them there. And I damn well don’t care that you’re carrying more mutant brats.” On account of you, ahem, not being picky about fucking one, that should be obvious.

He is making a face like you just sat on him. All offense and confusion, with a side helping of panic about your crushing intellect. “But.” He begins, and then stops, narrows his eyes, and spits, “Don’t call it whelping.”

“What?” Oh, this is what he gets offended about? You splutter. “Whelping is whelping! Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. What goes in is gonna have to come out.”

“Whelping is something barkbeasts do!” Kankri protests, flushing about this for some reason.

So you snap back, “And apparently it’s something you do too, or did you forget you’re the most pregnant of all the pregnant trolls in pregnant history!”

He almost manages to sit up too. “Shut up!”

“Make me!”

“Whelping is what you call it when it’s live young!”

“Yeah, well, unless you pump out eggs for me to decorate via my impressive purple bonebulge, it’s damn well not spawning!”

“You are such a piece of shit! It’s just—it’s just—“ Kankri flails a hand with more energy than you’ve seen from him yet, and delivers this crushing piece of logic: “—laying!”

You strangle the air with your claws. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Laying.” He is totally whelping and you don’t care if he has the vocabulary of a retarded barnacle, he’s gonna get huge. He’s probably just far enough along to get his cage growing, but if he’s got a lot of eggs in there, he’s going to swell up like a balloon. You take a moment to savor this joyful fact.

This shit, you determine with burgeoning enthusiasm, is going to be so hilarious.

You grin down at the nest of limbs hiding his belly. “Shit, Kankri, you’re going to have the biggest grub cage before you’re ready to start laying.” Whelping. “That’ll be fun, huh?”

He’s giving you this really blank look. You wonder if you’ve surprised him or pissed him off, because it is kind of hard to tell. “Grub… cage?” He repeats, wrinkling his brow. “Is that like a brood?”

You can’t help it. You’re tense and mad and he’s not bleeding anymore and he’s really not dying and you’re so fucking punch-drunk. So you just bust out laughing. He gets mad and claws your shoulder (so weakly it makes you cringe), but you are incapable of doing more than wheezing at him and bursting into fresh, helpless giggles because Kankri does not even know what a grub cage is. You finally find a word he does know—he calls it an egg sac—and his face flames when he realizes what you find so very amusing about this. “Gonna be fat,” you taunt between giggles. “Trundling along with your belly hanging halfway to your knees. Big squishy egg sac Kankri. Oh my fucking god, I’m going to need video evidence. We’ll record it for posterity.” You nip an ear as you growl, “Better start calling you Mother Grub, huh? I’m sure you’ll see the truth in the comparison once you’re big enough you can’t see around your own belly.”

He bites you. He may not be strong at this moment, but his sharp teeth are unflagging, and he does successfully make you squawk and recoil. Damn it, he’s as bad as Meenah.

“Do it and die,” he snaps at your scowl, but he’s breathing harder and you already damn well know you’re the black of his life. You’re pretty damn sure you are about to fuck him on this table. Just have to stop laughing yourself sick first. Oh good fucking cod, he’s so pregnant and it is rapidly becoming the most hilarious thing ever.

But then he goes, “You’ll just have to live with chat logs recording my misery, because I need to leave.”

You arch an eyebrow. “Aye, do you now? And to what destination?”

Kankri widens his eyes at you as he gasps sarcasm, “Stars, I don’t know, Dualscar. How about my home?”

Your laughing dies into a sort of exasperated sigh. He’s got to be kidding. He doesn’t look like he’s kidding.

“Seriously,” Kankri adds, and then actually sits up. “I can take it from here. Just call off the drones.”

“You magically have a ship ticket stuffed up that grub cage of yours?” You ask. “One that’s got the kind of clearance that means there’s no ID checkpoint, no blood test, no police drones to snatch you up? One that will mysteriously land and escort you through that murderous killer jungle you call a territory and to your front door, delivering you safe as an oyster tucked in its shell?”

“What the shit?” Kankri says flatly, which is more than enough for you. This is the first time he’s been unable to hold his own against you. When you were a wriggler, you made that kind of mistake with your first kismesis. You hurt her when she couldn’t fight back, and she never forgave you, did she? Kankri—you have a mind to keep him until that lowblood heart burns out in his chest.

So you’ve gotta keep it under control—your ever-pressing temper—even if he is talking about trying to drag his sick, beat up ass over miles and miles of wasteland, alone. You don’t know how he makes that trip when he’s well. And that all comes before he gets home. Kankri’s place—not at all inaccurately nicknamed the Badwood—is worse than Sdegr on a fucking riot day. You get eaten for blinking too slowly there. You, in all your highblooded, war hero glory, barely lasted two days before he found you.

And there was the whole gorgeous serendipity of realizing you needed Signless pitch and he was going to put up such a good fight. You take a breath, and quell the riptide anger pushing at you. The want you have for him leaves no provision for him dying of stupidity.

“How about no,” you say. Kankri freezes and just like that, you’re fighting another grin. “Yeah, I’m not really feeling it? I like my plan better.”

“Dualscar,” Kankri fastens his hand into your shirt. You can feel it shaking and kind of want to flick it off. He’s pretty gross when he’s this weak. “I need to leave as soon as possible. I need to get home, before I get too encumbered to travel.”

He’s already too encumbered to travel. And also, he’s not going.

“I have a better idea,” you say brightly, and pat his hand with yours. “I’ll put you up in my own personal hive. Feed you, shelter you, document every second of your despair all the way to you pumping out eggs like a big red tube of toothpaste. What do you say?”

Nice polite Kankri goes away then; suddenly he’s all teeth. You fucking love it when he does that, and it makes you suck in a breath. “You presume,” he spits, all curved fingers, wicked claws. “I’ll entrust my matesprit’s young to the likes of you? Carry them in my worst enemy’s territory? Fuck you.” He snarls, fangs on display, so fearsome for all that he does not appear to be able to get the rest of the way up. “I’ll carve your throat out.” His claws come at you—too slow—and you have a moment to react.

Maybe he’s a danger and that weak act was a ploy to get you this close to him. But you don’t flinch and when his claws connect on your cheek, they have no more sting than how you’ll go after a particularly determined itch. You’re pretty sure Kankri just missed your eyes too—cod, the last thing this moron needs is to try to travel. He doesn’t see that, though. His hand slides away and he looks devastated.

And oh, you like that too. You think you could get used to being the unchallenged dominant in this kismesitude.

“I presume,” you tell him with a wide, gleaming grin, trading your fangs for his. “To have my worst enemy chained up in my dungeons, to be tormented however I like best as he swells. You’ll have your grubs in front of the drones, if I want, and, given the effort I’ll be exerting…” You trail off, enjoying the stark horror you’ve put on his face. Kankri Vantas so rarely looks afraid of anything, but stuff him full of eggs and he looks helplessly terrified. You all but croon, “…I’ll be taking those eggs off your hands when you’re done.”

“NO!” Kankri roars, and he tries to leap at you, the stupid shit, so you grab his wrists and wrench them out. Pin him down with your weight leaned over him, get right up in that pretty, beaten face and snarl low and long, as he pants into silence.

“You’ll do as you’re fucking told,” you tell him when you’re done growling down. You add, coldly, because it’s true, “Mutant.”

His eyes are on fire. Like a bomb detonating, but he can’t budge your grip. You laugh at him for being weak and scared and full of eggs he can’t protect. You can’t strife with him right now, because of this power imbalance and likewise, that’ll make sex… complicated.

So you’ll take no further advantage, but by cod, you’ll shift every last particle of brain matter he has until he will never show you pride again. He will defer to his betters, will join with the Empire. You’ll show his skills to Meenah and she’ll pardon his blood—and he damn well will never dream of telling you another lie. Next time his heat comes, he will yield his nook, you will breed him, and you will have tears and pleasepleaseplease and when he’s too used to it to be so weak as this, you’ll be able to hurt him even then, even when he’s carrying your royal grubs sweep after sweep.

Yes, you decide. You are the most romantic. You are going to own him utterly, your perfect black lover--Kankri Vantas, tame at last.

Chapter Text

“Never,” Kankri spits at you. You smile down.

The last time you thought never about your kismesis was right before you fucked him black that first time. He was ridiculously small underneath you, this traitor to the Empire. Hot skin sticking to yours, sweat spiking his curls, fire-hot behind his fangs, learning to moan for your bulge. Your voice gave out first.

“Yeah?” You chuckle. “Try to sit up.”

No matter what he’s got, you’re certain to have already seen worse at sea. A really bad case of intestinal mold—maybe pneumonia if bathed in an ice pond—and the pregnancy has him off his game. He needs some vitamin C and a cheap set of antibiotics, and that’s all.          

The guestblock curtains are just a shade too cheap, furniture warm-toned instead of cool, books a level or two more simplistic than courtesy would allow. It’s satisfactory, whether or not Kankri can process the insults. You did say you’d chain him up, sure, but there are a whole bunch of rugs in here. Soft upholstery. A full recupercoon sits against the wall. That’ll be a good place for what hangs limp in your arms, exhausted from fighting you.

Once you’ve taken a blood sample, you lock the door after you and head back downstairs. Meenah’s latest gag gift takes twenty minutes to dig out of storage, but you barely notice. Kankri as your kept hatenook, fuck, you like that. He’ll be drunk by the time you climb the stairs, of course, without that watered down bilgewater he’s used to. He looked good in real sopor.

You think seriously about it while he’s intoxicated—just to see his disgust when he realizes how easy he was to shove a bulge in. The blood sample slots into Meenah’s machine (highbloods make the weirdest exercise equipment, you swear; who needs cardio and medscans from the same place?). You’re only imagining Kankri’s warmth around you, his shocked cries when your bulge proves he likes it just as uncivilized, just as filthy as every other troll does. She probably made his breeding a holy ritual, but you’ll take him until he howls damn like any other animal.

Sudden pyrotechnics startle you out of your thoughts. You raise your eyebrows as Meenah’s exercise machine—it whines and flashes lights to prevaricate its distress over your presumed desire to do aerobics. This seems extreme; you laugh. You’re underestimate your kismesis’ stupidity right until you pull up the infoscreen and congratulations, Kankri. You’ve managed to keep exactly one blood component above the water. The fucking hydration statistic has the proud distinction of just barely skirting critical levels.

This is when the bottom of your stomach drops out.

Everything from parasites to viral infections stares back at you, listed by priority for your convenience. Intestinal mold leers somewhere midway down. The pathogen count closes your throat and you just start scrolling, claws through the skin of your palms, jaw clenched tight, looking for the culprit. An immune system can’t just shut itself down. There will be an infection, and these are just symptoms. They are irrelevant. Kankri is strong.

And he’s a mutant; you’ve never known how far his clock will tick—

Your finger slips, and you scroll too far down—out of the illness counters and into nutrition—your fist just smashes the infoscreen in.

You take breaths until you can stop denting the exercise machine's handlebars, so you can type out a handful of internet orders. As you send for provisions, you notify the culinawrath experts kept on retainer for you that you want soup.  Chock full of whatever nutrients they can pack in, easy on the stomach. They fall all over themselves promising it in under ten minutes and you fucking count, so when it’s delivered in nine, no one gets shot.

Your kismesis isn’t dying because he’s sick.

His immune system wouldn’t be the first target of hunger, but when every single nutritive element of Kankri’s blood has been devoured, yes, his eggs will cannibalize whatever they can get. And Kankri’s all used up. Everyone knows how exhaustive the nutritional demands of pregnancy are.

No vitamins or nutrients, no protein compounds, no carbohydrates, no electrolytes, nothing. No coagulants—which explains him bleeding all over the dermal regenerator. The only part of his blood composition that isn’t entirely wrong are the hormones, and that, you are betting, is entirely because of the pregnancy forcing itself to top priority. No wonder he’s been incoherent. A blurry thinkpan is nothing compared to the consequences of his organs failing; because that is what his eggs will go for next.  If the shock doesn’t take them out first. There would be permanent damage and for fucking what? For his coddamned PRIDE?

He should have fucking flung himself on your doorstep if he did not have enough to eat. After that fucking desert journey, you’d have bloated him with delicacies, treated his young to the very best until he was waddling. You may not care for the seed, but those are your kismesis’s grubs, and you would have spared no expense to ensure them drawing breath. If he’s showing protective instincts, they’re still alive.

Half hour ago, when you left him, they were alive.

You are going to tear him limb from limb if he miscarries in your guestblock. The soup goes into a very sturdy bowl.  You have a pitcher of water cold enough to sting his mouth. If he passes out, you’ll wake him up again. You will pump his mutant blood with your fist around his heart.

His smell washes through the air of the guestblock, and you can taste his blood on it, feel his pulse laboring. Alive. He smells like sex and battle and warmth to you, sweat and teeth, a nook clutching your bulge tight as you fill it up with your color. All the things in life that make living unfathomable.

He smells strange, you think foggily. You still want to fix that.

And you are so, so angry.

You haul him up and bend his head back to take a long waft from his neck. Anger sparks in you, the throb of his pulse drawing your glare.

Kankri is gasping with pain. Awake now. You’ve wrenched his head back hard, and he claws at your hand, jerking as he tries to cough.

You breathe him in and suddenly your hand closes around his throat, bared up to your grip. His skin is hot with fever and your bulge rises. He didn’t want to fuck you before, so let’s see if he wants to tell you no thank you after you’ve had him enough to make him bleed, after you’ve torn his throat out while he takes you—

“Dualscar,” Kankri croaks, breathless—

You could kill him.

He jerks when your mouth closes over his pulse. It throbs all the more frantic underneath the grind of your thumbs (kill him, kill him), and he tastes like Kankri, you want more, you have always wanted more than his life—

Kankri abruptly presses into your hand. You bite his throat anyway, but it's gentler than you meant to be. He nuzzles you again. You lean back—he's arched over the back of the sofa, swollen grub cage on display with arms looped around it. Pale and staring at you wide-eyed.  Kankri shakes. For some reason, he’s bleeding again. Teeth marks on his throat. When did that happen?

His smell is everywhere, that’s probably it, that’s probably why you’re growling like this. He flinches when you lean in again, inhaling deep, smearing the blood on his throat. Just a superficial wound. Won’t let him die, your thinkpan insists foggily. “Brought you some food, Kankri,” you murmur to him. “You need to eat.”

“Alright,” he chokes. “Alright, just—just let go.”  With another inhale, you let his curls slip back through your fingers, let him double over and cough. You nearly get the first spoonful in while he gasps for breath. When he balks, you prod at his lips with unspeakable patience.

“Kankri. Open your mouth.”

His eyes dart. You think it might just be easier to feed him if his jaw is broken; he becomes cooperative as soon as you shift. You stop. His eyes are glued to you. “Chew,” you remind him. You run your fingers down the nape of his neck again. “—and swallow. Good.” You bring another spoonful to his mouth and he accepts it, unblinking.

Kankri rasps at you when you pry the spoon free, “I’ll feed myself.”

Rage numbs your blood to ice.  Fucking killing himself in your city. Apparently, he cannot feed himself at all.  “No.” His mouth does not automatically part for the next spoonful.  “Open up.” Kankri glares.            

“I’m not an invalid.”

“We can find some other way to feed you,” you suggest, “Since you prefer something besides a spoon. Mutants and needles go together, don't they?” Kankri goes pale again, and you push the spoon to his lips, but don’t stop talking. “IV fluids would probably be best, but it could be soup pureed just for you. Or it can be coddamn battery acid. Which would you prefer? Because what I put up your fucking veins will depend on my mood. Open your mouth.”

His lips part on command. Dip again, pet against the back of his neck. He’s so warm, so small. He isn’t going to die. You’re more and more sure of it with every bite you feed him, pushing the spoon into his meek mouth, staring at his bleeding throat as he swallows, proving he’s taking sustenance in.

You feed him the rest of his bowl without comment, and then give him the water. He gets three refills before you’re satisfied. “More soup?” Kankri shakes his head silently. Eyes so huge, shoulders up, shaking with fever. You can forgive him some, if he looks this cute, and your tone softens. “I’ll get you what you had before,” you offer. “Just tell me what you took.” His brow wrinkles, but you remain patient. “Which supplements?”

He shakes his head. “Supplements—?“

“Kankri,” you coax, instead of punching him in the mouth for even thinking he gets to lie to you anymore, “You do remember that I know you have a matesprit, right?” He shakes his head again, makes a thin, nervous sound when you growl. “I really don’t care if it’s a backwoods herb or a stolen pill bottle, I’ll provide it. What were you on last time you got pregnant?”

“Pregnancy supplements,” Kankri repeats, and then recoils from you, all cherry colored fury. “Fuck you! I’ve never been pregnant before!”

If he wasn’t so convincing—looking you in the eye with such genuine outrage—you might keep your temper.

But you really can’t.

Kankri is damn lucky the sofa is there to break his fall. You yank his head to the side as he lashes up to bite, reclaim his throat. “You really should think before you lie to me.” He thrashes under you, whining through gritted teeth when you grip his broken wrist. “Tell me another story, love. Why did you need to travel—?“

He chokes, shuddering against your grip. His pulse is slamming. “—had business in St—“            

“Right after getting your fucking matesprit to knock you up for your first time—“

“Because I didn’t know!” Kankri bellows, and collapses into frantic coughing, throat working hard within your fist. Your other hand has sunk to the springs, pulling them apart in your fingers.

Would you look at this troll, trapped and helpless? And yet, he fucking lies again. The results of heatfucking an egg-layer are obvious, and you know his Disciple has been inside him more than you, you know he’s had clutches of her eggs, that he’s near death trying to have another load of spawn—

Killhimkillhimkill—

The coughs have turned into noisy, gulped breaths, trying not to drown.  Egg-layer, you think, and something sparks in your thinkpan. There’s no adult who won’t fuck during heat at least once, right? But let’s assume this paranoid shit never did. There are still mandated tests. Schoolfeeding. 

And anyone who could have tested his blood would have been oathbound to report the mutant for culling.

Anyone who could confirm him as an egg-layer.

The grip on his throat bruises his face dark—but Kankri doesn’t go for your hand. He hides his grub cage from you with his arm and knees instead, already so devoted, so instinctive, and he wouldn't be able to endanger this brood, would he?  Not knowingly.

One by one, you peel your fingers from his throat and mangled metal.  Deep breath.  So—there's a troll on Alternia who figured it out only when his cage popped, huh? That’s what you’re supposed to believe?  Somehow you do. Kankri would have told you—hell, if only to taunt you whenever you would be at sea and thinking of nothing but those strong, smooth legs wrapped around you and guiding you inside to make him bear. He has never once breached the respect of your quadrant. 

The mere thought that he could, though, the thought of him lying to you--you need to claw him to ribbons. He pants heavily under you--but he'll have to do that later. You take handfuls of his hair and make him give his mouth to you.  You search roughly for any sour lies, but all you taste is Kankri, charred black.

How good it feels. His mouth gives you succor until he’s just gasping weakly around you, limp, begging for air. You have no intention of allowing that. He moans miserably for you, mouth parted for you to torment, and only once you’ve tasted every inch can you ease back, guiding him up with you.  “...I’ll bring you some schoolfeeds.”          

“I don’t need your help.”

Appallingly, he glowers back when you look down at him. Pale and bruised and fucking emaciated because he doesn’t know what he’s doing at all.  Signless doesn’t need your help.

“You need all the help you can get,” you say, voice gone soft. He would have starved to death in the desert, probably still trying to forge onward because that’s what he does, isn’t it? When it hurts, he pushes harder. He probably really thought he was sick.

He is so, so stupid.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kankri scoffs, eyes lit up with anger. “I know my limits.”

“And just how does your body build its eggs?” Your voice comes out shaking with fresh anger, and you are furious; you hate that he can make you afraid. “What do you think happens when you fucking try to fast, and the only food source is your own coddamn hide?” He flinches and it just makes you angrier. “Fear not.  If you've starved this brood to death, you'll just vent them out you nook I’ll put fresh batches in you until you get it right. I won’t let you die.”

Kankri’s is drawing inward. You wait to see if he produces some anger that is worth responding to, but he just curls up in front of you, hugging his belly. Doesn’t make a sound. His shoulders shake.  Fine.  Let him weep.

You purr at him, cold as ice, “Never, pitch black.”

Chapter Text

One of the things about Kankri that has always made sense to you is how he hates to be still.

Circumstances being what they are, even when you first met, he was incapable of the sort of loose-limbed relaxation landlubbing society would have you think of as ‘normal’. He would find a task to busy himself with, something that would keep him moving, and his mind would be miles away, churning out another pan-twisting sermon or the next foray for his rebellion, caught up so fast in intricate little details that you could nearly hear the cogs at work. As for you, either you are on a mission for the Empire and you will not rest until it is complete, or you are not—in which case there’s always another study to master, fresh recruits to torment, or stubborn quadrants to romance (though neither Meenah nor Kankri are terribly romantic souls, you do make the effort).

Whether or not you two have all but beaten each other into seaweed paste, Kankri will get back to his feet, dust himself off, and tumble headfirst into some grand scheme that steals him away from you. You understand. He likes to be busy.

Understanding it doesn’t make it easier to abide. You’ve tried to interfere—but it doesn’t matter how hard you pull him close, pin him by the throat, whisper black nothings. He won’t hesitate, if you do not occupy his time well enough, to go. And you will reluctantly admire him for it, even as you wish that just once, he would sink to your side and let you terrorize him into the early hours of dusk, let you win and hold him like he’s yours.

When he doesn’t rise again after your words make him curl around his belly of starved eggs, you frown. You are expecting retaliation, waiting for it, prepared to let it infuriate you when he tries to shrug your prudence off. The longer he goes without a single motion but the silent tremors through his shoulders, the less there is to anger you.

Instead you want to peel him apart and open like a turtle out of its shell and there’s that damning urge to push your lips to his again, make a spectacle out of how great your need is, how little you are entertained when you are apart from his side. You always want Kankri, true enough; rarely does that want feel as though it is a foreign thing you need to examine before you act upon it.

It must be the new power balance that makes you hesitate before taking what you want. When you approach Kankri he stiffens, but doesn’t make a sound, and it is easy to pick him up and dump that scrawny ass into the sopor. He is so small, and there’s a miscellaneous surge of tension that climbs to your throat as you release him into the slime. For a moment, his eyes flash towards you. He dives under the slime before you can reach far enough to touch him.

You roll your eyes. Well, at least he’s not such a bumpkin he doesn’t know how to oxygenate himself under the slime. In the long run, it will be better for whatever respiratory infections he’s hosting if he’s filled his lungs with the sopor anyway. You, meanwhile, have leave time to organize. You certainly are not interested in standing here to see if Alternia’s most insufferable adult is going to resurface.

Honestly, you think as you storm away, a troll like you should have someone waiting on the concupiscent platform to reward his service to the Empire at all times! Should have a whole legion of fucking egg-layers wanting your brats, should have trolls scrambling to take care of your bulge on the open seas. Damn Kankri for making all of that pointless. All you want is him, and he’s a nightmare. It’s long past time you put him somewhere for safekeeping anyway. What’s yours can go ahead and be of some service.

When you come back in with another meal hours later, you have a withered rose on the tray, courtesy of your neighbor’s bedraggled bushes. Yes, coddammit, and he will accept it. This sort of calm, mundane pitchflirting—not strifing or sex, just silly little annoyances and frustrations—is something you’ve wanted for a while. He’ll let you do as you please.

It’s soup again, because the internet seems to believe this is the correct decision for easy fare, and this time there are firebulbs in it. You know he grows those in the Badwood and he likes them well enough; you don’t want to give him a reason to spit soup on you. That is all.

He hasn’t resurfaced, but when you get to the recupercoon, the heat waves tell you he’s about boiling. You fish him out and drain the slime, refill it with colder sopor. He’s plastered to your chest, limp and flushed red, occasionally giving a weak, spasming cough as his lungs clear themselves of slime. Increased fever can be a good sign, sometimes; you may have given his body the resources to fight.

Or you may have told him he might have killed the Disciple’s eggs, and now he’s panicking himself to death with what little energy he has left. You can’t help but resent his sudden propensity for weakness, but you do not dump him on the floor like he deserves. Your hand cups one of his knobby shoulders and you idly pet against him while you wait for the coon to refill. Kankri shivers, deceptively still.

He thrashes when you try to put him in the cold sopor, and you end up climbed half into the pod yourself, trying to keep him under, snarling that you’re not trying to freeze him to death. He calms eventually (more likely, your high grade sopor takes effect and he can’t really remember how to move) and you are able to feed him soup. No protests this time, though he keeps sinking in the slime, trying to pass out until you have cradled the back of his skull and hold him above yourself, pushing the spoon to his sluggish lips while he blinks and shivers.

His arms do not leave his belly the entire time. You get a lot of the soup in him before he starts flinching from the spoon, and even then, you coax him to chew a few extra firebulbs. He calls you a name you don’t recognize, thanking you in a withered murmur.

You immediately dismiss it from your thoughts.

If battle and sex aren’t fair play, neither are using his fever delusions to inform on the Empire’s enemies. You coax him to drink, and when he’s done and just leaning against you, barely conscious, you find yourself smelling him again.

He smells sick and sweaty and strongly of sopor. Beneath it, there is the scent you like so well, and you fill your lungs with it again and again as he dozes. You’re not certain how much time passes. Everything feels vague. You’ve bitten Kankri again when you lean back, and your claws have worn red lines into his skin in several places, but it wasn’t bad enough to rouse him, and you’re somehow much calmer now, smiling down at your wasted kismesis and pressing him into the cool slime. He goes under easily and a flurry of bubbles spill from his mouth as he breathes the slime in.

You don’t bother pretending you don’t want to check on him afterwards—you come to the guestblock several times to make sure the slime is the right temperature. You make Kankri drink if nothing else, eat whenever he’s willing. You’re not surprised that his appetite is so small; you do not want to think of the size of his stomach after all this. It just pisses you off. You need to hold your anger in check. You focus on keeping the slime cold enough to keep fever from cooking him.

It’s bad. He’s insensate or he’s hallucinating. He doesn’t know who you are and asks you over and over where this is—teasing and taunting him only make him confused, so you just promise to explain everything after one more nap, because it’s so pitifully easy to put him under and he can’t seem to wake unless you draw him to the surface yourself. Sleep is the best thing for him and you try not to disturb him, try to let illness and sopor slime keep him under as much as possible, but you require affirmation that Kankri is not dead, so you pull him up and coax him to drink as he stares with glassy eyes and calls you by names you’ve never heard.

When you finally pull him up and he’s merely warm in your palms again you briefly think his heart may have stopped, but then he stirs and moans at you and you realize his fever has broken instead. It’s been at least two nights since you took him in, and you are not entirely sure you have been out of his room long enough to sleep. It really is strange, how vague time feels since you brought him here.

He smells so—

But if his fever has broken, he’s getting better and you are fiercely, deeply proud. You know, just looking at him, that he has not lost a single egg. You’re not sure if it was his will or his grubs’ that was the deciding factor, but none of Kankri’s little ones is dead. His belly has grown a bit, in fact. He may have put himself on the brink of death but that’s Kankri; he’s a survivor and a warrior before any of his other paltry titles. You smooth slime back from his blinking eyes. He will recover from all the damage he may have done himself because neither of you would accept less.

“…’ns?” He grunts up at you and you lean to his throat, inhaling his smell again as you wait—you can’t seem to stop, really—and the smell of sick troll and baked sopor coat your throat. Kankri butts your cheek with a horn. “’d you do? Head fucking hurts.”

It’s the first time he’s figured out who you are since his fever kicked up. You smile against his skin. It has nothing to do with Kankri being so out of it he called you by your hatchname; nothing at all. “You need a bath,” you decide, and Kankri stiffens up against you, either by the sound of your voice in his ear or the horrific notion of actual hygiene. You grin, gathering his wrists pointedly and he eventually looks up, gaze wary at long last.

“Dualscar.”

“And how are you feeling, my deplorable one?” You answer, trying not to grin too much at his irritated tone. “Well enough for the dungeons?” One of his arms had slipped to rest on his thigh and now it snaps back around his belly. Protective, and you laugh, run a finger along the back of his hand. “Relax. They’re all still in you so far. You’ve managed well.”

Kankri swats your hand back, then freezes, but your anger doesn’t spike beyond what you can manage. You catch his chin in your fingers and kiss him, but that’s all and you let him jerk away as he likes while you take him to the ablution block. You drop him, slimy clothes and all, into the trap. “Tell me what temperature you like,” you drawl and he jumps as water spits down at his feet—Kankri scrambles away and bumps into another spout. He shoots you a look that suggest mutiny, and you resolve to make sure the temperature is a good notch or two below the one he selects.

Which turns out to be roughly boiling and you are more or less convinced he saw through you or is just trying to keep you out with appallingly hot water. You’re not exactly interested, but the fact that he thinks he’s gotten something over on you doesn’t sit well, so you casually strip your shirt off and toss it to the floor. Most seadwellers do not handle hot temperatures well. You are not most seadwellers. Kankri’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t quite make a sound as you unbuckle your pants—he grabs the waterproof curtain of the trap and tries to jerk it between you, which only encourages you to sidle around and lift it to step into the water behind him. He startles spectacularly, and it makes you laugh, collapsing into the scalding water and reeling him in by a withered arm until he’s flattened against you, slime-sticky shirt glued to your bare chest as you idly lift a handful of water to his horns.

Since he doesn’t recoil, you suppose he genuinely doesn’t dislike this temperature. You’re about cooking, but you’ve had worse.

“Comfy?” You inquire. You think you hear a faint growl bubbling in his throat, but Kankri stays stubbornly silent. You assume that if you drop soap in his lap, it will be ignored, so you lather between your hands and dig your fingers into his hair. Kankri splutters, and for a moment, there is a very short, rather sad fight of you pulling his hair and him trying to lunge out of reach. It ends when you slap your other hand on his forehead and hold him still while you aggressively clean sopor out of his hair. You feel Kankri trying not to growl.

Of course when you helpfully dunk him under the water with no warning, he comes up livid. He bares his teeth back at you, every semblance of willingness to fight—and then drops his head and his scowl at once, avoiding your gaze.

He doesn’t want to fight you. He knows well enough that he can’t win, so he avoids it, but it’s not like you’re any less pissed. You follow him, growling at his personal space, trying to goad him into snapping at you so you’ll have something to work with—your teeth are centimeters away from his neck and he still won’t budge, just holds still and lets you, for all that you can feel he’s stopped breathing.

It’s been so long since you’ve had a fuck and the fact that your kismesis insists on being an invalid doesn’t help the way you want him. Dammit.

Fuck, better yet, what exactly is stopping you from having him? He’s right there. He’s not going to be able to fight. And grub cage or not, he’s got a nook that is perfectly good for a quick screw. You have no reason not to.

No reason but Kankri leaned away from you and not breathing, huddled over his cage in plain unease. Anger pushes at you, but fuck, you have not ever taken him without him wanting it in equal measure.

You lean away with a huff, giving him a little nudge in the calf so he doesn’t get away from this entirely. Kankri’s eyes are slow to open. When he looks at you, he almost seems amazed. You scowl at him to make him stop gaping. “What, you think I’ll force you down when you’re that miserable about it?” He just blinks. You show him your teeth. “Of course, if you’re disappointed…”

He finds somewhere else to look fairly quickly.